The following description comes from the event organizer.

What does a great artist who is also a mother look like? What does it mean to create, not in “a room of one’s own,” but in a domestic space? In The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem (WW Norton), award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge. She travels to Seattle from her home in Amsterdam to speak about her book, in which she explores the intimate and varied struggles of brilliant artists and writers of the twentieth century. Ursula K. Le Guin found productive stability in family life, and Audre Lorde’s queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms. Susan Sontag became a mother at nineteen, Angela Carter at forty-three. As Julie Phillips threads together vivid portraits of these (and other) pathbreaking women, she argues that creative motherhood is a question of keeping the baby on that apocryphal fire escape: work and care held in a constantly renegotiated, provisional, productive tension. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary life.