Price: $24.95
Page Count: 119
Publication Date: September 2017
ISBN: 978-1-77258-123-2
“Absent Mothers sheds much needed light on the neglected topic of losing one’s mother and speaks truth to the painful and often-sentimentalized experiences of growing up or living with an absent mother. The collection’s personal and creative reflections explored through poetry, short prose, and scholarly writings provide a wealth of cultural and geographical diversity and offers a refreshing understanding of this uncomfortable and complex topic.”
—Fiona Joy Green, author of Practicing Feminist Mothering and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
“Absent Mothers offers a multidisciplinary look at maternal absence—defined as both the experiences of motherless children and of mothers who have lost their children, willingly or not—from literary, cultural, political and deeply personal perspectives. The emphasis on Indigenous voices confronting this primal wound is especially timely as Twenty-First-century Canadians attempt to redress our troubled history with First Nations as a result of the lingering legacy of colonization and its destructive impact on families.”
—Laurie Kruk, Professor, Nipissing University (English Studies), author of My Mother Did Not Tell Stories (2012) and co-editor of Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland (2016)
Introduction
Frances Greenslade
Dying to Create a Hero:
Changing Meanings of Death in Childbirth?
Berit Åström
“Is Mother All Right?”: An Exploration of the Maternal
Figure—Absent yet Present—in Dementia Care
Esther Ramsay-Jones
May Breath: Poetics against Canada’s Ongoing Settler Colonial
Violence toward Indigenous Women and Mothers
Sarah de Leeuw
My Nehiyaw Mother
Randy Lundy
39
Remembering the Mothers of the Stolen Children:
A Discussion of the Representation of Mothers
in Jane Harrison’s Play Stolen
Emma Dalton
Mother India
Subimal Misra, Translated by V. Ramaswamy
Speaking from Beyond the Grave:
Abjection and the Maternal Corpses of William Faulkner’s As I
Lay Dying and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body
Bianca Batti
Blue Robe
Bernadette Wagner
Mother-Witch and Other Poems
Courtney Bates-Hardy
Notes from Tinkle
Madhulika Liddle
Mushrooms and Memory
Monica Meneghetti
The Orchard
Monica Meneghetti
About the Contributors
Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, Frances Greenslade has since lived in Winnipeg, Regina, Vancouver, Chilliwack and now Penticton. She has a BA in English from the University of Winnipeg and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of British Columbia. By the Secret Ladder and A Pilgrim in Ireland (Penguin) are her first two books, both memoir. Her novel, Shelter, was published in Canada by Random House in 2011, in the US by Free Press and the UK by Virago in 2012. It has been translated into Dutch, German and Italian. She has taught English and Creative writing at Okanagan College since 2005.
