Edited by Mai Abu ElDahab. Contributions by Mai Abu ElDahab, Lara Khaldi, Mary Jirmanus Saba, Mirene Arsanios and Nikki Columbus, Basma Alsharif.

Four essays and one conversation with contemporary artists and curators from different backgrounds and origins (Jerusalem, Lebanon, Kuwait, USA, Egypt) discussing their experience of becoming mothers as professionals in the arts, its reality and effects.

While their reflections represent a similar strata of art worker in terms of background, class, and career trajectory, the impact of instruments of patriarchy on rendering maternity invisible that they describe is recognizable and insidious. In a post-partum diary, Lara Khaldi makes audible the everyday exhaustion and disregard that comes with being a new mother; Mirene Arsanios and Nikki Columbus discuss the impact of the absence of legal or social protection for mothers; Basma Alsharif walks us through the difficulties of navigating the demands of different social contexts; Mary Jirmanus Saba pre-occupies at home with a flimsy maternity blog; And Mai Abu ElDahab puts propositions on the table for how to deal with all of this.

The intersection of motherhood and creative life is explored in these writings on mothering that turn the spotlight from the child to the mother herself. Here, in memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays, and fiction, mothers describe first-hand the changes brought to their lives by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering.

Contributors include Margaret Atwood, Lydia Davis, Annie Ernaux, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Griffin, Nancy Huston, Jane Lazarre, Ursula K. LeGuin, Margaret Mead, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Alicia Ostriker, Grace Paley, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Mona Simpson, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alice Walker, Joy William and many more.

A publication printed on the occasion of MOMMY, a group show that considered the mother, with work by Lutz Bacher, Susan Cianciolo, Sonya Hamilton, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eliot Porter, Jeff Preiss, Aura Rosenberg, Diane Simpson, Barbara T. Smith, Frances Stark, and Rosemarie Trockel. It also included new site-specific works by Cathy Wilkes and Anicka Yi, and a performance by Karin Schneider.

Selected writings by Lydia Davis, Doris Lessing, Elena Ferrante, Lisa Baraitser, Silvia Federici, Sara Ruddick, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Thomas Nagel, Anne Truitt, and Maggie Nelson.

A PDF of the reader can be downloaded here.

Iman Mersal intricately weaves a new narrative of motherhood, moving between interior and exterior scapes, diaries, readings, and photographic representations of motherhood to question old and current representations of motherhood and the related space of unconditional love, guilt, personal goals, and traditional expectations. What is hidden in narratives of motherhood in fictional and nonfictional texts as well as in photographs?

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet and associate professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.

This is the fourth book in the Kayfa ta series, a publishing initiative of Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis. Each book in the series is a monographic essay commissioned in the style of how-to manuals that situation themselves in the space between the technical and the reflective, the everyday and the speculative, the instructional and the intuitive, and the factual and the fictional. Design by Julie Peeters.

Iman Mersal intricately weaves a new narrative of motherhood, moving between interior and exterior scapes, diaries, readings, and photographic representations of motherhood to question old and current representations of motherhood and the related space of unconditional love, guilt, personal goals, and traditional expectations. What is hidden in narratives of motherhood in fictional and nonfictional texts as well as in photographs?

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet and associate professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.

This is the fourth book in the Kayfa ta series, a publishing initiative of Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis. Each book in the series is a monographic essay commissioned in the style of how-to manuals that situation themselves in the space between the technical and the reflective, the everyday and the speculative, the instructional and the intuitive, and the factual and the fictional. Design by Julie Peeters.