Author’s Note: Gabriella Burman on her book of essays, Michaela I set out to write a memoir after the death of my daughter, and that is still the plan, but the task of completing a book length project while also raising very young children is daunting for me; as many working mother writers do, I write in shorter spurts. So I decided to focus my writing around a central question — and as a bereaved mother, there were many, far too many. I began to “essay,” to wrestle with and reflect upon a single question in each piece. I accumulated…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Sally Deskins – is an artist, art writer and writer. Her art has been exhibited in galleries in Omaha, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Pittsburgh, Ohio and Chicago; and has been published in publications such as Certain Circuits, Weave Magazine, and Painters & Poets. She has curated various solo and group exhibitions, readings and performances centered on women’s perspective and the body. Her first illustrated book Intimates & Fools, with poetry by Laura Madeline Wiseman, was published in 2014 by Les Femmes Folles Books. Sallydeskins.tumblr.com
Anna Lawson Artist’s Statement: I have sketchbook after sketchbook of image ideas ….The set of images that are relevant to women …was started in response to being a very tired and frustrated mother and it was, in truth, the only way I could cope at the time. The first one hundred and fifty nine were completed in a period of around four weeks. The drawings are raw – by that I mean painful – they were in direct response to given situations – reactionary. I guess it stopped me from screaming at the children – you know those times when one…
Get the Issue Leap of Faith by Deborah L. Blicher – The little boy I hope will become my son lines up his scuffed shoes on the edge of the sandbox, gauging the distance to the ground. It’s sixty degrees out, but like all the children I have seen in this Russian city, he’s overdressed to my American eye. Between his striped, knitted cap and puffy blue coat, I can hardly see his face. We speak different languages, but as far as I can tell, he hates me. The boy, whose name in Misha, is two and…
Megan Merchant Ghazal for Unspoken Sorrow What will become of us, our son resting along the line of my hip, hum. The sweet whimper-whine his breath makes, lip pressing lip, hum. In our half-dark, we hush hands and mouths while he’s asleep in the room, the stretched and scarred afterbirth of my body unfolding a deep rooted hum. Thin white milk streams from my nipples onto your chest, a praise of unspoken sorrow. My body weeps without permission, a primitive, broken hum. A Monk said, you cannot know compassion until you love your own mother, absolutely. If I exhaled completely,…
Sarah stopped rocking; a branch broke off in the wind, rolling down the roof, or did the lights flicker? She shuddered; she had a childhood fear of wind, of things unseen. How long until the power goes out? The book she was trying to read lay on her lap, open; she rested her head against the hard wood of the rocker and closed her eyes. She had just recently begun reading in here, the room that once belonged to her oldest. She wanted to make it a happy room, a room for guests, as if new soft carpet and quiet…
Reviewed by Tessara Dudley – Wendy Wisner is a writer and a lactation consultant, but the driving force behind her poetry is her motherhood. Her poems offer snapshots of bearing and birthing, being sister or mother or daughter. Generations of family stretch across the pages of Morph and Bloom, as in “Weaning: Burial”: “The night we buried my uncle was the first night my son fell asleep without nursing. He didn’t even ask. … Back at the hotel, I thought: I am the mother of a son who will one day die.” The collection begins with “Eve”, a poem that…
Photos here: http://themomegg.tumblr.com/post/118876238212/launch-party-pix-by-edward-currelley
By now, it’s a familiar lament. Usually it hits mid-semester, when the honeymoon period is over and the work has really piled up. I ask them how they’re doing, and in response they cover their faces with their hands and shake their heads. “Why do we get so much busy work? We have so much to do, and it’s so boring.” “Boring,” “boring,” “boring,” they moan as if “boring” was the most offensive adjective in their vocabulary, surpassing “cruel,” “callous,” “indifferent.” Well, perhaps it is. At least cruelty can inspire indignation; they get fired up, energize themselves. Boredom, well that…
Review by Sarah W. Bartlett – The author writes, ‘I’ve been writing different versions of this book my whole life.’ What woman doesn’t write and rewrite her mother-daughter story, if only in her head? What daughter doesn’t at some point long to know her mother? Or at least know enough about her to construct a context for what the daughter experiences in her own lived life? JP Howard is fortunate enough to have had considerable context. She knew, even participated in, her model-mother’s glamorous life. And she shares some marvelous vintage black-and-white photos from the 40’s and 50’s. Don’t let…