Inflection Point in Literary Mama

I joined the staff of Literary Mama in the spring of 2014, shortly after I finished my MFA program. I'd published my first short story there, six years earlier, and had published an essay about finding models of mother protagonists in fiction--an adaptation of my thesis introduction--in the Literary Reflections department the previous month. My pre-MFA writing instructor Kate Hopper was resigning from editing the Literary Reflections department and recommended me as her replacement. At the same time, the editorial assistant for the department, Libby Maxey, moved up to take the other department editor position, vacated by Christina Speed. 

Libby and I enjoyed eight years of highly compatible co-editing until she moved over to help run the Poetry department around a year ago. We became good friends, even though we didn't speak to each other outside of email until 2018, when I joined the Senior Editor team, of which Libby was already a member and began to participate in conference calls, and we didn't meet in person until last summer. Libby was the first reader of the first draft of Uphill Both Ways, and she's always been my go-to when I have a sticky editorial question or any question at all about poetry. I was a little afraid we might not be as compatible in real life as we were over email, but we talked nonstop for a solid four hours when we got together, and I'm pretty sure we could have kept going if we didn't have time constraints.

I've made other good friends in my years at LM, including former editor Amanda Jaros, who was another UBW early reader and a kindred spirit in the mother-nature-writer realm (and who is coming out with her own hiking memoir soon!). I really enjoyed working with the senior editor dream team we had for several years with Amanda, Libby, Christina Consolino, Amanda Fields, and Hope Donovan-Rider at the helm. And it's been a joy to be part of this literary community and experience its growth and change of the last almost-decade.

But all good things must come to an end, and at the end of this month so does my term at LM. I'm leaving the Literary Reflections department in good hands, and looking forward to stretching my writing muscles in new, possibly not motherhood-related directions. As a swan song, I penned an essay that's been bubbling under the surface for even longer than I've been an editor at LM. Please enjoy what Libby referred to as an "origin story" of a Literary Mama editor: "Inflection Point: The Birth of a Mother Writer," in which I weave together the many stages in my lifelong dream of becoming a writer with the monumental effort of getting to a writing conference when my kids were small:

Six months before the conference 

You learn about the annual conference of writers from your writing instructor and look it up online. It will be held in April in the state where you grew up, where your family still lives, 1,800 miles away from where you live now. You check the school calendar, but the week of the conference does not align with the week of your kids’ spring break, so you won’t be able to turn it into a family vacation.

I wanted to write as soon as I could read. In second grade, I decided I was going to be an “author” when I grew up. I’m not sure I knew what that meant, but Betsy Ray of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books wanted to be an author, and so did I.

Five months before the conference 

You spend all your discretionary funds Christmas shopping and don’t have the money to register before the early bird deadline.

My third-grade teacher was big into creative writing and had us write a lot of poetry and short stories. I enthusiastically filled up her green poetry sheets with banal verse, clichés, and made-up words like “scrumpdillicious,” and she enthusiastically marked each page with a red A+.

You can read the rest of the essay here. Enjoy!

Five Hundred Miles in Deep Wild

 I'm pleased to share that my essay "Five Hundred Miles" appears in the 2022 issue of Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry.

My 15-year-old son Milo and I are hiking along the backbone of a ridge. The land drops away on both sides to deep, green valleys. Beyond the valleys, jagged peaks rise up, red and gray dusted with green. Farther in the distance, more mountains stretch hazy and blue to the edge of the sky. 

We climb up sharply, heading toward a rocky knob—the high point mentioned in the guidebook, I hope. I lift one foot after the other, repeating a mantra I found in a book on walking meditation: I have arrived. I have arrived. Looking down, I notice the track of a mountain bike between rocks. 

“What a stupid place to ride a bike,” I say.

“What a stupid place to do anything,” Milo replies.

It tells a little bit of our Colorado Trail story, although it's not a direct excerpt from Uphill Both Ways (though you might recognize a phrase here or there. . . I'm a strong believer in recycling). 

