ROOM TO GROW, edited by Christina Baker Kline, Golden Books, New York, 1999, 197 pages, hardcover, $23.

“I have never been able to make sense of things in the usual way, like reading advice books and how-to guides,” confesses Christina Baker Kline in the introduction to her most recent work, “Room to Grow.” “I tend to find meaning instead in art and drama, through storytelling and metaphor.”

So, when her sons, Hayden and Will, just 17 months apart in age, entered the toddler years, the Bangor native turned to writing as she sought to make sense of all her children’s changes. This was not new territory for Kline. In 1996, she edited a collection on the first year of motherhood called “Child of Mine.” With her mother, Christina Baker, Kline edited “The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism.” Her second novel, “Desire Lines,” set in her hometown, was released this spring.

Twenty-two writers of fiction as well as nonfiction contributed personal essays to “Room to Grow.” Their ages span more than 30 years and they are scattered across the country, although the majority live in the Northeast, just as did the contributors to “Child of Mine.” Annaliese Hood of Mount Chase is the only Maine writer in the collection. Kline divided the book into three sections: Conjuring a Family; Room to Grow; and Taking Wing, but most importantly, eight of the essays were written by men.

Fathers of young children are heard more often than they were 25 years ago, yet still their voices rarely are heard. The most illuminating moments in “Room to Grow” come from the hearts and minds of male writers. How they know and love their children, on the one hand, is no different from the ways of mothers. Yet somehow, it is a vast universe apart.

Gordon Churchwell of Cold Spring, N.Y., muses about his 2-year-old daughter, Olivia, and Atalanta, the heroine of his favorite Greek myth, in the thoughtful and compelling essay “Atalanta: The Riddle of Fathers and Daughters.”

“Atalanta is a complex girl,” he writes. “Her father abandons her on a mountainside hours after her birth because he wants a son. She is rescued and suckled by a she-bear and later raised by hunters. She grows up into an athletic phenom, so skilled a hunter that she takes part in the boar hunt of Calydon — which was an all-male event until she showed up. …

“When Atalanta decides she is ready for marriage, she issues a challenge, swearing to marry any man who can beat her in a foot race. Hippomenes wins her with the help of the goddess Aphrodite, who gives him three golden apples … Each time he begins to fall behind, Hippomenes throws one of the apples in Atalanta’s path. She stoops to pick them up, allowing her rival to win the race and her hand.

“To a young boy, Atalanta’s actions were a mystery. She could have won the race,” Churchwell continues. “What could those golden apples have represented? What value could possibly compare with her unbeatable status?

“My greatest fear as I started out on this journey of parenthood was thinking that it would be me who would provide the golden apples. Unconsciously slipping them into Olivia’s lunch box as she headed to school each day. This golden apple is the need for approval. This golden apple, the craving for validation. This golden apple, a reverence for consensus.”

As Churchwell listens to experts implore the mothers of daughters to be better role models, he wonders if it is not fathers who might tip the balance between female compromise and male expectations.

“What if Atalanta’s father did not abandon her on the mountainside at birth but instead loved her and cherished her. What if it was he who raised her and not a she-bear or strangers, and taught her to stand her ground before the Calydonian boar’s charge? Taught her to guide her spear into its heart with all the relentless courage and focus that our daughters should use to find the heart of all maters? … And what if he explained the price of the golden apples so that she could choose without compromise?”

Jon Katz is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, the author of five novels and three works of nonfiction. He gave up the corporate rat race to spend more time with his children. He often found that he learned more about his offspring and their world while acting as chauffeur than he did at any other time with them. Katz, dubbed “The Prince of Rides” by car-pooling mothers, advocates silence as an important parenting skill in “Driving.”

“Communication, I’ve learned, is actually nurtured while driving kids around,” he writes. “Somehow the driver becomes invisible while conversation rages all around him. The same girls who will respond monsyllabically to any question you dare to raise talk with rare abandon in the backseat. The ethical response, I initially decided, was to put on a CD and try not to listen. But the chatter, the chorus of glee and heartache, the observations were sometimes far too compelling.

“`I’m so sad,’ M announced one afternoon. `My hamster killed herself last night. She threw herself right off the dresser and onto the floor in front of my cat.’ J recounted in amazing, graphic detail how she’d thrown up in class.”

Buried in the essays by mothers are revealing nuggets as well. “[Our children] impede us, thwart us, pull the rug out from under our serious selves — but in so doing, they gift us, grace us, surprise us,” writes California author Noelle Oxenhandler in “Childtime.” Roberta Israeloff of East Northport, N.Y., calls parenthood “the most illuminating and subversive act I have ever perpetrated” in “Five Snapshots from the Year Jake Turned Ten.”

Kline worked hard to find ethnic and lifestyle diversity that would match the vast differences in the personal styles of her writers. Essays by the parents of twins and only children are tucked in among those by writers with blended families.

Annaliese Hood explains how she and her adopted and birth children made a family in a tiny Maine hamlet in upper Penobscot County.

“I used to believe that if you choose to adopt a child, no matter what it takes, you must fulfill all promises,” she writes in “Choices,” one of the most moving of all the essays. “But as with other things, the child seized from my womb and the child who slid into daylight through another’s birth canal get the same deal. Some promises we can fulfill. Some we choose not to. And others are just unfillable. And so I become mother and father to everyone.”

Two of her children are of African-American descent. Yet, even in northern Maine “… a snowsled riding, hunter-logger community … this town never blinked at me and mine. … often I swear these small-town folk saw no color when it came to one of theirs, and that’s what the Hood kids were,” she writes. “They were theirs, just like the McCarthys and the Craigs and the Carvers.

“Honestly, a black child was not the strangest thing about us. It is far stranger to our neighbors that we are vegetarians than that our family includes an adopted child. It is far stranger to be a third-grade atheist — black or white — in a town with a rabid, foot-stomping Pentecostal church; a Methodist church; one Catholic, a Jehovah’s Witness, a small Seventh-Day Adventist congregation, the Baptists a few miles down the road. … It is far stranger that we have no television than that we have an adopted child and that she happens to be black. Our children just make us more visible in a town where we always have been more visible.”

“Room to Grow” is a far more interesting and engaging collection than was “Child of Mine” because Kline reached further into the country geographically and across gender lines to find authors. However, the fact that she did not contribute an essay of her own is disappointing, especially to readers in her home state. Kline’s considerable gifts as an editor, a skill she once said is more conducive to life with small children than fiction writing, are evident on every page.

Christina Baker Kline and Annaliese Hood will read from “Room to Grow” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 17, at Borders Books, Music and Cafe, Bangor.