interview

Creating While Parenting: Abbi Crutchfield

This post was originally sent through my author newsletter on August 19, 2022. To subscribe to my newsletter and receive up-to-date news, musings, and more, click HERE.

Before we jump into this week's interview, a few pieces of business:  

  • This is the last Creating While Parenting interview I have scheduled! If you've enjoyed reading these, let me know. Or if there's some other demographic you'd like to hear from in future interviews, let me know that as well. 

  • The mega chapter book giveaway I organized continues through tomorrow, 8/20, with a winner being chosen on 8/21. Enter for a chance to win 10 new books for readers ages 6-9! 

  • I was so thrilled to be a guest on two podcasts this week! The conversation on Reading With Your Kids was about Madison Morris is NOT a Mouse! and how parents can help kids, particularly young girls, feel confident and empowered to make a difference in their communities. The conversation on DIYMFA Radio was more focused on the craft of writing, including how I transitioned from writing YA to chapter books and how the Class Critters series came together. I hope you'll give one or both a listen! 

  • If you've already read Madison Morris, would you consider reviewing it on Amazon and other retail sites? Reviews help a book find more readers! 

Now, without further ado...

This week's Creating While Parenting interview is with comedian and actor Abbi Crutchfield! I've been lucky to know this funny lady for over a decade, since before we both became parents. Now our daughters are friends, which is very cool!

Follow Abbi on Twitter and Instagram for jokes and updates on where you can catch her live and on your screen.

Here are her answers to my three questions!

1.     How would you describe yourself as a creator/artist/maker? 

I am a comedian, which means I write and perform comedy. The other titles I have had that fall under that header are stand-up, host, and comedy writer. As a performer, I am a stand-up comedian, a voiceover artist, a television actor, a commercial actor, a host of live events, and a host of television shows like "Up Early Tonight" on Hulu. I have also been a house sketch team member at UCB, an improviser, an actor in digital shorts with SNL cast members, and an actor on late night shows like "Full Frontal with Samantha Bee" and "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert." I provided guest commentary on music video shows for MTV and VH1, I have been a guest panelist on comedy game shows, and I have even hosted a couple of game shows. With comedy writing, I have been a social media manager at College Humor, a contributor to funny websites like SomeEcards, I have been published in comedy compilation books, and I even helped create a party game in the style of Cards Against Humanity.  

Everything I do today is something I dreamed of doing as a kid, and some of the jobs I have had exceeded the hopes I had as a kid! 

2.     How does being a parent impact and interact with your creative life? 

Being a parent has brought out my creative side, but I usually channel it into entertaining my daughter and helping her learn rather than using my experiences to inform a sitcom pilot. A lot of our interactions do end up in my stand-up, so parenting is helpful for generating new material! But mostly I make all of the objects in our house talk to motivate her throughout the day or help her problem solve, I turn chores into games, and I look up new crafts to make with her. My favorite was sewing felt into play bow-tie pasta. A lot of toys she has are fun for me to secretly play with. Shhh. Don’t tell her. 

3.     What keeps you most connected to your creativity these days? 

One way I stay creative in my spare time besides jotting down ideas for jokes is by engaging with nail polish enthusiasts on my nail art Instagram. It’s a hobby that I feed every day so I can learn about new nail art techniques, try and showcase new designs, or just socialize with fellow nail polish nerds.

Creating While Parenting: Stephanie Kate Strohm

This post was originally sent through my author newsletter on August 5, 2022. To subscribe to my newsletter and receive up-to-date news, musings, and more, click HERE.

This week's Creating While Parenting interview is with Stephanie Kate Strohm, a YA/MG author and mom to a four-year-old son. Stephanie's next book is a YA graphic novel Shakespeare retelling—Twelfth Grade Night, the first book in the Arden High series, cowritten with Molly Horton Booth and illustrated by Jamie Green—and it looks like so much fun.

Here's Stephanie's website, and here's where you'll find her on Instagram and Twitter. Don't forget to BUY HER BOOKS!

Read on for Stephanie's answers to my three questions.

