Welcome to our inaugural writer-moms Q&A series post. We’re excited to offer you both audio and written content for this series. And there’s no one better to kick it off than
, author of Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know about Women which came out in June by Algonquin and the author of . Maggie is based in Seattle, WA and writes about the intersection of sports and gender. She’s a mother of two young kiddos and attended our 2023 Write Like a Mother retreat in the Pacific Northwest and has since been a core part of the Scribente Maternum community.We are excited to launch this series with a discussion between me and Maggie! Feel free to listen to the full audio and/or read the Q&A below. The written content has been edited for clarity and length.
Elizabeth: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself as a writer? What's your background and role as a mom as well as your career writing trajectory?
Maggie: Oh man I feel like the mom introduction is easier, so I'm going to start there. I have two kids, one is six and just finished kindergarten; the younger is two-and-a-half. They're wonderful and hilarious and weird. And they also kind of follow the trajectory my book writing
I was pregnant with my older son when I started talking to my agent about this book. Working on the proposal basically through his early years. I sold the book right after my second child was born. So I had given birth and then a month or so later, my agent said “let's go out on submission.” The book came out this summer two days before my oldest turned six. I found all that kind of weird and interesting.
I've, I've just kind of always been a writer. I knew that I wanted to write books, but I found my way into journalism through my high school newspaper. I had my sights on becoming a reporter. And, of course, the best laid plans did not exactly go to plans mostly because the industry was falling into itself as I was trying to enter it. I've had a couple of different jobs within journalism but never a staff writing job. But I really wanted to just write, so I ended up going freelance in 2015. I didn't have kids yet. You have a lot more flexibility with freelance.
And as I've had kids that, that has sort of shifted a bit with freelance, but my intention was always to see if I could write a book especially as the magazine work was getting fewer and farther between.
Elizabeth: So before we get into some of the writing life stuff, can you tell us about your book?
Maggie: So, Better, Faster, Farther is the story of how we define gender through physical capability and using running as a lens to look at like the different things that women have been told over time that they can't do and how they've done them anyway and made space for themselves as physically capable human beings especially in the world of sports, but also how that like impacts the rest of society too.
So it's kind of a history but also a cultural critique and context for where we are today in terms of gender and sports but alsodifferent ideas about gender that we still hold.
Elizabeth: It’s so good! I learned so much from the book. I kind of toggled constantly between two emotions. And one was that these women are bad ass. This society is doing everything they can to keep them from running or doing sports yet. And the other was absolutely infuriated by the patriarchy. It’s wild that it wasn't until after I was born that women weren’t able to run the marathon at the Olympics.
Maggie: It's shocking. For me the important thing that I feel like I want to do in my work is just remind people of the context of the conversations that we're having now. You know, it's not just that women came out of nowhere and. They have had to have this conversation every generation and it's looked different every generation, but we're still in it.
Elizabeth: Yeah, it's different versions of the same thing with civil rights that it's like a different version of systemic racism that we're experiencing. It's a different version of patriarchy that we're experiencing. And the chapter on gender and that featured trans women and the discussion about trans women and also women who have heightened levels of testosterone. It’s so fascinating to me because you went into a lot of the science of gender in general and how our bodies are the way they are. I think it contributes to that discussion of gender as being on a biological spectrum, a vastly wide spectrum that we still haven't studied.
Maggie: There’s still so much to know. I think people really want answers. People really want like an easy solve or an easy fix. Even when I tell people, you know, especially someone I wrote a book about women and running, their first question is “what do you think about trans runners?” I'm like, Wow. That says so much about just where this conversation has gone. There's this assumption that we have the answer and we know how bodies are made and know all there is to athleticism and the body and we just really don't.
Elizabeth: Now that we’ve talked a bit about the book, tell us about the process. What was the process of developing the idea and, and also the concept?
Maggie: I got an MFA in creative nonfiction in 2013 and I was very focused on learning the process of like book writing. I knew that that was something I really wanted to do. I worked on a book proposal and I couldn't get an agent and I just kind of kept talking to people, kept getting feedback, and I would also very easily shut down. I was a lot younger and I had conversations with several agents who were were encouraging, but didn’t see “yes” right away and I never would follow up because I just thought they clearly didn’t like me or what I have done. I’m kind of glad it didn’t happen then.