I'm notoriously bad about keeping up with reading the literary journals and anthologies that come my way, even when my own writing is included. But I've read the two previous issues of Deep Wild and have started in on this one, and the writing is really good. If you love reading about nature and wild places, you'll love this journal. You can order your copy here.

And if you enjoy my essay, you'll definitely love my book, which you can order from one of the links listed here.

Leveling Up

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to give a presentation and lead a workshop at the low-residency MFA program I graduated from eight (!!) years ago. It was so good to be in a milieu of writers for the day, and both my sessions went incredibly well---I felt good while they were happening and I got good immediate feedback from a few students who stuck around (I think I might even have acquired a fan). It made me think I want to do more of it. Not teaching every day, and not in a traditional classroom setting. Certainly not to children or (horrors) teenagers. But adults eager and excited to learn, in a beautiful location, where I don't have to do any of the work to promote the event or recruit the participants, yes please.

So that's on my to-do list, what I'm thinking of as my leveling-up plan. Although it's not so much a plan yet as an aspiration, a desire to raise myself up to the next rung in the writerly career. Some steps along the way include illustrating my second book and writing my third book. Both of these seem, from where I stand now, really, really hard. Beyond my current abilities. But I remind myself that when I was in the early stages of writing Uphill Both Ways that I didn't feel smart enough for what I wanted to do with the book---incorporate natural, cultural, and environmental history in the travel narrative in a way that felt natural and seamless to the reader. All that research, all that managing of different narrative threads seemed like it was going to be too difficult and unwieldy. But just as when you face an impenetrable mountain range you can find a path through, I found my way into the heart of the story I wanted to tell, and I succeeded in writing it the way I envisioned.

It just takes putting one foot in front of the other, or in this case, pen and pencil to page. So that's my plan for July and August, daily drawing sessions, and writing or reading/research sessions. I'll also be playing along with the Summer Blueprint & Butt in the Chair Challenge with #AmWriting and Author Accelerator. By the end of August, I'll have a plan for Book #3, and although I have a pretty good (I think) mental picture for how this book will go, having it all on paper should make it that much easier to stick to it. 

I also want to try to avoid trying to do ALL THE THINGS this summer, as is my wont. Yes, birding, butterflying, dragonflying, hiking, and kayaking. Beach trips. Yoga when I get around to it. Reading through the books stack (which unaccountably keeps growing). Keep on promoting Book #1. That's a lot already, so I'm going to try to avoid adding additional projects to the list. Wish me luck!

A version of this post went out recently to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. Subscribe here and receive a free PDF of my illustrated short essay "Eleven Ways to Raise a Wild Child."

New Essay ~ Alligator Pear

 

Last summer I grew an avocado jungle on my deck. 

The previous fall, with school operating on a hybrid schedule and the pandemic unfurling before us toward what seemed like eternity, one of my sons asked if we could start an avocado tree from a pit. Eager for any of my children to show interest in anything that wasn't screen based, I jumped on the idea. I remembered my mom starting avocado trees by piercing pits with toothpicks and suspending them in water in a green depression glass sherbet dish. I didn't have a depression glass sherbet dish, so I used an empty yogurt container, and I didn't have any toothpicks, so I used party picks with paper Pinocchio heads on one end that my mother-in-law had given us for no apparent reason. Otherwise, my sprouting avocado looked exactly like my mom's.

Read the rest of "Alligator Pear" in the Flora issue of Stonecrop Review here.

And if you want to order a copy of my book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail, you can get it half off from Bison Books through July 15, 2022 with the code 6SUMM22.

Publication Day!!!

Today is pub day, friends! I know many people have already begun to receive their copies of the book, which I guess could make today a little anticlimactic, but I hear pub day is generally anticlimactic anyway, and I'm not good at waiting for Christmas or birthdays, so I'm all for the books trickling into the world ahead of schedule. So far the reviews have been all positive (but then again, so far I've mostly only heard from friends and family!). I've already given two interviews (keep an eye on my website for links to those when they're published), and I've got two book events scheduled with more to come (see below). It's all terribly exciting!

