Jan/Feb 2023

It’s liberating to know you can begin any time you decide. Permission isn’t needed. We hope that you give yourself permission to pause and read the latest issue from Literary Mama.

“I wasn’t leaving my kids, and I knew I had to do something drastic to bring them with me.”

“But I knew that I had to be honest on the page, which meant that some people weren’t going to like me—both as the character in the book and the author.”

“I think it’s so important to document the aspects of motherhood that are less visible, the raw human stuff we don’t talk about, the guilt, the pain, the grieving.”

“I wanted readers to feel like they were inside these women’s heads so they’d have more compassion for each of them.”

“The real fire of wanting comes . . . when you’re determining who you’re going to be, what your purpose is in the world. Power, ambition, money, sex, identity—these things orbit the central concept of desire like planets in a solar system.”

The Women Could Fly is a novel rooted in the inherent messiness of parenthood: a mother cannot be known by her child separate from her mothering.

The Other Mother is laced with an overarching theme of doing what is right to protect someone, even if that protection is self-preservation.

The poems in Catastrophic Molting acknowledge our anger while challenging readers to hope for and work for change.

I am going to forget this, the most exquisite moments of my life.

Mama, alone is …