3,000 Miles, Two Writers, One Book

Today at former LM columnist Gail Konop Baker's group blog, The Debutante Ball, Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant are guest-blogging about how they created their new book, Mama, PhD. Here's an excerpt:

Meet over email. Of course; you live, after all, 3,000 miles apart, but it helps our relationship get into writing right away. We are literally words on a page (screen) to each other for the first year of our collaboration (we don’t even talk on the phone!) It doesn’t hurt that we meet via Elrena’s submission to the section of Literary Mama that Caroline is editing at the time.

Meet when one of you is pregnant. This helps get the conversation personal, pronto, as Caroline cautions Elrena that she might not get back to her very promptly with edits.

Don’t always stick to the point. We know we are both writers, and mothers, and if we’d stayed on topic it might have stayed at that. Instead, we digress into breastfeeding and parenting and graduate school and ivory tower life — and friendship. And then, ultimately, a book.

Call for Papers

Demeter Press is seeking submissions for an edited collection on Queering Parenting

Publication Date: Spring 2011
Editors: Susan Driver and Zoë Newman

A proliferation of experientially based essays, media stories, documentary films, television profiles, photographic essays and do-it-yourself manuals featuring lesbian mothers and gay dads have emerged to mark out cultural discourses in which to understand lesbian and gay families. But while these images and narratives enable positive representations that counter invisibility and marginalization, they often work to delimit transformative mode of thinking and acting beyond normalizing categories. For LGBTTT2Q communities in Canada, the US, and Europe, family has been a site of struggle and invisibility, and has also been constructed as a site of transformation and pride, sometimes with the result that we have sidelined interrogations of how ‘queer families’ are normative and exclusionary. It is those troubling, ambiguous and unintelligible subjects that do not fit neatly into parental discourses that need to enter into public dialogues as part of a comprehensive project of queering parenting.

This book adopts a range of critically queer theoretical perspectives to rethink the parameters of parenting and family beyond heteronormative boundaries. Our goal is to engage with difficult knowledges and changing embodied parental experiences that include dynamic gender and sexual arrangements as they are lived through multi-layered racial, national and class relations. Rather than list those identities that fit into a queer paradigm we encourage a more pliable framework that explores the institutions, languages and contexts of parenting, complicating the ways powers shape alternatives to white middle-class heterosexual nuclear formations. Our interest is in fostering interpretive work on parenting that bridges articulations of intimate subjectivity, and analysis of broad social and historical forces that cumulatively impact what can be done and said in the name of diverse family relations.
We hope to include a range of styles of academic writing, and encourage interdisciplinary modes of analysis. The following topics interest us but they do not exhaust the horizon of our search:

* Transgender parenting within and beyond bi-gender mother and father roles
* Transnational queer parenting or transnational and queer critiques of the family
* Affective/psychic/embodied transformations of queer parenting
* Queering public/private and national boundaries of reproductivity
* The status of ‘queer’ as a strategic and heuristic tool of family life
* Parenting and sexualities
* Media representations and spectacles of queer families
* Alternative visual and artistic depictions of family life
* Racialization of queer family discourses
* Queering family law
* Queer interventions with reproductive technologies
* Reflecting on gay and lesbian self-help parenting texts
* Community based queer family activism and organizing
* Commodification of queer parenting and queer families

Deadline for papers is October 31, 2008. All papers must be MLA format (7000 word limit).
Please submit inquiries and complete essays to both: sdriver@yorku.ca and znewman@yorku.ca
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Association for Research on Mothering (ARM)
Demeter Press
726 Atkinson, York University
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, ON,
Canada, M3J 1P3
416-736-2100 x60366 (fax) 416-736-5766
arm@yorku.ca
www.yorku.ca/arm

Bliss Notes

Jen Lawrence (Reviews Editor) has recently launched Bliss Notes, a free weekly email newsletter focusing on joyful living.

Bliss Notes is a weekly newsletter designed to help you live a life of abundance. Whether we are bringing you a review of the latest self-help book, interviews with people who have mastered the art of abundant living, the latest wellness advice, ideas for restorative vacations, DIY spa treatments, interior design tips to bring flow to your home, or ways to bring more balance to your life, we will provide you with the tools you need to maximize your joy. If you have an allergy to patchouli and hemp, fear not. At Bliss Notes we are walking the spiritual path wearing a fab pair of Kate Spade ballet flats. We invite you to walk with us too.

