Andrea Buchanan has long been a bright star in the mama genre, with her first book Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It and the three recent anthologies that followed It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons, It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, and Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined. Guest interviewer Stacey Greenberg talked to Andi recently about the Sacramento Mother Talk event, her blog book tours, and the Literary Mama site and its resulting anthology.

Stacey Greenberg: For those who didn't go to the Sacramento Mother Talk event, tell them what they missed.

Andi Buchanan: About 15 women gathered at the house of [one of the mama's] in town. We spent maybe a half-hour chatting with one another and eating some of the great spread and drinking wine. Then we sat down in the living room and began the talk. Amy and Sheri said a few words about mamazine.com, and then I talked about Mother Talk and how it got started, and about Literary Mama and my latest books. I read my piece from It's a Boy and the discussion turned to the ways we've been surprised by our sons or had our expectations confirmed; this morphed into a larger discussion of gender roles and how restrictive things can be for even very young boys. Jennifer Margulis read her essay from It's a Boy, about how having her third child, a son, helped heal her guilt and sadness over an abortion she had years ago. We talked about the difficulties in writing about pain and loss, and about the difficulties of speaking about pain and loss when we are expected to be so stoic in the face of it. The conversation became more freewheeling after that, and then before we knew it, four hours had passed and we had to call it a night!

Stacey Greenberg: While nothing beats a real live get together like the Mother Talk events, I have to say that I love the idea of the Blog Book Tour. It seems like the perfect way for a busy mom to promote her book to millions of people. Tell me how you came up with this concept (or who did) and how you pulled it together.

Andi Buchanan: I was inspired to do a blog book tour for several reasons. Mostly because I learned from my experience promoting Mother Shock that the bulk of my audience is online—in other words, the kinds of people who read my books are the kinds of women who are comfortable with the internet, read or write blogs and on bulletin boards, and shop online. I figured a blog book tour would be more effective than a physical book tour, because a reader can be online at her convenience, as opposed to having to arrange for childcare or juggle bedtime schedules to get out of the house for a bookstore event at 7:30 on a Tuesday night—and a reader could also buy the book at her convenience, online, instead of trying to hunt for it at her local store's storybook hour.

In terms of the actual idea of a blog-based book tour, I was inspired in that regard by my friend Kevin Smokler of the Virtual Book Tour (VBT). The VBT targets bloggers who blog about publishing and literature, matching up lit blogs with authors who have books (mostly literary fiction) to promote. I basically took that idea and ran with it. Parenting bloggers are sometimes regarded with condescension—remember that awful NY Times article?—the same way that writers who take parenting as their subject get taken less seriously than other writers (can I tell you the number of times someone excited to hear that I write books is visibly disappointed when it becomes clear what the subject is?). But I think the parenting blogs are a presence to be reckoned with and that they should be taken seriously.

I hear all the time from people in publishing or promotion, "mothers don't read" or "mothers don't buy books" or "mothers won't spend money on books." But look at what's out there—a Google search on "mom blogs" yields over 20 million results! Mothers (and parents) are clearly reading, and writing; there is clearly a desire to communicate with other people about what we're doing, and an interest in reading about it, whether in the form of blogs or online magazines or books. The problem is that the traditional ways of selling books don't take into account the way our cultural landscape is changing. Certainly mothers buy books—who's buying all those Oprah book club books, if not mothers?—but maybe they don't (or can't) do it in bookstores. Maybe reaching out to where mothers already are—online—and paying attention to what they're doing there is a better way to connect.

Stacey Greenberg: How did LiteraryMama.com get started and how do you keep it going?

Andi Buchanan: Amy Hudock, who's Literary Mama's editor-in-chief, ran a real-time writing group for women writing about motherhood in California. She and I met after the publication of my first book, Mother Shock, in 2003, and she was interested in trying to get published a collection of the work these women were doing in her group. However, it seemed like a collection of that nature would need a bigger framework—not just women from the Bay Area writing about motherhood, but women all over writing about motherhood. Literary Mama emerged from that notion. We launched the site in November 2003, and in just over a year it was named by Forbes as "Best of the Web" and by Writer's Digest magazine as one of their "101 Best Websites for Writers." We have over 20 editors all over the country, and we all work on it whenever we can—in the dead of night, between diaper changes, while the kids are at playdates. It's run like a traditional print magazine—Amy is the editor-in-chief, I'm the managing editor; most departments have senior editors and assistant editors or copyeditors; the editors oversee their departments, but all the content is run by Amy and myself before it's given final approval. We do this all through email lists and a content management system on the site—it's the kind of virtual, collaborative project we definitely could not have done in pre-Internet days! As for our recent anthology, in January 2005 I pitched the idea of an anthology featuring the best work from the site to my editor at Seal. She went for it, we worked with our editors to choose the pieces we felt best exemplified the magazine, and just a little over two years after launching, we have our first collection—Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined.

Stacey Greenberg: It sounds like the Literary Mama idea has come full circle then! Is Amy happy with the way it turned out? Did any of the original bay area mamas make the cut?

Andi Buchanan: Yep, absolutely. We're all thrilled. And, yes, I was very happy to see at least two of the original pieces from that first writing group appear in the Literary Mama anthology.

Stacey Greenberg: Do you plan to do future anthologies?

Andi Buchanan: We'll have to see how this one does, of course, but I'd love to.

Stacey Greenberg: How is the book different from the website?

Andi Buchanan: Well, for one thing, it's organized by subject matter, rather than genre. But it's also just a different experience to read something from a physical book, with words on the page and selections back-to-back, rather than clicking from one thing to another online and reading something you can't hold.

Stacey Greenberg: When you wrote your first book, Mother Shock, you said you did it in three-hour increments, five days a week, while Emi was in school. Now that you are the mother of two, managing editor of Literary Mama, the editor (or co-editor) of three anthologies, co-host of Mother Talks around the country, and organizer of multiple blog book tours, do you have more childcare? How do you do everything you do?

Andi Buchanan: I wish! But I'm still on that three-hour-a-day of kid-free time, because my youngest is only three, and that's his playschool schedule—three hours or so in the mornings, five days a week. So I still have to cram as much as I can into that "free time." It's not nearly enough, so I also do work when my kids are around (and don't need me for a moment—as I type this, Nate, who's home sick with a fever, is playing with tiny cars), and I work after they're asleep at night. It's a busy schedule, and sometimes it's too much, but this is the way it is for now. As for how I get everything done, I don't. My house is a mess, it takes me forever to run simple errands, and I'm constantly leaving laundry in the washer for days. Though, in terms of getting things done and coping with my lack of time, this summer I actually shared an intern with my writer friend Miriam Peskowitz, and it was awesome—it really was a huge help having someone around to help, especially with all the paperwork/organizational stuff that went hand-in-hand with working on three anthologies at once.

Stacey Greenberg: Speaking of writer friends, through your many literary pursuits and travel, have you gotten to actually meet and get to know the major mama "players"? Even though a Google search turns up 20 million mama blogs, it still seems like the Literary Mama World is a small one.

Andi Buchanan: It is a pretty small world, and since I started putting together the manuscript for Mother Shock four years ago, I've been fortunate enough to get to know many generous writers, many of whom are also mothers.

I realized when I was writing about the essays in It's a Boy for my blog that pretty much every single writer was someone I knew, either in real-life or online, or had some kind of general connection to. That's slightly different for the It's a Girl book (there are more pieces by "new" writers in that one)—and not at all true for the Literary Mama anthology—but it does illustrate how in publishing connections do matter, and how simply being around for a while in the same general milieu can connect you with people who are doing what you're doing.