Real-life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love Edited by Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D.

Yvette Bonaparte grew up in New Jersey, but left after college in search of better weather. A former modern dancer, she used her Master’s degree in Writing to teach at Skyline College and the University of San Francisco. Currently, she is an administrator at the San Francisco Friends School. Addicted to travel since she lived in Liberia as a child, she has trekked through Nepal, ridden camels in Egypt, and been pregnant on Kauai and Oahu, where her son, Liam, was born. Her short fiction has appeared in Writing for Our Lives and Kalliope. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and son, and does her best writing when everyone in the house is asleep.

Mary Jane Beaufrand lives in Seattle with her husband, Juan, and two vagabundos--Sofia (age three) and Ricky (age one). A graduate of the Bennington Creative Writing Seminars, she has published fiction and creative nonfiction in Web del Sol, Short Story Magazine Online, and Fables Magazine, among others. Ricky sleeps well now and enjoys dropping things. Mary Jane and Sofia are back in music class. Most evenings you can catch all four of them dancing around the living room to “Love Shack.”

Rebecca Boucher lives in Brooklyn with her husband and four children.

David Carkeet is a linguist by training, a novelist, and the father of Anne, Laurie, and Molly. His novels include The Full Catastrophe (Simon & Schuster, 1990) and The Error of Our Ways (Holt, 1997). He has published essays in the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, the Village Voice, and elsewhere.

Samuel P. Clark is Chief of Operations for a social-service agency and has served as a city commissioner for fourteen years. His work has been anthologized in Blow-Drying the Frog & Other Parenting Adventures (Family and Home Network, 2002), the Don’t Sweat Stories (Hyperion, 2003), and A 5th Portion of Chicken Soup for the Soul (Health Communications, 1998). His annual tradition of writing a Father’s Day message was featured in Woman’s World magazine. He lives in north-central Florida with wife April Burk and daughters Kayla (now ten) and Sophie (four).

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and lives in New Jersey with her husband and toddler. Her first book of poetry, Resurrection, won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her novel, Judy Garland, Ginger Love, was published by HarperCollins (Regan Books) in 1998 and her second book of poetry, The Afflicted Girls, about the Salem witch trials of 1692, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press. An assistant professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, she has held fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Dennis Donoghue’s work has appeared in Teacher Magazine, the Brandeis Review, The Sun, and other magazines and literary journals. A sixth-grade teacher at Salisbury Elementary School, he writes early in the morning, before the sun and his toddlers are up. He lives in Rowley, Massachusetts, with his wife, Carla, and their three daughters.

Karen Driscoll gave birth to four children in less than four years (one of whom weighed almost twelve pounds). Her writing about mothering has been published in the bestselling Chicken Soup series, and Chocolate for a Woman’s Soul. She has also been published in MotheringMagazine; Brain,Child; ePregnancy; and elsewhere. Karen and her family live in Wallingford, Connecticut, where she has been known to make an amaretto cheesecake so scrumptious that those who taste it remember it for years to come.

Hope Edelman is the author of three nonfiction books, including the bestseller Motherless Daughters, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for creative nonfiction. Her essays and articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle,Self, Glamour, Child, and Seventeen. She is currently writing her fourth book, Motherless Mothers, about parenting. She lives with her husband and two daughters in southern California.

Louise Erdrich is the author of The Master Butchers Singing Club, Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, Blue Jay’s Dance, and two volumes of poetry. She is the coauthor, with her late husband, Michael Dorris, of The Crown of Columbus. She lives in Minnesota with her six children.
 
 

Peter Fong lives in Pray, Montana, with his wife, Sarah Putnam, and their two children: Dave (nine) and Marina (five). His fiction has been published in the Onion River Review, Soundings East, and Tumblewords. Accounts of his family’s recent travels in Asia have appeared in Fly Fisherman and the New York Times. He won the 25th Anniversary Fiction Prize from Soundings East, and has held a Moran Fellowship at Yellowstone National Park, as well as a Montana Arts Council creative writing fellowship. The son of a Chinese laundry man, Fong has worked as a copyeditor, high-school teacher, commercial fisherman, and sportfishing guide.

