LM discussed in San Francisco Chronicle

One of our Review editors, Joanne Hartman, altered me that Literary Mama had appeared in a July 24th San Francisco Chronicle article by Katherine Seligman titled "Ayelet, Unfiltered." The subtitle reads: "Berkeley writer Ayelet Waldman's bald honesty about putting her husband first made her a magnet for controversy. Would she take any of it back?"

Seligman interviewed me on the history of mother writing, and you can find me quoted in the article. You can read it here.

An interesting piece, Katharine Seligman. Thanks!

Literary Mama--The Book

Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined is now available for preorder from Amazon! The book will be out in January 2006 from Seal Press, it includes our editors' best picks of the fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from their departments.

Well, that takes care of holiday shopping for me.

Another LM Editor signs book deal

Congratulations to Rachel Sarah, one of our two Senior Columns Editors, for her newly signed book deal with Seal Press for Single Mom Seeking. You can read her Literary Mama column which inspired the book here.

Here is the blurb from Publishers Lunch that announced Rachel's news:

July 15 05

Non-fiction:
Memoir

Rachel Sarah's SINGLE MOM SEEKING, a dating memoir chronicling the humor, pitfalls, and rewards of balancing the complexities of parenting when coupled with the search for Mr. Right, to Jill Rothenberg at Seal Press, in a nice deal, by Rebecca Kurson of Anderson Grinberg Literary Management.

Yeah for Rachel!

Barbara Crooker's New Book of Poems

Barbara Crooker, a mother-poet and former Literary Mama contributor, has a new book out.

Barbara Crooker, a mother-poet and former Literary Mama contributor, has a new book out. Radiance won the Word Press First Book Award and is now available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore. (ISBN 1932339914)

Take a sneak peak of some of her new poems on her website.

Barbara's poems were among the first submissions that I received as poetry editor of Literary Mama, and I think I will always remember how her words moved me to tears as I sat in a coffee shop reading about her "poem-child" starting kindergarten in The Blue Snake Lies Curled in my Bowl like Oatmeal. While I sat there reading Barbara's poems, two women sat at the table next to me feeding bits of cinnamon raisin bagels to their children. I wanted to interrupt their morning coffee and pass the poem over to them. Instead, I selected it for publication on Literary Mama and got to share it with many many mothers. Now more of her poems are available for public consumption. Go Barbara! Keep 'em coming.

Interview with Brain,Child editors

Jennifer Niesslein and Stephanie Wilkinson are the brains behind Brain,Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers, one of the best print magazines around when it comes to reporting on and exploring the life of mothers. Stacey Greenberg interviews the duo for Literary Mama:

SG: How has the material you received changed over the years, if at all?

JN: It's funny -- certain subjects come in waves. For example, we'll receive nothing about atypical boys for a long time, then all of a sudden, everyone's son is wearing dresses and putting on nail polish. Generally, the subjects haven't changed a lot. It's motherhood, right?

SW: I think we get sent some really great stuff. Of course, it gets harder as you go along, from an editorial standpoint, since you don't want to repeat yourself too much. So it will always be a challenge for us to find fresh ways to talk about the tried and true stuff.

SG: How do you account for the fact that hundreds of mothers are clamoring to get their writing into your magazine?

JN: Mothers have interesting stories to tell and Brain, Child is one of the few publications committed to publishing personal essays about motherhood. I can't speak for all our contributors, but I personally think that our readers are the people whom I want to talk to when I write.

SW: I do think we hit a cultural nerve. The mid-to-late 1990s was a time when talking and writing about motherhood in a new, open, fresh way became popular. We are riding the wave, and helping sustain it, I hope.

New Columns

In our newest columns, Sybil Lockhart (Mama in the Middle) writes about her daughters' intense connection to one another:

[Encouraging their closeness] seemed like a brilliant tactic at the time, but watching Zoë and Cleo now, I wonder what weird dynamic I have created between my children. Zoë depends on Cleo being hers. They seem almost too close, too joined. Why is it SO important that they look the same? I wonder if Zoë, in her own kid-logic, has decided that if they look exactly alike, no one will compare them, and then they will be equally loved. Or maybe they really are just close, loving sisters, and I don't recognize that when I see it.

