Breakfast with Kate

Enjoy this next installment in our weekly series, “Breakfast,” where we get to meet an inspiring, creative mother from the blogosphere, and enjoy a peek into her creative space. This week we have breakfast with Kate Hopper, a Minneapolis-based writer, teacher, blogger, and mother of two young girls. I stumbled upon Kate’s blog several months ago, and was delighted when she joined us here at Creative Construction. Fire up the cappuccino machine!

CC: Please introduce yourself.
KH: I’m a mother and writer, and I teach “Mother Words” at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. I’m married with two daughters—Stella is 4 ½ and Zoe is 3 months old. Mothering consumes most of my energy right now, and because Zoe refuses to take a bottle, I do almost everything with her latched on to my breast. I never knew how much I could accomplish while I nursed, but my back and neck are killing me.

CC: Tell us about your writing life and creative projects.
KH: I’ve written a memoir currently titled Ready for Air, about the premature birth of my older daughter, Stella. It’s an account of the final weeks of my pregnancy, the “this-was-not-part-of-the-plan” first weeks of my daughter’s life in the hospital, and the isolated, post-NICU world we inhabited after we took her home. It’s a story about the different ways men and women deal with crisis and the unexpected. It’s about the dark side of pregnancy and motherhood—the fear, the irrationality, and the psychic disruption. And finally, it is a story of faith and resolve and of learning to let go of my fear long enough to love my daughter.

I write mostly nonfiction, and have a few essays bouncing around in my head right now, but my next big project is going to be fiction (I think). It will be a series of linked stories set in a small village in Costa Rica, where I lived for a couple of years in the mid-90s. While I was down there, I recorded the life stories of three generations of women, and these stories and their voices will be the backbone of the book. (When I’m going to have time to begin this project, I’ve no idea.)

CC: What inspired you to launch a blog?
KH: I started a blog because I wanted a place where I could discuss writing and reading and motherhood. I post about motherhood literature and craft issues, in addition to posting about my own experiences as a writer-mother. I’ve found that blogging has been a great way for me to think more in-depth about what I’m reading and why I think literature about motherhood is so important, and it also gives me an outlet to process the issues of craft the come up in my teaching. What I didn’t expect when I started to blog was how much I’d love it. I’m so inspired by the community of artists and mothers out there, and I often turn to their words when I’m feeling overwhelmed with life or frustrated that I’m not writing as much as I’d like to be.

CC: Where do you do your creative work?
KH: Before Zoe was born, I always wrote in coffee shops. I wrote most of Ready for Air at the Blue Moon and the Clicqout Club. If I get the little bugger to fall asleep in the stroller, I sometimes still get an hour of writing in at the coffee shop, but this doesn’t happen very often. It’s more difficult for me to focus on writing at home because there is always something else to do: laundry, loading the dishwasher, putting away Stella’s toys. But occasionally, I sit on the porch with my laptop, and I feel like a writer again. (But working at home means more clutter at home. Luckily, my husband is very tolerant of the piles of paper that cover our hutch and dining room table.)

CC: What do you struggle with most?
KH: Right now, time is the biggest challenge for me. I work part-time in communications in addition to everything else, and this takes up a couple of mornings a week. (These work mornings are only successful if Zoe remains asleep at the office, of course, and this only happens about 50% of the time.) I’m trying to reserve one morning a week for my own writing, but things always seem to come up. So I have three essay ideas floating around in my head, but I’ve done very little actual writing of any of them. This is tremendously frustrating for me.

CC: Where do you find inspiration?
KH: I always turn to literature when I need inspiration. Right now, I’m revisiting a decade of Best American Essays in an effort to find a structure that works for one of the essays in my head. I also love poetry, and often find myself anxious to get back to my own writing after I read one of my favorite poets. The other thing that both inspires me and seems to free space in my mind for writing is running. There is nothing like a long, slow run to make me feel alive and ready to write.

CC: What are your top 5 favorite blogs?
KH: It’s difficult for me to choose only five blogs that I love because there are so many. These are a few of the mother-writer blogs that inspire me:

• Beth Kephart’s blog: Her book A Slant of Sun was one of the first memoirs I read about being a mother. She is a gifted writer whose words never fail to move me.
• One Hand Typing: Mardougrrl is a mother who is working on a novel. She so often puts into words the frustrations and joys I’ve been feeling.
• From Here to There and Back: I love to read Kristen’s posts about mothering her son. She has opened her life and her words to us, and I’m so thankful.
• This Mom: No matter what she’s going through, Kyra’s writing always make me laugh and think.
• Speak Softly: Vicki is a writer and teacher, as well, and she’s about to get her first book published!

CC: What is your greatest indulgence?
KH: Chocolate, really good wine, and going out to a nice restaurant with my husband. The wine and the dates are not common these days, but I indulge in chocolate every day. (Hmmm, perhaps that’s why the pregnancy weight isn’t coming off very quickly?)

CC: If you were having coffee with a mother of young children who wanted desperately to fit more creativity into her life, what advice would you offer?
KH: It’s not realistic for me to try to write everyday right now, but know I’m a better mother when I have a little time each week to dedicate to my work. So I would tell this mother to dedicate one morning a week to her creative work. If her child(ren) still nap, set aside one day a week that she won’t do anything around the house during nap time. If they no longer nap, she should get someone to watch the kids for a couple of hours each week. (If she can’t afford a babysitter, maybe she could swap childcare with a neighbor or friend or ask for childcare money from relatives as a birthday present.) Motherhood can be all-consuming, but I start to feel desperate if I’ve gone more than a couple of weeks without writing, and that’s not good for me and it’s not good for my children.

CC: Thanks for sharing with us, Kate!