@Literary Mama
Read the most recent pieces at Literary Mama…
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COLUMNS
After All This Time by Ona Gritz from Doing It Differently
Hoboken is a transient town, and ours is a particularly transient building. I’m the anomaly. I’ve lived in the same apartment for twenty years, longer than I lived in the house where I grew up.
Of Claws and Doritos by Marjorie Osterhout from Dear Marjo
Dear Marjo, Ever since my baby was born, my friends have been telling me to remember “self care.” I don’t even know what this is.
Thailand Valentine by Avery Fischer Udagawa from Four Worlds
A fact of expat life—one both liberating and maddening—is living next door to local conflict but feeling helpless to quell it. I have no vote in Thailand. I have lived in Bangkok longer than any other city, but I email my ballots to Wichita.
Desert Bells by B.L. Pike from Senior Mama
The Mission San Xavier del Bac dozes in the Arizona sun just south of Tucson, haunting the desert with its memories of the early Spanish colonization of the New World, the Apache raids that emptied the territory of Spanish settlers, the Mexican war of independence, and the area’s abrupt adoption into the United States with the Gadsden Purchase in 1854.
How to Toast a Frozen Waffle by Marjorie Osterhout from Dear Marjo
Dear Marjo, I’ve been home with my kids since they were babies. I’ve absolutely loved being a stay-at-home mom, but now that my youngest “baby” is in middle school, it feels like it’s time to go back to work. But I feel conflicted about it.
CREATIVE NONFICTION
Hootchie-Cootchie Mama by Hannah E. Palmer
hat I would really like to say to him is, “I don’t like you anymore.” Instead, I serve dinner and say, “Would you like cheese on your pasta?”
The Neutral Ground by Annie Bleecker
In this summer you are two and I am 32, and on certain Sundays, the city is ours.
Landscape by Lisa Roth-Gulvin
Ultrasound guides his needle — a submarine beneath water. The room is stark, decorated in medical minimalism. The curtains are white and clean, the sleek cabinets gray, and the walls an unremarkable shade of blue. This comforts me. I like clean, tidy spaces. They shield me from chaos.
FICTION
The Kismet of Mumtaz by Nabeela M. Rehman
No one shows up to an Indian dinner party on time. Everyone knows to come at least two hours after the stated invitation, but her husband had gotten the odd notion that they would “come early and leave early.” As Mumtaz expected, only the arthritic mother-in-law was there to greet them at the door.
LITERARY REFLECTIONS
Now Reading: January 2014 by Libby Maxey
Essential Reading: Opportunity by Libby Maxey
POETRY
The Girl Who Lives in the Keyhole by Mary McMyne
Love as Though by Jill Rosenthal
Empty House by Jennifer Givhan
Moving by Cathy Barber
Green Tea by Cathy Douglas
Preadolescence by Kimberly Long Cockroft
PROFILES
A Conversation with Aline Soules by Carol Smallwood
Aline Soules is the author of numerous poems and prose works. Her most recent publication, Meditation on Woman, is a mix of prose poetry and flash fiction.
REVIEWS
Poetic and Profane: A Review of My Mother Did Not Tell Stories by Libby Maxey
Laurie Kruk is too good a writer for her work to be read and evaluated merely as “women’s poetry,” “mother poetry,” “feminist poetry,” or whatever ghettoizing label might be deployed to foreground thematics and downplay poetics. Nearly every poem in her 2012 collection My Mother Did Not Tell Stories contains at least one turn of phrase that is truly stunning in its simple perfection…
Language and a Life: A Review of The Translator by Suzanne Kamata
In literature, as in life, mothers get blamed for just about everything. They are held responsible for being overly attentive, or not attentive enough; for providing bad examples, or establishing impossible standards; for staying with unworthy men, or leaving good men.