June 11 - August 6 (no class the week of June 29)
Whether you are a new mom or a veteran, whether you gave birth to or adopted your child, in this online class you’ll learn how to take birth and motherhood stories and turn them into art. Weekly lectures, reading assignments and writing exercises will focus on telling details, character development, emotional distance, strengthening your reflective voice, and revision. You can expect to generate a number of short creative nonfiction pieces and one long piece. You will receive feedback from your peers and from me through online workshops.
This class is open to writers of all ability levels! Join us!
There is more information on my website: http://katehopper.com/pages/teaching.php
People can e-mail me with questions or to register: katehopper[at]msn.com.
San Francisco author S. Terrell French reads from her debut children's novel, OPERATION REDWOOD, at Books, Inc. (Laurel Village), 3515 California St., San Francisco, Thursday, May 21st at 7 pm. Kirkus Reviews calls OPERATION REDWOOD a "satisfying eco-adventure" starring a group of young people "gratifyingly diverse in age as well as experience and ethnic background. A highly enjoyable read." For more information and appearances, see www.operationredwood.com.
Former LM columnist (Bare-Breasted Mama) Gail Konop Baker has won the 2009 National Indie Excellence Award in the memoir category for her book, Cancer is a Bitch, Or, I'd Rather Be Having a Midlife Crisis (Da Capo Books).
Event: Writing Memoir Class June 15-26
"Lowcountry Writing Project, the Citadel"
What: Class
Host: Lowcountry Writing Project
Start Time: Monday, June 15 at 8:30am
End Time: Monday, June 15 at 12:45pm
Where: The Citadel
This year, we've seen an outpouring of terrific books about mothering, but two of our most recent favorites are Because I Love Her: 34 Women Writers Reflect on the Mother-Daughter Bond and Who Do You Think You Are?, a memoir by Alyse Meyers.
Both books take on the complex and rich mother daughter relationship, in all its dimensionality. Both books address that relationship with honesty, emotion, and, when fitting, humor. If you are the mother of a daughter, you'll appreciate the range of voices in the first collection in particular, with authors like Karen Joy Fowler, Joyce Maynard and Literary Mama's own Ericka Lutz and Rachel Sarah weighing in on their journeys of self-discovery as daughters, granddaughters, and mothers to their own daugthers. The beauty of this collection is that very circular nature of connection--how we as mothers hope to do "better" than our own mothers with our daughters, and how being mothers to those same daughters reflects back for us our relationship to our own mothers.
Alyse Meyer's memoir portrays an equally complicated, and often fraught, relationship with her own mother, a woman who struggled as a single mother in the fifties to raise her two daughters after her husband's early death. Meyer's path takes her away from her mother at an early age--she leaves the house at eighteen to live on her own in New York City, succeeding in business and finding love and motherhood herself. Even as she climbs the corporate ladder, Meyers still looks for the approval she yearns to have from her mother, approval that is not, ultimately, in the offing. After her mother's death, Meyers finds a box full of love letters from her father to her mother, and, in reading of their affair, also discovers a grace and peace that allows her to see herself in her mother, and her mother in her.
Tuesday, May 12
Pen Parentis is Proud to Present
Joanna Hershon & Joshua Henkin
Joanna Hershon is the author of three novels: Swimming, The Outside of August, and The German Bride, which recently had its paperback release. She has been an Edward Albee Fellow, a Writer-in-Residence at Porter-Gaud in Charleston, and has taught in the Undergraduate Creative Writing department at Columbia University. Her writing has been included in the 2008 literary anthology Brooklyn Was Mine, short-listed for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories, and has appeared in One Story, Post Road, Five Chapters and The Virginia Quarterly Review. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the painter Derek Buckner, and their twin sons.
Joshua Henkin is the author of the novel MATRIMONY (Pantheon, 2007, Vintage, 2008), which was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Book Sense Highlight Pick of the Year, and a Borders Original Voices Selection. He is also the author of the novel SWIMMING ACROSS THE HUDSON, which was named a Los Angeles Times notable book. His short stories have been published in Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, Triquarterly, DoubleTake, The North American Review, The New England Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two small daughters and teaches in the creative writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College, and at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y.
