Cup of Comfort

LM blog editor Amy Mercer has an essay titled, "What Makes me Whole" in the latest A Cup of Comfort for Writers. Amy's essay is about the struggle to balance writing and motherhood.

Cimarron Review

LM copyeditor and contributor Kristina Riggle's short story "Connection Lost" is featured in the current issue of Cimarron Review. In the story, a father wonders where he went wrong with his younger daughter, and thinks a particular college freshman might hold the answer, if he can only track her down. Look for it in bookstores, or you could order a copy (or a subscription) by going here

Dreaming About Water, a collection of personal essays and practical advice by and for women living with diabetes

Dreaming About Water.
Amy Mercer (LM blog editor) and Violeta Garcia-Mendoza (Lm Literary Reflections co-editor) are seeking personal essay submissions from women writers for their upcoming collection.

Essays should fall between 1,500 and 3,000 words and explore an aspect of living with diabetes.

The collection will cover any and all aspects of living with diabetes: from diagnosis to aging gracefully. Other possible essay topics may include:

Diagnosis
Growing up with diabetes
Dating with diabetes
Diabetes at college/leaving home
Diabetes & relationships with food
Finding the Perfect Doctor
Wedding planning/marriage with diabetes
Diabetes in the workplace
Traveling with diabetes
Starting a Family (either through pregnancy and/or adoption) with
diabetes
Gestational diabetes
Parenting and diabetes
Dealing with complications/ Staying healthy with diabetes
Type 2 diabetes

Our goal is to provide diabetic women- type 1 and type 2- with a place of community while they navigate the various stages of their lives, and their diabetes.

We welcome you to submit one or more essays. For more information, or to submit, please write mercermendoza@gmail.com.

Want to Write a Novel?

Want to take the big plunge, and write a novel? Novelist and teacher Masha Hamilton is offering two online novel writing classes starting on September 4th, and is seeking both beginning and advanced students. Susan Ito, Literary Mama columnist and fiction editor, highly recommends this fabulous teacher.

Click here for details.

Novel Writing I is right for any writer who has been thinking about starting a novel or is up to halfway through. The class will include weekly lectures, critiques, and exercises aimed at helping you see your work freshly. We’ll motivate you as we cover discovering the essence of your novel (and learning how to convey it in a single sentence), as well as the importance of the opening chapter. We’ll discuss where to start the story, how to create a strong protagonist, the dramatic arcs of major characters, choosing a point of view, and exploring the voice of your novel as well as individual characters within it. We’ll analyze scene and delve into the dramatic possibilities created by strong dialogue. We’ll also look at setting, pacing, profluence and psychic distance. Finally, we’ll consider the business end – where and how to market your novel manuscript – and you’ll get guidance on the next step. Limited to 10-15 students.

Novel Writing II is for the writer who has more than half of a novel completed and is looking for a critical, helpful eye before the manuscript reaches the agent or editor. In this class, more of your work will be critiqued, and you will be called upon to write detailed weekly critiques yourself. Lectures will spring more naturally from the nature of the work. We’ll talk about motivation in the soggy middle of our manuscripts. This will be a chance to workshop a large portion of your completed work, and resubmit if you choose. We’ll focus on the skills of revision and layering your novel, as well as how to become our own teachers, learning by reading the work of others. The class also will include guidance on what to do once the manuscript is finished. Limited to 6-10 students.

Classes are small to allow for lots of individual attention to manuscripts. Please email me at masha at mashahamilton dot com for more details about either class.

Masha has taught novel-writing privately, on-line, and for Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City, 92nd Street Y/Makor in New York City, Ann Arbor Writers’ Workshop in Ann Arbor, MI, Pima Writers’ Workshop in Tucson, AZ, Willamette Writers in Portland, OR., Ocean Park Maine Writers’ Conference near Portland, ME., Poets and Writers League, Cleveland, OH, and others.

Masha’s students have gone on to get agents, get published, to be accepted to prestigious MFA programs in creative writing. Here are some comments:

Masha is a born writer—and a born teacher. I believe she can help writers on any level with story, character, even sentence structure. I’ve earned an MFA in writing but I turn to Masha for something that no academic environment offers: concise, practical advice that brings results immediately. Plus, her energy and enthusiasm inspires me to keep writing, which is the most important issue of all. She’s the best! — John, Brooklyn

Masha Hamilton gears her writing classes to suit varying skill levels without sacrificing the pace or content of her teaching. No matter how much you’ve written, there is always something to learn. Balanced, substantive critiques combine with meaningful exercises and readings to create a productive and memorable workshop experience. Masha’s ability to maintain open classroom camaraderie while facilitating rigorous analysis of student work is particularly impressive. If you want to sharpen your craft, and approach your writing and revision with greater depth and objectivity, look no further. — Maggie, New York

"Who We Are"

In continuation of the Who We Are posting,next up on our list is Suzanne Kamata, Fiction Co-Editor, lives with her Japanese husband and bi-cultural twins on the island of Shikoku in Japan. She is the editor of the anthology The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan, and the author of numerous stories, essays, articles and reviews. Her writing about motherhood appears in the anthologies It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons, It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, and elsewhere. You can read her blog at http://gaijinmama.wordpress.com.

Grace Paley, writer and activist dies

“I’m not writing a history of famous people,” she said. “I am interested in a history of everyday life.”

Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died on Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. She was 84.

Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailiness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind. (New York Times, August 23, 2007)

Grace Paley is best known for her three collections of short stories, "The Little Disturbances of Man" (1959), "Enormus Changes at the Last Minute" (1974), and "Later That Same Day" (1985). She taught Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence. Her “Collected Stories,” published by Farrar, Straus in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. (The collection was reissued by Farrar, Straus this year.) From 1986 to 1988, Ms. Paley was New York’s first official state author; she was also a past poet laureate of Vermont.

"Who We Are"

Next up in the Who We Are category is Susan Ito, Fiction Co-Editor who blogs at ReadingWritingLiving.

Susan lives in Oakland, CA with her husband, two daughters and mother. She teaches writing privately and at UC Berkeley Extension. She is the co-editor of A Ghost At Heart's Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption (North Atlantic Books). Her essays and fiction have appeared in Growing Up Asian American, Hip Mama, Making More Waves, the Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere.

New Reading for Fans of the Bare-breasted Mama

Former Literary Mama columnist Gail Konop Baker is contributing to a grog (group blog) for debut authors, The Debutante Ball. Check out Gail's posts every Monday; her memoir, Cancer Is A Bitch: Reflections on Midlife, Mortality, Motherhood and Marriage, will be published in October by Da Capo Press.

Writing and Publishing The Short Stuff, Especially For Moms!

Instructor: Christina Katz

Class Maximum: 20

Finally, a writing workshop that fits into the busy lives of moms! The focus is on getting you into print sooner, rather than later, and without pulling all-nighters or paying a fortune in babysitter fees. You will learn how to write short, easy-to-write articles so that you will have an easier time working your way up to longer, more time-consuming articles (like features and profiles) later. You will try your pen at tips, fillers, short interviews, list articles, how-tos, and the short personal essays—all within six weeks. You will have the benefit of reading and learning from your classmates’ efforts. Opportunities for self-assessment and self-reflection are woven into the class.

Christina Katz has been putting writers through the writing and submitting paces since 2001. Personal attention from the instructor is offered throughout the class in the form of questions answered for the entire class, just like a traditional “live” class. Two detailed reviews of your drafts-in-progress are included at weeks three and six (you choose one of your pieces for an instructor critique each time). Because of the high volume of student productivity in this class, the instructor does not critique each and every student submission, but does share them with the entire class.

Busy dads and non-parents are also welcome, but should expect a course pre-designed to address and overcome the challenges busy moms face.

Duration: Six lessons with six assignments completed in six weeks

August 15 - September 26, 2007
October 3 - November 14, 2007

Prerequisites:

This may be your very first writing class or you may be an experienced freelancer. The only requirement is that you must be able to receive and create Microsoft Word documents to participate in this class (or text documents at the very least).

Cost: $160.00 for 2007 WPSS

"Who We Are"

Each week, we will introduce you to one of the women behind Literary Mama, including a link to her blog and/or website. Our diverse group of talented, smart and creative women work hard to honor "the difficult and rewarding work women do as they move into motherhood by making these stories visible."

First up: Kathy Moran, Editorial Assistant in Literary Reflections. Kathy has two grown boys and two granddaughters. In addition to being a retired secondary language arts teacher and literary magazine adviser in the Missouri public school system, Kathy is also a teacher consultant for the Greater Kansas City Writing Project and has been published in the Project's magazine The Quarterly (Caring Comes First: A Personal Narrative) and the Missouri Teachers Council of English publication Missouri Teachers Write. More recently, she developed the curriculum for an American literature semester course for the Center for Distance Learning and Independent Study at the University of Missouri. Kathy's personal reflections can be found at marmee's corner and marmee's musings.

Hero Series call for true stories

Adams Media is publishing a new anthology (book) series featuring uplifting true stories about the experiences and relationships that inspire and enrich our lives—namely those with our mothers, our fathers, and our teachers (also mother-figures, father-figures, and mentors). These slice-of-life stories will be written by people from all walks of life and provide unique personal insights into powerful universal truths, as well as honor the "everyday hero" in their lives. Each anthology in the series will be divided to highlight the variety of ways mothers, teachers, and fathers go beyond the call of duty to heroism.

Submission Deadline: SEPTEMBER 5, 2007

For detailed guidelines, please review:

"Hero Series Guidelines" on Literary Cottage Agency.

Creative Non-Fiction, writing memoir

For those of you in the Charleston, SC area, Amy Hudock,
Editor-in-Chief of LiteraryMama, will be team teaching a memoir writing course this fall.

Lowcountry Writing Project
The Citadel
Charleston, SC

Advanced Institute on Creative Nonfiction: Writing Memoir
Co-teachers: Amy Hudock, Ph. D. and Tracey Merton, MA
Offering 3 hours of graduate credit

Tentative Schedule

September 5th-November 15th, Saturdays and Wednesdays. $300.

http://www.citadel.edu/writingproject/

First Book

First Book is giving children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books.

Books stir the senses, inspire the imagination, and spark a love of reading that can last a lifetime.

Access to books is essential to reading development, yet many children from low-income families have no books at home or in the childcare centers they attend. There are millions of children waiting for your help. Donate now to put new books into the hands of children in need.

In September 2005, First Book committed to bring 5,000,000 new books to the communities devastated by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. With your help we reached our goal.

Join us now to join First Book and all of our partners who made Book Relief possible as we celebrate the distribution of our five millionth new book along the Gulf Coast. Please join us.

Tuesday, August 21st
1:00-2:30 PM
New Orleans Public Library
219 Loyola Avenue
New Orleans, LA
RSVP by August 7th
RSVP: Attend or Decline
or call 866-393-1222
Please note that space is limited, so RSVP as soon as possible.