At the same time, it's really hard to feel so happy and excited for myself when children are being bombed in Ukraine in an unprovoked attack by Russia, when trans kids are being persecuted by the government in Texas (and elsewhere), and women are losing their reproductive rights all over this country. The entire journey of creating this book has been a process of me trying to convince myself that what I'm writing about matters when really shitty things are going on in the world. The hardest day was November 8, 2016. Why should I bother writing a book about hiking, I wondered, when half of the people in this country chose to elect a tyrant and a buffoon president? It took me months to ease back off that ledge and get my pen moving again. The pandemic, along with being a health crisis of unprecedented proportions, brought with it dire predictions about the future of publishing, just at the point when I was ready to send my book proposal out to publishers. I had to forge through that barrier as well and send my book out into an uncertain world.

Speaking of uncertain worlds, on top of scrambling to accomplish a scattershot of pre-publication publicity efforts and having anxiety dreams about my book launch, this week I've been taking the younger two kids on tours of colleges around Maine. Unlike myself, who could not wait to go to college, their enthusiasm for the project is underwhelming. I wonder if it's because boys mature later than girls or if life at home here is just too cushy. C told me that he heard a radio report which suggested that all kids these days are lackadaisical about the future because they're skeptical that they'll even have a future, thanks to climate change, mass shootings, wealth inequality, and creeping christo-fascism (I added that part, but it's what keeps me awake at night). I countered, What about us, growing up in the Cold War? At least our kids don't have to worry about mutually assured destruction. And then Russia invaded Ukraine, returning nuclear annihilation to the realm of possibility. So I guess I don't blame the kids, if they really are skeptical about the future. But you'd think they'd at least want to go to college for the unlimited meal plans. May as well face the end times well fed.

As I try to balance my joy with a world of sadness, I'm reminded of Rachel Carson, whose first book, Under the Sea Wind, was published on the eve of the US entering World War II and as a result did not do well. But she persisted, writing two more books about the ocean world and one of the most important books of the twentieth century. I'm no Rachel Carson, and Vladimir Putin's shenanigans in Ukraine are no World War II (let's hope), but I can draw strength from Carson's example, and, as I did to extract myself from those earlier funks/existential crises, remind myself that what I write about--family and the natural world--does matter. Perhaps it matters more than anything else.

A version of this post went out recently to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. Subscribe here and receive a free PDF of my illustrated short essay "Eleven Ways to Raise a Wild Child" and also be entered in ONE LAST drawing to win a print of one of the illustrations from Uphill Both Ways.

The book launch party for Uphill Both Ways will be this Saturday, March 5, from 2-4 p.m. at Sheepscot General Store in Whitefield, Maine. There will be a meet & greet, reading, book signing, art print giveaway, and more!

You can order your copy of Uphill Both Ways from any of the following:

• Bison Books
• Bookshop.org
• Barnes & Noble
• Amazon

Or ask your local bookstore or library to order a copy for you. 

If you enjoy the book and aren't allergic to Amazon, consider writing a review. Those reviews really drive the algorithm. 

Book Update ~ Page of Praise

It's been a while since I've updated you on the progress of my book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking Toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail. So how about a little peek behind the scenes? In June I received the copy editor's suggested changes--they weren't huge, just some suggested word choices here and there, a bit of misused capitalization and hyphens, an extremely confusing number vs. numeral convention. I found that I wanted to rewrite my epilogue quite a bit, since that was the last thing I had written and so it hadn't gone through the endless rounds of edits that the rest of the book had before going to the publisher. Also it was meant to be "current," and much had changed between February and June. Most troublesome were the gear tables at the end, making sure I'd gotten all of the brand names correct (why is it that companies--especially outdoor gear companies--must abuse spelling, spacing, and capitalization so egregiously?) and second- and third-guessing my own math on the weight of items.

