When her adopted son disappears into the forests of southern India, Usha defies her husband, leaves the rest of her family, and goes to find him—alone. Have You Seen Romit? is the story of a middle-aged Indian woman who sets out to find her son and discovers, in the search, the full force of who she is.

Chital Mehta is a South Asian writer whose stories center on motherhood, family dynamics, and immigration. Her short stories have appeared in The Pinch, Oyez Review, SLAB Magazine, and elsewhere. Her novel, Have You Seen Romit?, was the winner of the 2025 James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel, judged by R. O. Kwon. She holds an MFA from Lindenwood University and lives in Delaware with her husband and children.

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Jackie Hoermann-Elliott and Jenna Morton-Aiken: The co-editors of the anthology Parenting While PhDing chat about raising children in a restrictive academic system.

Shasta Grant: The novelist of When We Were Feral reflects on absent mothers, growing up in the ’90s, and raising a teenage son in today’s patriarchal landscape.

Rebecca Morrison: The writer discusses her middle grade debut The Blue Dress, about an Iranian American girl navigating complicated relationships with her mother, her best friend, and her body image.

Kerry Docherty: The cofounder of Faherty brand discusses her memoir Selfish, which details her twisting, sometimes conflicted journey toward self-understanding.

Sona Movsesian: The co-host of the hit podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend discusses her new book The World’s Worst Mom.

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This episode includes guest co-host, Caroline Grant. Grant served on the editorial board of Literary Mama for 10 years, including 5 as editor-in-chief, and is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Make Yourself Useful: remembering a life in essential tools and unexpected foods. Grant has co-edited two anthologies: Mama, PhD and The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage. She is co-director of the Sustainable Arts Foundation (SAF), which worked for nearly 15 years to support writers and artists with children. SAF was recently sunsetted, returning its funds to Indigenous communities. Grant lives in San Francisco with her family.

Jackie Hoermann-Elliott and Jenna Morton-Aiken are the co-editors of the anthology Parenting While PhDing: Surviving and Improving the Working Conditions of Graduate Student Parents. Featuring contributions from graduate students about raising children, the anthology includes personal stories and advice for student parents. The book also offers tips for program administrators about creating more inclusive, family-friendly environments for students.

Hoermann-Elliott is an associate professor of English at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas, where she also serves as the co-director of the university’s first-year experience program. She is deeply passionate about supporting student parents and foster-care alumni. She’s also a mom of four kids, ages three to fifteen.

Morton-Aiken is the senior associate director of writing and English language support at Brown University’s Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, where she also teaches in the English department. She began teaching writing because she believed in the power of language to make the world a better place, a goal she’s still working toward as she also completes a leadership coaching certification. She’s devoted to facilitating the growth of humans, and relies on good books, Korean dramas, and snuggling with her husband, two cats, and two children to keep her going.

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When We Were Feral is a coming-of-age story set in the early 1990s. The novel is about friendship and the terrain between girlhood and adulthood. At the center is thirteen-year-old Maggie, who lives in a trailer on the edge of a rural New Hampshire town and is living with the grief of her mother’s disappearance. Maggie finds comfort with her best friend Sarah’s seemingly perfect family, and they’re soon joined by Erin, who has lost both her sister and mother. Compelled by a need to understand what makes mothers vanish, Maggie convinces her friends to search for answers.

Shasta Grant grew up in New Hampshire and lives in Indianapolis. An Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow, Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest winner, and recipient of writing residencies from Hedgebrook and The Kerouac Project, she holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home, and her stories and essays have appeared in cream city review, Epiphany, wigleaf, and elsewhere.

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The Blue Dress is based on Rebecca Morrison’s childhood as an Iranian immigrant trying to fit into her homeland and conform to her family’s expectations of beauty.

Morrison is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Newsweek, The Independent, and HuffPost. After spending nearly three decades practicing law, she left the profession in 2020 to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a writer. Her debut novel, The Blue Dress, published in March 2026, draws on her experiences growing up as an Iranian immigrant navigating the competing expectations of her family and her American homeland.

In addition to writing The Blue Dress, Morrison has also hosted The Second Half, a podcast exploring the struggles, heartbreaks, reinventions, and joys that shape the later chapters of life.

