It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
Countless therapy sessions start with “My mother…”
Welcome to Twisted Sister and kick back on Mother’s Day (as celebrated in the US and Canada.)
If nothing else, motherhood (and parenting) is a complexity that connects us in myriad ways – and is often laden with backstory and layers of complexity, but to cut to the chase, if you’re on this planet – you’ve been born, and birth (and death) is the common denominator that unites us all.
For those of us lucky enough to be parents ourselves, Mother’s Day brings special challenges, where according to the media, you can expect to be pampered, brunched, and showered with flowers, cards, and jewelry.
Uh, yeah, you can check that one right there.
Most often the reality is just another day on the job, where you have to buy your own card, unblock a toilet and clear last night’s dinner dishes to be able to cook everyone breakfast. Hopefully, the truth falls somewhere between.
(Ed. Note – actually unblocked a toilet during the writing of this post. Now kids are screaming for food. Breakfast can wait.)
For those of us who are mothers, even with the social changes that have been happening for — oh, let’s say the past fifty or so years — in female-male partnerships, most parenting and household work still typically fall on a woman’s shoulders. And the writers among us know the challenges we face here – carving out time for writing while balancing the demands of family life.
Which leads us back Twisted Sister, and why this lit mag was created – as a place for women and an opportunity to showcase diverse voices and unique stories. (For more on this, be sure to check out our essays on Women and Writing — Balls, Balls, Revisited, and Balls, Revisited. Again. (You can sense a theme here.)
Mothers are humans, like anybody else, and the portrayal of motherhood is difficult at best. Not always the land of cherubic infants and soft slumbers – our work featured runs the gamut of motherhood. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
To start off — Monsters and she was never there feature mothers of a dysfunctional sort, while Little Pots and Jars and Envelopes is a testimony to the fleeting nature of childhood. Mariel’s Flight recognizes the loss of a child, while May, Again? has a mother involved in her adult child’s life — whether they want it or not.
Something from the Garden gives us a mother who will do anything for their child, while The Closet and To Mother’s Farm feature a whole new level of motherly dysfunction. And in case you missed it the first time around, our discussion of Bad, but Not Necessarily Evil, Mothers will have you rethinking childhood memoirs.
Be sure to check our past F word (Family) issue and our Parenting issues (and man, do we have issues — get a load of parts one and two.)
XO,
Twisted Sister
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We want you! Or, we want your stories that is.
A short story is like a bomb exploding inside your brain – and that’s what we want. Give us your best – thrillers, scares, blood, guts and gore – give it fast, and give it hard. Give us those well written f*cked up pieces that nobody knows what to do with.
Fiction – we want it. Think dark fiction. We want scary, strange, and weird. Genre-bending is OK here, so give us your best post-apocalyptic spaghetti western. Gender bending is fine as well (this is a queer positive space after all.) We say cut off of 3000 words max, but talk to us if you have something longer. We want great, tight work, not fussy word counts.
Nonfiction – sure, we’ll take that too. Think book or movie reviews, essays that connect to writing about dark stuff or authors you want to do a short bio on (as long as their work fit’s our bill, sorry, no Danielle Steele fans here). Otherwise, the sky’s the limit.
Poetry — give us what you got. Keep it sharp and strange, and we’re all good.
Submission nitty gritty — use the handy-dandy form over here, or copy and paste (NO attachments please) in an email to twistedsisterlitmag@gmail.com {Ed. Note — I prefer 12 point font and double spacing cuz I can’t see shit, but that’s just me. I want a great freaking story over fussy formatting.}
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