A mother drops off her 12-year-old daughter and her friend—with ground rules in place—at the mall in Bozeman, Montana, with three younger children in tow. Within an hour, mall security calls her back. She returns. Two police offices are waiting there to tell her that she’s going to be arrested for endangering the welfare of her children.

In “Guilty as Charged: Her biggest crime? Trusting her own parenting,” Bridget Kevane patiently recalls the details of that day and the ones that would follow, plumbing her confusion, frustration, and guilt for the readers of Brain, Child. “During the months between my arrest and the deferred prosecution agreement that my lawyer eventually worked out, I began to feel that I was being reprimanded for allowing my daughter to develop [a] sense of responsibility,” she writes. What emerges is a courageously unadorned examination of her family’s ordeal, and an opportunity to reflect on the shrinking space available for parents to simply trust their instincts.

Source: Brain, Child

Right now I’m killing the third person. With this very blog post, I am contributing to the sneaky, first-person narrative trend that currently runs our written world (and by reading this, so are you). According to Nathaniel G. Moore in Broken Pencil, we’ve all been too busy talking about ourselves to notice the third person slipping beneath the pages of time.

Moore investigates the opinions of several literary aces and provides a multi-faceted look at why we're  so obsessed with “I” these days. Here are a few of their thoughts:

Writers don’t seem to want the excess baggage of a big, baggy, third person story or novel. The standard compulsions of the third person author seem outdated, less cheeky and immediate, than the prattle of a typical first person present narrator. —Spencer Gordon

Lately I have been seduced by the first-person siren song, because for some reason this point of view lets me write meaner people, which is exciting since I usually go for characters on the nicer end of the spectrum. —Jessica Westhead

When people write about what they know, they install themselves in the story with devastating first person results. It comes down to laziness. Pure and utter laziness. —Gradey Alexander

Source: Broken Pencil 

Image by My Buffo, licensed under Creative Commons.