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“In this time of uncertainty, when headlines gut us and humanity crests its limits, again and differently, I wish this for you: open yourself to the inevitability of the pendulum, whichever one you find yourself on this summer, at whatever cadence and height.”

Caitlin Robinson, Managing Editor
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Read the July/August 2026 Issue

Creative Nonfiction

Two for Joy
By Hallie Knox

Here Comes Trouble
By Nichole Gavel

The Light Under the Door
By Liz Koch

Fiction

Matter
By C. White

Remain in Light
By Betsy Boyd

Literary Reflections

Stepwhat?
By Sara Nolan

Poetry

Flicker
By Abigail Michelini

After the Fourth of July Floods, Walking the Dog
By Sarah Orman

If That’s All There Is
By Anna Giles

Three Doctors Pulled You Out
By Casey Andrews

As If It Were That Easy
By Akumbu Uche

La Maternité
By Ilene Millman

Things I Googled After You Were Born
By C.L. Brenton

Waking Early
By Gabriella Ekman

The Atheist’s Prayer
By Catherine Arnold

Profiles

Unwinding the Spiral: A Conversation with Lauren W. Westerfield
By M.D. McIntyre

Navigating the Harsh Realities of Pregnancy in a Post-Dobbs Era: A Conversation with Irin Carmon
By Samantha Ho

Reviews

Her Choice to Make: A Review of Jill Christman’s The Heart Folds Early
By Heidi Fettig Parton

God Listens. God Remembers. A Review of Pieces You’ll Never Get Back
By Elizabeth Conway

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What does it mean to be good? What are the consequences of doing what we want? Who determines what is selfish?

These are the questions that haunted Kerry Docherty—the cofounder of Faherty brand, mother of two, and wife—as she realized she was giving away too much of herself: to a marriage with her college sweetheart, to the fast-paced family startup, and to a growing household that demanded attention she didn’t always want to give. Determined to feel seen—as an artist, activist, poet, romantic—she began to steal simple moments for herself, replacing her to-do lists with poems, pushing the business toward the things she cared about, and widening her circle of creative friends. However, as she leaned more deeply into her passions and purpose, she found herself veering into an ambiguous relationship with a musician, a potentially destructive direction that would seriously test her marriage.

With incisive observation, biting humor, and searing honesty, Selfish details Kerry’s twisting, sometimes conflicted journey to self-understanding. It chronicles her efforts to reconcile capitalism with her own heart’s desire, her complicated family dynamics, her struggles with motherhood, and her efforts to rediscover parts of herself buried under other people’s expectations. Her example invites us to demand to be seen, do what we need to do, and dare to put ourselves first—and shows how doing so can actually be a gift to others. Selfish is both a love letter to the Self and an unapologetic call to action for women everywhere to meet their own needs.

Kerry Docherty cofounded the lifestyle clothing brand Faherty with her husband and his identical twin. A graduate of Yale University and Pepperdine Law School, she is passionate about community building, sustainability, and creativity. Kerry is also the author of the children’s book Somewhere, Right Now, featuring art by New York Times bestselling illustrator Suzie Mason. She lives with her husband and two children on the New Jersey shore, where she is constantly looking for sea glass.

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Have you ever wondered if you’re completely failing at parenting? In The World’s Worst Mom, Sona Movsesian delivers a funny, candid, and refreshingly honest look at the gap between the idealized version of parenthood and the messy reality. After chronicling her experiences working for Conan O’Brien in The World’s Worst Assistant, Movsesian turns her attention to the chaos of raising children.

Packed with laugh-out-loud stories, tongue-in-cheek survival tips, illustrations and comics, the book captures the everyday absurdities of modern parenting. Along the way, she shares personal anecdotes, behind-the-scenes moments with Conan O’Brien, and reflections on how her self-proclaimed shortcomings as an assistant may have prepared her for motherhood. The result is a relatable reminder that no parent has all the answers—and that finding humor in the madness might be the best coping strategy of all.

