Submissions now open!
We’re eagerly awaiting your work.
Literary Mama is now open for submissions! We accept work in Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, Reviews, and Literary Reflections. Please review the submission guidelines (including department-specific instructions) and become familiar with previous issues before sending us your best work.
While we prepare our next issue, expected in January 2025, our senior editors are revisiting some of the previously published pieces that have resonated with them most.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper joined the Literary Mama staff in 2022, and says, “When I look at a piece of writing, I’m usually thinking about the ideas and the language. I really like work that shows me something new in one of those areas—a new way of using language or an idea I haven’t seen before. It’s great when it seems new to the writer, too, as though something has been revealed to her in the process of writing.
“I particularly love pieces that seem unafraid, maybe even a little bit raw. I love that Literary Mama holds space for brave mama writers to share work that excavates deep, complicated, and difficult feelings.”
— Brianna, LM Senior Editor
Brianna’s Favorites
The Bear
By Amanda Roth
Poetry
”I love how this poem references, echoes, and builds on the children’s book, Going on A Bear Hunt. Drawing on a text with which I’ve had many intimate moments really gave the poem an emotional heft. I also appreciated the simplicity and directness of the language and the idea about openness and risk, captured in the last line: ‘this is how we hold our hands out for the world.’”
Why Don’t You Write About Autism?
By Alice Maurice
Literary Reflections
“I loved Maurice’s searching and questioning, her unwillingness to be satisfied with simple answers, the way it felt that something was being revealed to her as she wrote. I liked her voice—the down-to-earth, easy-going vibe in the piece that heightened the feeling of honesty. Plus, she writes, ‘maybe, just maybe, we should spend more time with the literal, before we vault over it with metaphor.’ And that seems like great advice for writing, parenting, and life.”
After having a panic attack in Target Optical
By Shea Tuttle
Poetry
“This poem so bravely burrows deep and true into what would initially seem to be a banal, everyday experience. The longer lines packed with verbs in the first parts of the poem create a sense of rushing, forward movement that contrasts with the short, noun-heavy last bit, creating a sense of being stopped in your tracks. It showed me the shape of something inside myself that I could not previously articulate.”
Fog and Sun
By Dorian Kingman Chong
Creative Nonfiction
“Like all of these pieces, I like Fog and Sun because it is not afraid to look at something painful. I think the use of the second person works well in this one to bring close an experience we might try to keep at arm’s length. The dialogue really amplifies and illustrates the writer’s daughter in the piece, which supercharges the emotional impact of the redemptive ending.”
Enjoy Your Time Here
By Amber Scott
Creative Nonfiction
“I loved how bravely Scott brought us right into a parenting moment and honestly explored the multiple, conflicting elements—both wonderful and terrible. She evoked an awed love so masterfully at the end that it gave me goosebumps. The specificity and care in the way she sees her daughter is so clear on the page, and yet it never gets saccharine or preachy. This is another one with ideas that can be a kind of guide, a new frame I can bring to moments in my own parenting.”
Exhaustion and Rest: Motherhood and Creativity
By Victoria Livingstone
Literary Reflections
“I was fascinated by the description of an infant’s exploration as ‘antithetical to capitalism’! That one sentence has influenced how I think about most human activity since I read it. I have returned again and again to Livingstone’s point that parenting is labor which is ‘neither economically productive nor sexy,’ [and so as a parent] ‘it’s easier to ignore the voices that pressure us to prove our utility.’ In these ideas I find permission, encouragement, and hope.”
This Mama Is Lit!
Our journal may have taken a publishing break, but our podcast has continued to offer monthly interviews with mama writers. Catch up on the latest episodes.