Have you always wanted to chronicle your experience of motherhood, but never knew how to begin? Are you looking for an outlet for self-expression, but can't imagine how you could juggle one more thing? Whether you are a new mother or a grandmother, someone who has long aspired to write or someone who has never written before, in Writing Motherhood Lisa Garrigues will show you how to use writing as both a tool for recording your life and a path to understanding your experiences. In just fifteen minutes a day, your Mother's Notebook will be a keepsake, and your daily writing will keep you sane.

Lisa Garrigues developed Writing Motherhood from her many years of teaching memoir writing classes and workshops to women. Equal parts inspirational and instructional, the book grew out of the author's own experiences trying to reconcile her responsibilities as a mother with her dream of writing. In Writing Motherhood, Lisa tells stories from her life and from her classroom that illuminate certain truths about motherhood—from the trauma of new motherhood to the challenge of mothering our own mothers. Then she points the way for readers to pick up a pen and record their own stories in the pages of a Mother's Notebook.

The 7 Building Blocks of Writing Motherhood, as described in the first part of the book, put the Mother's Notebook within reach of any woman who wants to explore the hazy lines of motherhood in between the bold lines of the page. Daily writing "invitations" make it easy for you to begin writing from the text of your own life, sidebar tips help you hone your writing skills, and sample notebook pages serve as models of how to write about motherhood. But Lisa also encourages her readers to move beyond the Mother's Notebook and connect with other mothers, both in person and online. Whether you are writing on your own or in a group, by the time you reach the end of Writing Motherhood, you will have discovered that just as mothering provides endless material for writing, so writing brings insight and wisdom to mothering.

Often laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes grab-a-tissue moving, and occasionally pared-to-the-bone direct, Writing Motherhood will resonate for every woman who is a mother, has a mother, knows a mother, or hopes one day to be a mother.