I’m No Superwoman: True Stories of Kids, Career and the Chaos of Modern Motherhood”
Juggling career, motherhood and family life is clearly a hot button topic for many women today. This anthology is different from other “motherhood” books out there today in a number of ways:
1) As an anthology of personal essays, this book features the voices of real women, not just snippets from interviews or summaries of other women’s experiences.
2) This book is NOT a self-help guide, nor is it a collection of funny, “make me feel good” anecdotal. The essays in this book, while they might be humorous, are thought provoking and deeply personal. They are the caliber of stories published in The New Yorker magazine.
3) This book explores the struggle of women torn between their roles as mothers and career women (or something other than “mother”), and what they have done, or hope to do, to make it work. The stories offer life lessons and, sometimes but not always, solutions.
We are looking for personal stories 1500 to 3000 words in length (approximately 6-12 pages, double spaced, 1 inch margins) that explore the challenges women face while raising kids and working a job, or raising kids and staying at home. We also encourage career women who have made the decision not to have children, or who are contemplating having children, to submit their stories. Our focus is not necessarily on success stories (how women manage to “do it all well).” Rather, our focus is on the struggles women encounter as we attempt to live a full life-- balancing career, family and ever elusive personal time.
Our readers will include young college graduates contemplating motherhood; women overwhelmed by the demands of career and family life; stay at home moms and moms trying to “on ramp” back into a career; husbands and fathers trying to better understand the plight of the women in their lives; and anyone wondering how mothers are faring in the professional world today.
The success of this book will lie in the readability of the stories. These are NOT scholarly essays. They are personal memoirs from real women illuminating the triumphs and failures of raising children while maintaining a career, or not. They should be dramatic, funny, emotional, passionate. Other potential issues to explore: equal parenting or not, successful relationships or not,fidelity or not; feeling good about work or not. Your candor, passion and, perhaps, humor are
most important. Funny and outrageous anecdotes (e.g. struggling to keep down morning sickness while presenting to a board room of men) are encouraged!
Manuscripts and queries should be typewritten and double-spaced. Please send in in Word or RTF format. Please provide a 3 sentence description of yourself, contact info, including an email address, and day and evening phone numbers. If possible, send writing clips of other work you
have published.
** If you do plan to contribute, we would appreciate you sending a short, one-paragraph abstract/proposal about your subject matter as soon as possible. We will do our best to review and provide
feedback.
Deadline for submission is April 14, 2010.
If we decide to include your story in the collection, we will contact you directly to discuss the
best way to handle the material/assignment. Due to the large volume of queries we have received,
we may not be able to include every story received. We will try to notify you within 30
days of receiving your manuscript to let you know whether it will be included in the collection.
All manuscripts and queries should be e-mailed to:
sam@walravens.com
Subject: submission: “I’m No Superwoman”
Samantha Parent Walravens
www.samanthawalravens.com
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