Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)

Cihlar
					, James

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    237 
Poster of Snoopy
Feelin’ Groovy
Midriff tops
Let It Be
Linda Ladd
Wild best friend
Who later died alone
In a motel
Bing
Toy chimpanzee
Pieced cloth body
Molded plastic face
Banana permanently 
In hand
Perfectly fit
Open space of mouth
What My Sisters Used
James Cihlar


English

What My Sisters Used

O’Reilly
					, Andrea

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    251 
The Association of Research on Mothering is pleased to announce the results of 
the 2008 literary contest on the theme of Mothers and Daughters. All judging 
was blind; identification of authors was not disclosed to judges: 
 
Creative Non-Fiction
Judge: Rachel Rose
 
1st Prize – “Knee Deep in the Mother of God,” by Rebecca Goodrich
2nd Prize – “Stories in the Wind,” by Beverley Brenna
3rd Prize – “A Letter to My Daughter (To Be Sent in the Future),” 
by Yelizaveta P. Renfro
 
Poetry
Judges: Fiona Tinwei-Lam and Rishma Dunlop
 
1st Prize – “Piannismo,” by K.V Skene
2nd Prize –“Blade,” by Leslie Vryenhoek
3rd Prize – “Just Beyond Call if You Need Me,” by Leslie Vryenhoek
Honorable Mentions
“First Birds,” by Laurie Kruk
“Learning the Words,” by Lorri Neilsen Glenn
“Sangan River Meditations,” by Susan Musgrave 
 
Congratulations to all contest winners and honourable mentions.
Thank you to all who participated in the contest.
Andrea O’Reilly, Founder/Director – Association for Research on 
Mothering (ARM); Editor-in-Chef/Publisher – Demeter Press; 
Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering for Research on Mothering 
2008 Literary Contest


2008 Literary Contest

Dunlop
					, Rishma

Folio
“Mom Getting Some Sun.” Photo: Rita Hermann.
226    Volume 10, Number 2
Editor’s Notes
…When Rita turned sixteen,
our mother set fire to her sheets
as Rita slept in bed. Through the flames,
she sang to her, Happy Birthday
to you, Happy Birthday to you.
    —James Cihlar, “House Beautiful”
It is with great pleasure that I introduce the poems of James Cihlar in this issue 
of Folio. This selection of poems about Cihlar’s mother is set in the landscapes 
and cityscapes of Midwest America. We encounter the narrator and his mother 
through poems and striking family photographs by Rita Herman, Cihlar’s 
sister. The images and poems range from depictions of the young woman 
before marriage, the mother during the narrator’s childhood and adolescence, 
to the narrator’s estrangement from the mother seen from the lens his identity 
as a middle-aged gay man. Throughout the collection, the narrator’s voice is 
accompanied by the stream of daughters, sisters, sister-in-laws, and friends 
who carry the reader through encounters which culminate with the mother’s 
aging, the ravages of illness, and death by cancer.
In a series of poems that begins with “What My Mother Used” the poet 
uses an economy of language in couplets that strike us with blunt force. For 
example, the title is followed by: “Miss Clairol/Custody,” then later in the 
poem, another couplet: “Seagram’s/Rage.” The dark humor of the titles that 
follow: “What My Stepmother Used;” “What My Sisters Used;” “What My 
Older Sister Used;” “What My Mother Used Later,” are undercut by painful 
memories.
Throughout these poems, the sense of the narrator’s city is a constant, 
haunting character. The City Beautiful appears in the poem “House Beauti-
ful,” and Cihlar skillfully plays with notions of aesthetics of home, domestic 
spaces, while using plain statement to reveal the shocking incident of the 
mother setting the daughter’s bed on fire. In the last stanza of the final poem 
“Resolution,” the narrator’s tormented relationship with the mother is the 
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    227 
tension of living, a return to childhood, mother-love tinged with fear:
And I’m middle-aged and fearful,
Holding my knees to my chin
On my old bunk bed,
Waiting for her to crash
Through the door.
At once powerful and knife sharp, Cihlar’s work is also poignant, deeply 
affecting, and human.  Readers can look forward to reading more of Cihlar’s 
poetry in his new book length collection Undoing, published by Little Pear 
Press of Seekonk, MA, edited by Martha Manno.
       —Rishma Dunlop
228    Volume 10, Number 2
“We Would Wear the Highest Heels.” Photo: Rita Hermann.


