By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
Writer Unboxed – Leveling Up: In Praise of Writer Dads
[dropcap style=”flat” size=”5″]T[/dropcap]here are supremely effective and eloquent writer moms among us, and we are so much richer for their battles to be productive, articulate members of our profession. We honor them, we thank them, and we love them.
And there are also powerful and remarkable writer dads here with us. To make them labor in a pink shadow is wrong.
I’m grateful to Guy Gonzalez for spotlighting this subject so many are hesitant to touch, not with a 10-foot poll of how many among us think family men can have as viable and praiseworthy a challenge in writing as family women do. Try putting writer dad into the search field on Twitter. Stand well back from your computer. The hits you get will stretch from here to China. Or from Beijing to us.
So why would so many intelligent people think only of women and not of men as well, when they hear or read or write the phrase “writer-parent?”
How easily what is politically correct can outstrip what is simply true.
It does us no good to prize one above the other. As we try to overcome the centuries of stupid, shameful oppression of women, it shows us to be at best over-compensatory—and at worst flatly bigoted—to suggest that a woman’s struggle to write amid family obligations will be automatically and in every case weightier than a man’s struggle.
Gonzalez’ new series on writer dads has debuted at Virginia Quarterly Review’s VQRonline.org with a smart, sensitive interview with author and writer dad Tobias Buckell.
Check it out—Writer Dad: Tobias Buckell—and then get back to Writer Unboxed and look at some of the superb, balanced, thoughtful, intelligent comments from the mighty WU community.
Read the full post and great comments at: WriterUnboxed.com