Review by Lara Lillibridge Janet Todd is an academic and novelist, known for her biographies of feminist writers as well as several novels. Todd was born in Wales and grew up in Bermuda, Sri Lanka, England, and Scotland. As an adult she worked in Ghana, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. before returning to Britain. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College. Janet Todd is also former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She co-founded Women’s Writing, the first journal devoted to early women writers. Radiation Diaries is a memoir written…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Carol Smallwood has been awarded the Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award for her lifetime work in writing, librarianship, education. Much of her work has the theme of women in her essays, anthologies, and poetry and she is grateful for Mom Egg Review in their dedication to helping so many women and mother writers like her. https://wwlifetimeachievement.com/2018/12/12/carol-smallwood
It’s Complicated… A folio curated by Marjorie Tesser As mothers, we are involved in the business of nurture. Sometimes this goes smoothly; motherhood can be a source of love and joy. But at other times, mothering can be complicated. Signals can be interrupted, misinterpreted. Mothers and children can be imperfect. There is disappointment, illness, loss. Often these are the things we are most reluctant to talk about. In this folio, writers confront, explore, and reveal complications of motherhood. They address the difficult topics of frustration, misapprehension, grief, and loss, and explore their intersections with mothering. These fraught topics are also addressed…
About “The Anxious Child’s Alphabet” by Kendra Keefer-McGee
Morals by Abigail Walthausen What can I give without Joseph, Doula and sheepwives and cowwives? A range of applied pieties, against pan proteins for storybook farmers for the beauty of the earth against a token virus. Every coffee ground to a worm in need. For the crystals and against the slice of Candelaria. Every eggshell for the soil, and carton away from turtles. There is no story to values {no sparkle in this set of brackets}. If I made a shoe to hold them together it would be coconut suede, laces out of saffron threads. Spine, compass, gelatin, center —…
The Loss by Dorsía Smith Silva At first, it begins so simple. The pain itself is nothing, something you control, by default. You recognize the strange violence, as it drifts through the pelvis and lands in the vulva. Now the burning turns course, assailing the inner and outer chords of the legs. At the ledge, you purge yourself, giving back a two-inch parallel of flesh. Such a tiny figure, having no name to speak of, camouflaging the repeated starving of all of your longing. You understand, it will never be the same again. Like a drawn-out broken signature, the…
The Stepdaughters Are the Wicked Ones by Alexis Quinlan Scalding sand kicked to cool, cruel clouds roll past, white on light and happy giddy girls, volleyball reddening wrists. Spike it, one cries. To the side, new wife learning blood again, its fairytale tides. Welcome, hectic heart, to the bottom beneath the bottom, dark and icy trench whose creatures need no eyes to see the dream of a mother who would other and wive forever and ever a man. Game on a beach. Whose serve. Alexis Quinlan is a writer and teacher living in New York City. Her most recent…
The Anxious Child’s Alphabet Kendra Keefer-McGee “The Anxious Child’s Alphabet” consists of twenty-six mixed media works on cradled wood panels. Together the Alphabet explores the existential anxieties of a child who experiences the world differently. “The Anxious Child’s Alphabet” came out of the tension between my children’s need for mothering and safety and my own need to create. My oldest son had ‘existential angst’ beginning at age 3. He worried constantly– about war, viruses, injustice, mortality, and religion. The Anxious Child construct was originally based on him, but came to represent the experience of contemporary life. As any mother…
To My Twenty-Six-Year-Old Daughter by Connie Post You are sitting in front of me two days before my hysterectomy telling me you are having a baby in July asking questions only the moon can answer the wooden grain in the kitchen table runs in the same direction as the conversation we sort through a thousand “ifs” as the kitchen light flickers I move a half empty glass away from surgery instructions that tell me no food past nine, only a sip of water, no jewelry, no aspirin I am telling myself I will be fine all surgeons know how…
Beta splendens (Siamese Fighting Fish) by Paulette A. Pashibin Beautiful carnivores: curious, watchful, with strange appetites. Females eat their eggs. Strong males build bubble nests, fortresses against mother hunger. All are selectively bred — like you, daughter — for specifically desired traits. They are called Delta, Halfmoon, Veiltail — exotic names, like yours. But make no mistake, names can’t change these Rumblefish. Even they find it hard to discern their flirts from their fights. Here’s the twist in our fishbowl: I tried to be both he and she, And the little egg ate its mother. Paulette A. Pashibin is…