So I really focused on getting my freelance career going and using my freelance writing to explore the things that I actually cared to write about. If you're a full time freelancer, you get assigned a lot of assignments that you don't care about. It's not necessarily the topic you would choose to go out and put your energy in. So I always tell other freelancers to have your passion work and your paid work and it's okay if they're not the same, but you can really look at it as like one funds the other.
So I was doing a lot of that around women in sports because I'd written a few pieces. And around 2015-2016, I was looking for my own projects and wasn't sure what they were going to be. Then in January 2018 I got an email from my current agent who was like, “Hey, I've been reading some of your work on women athletes. Do you have an agent? Do you want an agent? Are you thinking of any book projects?” And I was like, “yes, I'm thinking of all of these book projects.” She was sort of like, “okay, I don't think those are your book, but let's keep talking and figure this out.”
I’m very lucky and this is an unusual route to getting an agent. But I think it does show that writing about the things care about can pay off in different ways. And, know, eventually I was like, “I'm really interested in this idea of capability of strength of like women who are finally coming around to lifting weights and doing things,” I just felt like there was this big shift in the way that women of my generation were starting to like working out and consider themselves as athletes. A lot of the background research of the book is about strength and exercise and just how women's bodies are constrained. I was just researching and writing and researching and writing and researching and writing for years, and wrote the proposal and sample chapter. You know, sending it to my agent, having her be like, this isn't quite right yet, you know, and redoing the whole thing.
When it went out and my editor at Algonquin realy loved all of hte ideas, but the story of Bobby Gibb—the first woman to sneak into the Boston Marathon in 1966. I started looking into these other women runners and other women running stories and these huge historic events kept popping up for me. And I was like running makes so much sense as like a book topic because it's such a universal thing. And the publisher really liked it because there's a very defined audience of women runners. So that kind of sold it. But what was interesting was, even though that was sort of the last piece of the puzzle for me, it was very easy to fit the running story onto the research I'd already done. So that's sort of how the book came to be and it wasn't like I had a million people who wanted it. When it was coming out, everyone's like, oh my gosh, this is timed so well. And I'm like, wow, like, we've been working on for six years. It was actually partway through, even after I signed the deal that I realized it would come out right before the 40th anniversary of the first women's Olympic marathon.
Elizabeth: That’s amazing. So we reposted a story that you had written for your Substack
called “How I Spent My Book Advance,” and I resonated with it so much because you wrote about the writing process, the research process and how it all worked out as a mother. Could you tell us a bit about that post and maybe your reflections and thoughts on doing away with your GirlBoss dreams.Maggie: So the post is ostensibly about how I spent my book advance, but in reality it was a discussion of how I came to reassess my own work and my own finances and all of that in light of being a mom and being a partner and being someone who has this, yeah, creative “flexible” work life and that being a freelance writer. I'd have a relationship with an editor and I'd do a ton of work for them and then they'd leave that publication or they'd leave journalism or they'd get laid off. You just didn't really know what was coming around the corner and everything is very fleeting.
I just found that going through the whole book process, how long it takes to do all of the research and sell the book and being invested in long term by someone was a very different feeling for me. And even different, I think, than having a salary job, because it’s a kind of relationship. You're signing this copyright deal with the publisher for essentially forever. That was a really different thing for me, but it also helped me come around to. being okay not being the family breadwinner, it’s okay not to have a salary job and the benefits of that, because I’m also doing this other work caring for the children for the first like years.
You know, society isn't going to value that, but I'm going to value that, I'm going to have to look at my partnership in that we do value the fact that we have to take care of our children and that's going to be work between us. Just being able to see the longterm. Not everything has to be the big, successful, getting your book deal in your and, starting your career. It's okay to be on your own timeline.
Elizabeth: This kind of goes into this topic as well is how do you navigate the two identities that you hold that we talk about in Scribente, the identity as writer, the identity as mother, how do you navigate those?
Maggie: They're kind of both very ephemeral for me. I think even identifying as a writer, it's a hard thing for people to come around to because there's kind of a gatekeeping that happens, but it's also how you see yourself. I just published a book and I still feel kind of like, “oh, am I really a writer?”
I think like even maybe it's like harder to admit like outwardly because you don't want people to be like, “Oh, really?”
