Literary Mama Book Reviewed in Washington Post

Check out the lastest review of Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined (Seal Press 2006) entitled Literary Mama: Mothers of Invention by Evelyn Small.

Here is an excerpt

Literary Mamas includes memoirs, fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry by contributors who are long-time and first-time writers, scholars and grandmothers, all focused on motherhood in its infinite varieties. Here are women “writing through the distractions” and the “domestic chaos”; women dealing with the oft-repeated theme of balancing, doing the “devastating dance” of working and mothering; mothers who go crazy and others who just go; mothers who have tantrums — “there is something to be said for a tantrum”; a woman who “thought having a baby would not change my life”; a poet with only “a handful of poems to show,” but a “poemchild, whose smile is all my sonnets.” Fit and unfit mothers, all imperfect in their separate ways.

Here, too, is all the busy work of mothers — women engaged continually in those active gerunds that have been on mothers’ to-do lists through the centuries: nursing, weaning, caring, cleaning, teaching, fixing, helping, healing, hoping, fearing. Among my favorites are Megeen R. Mulholland’s poem “Miscarriage of an English Teacher” and Heidi Raykeil’s excerpt from her memoir about the death of her baby, “Johnny.”

Read the entire review here.