Excerpt of the Day: "Use Your Words" by Kate Hopper

All you mommies and mommies-to-be with a passion for—or minuscule interest in—writing will love Kate Hopper’s Use Your Words.  This writing guide for mothers allows you the opportunity to grow as a writer, chapter-by-chapter, and leads you through the process of turning your motherhood story into art.

Here’s a little taste of what’s inside:

Reading about other mothers’ lives and experiences has expanded my world. To be able to walk in someone else’s shoes, whether it’s for a moment or an hour or a few days, is an incredible gift. I have gained insight into parenting and the human experience.

The stories I’ve read and listened to have ranged from light and funny to heartbreaking, and there is room for all of these stories as a part of motherhood literature.

In the introduction to their anthology Mothers: Twenty Stories of Contemporary Motherhood, Kathleen Hirsch and Katrina Kenison write, “It takes courage to write about motherhood in a culture that sets women with children on the sidelines, and it takes even greater courage to give voice to the powerful emotions and fears that swirl deep beneath the surface of our daily lives, informing and shaping our relationships with our children and the world at large.”

We all have stories to tell. Whether we tell these stories is another question. It does take courage to write about motherhood, to explore writing about our children and our roles as mothers, to “give voice to the emotions and fears that swirl deep beneath the surface” of our daily lives.

I hope this book will help give you the courage to get your mother stories down on paper. How often have you said, “Use your words!” to your children? How often have you heard other parents utter that phrase? Now it’s your turn. I designed this book to help guide you on your journey as a mother writer and help you find the most effective way to tell the stories you need to tell.