Last week I got one more round of copy edits from my editor (more overuse of the hyphen) and I saw the draft cover design. It's so pretty!!! I can't wait to share it with you...and I will share it with readers of my newsletter first, so if you're you're not subscriber, be sure to sign up. The file my editor sent me for review was one long, continuous document with the full text of the book and little coded tags for the design team to use for inserting illustrations, photographs, maps, etc. The first page of the document was mostly blank with the following text at the top:

{~?~page of praise to come}

That's that page (or more) inside the cover of most books where other authors and reviewers wax effusive over the text of the book you have in hand, otherwise (and not very attractively) known as "blurbs." My blurbs started coming in in June, all from writers I admire so much, some of whom I know well, others who were scary to contact (and no, I never did hear back from Cheryl Strayed's publicist about getting a blurb from her). June was an otherwise difficult month, a the-bastards-are-getting-me-down kind of month. I'd often start my day like a cartoon character, floating a few inches above the ground, high on a beautiful blurb, only to, a few hours later, also like a cartoon character, have an anvil or a grand piano fall from a second-story window and flatten me into the sidewalk. I can't imagine how I might have peeled myself back up again if not for the stream of blurbs coming into my inbox.

So it occurs to me that we all need a page of praise, not just writers and not just about our books, but all of us should maintain a running list of kind words, compliments, and good deeds that others bestow upon us. And we should all make it our work to fill up the pages of praise of the people in our lives, to counteract the bastards who, let's be honest, are working overtime to get us all down. So next time someone does you a kindness, write it down, save it in an email file, or store it in that part of your brain you turn to when the going gets rough, and then pay it forward, help to fill someone else's page of praise.

This post went out recently to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. Subscribe here and receive a free PDF of my illustrated short essay "Eleven Ways to Raise a Wild Child."

World of Wonders

I've started a new project on Instagram--a #bookstagram series combining to of my favorite things, books and Fiesta dinnerware, #bookfiesta. Once or twice a week I pair a book I've recently read and loved with a complementary piece of Fiesta. I love the juxtaposition of something totally frivolous (my dish collection) and something deeply consequential (really good books). I also love picking our the dish that will go best with a beautiful cover design. And I love sharing what I read with the world. 

Today's post is of World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, alongside a p86 (that's produced after 1986 for you Fiesta ware novices out there) rose individual creamer, and some white lilacs. It's extra-special because I also reviewed the book at Literary Mama for this month's issue. My review begins:

The axolotl is a pink amphibian with dark eyes, feathery gills, and a disarmingly human-like smile. One gazes serenely from the cover of World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, lovingly painted by illustrator Fumi Mini Nakamura and tucked in among a colorful collage of magnificent plants and animals, some familiar (flamingo, narwhal, monarch butterfly) and others unknown to me (potoo bird, ribbon eel, southern cassowary). The axolotl’s cryptic, pink, Mona Lisa smile amid this kaleidoscope of wild creatures is an irresistible lure inviting readers to pick up the book and behold the wonders held within.

You can read the rest of the review here, and you can follow me on Instagram @andrea.lani.

P.S. If you receive these posts via email, the service that makes that happen, Feedburner, is going away at the end of July. You can subscribe to my newsletter here, or you can visit my blog site here to stay in touch.

Faith in a Seed

"Deep within the arboretum across the street from my office, along the edge of a field of raggedy wildflowers, sixty American chestnut trees grow in four neat rows. The trees were planted fourteen years ago, on a sunny but cool morning in June. My husband worked at the arboretum at the time and invited teams of draft horses to plow the furrows into which he planted the knee-high whippets just dug from their nursery beds. I took our infant son, Milo, to the arboretum that day, to watch the enormous horses draw plows that peeled back wide strips of sod, to see his father lower tiny trees into the ground. Milo, two weeks old at the time, snuggled deep in a front pack, his still-wobbly head asleep against my chest. Neither horse nor tree made an impression on his newborn mind. I might have forgotten the day myself, if not for the momentousness of it being our first big outing after his birth, the connection of his father to the event, and the proximity of the arboretum to my workplace, allowing me to return and visit the chestnuts years later."


