This Mama Is Lit!

Eva Langston and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Lish McBride, author of quirky books for teens and adults, about writing in different genres, navigating the publishing industry, and weaving humor through daily life.

Lish McBride is a prolific writer of Young Adult and Adult books that often contain humor and magic. Her latest adult novel, The Suitcase Swap, is a love story born out of a JFK Airport baggage claim snafu. The book was first released in the United Kingdom and will be out in the U.S. soon. The audio version can be found here. Her latest YA novel, Most Likely to Murder, will release in March 2026 and is available now for preorder.

In addition to being a professional writer, Lish exists as an amateur goblin living in the Pacific Northwest. In the crime of the century, she tricked not one but two universities into giving her degrees, ending up with an MFA from the University of New Orleans. Lish is a former bookseller and event host at Third Place Books, a giant thriving indie bookstore just outside of Seattle. Her first book, Hold Me Closer, Necromancer, was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults title, Morris Award finalist, and won the Scandiuzzi Children’s Book Award. She is the author of other funny and creepy Young Adult books such as Necromancing the Stone, Firebug, Pyromantic, Curses, and Red in Tooth and Claw. She also has her adult fantasy romance series, which so far includes A Little Too Familiar and Rough Around the Hedges. Beyond writing, her ultimate dream is to have her own castle and one of those libraries with the wheely ladder.

Author website: https://lishmcbride.squarespace.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lishmcbride/

Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/lishmcbride.bsky.social

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Alicia Elliott's debut novel, And Then She Fell, explores how motherhood and mental health collide as an Indigenous young woman confronts her inherited trauma and looks to her own creation story to find her power.

Alicia is a Mohawk writer and editor living in Brantford, Ontario. Her short fiction was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2018, Best Canadian Stories 2018, and The Journey Prize Stories 30, and she was chosen as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, was a national bestseller in Canada. Her debut novel, And Then She Fell, was A Globe and Mail "Best Book of 2023" as well as a Most Anticipated Book Pick by Good Morning America, Bustle, CrimeReads, Electric Literature, and more.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ellialic/?hl=en

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Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Amanda K. Jaros, author of Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology, about mothering and stepmothering, running a motherhood magazine, and finding support in writing communities.

Amanda is a writer and editor living in Ithaca, NY. Her writing passion began with personal journals and short stories as a child, which morphed into a series of mommy blogs after she had her son in the mid-aughts. Nearing forty, she decided to follow her dream and returned to school to earn her MFA in creative nonfiction from Chatham University (where Rachel Carson earned her degree in 1929!). In recent years, her writing has appeared in a wide range of places, online and in print, from literary magazines to the local newspaper.

The opportunity to work at Literary Mama opened the door for more editing experience and she stayed there for 11 years. Amanda started as a blog editor, moved to the creative nonfiction department, and then became a senior editor while eventually serving as Editor-in-Chief from 2018-2022. During that time she incorporated the all-volunteer organization as a 501(c)3 nonprofit and led several successful fundraising campaigns. Find more of her work here. In 1999, Amanda thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail by herself. Her memoir In My Boots about the six-month adventure was published this year by Black Rose Writing.

Since 2018, Amanda has served on her County Legislature, participating in many committees and boards, focusing on environmental, water resources, health and human services, and government operations issues. She loves trees, mountains, the Adirondacks, and everything in nature. When not writing or editing, you can find her on a trail somewhere.

Author website: http://www.amandakjaros.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandajaroschampion/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Amanda-K-Jaros-Author/100089608878145/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-k-jaros-champion-082b6842/

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Eva Langton and Amanda Fields chat with Nikkya Hargrove, author of Mama: A Queer Black Woman's Story of a Family Lost and Found, about raising her half sibling as her child and navigating the family court and prison systems.

Nikkya Hargrove's powerful memoir Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found follows her journey as she makes the decision to raise her third half sibling, Jonathan, after he was born to her mother, who had a crack cocaine addiction and spent time incarcerated while Nikkya was raised by her grandparents. The book traces Nikkya’s path toward custody and adoption, her family’s perspective on her queerness, and the way she finds love and forms a family.

Nikkya Hargrove is a 2012 LAMBDA Literary Nonfiction Fellow and has written about adoption, same-sex multi-ethnic marriage, motherhood as a gay woman, and the prison system for The Washington Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, Scary Mommy, and Shondaland, among many others. She has worked for social impact nonprofits providing support to underserved communities throughout her professional career. She graduated from Bard College and lives in Connecticut with her wife and three children.