1.     How would you describe yourself as a creator/artist/maker? 

I'm a writer! These days, what kind of writer I am feels like it is ever-changing, but the one constant is always the words on the page. After a decade of writing contemporary YA romance (the kind that makes you smile, not cry), last year I released my first middle-grade book (Once Upon a Tide: A Mermaid's Tale), and this year sees the release of my first graphic novel, Twelfth Grade Night, the first book in the Arden High graphic novel series of Shakespeare retellings! When I first became an author, I never anticipated writing graphic novels, but in the past few years, between Arden High and adapting Disney's Twisted Tales series into graphic novels, I've spent the vast majority of my time working on graphic novels. 

2.     How does being a parent impact and interact with your creative life? 

Molly Horton Booth and I first started working on the pitch for the Arden High series while I was pregnant...and that baby bump will be a four year old kid when Twelfth Grade Night comes out! I was learning how to write a graphic novel at the exact same time I was learning how to be both a writer and a parent. Learning to write a graphic novel meant poring over other people's scripts to learn how to write not only the dialogue, but the panel descriptions as well, and understanding the immense freedom that comes with using images as well as words...but also the limitations of the genre, like being aware that there are only so many words you can fit in a speech bubble, and only so many panels you can fit on a page. (And so many exact page numbers to hit...who knew I would be so bad at counting...) Learning to write as a parent meant utilizing every single minute of free time I had—no more waiting for inspiration to strike. Especially after Covid hit and I no longer had any sort of childcare, inspiration had to strike at naptime, or it wasn't happening.

3.     What keeps you most connected to your creativity these days? 

As hard as it was writing only during naptime and bedtime during that first Covid year, it felt like the only thing that kept me connected to my creativity—that connected me to any sense of self or identity I had outside of "mommy"—was the time I spent at my computer. And these days, even though I have much more time to write now that my kid's in preschool, I find I connect to my creativity the exact same way: when it's just me, my laptop, and the blank page.

Creating While Parenting: Corey Ann Haydu

This post was originally sent through my author newsletter on July 22, 2022. To subscribe to my newsletter and receive up-to-date news, musings, and more, click HERE.

This week's Creating While Parenting interview is with Corey Ann Haydu, who is the author of an assortment of wonderful books for kids and teens. I first met Corey through the New School's MFA in Creative Writing program. We weren't in the same cohort, so we met as alums...and then she moved into my neighborhood! These days, I'm always happy to see her smiling face when we cross paths.

Corey is the author of the Hand-Me-Down Magic series. Her most recent middle-grade is One Jar of Magic, which comes out in paperback on August 23rd. Her newest YA is Lawless Spaces. She also has a picture book on the way.

Corey has two daughters: Fia, age 4, and Thisbe, who was born in July! (Corey sent me her answers three days before giving birth, so you'll see a reference to being pregnant below...) Congratulations!!

Here's Corey's website and her Instagram and Twitter. Don't forget to BUY HER BOOKS.

I'm thrilled to have Corey participating in this series, because she writes so eloquently about being a writer and being a parent on her own social media and newsletter! Read on for her answers to my three questions.

1.     How would you describe yourself as a creator/artist/maker? 

I am an author of children's books for all ages, picture book through YA. I've been working in children's publishing for almost 15 years, publishing for almost ten years now, and I have both evolved and stayed on theme I think! I've sort of slowly made my way into different age categories and different genres, but thematically I tend towards battling the idea of perfection as something to strive for, and finding hope and joy in challenging circumstances. I think those are sort of my areas of interest as a writer, and I seem to be able to return to both of them again and again. A few books in, I started playing with magic as a way to get at these themes more precisely, and that's become a really central part of my work—using magic as a way to unveil what is real and tangible and important and meaningful in our ordinary lives. 

I'd like to think I write for the readers, and I do on some level, but I also really, really write for me. I myself am in a constant search for hope and joy in the midst of challenges—not by pretending the challenges away but by seeing both the difficulty and the light clearly. I like honesty—not everything's fine! but instead everything's not fine, but here are some anchors of beauty to hold on to in the midst of all this not-okay-ness. And I'm also in a constant battle to stop holding myself to impossible standards, trying to resist the allure and the lie of perfection that I grew up with. So I think I write for me most of all, to keep trying to center myself on these ideas, to keep trying to relearn how to be in the world, to keep trying to understand these big ideas and how to survive what is hard both out in the world and inside myself. 