Putnam Goodwin-Boyd was an elementary-school teacher for ten years before taking a hiatus to care for his three young children, get a Master’s degree from Smith College, and write. He has published a math text for English as a Second Language students and written for Connecticut College Magazine, Hampshire Life, and FamilyFun. He has published articles on teaching in Instructor and Wonderful Ideas Magazine and written children’s fiction for Cricket and Spider Magazine.

Katie Greenebaum graduated from Yale and received an MFA from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns fellow in fiction writing and won the Balch Award for best short story. She has been a Pushcart Prize finalist and has published in journals such as Chelsea and Literal Latte, and the anthology Child of Mine (Bull, 2000). She has been an English and writing teacher for many years and lives with her husband, Josh May, and their children, Nora, Jake, and Alice, in Nashville, Tennessee.

Geoff Griffin is a sportswriter who lives in Enterprise, Utah, with his wife and two children. He enjoys being home with his daughter, Alex (age twelve), and son, Mose (age ten), during the day before going off to cover ballgames late into the night.

Elisabeth Rose Gruner is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Richmond, where she teaches children’s literature. In addition to publishing scholarly articles on children’s literature and Victorian novels, she writes frequently for Brain, Child. Nick is now five, and his big sister, Mariah, is thirteen.

Ayun Halliday is the author of The Big Rumpus (Seal Press, 2002) and the brains, breastmilk, and sole employee of the East Village Inky, which won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for best zine. She contributes regularly to BUST and Hip Mama, but rarely to the upkeep of her small apartment in Brooklyn. A collection of Ayun’s autobiographical travel memoirs, Monkey Bites (and Other Traveler’s Lessons Learned Too Late), about her travels in Sumatra, Rwanda, Saigon, and elsewhere, is forthcoming from Seal Press.

Shu-Huei Henrickson absconded from her homeland Taiwan and entered the U.S. (legally) in 1991. She lives in Illinois and teaches English at Rock Valley College. Prone to frequent attacks of wanderlust, she has traveled to Russia, Japan, Malaysia, Turkey, England, Germany, Norway, and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared in Standards, American Voices, Fourth Genre, Towers, Mind in Motion, Spectacle, Out of Line, and Fiction International.

Kerry Herlihy’s stories have been published in The Bitch in the House (William Morrow, 2002) and Motherland: Writings by Irish-Americans on Mothers and Daughters (Quill, 2000). A teacher by training, she currently teaches English as a Second Language in southern Maine, where she and her daughter live.

Leanna James is a widely published writer based in Northampton, Massachusetts. A frequent contributor to Brain, Child, she has an MFA in creative writing from Mills College. A former college creative writing and literature teacher, she is currently at work on a novel set in San Francisco about a musician struggling to reconcile with her estranged mother.

Alexandra Kennedy is Vice President and Editorial Director of FamilyFun and Disney Magazine. Since FamilyFun’s premier in 1991, she has overseen its editorial content as well as its brand extensions, including a bestselling book series and an award-winning Web site, and has appeared regularly on television. With a BA from Colgate University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, she began her magazine career as an editor at New England Monthly, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband, poet James Haug, and their two sons.
 
 

Paul Kivel is a social justice activist, writer, and violence-prevention educator. His most recent books include Boys Will Be Men: Raising Our Sons for Courage, Caring, and Community; I Can Make My World a Safer Place: A Kid’s Book about Stopping Violence ; and Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, which won the 1996 Gustavus Myers Award for best book on human rights. He lives in northern California.