 Sona Movsesian is a former executive assistant turned author, podcaster, and media personality. She began as Conan O’Brien’s personal assistant in 2009, and was featured on his show on many occasions, including a televised trip she took to Armenia with O’Brien for his Conan Without Borders travel series. Since 2018, Movsesian has been a co-host of the hit podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, and in 2022 she released her book The World’s Worst Assistant, which became a New York Times bestseller. Her second book, The World’s Worst Mom, will be released in early September. Movsesian lives in Los Angeles with her husband and twin sons.

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This Mama is Lit!

Andrea Louie: The author of Chinese American Mothering: Toy Len Goon’s Legacy and The Myth of the Model Minority discusses her grandmother’s 1952 U.S. Mother of the Year Award.

Lisa Roe: The author of the forthcoming novel Big & Lily chats about sisterhood, second acts, and the ways women learn to rewrite the stories they’ve been living.

Martheaus Perkins: The first-generation college graduate and son of a single Black mother discusses his debut poetry collection, The Grace of Black Mothers.

Heather Sweeney: The writer of Camouflage: How I Emerged From the Shadows of a Military Marriage reflects on rediscovering her identity while navigating single parenting.

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Her most recent book is Chinese American Mothering: Toy Len Goon’s Legacy and the Myth of the Model Minority. In 1952, Toy Len Goon, a Chinese immigrant widow who raised eight children while running their family laundry, was selected as U.S. Mother of the Year by the American Mother’s Committee of the Golden Rule Foundation. In Chinese American Mothering, Andrea Louie—the granddaughter of Toy Len Goon—argues that her grandmother’s selection for this honor can only be understood within the context of shifting representations of Chinese Americans during the Cold War era, and the accompanying assumptions about the strategic role that positive representations of Chinese Americans could have in extending U.S. influence to Asia.

Andrea Louie is a professor of anthropology at Michigan State University, where she is also affiliated with the Asian Pacific American Studies Program. She is the author of Chineseness Across Borders: Renegotiating Chinese Identities in China and the United States and How Chinese Are You?: Adopted Chinese Youth and their Families Negotiate Identity and Culture.

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A sharply funny, deeply heartfelt novel about two sisters who discover the best way to find yourself is by getting lost.

For her entire life, Bridget “Big” Ackerman Petty has struggled to hold everything together—her kids, her husband, her demanding mother, all in dizzying orbit around her. While the kids are grown and her husband is retired, every day still feels like a to-do list she can never quite finish. Why is everything so effortless and easy for her sister Lily—a woman blessed with a magnetic personality, a thriving business, and a husband who adores her?

But when Lily discovers her husband’s been cheating, her “perfect” life implodes. Devastated and overwhelmed, she decides to run as far away as possible: to Alaska to lose herself on a hardcore survival trek—and she’s dragged her reluctant sister Big along.

No cell service, no easy exits—just grizzlies, outdoor plumbing, and a group of strangers who know how to read a compass. As the sisters navigate freezing rivers, unmarked trails, and more than one near-death experience, the defenses they’ve used to protect themselves begin to crumble, and they’re forced to face everything they’ve spent decades avoiding: resentment, regret, envy, and the terrifying possibility that the other sister’s life might not be as easy as it looks.

Big & Lily is a laugh-out-loud, emotionally rich novel about second acts, sisterhood, and the unexpected ways we find ourselves when we’re truly lost.

Lisa Roe graduated from the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and spent many years as an advertising creative director and copywriter in New York City before accepting the tougher job of stay-at-home mom and turning to writing fiction—mostly to entertain her kids, but later to tell her own stories. A classic firstborn, reluctant empty nester, and Dr. Doolittle wannabe, Lisa lives in New Jersey with her husband, David, and three incorrigible dogs. Big & Lily is her second novel.

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“This moment is about accepting where I am and showing up how I can.”

