I Found this Hard

Turning the light on myself. Parents that Write #27 Q&A with Danusia Malina-Derben

Welcome to Parents That Write.

Parent writers, artists, and creators are more than just their ‘chaos’—we’re publishing books, dropping albums, optioning screenplays, and making magic every day.

How do they do it? That's what we're here to find out. Each week, my guests tackle eight quickfire questions, plus a few wildcards.

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Hello Lovelies,
After featuring 26 brilliant parent-writers about their creative lives, it’s my turn under the spotlight. A few of you (you know who you are) nudged me to answer the questions myself so here I am, wrangling my own wild writing mind into something resembling coherence.

Before we get into the questions: if you want to explore the full archive of conversations with fellow parents who create/write, you’ll find a treasure trove here. Highly recommended if you like your inspiration with a side of real life.

In the coming weeks, I’ve a lineup for you that makes me giddy: Annie Ridout, Wake Loire, Francesca Bossert, Lindsay Johnstone, Amy Beeson, Shelly Mazzanoble, Claire Venus, Violet Carol, Ray Katharine Cohen, Anna McNuff, and a whole constellation of other brilliant humans.

And yes, fathers (and father figures) ARE in this series too though let’s be honest: too many dudes still think “writing/creating” means disappearing into a room for twelve hours while someone else changes the nappies, cuts the grapes in half, and wrestles the existential angst of parenting. (No shade to the men who’ve shown up in this series so far—you’re gems.)

CONSIDER THIS A CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: If you know a father who’s raising kids while building creative works, nudge them my way. We need more of your stories here.

Alright. Enough throat-clearing. Here’s me, answering my own damn questions.

I wrote one perfect sentence and then emotionally disintegrated for aesthetic purposes.

Share a broad snapshot of your life. Who are you parent to and/or have caring responsibilities for?

Official Snapshot
I’m a mother of ten, and the founder of a niche C-suite consulting company that helps C-suites stop spiralling into dysfunction. I’m the award-winning producer and host of Parents Who Think podcast, and family show Seraphina Speaks hosted by my triplet tween daughter. My most recent books are NOISE an unflinching ‘memoir-manifesto’ that looks at what motherhood does to identity, and what it demands in return, and SPUNK a necessary look at what we expect from fathers, and what we don’t.

I speak on toxic leadership, gendered cultural dynamics and care, and the politics of truth-telling across boardrooms, bedrooms, and every space where power hides in plain sight. It’s the work I love most.

We live in a mini country house that feels vaguely like the set of Pride and Prejudice, but with significantly more screaming and tech chargers. Neurodivergence is our normal. So is the belief that no one should have to shrink to fit.

Unofficial Snapshot
I answer 247 questions before 9am and still remember who needs antibiotics, who’s cried twice, and what metaphor I was chasing at 3am. I’ve led boardroom interventions with mashed banana in my hair. Most of my best sentences arrive in the car between snack requests, route changes, and someone yelling that they’ve lost a shoe. I edit while the house sleeps. I’m raising young humans and building platforms and truly trying not to disappear in the process.

Also, I play competitive-level Scrabble thanks to a world champion I met by accident in Goa and trained with over two gloriously intense weeks.

Words are my refuge, and on some days, the only place that feels like mine.

Where can we find you?

Website | Linkedin | Substack

Can you share favourite praise for your writing?

Praise? Oh, I hoard it in a secret Google Doc called “reasons not to fake my death.

Why do you write?

➡️ Because I’m suspicious of any culture that rewards silence. ➡️ Because mothers are handed the role of caretaker but never witness.
➡️ Because if I didn’t write, I’d start erasing myself thought by thought, edge by edge until I became palatable enough to survive and too hollow to matter.

I write to give shape to what we’re not supposed to say: that love isn’t tidy, that care has a cost, and that motherhood can be both a devotion and a trap.

I don’t write for catharsis. But I do write for interruption.To unspool the myths women are force-fed about goodness, about femininity, and, of course, about sacrifice. I write to hold power to account, including my own.

And I write because I believe in lineage, not only genetic, but creative. That my children deserve to see a woman who didn’t shrink. That truth can be a kind of inheritance. That telling the truth might be the most radical form of parenting I have.

What does the inside of your writing mind look like?

It’s a surveillance room and a faux séance.

It notices everything even the things I wish it didn’t. Dialogue fragments. Facial tics. Emotional subtext people think they’re hiding. I walk through the world picking up frequencies no one asked me to tune into. It’s intrusive and holy.

Sometimes it’s a courtroom. A ruthless cross-examination of language, of memory, of what I think I know. Every sentence must account for itself.

Other times, it’s feral, kind of half-dream and half-demand. I follow instincts I can’t really explain. I write something down and only understand it weeks later. Often, I chase a line like it owes me money.

My writing mind is not polite. It interrupts eating, sex, sleep, meetings. It doesn’t care if I’m tired. It doesn’t care if I’m liked. It wants the truth, and it wants it unwrapped, unwashed, and still bleeding.

But there’s reverence, too. I’ve a deep respect for form, rhythm, structure. I think in spirals, in recursion, in echoes, in whispers. My best writing comes when I let the subconscious lead, then bring in the scalpel.

It’s not chaos. It’s choreography just performed in the dark.

