(m)other voices

Jamye Shelleby was a regular contributor to (m)other voices from May to December 2011. Currently, she is at work on a novel.

She writes early each morning, waking before the rest of the household in order to find some precious quiet space. Because although she enjoys other creative pursuits—such as photography and sewing & knitting,—writing is the only one she’ll give up sleep for.  Her short stories have made their way into Shenandoah and The Drum, and her nonfiction into MomSense.

When the clock strikes 7 a.m., she shapeshifts from Writer to Mother, and spends the rest of the day caring for her three little men.  Often, she’s simultaneously feeding the baby, playing ball with the toddler, and attempting to answer the First Grader’s  complex scientific questions, such as, “How do they measure the speed of light?”

She surmises that the speed of light can be measured with the growth of children, who change at the maximum speed possible in the world, whose weight and height she calculates not with a scale or marks on the wall, but with her own arms.

In the evening, the four of them welcome home the man who started it all.  Jamye never stops being grateful for the college sweetheart-turned-husband who supports her every endeavor, whether it be a summertime fruit-picking & pie-baking business or a lifelong pursuit of finding just the right word to capture an instantaneous moment in time.

This is why she gets up every morning to write: to do her best at turning the intangible into something tangible, at preserving a brief moment in the world by immortalizing it with words.

Here are some of her best (m)other voices posts: A Dream Deferred; What is Right and Good; Letter to myself, circa 2005; The Incremental and the Incredible: a Photo Essay; A Night in New York; Eating for Two (or Four); Living Memorials; Poems for my Boys; Timeline.

For an entire catalog of her posts, click here.

Other places to read Jamye’s work:

“The Books I’ll Never Write,” guest post on Randy Susan Meyer’s blog

“Twenty-five,” fiction, published in The Drum