Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, LM's Literary Reflections Editorial Assistant, is pleased to announce her 10 week workshop for beginner mama poets. If you're an expecting, new, birth, step, adoptive or grandmama wanting to learn more about the joys of poetry, as well as create and present your own poems in an encouraging and inspiring workshop format, this is the place for you!
Among others, topics will include: reading & writing as a poet, poetry of remembering & remembrance, forms and how to make them relevant, and the rigors and rewards of revision.
The workshop will run from July 1st to September 9th. Cost is $250. Class size is limited. For more information or to register, please write violeta724@earthlink.net.
Los Angeles writer, playwright, and performer Karen Rizzo wrote the book Things to Bring, S#!t to Do . . . and other inventories of anxiety made entirely out of lists she's saved since she was a child.
1) The memoir was a 2006 Book Sense Highlight for ‘Fascinating Lives’
2) Our interview with her is now up in Profiles
3) Find out what she thinks list-making really tells us about ourselves
4) She just wrote to tell us that she's now working on a novel
5) She says it scares her
6) We wonder if there are any lists in her novel
7) You can watch her here, reading some lists from her book
Fiction Co-Editor Suzanne Kamata's debut novel Losing Kei can now be pre-ordered at Amazon.com.
Jill Parker is an American painter living in Japan. Far from the trendy gaijin neighborhoods of downtown Tokyo, she’s settled in a remote seaside village where she makes ends meet as a bar hostess. Her luck changes when she meets Yusuke, a savvy and sensitive art gallery owner who believes in her talent. But their love affair, and subsequent marriage, is doomed to domestic hell, for Yusuke is the chonan, the eldest son, who assumes the role of rigid patriarch in his traditional family while Jill’s duty is that of servile Japanese wife. A daily battle of wills ensues as Jill resists instruction from Yusuke's mother in the proper womanly arts and even the long anticipated birth of a son, Kei, fails to unite them. Divorce is the only way out but in Japan a foreigner has no rights to custody and Jill must choose between freedom and abandoning her child.
Told with tenderness, humor, and an insider’s knowledge of Japanese family life Losing Kei is the debut novel of an exceptional expatriate voice.
Recently, a friend wrote to say that she had spent another sleepless night mourning the loss of her 18-month-old granddaughter. I know my friend would sell her soul for one more glimpse of that innocent face or to hear one more peal of her toddler's belly laugh. Just a little over a year ago, this young child perished after she was backed over by a car. In an instant, a life full of promise was crushed under tons of steel, rubber and plastic. In that same instant a grandmother's worse nightmare was realized. The heart that pulsed with love for that little girl broke open and bled. It bleeds still, unabated.
Now my friend spends sleepless nights playing the 'what if' game. What if someone had checked on the toddler's whereabouts once more? What if the toddler had turned right in her wanderings rather than left? What if she had lingered one more moment over a snack, or napped a little bit longer? What if? What if.
Since the year 2000, it is estimated that 1,150 children have perished in non-crash, non-traffic vehicle fatalities. The number is approximate because no federal or state agency is charged with tracking the grim statistics. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) believes that over 9000 children are treated in emergency rooms for injuries incurred in non-crash, non-traffic incidents each year. Experts caution that all of these numbers likely severely understate the real ones.
While back-overs represent the greatest percentage of such accidents (49.5%), children are also injured and die to due to hyperthermia from being left in cars that have become ovens in the heat of the sun (19.6%). The number of children involved in front-overs is 13.4% of the total. Vehicles set in motion make up 7.1% and power window strangulation makes up 2.1%
The average age of the victims is between 12 and 23 months.
Every mother's heart breaks when she reads those statistics.
There is federal legislation, currently in committee, that would require automakers to install safety devices in all vehicles sold in the United States. The devices would include a back-over warning system, power window stops and brake shift locks. Study the legislation. If you feel you can support it, communicate with your legislators.
