Inside Higher Ed

LM columnist Libby Gruner and six other women are blogging at InsideHigherEd.com on the subject of combining family life with a career in higher education. The writers are all contributors to the anthology, Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, edited by LM columnists Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant. The weekly blog rotation goes like this:

Monday: The Career Coach Is In by Megan Kajitani
Tuesday: Mid-Career Mothering by Libby Gruner
Wednesday: ABCs and PhDs: Biologists at Home, by Dana Campbell, Liz Stockwell, and Susan Bassow
Thursday: Math Mom by Della Fenster
Friday: Drama Mama by Anjalee Nadkarni

Join the conversation at http://www.insidehighered.com/views/blogs/mama_phd

WRITING MOTHERHOOD PAPERBACK TOUR MAY 2008

Writing Motherhood, at once creative writing manual and mothering memoir, inspires women to mine their everyday lives for stories to preserve and pass on. Treat yourself to a Mother's Day gift and join author Lisa Garrigues for an experience that will energize your spirit and ignite your pen. For mothers of all ages and writers at all stages.

Wednesday, May 7, noon
Brown Bag Lunch with Lisa Garrigues
ELLIOTT BAY BOOK COMPANY
Seattle, WA

Thursday, May 8, 7:00 pm
Mothers' Night Out with Lisa Garrigues
BOOKS INC IN BURLINGAME
Burlingame, CA

Saturday, May 10, 11:00 AM
Muffins and Mimosas for Mother's Day
MRS. DALLOWAY'S
Berkeley, CA

Sunday, May 11, 4:00 pm
Mother's Day Getaway
BOOK PASSAGE
Corte Madera, CA

Friday and Saturday, May 16 - 17
Guest Author and Workshop Leader
ANN ARBOR BOOK FESTIVAL
Ann Arbor, MI

Julia Cameron calls Lisa Garrigues “a trailblazer and a muse.” Brooke Shields says, “I wish Writing Motherhood had been around when I was a new mom. The book helps us overcome our fears and unlock the thoughts and feelings we all have inside.”

The Traveling Mamas

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

"Best of" Editor's blogs

Parting From LM Columns Editor, Alissa McElreath's blog, World Of One Thousand Different Things

There's a beautiful, old cemetery I pass every day on my way in and out of work. It's sprawling, and green, and dotted with the mottled gray and, now and again, sharp white, of the tombstones and graveside monuments. It has that hunched-over beautiful, sad, and eerie quality older cemeteries have--none of that sterile quality of the newer modern and always well-tended ones. Tucked under a drooping bush by the end of the fence closest to the road is a stone angel. You can only see her when you hit a certain curve in the road, and only then for a few seconds. She peeks out from under the branches, hands folded delicately, head bowed towards the dead before her.

This morning I looked for the angel, as I always do, then my car whizzed past, on and up towards the entrance to school. To my right suddenly, directly across the street from the cemetery and the angel and past a corner where prostitutes and drug dealers hang out as early as 5:00 p.m. on a weekday, I passed a large, leafy tree. In the fork of its lowest two, thick branches sat a woman. The image would have been picturesque: a young woman in a floral skirt, barefoot, wild curly hair blowing in the chilly morning air. It could have been picturesque, only it wasn't. Her face turned to me as I passed by--a face much older than her years, and her eyes were vacant and drugged. Her hair was wild because it was unwashed and uncombed, her feet bare because she didn't have any shoes, her skirt torn, her ankles tattoed with scabs.

I wondered if she knew about that angel across from her; the one separated by a chain link face, the one with her back turned, hands folded, praying for the dead.

Spend Mother’s Day Month with Literary Mama!

For immediate release
Contact: Caroline Grant
cmgrant@speakeasy.org

Spend Mother’s Day Month with Literary Mama!
Writer’s Digest pick: One of 101 Best Web Sites for Writers
Forbes pick: Best of the Web 2006

Literary Mama celebrates Mother’s Day all month long with fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, essays, author profiles, and book reviews. This month, we’re also adding two timely new columns to our roster:

“Multi-Culti Mami,” by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, will revisit the author’s tangled loyalties from a bilingual and bicultural childhood and motherhood. Born to an American mother and a Spanish father and raised between Spain and the US, Violeta went on to marry an American, English-speaking man and settle in Pennsylvania, where she and her husband are raising three Guatemalan-born children in a multicultural American family. “Multi-Culti Mami” will offer the perspective of one member of the growing bilingual, bicultural presence in this county, and give a behind-the-scenes look at how one family, particularly, is making that look and work in their home. It will speak to any mother who struggles with what it’s like to come to terms with her own history and difference as the head of a family.