Traveling Mamas Anthology

TravelingMamas.com is in search of true uplifting, funny, inspirational, and touching stories with a travel theme for an upcoming anthology series. Possible themes may include family travel, romantic escapes, girlfriend getaways, and solo trips.

We’re looking for stories that inspire us, force us to laugh out loud or make us reach for the tissue box. Bring us into your story by using the five senses. Every story must have a beginning, middle, and end.

Rights:

We are requesting one-time rights. Reprints are acceptable as long as you own the rights.
If your work has been published before we ask that you please send the name of the publication the story appeared and the date it was published with your submission. We will have the right to edit your work.

Submission:

Word count: 300-1000 words.
More than one story may be submitted.
The story can be told in first or third person. You don’t have to be a mom to tell the story.

Deadline is midnight September 1, 2008.

In the body of your email please include your name, address, phone number, and preferred email address. At the bottom of your story please include a brief author bio (no more than 100 words) to be included in the back of the book. If your story is chosen you will be able to revise your bio before publication.

Please send your submissions in the body of an email to: anthology@travelingmamas.com (no attachments will be opened).

Compensation:

$50 (Payment upon publication)

A Traveling Mamas travel pack that includes one copy of the book your story appears in.

Please be patient. This is a long process. We will let you know as soon we know if your story has been selected. If you don’t hear from us, we may be holding your story for upcoming books.

Thank you for joining our journey. We look forward to reading your stories.

The Traveling Mamas

Multilingual Living Magazine

Violeta Garcia Mendoza, LM's "Multi-Culti Mami" columnist has an article published in the July/August issue of Multilingual Living Magazine. It's entitled "What Led Us to These Doors: Our Family's Journey of Bilingualism and International Adoption." It's the (brief) story behind her family's adoptions, and how bilingualism looks in her house. There's also a section with tips for parents interested in keeping their adopted children's native language as part of their lives.

Literary Reflections Selected Short - June

Literary Reflections is pleased to present our featured writing prompt response for June. We asked "Is there a difficult or joyful experience of your own that you have not yet been able to write about? What would it look like if you could paint a scene of it?"

Meredith Hatcher wrote:

Forgiveness Pending

I knew immediately when I saw that pink blot on the tissue paper. My husband heard my hysterical wailing and ran into our tiny bathroom. (Was it hysterical wailing? Or did I call his name? Yell out "No", or maybe "Oh, God"? I remember the horror more clearly than the dialogue.) He had to repeat his frantic "What?" before I could manage to say, "I'm having a miscarriage."

Seven hellish days of ultrasounds, blood work, doctor appointments, and spotting produced no clear answers. I grew to hate the doctor's office and everyone associated with it.

"Still no heartbeat, but it's possible that we were just off on your due date. With a very early pregnancy, a heartbeat isn't always detectable. The pole appears to have gotten slightly smaller. Your hormone levels are low. This is either a six-week pregnancy or a miscarriage."

"There's no way my due date is off by that much," I answered clearly. (Do you KNOW how much time I've spent poring over my calendar these past seven days? How many times I've stared at that one calendar box? I hate that little white calendar box, crowded with smiling doodles, hearts and the screaming words "I'm pregnant!" I hate that little white box almost as much as I hate you!")

"There's no way," I repeated, "I found out I was pregnant ten weeks ago."

"Well then, it looks like we're dealing with a miscarriage."

The discussion that followed yielded one of the most regrettable decisions I've ever made. I chose to have a D&C to remove the baby, and I've doubted that decision since. The valid reasons I once saw for having the D&C now haunt me as weak excuses. (It had been the worst week of my life. I was exhausted and emotional. I couldn't bear to just sit around and wait for a full miscarriage -- a nightmare I imagined of blood and baby gushing down my legs. They said there was a risk of infection if the baby, not living, remained inside of me for too long. I was so sure of my dates. I was so sure when I saw that first pink spot on the tissue paper.)

When I delve into the wreckage of my regret, my computer screen disappoints me with the same hurtful string of unanswerable questions. Was my baby truly ready to go? Did I ask enough or the right questions of the doctor and nurses? Could my baby have survived? Did I give up on him (her?) instead of fighting like a real mother? (Surely only really mothers experience this aching guilt. There's not enough space in 500 words for this guilt.) Can I forgive myself for falling so short of my own expectations?

I try to write about it, but the results always smell more like old library book documentation than freshly-cut green growth. My writing offers up my endless apology, but it falls painfully short of granting me absolution.

Meredith Hatcher may be contacted via meredithhatcher(at)hotmail(dot)com.