Telling Truths: Storying Motherhood





Price: $34.95

Page Count: 325

Publication Date: May 2014

ISBN: 978-1-927335-42-0

Telling Truths: Storying Motherhood is a collection of creative non-fiction essays. Through story, contributing authors explore how expectations collide with the complex realities we face as we mother. They illustrate how mothering is inextricably linked to the positions we occupy within our specific socio-cultural contexts; how our versions of mothering are transformed in relationship to the children we raise, long for, and mourn. Together, as writers and readers, as mothers and parents and communities, we are rewriting and rereading and reinventing what it means to mother and parent our children at this moment in history. This anthology is an important contribution to ongoing dialogues that resist traditional expectations around motherhood.    

“We carry within us stories of our mothers and grandmothers, yet for many years these stories were neither heard nor valued by society. Telling Truths: Storying Motherhood is an extraordinary new collection of creative nonfiction that demonstrates the breadth and richness of mothers’ stories and the importance of passing on our stories to future generations. Through these accounts of courage, love, resilience and joy, we connect to the manifold experience of motherhood and witness lives being transformed as new perspectives emerge. The identities of mothering and motherhood are constantly shifting, and so what we experience in this varied collection is a fluid and ever-changing portrait that has the astonishing power—through telling and witnessing—to bring us closer to understanding all that mothering is—and can be.”
—Lissa M. Cowan, author of Milk Fever

“This is a book that tells some uncomfortable and some beautiful truths about what it means to mother in the twenty-first century.”
—Susan Boychuck, Women’s Words, University of Alberta

Review from Canadian Literature

Sheena Wilson, PhD., is a professor of literature, culture and
writing studies at Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta.
Diana Davidson, Ph.D., is a writer whose debut novel Pilgrimage, published in 2013, has been called a work of “frontier feminism.”