“Great Green Room,” by Stephanie Hunt, will focus on ecology and family. Moms everywhere can recite it by heart: “In the great green room, there was a telephone, and a red balloon, and a picture of….” Ah yes, this litany of stuff, this innocuously sweet, sing-songy consumer mantra that we feed our kids from the earliest board book get-go. But what about the other Great Green Room, the one chock full of natural wonder and an increasingly at-risk eco-system? How do we as parents, as providers and protectors of the next generation, respond to a threatened environment before we, indeed, are saying “Goodnight Moon?” The column is not a how-to with recycled go-green tips, but personal reflections on the struggles, challenges and what’s at stake, from a mom who is committed but conflicted.

Literary Mama publishes new work every week by mothers, about motherhood, for everyone. May also brings columnists Ericka Lutz writing on family food; Libby Gruner on graphic novels for teens; Caroline Grant on Autism: The Musical; 12-Step Mama taking the 10th step, Ona Gritz realizing that she's become the kind of writer her mother loved to read, and the final installment of Zen and the Art of Child Maintenance. Finally, look for a profile of Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile, authors of I Was A Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids and Dirty Little Secrets From Otherwise Perfect Moms and an essay by Jessica Smartt Gullion about writing through family interruptions.

Literary Reflection Selected Short: April

Literary Reflections is pleased to announce April's featured writing prompt Selected Shorts. We had a record 11 prompt submissions to our April question, which was "Do you write "in your head" as you go about your daily tasks? If so, describe your thought process. If not, reflect on how you generate writing ideas and fit writing into your daily routine."

Heidi Scrimgeour wrote,

I write in the shower.

For me, writing is less a physical act with pen and paper and more about stolen moments of mental space. They're few and far between but guaranteed; as soon as I set foot in the shower the wispy ideas and snatched threads of dialogue rain down as fast and free as the water.

It replenishes me, my daily writing shower. Sometimes it happens while small fists bang devilishly on the shower door. Sometimes my wet writing reverie is brought to an all-too abrupt end by the need to issue time-out sanctions and resolve small boys' disputes.

I long for the shower space. Proverbs says that hope deferred makes the heart sick, while a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. Most of the time, I carry a kind of heart-sickness with me: a longing for a time when I can write uninterrupted, without the chaos of these ever-present tiny budding souls whose seemingly endless needs tear me from myself and from my words.

I couple that with the knowledge that one day I'll miss these small days that seem so purposeless and yet are infused with teaching them how to be -- a task as purposeful as they come. I know one day I will berate myself for all the ways I wished this time away; I'll wish to be able to repay all the times that I lingered in the shower in return for one more chance to drink in the delicious undiluted joy of mothering two small, fuzzy headed boys.

But now, juggling my need to write with the needs of my children is like constantly deferring hope. Even as I write this I know naptime must be coming to an end any minute now. I try not to resent the abrupt conclusion of this stolen moment. But even as I wrench myself from here and ascend the stairs to greet the urgent cries of Mama! I am torn in pieces.

I tempt them into silence with the TV while Mama finishes her words. They squeeze in beside me, struggling to navigate the way Mama slips from song-singing playmate to distracted scribbler on scraps of paper. I fight the urge to pull away, to clutch frenziedly at the words before they float away, consigned to a place of darkness where forgotten-ideas taunt me while I sleep.

As I move from this to Mama, dizzy at the shift in gear, I feel as guilty as an adulteress slipping back beneath the sheets. My loyalties are divided, and it feels as if I must sacrifice a part of me to let the other flourish.

But I write like this. Guiltily, desperately, with a heartsick longing. Yet when I give myself to this, to this wrangling of desires, I find that elusive fulfilment; my tree of life. And my daily shower makes that happen. It's water to my writer's soul, and when that part of me is watered, I'm a better Mama and a better me.

You can contact Heidi at heidi@giftofthegab.net and www.onefeistymama.vox.com.

Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years

Suzanne Edison's, The Moth-Eaten World, originally published in Literary Mama, will be included in the anthology, Online Writing:
The Best of the First Ten Years.

The Moth-Eaten World
by Suzanne Edison

(for my daughter, at four)

If your eyes were like tea leaves
instead of roasted coffee beans, oily brown,
thick with residue, or like grains of corn pollen
Native Americans used as blessings,
silken light — I might read them.

I might know where
you were those first few days
after knobby midwife palms
caught your crinkled body, after
your birth mother’s unshakeable hands
held you.

I search the adoption papers for clues.
Translated from Spanish spaces grow
between words, words lose
sense, the way glitter flakes
from your fairy princess wand, trailing
no discernible pattern.

And when your body quivers, sensing
a faint felt memory, traceable as
Braille, the raised bumps circling
a mother’s aureole, or lips filled with warm
milk, the almost unendurable sweetness—

I want to shake loose a story,
rattle my stick of bones
and teeth, and return from the Other World
with a cloth monkey, a bag of herbs,
something without holes.

Suzanne Edison’s work has appeared in a recent anthology titled Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism and Awakening, Seattle Woman magazine and with the King County Arts Program, Poetry on Buses 2004. She lives with her husband and daughter in Seattle, Washington.

Best Of......editor's blogging

Nicole O'Donnell blogs about driving with her family and a pony...and being tailgated by a "hog" at Subartic Mama.

Love You To Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs

LM Fiction editor Suzanne Kamata and Special Needs Mama columnist Vicki Forman will appear on the KPFK Radio show Bibliocracy on Monday, April 28 to discuss Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs. This breakthrough anthology features poetry, short fiction and essays by established and emerging writers. To listen in or to find out more, go to:

http://bibliocracyradio.blogspot.com/

Spoonfuls of Stories®

A Storybook Ending for Prospective Children's Book Authors
Cheerios® Launches Next Spoonfuls of Stories® Children's Book Contest
to Give Would-Be Authors the Chance for
Cash Prizes and Publisher Review!

Once upon a time, there was a writer with an idea for the greatest children's book in all the land. She had worked on the story, and dreamed of getting it published for children and families to enjoy. But the publisher lived on an island (Manhattan) far, far away and the waters surrounding the island were filled with many unknowns. So she hid away her children's book idea…until now.

Starting April 16, 2008 and going through July 15, 2008, Cheerios invites previously unpublished adult authors to submit their children's book manuscripts in the second Cheerios® Spoonfuls of Stories® Children's Book Contest. The book should be suitable for children who are 4 to 8 years old. For a complete list of rules and to submit an entry online, go to www.SpoonfulsofStoriesContest.com. Cheerios will provide cash prizes to up to three winners, and the top winner will have their book evaluated by Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing for a potential book deal. A book deal is not guaranteed.

Last year, Cheerios received close to 1,000 entries in the Children's Book Contest, and Shellie Braeuner of Nashville, Tenn., was named the grand prize winner. In addition to her $5,000 prize from Cheerios, Braeuner received a book deal from Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. Her winning story, The Great Dog Wash, is being published and will be printed and available in Cheerios boxes in the spring of 2009. The book also will be available in hardcover on bookshelves in the summer of 2009. Two first prize winners, Alison Anderson of Cumberland, Wisc., and Kate Heilman of Chicago, each received $1,000 from Cheerios, and their stories (The Sleepy Song and Theo the T-Rex, respectively) are featured on www.SpoonfulsofStories.com.
"Winning the Cheerios Spoonfuls of Stories Children's Book Contest has opened up a whole new world for me," said Braeuner. "I've been writing for many years, working on children's stories and novels alike. The publisher piece of the puzzle has always been a bit of a mystery to me, so I was excited to learn about the contest and enter my story. But it was nothing compared to the excitement when I was told I had won and my story got to a publisher's desk. I am honored to have gotten a book deal, and I can't wait to see my words in print and my book in Cheerios boxes and on bookshelves! The whole experience has been wonderful every step of the way.

"Kids need books; the more books — and the more kinds of books — the better," said Ricardo Fernandez, marketing manager for Cheerios. "Supporting up-and-coming authors goes hand-in-hand with our efforts to get high quality books to kids through our Spoonfuls of Stories program. We hope we can help encourage more new children's book authors each year through this contest."