Letter(s) from the Editor(s):
Darcie Friesen Hossack
with guest editors Anne Sorbie and Heidi Grogan
Dear Readers,
This month is special for a number of reasons.
Spring has finally arrived in the Northern Rockies climate I call home. It is also the month of Mothering, or Mother’s Day, in certain parts of the world. And now, we at WordCity Literary Journal are also celebrating two more things: our new, dedicated website, and this month’s collaboration with the editors of (M)othering Anthology (Inanna Publications, Spring 2022), Anne Sorbie and Heidi Grogan.
“Wonder, wildness and kindness, beauty and grief inform the witty, the raw and the real in the work of 56 writers and artists who explore how mothering transforms and others us.
The (M)othering Anthology is a collection of writing and art that reflects the universality of our most human characteristic, one that applies to and identifies all of us.
The pages of this book embrace the work of Governor General’s Award winners, recipients of the Order of Canada, locally and internationally renowned visual artists; poet laureates, award winning journalists, translators, essayists, playwrights, and spoken word artists, who are not all or always mothers. They’ve won Alberta Book Awards and Pushcart Prizes, IPPY’s, and been recognized in Commonwealth, national, and regional magazine competitions.
These writers and artists inhabit mothering as becoming.
Their work expresses and illuminates the kind of body, mind, and soul search that only the mothering myth can evoke.”
This issue of WordCity Literary Journal comes alongside the anthology, honouring its theme, its editors, publisher and its writers and poets.
From here, I’m going to give space to the voices of these two amazing women, themselves gifted poets and writers, and thank you all for joining us here to celebrate the diversity of ideas and experiences you’ll find as you read.
Sincerely,
Darcie Friesen Hossack, Managing Editor, WordCity Literary Journal
Welcome to the May issue of Word City Literary Journal!
As the editors of the upcoming book, The (M)othering Anthology, (Inanna Publications, Spring 2022) we were thrilled to be asked by Darcie Friesen Hossack to consider collaborating with her and the WCLJ editorial team on the topic of mothering.
And! Together, our hopes of featuring poetry and prose and visual art from around the world, from as many perspectives as possible have been surpassed.
The issue encompasses a broad spectrum of the human experience as it relates to mothering or being mothered.
Thirty-six writers and artists have considered the act of mothering literally, figuratively, and metaphorically. Their work provokes thought about how mothering shapes and transforms our identity, how it makes and grows us. Each written and visual contribution shows us where mothering has taken its creator: to joy, to dark places, to ache, to freedom and its opposites, to confusion, to wonder, to grief, to hope.
The submissions are real, wild, and beautiful. One after the other they are heartbreaking, devastating, and vulnerable. Together, the contributors’ work illuminates a variety of beliefs and backgrounds, genders, sexual orientation(s), identities, cultures and peoples, origins and birthplaces.
These poems, fiction, non-fiction, visual art and book reviews demonstrate a universal collaboration, a coming together. And we, along with the editors of this journal have joined the contributors; all of us uniting in action, at a time when the people in our world need the compassion and understanding of each other.
The creative act is a political act, a call to action, one that supports those who are willing to stand in their truth. For in doing so, they carry out at the deepest of levels, the act of what we know and recognize as mothering. Conceiving and carrying. Birthing a bloody mess. Nurturing, protecting, giving, staying, letting go and holding on.
What follows, is exquisitely beautiful, funny, painful even disturbing. Our contributors inhabit mothering as becoming, as knowing, as expression, as trans-generational.
These individuals speak to the practise of what it means to create, to love, to be devastated, and to share truths about who they / we are. They stand in the belly of her/their/his/story.
They are where they come from, what they’ve experienced, what they’ve created.
Their work expresses and illuminates the kind of body, mind, and soul search that only the mothering myth can evoke. ~ Anne Sorbie and Heidi Grogan
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