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First, when your little boy decides to give you a new hairdo while weaving binder clips, white out, jars of pencils, and possibly a small stapler into the back of your head, let him. This may give you another ten minutes or so of working on your book. Recognize as soon as the call comes from the West Coast radio show your son will forget the “no talking game” and demand something complex from the refrigerator. You will describe your artistic beliefs while mixing Parmesan cheese into orzo. Then he will tell you he needs to sit on your lap and whisper things in your ear even though this sort of thing never happens anymore. Practice sounding authorial while your child mutters, “I love my momma” in your ear repeatedly.

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Hearing the news about CEOs and Hollywood stars implicated in the recent college admission scandal infuriates and inspires me. I am a writing coach, with three published novels, numerous essays, and decades of teaching high school and college students with stints in schools blacklisted by the Chicago Police Department for gang activity and schools famous for the wealth of its students, the rigor of its classes and its social pressure. I work with rich kids, poor kids, and everything in between. My message to them remains the same, tell your story, tell it well. Teenagers need to be allowed to find their own identities through music and books and their peers and teachers. Not their parents.

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Although my father, the literary critic and novelist Julian Moynahan, had writing and reading space in a separate building in our back yard, nicknamed by my mother, “The Ivory Tower” my clearest memory is not one of a static writer sitting at a desk but more one about edges, the side of the dining room table, the kitchen counter, a chair in the living room. He had his solitary side but clearly he found inspiration when his time was short, compressed, dictated by dinner and putting out the garbage, the only domestic duty I recall him performing.

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