So begins my essay, "Faith in a Seed," which took me years to write and even longer to get published (this is, unfortunately, my process—slow writing). Still, I'm thrilled that it's found a home in a very local publication, the 2020 issue of Sprire: The Maine Journal of Conservation and Sustainability. You can read it now, here, if you're so inclined, and while you're there, check out the other offerings in the issue. And please do come back and let me know what you think in the comments.

If Mom's Happy

Many years ago, I was shopping in Portland with a friend when she nudged me into a little boutique and, before I knew what was happening, I was standing in a room surrounded by whips and dildos.

"Don't worry," she said. "It's a feminist toy shop."

The experience was eye-opening, to say the least, and it served as the kernel of a humorous short story I wrote during grad school about a mom in a toy shop. I had fun writing it, but I didn't expect it to go anywhere. It had everything going against it: the protagonist was a mom (protagonists are children, or coming-of-agers, or elderly people looking back over their lives, or men of all ages and types; never moms); it was funny, and not even darkly funny; it was not the least bit tragic; it was not sic-fi, fantasy, horror, or speculative in any way; it was not weird and not hybrid and not experimental and not lyrical. In short, not the stuff of which literary magazines are made.

And then last fall I saw a call for submissions for If Mom's Happy: Stories of Erotic Mothers. From the editor:

"Mothers might be exhausted, over-touched and under-appreciated, but they’re problem solvers who know how to get their “self-care” on.  In If Mom’s Happy: Stories of Erotic Mothers, we hear from women waiting for their child’s arrival; mothers of infants, toddlers and teenagers; straight, queer, partnered and single mothers. We hear from mothers who like it vanilla and others who want some kink. They lust after their longtime partners and near strangers, in public and in private, alone or with another…or a few others. No matter where, when, or how, these stories capture the complex and profound–and ultimately satisfying–task of attending to your own desires while tending to children."

My story was still a humorous tale about a trip to a sex toy shop, not erotica, but I figured it was worth a shot and submitted. I heard back in short order from the editor, who liked the premise, liked the characters, liked the dialogue, liked the writing, but wanted me to turn up the heat a bit…okay a lot…to make it more erotic.

And I did, which was a lot more fun than I had anticipated (why had I anticipated writing sexy scenes to be un-fun? Let's blame a prudish Catholic upbringing, shall we?). So now my story, "Toy Story," is in good company with many other stories of sex after kids in If Mom's Happy, available for order now, just in time for Mother's Day. Not that I would recommend you buy a copy for your own mother, but there's nothing to say you can't get yourself a treat; after all, if Mom's happy, so is everyone else.

How to Write with (or Despite) Kids

At risk of turning this here blog into the department of shameless self-promotion, I have another publication to share with you today.

Two of my writing assistants.

In How to Write with (or Despite) Kids over at WOW! Women on Writing, I share some of the ways I've been able to make writing work for me over the years, even with three kids using up as much of my time and many of my brain cells as they possibly can. I hope you enjoy it and find some useful advice.

Catastrophic Happiness Giveaway

Well, friends, I've been dawdling long enough since I got back this summer. It's time I jump-start this blog—both the writing and reading of (not to mention commenting on)—and what better way to do that than a giveaway?

I hope you all adore Catherine Newman as much as I do. I came across Catherine's (I feel like I can refer to her on a first-name basis since she once commented on my blog) first book, Waiting for Birdy, almost by accident when I was on maternity leave with the twins. Her funny, neurotically optimistic take on life with baby and big kid helped get me through that first summer with two newborns and a disaffected four-year-old. I know "neurotically optimistic" sounds like an oxymoron, but that's how the book stuck me—she was equal measures terrified that something terrible would happen to her children and certain everything would turn out all right.

