Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers is, according to its website, "a quarterly print publication that reflects modern motherhood-the way it really is." The magazine was started in 1999, the same year I had my first child. I remember hearing its title just a few months after having become a mama and knowing I needed to find that magazine. I subscribed without ever having seen an issue, and once my first issue came, I read it cover to cover in a matter of hours and then ordered every back issue available. Saying this magazine, with its honest and excellent writing about motherhood, had an impact on me is an understatement. Quite simply, mamazine.com wouldn't exist without Brain, Child. So when Brain, Child editors Jennifer Niesslein and Stephanie Wilkinson agreed to let me interview them via email, I was pretty damn thrilled. And, since Oprah hasn't called them yet, I'm thinking we need to be writing Oprah ourselves. Now there's an episode I'd watch.

mamazine: What led you to start Brain, Child? What do you wish you'd known then that you know now? And what has surprised you about the experience?

Jennifer: We started Brain, Child because it's a magazine we wanted to read and to write for. We're both pretty pragmatic people and had worked for other publications before, and so I think we had some inkling as to how much and what kind of work would be involved.

The response to the magazine has been surprising…and super duper gratifying. On one hand, we knew that the failure rate of magazines in their first year is some scary number (90% I think?) so we planned to take things very slowly and back off if it bombed. On the other hand, we both really believed in it (I remember telling Stephanie, "We are TOTALLY going to be on Oprah!" ha!), so it wasn't completely shocking that other mothers liked Brain, Child, too.

Stephanie: I had always dreamed of starting a magazine. But if it hadn't been for Jennifer – who has a marvelous "why the hell not?" attitude – I don't know if I would have had the guts or stamina to do it. If I had known how much I would love it, I would have done it years earlier. (Of course, years earlier I had no kids, so perhaps it wouldn't have worked out quite as well.)

Like Jennifer, I am surprised and thrilled at the devotion of our readers. Probably all magazines get love letters, but when they're directed at the thing you helped create, it's really a boost. We do get our share of hate mail, too, but the love is big and it keeps us going.

mamazine: What are some of the general trends you've noticed in recent submissions? Are there certain themes or topics that are popping up right now?

Jennifer: It's pretty cyclical. Stephanie and Debie Thomas, another editor who works on Brain, Child, read most of the recent submissions, so they can comment better on what's the hot topic lately. I noticed that in the fall issue, we almost unwittingly had a Judging Other Mothers (Don't Do It) theme.

The best submissions, I think, are the ones in which a writer truly is grappling with a given issue. It's easy and pat to write about how hard divorce is on the kids, but it's much more interesting to read, as Theo Pauline Nestor does in the fall issue, about how happy she is in a new romantic (post-divorce) relationship, and how her very happiness is hard on the kids, and how those emotions are incongruous and unexpected and difficult for everyone. That sort of essay really gets at what a messy business raising children is.

Stephanie: There are topics that are always going to be around—guilt, desire for time alone, unbelievable instant attachment to one's child (or conversely, guilt over NOT feeling an unbelievable instant attachment to one's child), playground difficulties, feeling judged, the trauma of a sick or disabled child, the funny things kids do that make you think about life differently, etc.—but what we really like is an essay or story that takes one of these evergreen subjects and surprises us, either by her approach to the topic or by showing us some aspect of the issue that we've never thought of before.

mamazine: Much of the writing about motherhood, in general, is done by white, middle-class women. Is that something you've noticed while editing Brain, Child, and is it something you've thought about reasons for? Have you attempted to attract a more diverse set of contributors and readers to the magazine? (I ask this as a white, middle-class woman who is finding it harder than I thought it would be to get submissions from mothers across the spectrum.)

Jennifer: I think much writing, period, is done by white, middle-class people. There's been some really great stuff in the Columbia Journalism Review in the past year about how the issues facing working class people get ignored in daily papers because the economics of starting off in journalism are set up so that you almost have to come from a family that can financially support you while you work in NY or Chicago or wherever, for peanuts.

The economics of Brain, Child aren't much different – we worked without pay for years, relying on our husbands' jobs and health insurance. We've always paid our contributors, but it's never been enough to live off of, by any means. Until essay-writing becomes a feasible way to earn a living (for more than a handful of people), I think we'll always get more submissions from women who have the luxury of carving out time to write, and/or those whose culture thinks writing is a worthwhile endeavor.

So that's my answer on class; race, I don't know. We communicate with most of the writers and artists through email, so if they don't tell me what race they are, I don't know. I'm not dumb enough to think that motherhood is a color-blind experience, but I also know that we've run pieces by middle-class writers of color and nothing in those pieces signified the writer's ethnicity.

Stephanie: What Jennifer said.

mamazine: What are your thoughts about the future of the mothers' movement?

Jennifer: Stephanie just did a big, excellent feature on the future of the mother's movement, so I'll let her answer that. But I think the movement can happen.

Stephanie: Yes, I think all the pieces are out there and there are actually a lot of groups working to try to make a mothers' movement happen. I tend to agree with people in the article I wrote (like political activist Karen Kornbluh and the founder of Mothers & More, Joanne Brundage) who say that it's a difficult time, politically, for a lot of social change to happen. People aren't in the frame of mind these days to believe government can do much to solve their problems. But that pendulum is likely to swing again, and when it does, I'm confident the groundwork is in place to help mothers out a whole lot more.

Jennifer: The big change for me is that I just started a leave of absence to work on a book, so there are some behind-the-scenes changes, parcelling out my job responsibilities. Until that all shakes out, I can't imagine making any big changes in the magazine. Someday, I'd like for it to be longer or bimonthly, but that's down the road.

Stephanie: We do have our hands full right now as our staff expands to meet all the needs of the business end of things and to help cover for Jennifer while she's on leave. (Believe me, nobody can replace her!) I too would love to see the magazine expand and come out more frequently, and I'd love one day to be involved in publishing books. But my brain hurts too much at the moment to do more than think about it for longer than two seconds together.

mamazine: What are you reading right now?

Jennifer: My book is about my quest through self-help advice, so right now, I'm reading Dr. Phil's Relationship Rescue.

I like to have a little something on the side, though, so I'm also reading a book called The Good-bye Window: A Year in the Life of a Day-Care Center by Harriet N. Brown. I'm really liking it, especially the parts about our culture's conflicted ideas on where children under three should be spending their days. That, and a book of essays called Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants.

My nightstand's a mess.

Stephanie: My reading recently has focused a lot on prostitutes and other outcasts in 18th- and 19th-century England—don't ask me why. I loved The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber, I liked Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue, ditto with A Factory of Cunning by Philippa Stockley, and am currently reading Misfortune by Wesley Stace.

For something completely different, I'm also reading Benjamin Kunkel's new novel Indecision, which is a hoot—and am salivating to start in on a book Jennifer passed to me, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach.

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