As Mother’s Day beckons, Mary Shelley would like to have a word, or rather a novel’s worth of words. Her novel 200-year-old Frankenstein Or a Modern Prometheus has much to say today about the essential matristic values of nurturing and life-giving, women’s reproductive and other rights, parenthood and child care, and more. The novel’s two centuries of play, film, and book adaptations, most recently Kris Waldherr’s excellent Unnatural Creatures: A Novel of the Frankenstein Women, attest to Frankenstein’s continuing relevance to profound aspects of human experience.
First, let’s look at what might have influenced the writing of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women which in 1792 championed educational and employment opportunities for women. She advocated for women to be treated as full human beings rather than as mere objects of beauty whose inherent “hysteria” made rational thought impossible. Wollstonecraft cited the benefits to society of mothers who can properly educate their children. Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth to Shelley and was vilified for a previous illegitimate daughter.
Continue reading “It’s Alive!!!!: Mary Shelley Has a Word to Say about Mother’s Day by Carolyn Lee Boyd”
Tobie Nathan’s panoramic novel about Jews and Muslims (and Christians) in early twentieth-century Egypt, 
Though I have not been Christian for many years, I love to decorate my house for the holidays. I have many decorations that I have collected over the years, including a Hummel angel gazing at the Christ child that was my father’s mother’s and a small crocheted Christmas tree given to me by my mother. My Christmas tree is a living one in a pot, and I usually manage to keep it alive on the balcony or outside for several years. One of my hobbies is collecting ornaments for the tree. Among my favorites are glass icicles and snowflakes crocheted by my friend Alexis many decades ago. There are white doves and brown birds that land on the tree branches and glass balls that have come into the stores again in recent years.
their hands over and under mine and we offer our gratitude into each morsel in turn, one for each direction and each element. For North, we speak of stability and strength, the health of our bodies, the safety and security of our foundation, the earth on which we live. For East, we speak of air, our mental states, how we will be mindful of how we speak and think and focus our energy and time. For the South, we speak of fire, of tending the flames of our inspiration, nourishing our passions, and watching for burnout. In the West, we speak of water, of being emotionally stable and loving. In the last seventeen years of parenting, if there is one thing I have learned is that rituals with children need to always involve action. The kids are eager to toss the biscuits into the air, in the directions we are honoring. In past years we have tossed pinches of cornmeal, at other times of the year grains of corn or flower seeds or dried herbs or petals, at the Winter Solstice we toss pieces of our annual golden “sun bread.” This bread, washed with egg and laden with butter is one we make together on solstice morning, shaping the smooth dough into a large sun face with a spiraled corona of rays. After it has baked, we offer scraps to the sun at noon, tossing them high into the air as we shout “Thank you! Thank you!” again and again into the crisp winter air. Last year, my garnet bracelet, a symbol of the path I walk with the goddess Persephone, flies off as I toss my sun bread and disappears into the waving stalks of wild grasses. We are never able to find it and the unexpected symbolism of Persephone becoming joined anew with the amber waves of Demeter’s grains delights me.
blackberries and rose petals. And, now on Lammas, there are these small white biscuits in our hands. My oldest son is almost seventeen. He is nearly as tall as his father, six feet. He has the biscuit for the south, which from where we stand on the deck is our house. He winds up his arm and lets the biscuit fly up, up and over the roof.
the women to circle, sing, celebrate, and share since 2008. She plans and facilitates women’s circles, seasonal retreats and rituals, mother-daughter circles, family ceremonies, and red tent circles in rural Missouri. She is a priestess who holds MSW, M.Div, and D.Min degrees and wrote her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create 
Two recent posts, 
Last week a friend of mine started a post asking people to share something that they’ve enjoyed or appreciated since shelter-at-home orders began across the country and globe. This friend was in no way trying to minimize the very difficult situations that so many of us find ourselves facing during this pandemic. Rather, the list she elicited and generated helped to create, at least for me, a moment of hope or peace—a moment that I suspect many of us need right now.
Very early in Henri Bosco’s 1948 novel Malicroix, a young man, Martial de Mégremut, living placidly amid fruitful orchards in a tame Provençal village, receives a letter informing him he has inherited “some marshland, a few livestock, a ramshackle house” from a reclusive great-uncle, Cornélius de Malicroix. Against his family’s strenuous objections–with alarm they speak of “marshes, mosquitoes, miasmas”–Mégremut resolves to travel alone to the remote Camargue to claim his “wild” Malicroix inheritance. The house is on an island, and to reach it Mégremut must cross a rough river, at night, in a frail wooden boat piloted by a taciturn old man who meets him at dusk in the middle of a vast plain.
and share since 2008. She plans and facilitates women’s circles, seasonal retreats and rituals, mother-daughter circles, family ceremonies, and red tent circles in rural Missouri. She is a priestess who holds MSW, M.Div, and D.Min degrees and wrote her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create 
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