Literary Mama

We’re looking for four wonderful women (mothers!) to join us here on the Literary Mama editorial board. Creative Nonfiction Co-Editor The Creative Nonfiction Co-Editor will head up the Creative Nonfiction department with Shari MacDonald, our current CNF Editor. Duties and joys include selecting nonfiction pieces, writing acceptance and rejection letters, working with authors on accepted […]

Former Literary Mama Creative Nonfiction Editor Jennifer Margulis (Author of Toddler and Why Babies Do That) was recently awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research, teach in the English Department, and write in Niger, West Africa for the 2006-2007 academic year. Jennifer and her family will be living in Niger, the poorest country in the […]

Well, first there were the CDC guidelines to treat all women as “pre-pregnant,” as outlined in this article in the Washington Post and subsequent MetaFilter dicussion. Then there was the breastfeeding awareness campaign that equated not breastfeeding with riding a mechanical bull while pregnant, as detailed in the New York Times article, Breast-Feed or Else. […]

A little while, Literary Mama published my review of Darla Shine’s Happy Housewives. I half expected Shine to respond as she had to some of my previous blog posts, but my review was greeted by silence. Perhaps she hadn’t read it. Perhaps she had and was pleased: although I was not a huge fan of […]

Literary Mama has launched two new sections for your reading pleasure. LM’s new Op-Ed section features blistering, humorous, controversial, and of course opinionated commentary. Check out the latest piece by Susi Elkins about the Bush Administration, Budget Cuts and Big Bird. And if you have something to say, let our Op-Eds department know. We’re always […]

It just won’t go away, will it? My copy of Leslie Morgan Steiner’s Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families arrived last week and although I have not yet had a chance to dip underneath its spilled milk cover, I feel as though I have already formulated […]

Given that it is International Women’s Day, Maud Newton’s blog post today reads as particularly disheartening. Newton links to Meghan O’Rourke’s essay in Slate entitled Desperate Feminist Wives: Why wanting equality makes women unhappy. O’Rourke refers to a recent study by sociologists at the University of Virginia on happiness within marriage. The study discovered that […]

I was saddened to hear about the death of NOW co-founder and Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan yesterday. I didn’t really know why I felt sad. I did not know her. She was 85 years old. By all accounts, she had lived a very full and remarkable life. It was author Ann Douglas who (as […]

Welcome, new readers, to the Literary Mama blog. You may have found us by way of media appearances or book readings for Literary Mama, It’s A Boy, or Confessions of a Naughty Mommy, all of which were written or edited by Literary Mama editors. Perhaps you attended one of the Mother Talks which took place […]

The buzz from last Friday evening’s Mother Talk has yet to die down. I pick my son up from preschool and a mom stops me with an urgent glance: “I’m so disappointed I missed the Mother Talk! Are you doing it again soon?” I’ve gotten calls and emails from others who couldn’t make it and […]

Jennifer Margulis predicted we might have a big crowd, but I didn’t believe her. After all, how many of these bookstore things have I done where it turns out to be just me, standing next to a tower of destined-to-be-returned-to-the-warehouse books, and one old guy who thought he was sitting in the café? But she […]