Being a senior mama, I’ve stuffed decades of family memories into my cluttered brain. Most are vague, like old, uncaptioned photos in a shoebox, nameless and slowly fading. A few remain vivid, charged with remembered detail by the intensity of …

This month Cassie Premo Steele invites you to submit a short story or creative non-fiction piece of 800-1200 words on the theme of claiming one’s own space as a mother writer.

When it is -30, and the stars are bright and the baby is in a sling zipped into your parka, the crunch of your snowshoes on the trail sounds like music played on instruments carved out of ice. You might imagine all the mothers in other places who wouldn’t dare leave the house with a baby in this temperature. Smug, you might even think I am a tough mother, one who looks winter in the eye and puts snowshoes on. Don’t let yourself forget: mothers have been doing this forever.

This month Cassie Premo Steele chose two poems by readers on the themes of mothers and suicide. And yet not. There’s something deeper at play in these poems. As if something is being shaken loose. Read the poems and then listen in on the conversation between the poets. See if something is opened and released in you.

For Lent this year I’m giving up sleep. This was not a deliberate choice. It was thrust upon me last month—upon all of us—by the sudden death of Sally, our daughter Dara’s diabetes-alert service dog. For the past two years Sally has accompanied Dara everywhere, able to sense a rapidly rising or falling blood glucose level through the genius of her doggie nose. She was trained to alert Dara to these potentially life-threatening changes with a lick to her hand, prompting her to do a finger-prick blood test and correct any irregularities before they result in a medical crisis.

Being a senior mama, I qualify for all those dubious privileges of advancing age that our society offers. Senior coffee at McDonalds. Senior Discount Day at the grocery store on the first Wednesday of every month. And loftiest of all: …