The Details...
DATE: Tuesday, May 12
TIME: 6-8 pm, come after work!
LOCATION: The Upstairs Library at the Libertine, inside the Gildhall Hotel @ 15 Gold Street, NYC.
DIRECTIONS: Walking directions from A/C (@ Broadway/Nassau) or 2/3/4/5/J/M/Z (@ Fulton) trains: Walk east on Fulton Street to Gold Street, turn right and right again at Platt.
We are looking for personal stories 1500 to 3000 words in length (approximately 6-12 pages, double spaced, 1 inch margins) that explore the challenges women face while raising kids and working a job, or raising kids and staying at home. We also encourage career women who have made the decision not to have children, or who are contemplating having children,to submit their stories.
Our readers will include young college graduates contemplating motherhood; women overwhelmed by the demands of career and family life; stay at home moms and moms trying to “on ramp” back into a career; husbands and fathers trying to better understand the plight of the women in their lives; and anyone wondering how mothers are faring in the professional world today. The success of this book will lie in the readability of the stories. These are NOT scholarly essays, and they do not need to have a “moral” to the story, or a solution to the problem. They are personal memoirs from real women illuminating the triumphs and failures of raising children while maintaining a career, or not. They should be dramatic, funny, emotional, passionate. Other potential issues to explore: equal parenting or not, successful relationships or not, fidelity or not; feeling good about work or not. Your candor, humor and passion are most important. Funny and outrageous anecdotes (e.g. struggling to keep down morning sickness while presenting to a board room of men) are encouraged!
Manuscripts and queries should be typewritten and double-spaced. Please send in in Word or RTF format. Please provide a 3 sentence description of yourself, contact info, including an email address, and day and evening phone numbers. If possible, send writing clips of other work you have published.
** If you do plan to contribute, we would appreciate you sending a short, one-paragraph abstract/proposal about your subject matter as soon as possible. We will do our best to review and provide feedback.
Deadline for submission is July 15, 2009.
If we decide to include your story in the collection, we will contact you directly to discuss the best way to handle the material/assignment. Due to the large volume of queries we have received, we may not be able to include every story received. We will try to notify you within 30 days of receiving your manuscript to let you know whether it will be included in the collection.
All manuscripts and queries should be e-mailed to:
sam@walravens.com
Subject: submission: “Moms in the Fast Lane”
Samantha Parent Walravens
Writer, Freelance Journalist and Mother of Four
sam@walravens.com
Here is a way to do something FREE, WONDERFUL and LASTING for MOTHERS DAY.
Be part of the founding initiative for the Museum Of Motherhood. Please take a moment to reflect on a mother you've known, your own mother or your experiences as a mother and share them with us at Museum Of Motherhood.
Write your 'Mothering' story here:
http://www.museumofmotherhood.org/ROM.html
Celebrating Motherhood as Muse:
A Mother's Day Reading with the Motherlode Writers
Sunday May 10th 2 - 3 p.m.
Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA 94925
(415) 927-0960
http://www.bookpassage.com/content.php?id=16
The Motherlode Writers is a Berkeley-based community of mother-writers. We work in a wide variety of genres, including essay, memoir, poetry, and fiction. Our work has been published in print and online outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Literary Mama, a variety of anthologies, and numerous other journals, blogs and 'zines. Our recent books include Sybil Lockhart's Mother in the Middle: A Biologist's Story of Caring for Parent and Child (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2009); Sophia Raday's Love in Condition Yellow: A Memoir of an Unlikely Marriage (Beacon Press, 2009); and Caroline Grant's Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008). Readers also include Marian Berges, Ursula Ferreira, Rebecca Kaminsky and Sarah Kilts. Bring the kids and join us on Mother's Day for a celebration of Motherhood and Writing!