Not Your Mama’s Trash
Working Poor Women on Motherhood
Mama Highway Exit 1

Call for Submissions

According to most of those pregnancy and birth and parenting guides lining the shelves of bookstores and libraries across the country, being middle class and heterosexually married and white is somehow inherent in being a mother. There’s the occasional island of difference like Ariel Gore’s Mother Trip or Rachel Pepper’s Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians, but they are so few and so far between, and none of them really focuses on class. So, that’s what we propose to do now – put together an anthology of work about pregnancy and birth and parenting that addresses how poverty shapes those experiences.

If you grew up poor, if you’re living in poverty right now, if you did last year, but now it’s better, or vice versa, we hope you’ll help us in this work by contributing something. We’re mostly focusing on writing about your experiences of this particular reality – essays between 1500 and 6000 words or short stories or poems, but we’re also open to some visual expressions – family self-portraits, photographs of your home, drawings your kids did about their experience, and the like.

We’ve chosen to use the words women and motherhood, but we’re using them to focus on the female experience of poverty and parenting under patriarchy, not to exclusively define that. So, if your folks tried to raise you as a girl and got it wrong or vice versa, your contributions are more than welcome – they’re actively desired. We’re not buying the line that if you don’t have a uterus, you can’t be a mama, and we’re not buying the line that if your kids call you papa, your experience of pregnancy and birth is somehow invalidated.

We’ve chosen to use the word trash, but we’re not using it to focus on some one-dimensional media concept of women of european descent living in the rural south in trailer homes on welfare. If you are a woman of european descent living in the rural south in a trailer home on welfare, we trust that you’ll offer much more in your contribution than some tired republican bullshit soundbite. If you are a woman of mixed african, south asian, and european descent living in low income housing in a medium-sized city in the great lakes region, we want to hear from you. We want to hear from all the mamas and papas out there who’ve grown up in, lived in, are now living in poverty and feel like they’d like to read this book when it’s published. We want to challenge the monolith on those bookstore and library shelves, and we can’t do it without you.

We don’t actually have a publisher right now, but we have a couple of good prospects. We have faith that between the four of us, we can get this project a publisher, but first we have to have your work to persuade them we have voices to share and an audience for them – for us. We plan to distribute any proceeds from the project among the contributors after a portion is set aside for a mama-to-mama emergency fund through an online community we’re all part of. We hope that this will be the first in a series of anthologies of, by, and for those of us parenting outside the pink and blue and white picket world of those shelves in the bookstores and libraries.

Please send your submissions or inquiries to MamaHighwayAnthologySeries@yahoogroups.com and join us in raising our poor, mama voices.