Margo Orlando Littell on The Distance from Four Points My Characters’ Trapped-in-Amber Fate When I started writing The Distance from Four Points in 2013, pandemics were something safely tucked away in the world of science fiction or dystopian fiction—not the gritty, realistic literary fiction I was working on. Yet here we are. My novel is coming out when the unimaginable has become our daily life. It hasn’t even seen a bookstore shelf and already feels like a relic. In The Distance from Four Points, Robin Besher must leave her affluent suburb and return to her Appalachian hometown to…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Deborah Leipziger Susan de Sola’s poems are like sea glass arriving on the shore: beautiful, crystalline, and surprising. Her first poem “Bowl of Sea Glass” conveys a tactile joy: The sea’s soft fingers of anemone know to open in the dark. … The sea lifts, pounds the glass. Insists on randomness. De Sola’s poems transcend place and time. From Mt. Etna to Holland to a Jewish cemetery in Marrakesh; to Little Odessa and Bryn Mawr, we are transported. De Sola is a boundary spanner – she spans countries and continents and her identities give her…
Marjorie Maddox On Writing Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises I didn’t plan on publishing a book during a pandemic. You may not have planned on reading it then, either. But, since most of us are now inside, Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises will, I hope, find its way inside the lives of your middle-grade and YA children, as well as become an inner part of your own writing practices. If you are also a teacher, this is also a book for you, especially if you are looking…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Rebecca Foust’s chapbook The Unexploded Ordnance Bin is timely during a pandemic. The unexploded ordnance bin her son finds on the beach becomes a metaphor for political chaos, neural divergence, and the kind of metamorphosis that can happen when deeply held notions are blown apart by experience. The book is arranged in three sections, each highlighting the possibility of explosion that tinges every choice governments and individuals make. In the title poem, Rebecca Foust imagines the unseen autism gene as the unexploded device. “at the police station the desk sergeant crooked a…
Here, At Home My current creative life is a ritual performed only for myself. A site-specific, home-bound durational piece. – – Lauren Sharpe, “Domesticity, Now” In recent weeks our relationships with our homes have significantly shifted. But even in steadier times “home” is subject to exigencies and is also itself a source of strength. In this folio, writers of non-fiction explore interplay among experience, motherhood, and home. Kelly Bargabos – “All There Is” “The receptionist who collects the tickets unlocks the front door. The narrow hallway fills up.” Sarah W. Bartlett –…
Kelly Bargabos All There Is The receptionist who collects the tickets unlocks the front door. The narrow hallway fills up. The line is organized and orderly, for the most part. They only get rowdy when someone takes too long to load their tray. “Good Morning. How are you?” I ask. Such an asinine question. How good could they be? They’re here for lunch. I’m sure things could be better. But I ask anyway. I always try to smile, look them in the eye. I want them to know I see them. They’re not invisible, not to me. I…
Sarah W. Bartlett Coming Home “Where we want to be is where we ought to live” – SWB, summer 1996 Apparently, I’ve been searching for a sense of home since childhood. In the great woods behind our house when family connection broke down. In music to which I devoted after-school hours. In writing to name and to understand. In exploring nature for answers and guidance. In endless gardens planted, and myriad growing things nurtured. I was an adult before I discovered my soul home. It perches on a Vermont hillside among maples with a permanent 180˚ western…
Joanna Bettelheim Our Ex, Carol My father married my mother, whose name is Carolyn. After they divorced, he dated Carol. My mother bought a house in an adjacent neighborhood, keeping me in the same school district. My new bedroom had been a family room; the washer and dryer rumbled in the closet while I slept. We tried to move our cats, Jack and Jill, but Jack was too stubborn (“too stupid” according to my mom) to make it stick, finding his way home over and over again for a month before our neighbors agreed to adopt him. My dad…
Laura Dennis It’s Not Always Headline News Every morning, the same routine. Sip my coffee. Scan the news. Gasp at the pain in my gut. The headlines alone drive me to close my laptop and stare off into space. The still, small voice in my heart likes it when this happens, for then it can cease being both still and small. Instead, it gets to bang around inside, begging me to do something, anything, to help. Yet for a long time, I could not see how. I’m a single mom of three who hasn’t seen child support in months.…
Lisa Hase-Jackson Cucumbers in July I keep forgetting to buy cucumbers. Other things on my mind, I guess, things I cannot forget, like my mother’s girlhood name, the one my aunts and uncles still use. Cee Cee. A nickname invented by their youngest brother when he couldn’t pronounce “sister.” Other things on my mind, too, like my mother’s cancer is no longer in remission, that she is going to die soon. None of us have forgotten the way last summer’s chemo took her hair or the way radiation made her bones brittle, took what little fat left on…