I've been a follower of her blog and her various other writings ever since. I love that she's funny without descending into snark or that grating, self-deprecating tone that lots of writing about parenting succumbed to during the mommy blog heyday a few years ago (you know, that "I am the suckiest mom ever" or "being a mom is the suckiest thing ever," vibe). I love that her writing is touching without being saccharine (I don't think she's ever used "treasure" as a verb). I love that she's not afraid to admit that she genuinely likes her kids. And I love that she can write a moving, meaningful, humorous essay about pretty much anything—or, practically, nothing (e.g., doorknobs).

Speaking of childhood's messy years, this is only a slightly staged picture of one child's bed; I just moved the items he actually sleeps with a little closer together so they'd fit in the frame.

So of course as soon as her new book, Catastrophic Happiness: Finding Joy in Childhood's Messy Years, came out, I rushed out and bought me a copy. And then my smart and funny and talented co-editor in the Literary Reflections Department of Literary Mama, Libby Maxey, actually got to interview Catherine, and had Catherine sign a copy of the book for me. So now I have two copies—and I want to give one away (the one that's not signed, of course) to one of you.

To enter, go check out Catherine's blog and Libby's profile and then come back and leave a comment. I'll choose a winner at random from the comments on this blog (sorry, Facebook comments don't count) on October 15.

And the winner is Lone Star Ma! Drop me a message with your mailing address and I'll get it out to you in the mail!

A Place in Mind

"On New Year’s Day of the first winter we lived on our land, I put my son, Milo, into a little blue backpack and took him for a walk in the woods. The day was warm––topping forty degrees––and sunny. Melting ice dripped from the eaves and the softening crust of snow yielded to my footfalls."

I'm super excited that Northern Woodlands magazine picked up a short piece I wrote about a tree and an onterested in trees or wildlife or nature or silviculture or conservation, I'd recommend you subscribe. The magazine is always full of interesting things about this neck of the woods.

I'm super excited that Northern Woodlands picked up for their Winter 2014 issue a short piece I wrote about a tree and an owl and a little boy who has grown up very fast. Unfortunately, it's not available online, but if you pick up a copy of the magazine, flip to the inside back cover, and it'll be there in the "A Place in Mind" feature. And if you live in the Northeast and are interested in trees or wildlife or nature or silviculture or conservation, I'd recommend you subscribe. The magazine is always full of interesting things about this neck of the woods.

Four Days at Russell Pond

"Less than a mile up the trail and the space between my shoulder blades already aches. I’m regretting the overpriced mini tube of sunblock, which the dense trees and clouds have rendered unnecessary, the extra layer I threw in at the last minute, and my insistence on healthful foods that caused me to pack two pounds of green beans and carrots fresh from the garden, a jar of sunflower seed butter, and three loaves of German bread the size, shape, and weight of bricks."

If you'd like to know how the rest of the trip went, please read the rest of "Four Days at Russell Pond: A First-Time Family Backpacking Trip" in Issue 19 of TrailGroove Magazine.

In other writing news, as you may (or may not) know, I recently joined the editorial staff at Literary Mama. We have just opened submissions in the Literary Reflections department, where we seek essays focused on the creative process and literature--writing, reading, sharing books with your kids. Please check out our submissions guidelines and our archives and consider drafting and submitting an essay reflecting on your experience with literature, writing, and motherhood.

Literary Mama is also starting to incorporate photographs on the site and seeks original images that reflect the various sections of the site. I know I've got a few great photographers among my readers, and I encourage you to check out the call for submissions and send in some photos.

And, finally, Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers. My seven-year blog anniversary just went by, unacknowledged, and I want to express my gratitude to those of you who have been with me since the start (are there any original readers out there?) and to those of you who have just joined me, and to all who fall somewhere in between. Thank You!