What else can be done? My friend wants to remind all of us that one of the simplest steps we can take is the first step. We must check on young children one more time than we think is necessary. Who among us has not been amazed by how quickly a toddler can dart from a place of relative safety to one of extreme danger? It only takes an instant. We need to discipline ourselves to check, and then check again.
If you wish to know more about the status of the House and Senate bills, or to get more information about these sad tragedies, check the website www.kidsandcars.org. I used their resources for the statistics mentioned above.
Whether you are a mother, or have been loved by a mother, you know the power of the maternal bond. Take a moment today to honor it by taking action. Let each of us do what we can to assure that no child we love dies needlessly.
Terry Ryan, author of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, passed away on Wednesday, May 16th at her home in San Francisco after a battle with cancer. Ryan's mother daughter memoir tells the story of a woman who, "raised ten kids on twenty-five words or less." The memoir was made into a movie staring Julianne Moore and recently reviewed by LM's Caroline Grant in Mama At The Movies. Read a local story about Terry Ryan at,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/17/BAGP0P3U2E115.DTL
In The MotherHood is the first scripted Web series by moms, for moms and about moms. Conceived by Suave and Sprint, the story will be written in part by YOU, based on your funny, comical and no-holds-barred experiences of motherhood.
Colicky babies, toppling toddlers, terrible-two tantrums, kindergartners uttering obscenities (during parent-teacher conferences, of course) — the comedies of motherhood never seem to end!
What can you do, except laugh and then write about it at In The MotherHood?
It's easy to take the next step, and here's a little secret: Behind the Sign Up Now link lies a haven for harried mothers, a paradise for pooped parents — a really fun event where you'll get to tell your best motherhood tales, win prizes and see your work turned into a series of video webisodes starring the fabulously funny Leah Remini.
We need moms of all kinds to become a part of this new community — you are welcome whether you want to write your own script or just want to read others' stories and vote on them. So what are you waiting for? Sign Up Now before your kids figure out that you're on the computer.
Editors, contributors, and friends of LiteraryMama.com will be reading poetry, fiction, and memoir in honor of mothers at the East Bay Meeting House (coffee shop next to East End Brewery) this Monday night, May 14th, 8:00-9:00. Mama writers are welcome to join us to read their own work during the open mic that starts at 9:00. Sign up for the open mic begins at 7:30.
Write ahudock@sc.rr.com to contact Amy Hudock, Editor-in-Chief of the
award-winning on-line literary magazine LiteraryMama.com, profiled in
April's SKIRT! at
http://charleston.skirtmag.com/stories/040107/chs_s_20061101016.shtml
Journalist E.J. Graff asks the question, do The Mommy Wars really exist? In the Sunday, April 29, 2007 issue of The Washington Post. Graff says,
"The ballyhooed Mommy Wars exist mainly in the minds -- and marketing machines -- of the media and publishing industry, which have been churning out mom vs. mom news flashes since, believe it or not, the 1950's. All the while the number of working mothers has been rising."
Graff says that 75 percent of mothers with school age children work "because they have to. And most stay-at-home peers don't hold it against them."
Have we been pushed by the media, (The Oprah show, Dr. Phil, book publishers and even The New York Times) to believe we're fighting a war that doesn't exist? Read The Mommy War Machine.
"Celebrating Motherhood as Muse: A Mother's Day Reading wih the Motherlode Writers" Sunday, May 13th from 4-6pm at Nomad Cafe 6500 Shattuck Ave. Oakland, CA 94609, (510) 595-5344. The Motherlode Writers is a Berkeley-based community of mother-writers who work in a variety of genres, including essay, memoir, poetry, and fiction. For more information, please visit their website: http://motherlodewriters.blogspot.com/
Motherlode is a writing group that originated from LM's editor-in-chief, founder and columnist, Amy Huduck's original, Books and Babies group. Several current and former LM editors and columnists will be there, many with kids in tow.