Twenty Years of Literary Mama: A Letter from Jacinda Townsend

Once upon a time, before there were any novels, or any awards, or any reviews, there was, for me, Literary Mama. I’d had a baby the same year I started teaching creative writing at a university, which was a mere couple of years after I’d gotten my MFA, and I had no role models for making this all work; on the contrary, I had the voices and examples of male writers whose wives hustled their children away to give them writing time, women who’d foregone having children for the sake of maintaining their creativity. It was only through Literary Mama that I discovered a writing community that not only refused to check the “either/or” box, but kept checking “all of the above” in such a rich, dynamic way. I couldn’t help but read this journal as often as I could.

The paradox of writing through motherhood is that it is, so often, an even more solitary activity than it was before we had children, but Literary Mama provides us with a writing village of sorts, a virtual neighborhood where we can poke our heads out of our figurative windows between drying the laundry and building an essay, a place where we can all say, “Hello. I see you. I hear you. What you’re saying is essential.”

Please join me in supporting the Literary Mama community, and all the rich content that enriches and nourishes us, that gives us pause and makes us rethink the world around us. 

Your gift to Literary Mama will sustain daily operations at the journal, such as website maintenance, and build a fund for Literary Mama to expand its support of writers. This year, specifically, your gift will assist Literary Mama in paying contributors to the 20th anniversary anthology, coming out in 2023 by Small Harbor Publishing. Supporting Literary Mama helps us continue to care for our growing community of mothers who write, writers who mother, women who see neither thing as opposing the other. Literary Mama is an incredibly special baby. Please join us in helping it grow.

Thank you for supporting Literary Mama!

Jacinda Townsend

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