Mother’s Day is fast approaching — May 2nd is a day to cherish time spent with your mother, grandmother or daughter. This week’s special is:

I’ve Always Meant to Tell You:
Letters to Our Mothers:
An Anthology of Contemporary Women Writers
Edited by Constance Warloe (Hardcover, 504 pages, 1997, $22.00)

In this collection of original letters, more than 75 daughters, including Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver, Ntozake Shange, and Hilma Wolitzer, speak to their mothers, both living and deceased, with messages that come straight from the heart.

These are novelists, poets, essayists, humorists, cartoonists and journalists of different ages and cultures. Together they share thoughtful, provocative, funny, and sometimes painful revelations — memories, confessions, poems, fables and tales — at once personal and universal. Illustrations.

Our favorite letter is from Barbara Kingslover to her mother (click to enlarge):

Library Journal “highly recommends” this book for women’s studies, literature, and general collections. “The letters are addictive,” writes Kirkus Reviews. “Like listening to a top-40 station, you hang on to hear what’s next.”

Purchase this book for $22:

The University’s Press release.

Article in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus 14 May 2009.

Article in the Yorkshire Post 16 May 2009.

He draws on Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg, from 1986, and shows how her advice to poets applies to writing web posts and constructing wikis.  Shawn’s connection: The weblog gives you that extra push needed to overcome doubt.

I am amazed at how many people consider themselves a writer, or who hope to become one, and weblogs have done something that journals never did. They’ve given an extra push of motivation to those people who always wanted to write, but never did.

Unfortunately, it seems the same motivation which encourages us to publish, also feeds those voice of self-doubt that Natalie talks about. I don’t know how many posts I’ve started and deleted because I thought they weren’t relevant or exciting or interesting enough. Which is why I love this sentence so much: “Instead, have a tenderness and determination toward your writing, a sense of humor and a deep patience that you are doing the right thing. Avoid getting caught by that small gnawing mouse of doubt.”

Nice connection. The kind of writing is not relevant here.  Tech writers, article writers, journalists, grant writers, freelancers suffer the same self-doubt as poets and essayists, and the weblog gives them all a space to practice patience, to chase out the mouse.

Both the book and Shawn’s blog are worth a read.

Now that I think about it, Gladwell did exactly what he’s arguing against in getting the point of Blink across. He inundated us with information, when his whole thing was about being able to get what you need to know in order to understand something through the abbreviating process of thin-slicing. Oh well, maybe he’s paid by the number of pages he publishes.

Instead of glowing about Gladwell like I did before, I’m going to glow about someone else. I learned about Sloane Crosley when Emily Gould reviewed her book of essays, I Was Told There’d be Cake, for Radar Online. (This title also pretty much sums up how Bongo feels every time he arrives at a party. Or at work, even.) Crosley is a book publicist, very young and accomplished in comparison to the rest of the industry, and reportedly also very nice. Normally I don’t feel compelled to take online book reviews seriously, but for some reason I felt pre-ordering Cake would be a safe bet. Fortunately for Crosley, Amazon, and me, it was.

Crosley is the kind of female writer I would one day like to be. I found familiarity in Candace Bushnell’s voice and Lauren Weisberger’s voice, but I couldn’t fully align with them. (If you’ve read Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada, you’d know they’re not as pink and ditzy as HBO and FOX would like you to think. In fact, they’re both kind of bleak at their ends.) They were almost too magenta for me, too fashion-focused, too man-crazy. Crosley is a nice mixture of quirky, confident, and intelligent leaning toward the nerdier side of the spectrum. Her essays are quick reads and she’d be the type of person you’d want to meet with for coffee even when you don’t drink coffee.

She talks about this strange pony collection that exes have left her with. And accidentally taking home a rare species of butterfly from the butterfly exhibit she was begrudgingly volunteering at. Her book cover seems to encapsulate the glamorous side of more hipster interior decoration, and the sans serif font combined with all those flowery figures is so 2008. I also like this about her, from her bio, “She also wrote the cover story for the worst-selling issue of Maxim in that magazine’s history.” She’s just charming.

If I ever have kids, this is what I’m going to do with them: I am going to give birth to them on foreign soil – preferably the soil of someplace like Oostende or Antwerp – destinations that have the allure of being obscure, freezing, and impossibly cultured. These are places in which people are casually trilingual and everyone knows how to make good coffee and gourmet dinners at home without having to shop for specific ingredients. Everyone has hip European sneakers that effortlessly look like the exact pair you’ve been searching for your whole life. Everything is sweetened with honey and even the generic-brand Q-tips are aesthetically packaged. People die from old age or crimes of passion or because they fall off glaciers. All the women are either thin, thin and happy, fat and happy, or thin and miserable in a glamorous way. Somehow none of their Italian heels get caught in fifteenth-century cobblestone. Ever.

“Bastard Out of Westchester”
I Was Told There’d be Cake
by Sloane Crosley

Finally, in an age where I really miss pop-up books, Crosley crafted dioramas to illustrate her visual interpretation of her stories. Check out the rest of The Diorama Diaries on Flickr. Here’s my favorite one, from the Sign Language for Infidels set.