Lizbeth Finn-Arnold (Mom and Pop Culture) describes her search for balance -- in her body and in her life:

I lean forward, as if this will help restore my balance. I can feel the familiar tingling in my fingers and toes now. My heart feels like it is racing, and I take a couple of deep breaths, in the hopes of slowing it all down. The whole right side of my face is throbbing. I massage the back of my neck as my jaw pops. This is it. This is what it feels like to have your body assailed from the inside out. I don't know why they call a migraine a "headache" since it is so much more than that. It is an all-over bodily assault.

And in my Mother Shock column, I pose the question: is it time to go back in the world?

"The little one isn't so little anymore," a friend remarks of her nearly four-year-old son. "What am I supposed to do next year, when he's in school for a full day?" She worries her uselessness will be exposed. Without a young child, a baby, to consume those long school-filled hours, she fears she will no longer have justification for being, as she calls it, out of the world. Is it time to go back in the world? Does she want to go back in the world? A third baby might make those questions moot, at least for a few more years.

Passing Judgment

New in our "Your Commentary" section, editor Dawn Friedman poses the question: What pushes your judgmental button?

In her interview with Literary Mama, author Marrit Ingman speaks about the lure of casting a critical eye on other mothers. She says, "It's hard to reason qualitatively when you are tired and you have an infant, and you are making decisions that you think are going to make or break your child as a human being forevermore. We have no idea whether we are successful as parents of very young children except by comparing ourselves to other people."

Do you find yourself critiquing other mother's choices? What pushes your judgmental button? We want to hear more about what's going on for you when you find yourself shaking your head over another woman's parenting decisions. What makes YOU indulge in other-mother gossip?

Mom-on-mom judgment has proven to be the hot topic in every Mother Talk salon we've done, no matter what we start talking about, and I'm hoping this will spark an interesting conversation here as well. Send in your thoughts on this to Dawn at commentary at literarymama dot com.

Reading List: What do LM editors like to read?

Every so often, I get an email from a reader asking me what I like to read when I'm not writing. Right now I'm in the midst of reading submissions for It's a Girl and getting the Literary Mama anthology ready to go, so I'm not doing much reading for pleasure at the moment. But I have read some great books recently, and I thought I'd list them here. Hopefully some other LM editors will chime in with some recent favorite books, too. Here are some of my favorites from the past six months of reading:

• The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry
• The Know-it-All by AJ Jacobs
• The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank
• Inamorata by Joseph Gangemi
and the best book I've read in a really long time:
• You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon
I absolutely loved this book. It has incredible writing, a compelling story, and Chaon writes so well about the complicated relationship between a damaged mother and a damaged son, and the way families work or don't work.

I'd love to hear what others are reading, so, please, feel free to share with the class!

Alli, revisited

Update: from Ariel Gore's blog, the coroner reports Allison suffered a fatal seizure caused by Wellbutrin.

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I just wanted to highlight a comment from one of the posts below on Allison Crews. It comes from Alli's partner, Julie, who writes:

[Alli's] cause of death has not been determined. I am the one responsible for the inaccurate statement that she committed suicide. I never meant for people to think she did it intentionally, it was just the only word I had for what I immediately thought had happened, that she had accidentally killed herself. I am Julie, Alli's partner. I posted under extreme distress, as I was one of two people who discovered Alli's body in my home. I didn't mean to set off a tidal wave of assumptions, but I obviously wasn't the picture of clarity or lucidity at that moment (or any of the rest of them since then, really.) Alli will always be loved, missed, and remembered.

A website has been set up for friends to write their memories of Allison for her son, Cade, here.

Supportive Celebrity Mama

Brooke Shields got it right in her New York Times Op-Ed piece when she wrote: "comments like those made by Tom Cruise are a disservice to mothers everywhere."

Brava to Brooke for taking the high road and using Tom Cruise's "performance" on Matt Lauer as a platform to raise consciousness about postpartum depression and to urge those in the health care profession to take action.

It is so refreshing to see a celebrity brave enough to challenge the supermom image that so many mothers in the public eye feel pressured to perpetuate.

Thanks, Brooke!

Expect a review of Brooke's new book, Down Came the Rain, in October, and check out my most current column, where I grapple with deciding whether to take antidepressants: Mother's Little Helper.