Catherine Connors
Author "HerBadMother.com"
Tele-Retreat: March 2, 12pm EST
"The New Radicals - Making Social Change" panel discussion with Claire Diaz
Catherine is a mother, writer and recovering academic in Toronto who traded the lecture hall for the playroom and discovered that university students and preschoolers have much the same attention span. She’s the author of HerBadMother.com, the co-founder and editor of the Bad Moms Club, the featured parenting blogger at Beliefnet, the moderator of Her Bad Mother’s Basement, a contributing editor at BlogHer, and a freelance writer who writes, sometimes, about surviving motherhood, sometimes about surviving womanhood, sometimes about trying to make the world a better place, and more often than not about her belief that bad is, really, the new good. (She really does believe that bad is the new good. She wrote a Manifesto. She’s that committed.)
She’s done some awesome stuff, including but not limited to: giving birth, twice – once in a truck, almost, and with no epidural, a story that she totally plans to twist into on the back of a turnip truck with a tequila-soaked clasped in mouth by the time the child is in his teens – meeting Grover, and being held captive on a Greek Island. She wants to do more, though, because there’s still Elmo, and Madagascar. And she most wants to make the world a better place, for moms and children especially, but also everybody, really, even Oscar the Grouch, who really is just a misunderstood environmentalist.
In her spare time, she practices talking about herself in the third person. She’s getting pretty good at it.
Her Bad Mother has been mentioned in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the American Prospect, the London Times, and sundry other publications, as well as on CNN, ABC, CBC and the BBC online. She has also made appearances on TVO, Lifetime Television, and Disney Family’s ‘Get Hatched’ video series with Teri Hatcher, during which she did absolutely no hatching, contrary to what you might expect. In 2009, Babble.com named Her Bad Mother one of the top ten mommy blogs of 2009 in its list of the year’s Top 50 Mommybloggers, ranking it among the Best Written, Most Confessional, Most Controversial, Most Popular and – drum roll – Funniest mom blogs on the Internet. Then they did it again in 2010. She thinks they might know something she doesn’t.
Catherine’s writing has also appeared in a variety of on- and off-line publications, numerous books, and maybe one or two papyrus scrolls. She still dabbles in her academic work, which concerns women and mothers in the history of political philosophy, and that stuff almost always comes out on scrolls, which are totally more noble than the Internet, seriously. She also speaks regularly on mothering in the public sphere, blogging family life, women and blogging, and social media and marketing, sometimes all the same time.