Gordon Korman is an author of books for children and young adults. Born in Montreal, Quebec, he published his first novel, This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, when he was fourteen. He has written over forty books and won many awards, including the Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award for The Zucchini Warriors, the Markham Civic Award for the Arts, and the ALA Best Book List and ALA Editor’s Choice for A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag. Translated into French, Swedish, Norwegian, and Cantonese, his books have sold over seven million copies. He lives with his wife, Michelle, and their children, Jay and Daisy, on Long Island.

Morrey McElroy is a theater teacher, children’s theater playwright, and mother of two in New Orleans, Louisiana.  She has an MFA from Louisiana State University.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee has written six novels for children, including Necessary Roughness, an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. Her work has also appeared in the Kenyon Review, American Voice, and the New York Times, and her short fiction won an O. Henry citation. She has been a Fulbright scholar, a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is currently a visiting scholar at Brown University.

Ericka Lutz is the author of seven books, including On the Go with Baby and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Stepparenting. She has written about parenting for anthologies (Child of Mine, Bull, 2000), periodicals (Parents Press, Chicago Baby), and the Web (Amazon.com, BabyZone.com). An instructor at UC Berkeley and a writing consultant, she lives with her husband and their nine-year-old daughter in Oakland, California. She contends she’s still cool, though her daughter, Annie, is beginning to express doubts.

Judy Margulis is a psychologist in private practice in Berkeley, California. She lives in Oakland with her husband, Jeffrey Kessel. She has a son, Jacob, twenty-three, and a daughter, Hannah, twenty-one.

Joyce Maynard has been a journalist and fiction writer since her teens. She is the author of four novels, a memoir, a collection of personal essays on mothering , and two picture books, as well as hundreds of columns and essays for the New York Times, National Public Radio, and many magazines. Maynard wrote Parenting Magazine’s column “A Mother’s Days” for many years, as well as the syndicated column “Domestic Affairs,” in which the story here first appeared. The son whose first steps she describes recently turned nineteen. Her latest novel, The Usual Rules (St. Martin’s Press, 2003), includes a four-year-old boy coping with the sudden death of his mother. “Among my goals as a writer,” she says, “is to portray children with at least as much dignity and understanding for the complexity of childhood as an adult can muster.”

Priscilla Leigh McKinley graduated from the University of Iowa with an MFA in nonfiction writing and is currently working on a PhD in Language, Literacy, and Culture. Her creative nonfiction has been published in a variety of magazines and books, including Between Mothers and Sons: Women Writers Speak about Having Sons and Raising Men (Touchstone Books, 2001). She is working on a memoir, Bittersweet Vines, about losing her sight and regaining her independence. She lives in Iowa City with her husband, son (who is now a teenager), dog, and two ferrets.

Catherine Newman is a freelance writer and editor who lives with her family in western Massachusetts. A contributing editor at FamilyFun, she published an essay about marriage in the bestselling collection The Bitch in the House (William Morrow, 2002), and has written extensively about toddlers in her weekly online parenting journal, “Bringing Up Ben,” on parentcenter.com. She holds a PhD in literature and women’s studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Jennifer Niesslein is coeditor of the award-winning magazine Brain, Child. She lives with her family in Charlottesville, Virginia.
 
 

Brett Paesel is an actress and writer living in Los Angeles. She has written a pilot for Comedy Central and numerous sketches for the live sketch show Margot’s Bush. Formerly in the cast of HBO’s Mr. Show with Bob and David, she currently does performance pieces around town. She lives with her husband, Patrick Towne, and their son, two-year-old Spencer.

Elise Paschen is the author of Houses:Coasts and Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her poems have been widely anthologized and published in numerous magazines and journals, including the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the Nation. A co-founder of the Poetry in Motion program that places poetry posters in subways and buses, Paschen is coeditor of Poetry in Motion and Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast, as well as the bestselling anthology Poetry Speaks. Former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America, she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two children.

