April Parent-Lit Workshop Now Open for Registration

Susan Ito's January Parent Lit Writing Workshop is off to a terrific start, with fantastic discussions, a wonderful bonding community of parent writers, and of course, great writing.

The next session (April 1-June 3) is now open for registration. Find out more and register here.

Anyone who has had a child knows that parenting is one of life’s most exhilarating, awesome, maddening, humbling, crazymaking, joyful and wrenching experiences–which is what also makes it excellent inspiration for writing. This past decade has shown an explosion in “Parent-Lit,” or the literature of parenthood, in all forms: creative nonfiction, poetry and fiction.

This workshop is for anyone who wants to tap that rich vein in their writing. It’s for new parents, prospective parents, grandparents, stepparents, adoptive parents and birth parents. It’s for people all over who want to come together and share their stories and their words, to learn something about the craft of writing.

It’s not easy for some parents who want to write to get out of the house for a writing workshop. So this workshop will allow parents to participate while breastfeeding, sitting at home in a robe and pajamas, hanging out at the playground (with wireless internet, that is) or in the wee hours of the morning.

About the class:

The class will run for 10 weeks, starting April 1, 2007. Fee for the class is $350. Participants will learn the fundamentals of both creative nonfiction and fiction writing, using parenthood as a theme. We will read and discuss published examples of great parent-lit, and write some of our own. Assignments will consist of a combination of short exercises and more developed projects. If schedules permit, we may have several live “chats” via instant messaging. Class size is limited to ten.

Workshop topics will include (more to come, based on class requests):

* Turning Life Into Fiction
* The Parent Pantoum: the Poetry of Repetition
* The Many Faces of Creative Nonfiction
* Writing Columns: the Slice of Life
* Taking a Stand: Writing Op-Ed and Opinion Pieces
* Flash Fiction: writing short-shorts
* My Family, My Material: How to be intimate, yet not invasive when writing about relatives

Single Mom Seeking -- A REVIEW!

Single Mom Seeking: Playdates, Blind Dates and Other Dispatches from the Dating World
by Rachel Sarah
ISBN#1580051669
published by Seal Press

Review by Shari Maser

I’ve never been a single mother, and I haven’t been on a date in over seventeen years. So I was quite wary of Single Mom Seeking: Playdates, Blind Dates and Other Dispatches from the Dating World, even though a friend highly recommended it. I was sure that it would bore me because the subject matter was so far removed from my own reality, or (worse) I was afraid that I might feel voyeuristic, reading what amounts to someone else’s diary about her hot dates!

But my worries were unfounded. This was a page-turner, in a “wow, I know exactly what she’s talking about even though I never thought about it THAT way before” kind of way.

Sometimes her experiences resonated with my own... balancing the needs of a sick child against a scheduled commitment, racing to get my work done before my baby wakes up from her nap, balancing my need for intimate adult conversation with my child’s need to be with me, oozing breastmilk in public...

When her experiences didn’t resonate, they still captured my imagination. I found myself wondering, “What would I have done?” I was inspired to discuss her dilemmas with my husband, my friends, my sister. I was prompted to evaluate my own moral character and challenged to re-examine some of my “black-and-white” ideas about relationships.

I was so intrigued that I would have read this book from cover to cover...but whenever I put it down for a moment to brew some tea or use the bathroom, my husband swiped it, and I had to fight to get it back.

I asked Steve what a forty-something married man found so fascinating about the dating life of a single mother. His response — it’s fresh. Not a story he’s heard before. Funny, real, unpredictable, action-packed.

This is all true. It is fresh -- with a unique perspective on motherhood, dating, friendship, and family. It is definitely an original story, as Rachel Sarah gives us a play-by-play narrative about her dating life as a single, attachment-parenting, breastfeeding mother. It’s also funny, action-packed and unpredictable — full of life’s little moments, the kinds that nobody could possibly make up if they tried.

Single Mom Seeking is about relationships — between parents and children, between women and men, between service providers and recipients, among friends. Rachel Sarah, a natural storyteller with a strong sense of humor, entertains us with the “who said what to whom” details while she enriches us with her thoughtful evaluation of the elements that contribute to the construction and destruction of relationships. She makes us think, care, and laugh all at the same time. For me, reading can’t get any better than that!

Shari Maser is the attachment-parenting, home-educating mother of Alex and Erica. She is the author of Blessingways: A Guide to Mother-Centered Baby Showers - Celebrating Pregnancy, Birth, and Motherhood.

Rachel Sarah Appears in NYC

Oh, you lucky New Yorkers!

If you're in New York City, please come out and hear Single Mom Seeking LITERARY MAMA columnist Rachel Sarah at one of these events:

In The Flesh Reading Series "Erotic Memoir Night"
Wednesday, January 17th
8 p.m.