Author website: https://www.nikkyamhargrove.com/

Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/nikkyahargrove/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston, Holly Rizzuto Palker + Amanda Fields chat with Sandra Chwialkowska, author of The Ends of Things, about screenwriting versus novel-writing + surviving a book launch with a newborn baby.

Sandra Chwialkowska is a television producer and writer whose first novel, The Ends of Things, is a psychological suspense that explores female friendship and agency, and pushes back against the trope of the helpless female as a “perfect victim.” Her prolific years of screenwriting translate into engrossing cinematic writing on the page, and this novel grew out of her own fears of traveling alone as a woman.

Sandra Chwialkowska is a television writer and producer who splits her time between Los Angeles and Toronto. Most recently, she served as writer and co–executive producer on the Golden Globe–nominated ABC series Alaska Daily, starring Hilary Swank. She has also developed several TV adaptations for female-centric thrillers, including Mary Kubica’s New York Times Bestseller Local Woman Missing. Sandra holds a BA in literature from Yale.

Author website: https://sandra-c.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sandrachw/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-chwialkowska-75603a8/

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2181319/

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Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker speak with Susan Kiyo Ito, author of I Would Meet You Anywhere, about adoption, the complexities of meeting one's birth mother, and reproductive freedom. Seeking her birth mother and fighting for reproductive rights inspires Susan to find the power of support in community and answers through her writing.

A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award and a Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, I Would Meet You Anywhere is the stirring culmination of Ito’s decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story. Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father white. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early twenties was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother’s desire for anonymity against Ito’s need to know her origins, to see and be seen. Along the way, Ito grapples with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family.

Susan Ito began reading at the age of three, and writing stories at the age six. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Hip Mama, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen,The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is a MacDowell colony Fellow, and has also been awarded residencies at The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. She has performed her solo show, The Ice Cream Gene, around the US. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater. She is a member of the Writers’ Grotto, and teaches at Mills College/Northeastern University and Bay Path University. She was one of the co-organizers of Rooted and Written, a no-fee writing workshop for writers of color. She lives in Northern California.

Author Website: https://www.thesusanito.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/susanitowriter

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesusanito/

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Holly Rizzuto Palker and Eva Langston speak with Judith Smith, author of Difficult: Mothering Challenging Adult Children Through Conflict and Change, about mothering challenging adult children, and how to find solutions through acceptance and no assignment of fault. Becoming an adult is not nearly as clear today as it was 50 years ago. Major structural changes are needed for mothers not to blame themselves and begin to discover answers on how to move forward.

Difficult is based on a series of in-depth interviews Judith Smith conducted with women (all over 60 years of age, across socio-economic and geographic locations). Despite the unique circumstances of the women’s lives, she discovered many commonalities in their stories. Nearly all had re-opened their homes to their adult children when they had nowhere else to go. Many of the adult children had mental health problems or substance abuse disorder—or both. None of the women had expected their own later years to be framed by being once again “parent.” Yet for all the many similarities, there were also unique circumstances in each child’s life. That’s what led Smith to search for a name to describe what she was seeing and to ultimately settle on the term Difficult Adult Child. She chose this name to acknowledge not just the challenges faced by the grown children, but the hardships passed along to the mothers who cared for them.

Judith is a licensed clinical social worker who offers individual counseling, webinars, and weekly support groups for mothers with "difficult adult children." After years as a researcher on child development, Judith began researching an understudied aspect of the life cycle -- mothering in later life. Her work focuses on the unique stresses that mothers experience when their adult children are struggling with serious mental illness, substance use disorder, or chronic unemployment and incarceration.She has been interviewed in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and on many podcasts including Schizophrenia: Three Moms in the Trenches.

Author Website: https://www.difficultmothering.com/

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/judith-r-smith-99a81134/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/difficultmothering/

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Holly Rizzuto Palker and Eva Langston chat with Rachelle Bergstein, author of The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us, about why Blume, once the most banned writer in the United States is more relevant now than ever. Judy Blume's ability to reflect real life parenting, puberty and precocious kids built a trust with her adolescent readers and provided a solid training ground for the next generation of women's rights activists. The original Judy Blume generation has now grown up and taken her messaging into our own parenting and beyond.

Rachelle is a lifestyle writer, bestselling author and editor, focused on style, pop culture and families. Her latest book, The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood For All of Us published with Simon & Schuster in July 2024 and it was a USA Today bestseller, as well as a notable nonfiction pick by LibraryReads. Bookpage called it “ground-breaking,” the LA Times called it “lively and important,” and it has been positively reviewed by Kirkus, The Wall Street Journal and The Skimm.

