Boomer and The Babe Presents - Kate Hopper

USE YOUR WORDS: A Writing Guide for Mothers by Kate Hopper is the first book to focus on the craft of writing using motherhood as the lens. According to an October 2010 article in Ad Age, there are 3.9 million mommy bloggers. Unlike other writing guides for mother writers that focus on journaling or how to fit writing into a busy life, USE YOUR WORDS is a writing workshop between covers. Each chapter contains a lecture, a published essay by a contributing writer, and exercises that will serve as jumping-off points for the readers’ own writing.

When award-winning writer Kate Hopper began writing about what she felt was the central experience of her life, motherhood, she found that some people weren’t taking her writing seriously. Through her years of blogging and teaching, Hopper discovered that mothers crafting memoirs and essays deal with issues of identity, loss and longing, neurosis and fear, ambivalence and joy. She found stories of transformation in how the authors see themselves in relation to the world in which they live.  As she says in her introduction, “Last time I checked this was the stuff of which real literature was made.”

Together, the chapters of USE YOUR WORDS teach the skills beginning mother writers as well as more advanced writers to hone their ability and turn their motherhood stories into art.