Love You to Pieces Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs

The first literary collection-fiction, essays, and poetry-on raising special-needs children Responding to a dearth of literary writing on disability, Suzanne Kamata gathers parents' perspectives at various stages in the lives of children with mental or physical difficulties. In these real and fictional stories, families cope with autism, deafness, retardation, muscular dystrophy, and more, laying bare the moments of rage, disappointment, and guilt that can color their relationships. Parent/child communication is a challenge at the best of times, but here we see the epic struggles and triumphs of those who speak their own language-or don't speak at all-and those who love them. Together, the authors-including Michael Berube, Jayne Anne Phillips, Penny Wolfson, Carol Zapata-Whelan, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and Bret Lott-paint a beautiful, wrenchingly honest portrait of what it means to care for a child who does not experience the world as we do. The book serves as a site of quiet contemplation amid the swirling issues of medical research and disability rights, and the writers come clean about the complications of even the deepest love.

Suzanne Kamata is fiction editor at the online magazine Literary Mama. Her essays, stories, and articles on parenting a disabled child - her daughter is deaf and has cerebral palsy -- have appeared or will appear in Utne Reader; Brain, Child; Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined; It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters; and an anthology on new family configurations to be published by Riverhead in 2007. Her anthology The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan was nominated for the Kiriyama Prize. Her work has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, and her essay "The Sound and the Worry" was given a special mention in the latest Pushcart Prize anthology.