Blog Book Tour: Literary Mama Anthology

Last November, I participated in the It's a Boy blog book tour. Today I'm joining 62 bloggers who are participating in February's book tour for the Literary Mama anthology. All individual pieces mentioned can also be read online.


The new Literary Mama anthology, edited by Andrea J. Buchanan and Amy Hudock, compiles some of the best fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published on the Literary Mama web site.

I found myself most drawn to the essays. In the introduction, Buchanan makes a persuasive case for the importance of literary writing about motherhood. She contends, "Motherhood is not viewed as a theme worthy of literature, unlike uniquely male stories (such as traditional war stories." She makes the point that even though mother-writers today are writing about their experiences, their works may not be read in the future--just as we have forgotten many mother-writers of the past. The essay troubled me; must women writers continue to "discovered" every generation, or will we finally be able to develop a female literary tradition?

Another essay that drew me in was "Out of the Woods," by Lizbeth Finn-Arnold. The author engages Thoreau's words in a dialogue that questions what his ideas about solitude can mean for a mother-writer. I could identify with her struggle to combine writing and motherhood; during Ben's first year, I found myself angry with the male writers of the past who could go into a room and close the door while someone else cared for their children. But Finn-Arnold discovers her own sense of solitude and her own voice as a writer--paradoxically by realizing "my children were my greatest inspiration...my Walden Pond... a mirror into my very own soul."

Heidi Raykeil's essay "Johnny" will be heartbreaking for any parent to read. In it, she describes her son's death at two weeks old:

So what were we supposed to do? Where were we supposed to go? How could we possibly leave? .... We left the room; we left the doctors and our families and the sad, helpless faces. We left our son, our first, our only baby. We left him there somewhere in a basement, in the morgue, locked up, barely just dead. We left him, and we left what we had known of our lives as we left the hospital that day.

Raykeil's direct style conveys her bewilderment and grief as she ventures back into the world and learns to live without her son.

The poetry covers a wide range of experiences. Megeen R. Mulholland's "Miscarriage of an English Teacher" uses grammatical terms to parse grief, while Phyllis Capello's "Hospital Quartet" shares harrowing details about watching a child undergo chemo. Rachel Iverson's "Nighttime with Dorothea" portrays the joys and frustrations of nighttime nursing. And "Packing the Car," by Linda Lee Crosfield, shows a mother's sadness as her son moves out. (While I was looking up the links for these poems, I also discovered "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Elmo," which was not included in the anthology; anyone whose child is a member of the Cult of Elmo may find it entertaining.)

The writing about motherhood in this anthology goes beyond what's found in the glossy parenting magazines. As a mother-writer, I'm grateful to Literary Mama for taking mother-writers seriously.