Rachelle's first book, Women from the Ankle Down: The Story of Shoes and How They Define Us (HarperCollins, 2012) was called “wickedly provocative” by Kirkus, “fleet-footed” by the New York Times, and was named one of Janet Maslin’s top beach reads of Summer 2012. Her second, Brilliance and Fire: A Biography of Diamonds (HarperCollins, 2016) was called “exhilarating” by the Wall Street Journal, and was picked as one of Amazon’s top nonfiction titles of June 2016. It was featured in best-of summer lists at Harper’s Bazaar and The Knot.

Rachelle spent five years as a features editor and reporter for the New York Post. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg View, Forbes, Wirecutter, LitHub and others. She has been interviewed for 99% Invisible, NPR’s Weekend Edition and Marketplace and has appeared on WSJ Lunch Break, Bold TV and Yahoo Finance. Inspired by Judy Blume’s longtime fight against book bans, Rachelle follows the current politically charged book banning crisis on her Substack, called Banner Year. She lives with her husband and son in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Author Website: https://www.rachellebergstein.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachellewb/?hl=en

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelle-bergstein/

X: https://x.com/RaBergstein

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Holly Rizzuto Palker and Brianna Avenia-Tapper chat with Aileen Weitraub, author of Knocked Down: A High Risk Memoir, about the sacrifice of motherhood, interfaith marriage, and the gifts of grief. Grieving the loss of her father while on bedrest has Aileen poking at the notion of how the boy becomes a man when he loses a father. But what about the girl? What does she become?

Aileen Weintraub is an award-winning author, journalist, and editor whose latest book is Knocked Down: A High-Risk Memoir, about a Brooklyn girl who moves to the country, gets married, and finds herself living in a rickety farmhouse, knocked up, and faced with the prospect of five months of bed rest. What ensues is a laugh-out-loud, emotionally charged story of one woman’s unexpected path to authenticity. The Erma Bombeck Workshop named Aileen Humor Writer of the Month for Knocked Down and Publishers Weekly says, “…there’s beauty on every page.”

Aileen is also the author of the middle-grade social justice book WE GOT GAME! 35 Female Athletes Who Changed the World, which was honored as A Mighty Girl’s Best Book of the Year. Her best-selling Never Too Young: 50 Unstoppable Kids Who Made a Difference won a Parents’ Choice Award. She has been invited to write about women’s health and wellness for multiple anthologies including PLAY IT FORWARD and SO HEAVY A WEIGHT both forthcoming in Spring 2025.

Her essays and articles have appeared in The Washington Post, HuffPost, NBC, AARP, Glamour, and other publications. Her essay “This Is What No One Tells Women About What Happens to Your Body in Your 40s,” in HuffPost garnered over 2 million hits and was discussed on The View.

Inspired by the athletes in WE GOT GAME! Aileen has taken up boxing. She pronounces her name with a long A, like the first letter of the alphabet.

Author Website: https://www.aileenweintraub.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aileenweintraub/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AileenWeintraub.Author/

X: https://x.com/AileenWeintraub

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Holly Rizzuto Palker and Amanda Fields chat with Nancy Johnson, author of People of Means, about ancestral pride, Black excellence and social reckoning in each and every moment in time. They explore the notion of how nothing has changed, yet so much has in a short period of time. Ultimately, Nancy writes to open the dialogue on race and welcome complicated conversations about the racial divide in our country.

A native of Chicago’s South Side, Nancy Johnson worked for more than a decade as an Emmy-nominated, award-winning television journalist at CBS and ABC affiliates in markets nationwide. Her debut novel, The Kindest Lie, has been reviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and is featured on Entertainment Weekly’s Must List. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and has been named one of the most anticipated books of 2021 by Newsweek, O, the Oprah Magazine, Shondaland, NBC News, Marie Claire, ELLE, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Post, Good Housekeeping, Parade, Refinery29, and more. Booksellers nationwide selected her novel as an Indie Next pick and librarians chose it for LibraryReads. Nancy’s work has been published in Real Simple and O, The Oprah Magazine, and has received support from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, Tin House, and Kimbilio Fiction.

A graduate of Northwestern University and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Nancy lives in downtown Chicago and leads corporate and internal communications for a large health care nonprofit.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nancyjauthor/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NancyJohnsonAuthor/

Author Website: https://nancyjohnson.net/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com