Editor’s Notes

Rosenzweig
					, reviewed by Rosie

280        Volume 10, Number 2
Book Reviews
The last line of the poem encapsulates the power of motherhood. As Nahum 
describes his daughter seated at the kitchen table having tea with her mother, 
Laike reads her tea leaves and sees a happy future; Hannah turns to her father 
and announces: “you see, Pa / I told you / if Ma says, / it’s true” (101). 
Laike and Nahum is a gentle and moving book that tells a story of mother-
hood, love, and survival. 
 We, The Women
Merle Nudelman. 
Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2006.
Reviewed by Rosie Rosenzweig
Merle Nudelman’s first volume of poetry, Borrowed Light, probed her personal 
history.  Now, in We, The Women, the poet examines specifically female subjects, 
including pregnancy and childbirth (even losing weight after delivery), chil-
dren, mothering, dinner with mothers-in-law, and the inevitable memories of 
her own mother. She also limns the tender vulnerability of a young molested 
girl, as well as the mature career women molested under the corporate guise 
of billable hours. 
The poignancy of “Variations of the Last Time” that she saw her mother, 
and “Mama Loshen,” about the native language of her mother, both rekindled 
memories of my own immigrant mother in Windsor, Ontario. Nudelman 
evokes her mother’s mother tongue of Yiddish:
I fit our words like puzzle pieces
into the sounds I knew,
stored these clues of meaning
inside my own secret cache.
I clicked them on to light your stories –
My lanterns into your Slavic wilderness.
Nudelman ranges widely across poetic form.  Her repertoire includes lyrics, 
sestinas, pantoums, concrete poems, some modified sonnet forms, even a ghazal. 
Her adroit use of repetition showcases her natural cadence and rhythm.
The title poem, “We, the Women,” describes women as
tender repository of people-eggs,
tucked within like so many snug peas.
Calm spheres, each waiting her turn
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        281 
Book Reviews
[stanza break]
To burst the pod…
Moon-women, …
We sprinkle that knowing-dust
Into our daughter’s eyes.
And men? They are “that thrashing,” a mere staccato lunge into fecundity 
and then no longer central to the heritage of women.
Lying to Our Mothers
Katherine Lawrence.  
Regina:  Coteau Books, 2006.
Reviewed by Nancy Gerber
Katherine Lawrence’s collection of poetry, Lying to Our Mothers, is the po-
etic equivalent of a bildungsroman, the novel that explores personal growth. 
Memorable and moving, these poems map the speaker’s journey from girlhood 
to womanhood.  With its emphasis on images and memory rather than plot 
and sequential time, poetry is a genre especially suited to representing the 
complexities and contradictions of maternal subjectivity, allowing readers to 
witness the speaker’s transformation from daughter to mother and from being 
her mother’s daughter to becoming her daughter’s mother.
The poems are divided into four sections.  The first, “You Knew – Didn’t 
You?”, explores the emotional geography of female coming-of-age in the 
1960s: the desire for freedom and adventure, the value and vicissitudes of 
girls’ friendships, the pain of mother-daughter conflict.  In “Mud Wars,” the 
tension between a strong-willed mother and an equally strong-willed daughter 
is announced: “Our first house / a battlefield / because the address told us so: 
61 Battlefield Drive, / the ravine across the road / site of all our wars: mother 
versus a small muddy daughter” (3).  The speaker brings her feminist perspec-
tive to bear in acknowledging her mother’s domestic entrapment: “How could 
we stop ourselves? / You tied at the waist / to stove and sink.  Me, fixed on 
spring’s wild / riot beyond the door” (3).  
The second section, “The Soft Give of Flesh,” includes an eponymous 
poem where a mother meditates on the impossibility of protecting a teenage 
daughter from violence: “She is immunized against pertussis / tuberculosis, 


