Elizabeth Mosier's recent novella, The Playgroup (GemmaMedia, 2011), explores that intense time when the children are small, toys constantly litter the floor, and mothers -- especially playgroup mothers -- become central to each others' worlds.
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Mei-Ling Hopgood is an award-winning journalist who has reported on cops, diversity, the Pentagon, transportation, spelling bees, and, most recently, global motherhood. Hopgood, along with her husband and two daughters, lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for four years and just recently moved back to the US Midwest. While abroad, Hopgood researched and wrote her latest book, How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm: And Other Adventures in Parenting (from Argentina to Tanzania and Everywhere in Between). She consulted with parents and experts around the world on how to raise children, and she attempted to incorporate global child-rearing best practices into her own mothering -- with mixed results. How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm shares parenting tips from 11 countries.

Literary Mama Fiction Co-editor Suzanne Kamata, an expatriate mother in Japan, asked Hopgood some questions about writing, travel, and motherhood.
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After several years of reading her columns and blogs, and several more of an email/Facebook/Twitter friendship, I am finally meeting Ericka Lutz. She and I share an uncanny affinity: We are Jewish feminist writer mothers of daughters; we are denizens of corresponding coastal liberal enclaves (she is Bay Area born and bred and now lives in Oakland; I'm from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and live next door in Arlington); we both dislike Paris, Christmas, narcissistic writers, and fey spirituality. This is a propitious moment, then: not only is it our chance to find out if our connection holds in real life, but Lutz is just a few weeks away from publishing her first novel, The Edge of Maybe, and I have been asked to profile her for Literary Mama.
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When you think of Erma Bombeck, the word "feminist" probably doesn't leap to mind. Instead, you might think of your mother's well-worn copy of one of Bombeck's ten bestsellers or a yellowed clipping of one of her syndicated newspaper columns stuck to your childhood fridge with a magnet. And, perhaps, that's just as Bombeck would have wanted it, having made a career, as she did, out of lampooning her life as a suburban housewife. But Bombeck was in many ways a feminist. A working mother herself, she nevertheless believed that the women's movement needed to expand to include the voices of stay-at-home mothers. As she strove to balance her own career and family, she also worked tirelessly -- if in vain -- for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
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The Crying Tree explores the challenge of forgiving the unforgivable. Irene Stanley, a conservative wife and mother of two, faces a parent's worst nightmare: her son, Shep, is murdered. Irene struggles for many years with her son's death and the protracted death sentence of his murderer until she decides she must forgive both the criminal and the crime.
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When Nina Sankovitch lost her older sister Anne-Marie to cancer, her life went into a tailspin. Three years later, Sankovitch's grief and pain were as acute as ever. That's when she turned to books. She committed to reading a book a day for a year, hoping to find the solace and answers she was looking for through the written word. Sankovitch recounts her experience in the recently published Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading. Literary Mama Profiles Editor Lisa Moskowitz Sadikman interviewed Sankovitch about how she managed to read a book a day, how reading informed her motherhood and the connective power of books.
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