peripheral vision

The blog has been pretty quiet for the last several months because I’ve been working on lots of stuff in the background. One of those things is a book, which I’m excited to officially launch today. Two-Powered: A Diary of Motherhood and Apple Pie combines words and images I created during the first two years of my son’s life. I was also granted permission to include a beautiful poem by Adrienne Rich, a poem I discovered during the same time period.

I thought about searching for a publisher for the book, but I decided to self-publish for a number of reasons. The biggest of which is that I have no patience. I’m guessing it would take at least a year to get to print, and possibly much, much longer. And I’m more into making stuff than selling or pitching stuff.

This book doesn’t fit easily into a specific genre – is it a momoir or a photography book? I don’t know. I’ve read that genre-bending books are considerably less attractive to publishers, who need to figure out how to market their books. If there isn’t a tidy demographic to market to, it’s a much riskier venture. I thought about trying for photography publishers, who could foot the bill for producing it in fantastic quality, but these really aren’t fine art images. They’re not about beautiful colour or good tonal ranges; the digital files themselves aren’t particularly high quality either – some of them I even made on my husband’s crappy little point-and-shoot.

The bottom line is that I really feel the collection contains a message that needs to get out sooner than later. So I decided to publish it on demand through lulu.com.

I think it’s very difficult to mother in a culture that has no space to admit real ambivalence into the discourse. When my mom read my book, she said, “Wow, you were in a real depression.” But I don’t believe I was. I don’t think it was pathological at all – I think it’s normal to be ambivalent as a mother, and healthy to acknowledge that it’s really f-ing hard, especially in the first two years. Can you think of anything in which you have a bigger stake than in the growth and well-being of the most important and helpless person you’ve ever had the fortune to know?

My husband developed a website to showcase the content of the book. We still have to put a link to it on my home page, but in the meantime, you can get there from here. I thought about only including the first 15 images to encourage people to buy the book, but I felt that if my goal was to speak through this cultural silence, I should my money where my mouth is and put it all out there. If you do buy the book, you do get treated to Adrienne Rich’s wonderful poem, which isn’t on the site.

So there. It’s done, it’s out there. Wow does this ever feel anti-climactic.

Check it out here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 7:55 am and is filed under books, it IS all about me!, motherhood and photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.