M M De Voe

Read this if you have kids

A little more than ten years ago, I was a writer with an MFA from Columbia who could not get my novel published. It won awards in its non-published form, and my thesis committee had raved over the content, but my high-powered LA agent sent letter after letter from editors rejecting me although they loved the writing. I should have known the story was being rejected because the book did not suit the market, but I was the mother of two very small children and when I went out for coffee with my childless grad school friends or mentors, they invariably would look at the baby in the bucket seat beside us at the cafe and say, "Well, you know, you kind of chose motherhood, didn't you."