Free E-Book--Motherlode: Essays on Parenthood

"The lead singer of the band has blue eyes and blond hair that curls long and shaggy past his ears. His wiry body stands relaxed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. He sucks in his cheeks when he plays the guitar, his face an impassive mask of concentration, but once in a while one corner of his mouth lifts. When I catch his eye, I smile at him and he looks quickly away, as if he never saw me. I’ll be taking him home after the show."

So begins my essay, "Here Be Dragons," in the newly released collection, Motherlode: Essays on Parenthood.

This essay has been in process for nearly four years. The first kernels of it began sprouting not long after M started guitar lessons. It lived in an earlier version, called "The Boy in the Band" (thanks to a writing prompt from Lisa Romeo) in Issue 12 of GEMINI. During the last semester of my MFA program, I worked on it with my mentor, the indomitable Aaron Hamburger, after we got all that pesky fiction out of the way. And then I worked on it some more and some more and some more.

I wrote it as I lived it and lived it as I wrote it. All the while, more experience fed the writing, as I worked through the situation and into the story. In the end, I think it's an essay that asks (but does not answer), how do we keep our children safe in the face of unknown dangers?

And now I'm very happy to share it with the world in the new collection, Motherlode, which you can get as a FREE Kindle e-book today through Sunday (October 24-26, 2014) here (No Kindle? You can download the viewing software onto your PC).

Alongside my piece are several wonderful essays: Stephanie Vanderslice on that painful but inevitable growing apart that happens when your child reaches a certain age; Ann V. Klotz on being an expert on teenage girls, but still struggling to raise teenage daughters; Julia Poole contending with her own fears and prejudices when her son joins the wresting team.

I would love it if you got your free e-book version and came back here to let me know what you think. And if you'd rather read a real actual book made out of paper that you can hold in your hands, you can get a copy here.

Memento Mori -- Mutha Magazine

The old-fashioned name for baby teeth is “milk teeth,” presumably because they grow in while the baby is still nursing, each tooth one milestone closer to the inevitable solid food and weaning of the child. The dentist name for them is “deciduous,” like trees that lose their leaves every fall and grow them anew in spring. The name suggests renewal and rebirth. But, unlike trees, children only shed and regrow their teeth once, a reminder of the fleeting nature of childhood and the impermanence of life itself, and that second chances are doled out rarely.



Please go here to read the rest of my essay, "Memento Mori" at Mutha Magazine. Thanks!

The Mother as She Writes

When people ask me what I write about, I brush them off with a self-deprecating, “Just stories about mothers.” I imagine that, to other people, motherhood lacks the narrative weight of war and social upheaval, the excitement of werewolves and zombies, the sensuality of erotica and romance. On a deeper level I am embarrassed to say I write about motherhood because I think people won’t take me seriously, as a person and as a writer, and I feel uneasy admitting the extent to which my own identity is wrapped up in motherhood. Yet, without my children, I would not be a writer at all.



Please check out more of my Literary Reflections essay, "The Mother As She Writes" at: Literary Mama.

Kate Hopper's Ready For Air

Immediately after M was born, his heart rate spiked to more than 300 beats per minute. The nurses blew oxygen by his face as I held him, still wet and slippery, on my lap, until the pediatrician arrived and they whisked him away to the nursery for an EKG. He came back to me with electrodes stuck to his chest and an oxygen monitor clipped to his toe. Whenever the monitor slipped out of position, it set off a piercing alarm, which set M off screaming, which brought in the nurses to check to see if his heart rate had spiked again. 

Three days later, we left the hospital to head directly to the pediatric cardiologist for an echocardiogram. Before we left, the hospital gave us a cheap stethoscope, a prescription for digoxin, and instructions to keep a plastic baggie of ice cubes in the freezer. If M’s heart rate went up, we were to add water to the ice cubes and place the baggie over M’s face, to trigger his dive reflex, stopping his heart briefly to allow it to reset at a normal rate (we only had to do this once, and it was every bit as horrible as it sounds).

