Eight Questions – Interview with Tara Cain

This is the first in a series of weekly interviews at BloggerDad.com called Eight Questions, featuring some of your favorite parent bloggers on the web. The inaugural interview is with Tara Cain of mommy blog, From Dawn Till Rusk. Cain, the features editor of daily UK publication, Coventry Telegraph, started blogging in March and hasn’t looked back. She is equally at home writing about topics as varied as the school uniform racket which forces parents to dole out tons of money each year, embarrassing things her children say in public, to the tragic but inspiring story of a brave young man dying of leukaemia.

Today, Cain opens up about her experiences since March, the origins of her blog, balancing home and work life and the differences between print media and blogging.

1. What prompted you to launch From Dawn Till Rusk?
   I was asked to start this blog by my editor as we were relaunching the paper’s website and they were keen to get a ‘family friendly’ blog up and running.  I agreed to write it from the perspective of a working mum trying to juggle a career with raising two young children and running a home and thought it would take me a couple of minutes at the start of my working day. Then I realised that just knocking out a couple of lines every day wouldn’t cut the mustard and instead of just writing something for work, I was hooked and actually taking it home to work on. The name was chosen for me and was supposed to reflect the fact that, as a working mother, you never ever stop. But then, as a non working mother you never ever stop either and to be honest, coming to work is rather a rest!

I think having children is the best source of material a writer can have

2. How do you choose blog topics and what kind of preparation goes into each post?
   I have absolutely no shortage of blogging topics. In fact, I have a huge backlog of things waiting to post, and I have to hold myself back. I think having children is the best source of material a writer can have, from the funny things they say and do to the feelings they engender in you, the impact they have on your life and your relationships, how they change you as a person, the questions you constantly ask yourself. I cannot imagine ever getting writer’s block, only the lack of time to sit down and actually write. I now have a bloggy notebook on hand at all times to jot down any ideas that come to me –  usually on a car journey or while doing the washing up funnily enough. I am not aiming to win any prizes for my words so I tend to just write each blog as a stream of consciousness rather than actually sit down and map it out.
3. Two part question: How did you determine how much of your family life will make its way into the blog and have you written anything which you have since regretted?
   I have read a number of blogs where identities are changed and I totally understand why. But that’s just not me and while I do share my children’s names I never reveal where we live or anything else that could identify them. I also never use my married name. There are many blogs out there that share every cough and spit of their lives which I personally find rather boring. I want to be entertained and aim to write the sort of posts I would like to read myself. I haven’t written anything I regret – I do think long and hard before putting up anything controversial or provocative. There are some big bloggers out there who use colourful language or intimate details of their life and they are really popular (and, by most parts, well written) but that’s just not me. I’m all for good, clean fun.

Everybody can write, they just need to find their voice.

4. Since you are a journalist, you have a bit more writing experience than the average blogger. What differences stand out to you in writing for the two different medias (print and the web)?
   I think that blog writing is a totally different animal. Some of my favourite bloggers are not professional writers and have no training to speak of and yet they write entertaining tales that make me revisit them time and time again.  I do not think I have any edge over any other blogger because I am a journalist. Quite the opposite in fact, because as a media writer you are taught to keep your emotion out of your copy and stick to the facts. Just the facts, ma’am (as they said on Dragnet). Blog writing is so much more honest, down to earth and ‘grubby’. Everybody can write, they just need to find their voice.
5. What lessons, if any, have you learned from other bloggers and how can those lessons be applied to traditional print journalism?
   My favourite bloggers just seem to have a very natural style and can make you laugh/cry/growl with a few carefully chosen words. I can find myself totally immersed in a piece of writing and it could be about something as trivial as watching High School Musical DVDs to something remarkable like discovering your unborn child has a disability. As a features editor I think more papers should go down this route of human stories, which can be so powerful to the reader. One of our most popular pages in the paper is when we run a short story competition where we set people up with an intro and ask them to write a yarn from there.
6. How do you balance your family life and work-life?
   With the support of my great husband (we’ve been together for 17 years now, married for 7) and a lot of organisation. I work four days a week and am lucky to have hours sympathetic to being a parent and I am very lucky in that my children are really sociable and love nursery and after school club (my son often begs me to go there weekends, which makes me think I must be a bit of a dull mum!). It is tough and I do agonise over whether I should stay or devote my time to my family, but at the moment this is what works for me – and for us.
7. In reading a large number of parenting blogs from around the world, what parenting or blogging differences, if any, have you noticed between bloggers from the UK and elsewhere in the world?
   I have read many many many blogs in research for my own. In America it is BIG business and there are quite a few blogging celebrities and even an annual conference dedicated to it. But other than that the quality and styles are as varied here as they are the world over. There are a lot of parent bloggers being offered book deals I have noticed, so it seems the word ‘blog’ isn’t going to be greeted with the “uh, what’s that?” grunt it did when I told many of my friends I was starting one up!
8. What are your future writing, blogging and family goals?
   As I said before, I don’t really get to write much with my job – blogging seems to have become my writing outlet. Like many others, I enjoy it because I get to put much of my thought process down in print – things that would ordinarily fade into history without another thought. And having children makes me want to remember every precious thing about them.

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