I think that about motherhood. too sometimes. Sometimes I wonder, “I’m a mother, how did that happen?” Like,” these kids are mine? I'm in charge here?” So, I don't know. Maybe that's just me as a person is just constantly an imposter in my own life. But there is something about it that's kind of beautiful. I think both identities are something that you sort of learn as you go along. It's a constant looking back and being like, “Oh, I used to be like that.” And now look at us when you see the picture of your seven year old as a baby and you're like, “you used to look like that! You used to be a tiny baby! Can you believe that?”
It’s also like when you read something old that you've written, you know, and you're like, “I wrote that?!” Sometimes when people were reading things from the book to me, I was like, “whoa, I did that? That's pretty good! Good job me!”
I think like any identity, you are constantly figuring it out as you go along. With both of my kids, I was sort of like, “oh shit, I have to get back to writing as soon as possible” after they were born. And that wasn't this deep desire to feed the capitalist machine, I needed to do the thing that feels like me. That's not serving them, you know, serving someone else constantly.
I think we've talked about this at Scribente, but I didn't really start writing about being a mom until just recently. It's something I want to explore more, but again, it's sort of like “can I even write about that? Am I allowed to write about being a mom?”
Elizabeth: Yes totally. I think that there are a lot of writers who've really opened that. I feel like we're in a really cool era of moms who write about mothering like with Angela Garbes and I just started Ruth Whippman's Boymom. And I'm like, Oh my God, why didn't I have this?
Maggie: It's really blowing up. And, and I think part of that too, is just having the options more now. Being able to write books when your kids are little, I don't think that was really very easily done in previous generations. And so that is I think a real cool result of that progress.
Elizabeth: Speaking of Scribente and writer-moms, you were an attendee at the retreat in the fall of 2023. And from that, you've attended a number of events, both in person and online. I’m curious about what you've gotten out of the Scribente Maternum Community.
Maggie: Oh, so much! I mean so much community in general. I went to the retreat right after I turned in the last edits on the book and I was at this point where I was like “what am I doing ? where do I live?” And because I did my MFA in New York, there's such a writers community there and I knew a lot of other writers and I would go to readings and stuff like that. Leaving New York, I was kind of like, how do I do that in Seattle? Would I go to things or to classes, but never really connected with a group. And then, COVID hit and having small children, I wasn't really able to do anything. Especially looking forward to having the book come out, I was like “Who is my community? Where, where are my people?” So I went to the retreat to see if these might be my people, you know? Or, see if I can get some ideas or something, because I'm also like in this weird writing moment of having just finished this big thing and I don't really know what's coming next. And the retreat just kind of blew all of my expectations out of the water because just the group itself is so diverse and interesting.
The way that it was structured with a lot about sharing and connecting and, even though we were all talking about writing, the focus I think was really on the community building. That was so amazing for me because this is what I needed. Just being able to maintain some of those connections and having Scribente folks support the book and come out on the book tour was just a dream.
It’s just such a great experience to be around other writers who are in a similar kind of life experience and for that reason are very supportive and very good cheerleaders. I just love that energy.
Elizabeth: So one of my final questions is what are you reading and what are the books that you find yourself consistently recommending to people?
Maggie: That is a great question. I'm reading Station Eleven right now (by Emily St. John Mandel). I am really loving it. I am having the weirdest dreams from it, but I've been waiting to read it. It's like one of those I knew it would kind of emotionally difficult and it just felt like the right thing. I’m really sucked into it, but also it's so thought provoking and it's making me think about humanity. Cause we're just like at this very weird place in humanity right now.
One of the writing books that I always recommend to writers who are working on, a book project or a nonfiction project is The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick. It’s extremely thought provoking and inspirational, but also a very practical way of thinking about nonfiction writing, which is that yes, you're telling a story, there's a narrative, “a situation,” but there's also, a larger, overarching thing that you're trying to do with that, and so it breaks down a couple of different famous essays or like chapters that do this in like a really good way. So that's a fantastic writing kind of guide and manual.
Elizabeth: Thanks so much Maggie for the taking the time to talk with me. It was so fun to catch up!
Maggie: I loved catching up, too!
We are so grateful to Maggie for taking the time to talk. You can get her book anywhere you find your books (especially your local bookstore), but if you want to scoop it up right now, you can get it at the Scribente Maternum Bookshop Storefront here. You can also find Maggie on Substack
and Instagram @maggiejmertens.
We have more writer-mom Q&As planned. Let us know if there’s an author you’d love to hear from in this series!
Q&A with Author and Writer-Mom Maggie Mertens