Suspend Your Disbelief

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"The Kids Are All Bright": Elizabeth Ames Staudt on childhood and writing


Friend of FWR (and very talented writer) Elizabeth Ames Staudt reflects in the Kenyon Review on writing about children and one’s children becoming writers:

Do writers want their babies to be writers? I feel like, in the way-too–many-celebrity-profiles I’ve read, most famous people hope their progeny will not head Hollywood-wards, but are quick to add that they will support them unflaggingly should they ultimately choose that dangerously glittery path. Except Britney Spears. I’m pretty sure she was quoted saying that she’d lock her sons in a room until they changed their minds. Okay, she really said she would lock them up until they were thirty. Is it worse that I knew the first part without googling? Or that I spent thirty seconds fact-checking Britney Spears’s parenting policies?

Read the full essay at the Kenyon Review blog. And congratulations to the recipient of that precious onesie: future writer or no, may there be plenty of love—and little hurt—in your life.


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