MOTHER IS A VERB

Summer Stewart, Elisa Carlsen, & Amy Baskin in conversation w/ Frances Badalamenti about care, carrying, identity, & the roles we take on What does it mean to mother? Not just to be a mother, but to mother: to care for, protect, tend, absorb, manage, create, sustain, and sometimes sacrifice. Join Summer Stewart, Elisa Carlsen, and Amy Baskin in conversation with moderator Frances Badalamenti for an expansive discussion and literary reading inspired by Stewart’s book MOTHER! about mothering as an act, an expectation, a form of labor, and a role that reaches far beyond traditional ideas of motherhood. Together, the writers will discuss the things we are asked to carry and the identities that built around them. They’ll talk about caretaking and creative work, bodies and obligation, gender and family, and the roles women in particular are expected to move between: daughter, partner, mother, worker, artist, caretaker, fixer, witness. But this conversation isn't only for mothers. Mothering can happen between friends, within families and communities, through art, toward our own parents, toward people we love, and toward parts of ourselves. It can be chosen or expected, joyful or exhausting, intimate or invisible. Sometimes it is an act of love. Sometimes it is labor no one notices until we stop doing it. Come talk with us about what we mother, what we carry, the masks we wear, and what happens when we decide some of it no longer belongs to us.