2.     How does being a parent impact and interact with your creative life? 

More and more every day, I find that the intersection of parenting and creativity is HUGE. Just in a really literal way, I have been exposed to different age ranges of children's literature through my own child, and because of that I've pushed myself into new spaces. The child experience is so front and center in my world at all times. My daughter, Fia's concerns and struggles interest and engulf me not only as a parent, but also as a writer. In the same way as I write to try to figure out my own relationship with hope or perfection, I'm also writing to try to figure it all out on her level. I have a picture book coming out in 2024 that is really directly related to parenting challenges I faced in her toddlerhood. It was written as a way for me to sort out my own complicated relationship with being a big personality, a person with big feelings, and how to find that self-compassion and acceptance so that I could ultimately give her bigness and emotional landscape compassion and acceptance too. I mean, it's honestly a really beautiful thing for me, to have this new place to draw inspiration from, and I feel really lucky that my work lets me sort of unwind what is hard for me to understand in the world. 

Logistically, of course, it can be tough, but for me, writing is generally a refuge—a place I get to go and not a place I have to go, if that makes sense? So there can be stress, especially in Covid times of balancing parenting and writing, but usually writing is like my little gift to myself when real life and parenting life feel messy and hard and exhausting. I know that's not the case for everyone, but that's my relationship with my work, and it's stayed pretty consistent even in parenthood.

3.     What keeps you most connected to your creativity these days? 

What a tough question! You know, I think right now, friendships are what keep me connected to creativity. I've discovered over the last few years what a legit extrovert I am, something I don't think I knew about myself at all for many, many years. I really need to be connected to people in order to connect to creativity. I'm super curious about people and their lives and their feelings and choices and relationships with one another, so being around that energy and in the world in that way helps me come up with new ideas and new ways of seeing the world. I have a group of friends who are also moms who I see every week, and honestly that weekly 2-hour meet-up is something that both grounds me and lets my brain move more easily, more airily. 

I've found walking is also something that helps my creativity. I'm very pregnant, so that's gotten trickier these last few months, but long walks either with others or alone really help my brain loosen up, and I often find myself getting new ideas and jotting down little bits and pieces of thoughts on those walks. 

Creating While Parenting: Janae Marks

This post was originally sent through my author newsletter on June 24, 2022. To subscribe to my newsletter and receive up-to-date news, musings, and more, use the form on my homepage: KathrynHolmes.com.

This week's Creating While Parenting interview is with my amazing friend Janae Marks!

Janae lives in Connecticut with her husband and 7-year-old daughter (as well as an adorable dog). We've known each other since graduate school; we both started the New School's MFA in Creative Writing (with a concentration in Writing for Children) in 2008 and graduated in 2010. Janae has always been a talented writer, and it has been such a joy to cheer her on as her career takes off!

Janae currently has two middle-grade books out in the world: From the Desk of Zoe Washington and A Soft Place to Land. Next up is On Air With Zoe Washington (the sequel to From the Desk...), releasing February 14, 2023.

Janae's website is JanaeMarks.com. Connect with her on Twitter and Instagram. Buy her BOOKS!

Now, here are Janae's answers to my three questions:

1.     How would you describe yourself as a creator/artist/maker? 

I'm an author! I currently write books for middle-grade readers. I've been published since early 2020, but worked toward becoming a published author for more than a decade before that. 

Up until recently, I juggled my author work and parenting with another part-time job. I had that job for seven years, but finally got to the point in my author career where I could leave that other job behind. So now I'm juggling writing and parenting, which is still a lot but feels much more manageable. I love what I do!

2.     How does being a parent impact and interact with your creative life? 

When my daughter was born almost seven years ago, I had to reconfigure my creative life. I couldn't write whenever I wanted to anymore. Instead I could only write during certain pockets of time, which in the beginning was whenever my daughter was asleep. When she was a few months old, I started writing the manuscript that eventually turned into my debut novel. I wrote when she slept, either in the early mornings or during her naps. Since my time was more limited, I learned not to waste a single second, so I was still pretty productive. 

Now that she's in school, I have more time during the day to write, but there are still other author, parenting, and household responsibilities that I need to fit in. But it feels much more manageable. So if anyone reading this has young children: it gets better!

