[Stefanie DeMaria]

Attached here. Thanks for reading.

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[Robin Nixon]

Hi Stefanie,

I am so glad I chose yours as one of my two to read. I am also estranged from my mother and found it shocking, healing and befuddling to look at my mother’s choices after becoming a mother myself. I am impressed by your self-compassion and maturity; both will do your own daughter well. Taking care of yourself is so important, always, but perhaps especially when kids are still in the baby/toddler stage. My eldest is 15 now, youngest is 7, and it just keeps getting better.

As a reader, I really appreciated the use of specific details. They brought color and realism to your piece. I found myself wanting more information on the reasons behind the estrangement, but the author must be ready to share that type of information first. It is fine to leave readers hanging. I have seen some authors work around that by specifically naming the thing they are NOT going to talk about. Something like “I don’t want to put into words what happened. I am sure you remember it as well as I do. Or maybe you remember it differently. I may never know.” Just an idea.

Thank you for sharing this. I hope to learn more about your story over the next few weeks.

Robin

[jenniferc.lopez11]

Wow, so many layers of time, place, emotion! “My memories can only explain so much, so I have many questions.” I feel you on that kind of questioning, on the layers of perspective – feeling and questioning with and through memory, experience, perspective, conversations. I keep coming back to this line: “You didn’t raise me, but I still carry your softness and devotion from the before.” It is such deep, sacred work to hold and consider all of these layers in relationship and lineage.

I feel struck by and curious about place, relationships to place, and how place relates to the relationships you’re naming and exploring (partly as someone who also grew up in The Bronx): blooming on the sidewalk cracks on the other side of Soundview; the burning Bronx and the lingering smoke; looking at Manhattan from The Bronx; Nuyorican, Puerto Rican; and the smaller places within that – church, the kitchen table. I love how these details situate your stories, you in them, invite the reader into them with you.

[Gabby Rivera]

Stefanie, this is excellent. Your voice is authentic and rooted in strength, vulnerability and truth. Love it all. Love the specific moments you lay out for us, to really put the reader in your life and make us laugh: I put ketchup on my pasteles. I can even makes that life changing lasagna just as good as you ever did. And there’s so much beauty in the writing too: Your Bronx was on literal fire, while mine choked on lingering invisible smoke. I wasn’t going to be another forgotten girl from the forgotten borough, so that train became my escape to the horizon. I think my main questions are: What happened with the mom?? Is she an ex-drug addict turned Evangelical? Was there a falling out about queerness? Some moments were just a touch unclear but that’s an easy fix, just a clarifying line here and there would fill those little voids. You got this!

[Author]

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