Carrie Vittitoe

A five-week virtual course on Writing Motherhood hosted by Gila Lyons will run from October 10, 2023 – November 14, 2023.  Class will include readings, discussion, writing exercises, the opportunity to develop longer pieces, and hearing and sharing stories of motherhood and mothering with other creative, thoughtful, searching, and soulful writers. There will be opportunities to share […]

By the time my daughter was three years old, many of her friends had Barbies. She began asking for one of her own. I was of the mind that Barbie was a clueless bimbo with weird feet, and Ken was a putz. I didn’t buy one until that day in the grocery store. It had […]

The new Barbie film has transported me to my childhood. Barbara Millicent Roberts arrived at my house on December 25, 1963. Barbie was gorgeous in her gold and white bathing suit and matching headscarf. The new doll was a grown-up girl, but many of my friends looked like her, All-American little girls with blue eyes, straight part-in-the-middle, yellow-white hair, and Coppertone-tanned […]

Applications will soon be accepted for A Hotel Room of One’s Own: The Erma Bombeck | Anna Lefler Humorist-in-Residence Program (Sept. 5-Oct. 5). The winners, finalists and honorable mentions will be announced in November. The grand prize winners will be honored at the April 4-6, 2024, Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop, where they will be “robed” in […]

Unless you’ve been living in a bubble, you’ve seen video and memes or heard chatter from friends about Greta Gerwig’s new film, Barbie. If you’ve seen it, we’d love to publish your 400-700 word essays or poems on the blog about what Barbie means to you as a mama. These are just some ideas you […]

By the time July and August roll around, the heat can be unbearable. While this makes gardening and hiking difficult, it makes reading under a fan with a cool drink beside you an absolutely perfect way to spend an hour. Our staff shares what they’ve been knocking out from their to-be-read lists. What book are […]

Ten years ago (“the blink of an eye,” in Mama time) I wrote a post honoring this site’s 10th anniversary. I’m back for another milestone—20 years of Literary Mama! The editors asked for some thoughts on the Columns department, which is where it all began for me, having edited nine columns for LM. I really […]

How does summer influence you as a mother? You may try to recreate the wonderful experiences from your childhood with your own kids, such as camping in the quiet woods or chasing lightning bugs in the backyard. Maybe you struggle with summer and the pervasive lack of routine that seems to come with it. With […]

I’m a little bit addicted to traveling. While I tell myself that there are worse addictions, the state of the carpet in my home and the 16-year-old sandals in my closet suggest that maybe I ought to focus at least some of my attention on non-travel spending.  The writer in me has an opinion about […]

It was one of those moments that is hard to describe. An email arrived in my inbox in December 2018 from Felicity Landa and Colleen Kearney Rich, then fiction editors at Literary Mama, about the acceptance of my flash fiction. Oh, the joy! An acceptance does that every time to a writer. What’s more, Literary Mama has been […]

Part of the mothering story is the fathering story whether that fathering was purely biological or whether it involved consistent and complex relationship. Writers who have contributed to Literary Mama over its two decades have examined the role of fathers and what it has meant and can mean to daughters, sons, wives, families, and communities. […]