How is your ability to write affected by being a parent and your ability to parent affected by your writing?

I've been a parent since I was seventeen. Writing and parenting didn’t interrupt each other, they built each other. Both require stamina, intuition, and the ability to stay with something long past comfort.

I don’t write despite being a parent. I write because I parent. And vice versa.

How often do you write with your child around or not, and what kind of writing do you get done when your child is nearby?

This question assumes there’s a choice. There isn’t.

I write when I can—at the edges, in the gaps, sometimes right in front of them. Not as a strategy but as a survival mechanism.

Writing isn’t a hobby. It’s work. And like most working mothers, I don’t get the luxury of perfect conditions. I write with a child on my lap. I write when the room is loud. I write because if I waited for silence, I’d still be waiting.

(And yep, I wrote the question. Look, even I wanted to believe we had options.)

What is your best writing habit?

Relentless returning.

I don’t wait for clarity, time, or divine intervention. I come back to the page like it owes me something even when the sentence is terrible. Even when I hate every word. Even when a child is yelling and I’m writing in six-minute increments. Especially then.

I stopped romanticising rituals a long time ago. My habit isn’t pretty but it’s durable. I write inside mess. I revise inside fatigue. I finish things because I refuse to let them rot in draft form.

The best habit I ever built was not leaving myself. Not walking away from the idea just because life is loud.

What are the three most important characteristics of being a writer who is a parent?

1. Self-trust
You’re raising something fragile, unpredictable, and often invisible to others. Whether it’s a child or a piece of work, you have to trust that what you’re nurturing matters even when it’s not behaving, not progressing on schedule, and definitely not sleeping through the night.

2. Immunity to comparison
There is no one right way to parent. There is no one right way to write. The moment you start measuring your pace or shape against someone else’s, you risk distorting what was uniquely yours. Protecting your voice (as a parent, as a writer) means refusing to be eroded by other people’s timelines, aesthetics, or polish.

3. An intimacy with uncertainty
You don’t get guarantees. Not with children and not with books. You have to be willing to love something deeply without knowing how it will turn out. To stay in relationship with something in process, with all its contradictions, and not rush it into resolution just to feel safe.

What or who is your secret writing weapon?

Grief. Not the grief of grand losses—though I’ve known that too—but the quieter, cumulative grief of motherhood. The selves I’ve shed. The hours I’ve given away. The conversations I’ll never finish because someone needs a snack.

It sharpens me. It reminds me that time is finite, and so is attention. I write like someone who knows what it costs not to. And I don’t waste time pretending I have forever.

Grief keeps me honest which means it keeps me writing.

What or who has been the most significant creative influence in your life?

I write like the girl I was is watching. She hates being bored.

What unfinished writing projects do you have lying about?

I’m not someone with a graveyard of half-written things. If a piece doesn’t have enough heat to hold my attention, I don’t drag it along.

Right now, I’m writing a TV series—a dark, seductive, psychologically sharp drama for screen. It explores how people manipulate love to gain power, security, or redemption. The architecture is already in place. It’s an autopsy of modern love, and it gets to the heart of things

I also have a memoir—not yet on the page, but fully alive in my life. It’s not unfinished so much as in process, being shaped in the margins of everything else. It’s personal, political, and too vulnerable to rush. I’ll write it when it’s ready to be written fully and not a minute sooner.

How much torture/pleasure is involved in your writing life and in what form does it come?

The torture is foreplay. The knowing, the circling, the not-yet. I feel it in my body—when something’s close but still out of reach. It’s not pain, exactly. It’s pressure. Desire without release.

But when the line lands…when I press into something raw and it holds, that’s pleasure. Deep, cellular pleasure. The kind that hums in the spine.

Writing doesn’t calm me. It arouses something sharp and necessary. It reminds me I’m alive.

What is the favourite sentence you’ve ever written, and why?

Sometimes a woman’s only real power is the decision not to disappear.

It takes more than delicacy to hold shape under pressure

If your writing discipline was a food, what would it be?

A mille-feuille. Dozens of impossibly thin layers, built with obsessive care and the full knowledge that most people will crush it with a fork in two seconds flat. That’s the game. It looks delicate but it takes nerve, patience, and exacting control.

My writing discipline is that: layered, exact, and a little absurd. It requires precision and pleasure in equal measure. And the quiet satisfaction of knowing the structure is stronger than it looks.

P.S. They’re also called Napoleon cakes. Fitting, really! Precision-obsessed, deceptively structured, and under no illusion about what it takes to conquer a blank page.

Closing out this Column with:

"A woman artist is not deprived by cooking and having children, nor by nursing children with measles (even in triplicate)—one is in fact nourished by this rich life, provided one always does some work each day; even a single half hour, so that the images grow in one's mind.”-- Barbara Hepworth [artist + sculptor, mother of triplets]

CALLING ALL PARENTS WHO THINK (AND CREATE) TO THE COMMENTS 📓✨👇🏻

Writing inside a life is its own kind of work. Thoughts arrive half-formed, half-interrupted. Some things get written and some stay quiet for years, right?!

What’s taking shape for you right now even if it’s not on the page yet? The comments are open if you feel like sharing, come chat!

Sending you all creative juice,
Danusia x