Review by Emily Webber If you’ve ever worked an office job or wondered how people endure toiling away in a cubicle farm, you’ll tear through Wendy J. Fox’s linked story collection, What If We Were Somewhere Else. Each story imagines the lives of a group of coworkers at an unnamed corporation. But, beyond that, each of these characters is thoroughly human, searching for what will satisfy them both at work and in their personal lives. The collection opens with “The Book of Names, a Spreadsheet” which serves as an introduction to the characters and the office they inhabit. It…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Jane Yolen Bambi Haiku An old book opens. A fawn loses his mother. Yes, there will be tears. A child ‘s first movie. My age? I was only four. The skunk was no help. I kept on screaming: “Bad men killed Bambi’s mommy.” I was taken home. A week of nightmares. I had to sleep with mother. Oh, Dismal Disney. Return to “Storied Mothers.” Jane Yolen’s 400th book was published in March 2021. Her latest book of adult poetry in November 2021. She writes for children, YA, and adults: picture books, poetry, nonfiction, novels and has won dozens…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg Poets are often drawn to the fragile expanses of a landscape—internal or external—and Kelly R. Samuels’ poems seek to capture the ephemeral beauty of existence and place that is in peril as we go about our lives. Her poems give elegant and evocative homage as they serve as cautionary tales in a world of climate change denial and the transformative forces of humanity and nature. Her language skillfully summons a music of shift and flow, the rhythms of expansion and retraction of a changing vista. From “Here’s Now Alteration:” (35) And…
Review by Lara Lillibridge At age thirty-five, Cassandra Lane found herself pregnant after a lifetime of saying she never wanted children. She wrote, “my pregnancy boomeranged me back to my family and our past,” (25) and reawakened a need for her ancestor’s stories, a desire to know her people, long ago erased by white culture. “This work is a hybrid—a romance and a horror, a memoir and a fiction—forged out of what is known and what is unknown.” (1) Lane’s memoir blends her personal narrative with a reimagining of the lives and deaths of her great-grandparents, Burt and Mary…
Review by Carla Panciera If you’ve ever compared your family to the perfect families captured in Facebook posts and felt, despite your awareness of social media’s tricks, that everyone else has their you-know-what together, then the families in Michelle Ross’s second collection of short stories should make you feel a lot better. Ross’s characters are real — flawed, overanxious, exhausted women just trying to navigate the challenges of motherhood, selfhood, neighborhood. In Ross’s world, motherhood is the ultimate shapeshifter, beginning in pregnancy when “[your] belly is hard as a rock . . . a huge geode, the fetus, a…
Procreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 49th edition of this scholarly discourse. Literature intersects with art to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA #artandmotherhood Art by Thatiana Cardoso Since 2013, I have explored the tension between strangeness and familiarity of everyday objects through photography, video, performance, and drawing. I investigate…
Mom Egg Review / MER VOX Best of the Net Nominations 2021 Prose Keshni Naicker Washington – Blue From “Mother is Speaking” Folio Curated by Keisha-Gaye Anderson Sophie Rhem – Am I A Mother I Am From “Range of Motherhood” Folio Curated by J.L. Scott Fiction Naomi J. Williams – No Doors From “Range of Motherhood” Folio Curated by J.L. Scott Jennifer Dickinson – No One’s Darling From “My Mother” Folio Curated by MER VOX Poetry Tina Cane – When the Let Down Was Good From “Healing and Recovery” Folio Curated by Jenn Martelli and Cindy Veach Joan Kwon Glass…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor This new resource book on the novella form opens with examples of familiar novellas like Ethan Frome and The House on Mango Street. Divided into sections that will be helpful for any fiction writer, the book provides practical step-by-step information for writing in this form. Each chapter offers a journaling section with detailed practice prompts. The author also advises aspiring writers to write fifteen minutes a day without stopping. In the first section, the author both defines fiction and provides ways to approach writing a novella. “As a genre, as a way of…
September 15, 2021 MER VOX Quarterly – Fall 2021 In this issue, two folios of work focus on aspects of women’s lives and motherhood. “Fifty Plus and Fabulous: We Write Our Stories” is a rich folio of work by poets illuminating the experiences, challenges, and wisdom of that demographic in surprising ways. Curator JP Howard notes, “This folio centers, celebrates and uplifts the powerful words of age fifty and plus women writers who are also Mamas, because our stories/our words/our narratives deserve to be celebrated and uplifted…” “Mother Figures: Other Mothers” is the first of a series of…
Fifty Plus and Fabulous: We Write our Stories! A MER VOX Folio Curated by JP Howard Featured Writers Catherine Gigante-Brown H.E. Fisher Shalewa Mackall Lynne McEniry Theta Pavis Martina Green McGowan Cheryl J. Fish Kathy Engel Annis Cassells Golda Solomon Carol Dorf JP Howard This folio centers, celebrates and uplifts the powerful words of age fifty and plus women writers who are also Mamas, because our stories//our words/our narratives deserve to be celebrated and uplifted. I am a proud 50+ Mama writer and I created this particular folio because there have been days when I don’t feel that our…