The hardest part has been when I've had to write or attend author events when my daughter is not at school on the weekends. Fortunately, I have a very supportive husband who takes care of everything when I can't, but I've had to learn not to feel so guilty about taking that time! This has also gotten easier as my daughter has grown, because now she's used to it, and also has her own life and friends to spend time with when I'm away.

3.     What keeps you most connected to your creativity these days? 

First and foremost, reading books. I don't only read middle-grade novels, but also books different from mine, and I'm always inspired after reading a good story. I also try to stay connected to other writers, through coffee shop writing dates, writing retreats, conferences, and group chats. Writing can be such a solitary activity, so I love any opportunity to chat with other authors. Being part of this community, cheering other writers on, makes me want to keep creating myself. 

Creating While Parenting: Lauren Gibaldi

This post was originally sent through my author newsletter on June 10, 2022. To subscribe to my newsletter and receive up-to-date news, musings, and more, use the form on my homepage: KathrynHolmes.com.

Welcome to the first edition of Creating While Parenting! I'm so excited to introduce you to my first interviewee, Lauren Gibaldi.

Lauren lives in Orlando, FL, with her husband and two kids, ages 8 and 4. She and I met as debut authors back in 2013; we both released our first YA novels in 2015. In 2016, our second books came out on the same day! (We also joined forces, along with two other YA authors, for a mini book tour in North and South Carolina that summer. Road trip!) Lauren is still one of the people I email for advice and feedback, and I really hope we'll get to hang out in person again sometime soon.

You can learn more about Lauren, including what's coming down the publishing pipeline next for her, at her website: LaurenGibaldi.com. Connect with her on Twitter and Instagram. And don't forget to BUY HER BOOKS!

I'm so grateful to Lauren for agreeing to be one of my guinea pigs (my very first guinea pig!) for this new interview series. So, without further ado, here are her answers to my three questions:

1. How would you describe yourself as a creator/artist/maker?

I'm what I (delightfully?) call a wri-brarian...a writer/librarian. While my two professions are completely separate, they intertwine in fun ways. I've been writing most of my life, going a bit more professional in college, when I had a column in a local newspaper. I was an editor/copywriter/article writer after that, and then my first novel, The Night We Said Yes, came out in 2015 with HarperCollins. Since then I've authored two additional novels, and co-edited (with Eric Smith) an anthology, Battle of the Bands, which released last year. I've been a librarian for almost 11 years, starting at a college campus, and then moving to a public library, where I am now. As a librarian, I predominantly work with children—recommending books, making displays, and creating/enacting programming and storytimes. I use my writing abilities to create scripts and songs for storytimes. I use my knowledge of books coming out to make recommendations. And on the other side, I use my knowledge of books coming into the library, and their popularity, to gauge what I might want to write, what might be missing in the market. It's a fun crossover, one I'm really proud of.

2. How does being a parent impact and interact with your creative life?

It admittedly makes everything harder, but also better, if that makes any sense at all. In my writer life, I have to force myself to write in the small snippets of time I'm allowed. It makes me value my free time more. It also makes me proud of what I'm doing in the time given. And, of course, my kids are inspirational—their likes/dislikes/quirks...all of them inspire me. I mention a banana moon in my third book, This Tiny Perfect World, because my daughter would always refer to it as that. In my librarian life, they're a great inspiration. I create programs around things they like, knowing other kids like similar things. Have I written my own educational songs and rhymes around Disney princesses, superheroes, Star Wars, and the like? I have! My daughters give me ideas, and I want to make them proud. And it's fun singing the songs I create for them. Also, I keep up more with children's literature. I may not have read Dog Man were it not for my eldest. And for them, I can always bring home all of the amazing books coming out. A current hit has been Endlessly Ever After—a choose-your-own-adventure picture book which is the ultimate in creativity.

3. What keeps you most connected to your creativity these days?

Well, for the librarian side, my paycheck, haha. But mostly my love of doing what I do. I love creating my programs at the library. And with writing, sure, I have off months when I don't find inspiration or time to do what I want. But I always come back to it. It's a need, I guess. A desire to keep doing it. Knowing how happy and accomplished it makes me feel.