Giving Tuesday 2021

Recently, when I told my eight year old that l had scheduled her vaccine appointment, she leapt in the air and said it was the best thing that has ever happened. I flinched, felt that nuanced pang that so many of us have come to understand in this continuing pandemic. I felt gratitude for her safety, her community, the things that have gone right in the everyday. I felt trepidation about what’s to come for a kid who’s had a real stinker of a few years. 

Everyone’s having a hard time, it seems, in the pandemic. So many of us crave connection, stories, and empathy. How we parent in such times, how we ground our children and help them grow, how we make and perceive our mistakes, implicating ourselves and challenging those around us to be better: this matters. And the stories we tell about parenting and the many faces of motherhood matter, deeply. 

As a community of volunteers in a nonprofit organization, Literary Mama staff put abiding effort into publishing diverse stories of motherhood and complicating our perceptions about how motherhood is defined. We’ve been doing this for 19 years. In that time, we’ve remained committed to publishing in a variety of genres and working with emerging and established writers. As an online journal, we continue to work toward a smoother reading experience across digital platforms, a robust group of departments and editors, and anti-racist learning. We pride ourselves on feedback and community, and this is what keeps us going as a staff of volunteers and mothers with multifaceted responsibilities and hopes. We pride ourselves on an expansive view of motherhood and on continually understanding the privileges that go into this labor.

We know that much of this deliberate growth is made possible by the donations we have received, and we hope to continue this trajectory. Donations this year will assist us in maintaining website backups and storage, technical support from our web designer, and our membership in CLMP. We will also need to upgrade our web host in the future. Finally, senior editors are generating ideas about our upcoming twentieth anniversary, and donations will assist us in organizing a way to celebrate this milestone.

We are thankful for everyone who has supported our work. If you’ve donated in the past, we hope you’ll consider donating again. If you’ve been published in Literary Mama, we hope you’ll consider supporting future issues. If you have read and enjoyed these pages, please do consider a donation. As our Editor-in-Chief, Amanda Jaros, wrote in last year’s letter, “the work of mother writers has never been more important.” We hope you will support us in any way that you are able.

To donate: https://literarymama.com/donate. 

Amanda Fields

Senior Editor

-Literary Mama is an exempt organization as described in Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. All donations are tax deductible.