In the Flesh is a monthly reading series to get you hot and bothered, hosted and curated by Village Voice sex columnist and acclaimed erotic writer/editor Rachel Kramer Bussel

Rachel Sarah will get hot on the page with the likes of:

Susan Shapiro,(Secrets of a Fix-Up Fanatic: How To Meet & Marry Your Match)
Ron Geraci, (The Bachelor Chronicles),
Grant Stoddard, (Working Stiff: The Misadventures of an Accidental Sexpert),
Virginia Vitzthum (I Love You, Let's Meet: Adventures in Online Dating)

Free refreshments will be served.

Happy Ending Lounge
302 Broome Street, NYC
Tel: (212) 334-9676
How to get there: B/D to Grand, J/M/Z to Bowery, F to Delancey

~~~

On Thursday, January 18th, Rachel Sarah will be reading from Single Mom Seeking at the Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side

Thursday, January 18th
7 p.m.
2289 Broadway @ 82nd Street
New York, NY 10024
Tel: (212) 362-8835

In Honor of Tillie Olsen: 1912-2007

The entire Literary Mama community mourns the passing of Tillie Olsen, who died on New Year's Day at age 94. She was -- and is -- a hero to women writers everywhere, especially to those of us who try every moment of every day to balance writing with motherhood.

Lengthier and more formal obituaries can be read in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, and they do a fine job reciting the facts of Tillie's life. But Tillie was more to us than a resume, more than a prominent writer and early feminist.

She was a mother who wrote, and wrote well.

It wasn't easy. Born in 1912 and a mother at age 19, Olsen lived in poverty for years, working in one menial job after another while raising four daughters. In the nooks and crannies of her time, she wrote about women like her, women whose voices were silenced by the demands, needs, and expectations of everyone around her. But still she kept writing. In her own words:

Time on the bus, even when I had to stand, was enough; the stolen moments at work, enough; the deep night hours for as long as I could stay awake, after the kids were in bed, after the household tasks were done, sometimes during. It is no accident that the first work I considered publishable began: "I stand here ironing."

Olsen's body of work is slim: only five stories, an unfinished novel and several poems written over seven decades. But her work was powerful; it unlocked and opened doors to other women like her -- like us -- who insist that art and motherhood are not contradictory, but complementary. "[Children and art] are different aspects of your being," she once said. "There is . . . no separation." A life combining meaningful work and motherhood "could and should be" possible for women.

And so we grieve, for the loss of a mother and writer who -- in many ways -- made the existence of Literary Mama possible. "Among women writers in the United States, 'respect' is too pale a word: 'reverence' is more like it," novelist Margaret Atwood once wrote about Olsen. "This is presumably because women writers, even more than their male counterparts, recognize what a heroic feat it is to have held down a job, raised four children, and still somehow managed to become and to remain a writer . . . The applause that greets her is not only for the quality of her artistic performance but . . . for the near miracle of her survival."

But while our grief is for a public figure who felt close to our hearts, there is one among us who mourns for a beloved grandmother. Tillie Olsen's granddaughter, Ericka Lutz, is a Senior Editor and columnist at Literary Mama. Her column, Red Diaper Dharma, explores the legacy of growing up in a family of strong people like Grandma Tillie, and includes her personal remembrances in the most recent installment.

Tillie's 95th birthday would have been this Sunday, January 14. Her family requests that on her birthday, people whose lives have been touched by Tillie gather with friends in their homes and public libraries to celebrate her life and to read her work together. For more information about how to email the family or to make contributions in Tillie's name, see the Tillie Olsen memorial Web site.

Missive from Rachel Sarah

Our intrepid columnist Rachel Sarah reports from the front lines of the book biz:

Single Mom Seeking Live on Channel 4 Bay Area News!

KRON TV host says: "Probably the hottest single mom dating book out there."

Henry Tenenbaum was a sweetheart. I thought that were off air when the anchor Ysabel Duron asked me about a matchmaker -- and I essentially gave away the end of the book. Oh, poop.

Anyway, I had a ball.

xo,
Rachel

P.S. And I'm THRILLED that in the calendar for my book launch party here in Berkeley, they put Literary Mama in my bio. Yippee!! Hopefully, this will bring lots of readers to the site. You can see it here: http://www.blackoakbooks.com/calendar.html#11

Crisis at Op Ed!

Ok folks, my iBook gave up the ghost just before the holidays and despite expert assistance, I can't move my mail over to my shiny new MacBook. This means that submissions I've received for Op Ed (including accepted pieces) are (in the immortal words of the Violent Femmes) gone, daddy, gone.

If you've submitted an article to me ESPECIALLY if you had it accepted, please Please PLEASE send it to me again! I've learned my lesson and all of my email now goes straight to my gmail account, where it will remain untouched by computer crashes. That email is Dawn DOT Friedman AT gmail DOT com.

Thanks so much!