Literary Mama : Blog : 3rd Annual Mother Words Reading, Minneapolis

3rd Annual Mother Words Reading, Minneapolis

Posted in Events by Christina Marie Speed on August 29, 2009

Thursday, September 24, 2009 * 7 pm *

3rd Annual Mother Words Reading, Open Book, Minneapolis

Please join us for the 3rd Annual Mother Words Reading! Kate Hopper, who coordinates the event, will be reading with the wonderful Kate St. Vincent Vogl (Lost and Found: A Memoir of Mothers, North Star Press, 2009) and Vicki Forman (This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). This is the first time that a nationally known writer, Forman, will be flying to the Twin Cities for the event.

Free and open to the public! Bring your friends!!

About the annual Mother Words Reading

So often in our society, writing by a group of people is lumped together and dismissed. This has certainly been the case with motherhood literature. In 1976, Adrienne Rich began Of Woman Born with this: “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.” Three decades later, we have made some headway: a few literary journals featuring motherhood writing have emerged, motherhood scholarship has found a place in some academic settings, and a number of books about motherhood have been published. Yet, motherhood literature is still largely ignored, and motherhood memoir, christened “momoir,” is routinely dismissed. But like all great writing, literature about motherhood, is, as Patricia Hampl says about memoir, “an attempt to find not only a self but a world.” Motherhood literature is not about motherhood; it uses motherhood as a lens through which to see the world. Kate Hopper launched the annual Mother Words Reading in 2007 as way to showcase literary nonfiction of women writing about motherhood.

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