Against the uninterrupted writer: Nine tips for writing while parenting

This piece offers nine flash tips for writing while parenting young children. Against the fantasy of the autonomous, uninterrupted academic writer, I argue that writing while parenting makes visible the reproductive labor that academic work usually hides. But instead of treating parenting as an obstacle to writing, I approach it as a condition from which another writing praxis can emerge: one that is interrupted (a lot), takes place in unconventional times and places, depends upon relational and material supports, and leans into the grit of mundane realities for motivation. My tips draw upon Marxist feminist analysis as well as autoethnographic stories from my own adventures in poo blowouts, birthday‐party planning, writing at Costco, fighting over unfolded onesies, and missing deadlines. I offer them as practical strategies for writing from inside the fractured temporalities of childcare while refusing productivity as the sole measure of writerly success and insisting that knowing how to write also means knowing when not to. Ultimately, I propose writing while parenting not as a problem to be solved through greater efficiency, but as a cultivated practice of storying otherwise from within the mess, labor, and infrastructure of care.