A CNQ Editors' Book of the Year
A Dropped Threads-style anthology, assembling original and inspiring works by some of Canada's best younger female writers -- such as Heather Birrell, Saleema Nawaz, Susan Olding, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Carrie Snyder, and Alison Pick -- The M Word asks everyday women and writers, some of whom are on the unconventional side of motherhood, to share their emotions and tales of maternity.
Whether they are stepmothers or mothers who have experienced abortion, infertility, adoption, or struggles with having more or less children, all these writers are women who have faced down motherhood on the other side of the white picket fence. It is time that motherhood opened its gates to include everyone, not just the picture postcard stories.
The M Word is a fabulous collection by a talented author and blogger, which is bound to attract readers from all walks of motherhood. The anthology that presents women's lives as they are really lived, probing the intractable connections between motherhood and womanhood with all necessary complexity and contradiction laid out in a glorious tangle.
It is a book whose contents themselves are in disagreement, essays rubbing up against one another in uncomfortable ways. There is no synthesis -- is motherhood an expansive enterprise, or is motherhood a trap? -- except perhaps a general sense that being a mother and not being a mother are each as terrible and wonderful as being alive is. What these essays do show, however, is that in this age of supposed reproductive choice, so many women still don't have the luxury of choosing their mothering story or how it will play out. And those who do exercise choice often still end up contending with judgement or backlash.
The essays also make clear that women are not as divided between the mothers and the childless as we might be led to believe. Women's lives are so much more complicated than that. There is mutual ground between the woman who decided to have no more children and the woman who decided to have none at all. A woman with no children also endures a similar kind of scrutiny as the woman who's had many, both of them operating outside of societal norms. A woman who has miscarried longs to be acknowledged for her own beyond-visible mothering experiences, for the baby she held inside her. And while infertility is its own kind of journey, that journey is also just one of so many whose origins lie with the desire for a child.
Booker, Julie: - Julie Booker is a Toronto writer whose short-story collection, Up Up Up, came out in 2011. Her twins are finally allowing her to work on a novel.
Clare, Kerry: - Kerry Clare reads and writes in Toronto, where she lives with her husband and daughter. Her essays, short stories, and book reviews have appeared in the New Quarterly, the National Post, the Globe and Mail, Canadian Notes & Queries, Prairie Fire, Quill & Quire, Today's Parent, and other fine places. She writes about books and reading at her blog Pickle Me This and is editor at 49thShelf.com. Her essay "Love is a Let-Down" was nominated for a 2011 National Magazine Award and appeared in Best Canadian Essays 2011.
Coulter, Myrl: - Myrl Coulter's adoption memoir, The House With the Broken Two, won the 2010 First Book Competition sponsored by the Writers Studio at Simon Fraser University and the 2011 Canadian Author Association's Exporting Alberta Award. Her work has been published in several anthologies and Geist magazine. Myrl lives in Edmonton, Alberta.
Couture, Christa: - Christa Couture has established herself as a singer-songwriter with sharp-shooting wit, effortless grace, and heart-on-sleeve intensity. Since her critically acclaimed debut album, Fell Out of Oz and her sophomore record, The Wedding Singer and the Undertaker, she has explored intimate spaces with a frank confidence that avoids cliche and melodrama. She released her third album The Living Record in September 2012, produced by Steve Dawson and picked by CBC Music as one of the "Best Albums of 2012." In addition to being a touring and recording artist, Couture is a graduate of the Vancouver Film School, the managing editor of RPM.fm "Indigenous Music Culture," a knitter, a blogger, a graphic designer, a scotch drinker, and then some.
Cullen, Nancy Jo: - Nancy Jo Cullen is a Journey Prize-nominated fiction writer and the author of three critically acclaimed collections of poetry with Calgary's Frontenac House Press. Her most recent book, the short story collection Canary, is the winner of the 2012 Metcalf-Rooke Award. Nancy Jo is the 2010 winner of the Writers' Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for an Emerging LGBT Writer. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph Humber.
