Mother Tongue, Issue 9

Mother Tongue is a biannual print magazine that interrogates (and celebrates) modern motherhood through inclusive stories about art, sex, pop culture, politics, food and a few things in between. It’s not about kids or how to parent them: it’s about the nuanced lives we are living—as mothers, and much more. The magazine is edited by co-founders Melissa Goldstein and Natalia Rachlin and designed by creative director Vanessa Saba.

In this issue:

Issue 9 is full of women sharing, with great conviction, how they see the world (and themselves in it): filmmaker Mary Bronstein makes a horror show of the maternal experience; writer Alexa Wilding asserts her existence amidst illness in the best way she knows how, and our cover star, Erykah Badu is, in her own words “pregnant with possibility.” Caro Claire Burke confronts millennial “cringe” and wonders why we’re so afraid of it; artist Carmen Winant takes us on an all-American road trip (with her mom), and we publish a short fiction piece for the first time, a ghost story, no less, by the young writer Yukti Narang. There’s also talk of earlobes, an account of fertilization as you never knew it, poetry by Kate Baer and Hala Alyan, an ode to frivolity, and a reexamination of Linda and Paul McCartney’s supposedly perfect love story—yet another reminder that things are not always as they appear.

This issue also features words and work by: Hala Alyan, Angelica Alzona, Joana Avillez, Kate Baer, Kate Branch, Caro Claire Burke, Clémence Polès Farhang, Erin Feher, Kate Forster, Liana Finck, Hannah Felt Garner, Malwina Gudowska, Victoria Hely-Hutchinson, Bess Kalb, Hillary Kelly, Julie Kim, Keerthana Kunnath, Shannon Cartier Lucy, Chau Luong, Melissa Maerz, Janet Manley, Weronika Anna Marianna, Helena Minginowicz, Yukti Narang, Alice Pfeiffer, Naila Ruechel, Vanessa Saba, Anaïs Wade, Alexa Wilding, and Carmen Winant.