Kyle Minor is the author of two collections of short fiction:

I’m spending the summer in Iowa City, away from my family, which means I’ve traded our house, my office, my bedroom, and my library for a hundred square feet in a rooming house. The first thing I did when I arrived was install bookshelves, and I keep them by the bed by default, since everything in my tiny room is by the bed.

The first shelf is full of galleys and advance reader’s copies of books I plan to review or otherwise write about during the summer: Douglas Watson’s The Era of Not Quite, Mario Zambrano’s Loteria, Monica Drake’s The Stud Book, Pamela Erens’s The Virgins, Bennett Sims’s A Questionable Shape, Shawn Vestal’s Godforsaken Idaho, Andrew Sean Greer’s The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, and Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia. I’ve read half of these, already, with great pleasure. This summer will be a good season for new books.

The second shelf is full of books I want to read or re-read for pleasure this summer: J R and Carpenter’s Gothic, by William Gaddis; Hemingway’s Boat, by Paul Hendrickson; Possession, by A.S. Byatt; How Music Works, by David Byrne; various collected and selected stories collections by John Cheever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Graham Greene, Cynthia Ozick, and Eudora Welty; Beloved, by Toni Morrison; The Boat, by Nam Le; Beautiful Fools, by R. Clifton Spargo; and Robert Thacker’s biography of Alice Munro.

The remaining shelves are full with books I’m using one way or another as models or informants for the novel I’m completing this summer. Among them: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and Patrimony, by Philip Roth; Friend of my Youth and Open Secrets, by Alice Munro; The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard; Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoutes, by Bernard Diederich; The Rainy Season, by Amy Wilentz; various essay collections by Cynthia Ozick; House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III; Create Dangerously, by Edwidge Danticat; and galleys of Praying Drunk, my forthcoming story collection, which is in some ways in conversation with this novel.

What else, besides books? Several months worth of the New Yorker; a couple issues of NOON; issues of The Iowa Review, The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, and Gulf Coast; a deck of Tarot cards, a King James Bible in staplebound pamphlets; two packs of guitar strings; a plastic bin of toiletries; two bananas; three medicine bottles; a box of plastic spoons; two boxes of cereal; two cans of tuna; folded T-shirts and underwear; a jug of Tide laundry detergent; Sharpie markers in ten colors; a gift certificate for Thai food; four Rumpus letters-in-the-mail; a letter home; inexplicably a shoelace that is not mine; a flash drive; my wallet; my car keys; the daily schedule I made in April, which says I’ll be home by August.

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Bonus points to anyone who renders their own bedside scene into a story. What’s your inexplicable shoelace?

By Priscilla Galligan

Priscilla Galligan (@cillagalligan) is a researcher, grant and freelance writer. She has poems forthcoming in several magazines and two collections. She is also working on an historical murder mystery novel that takes place between 1790 and 1890. She lives in Warren, Rhode Island, the smallest town in the smallest county in the smallest state.

Ash Wednesday
signals deathly reminders
of winds still
between us

Questioning whether time
ends
between souls
that last day
lingers

In procedures,
with papers signed
a wallow of sorrow hovers
for all I could not recover for you

The will of yourself to devote things,
will writing on medical tape,
On a bedside table
Hope frays

In the monstrosity of a hospital
that would soon make
itself larger than death

Fixing your mussed hairdo
in the silken scarf, you stare
fearfully into my eyes,
transfixing, similar
to a hurricane tearing us
from our embraceable posts

struggling to smile away
tears of how far we brought
our friendship in 38 years
over tumultuous seas, currents and undertows

Now, in deafening silence
on a lonely
grey day
I watch a hurricane of disease
destroy this port of love
in a room filled with lilies

Near hovering vortexes of crows
Return your cries aloud in my heart,
surrounding me in a graveyard

Returning your voice, laughter
resonating rumblings of you forth,
Like a catalyst
spinning the cocoon
of a death back to life

Spring kills me, lilac breeding out of dead ground
Every year the resurrection of Eliot
Every year the lilies bloom
Every year the winds carry me home with you,

In the statement from your grave,
of what remains still
…unspoken

________________________________

Priscilla Galligan©2013–All Rights Reserved

Portrait of the Artist as a Mother

By Geri Lipschultz

We Wanted to Be Writers’ call for favorite literary moms struck me, and famous mothers paraded by, mothers like the mother of Marcel, The Stranger’s mother who died, Akhmatova as mother, Toni Morrison’s Sethe—many mothers there are, and I thought of Molly Bloom as mother, and the mother in Lolita, the mothers in Ada, the twins, Aqua and Marine, but finally, I remembered Mrs. Ramsay, the mother born in part from Virginia Woolf’s mother, whom I’d studied, really thought about, pondered over, and about whom I’d written, because her path in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse was crossed with that of an artist, and there rose up the conflict of the artist with the mother, and as I say, the paths crossed. Woolf was never a mother, but she was an artist extraordinaire: she mothered books.

