Our Mothers, Our Selves: Writers and Poets Celebrating Motherhood - Hardcover

"The essays, photographs, fiction, and poetry included in this collection empower mothers by allowing women to share their story without interruption or censure."-The Mother is Me ?The essays, photographs, fiction, and poetry included in this collection empower mothers by allowing women to share their story without interruption or censure.?-The Mother is Me ?Donnelly and Bernstein...have collected essays, short fiction, and poems about motherhood, most by contemporary writers, including themselves. Many of the contributors to their 'womb-book' are well known, e.g. Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Bly...[W]ill interest the general reader.?-Library Journal "Donnelly and Bernstein...have collected essays, short fiction, and poems about motherhood, most by contemporary writers, including themselves. Many of the contributors to their 'womb-book' are well known, e.g. Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Bly...[W]ill interest the general reader."-Library Journal

Finally, we have an inclusive collection that brings motherhood into the fold of feminism. As we accede to our universal origins in the mother, we witness the infinite variety of experiences awarded the offspring. Spectrums of gender, race, age, religion, class, and nation give voice in Donnelly and Bernstein's anthology as more than 80 writers contribute poetry, essays, memoirs, and short fiction. Some of the artists are well-known, including Maya Angelou, Galway Kinnell, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, and Robert Bly, while others are less known. All attest to the experience of motherhood as primal. Writing as mothers, as children to their mothers, and as close observers, women and men create selections that fall into three trimesters of involvement: the experiences of going beyond the self, beyond reflection, and, finally, beyond the whole. The many shades of emotional experience, from ecstasy to horror and all points in between, are portrayed in words and photographs. As images take shape, nightmares are relived, emotions flow abundantly, and details come into focus as the cathartic effect of the writing builds. Painting motherhood as much more than just a pretty picture, the editors' purpose is clearly to bring us all together under a multi-faceted umbrella of empathy and to unite us in the diversity of the experience of motherhood.