June 4, 2026
Down with art monsters.
‘“The word genius,” I learn from Kasia Van Schaik in Women Among Monuments, “comes from the Latin gignere for ‘beget’ or ‘to give birth or bring forth.”
And the glaring fact of this means that, when Van Schaik notes how the Romantic concept of genius was gendered (women were assumed to be ineligible for genius as “[d]ue to their biology, women, apparently, were fated to lack wit, judgement and skill”) I’m amused instead of outraged, the overcompensation of this clear, the tiny-dick-energy of a jacked-up Ford F-150.
How a woman’s procreative powers might make a man feel small, incidental, not integral, and so we have to shift things so that he’s centred, and we’re peripheral, and we take care not to mention motherhood in a conversation about the writing life. ‘
13 years ago I was almost 42 weeks pregnant. Tomorrow I will be the mother of two teenagers who are truly the most delightful people I’ve ever known. I am the luckiest.
I wrote about how motherhood made me a writer, and how a person’s creative and uncreative lives can exist in collaboration regardless of whether or not they are parents, and maybe for the better.
Like seriously, lick your own postage stamps, Nabokov.
Down with art monsters.
Read it all at https://kerryreads.substack.com/p/hybrid-creatures-artists-and-mothers.