It’s not really the begetting of the baby, but the mothering that makes one a mother. Similarly, it’s the writing, the doing—the willingness to go beyond the veneer. The mothering shows up in the child, one would hope; similarly, the mark of the writer is in the book. But whatever the relationship, and in fact nothing is purely parallel, I came up with the word “mothertime,” for a paper in my Modernism class. I don’t suppose I’m the only one to embed the creations of other writers into my writing. In the event you haven’t read Woolf’s incredible novel about, among other things, the inner life of a mother, I’ll simply say that Mrs. Ramsay, wife/mother extraordinaire, is the star of this book, and Lily Briscoe is a painter, someone who would seem to pull back from either of these gendered roles, but, among other things, treasures Mrs. Ramsay as an artist. Maybe it is stretching the point, but women are so often identified by their biological endeavors, yet in Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe sees the temperament of an artist—which is perhaps irrespective of her biological expressions. This is especially evident to Lily Briscoe in the way Mrs. Ramsay secures time.

Maybe for men it is the Muse, but for women, maybe it’s mothertime, a time away—and surely the Muse will come.

I defined Mothertime as a moment of extreme receptivity, the all-consuming kind experienced by mothers, however, in a temporal space that presupposes the absence of children, husbands, friends, such that any living thing with needs of his/her/its own is conspicuously not present—often accompanied by the element of “shock,” and whose exit is often marked by

one particular thing: the thing that mattered: to detach it, separate it off; clean it of all the emotions and odds and ends of things, and so hold it before..bring it to the tribunal where, ranged about in conclave, sat the judges…” (Woolf 112-113);

a room (in the mind) of one’s own;  a place where time is experienced as inexplicably absent; an expansive experience in the mind, compressed into one moment, where there may be crowds of live beings in the vicinity, but they are sufficiently and utterly blocked out, if just for that infinitesimal moment that nevertheless feels like an eternity and is indeed eternal; a moment when the quotidian is elevated into the transcendent; a time secured for a “shrunken” self which, prior to that moment, has spent an extraordinarily large “plateful” of time in the expanded state (as an offering, as a coach, as a spiritual midwife, as a matchmaker—one who selects for another a husband or wife or a “specially tender piece of eternity” that is in actuality a chunk of beef [105]),
in the presence of one’s children, one’s husband, close friends and other; a moment in which one “astonishingly beautiful” mother of eight may revive herself, may release herself, may forget herself, may experience the eternal, may transcend all of the above; a time different from fathertime in that it is not a means to an end, not a structure that allows for evaluative systems, such as points upon a line, or alphabet letters swimming in a mental soup, certainly not the letters Q, R, S, T…although it may be reflective; may be passed on to others of like minds, preferably but probably not exclusively female; the secret hiding place of Mrs. Ramsay.

Like Lily Briscoe, I am enamored of this space Mrs. Ramsay gives to herself. Unlike Lily Briscoe, I recognize it. I have been there. I go there when I write.

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Have you experienced mothertime? How do you invoke it?

Don Wallace is a former classmate from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a regular contributor to this blog.

My mother, Elizabeth, was a great reader; as I described at her service this last February, she loaded up her bedside table with piles of books knowing this would lure me in to sample something I’d never have considered.

Some of these books I remember mainly because in retrospect they were so au courant: I’m 15 and Susan Sontag’s Death Kit appears by the bed. Whoa, what a title! This became my first experience of dense post-modern prose. I can’t say I finished it.

I can say I finished Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice Not An Echo the previous year, when I was 14 and my parents were anxious to stave off any liberal sympathies aroused by a recent cross-burning in our neighborhood. Our house always had the latest in John Birch lit lying around, which makes the Sontag and Betty Friedan and later choices all the more remarkable. (We also had a lot of golf lit.)

My favorite books were those fat annuals of New Yorker “Best of” cartoons. But I’m pretty sure my first sex scene in lit came from Ayn Rand, in The Fountainhead, a text that seems to give a stiffie to Tea Party lads of all ages even today. Was that Mom’s intention, her indirect attempt at sex ed? I’d hate to think so. But she’d love the idea were I to propose it, and I miss her laughter that would follow.

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To what new realms did your mom introduce you through books?

Wash Day 

By Ross Howell

Ross followed a career in academic fundraising, public relations, book publishing, and marketing after receiving his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’s now freelancing non-fiction and fiction, and teaching at Elon University. He lives in Greensboro, NC, with his wife, Mary Leigh, English cocker spaniel diva, Pinot, and rescued pit bull Lab mix Sam.