Rudri Bhatt Patel, Senior Editor
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Read the May/June 2026 Issue

Creative Nonfiction

Last Swim
By Christie Ellen

Possible Causes of Chronic Hives
By Ania Payne

Night Talk
By Patricia Lawler Kenet

Fiction

Circe
By Laura Leigh Morris

It’s Not Called a Miscarriage if You’re a Horse
By Ani King

Poetry

Half Milk, Half Terror
By Sian Maciejowski

Dreamscape with Cogs and Crickets
By Megan Peak

St. Mary Falls
By Angie Crea O’Neal

On Reflection
By Leah Edelman

No-Name Child
By Emily Hunsberger

On a family camping trip at dusk
By Anne M. Terashima

A Sonnet for Mother
By Sara Wenger

Holy Shit
By Rachel Beachy

Scene from a Marriage
By Kathie Collins

Profiles

Writing Through Postpartum Anxiety: A Conversation with Cassidy Gard
By Tess Clarkson

A Sock Puppet Tackles Motherhood, Memory, and Identity: A Conversation with Hollay Ghadery
By Sheelagh Caygill

Reviews

Masks of Perfection: A Review of What’s Yours Is Mine
By Shellie Kalinsky

Accessing Abilities While Parenting With a Disability: A Review of Jessica Slice’s Unfit Parent
By Hilary Hodge

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Martheaus Perkins is a first-generation college graduate and son of a single Black mother. He is the author of The Grace of Black Mothers, published with Trio House Press. His writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, diode, Obsidian, Mizna, and Beloit. The name “Martheaus” is a collection of each woman who raised him: “Mar-” was his grandmother, “-Thea-” is his mother, and “-us” represents the aunties who created the name.

Perkins’ debut poetry collection, The Grace of Black Mothers, is a lyrical reckoning, finding grace through Black mothers, aunties, and grannies. Mamie Till-Mobley, Sybrina Fulton, Harriet Tubman, and the author’s own mothers guide readers through the collection. All the while, Perkins brings an array of poetic forms to genres such as fighting game menus, optometry charts, screenplays, pirate codes, and social media threads. The Grace of Black Mothers includes homemade heroes and villains, justice and fabrication, wit and risk, resurrection and erasure.

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Camouflage: How I Emerged From the Shadows of a Military Marriage is about Heather Sweeney’s journey from being overshadowed by her husband’s military career to rediscovering her identity as a single mother. The memoir explores how military spouses often conform to a support role that is secondary to their spouse’s military career. Sweeney writes about how the hardships of military life contribute to her adaptability and resilience.

Heather Sweeney is the author of the memoir Camouflage: How I Emerged from the Shadows of a Military Marriage. She writes about divorce, life as a military spouse, parenting, and women’s health. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, HuffPost, Newsweek, Business Insider, Good Housekeeping, and Military.com. She lives in Virginia, and Camouflage is her first book.

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This Mama is Lit!

Whitney French: The speculative fiction author discusses Syncopation: A Novel in Verse, which emphasizes memory as the highest currency and love as dangerous, unruly, and singed with hope.

Lara Ehrlich: The author of the novel Bind Me Tighter Still discusses domesticity and wildness in motherhood, the fierce love for our children, and feeling like we’re always falling short.

Chloe Yelena Miller: The co-founder of Brown Bag Lit, an online writing community, discusses her second full-length poetry collection, Perforated.

Rebecca Lehmann: The award-winning poet and essayist chats about her debut novel, The Beheading Game, in which Anne Boleyn wakes up the day after her execution, sews her head back on, and seeks vengeance on Henry VIII.

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In Syncopation: A Novel in Verse, in the aftermath of a Memory War, society is fragmented into new cultures, castes, and coalitions. Set against a backdrop of retrofitted food garages, microchip-sorting factories, and hyperloop terminals, this novel-in-verse emphasizes memory as the highest currency and love as dangerous, unruly, and singed with hope.

The protagonists are O and Z, two young women searching for purpose in a world where a decades-long earthquake reverberates, and the population scrambles to hide from deadly acid rain. Descended from space pirates, O is drawn to the sky, while Z is earthbound, a skilled forager with connections to the black market. The two become travel companions and lovers, and are conflicted between choosing their values or each other.

In this speculative novel, French offers readers an intricate future-world that resonates powerfully with our own, as it explores a people gripped in the war-torn politics of migration, memory-keeping, labor, and survival.

Whitney French is a writer, educator, and publisher. She is the editor of the award-winning anthology Black Writers Matter (University of Regina Press, 2019) and Griot: Six Writers’ Sojourn into the Dark (Knopf Canada, 2022). Whitney is a Black futurist who explores memory, loss, technology, and nature in her work. She is a certified arts educator and an assistant professor in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She is also the co-founder and publisher of Hush Harbour, the only Black queer feminist press in Canada.

