PEN PARENTIS

We wish to see a world in which writers who have children feel supported and celebrated for maintaining the balance of family with a creative career, without an assumption being made that they 1) write only about their children or 2) have given up on their creative careers or 3) that they are in any way less creative or interesting than their counterparts, merely because they are raising children in addition to writing. Specifically, we would like to see Pen Parentis Literary Salons around the globe, and would like to found Pen Parentis Local Chapters where writers who are parents can support and celebrate each other in smaller, less urban communities.

Writers discover us through social media and follow us for inspiration, attending our Salons or starting at an accountability meetup, then they become part of our community and create accountability pods and/or workshops with other writer-parents. When they publish they can read at our salons to inspire other parents to complete their work. Simple and effective. The Cycle of Support.

We are also developing a set of guidelines for Pen Parentis Local Chapters, so that interested parties who reach a minimum number of committed writers who are parents in a specific geographic location can get a packet to help them run events similar to our urban Salons but tailored to a small, regular group. We hope to also fund trips from urban centers to these local chapters so that they can visit with established authors who are also parents, in order to foster a mentoring relationship among these established and emerging authors. We use our website, Twitter, Facebook (both a public and a closed group) to monitor feedback from interested parties and have recently hired a volunteer from Colorado to publish a series of parent-writer interviews on our website to help inspire writers in more remote locations where it is harder to find community. Finally, our popular Pen Parentis Writing Fellowship for New Parents results in nearly 200 new works of professional-level quality fiction each year, all written by the parents of children under 10 years of age--a time that is critical for writers who are also parents.

We have been successfully running the Pen Parentis Literary Salons in Lower Manhattan for ten years now. Our Executive Director is passionate about helping parents stay on creative track and paired with a curator who is determined to keep diversity high in our panels, we have one of the most high-end and inclusive Salons in New York City. We have many volunteers across the country, and are growing all the time. We run a 245K organization on a shoestring budget because our passion draws volunteers from across the country and the magic of the internet allows Pen Parentis to employ these passionate volunteers and keep in constant touch with them.

When we first began, we were two parent-writers looking for inspiration from experts at a reading series. Now we know that there are no experts, that everyone needs community. What we now seek is a shift in the image of what a "good writer" has to be. No longer is a writer an Ernest Hemingway who abandons his child and wife while he smokes and drinks his way to greatness. Now we have Jennifer Egan who tells her two sons about her Pulitzer win over dinner after soccer practice.

Pen Parentis has grown from a dozen people in a room to an organization with bicoastal SRO events covered by the New York Times and LA Times. We have added an annual Fellowship to encourage the production of new works of fiction by authors at a critical stage of their lives, and are working on a data-driven book for best practices of authors who are also parents. Social media has allowed us to expand our communities beyond the boundaries of major urban centers and best of all, volunteers are coming forward asking how they can help, since Pen Parents helped them feel part of an artistic community - wherever they live. We have received lovely thank you notes from writers who had all-but given up on their art until they came across our community: either through the Fellowship, a Salon, or through social media--they found inspiration in our work and in our members and now they write again, and are themselves Pen Parentis Authors. Impact-wise, we are flourishing. We have volunteers from all over the nation, giving thousands of hours of time to the organization's mission. We would like to raise more money--our goal is to have our enthusiastic fan base learn to show their support financially - so that our volunteers could at some point become permanent paid employees.

Recently: Pace University developed an app for us, and we transitioned entirely to an online platform for the salons and the Cycle of Support. Spreading the word that we exist is our main problem-- so we are actively seeking introductions to other literary nonprofits. We are excited to grow nationally in the years to come, despite the challenges of the coronavirus--or perhaps to some extent, because of it. We have become an essential service to our members to help them stay on creative track, and we are proud to lead into the future.