Collage
downloadD.J. Lee's essay "Collage" contemplates the difficult intersection between mothers and daughters, dramatized in the placement of photographs in a collage. Lee's essay explores how a two-dimensional image "can express the depth of pain and love between generations."
Daredevil
downloadIn Colette Sartor's "Daredevil," a little girl becomes the catalyst for unsettling and then tragic events in the lives of a young mother, Grace, and her son Aidan. The story explores issues of faith, risk-taking, and the limits of sympathy, and looks at the many ways in which a home can be threatened.
The Other Half of Graceland
downloadA teenaged girl narrates John Haggerty's "The Other Half of Graceland," describing a trip to the eponymous home of Elvis along with her mother, who is looking for what the magazines call more pizzazz in her life. Armed with a make-up kit, an expertise for matching blush to skin tone, and a keen eye for adult behavior, Lisa steers them through their pilgrimage and tries to mediate the relationship between a young man they meet there and his father. As Lisa manages her mother's own delicate emotions, Graceland becomes the setting for the revelation of flaws and for the discovery that some flaws are only imagined. "The Other Half of Graceland" is read aloud by Megan Biglow.
excerpt from Holy Day
downloadThis excerpt from Anne Colwell's novel Holy Day finds Maxine waking hungover in 1969 to confront her three young children and the challenges that arise from the issues surrounding their birth. Religion, marriage, the ability to be a good mother--these obligations press against Maxine as she remembers the post-McCarthy-era days before her marriage, when even conformity could offer a sense of new beginning. Her decision to convert to Catholicism sets up the complicated balance of independence and loss that both she and her husband now face.
When My Father Was In Prison
downloadHadley Moore's "When My Father Was In Prison" describes the power of language in the life of a nine-year-old boy as he tries to sort out what it means to be a boy, a man, a father. A father in prison, a pet bird that has died, an older brother discovering his sexuality--Moore's narrator studies it all, coming to understand some part of how he fits in to his world.
While You Were Gone
downloadIn Lisa Korzeniowski's "While You Were Gone", a mother's night out leaves her children to do whatever they want, thrilled to be free from a parent whose weaknesses and failures are all too apparent. But their experience of exhilaration quickly slides into yearning for their mother's love and for the return of her questionable authority.