Dachsel, Marita: - Marita Dachsel is the author of Glossolalia, Eliza Roxcy Snow, and All Things Said & Done. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and the ReLit Prize and has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2011. Her play Initiation Trilogy was nominated for the Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding New Script. She is the 2013/2014 Artist-in-Residence at UVic's Centre for Studies in Religion and Society. After many years in Vancouver and Edmonton, she and her family now live in Victoria.
Fitzgerald Bryden, Diana: - Diana Fitzgerald Bryden's first novel, No Place Strange, was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and longlisted for the IMPAC/Dublin Award. She is at work on a second novel, Tunapuna, and is the author of two books of poetry: Learning Russian, shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award, and Clinic Day.
Landsberg, Michele: - Michele Landsberg is a Toronto-born journalist, author, and feminist activist.
McFadden, Deanna: - Deanna McFadden's professional writing career has involved abridging classics for kids, publishing a few poems, writing some very odd short stories in university, hacking it up for the internet, and completing one unpublished novel. During work hours, she develops content and manages an ebook program for a very large publishing house. At home, she's happily embedded in a family unit that consists of one amazing boy and an equally amazing husband.
Olding, Susan: - Susan Olding's Pathologies: A Life in Essays won the Creative Nonfiction Collective's Readers' Choice Award for 2010. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in magazines such as CV2, Event, the L.A. Review of Books, the New Quarterly, and the Utne Reader. She lives with her family in Kingston.
Pick, Alison: - Alison Pick's most recent novel is Far to Go, winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction and nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Rights have been sold internationally and the book has been optioned for film. Pick was the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award winner for most promising unpublished writer under 35 in Canada. She has published one other novel, The Sweet Edge, and two poetry collections, The Dream World and Question & Answer. She is currently on the Faculty of the Humber School for Writers and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Her memoir Between Gods, from which this essay is loosely excerpted, is forthcoming from Doubleday in 2014.
Snyder, Carrie: - Carrie Snyder is the author of two collections of short fiction, including The Juliet Stories, which was a finalist for Canada's 2012 Governor General's Award for Fiction. Her debut novel, Girl Runner, will be published in Canada by House of Anansi this fall. Carrie lives in Waterloo, Ontario, with her family. She blogs as Obscure CanLit Mama.
Storms, Patricia: - Patricia Storms is an award-winning cartoonist and author/illustrator of children's books and humour books. Her cartoons have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Reader's Digest, The Town Crier, The National Post, The London Times, The London Evening Standard, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Canadian Notes and Queries. Her newest picture book, Never Let You Go, has been described as "profound" with "exuberant illustrations#&34; and has been published in numerous languages. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two fat cats in a cozy old house full to the brim with books.
Tsiang, Sarah Yi: - Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang is the author of the poetry books Status Update and Gerald Lampert Award-winning Sweet Devilry. She is also the author of several children's books, including A Flock of Shoes and Warriors and Wailers. Sarah's work has been published and translated internationally, as well as named to the OLA Best Bets for Children 2010, Best Books for Kids & Teens 2011 & 2012, and the Toronto Public Library's First and Best Book List (2012). She is also the editor of the anthology Desperately Seeking Susans and the forthcoming Tag: Canadian Poets at Play.
Uppal, Priscilla: - Dr. Priscilla Uppal is a Toronto poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, playwright, and a Professor of English at York University. Among her publications are nine collections of poetry, most recently, Ontological, Traumatology, Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010, Winter Sport: Poems and Summer Sport: Poems; the critically acclaimed novels The Divine Economy of Salvation and To Whom It May Concern; and the study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy. Her memoir Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother was nominated for the Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Prize for Non-Fiction and the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction. Time Out London dubbed her "Canada's coolest poet." For more information, visit priscillauppal.ca.