I did not know it at the time, sitting in the cardiologist’s office, still stiff and in pain from giving birth, wearing pajama pants and a shark t-shirt (I had not expected to go anywhere upon leaving the hospital), but this was my first introduction to the most profound truths of motherhood: you have no way of knowing how this is all going to turn out and, what’s more, you have no control. This is a lesson that continues to reassert itself with great urgency as my children careen toward the teenage years. 

Which brings me to today's post topic. I first “met” Kate Hopper about five or six years ago, when I took her Motherwords (now “Motherhood and Words”) class online. At the same time that she was midwifing her cyber-students’ stories, she was working on her own memoir, Ready for Air, and I remember her describing the theme of the book as “learning to live with uncertainty.” Which seems like it could be the theme of all of parenting.

Having read––in our class materials and discussions, as well as on her blog, and in her wonderful writing handbook Use Your Words––about the rigors of Kate’s writing and rewriting process and the challenges of getting the book published, I feel so very happy for her that Ready for Air is now out in the world, and so very honored to have been sent a copy to read write about here.

The book begins with Kate heavy, swollen, hot, and miserable. She thinks she’s just having a sucky pregnancy, but soon finds out that she’s suffering from pregnancy-induced hypertension, and events begin to cascade as she is admitted to the hospital, injected with magnesium sulfate, and, eventually, wheeled into the OR where daughter Stella is delivered by emergency caesarian two months early. What follows is Kate’s journey through coping with her baby in the neonatal intensive care unit, and then coming home, quarantined in the Minnesota winter, with her preemie.

I brought the book to the beach and to bed with me, and found myself unable to put it down, wanting to read “just one more chapter,” dying to know what would happen next.

One of the things that makes this book so readable is how very honest Kate is about herself and how funny she can be, even in the face of terror. Yet she doesn’t resort to that self-deprecating-yet-snarky tone I’ve noticed has popped up in so much writing in the last few years. I love that this woman, who is one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met, can have a fit that her husband brought home the wrong scent of soap. It makes her feel real, and makes me feel much better about the many fits I had when I spent my days at home with a crying baby (or two).

In her essay “Talking About Mothers” Sara Ruddick writes, “In writing as in living, it is difficult to describe the pleasures of motherhood without sentimentality, to discuss the inevitable pain without false pathos, to balance the grim and the satisfying aspects and to speak of each honestly.” Kate Hopper has hit that sweet spot in Ready for Air. As I read, Kate's love for Stella, her fear, her exhaustion, her frustration, all radiated off the page, and always felt completely genuine and not sentimental. Now I’m going to go back and read Ready for Air again, much more slowly this time, to try and see how she pulled it off.

As a part of her blog book tour, Kate would love to have readers suggest NICUs or Hospital Resource Centers that they think would benefit from a free copy of Ready for Air. Please  comment on this post on Kate's blog and include in your comment the name and address of the hospital, specifying whether it goes to the NICU or family resource center, etc. At the end of the tour, Kate will randomly pick 15 hospitals to receive signed copies of Ready for Air.

Kate Hopper is the author of Ready for Air: A Journey Through Premature Motherhood and Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers. Kate holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and has been the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, and a Sustainable Arts Grant. Her writing has appeared in a number of journals, including Brevity, Literary Mama, Poets & Writers, and The New York Times online. She is an editor at Literary Mama. She teaches online and at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. For more information about Kate’s writing and teaching, visit www.katehopper.com.

The Mother-Writer Series, Post I: Alicia Ostriker

"The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers."

––Alicia Ostriker
"A Wild Surmise: Motherhood and Poetry"
Writing Like a Woman, 1983

Z got up early Saturday morning to make us the breakfast he'd been planning all week--fruit salad and smoothies (I  helped him cut the pineapple and made some muffins to help fill people who are not fruitatarians up). He HATES having his picture taken, but consented to putting his arm within viewfinder range long enough for me to snap a single photo.