Mamazine talks to Andi about Mother Talk

From Mamazine.com's interview with Andi, Surviving Mother Shock:

mamazine.com: Can you tell us a little about MotherTalk, the reading/discussion series you and Miriam Peskowitz have started?

Sure. Mother Talk (which Miriam and I started up in partnership with LiteraryMama, where I'm managing editor) is kind of a cross between a literary salon and a good old-fashioned 70s consciousness-raising group. A Mother Talk evening usually features a group of women coming together in someone's home to eat food, drink wine, and talk with a local or visiting mother-writer. We've done Mother Talks featuring myself and Faulkner Fox, Miriam Peskowitz, Catherine Newman, Jennifer Lauck, and Jennifer Margulis; there are two more coming up in November: one in Philadelphia on November 17 featuring myself and Marion Winik (Above Us Only Sky is her newest memoir; she also has an essay in my collection It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons, out next month); and one in New York City on November 19 featuring myself and several NYC-area contributors to It's a Boy.

These are fun, wide-ranging, sometimes intense, always compelling evenings, and the really thrilling thing for me is that no matter who the audience is—women who have grown children, women who have newborns, women who have teenagers, women who aren't sure if they want to have children—the conversation is incredible. Women just seem hungry to talk about this stuff—and we've covered everything at these Mother Talks from mom-on-mom judgment to feminism to the invisibility of part-time work to how to use humor to cope to parenting as a spiritual path. It's really amazing. Miriam and I recently started a blog for it, and we're hoping to eventually have instructions up there on how people can host their own Mother Talk events, with various texts to download for use as discussion-starters if people are interested and other info.