Jamie Pearson wrote “The Dinner Hour” to regain her sanity after an evening that tested her both as a parent and a person. She came to writing via a degree in political science and a career selling securities on Wall Street. She now works as a freelance journalist, writing for the Rockridge News and the Oakland Business Review. In her current position as a full-time mother of two, she struggles daily to understand how the most fulfilling work of her life can also be the most mind-numbing. She lives with her family in Menlo Park, California  Read an excerpt from Toddler at www.imperfectparent.com.

Kerri Peterson is a family physician in Carmel Valley, California. She is the mother of four boys under seven, and is currently on sabbatical from medicine, in order to be at home with her children. She has a regular advice column in Working Mother magazine and has been a regular columnist for Single Mom magazine, as well as for Medical Economics. She has also written essays for several medical journals about the humanistic side of medical practice. She is writing a memoir about her experiences as a physician in recovery from anorexia and drug addiction.

James di Properzio attended St. John’s College in Santa Fe and Annapolis. Currently he frails the banjo, plucks the lute, blows the shakuhachi, draws, and writes prose, poetry, and creative nonfiction from his home in Greenfield, Massachusetts. When he is not taking care of his two toddlers, he is advocating Green local politics and putting them into practice as a member of the Board of Directors of Green Fields Market, the local food co-op. As the founder of a writing consulting business, Properzio Prose, he also writes science profiles for the World & I Magazine, edits scientific texts, and translates Italian.

Scott Samuelson drinks not-too-dry gin martinis, spends too much on the food he cooks, is especially fond of the music of Ben Webster, and, when not too tired at the end of the day, types an essay or poem on an old Smith Corona. He and his wife, Helen, are raising their daughter, Irene, and son, Billy, in southeastern Iowa. When not at home chasing after his children or traveling in his grandfather’s native Lebanon, he is teaching courses at Kirkwood Community College in Philosophy, Logic, or the Humanities. He has published scholarly articles on James Joyce, Vico, and Italian mannerist philosophers.

Erika Schickel is the author of "You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom."  She writes for the Los Angeles Times, Bust Magazine, Hip Mama and for LAObserved.com.  Erika lives in L.A. with her husband and two daughters.  Read more of Erika's work at erikaschickel.com.

Suzanne Schryver is a full-time mother of three small children--Cameron (four and a half), Justine (almost three), and Wesley (fifteen months). She lives in New Hampshire where she volunteers at her children’s preschool and is an avid runner, even in the worst weather. Before becoming a mother, she taught creative writing and earned a black belt in karate. She is writing a novel about a six-year-old girl who is dropped into the life of her unsuspecting father.

Meredith Small is a writer and professor of anthropology at Cornell University. She is the author of Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent (Anchor Books, 1998) and KIDS: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Our Children (Doubleday, 2001).

Annie Spiegelman has been working in the film industry for fifteen years.  She is a first assistant director in the Director’s Guild of America and the author of Annie’s Garden Journal: Reflections on Roses, Weeds, Men and Life (1996)--listed as a Border’s Original Voices selection--and Growing Seasons: Half-baked Garden Tips, Cheap Advice on Marriage, and Questionable Theories on Motherhood (2003). She lives in northern California with her family.
 
 

Marian Brown Sprague is on an extended leave of absence from her work in the non-profit sector. For the past five years, her job satisfaction has come from mothering her only daughter. Her writing has been published in the San Jose Mercury News, the Santa Clara Weekly, Who Cares, and Caring People. She lives with her family in Woodside, California.

Sachin Waikar fled clinical psychology--where his anxiety research was published in several journals and featured on national television--and business consulting for the risk-free life of a writer. His current projects include a short-story collection about suburban Indian Americans
and screenplays about high-functioning zombies and spy-dreaming dads. Sachin lives in the western suburbs of Chicago with his wife, Kalpana, and son, Kayan.

Eve S. Weinbaum used to have lots of time for union and community organizing. She is now the mother of Jonah, who is four, and Aviva, three. In her free time she is an assistant professor of Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her book, To Move a Mountain, is forthcoming from the New Press. She has published several articles on grassroots organizing, women and politics, and social movements. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.