Mothers, Mothering, and Ongoing Conversations
Mixed Genre Folio Edited by Mary McLaughlin Slechta
The voices in this folio—a hive of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and art—hum with the conversations women have with their children, partners, mothers, and themselves. You will hear the pride and guilt of working mothers/artists, the frustration of adult children debating parents, both deceased and living, and the joy of others sifting memory for lessons and meaning. One poet opens our ears and hearts to the tender whisperings of guardian angels, while another, in communion with the moon, contemplates self and the passage of time. Three works-in-progress will leave you wanting to know where the conversations are headed: a teacher given a second chance, post-mortem, with a difficult student; a fatherless son contemplating his mother’s strange wanderings along an ocean shore; and a couple debating whether to have a baby in the face of climate change. Recounting the persistent, positive self-talk that helped her become a reporter, an essayist shares the lines of poetry, the voice of the poet speaking directly to her, that led her eventually towards a life of writing and teaching.
Here are brave and wonderful conversations. The writers invite you to engage, and the artist offers a touch of grace in her humorously titled collage, “Hard Head.”
–Mary McLaughlin Slechta, Folio editor
Pichchenda Bao, “Sleep When the Baby Sleeps and Other Nonsensical Writing Advice”
Denise Lewis Patrick, “Motherconversating”
Shinelle L. Espaillat, “Schrodinger’s Mother”
Lyndsey Ellis, “Jimmy’s Revival”
Sophia Russell, “Fab and the Fates”
Jacinda Townsend, “Dwight”
Gail Upchurch, “Good Girl”
J.E. Sills, “Sailing With Lucille”
Avery Irons, “The Language of Our Mothering”
ZM Spalter, “In the Beginning”
Lorraine Rice, “The Far Side of the Moon is Another Form of Absence”
Rita Kelley, “Hard Head”
Folio Editor – Mary McLaughlin Slechta is a fiction writer, poet, and Kimbilio Fellow living in upstate New York. Her short story collection, Mulberry Street Stories (Four Way Books), was the 2021 winner of the Kimbilio National Fiction Prize, a Legacy Award finalist for the Hurston /Wright Foundation, and recipient of Central New York Book Award. She has previously published in Mom Egg Review and work has appeared in midnight & indigo, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and LEON Literary Review.