We, The Women

Casey
					, Alicia

82        Volume 10, Number 1
       Our first day home from the maternity ward, 
we bring our daughter to the back deck, 
        tucked into the fleece-lined, false womb
 
       of her pumpkin seat, her knees drawn up 
like parentheses. Spring has come calling, 
        and the sudden shift of the season thrusts 
       the blooms of the Bradford pears
head-first from their delicate casings.
        Everything is newborn:  the trumpet vines
 
       unfurl crimson bells, arrowed tulip leaves 
spear the mulch. On the roadside,
        the cardinal, who spent the lonely winter
 
       like an ornament hung among china-
blue berries of an Eastern red cedar, has found 
        his dull-feathered mate.  Under a rushing
       current of bird calls, I hear the low drone
of wings, a colony of red wasps building 
        their hive in the eaves.  A solitary
        scout circles down and finds purchase
on the arched fold of her blanket.  Sunlight 
        sparks its thorax into brief ember.  I pause,
        resisting the urge to swing,
as I turn to her father and say,
        you fucking kill that thing.  
Homecoming
Alicia Casey
brought to you by COREView metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
provided by Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and...


Homecoming

Home
					, Alice

All in a Day’s Carework: A Typical Day Mothering Children with
Invisible Disabilities

Harriss
					, Clarinda

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         287 
Blood Orange
Clarinda Harriss
Unborn, you demanded I feed on blood orange
salads and Spockish mother-wisdom lingo.
You hung in for ten full months, then bingo:
out you popped, long, lean, a trifle mangy 
from so much womb-time.  Proverbial “little stranger”
in a family of big-nosed dark-haired Ringo
Starr lookalikes, you were our blond gringo.
You seemed perpetually in danger.
I watch as you nuzzle your son’s head, whisper
into its whitegold feathers. Like me, you spy
on your children’s sleep, those hours of winter
when Death seems a Grimm creeper who lies
on baby faces to crush the wispy thistle
of their breath. As you listen to him whistle
for his life, remember, Andy, you didn’t die.
 


Blood Orange

204         Volume 10, Number 1
In the nursing home, my mother maneuvers silently through
patient rooms. The whine of rubber on tile unnerves them.
She checks the windows.  Her hands grasp the fragile chains,
sliding curtains back from filtered glass.  She knows, 
it’s been months since most had sun.
If there are fresh chrysanthemums,
she pauses to arrange them prettily.
She’s known for her knack with the dying.  They call her
when pallor shifts from parchment to clay, when no 
amount of morphine from the drip sleeps the pain.
The order reads, Do Not Resuscitate.  For her,
it’s a break in the day.  No needles, no calculating
medications, and the doctors will not intervene.
They’re only interested in the ones they can save.
She says these are moments of peace. She skates a chair 
to the bedside, lowers the metal gate and circles 
her thumb across the skin of their palms.  It’s a conjure.
When the eyes drift up and clear, she draws out
the finest memory.  She sat first at her father’s bedside. 
His was Indiana, late August.  In the eastern wheat field, 
he and his best girl lay counting stars.  
Indiana, Late August
Alicia Casey


Indiana, Late August

Bode
					, reviewed by Rita

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        285 
Book Reviews
You Can Get There From Here: 25 Years of
Bridging Courses for Women at York University
 
