S. Bear Bergman is an author, storyteller, educator, and the founder and publisher of children’s book press Flamingo Rampant, which makes feminist, culturally-diverse children’s picture books celebrating LGBT2Q+ kids and families. He was the co-editor of Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. His latest book is Special Topics in Being a Parent.
Special Topics in Being a Parent offers practical parenting advice (augmented by charming illustrations) informed by queer experiences for anyone doing the work of parenting children. With plenty of humour and compassion, this tender guide helps parents to live their parenting values while enabling their kids to grow their capacities, understand the world, and above all, feel connected and loved.
Interviewed by Nancy Issenman
Nancy Issenman (NI): Congratulations on writing and publishing such an uplifting and instructional book. As a queer and Jewish grandmother there is so much here that made me laugh, nod in agreement but also made me ponder. Oh that we could have had this 40 years ago, but it’s here now and what a gift!
I wonder how long Special Topics took to write and how your values and ideas changed as a result of a) researching and writing this book and b) parenting over the time you wrote it?
S. Bear Bergman (SBB): Special Topics took about two and a half years to write, depending on what you count? I kind of always feel like every book I manage to produce has been in progress my whole life, but the part where I sat down and opened a new document to the moment I sent the final draft off, a bit under three years.
In that time my ideas didn’t change so much as deepen. Parenting is like being given a lifelong practicum in humility and flexibility, and the values I held at the beginning – that children are whole people, that parenting is a collaborative activity, that you can’t control your kids and you shouldn’t try – stayed constant. What I would say, though, is that my confidence in them grew. It’s one thing to believe in it but it’s another to grapple with the daily results of my decisions. Writing the book while doing the constant and ongoing work of parenting gave me plenty of material, but also the confidence of my convictions grew as I measured it against what I was recommending or considering.
NI: Do you think you could have written this say, 10 years ago, and if so how do you think it would have been received? Where, other than libraries and bookstores, would you like to find a home for this book?
SBB: Ten years ago, I definitely did not know enough to write this book. That may or may not have stopped me; I think it’s hard to know in the moment what we know or don’t and the older I get the more aware I am of how much I don’t know and probably never will. But also, I was still very much in the trenches of early parenting and just trying to keep my head above water.
It feels impossible to know how it might have been received, and whether it would have been better or worse. I have made the choice since I started doing public queer activism as a 16-year-old that I was going to do it full face and in an integrated way, which for me was about a decision to not let shame or fear take up too much real estate in my brain. But I think a position of queerness, of having learned to take every bit of “conventional wisdom” and all cultural imperatives with a whole pinch of Diamond kosher salt, adds to the work in ways that I would not want to hide or elide.
I think now, more people are hungry for more honesty and more humor and fewer gendered parenting.
As for where it might live: honestly, with parents and caregivers who want their impacts to match their intentions, who are trying to work on ways of parenting that are collaborative and connected without being unrelievedly permissive. I’d love to see it as a gift for new parents that celebrates their commitment to an emotionally aware family life. And I often consider just…. leaving them around in places like midwifery practices or pediatricians offices.
NI: I really love that you included so many personal stories and anecdotes. It certainly adds to the humor and readability of the book. Why was it important for you to include your own experiences?
SBB: Here’s the thing: I am actually not naturally good at most of the critical parts of parenting. So because I have had to arrive to better work via trial and error (which is misnamed, I fear; it’s actually more like trial and error and error and error and error and error) I have a whole lot of these stories of when I did a poor job and then eventually a somewhat better one. And because the overall tone of parenting books – and advice books generally, often – can be so very judgmental, I wanted to go the other way, more like: let me have made these mistakes so you don’t have to! Which was almost the subtitle of the book.
Beyond that, I think the humor does an important job. It creates some sense of sticking-together-ness, even once things get a little tough. If you crack up reading about how I once basically marinated my three-year-old in wheatpaste, it builds some trust – I am sometimes an absolute fool, like we all are – then maybe you’ll also stay with me when I say something harder, like “you have to apologize to your kids when you screw up.”
NI: You mentioned that “Saul thinks my words are worth his pictures” The final outcome of this co-production clearly points to a real joining of minds. I am curious: did you give him the completed manuscript to illustrate or did you work together on each page/chapter to achieve the visual, or something in between? Is it fair to assume you had a lot of fun?
SBB: I pretty much turned over the final text, and left him alone to do his magic, and then at the end we went back through and made very minimal adjustments. Those would typically be either because I hadn’t been quite clear, or because I wanted to show something that would have been easy to represent in drawing but unbearably dull to try to write out. I think of this as “the Hunt for Red October effect.” The book is so bogged down with descriptions of what every blinky light and phosphorescent dial on the submarine does, but in the movie you just see a whole panel of stuff and you understand, yes, these are the controls.
For sure, Saul really gets my tone and vibe, but his part of the work is also both very important and creative, so I tried to impinge on it as little as possible – just enough to make sure things felt like they were in sync the whole way through.
NI: What’s next for you?
SBB: This is a great question, and at the moment it’s a little unclear. I should be touring my new storytelling show, The First Jew In Canada: A Trans Tale, but the current climate around both trans topics and Jewish culture make that very difficult. I am working on a book of the show, which I hope will prove more popular, in part because it’s less subject to protest, or attack than a live event, but that is of course an absolutely exhausting reality.
I am also working very, very slowly on a novel, called The Ladies’ Auxiliary, about a group of senior women who make some wild choices about how to spend their scant remaining time. I had imagines a third Special Topics book, one about love and relationships, but Saul has a number of his own projects to pursue so I would have to change illustrators, and I’m not sure I want to or even could? But stay tuned, certainly.