This Mama Is Lit!

Sam Field and Amanda Fields talk with Aga Maksimowska, author of Becalming , about drawing on the complexities of family life in fiction and revisiting characters through the lens of motherhood. Becalming tells the story of two people realizing that happily ever after is not something to be but something to continue to explore, through adversity and outrage, tragedy and inspiration, and love. Gosi...

Sam Field and Tiffanie Drayton chat with Suzi Q. Smith, author of A Gospel of Bones, about finding beauty in difficult experiences, creating your own gospel, and the revealing power of poetry. Suzi Q. Smith is an award-winning multihyphenate artist, educator, and organizer who lives in Denver, Colorado. She is the author of two poetry collections, Poems for the End of the World and A Gospel of Bon...

Sam Field and Tiffanie Drayton chat with Mac Crane, author of Perverts , about challenging the definition of perversion, finding connection, and exploring how parenthood affects the creative process. Nothing is off limits for Mac Crane as they rework classic stories of rejection, isolation, and connection to suggest that the so-called pervert, by existing in the margins of society, may be the one...

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Leila Farjami, author of Daughter of Salt , about breaking the chain of familial obligations and healing from being a child of war. Daughter of Salt is a poetry collection focused on a speaker who fiercely engages with and questions her mother, her father, ancestors, and herself. Across the poems, patriarchy, intergenerational trauma, and displaceme...

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Chital Mehta, author of Have You Seen Romit? , about raising children across cultures, stretching marital boundaries, and the weight of writing rejection. 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 middl...

Amanda Fields and Caroline Grant chat with Jackie Hoermann-Elliott and Jenna Morton-Aiken, co-editors of the anthology Parenting While PhDing, about raising children in a restrictive academic system. 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 colle...

Amanda Fields and Tiffanie Drayton chat with Shasta Grant, author of When We Were Feral, about absent mothers, growing up in the ’90s, and raising a teenage son in today’s patriarchal landscape. 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 t...

Tiffanie Drayton and Amanda Fields chat with Rebecca Morrison, author of The Blue Dress , about adapting her memoir into a young adult novel, opening dialogue for teens to talk about disordered eating, and representing Iranian culture in the media. 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 expectation...

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Sam Field chat with Kerry Docherty, author of Selfish , about finding quiet moments of creativity, ambition, and why putting yourself first isn’t always selfish. 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...

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Amanda Fields chat with Sona Movsesian, author of The World’s Worst Mom , about parenting twins, normalizing vulnerability and finding her voice as a comedy writer. 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 par...

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Andrea Louie, author of Chinese American Mothering: Toy Len Goon’s Legacy and the Myth of the Model Minority , about her grandmother’s 1952 U.S. Mother of the Year Award. 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 chi...

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Sam Field chat with Lisa Roe, author of Big & Lily , about sisterhood, second acts, and the ways women learn to rewrite the stories they’ve been living. 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,...

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Martheaus Perkins, author of The Grace of Black Mothers , about Black motherhood, poetic form, and the complicated inheritance of the American Dream. 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...

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Heather Sweeney, author of Camouflage: How I Emerged From the Shadows of a Military Marriage, about identity, divorce, and rebuilding after years as a military spouse. 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 iden...

Amanda Fields and Tiffanie Drayton chat with Whitney French, author of Syncopation: A Novel in Verse , about memory, identity, and what it means to reshape yourself in a fractured world. 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...

Amanda and Sam chat with Lara Ehrlich, author of Bind Me Tighter Still , about domesticity and wildness in motherhood, the fierce love for our children, and feeling like we’re always falling short. 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...

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Chloe Yelena Miller, author of Perforated , about impossible wishes and material fears in parenting and poetry. 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...

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Rebecca Lehmann, author of The Beheading Game , about rewriting Anne Boleyn through the lens of motherhood, the punishment of powerful women, crafting a queer love story, and bringing poetry to the novel-writing process. 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 Fe...

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Chloé Caldwell, author of Trying , about loneliness in infertility, contradictions with IVF in the queer community, and the rawness of writing in the moment. Over the years that Chloé had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she’d read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected her experience; for one thing, m...

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Karen Palmer, author of She’s Under Here , about living with an undercurrent of fear and clawing her way out of abuse. In her memoir, Palmer examines why she ended up trapped, how she escaped, and how she handled the ongoing perils of life constructed around a false identity. She ruthlessly explores the lines between desire and fear, victim and perpetrator,...

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Amanda Fields chat with Dr. Robyn Kozlowitz, author of Post Traumatic Parenting, about using guilt as a teacher, discovering how stress and trauma affect parenting, and creating patterns of joy. Dr. Kozlowitz argues that the best time to rewire our trauma brain is when we are parenting. It gives us an opportunity to heal our inner child through admitting our own damage and...

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Eva Langston chat with Michelle Lerner, author of Ring , about defining and treating complicated grief, living with irreparable damage, and finding healing in nature. Ring takes the reader on an unforgettable odyssey through the depths of human emotion, from the hollows of grief to the heights of newfound hope. In the backdrop of a snow-covered sanctuary designed to aid th...

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Claire Adam, author of Love Forms , about forced delivery in Venezuela and testing the mother-child bond in fiction. Love Forms, longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize , centers on Dawn, a 58 year old mother of two grown sons. She finds herself returning to her past and a secret she has kept for many years. When Dawn was 16, her parents sent her from...

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Teri Vlassopoulos, author of Living Expenses, about technology creep in modern relationships, fertility treatments’ effect on emotional intimacy, and bookstore karaoke. Teri’s most recent novel interrogates the strain that can accompany even the strongest of relationships and also the discovery that so often it is when we are on the way to something...

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Brittany Micka-Foos, author of It’s No Fun Anymore , about domestic horror tropes and how a neurodiversity diagnosis offered insight into writing and motherhood. The lack of safety felt in womanhood and discomfort that lies within it is the discussion that Brittany strives to acknowledge and pursue. Her most recent book is a collection of eight short storie...