Ruby Newman and Andrea O’Reilly, eds. 
Toronto: School of Women’s Studies, York University, 2006.
Reviewed by Rita Bode
You Can Get There From Here is a volume of voices, rather than a collection of 
essays, whose range and power attest to the success of what the book records: 
the history of York’s Bridging Program for Women, and the experiences of the 
women who have been involved with it. Now part of the School of Women’s 
Studies, the Bridging Program aims to enable women, over the age of twenty-
one and out of school for at least two years, to acquire the critical thinking and 
writing skills required for university-level study. A grade of B in the Bridging 
course qualifies students for admission to undergraduate studies at York. 
The voices number forty-seven in all and include the program found-
ers and supporters, instructors, and students. The editors, both of whom are 
involved in the program, divide the book into three sections that correspond 
to these groups: History, Pedagogy, and Student Voices. The pieces across the 
sections reflect, in addition to such practical benefits as job advancement, a 
vision of higher education as a life-enhancing experience offering intellectual 
as well as emotional and psychological fulfillment. While not all the Bridging 
students continue their studies, they are given an excellent chance to do so, and 
the program’s thoughtful curriculum of texts that speak to a range of female 
experiences encourages the intellectual self-confidence of all participants.
The contributions commonly express such values as determination, com-
mitment, and the importance of mutual respect in human interactions. This 
pattern of similarity enhances rather than negates the individuality of the 
volume’s multi-voices, for the contributors speak these values from personal, 
unique perspectives that reflect a broad diversity in racial and socio-economic 
backgrounds. This commonality, moreover, suggests a truth about higher 
education that is too often overlooked by educational institutions, especially 
for mature female students: getting “there from here” requires a communal 
understanding and practice in which administrators, instructors, and students 
work together to create the opportunity for individual achievement. 
You Can Get There From Here articulates its own “idea of a university” 
on several fronts. Its “feminist pedagogy,” valuing the students’ thinking and 
experiences, offers, for all classrooms and both sexes, the worthy practice of 
student validation. This validation, moreover, as both instructor and student 
contributors make clear, comes not at the expense of academic standards. The 
bridging program is as committed to intellectual rigour as it is to warm support 
286        Volume 10, Number 2
Book Reviews
and encouragement and affirms that one need not exclude the other. 
The program’s aim of facilitating the process of university study for women 
involves a re-configuring of the traditional places of higher learning. Through 
the Bridging classes, the ivory tower becomes accessible in the community spaces 
of suburban malls, public libraries, company offices where what counts is the 
gathering of eager minds to read, think, discuss, and communicate ideas. 
Since together the individual contributions affirm the importance of 
shared activity in helping to realize educational goals and dreams, it would 
somehow be against the spirit of this volume to single out any one individual 
contribution for specific comment. A thoughtful addition to this collection 
is that each contribution is accompanied by the author’s photograph. In this 
celebratory record of the bridging program’s twenty-fifth anniversary, as in the 
program itself, no one remains faceless.
Mothers of the Nation: Women, Families, and 
Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Europe
 
Patrizia Albanese. 
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
 
Reviewed by Layne Parish Craig
In Mothers of the Nation: Women, Families, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Cen-
tury Europe, sociologist Patrizia Albanese provides an empirical study of the 
relationship between states’ adoption of nationalist ideals and women’s roles in 
such nations. As she writes in her introduction, “This book … tests whether 
nationalism intends to modernize or archaize gender and family relations.” 
Albanese’s “test” is as rigorous and well-defined as such a project can be, and 
its potential contribution to work on the material relationship between “the 
personal and the political” is provocative.
Albanese’s project examines the real-life effects of policies regulating 
women and families in nationalist and non-nationalist states at two points in 
history: between World War I and World War II and Post-1989. For each time 
period, she examines two nationalist states (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy 
for the Interwar period and Post-Soviet Russia and Independent Croatia for 
Post-1989) and two non-nationalist states (Revolutionary Russia and Yugoslavia 
for the Interwar period and Post-reunification Germany and Contemporary 
Italy for Post-1989). Each of the text’s chapters focuses on one of these gov-
ernmental bodies, outlining its history, demography, and policies pertaining 
to women and families, then offering statistical information about women’s 


Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)

Not a member yet

What My Sisters Used

2008 Literary Contest

Editor’s Notes

We, The Women

Homecoming

All in a Day’s Carework: A Typical Day Mothering Children with Invisible Disabilities

Blood Orange

Indiana, Late August

You Can Get There From Here: 25 Years of Bridging Courses for Women at York University

“Ginealogy”: Towards the Revival of Feminine Genealogies in the Works of Contemporary Polish Artists

1,574

1,824