Motherhood & Words

11th Annual Motherhood & Words Reading

In An Abbreviated Life, Ariel Leve writes, “We tell our stories to be heard. Sometimes those stories free us. Sometimes they free others. When they are not told, they free no one.”

In celebration of writing our truths and being heard, I want to invite you all to the 11th Annual Motherhood & Words reading on Thursday, March 23rd.

For the past decade I have dedicated myself to helping people, primarily women and primarily mothers, write the stories they need to write. I launched the Motherhood & Words reading in 2007 as a way to highlight the amazing writing out there by women about motherhood.

You need not be a mother to attend, of course. This reading is about community and about bringing people together to celebrate the complex realities of women’s lives.

I hope you’ll join me to listen to and meet these amazing writers:

Judy Batalion was born in Montreal and worked as an art historian and comedian in London before settling in New York City, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. She was a columnist for the New York Times’ Motherlode blog and her essays about parenting, relationships, mental health, art and culture have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vogue, Salon, Cosmo, Tablet, the Forward, GOOD, and many other publications. Her first book, White Walls: A Memoir about Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess In Between, was published by NAL/Penguin.

Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), a young adult novel that won the 2016 Minnesota Book Award in Young Peoples’ Literature. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, where she teaches critical and creative writing, journalism, and African Diasporic topics. A Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow, her next novel, Dream Country, is about more than five generations of an African descended family, crisscrossing the Atlantic both voluntarily and involuntarily (Dutton, 2018).

Susan Ito is the author of The Mouse Room. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. She has been a columnist and editor at Literary Mama, and her work has appeared in Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Hip Mama, Catapult, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere.  She has performed her solo show, The Ice Cream Gene, around the US. She is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and is on the faculty of the MFA Programs at Mills College and Bay Path University. She is working on a theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma. She is founder of the Asian American Women Writers Workshop and maintains a literary blog, ReadingWritingLiving, where she writes about creativity, family, wellness, and work/life balance.

When: Thursday, March 23rd – 7 pm

Where: The Loft Literary Center – Open Book
1011 Washington Ave. S. Minneapolis, MN 55415

This year the reading is sponsored by Pacifier, an urban kid and baby boutique; Park Nicollet Women’s Center, a new concept in women’s health; Corazon, a gift & clothing store with shops in Minneapolis and St. Paul; and The Loft Literary Center.

Free and open to the pubic. Bring your friends, enjoy snacks, wine, and fellowship, and be wowed by these amazing writers.

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Kate

I have been teaching creative writing for almost twenty years. Reading about other women’s lives and experiences has expanded my world. To be able to walk in someone else’s shoes, whether it’s for a moment or an hour or a few days, is an incredible gift, providing me with insight into the human experience. It takes courage to write your truths, especially if it doesn’t seem as though anyone cares, as though anyone is listening. Let me tell you: your stories matter, I’m listening, and I’m here to help you find the heart of those truths, to get them down on the page, to craft them, and to send them out into the world. Together, we will change the world, one story at a time.