Last Dance

Discussion: Will Substack be the new literary magazine?

My mother painted by her friend Gertie

This nonfiction essay was published in Iron Horse Literary Review on New Year’s Eve 2024. At the end of the essay, I will talk about my concerns with the world of the literary magazine in our times and add a link to an essay I wrote earlier about the importance of the literary magazine.

Last Dance

The afghan I knitted when she floated in my womb now lies across my knees. She kneels before the tub to run her wrist beneath the stream of water. Her hair is turning white, turning early. She stands to dry her hands. She takes the afghan from my lap, folds it lengthwise, then in half, runs her hand across the panel I crocheted, smooths the zinnia I cross-stitched in shades of ochre-red, leaves in mossy greens. The slender bones atop her palm, the small circle of her wrist, define a wisp of bone I let go from deep inside.

She lifts my nightgown. My nakedness. She leans to embrace as if to take a turn on a dance floor from my past.

She’s not built for lifting. I’m heavy with my losses. I stand. She swivels, moves me to the bath seat warmed with water from the tub.

We’re awkward in this dance, her head upon my shoulder as she braces to make the move go easy. I feel the fear—that she will drop me—her warm breath against my neck. I move my right hand to her back to tell her, It will be all right.

My hips on the seat, she lifts my legs into the porcelain tub.

“Mama, is it warm enough?”

I nod.

The room has fogged. Strands of hair curl round her smooth, white forehead. I want to lay my hand there. Does she long for the pressure of my hand?

She cannot know, as I sense her fear ease in the details of the washing, how I once feared I’d drop her small, bare body in this tub. She cannot know, as she raises up my limp and sagging arm, how I once cradled her inside the crook of this old elbow. She cannot know, as she squeezes water from the washcloth to drip onto my mottled back, how I made sure my grip was firm and how she curved into my arc. She cannot know, as she soaps my yellowed toes, how the scent of her skin was a confection to my soul and that she’d once lain with perfect ease inside my arm.

She places the cloth in my good hand. Her knees, pressed against the bottom of the tub. She sits on the heels of her bare feet. Her head bowed, she waits while I wash beneath my hanging breasts, between my legs, averts her eyes until I lay my hand upon her shoulder prepared for our next move. I want to touch her lightly but gesture no longer mirrors thought.

We wait until the tub is empty so I can get a footing on the rubber mat that lies beneath the bath stool. She wraps a large white towel across my shoulders. She dries my back, rubs talcum in my skin. I raise my right arm; she, my left to lay a gown across my nakedness before we start the awkward dance back to my chair.

As I say in Iron Horse Literary Review: I wrote “Last Dance” after my mother had a severe stroke with aphasia. My deep love and empathy for what she was going through without her being able to explain caused me to want to write in her voice.

But now I ask: Is Substack the new literary magazine?

The reason for my question is that the essay can be found only via Iron Horse Literary Magazine’s Facebook page with this note by the editors:

"The afghan I knitted when she floated in my womb now lies across my knees."

Every year, the IHLR PhotoFinish drops at midnight on New Year's Eve. Read Mary L. Tabor's essay, "Last Dance," and the other poems, essays, and stories in this year's finale issue! https://issuu.com/ironhorsereview/docs/2024_ihlr_photofinish

But, since New Year’s Eve, the magazine that promised to pay me has not done so and their website has not been updated. I like to think they’re trying, but still not done. Are they in trouble? Out of business?

Apparently not—but operating only through Facebook? Facebook is most definitely NOT the new literary magazine. Posting literary fiction and memoir is not what most folks do on that platform—and most young folks don’t even bother with the site anymore.

One must wonder if this is the new world of the so important literary magazine to established authors and to emerging ones. I write about that here: “Literary Magazines: Why Bother?” That world was the place I got my start and where so many of the famed I cover in that essay did as well.

So, perhaps, Substack is the new literary magazine? —despite its apparent focus on politics. Let’s talk about this!

My next guest is Ann Kennedy Smith who writes

Mary Tabor writes