There is a lot in store for the Museum of Motherhood over the next couple of months! We’re excited to share the events and projects we have planned leading up to Mother’s Day with you in our upcoming blog entries (including last week’s post about the 2015 conference titled “New Maternalisms” to be held on May 2). We hope that you will share these happenings with your communities and join us for these mother-centric plans.
This week, we’re profiling the Mom Egg Review, which will be celebrated at the Upper West Side Barnes and Noble location at Broadway and W 82nd St on Wednesday, May 7 from 7-9PM. The night will feature readings from select contributors to the collection. And who better to explain the purpose and vision of the Mom Egg Review than its editor, Marjorie Tesser?
For those of you who don’t know her, Marjorie Tesser is a poet and editor of the Mom Egg Review, an independent annual print collection of stories (both fiction and non-), poetry, and art that embraces motherwork. An attorney by training, she can also count editor and entrepreneur as her callings. In addition to editing the Mom Egg Review, Marjorie was also the editor of a compilation of poems called Bowery Women and co-editor of Estamos Aqui: Poems by Migrant Farmworkers. She is the author of two books of poems, The Important Thing Is and The Magic Feather.
Of the Mom Egg Review, Marjorie writes:
Mom Egg Review publishes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by writers who are mothers or who write about motherhood.
There’s a school of thought in modern literature that the personal narrative is dead, that its narrow point of view speaks little to the complexities of today’s world; that those stories all have been told. But not these stories, of women’s lives—of family and motherhood, of culture, work, love, politics, from diverse women’s viewpoints and experience. For thousands of years, the focus of history and art has come from the perspective of males. But women’s stories and insights are important, vital, for our world.
The Museum of Motherhood (along with its non-profit Motherhood Foundation) believes in the importance of these stories, and supports, promotes, nurtures, and celebrates women and their work in an amazing variety of ways—creative, academic, maternal, and entrepreneurial are just some examples, and consistently fosters connections and collaboration.
Our current issue of Mom Egg Review contains a special poetry folio themed “Compassionate Action”. The poems address urgent circumstances, and explore options for overcoming stasis and aligning hands and feet with minds and hearts.
The Museum of Motherhood is the epitome of such action, telling and showing the truths about mothers’ roles and work and value. The media and the established powers, with their tendency to exalt or disparage motherhood, are not exposing these truths. It’s up to us to insure that our stories get told, and heard. We need to support the institutions that that work to ensure that our voices, our experience, views, needs, and realities, are acknowledged.
Contributed by: Jenny Nigro, MoM Online Intern