In 1956 my mother Rachel moved back to the farm in Virginia where she was born. She was 41 years old and finished with a drunk for a husband. With the cash her sister mailed her, she bought bus tickets and made the cross-country trip from Richland, Washington, two kids in tow.

The old home place was on the Blue Ridge plateau. There was electricity and running water drawn from the spring house my grandfather had built. There was telephone service on a party line. There was TV with an antenna mounted atop a locust pole by the meat house where we cured hams. There was an electric range in the kitchen perpendicular to a wood-burning cook stove and an electric hot water heater and refrigerator by the old kitchen hearth. These were real amenities in those days in that part of the world.

There was one other electrical appliance, a washing machine in the spring house. A cast iron kettle once used to cook apples or sorghum was hung over a stone hearth. At daybreak my mother poured water from the spring basin into the kettle, five or six brimming milk pails. Then she went to the wood house for kindling and wood. She carried them to the hearth, added old newspapers and struck a wooden match from a box by the hearth.

The crackling fire was always cheerful, even in summer. Firelight glittered over the spring trough where my mother cooled milk from her cows in fifteen-gallon galvanized cans. Once the fire was going, she banked the coals and gathered two milk pails. Her wash day began like every other day. She walked to the barn to milk by hand two Holsteins and a Guernsey cow.

With my help she finished milking in a half hour, carrying the pails to the spring house. She strained the milk into cans, gave the barn cat foam and milk from the strainer, poured milk into a Mason jar for me to carry to the refrigerator, and cleaned the pails and strainer.

We carried the laundry, bundled in sheets the evening before, from the back porch to the spring house. She always did her sheets, pillowcases, towels, and washcloths first, since they would dry quickly on the clotheslines, leaving room for slow-drying garments like jeans and overalls.

Steam rose from the big kettle. My mother rolled the washing machine from the corner to its position by the spring trough and plugged it in. She always wore big rubber galoshes. The washing machine’s electrical cord in the wet spring house could give a tingle and sometimes a jolt to anyone handling it.

With a clean pail she dipped water from the kettle into the washing machine, then added detergent. She turned the dial and the agitator began to oscillate. As suds sloshed over the paddles, she loaded her sheets. She used a big wooden spoon—like the kettle, once used to make applesauce or molasses—to arrange the sheets in the scalding water.

My mother liked to sing as she worked. She was a small woman, barely five feet tall, but she had a big soprano voice. “What a friend we have in Jesus, / All our sins and griefs to bear!” she sang. “Gah-wump, gah-wump,” the agitator grumbled. “I come to the garden alone, / While the dew is still on the roses.” “Gah-wump, gah-wump.” After ten minutes or so, she’d turn the dial to stop the machine. Then she’d lower a black rubber hose hooked to the side of the tub. Soapy water spilled onto the floor of the spring house and out into the creek.

When the tub had drained, she refastened the hose and added cold water from the spring basin. When she had the amount she wanted, she started the agitator to rinse the load. After a few minutes, she stopped the machine and drained the tub. Now came my favorite part.

Mother swung the wringer over the tub and locked it in place. With a lever she engaged the rollers and began to feed a soggy sheet between them. As rinse water spurted from the wringer, I stood on the opposite side guiding the sheet, now flattened and stiff, into the laundry basket. For some boyish reason this metamorphosis intrigued me.

Once all the pieces had been through the wringer, we were ready to take the laundry basket out to the clotheslines. On this journey we were accompanied by a barn cat or my farm dog or sometimes both. Neither much liked treading the damp ground to the clotheslines. They’d stop at the last big rock of the footpath, watching from the dry stone.

By afternoon she was ready to begin her ironing. She’d make a cold meal of cornbread and milk, set up her ironing board in the room where we kept the TV, and watch her favorite soap operas while she ironed.

My mother ironed everything—shirts, pants, dresses, slacks, T-shirts, undershorts, socks. The clothes I wore to school were crisp and full of sunshine. When I boarded the bus, I knew the world was a grand place, where every child wore spotlessly clean, neatly pressed underwear.

The first load I removed from the dryer in the basement of my college dorm laundry changed that world view forever. My underclothes looked gray and rumpled, even after I folded them. My socks crackled with static and clung sullenly together. I couldn’t iron a shirt collar without a crease.

At that moment I longed for the sound of my mother singing in the musty spring house on wash day. I could see her taking brilliantly clean sheets from her clotheslines, big rubber galoshes swallowing her ankles—a dog and cat her spectators. And when her episodes of As the World Turns and The Days of Our Lives were over and her ironing was folded, three cows stood at the barn waiting to be milked before supper.

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What chores make you nostalgic for your mom?

