Dear Especially After Breaking: What If You Decide With The Full Force Of Your Own Formidable Wisdom?

Lit Salon on whether to subject our tenderest, most vulnerable and heart-soaked material to the "brutality" of publishing + the magic of milkweed, crow & moon + a possible middle ground

Dear Jeannine,

Many years ago, I won’t tell you how many, except to say the world was very different then, and quieter, I gave birth to a baby girl.

I want to tell you the whole truth about it, which is that I was a teenaged mother, unwed and terrified. But, also, I was—strangely—a little bit happy about the circumstance of becoming pregnant, for reasons …