Today's Feature: Because my name is mother...

[image error] Deborah Batterman's new ebook, just published as a Kindle Single, is intimate and inventive. The linked essays in Because My Name is Mother are rich with telling details. Objects and everyday acts resonate until we can see ourselves in the vivid moments the author creates. There's the photograph of the author’s parents, “young and happy and vibrant, maybe even in love.” There's the author’s attempt to keep her dying mother’s traditions alive, but in her own way. The end of a grown daughter’s visit is touchingly rendered by her mother’s homely act of making her bed.

About the collection, Deborah says,"There's a progression in the way these pieces hold together -- the first two from the perspective of the daughter reflecting on her mother, the last two from the perspective of the mother reflecting on her daughter. Smack in the middle sits 'Cute?!#@Sixty,' a favorite in the way it serves as a fulcrum on which both my mother and my daughter sit."

Deborah Batterman fills the senses with her poignant, funny observations of family and modern life, drawing the reader in, revealing layers of existence with the nuanced phrase, the apt symbol. Whether photographs or fabulous shoes, the refrains make this a collection to savor. “There are some things you just never want to come to an end” the author says in “Sweet Indulgences.” For me, reading Because My Name is Mother is one of them.

Author Deborah Batterman is a native New Yorker, a fiction writer and essayist. Her stories have appeared in anthologies as well as various print and online journals. A story from her debut collection, Shoes Hair Nails, available in both print and digital editions, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her new Kindle Single, just in time for Mother's Day, is called

Learn more about Deborah at the following sites: Facebook, Twitter, GoodReads, and her blog, The Things She Thinks About. . .