by Joan Crate, Cheryl Foggo, Linda Gaboriau, Tchitala Nyota Kamba, Sherry Letendre, Karen W. Olson and Susan Ouriou
FREEHAND BOOKS
2023/$16.95/70 pp.
In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, seven writers, primarily from Alberta, came together with the goal of building diverse, supportive community for one another and for those in the generations that follow. As women and as grandmothers from diverse backgrounds, they connected to share stories of loss and healing, both personal and cultural, with an urgency exacerbated by the pandemic and the climate crisis. “We have a duty to channel our stories as medicine, so we can help promote hope and healing in the world around us,” notes Sherry Letendre. “How often do we get to hear women who are not public figures speak out about their painful lives or their divine dreams?” Linked by a desire to find ways to work together despite their differences, and in recognition of the common struggles women experience on an ongoing basis, the Many Mothers collective began to write together.
Over the following two years, Crate, Foggo, Kamba, Letendre, Olson, Ouriou and Gaboriau crafted and workshopped scenes for the stage, but the connections they forged went beyond the page. As they sang, wrote, talked, beaded, drummed and shared together, they came to understand the great grief they held for the world that coming generations will inherit. As Susan Ouriou recognizes, building their scenes on the page and then taking them into performance permitted the group members “a way of forging, in real time and real space, a connection with others.” Bringing the scripts into performance allowed barriers to fall away and the writers to speak to their audiences with the full, rich slate of emotions underpinning each of their scenes.
Though the scenes themselves are distinct in voice and divergent in focus, ranging from Cheryl Foggo’s futuristic “The Sender” to Karen W. Olson’s story of memory and motherhood in “Long Shadows / kino potasin,” the pieces are linked by their desire to recognize harms against women in the past, and to prevent, through confident storytelling and the immediacy of theatre, the same harms from occurring to coming generations. The dual nature of the project is evident throughout: during a time of tremendous cross-cultural loss and uncertainty, the Many Mothers group shored up its members’ resolve both personally and socially. Letendre acknowledges that “the moments of sharing with these women were powerful, and I came to see them as both allies and friends,” and, at the same time, she believes the scenes they created together are reparatory, “a way to begin a dialogue of reconciliation in our communities and empower our youth.” At a time when the world stood still, caught in pandemic inertia and climate grief, the women in this collection wrote their hope and their loss into action.
Jenna Butler is the author of Revery: A Year of Bees.
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