More insights from the writer's conference

After my inauspicious start to the writer's conference, things got better. I still felt like I was in no man's land--I wasn't an MFA student or an MFA professor or a published novelist/poet. But I was fascinated by all of the speakers, so I sucked it up and went to as many lectures as I could.

One of the first lectures I went to covered the pitfalls of writing about your children. Now there's something I do a lot. The question the women at the podium posed was whether or not you should blog or publish about your kids at all and whether it's your place to put stories about them "out there" no matter how funny/cute/poignant they are. When are the stories about your kids yours to tell and when are they theirs to tell (or not tell)?

Some of the women said they stopped writing about their kids when they weren't babies anymore. They thought that the baby years are much more the mom's story and more about what she was going through. Once the baby grew into a more separate and recognizable person, then the kids' lives were no longer the mom's story to tell.

Other women wrote about their children until they were five or six, thinking that now the kids are starting to read and could find out what their moms had been writing about them. If they published books, however, the kids are going to read it some day anyway. So maybe that's more relevant to a blog.

One of the women blogs about her son and he's 10 years old and she is just now thinking of stopping. I'm not sure why 10 years old seemed like a stopping point for her or whether he okays what she puts up there or not.

Interestingly, none of them felt the same way about baring the most personal, painful details about their parents', brother's, sister's or husband's lives. Only their children's. They had reservations about their other family members and whose feelings they would hurt, but it didn't stop them from writing the stories down. They also said that when they did write about their families, it never elicited the responses they thought it would. So they learned not to worry too much about who they were going to offend.

So, that left me wondering about writing about Ellie, and whether it's my business to write down the funny things she does, even for the five readers of this blog. I would miss it a lot, but maybe it isn't my place to write down what she does. At least not without her permission.

But if I take the cues from these women, what I really should be doing is writing down all the damaging, destructive events from my childhood and all the other people in my family, everyone except Ellie, can just go screw themselves. So my blog posts might get a little more interesting!

Given the topic of this post, I thought I'd throw out a link to a Youtube video of a comic named Louis CK, who obviously doesn't care what kind of psychological damage his comedy might do to his kids later. (He is completely foul mouthed, so don't watch him if you don't like profanity. The F-bomb is literally every other word.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vRhr502wIc