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In Bind Me Tighter Still, the youngest of three siren sisters, Ceto, is weary of an existence driven by hunger. She trades her tail for legs, marries the first man she meets, and bears a daughter—only to discover that domesticity is just as mundane as sirenhood. In search of something more, she flees with her daughter Naia to the ocean, where she establishes a mermaid burlesque called Sirenland and reinvents herself, performing as a siren in a tank built into the limestone cliffs overlooking the sea. She hires and trains human women to perform with her, and Sirenland becomes a national roadside attraction. Her daughter Naia performs as well, until she turns 15 and begins to resist the world her mother has created.

Lara Ehrlich is the author of the story collection Animal Wife (Red Hen Press, 2020) and the novel Bind Me Tighter Still (Red Hen Press, 2025). Lara is also the host of Writer Mother Monster, a podcast that has featured more than 100 conversations with writer–mothers navigating the tension between artistic ambition and caregiving. Her writing has been published in StoryQuarterly, Hunger Mountain Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Literary Hub, and others, and she is the writer in residence at Connecticut College. She is the founder and director of Thought Fox Writers Den and lives with her family in Connecticut.

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www.ThoughtFox.org

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https://redhen.org/book/bind-me-tighter-still/

Mentioned in the episode:

Nobody’s Girl

Hans Christian Andersen

Disney’s The Little Mermaid

“We will scream until our throats are ragged, and then we will read bedtime stories.”

Katherine Murray, Senior Editor
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Read the March/April 2026 Issue

Creative Nonfiction

Coffee Hour
By Nicole Hoagland

Are You Worth Saving?
By Karen Fritts Stanley

Just the Woman Who Married Their Father
By Quade Hermann

Fiction

Creatures of the Goblin King’s Realm
By Ann Claycomb

Lectures on the Fly
By Laura White Gray

Literary Reflections

The Patchwork Quilt: Piecing an Identity Together
By Alison Colwell

Poetry

The Sonographer’s Report
By Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné

after my mother’s mastectomy
By Laura Keeling

The Quickening
By Tamara Kreutz

Heaven
By Francine Rubin

Email from Ex-husband
By Ann Stinson

What is Brave
By Krista Puttler

After Midnight
By Misty Archambault

Time Lapse
By Maureen D. Hall

Out of the Pit
By Courtney Edwards

Profiles

An Expatriate on Route 66: A Conversation with Winnie M. Li
By Haley Sandlow

Exploring Truths: A Conversation with Grace Talusan
By Zihan Zhang

Learning to Love: A Conversation with Natasha Williams
By Jodie Sadowsky

Reviews

Beautifully Strange Stories: A Review of The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe
By Dorothy Rowena Rice

Stills From the Life of a Writing Mother: A Review of Mothersalt
By Katherine Harnisch

Switched At Birth: A Review of Cindy Jiban’s The Probable Son
By Amanda Fields

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In her second full-length poetry collection, Perforated, Miller’s poems span the grief of public and private losses. The poems are situated in both the US and Italy, ruminating on topics such as immigration, climate change, school shootings, and 9/11.

Chloe Yelena Miller is a writer and teacher living in Washington, DC, with her partner and child. She’s the author of Perforated (2026) and Viable (2021), both published by Lily Poetry Review Books, and the poetry chapbook Unrest (Finishing Line Press, 2013). She co-founded and co-directs Brown Bag Lit, an online writing community. Miller teaches writing and literature through University of Maryland’s Global Campus, Politics and Prose bookstore, and New Directions in Writing. Miller has a Bachelor of Arts in Italian language and literature from Smith College (1998) and an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College (2003.)

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Rebecca Lehmann is an award-winning poet and essayist. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Between the Crackups; Ringer (which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize); and The Sweating Sickness. Her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, NPR’s The Slowdown, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. She lives in Indiana with her family, where she is an associate professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Saint Mary’s College. The Beheading Game is her debut novel.

In The Beheading Game, Anne Boleyn wakes up the day after her execution, sews her head back on, and seeks vengeance on Henry VIII.

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