Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel





Price: $34.95

Page Count: 260

Publication Date: March 2019

ISBN: 978-1-77258-179-9

“Don’t women with children travel?” Marybeth Bond and Pamela Michael enquire, in their book A Mother’s World: Journeys of the Heart (1998), when discovering the absence of portrayals of travelling mothers. Addressing this absence, our book Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel explores the multiple dimensions of motherhood and travel. Through a variety of compelling creative pieces and critical essays with a global outlook and wide-ranging historical, cultural, and national perspectives, Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel examines the vital contributions made to travel writing and representations of travel by mothers. Autoethnographical approaches inform many of the pieces in this book, illustrating the significance of the personal and writing the self in re-imagining our cultural narratives and representations of travel, and the mothers who undertake it. This book is about mothers who travel, for mothers who travel with their children, and all those readers who have travelled in any capacity, with or without family.

TRAVELLIN’ MAMA: Mothers, Mothering, and Travel is highly engaging and thought provoking volume that aptly balances creative and critical perspectives in exploring maternal travel by combining studies in travel writing with motherhood studies. This stimulating collection offers a truly interdisciplinary array of topics, insights and questions. It examines diverse geographical destinations and starting points and generates enriching reading experiences as it uncovers diverse, global, and complex issues of travel, mothering, and travel narratives. A significant contribution to maternal travel, it empowers interdisciplinary research that questions deeply rooted assumptions about women’s lives and women’s travel narratives in particular. It is a welcome and topical addition to an exciting, growing field of research.

-- Dr Claudia Capancioni, Senior Lecturer in English and Program Leader, Bishop Grosseteste University

Travellin’ Mama is a timely collection of essays that moves well beyond the family vacation to examine maternal journeyings involving life experiences from professional requirements to enforced migrations. Effectively balancing creative, biographical and scholarly works, the volume’s focus on travelling mothers and children offers a new and rich field of study in both travel and maternal scholarship and writing.

-- Rita Bode is Professor of English Literature at Trent University, Canada

Click here to read a review from Mom Egg Review

Dedications
Acknowledgements 
Introduction: Into the World Within Us: Perspectives on Mothers and Travel
 
Relocation 
Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon 
Departure; Day 2 January 22, 2106, Immigration: London 
 
Karem Roitman 
Travelling the Same Road: The Parallel Journeys of Motherhood and Migration 

Adventure 
Nicola Waldron 
Travelling Light 

Li Miao Lovett 
Waterfalls in the Dark 
 
Dena Moes 
Annapurna Epiphany 
 
Jane Frank 
Long Haul Flight After a Visit to the Dali Museum 
 
Vanessa Couto Johnson 
Mexican Restaurants in Deutschland 
 
Katharyn Howd Machan 
As I Travel to Key West 
 
Identity 
Charlotte Beyer 
“No Ship Is Going to Sink With My Family On It”: Motherhood and Travel in Jackie French’s Children’s Novel How the Finnegans Saved the Ship
 
Melanie Duckworth 
“Everyone wants to escape from their own lives sometimes, don’t they?”:Motherhood, the train to Edinburgh, and the work of Kathleen Jamie
 
Discovery 
May Joseph 
Voices from the Oublie 
Cheryl Clark 
Twilight 
 Laura Foley 
Pomegranates in Tehran 
 
Work 
Anne Hamilton 
Was it Not Lucky that the Boy was with his Mother? 
 
Angela Castañeda 
Negotiating Fieldwork and Mothering 
 
Holly Anderson 
Ink Black Sky Bright White Page 
  
Culture 
 Maria Lombard 
Attached Bodies: Movement, Baby-Wearing, and the Travelling Mother 
 
Lynn Mastellotto 
Kids and Food: Family Life Abroad in Recent Relocation Memoirs
 
Exigency 
Cara Margo Delay 
Backstreet to Britain: Women and Abortion Travel in Twentieth-Century Ireland 
 
Monica Reyes 
Sins of Omission: ‘Unpacking’ the Rhetoric of Sexuality within Nineteenth-Century American Mothers’ Travel-Diaries”

Janet MacLennan
When Monsters Move the Mother in You

About the Contributors

Charlotte Beyer is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. She has published widely on crime fiction and contemporary literature. She is the editor of Teaching Crime Fiction (Palgrave, 2018), and Co-Editor of Mothers Without Their Children (Demeter Press, 2019)

Janet MacLennan, born on an island in the Atlantic, has made her way to an island of quite different climes–from Canada to the Caribbean to make her home as a professor of communication, narrative researcher, and travellin’ mama to a travellin’ boy.

Dorsía Smith Silva is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras in the Faculty of General Studies. She is the co-editor of Caribbean without Borders: Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture (2008), among others. In addition, her poetry has appeared in Adanna, POUI, and Nourish.

Marjorie Tesser is the author of two poetry chapbooks THE IMPORTANT THING IS (Firewheel Award Winner) and The Magic Feather. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in Drunken Boat, Akashic Press’ Thursdaze, Earth’s Daughter, The Saturday Evening Post, and others. She is the editor in chief of Mom Egg Review.