Kurt Sipolski began writing as a reporter in Sydney, Australia. His work has appeared in

In this scene from Too Soon for Flowers, polio-stricken Gray is taken to the hospital by his family for his second operation.  Several other little boys are in the same room.

It was an awful time for everyone as Bill, Iris and Jimmy prepared to leave. Gray burst into tears, then Larry started to whimper, then the other boys. They knew from their own experience what it was like to be left in the hospital as the family left and they were in complete sympathy for Gray.

Iris whispered in Gray’s ear, “You are the bravest boy I know. You can do this.”

As they walked away from him in his hospital room in Peoria to drive home he cried terribly and it broke Iris’ heart.

“I’m sorry I had polio. Please don’t leave me here. I’m sorry!”

She cried all the way back to Hardscrabble. Bill’s heart was in his mouth. Two of the most important people in the world to him were hurting and as big and powerful as he was, he felt helpless.

They couldn’t return the next day, but had to be there the following day as that was when surgery was scheduled. Iris was anxious the entire time and barely spoke during the seemingly endless drive. She had Bill drop her off at the entrance before he parked the car. She walked quickly inside, knowing Gray would be nervous and scared.

Instead, there was laughter coming out of the room. When Iris walked in, Gray said, “Mom, guess what dumb old Larry did!” Iris kissed him on the lips and said, “What did dumb old Larry do?” as she sat next to him and smiled at Larry.

“That big fat Nurse Emma came in. We call her “Nurse Enema.” He laughed. “She came in and asked everyone when their last bowel movement was and Larry told her the TRUTH.” Gray squealed all over again as she looked at Larry lying on his stomach, miserable and embarrassed from the procedure.

Gray had learned three years earlier you say, “Oh, I just had one” and never, ever: “the day before yesterday.”

“Larry’s a dummee” the boys started to chant. The other parents started to arrive and the kidding stopped suddenly.

Then Gray started to whisper:  “Mom, last night the guys and I were joking with George. He’s so little we were kidding him and I called him a squab. But today when his family came to take him home he told them I was calling him names. His Mom just came over and stared at me. I put the sheet over my head she looked so mad. But I was just kidding. Just like Jimmy and I do.”

Iris knew immediately what the problem was.

“George is a black boy. When he told his mother you were calling him names she
probably thought you called him a nigger.”

“A nigger? What’s that?”

“Oh, it’s just a name that’s not very nice now for black people. At one time it didn’t mean anything too terrible but now people made it ugly.”

Gray was still baffled. “But what’s wrong with somebody being black?”

She sat closer to him on the bed and held his right hand. “When some people aren’t very happy inside with themselves they make fun of others, sometimes when it’s nothing that can be helped.”

“Oh,” Gray suddenly understood. “Like when Teddy called me a cripple right before I popped him!”

“Yes, and sometimes people like that need to be popped.”

“But why didn’t she just ask me?” Gray said. “He left this morning and she’ll always think I called him a bad name and be mad at me.”

“Oh, Gray…practically all the problems in the whole world could be solved if people would just talk to each other. Sometimes people think something wrong and it just grows and festers, when nothing was meant at all.

“You know, some people don‟t like Jewish people, but it was a Jewish doctor who invented the Salk vaccine.”

Gray paused. “Well. Why are people like that?”

“People are the way they are. Sometimes people change.”  She thought of herself. “And sometimes they don’t.”

When his parents left for a cafeteria lunch, Gray thought and thought. He really
wasn’t sure if he liked the world that would await him.

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Gary's mom, Terry at 24

Responding to our invitation to include noteworthy mothers in literature in our May Mom Project, Gary Iorio recalled,

In one of Vance’s [Bourjaily] classes we were doing ‘Comic Novels,’ or ‘Humor In Literature.’  We read  A Mother’s Kisses by Bruce Jay Friedman. The mom’s name was Meg, and she was unforgettable. I can’t nominate the mother from The Grapes of Wrath, because I read it in 1971 and now I get a little too much of the movie’s Jane Darwell mixed up with Ma Joad as written. Speaking of movies, I can’t nominate either the mother from So Big or Giant because Edna Ferber is still waiting for me in the library.”

Last Mother’s Day, Gary wrote this poem about his mom that was later published in Humber Pie. He reminisces, “She loved movies.”

In honor of the inimitable place they occupy, we’re putting mothers front and center all month. Tell us about your favorite mom in literature—including why you love or hate her—to be entered into a drawing for one of three copies of We Wanted to Be Writers (Sophie Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint, anyone?). Already own our book? Why not enter anyway and if you win, give the new copy to . . . a mom?

Mutiple entries are encouraged. Submission deadline is May 31, 2013. Send your lit mom entries to cheryl at wewantedtobewriters dot com. Literary moms and drawing winners will be announced June 1.

*Note: Like so much in life, best delivered with a hug.