Photo by Foad Roshan via UnsplashGold sneakers peeked out from under Safiya’s plain abaya. We both grinned when she...
Creative Nonfiction
The Keeping Room is an online magazine for all women writers, poets, and artists.
We are looking to publish your short stories, essays, free writing, poetry, and photo essays that touch on topics related to Women’s Wisdom, Lessons Learned, Self-care, Bodies, Relationships, and Community.
Writers selected for publication will be paid $25
What She Remembers by Kandi Maxwell
She’s backpacked hundreds of miles throughout Northern California’s backcountry—The John Muir Trail, Ansel Adams Wilderness, Yosemite, Sequoia, King’s Canyon, the Trinity Alps, Mount Whitney, and Mount Shasta to name a few.
A Scar That Burns by April McCloud
The thing I remember most about dying, is how much it burns.
Why Motherhood by Shay Galloway
My mother did not want seven children. She birthed me at the age of seventeen, her high school diploma incomplete, her...
The Turquoise Mountains by Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio
My first canvas hangs on the wall of my art studio in Waltham, MA. It is an abstract landscape of blues, browns, and purples, evoking mountains, lakes, and volcanoes.
Country Mouse and City Mouse by Katherine Riegel
1. One of us thinks too little about weight. One of us thinks too much. She is all angles, like the drawings of women in pattern catalogs at the fabric store. I am all rounded: my chin, my stomach, my upper arms like still life paintings of plump, ripe fruit.
We Are Doing Our Best by Eileen Cunniffe
We are everywhere, the middle-aged, aging daughters and sons. Watch us folding walkers and wheelchairs into trunks, and then unfolding them again in handicapped spaces or next to sidewalk cutouts
Chicken Feet by Andreea Ceplinschi
I could only love you the same way our mother loved chicken feet.
We weren’t rich, but our grandparents raised chickens and mother could make one bird go a long way for a family of four …
Anticipatory Grief by Debbi Welch
Isn’t good old-fashioned grief enough? Loss, tears, the flooding of memories?
Sonata by Julie Lockhart
C-sharp (#): Compositions in a minor scale, such as Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata in C# Minor,” can evoke a misty evening of sad contemplation, moody ruminations, even grief.
Grandma Helen by Stacy Alderman
The only picture I’d ever seen of my maternal grandmother was her wedding portrait. Its muted hues, her close-lipped...