Edited by Anne Sorbie and Heidi Grogan
INANNA PUBLICATIONS
2022/$24.95/244 pp.
In (M)othering: An Anthology, the editors—Calgary writers Anne Sorbie and Heidi Grogan—tell us what they have set out to do. “Mothering,” they write, “is neither a linear experience nor easily confined to a consistent form practised by all who mother/care for their siblings, parents, their colleagues and friends or their children.” The strength of this anthology is that breadth of approach to the subject. Bringing together poems, short stories, personal essays and visual art—in a single, long, associatively structured section—the book mirrors, with its pastiche form, that clear statement about the book’s subject matter. By attempting to expand rather than define mothering’s range, the book effectively suggests an even larger, perhaps infinitely variable, terrain.
(M)othering: An Anthology is a kind of archive, a receptacle for works that widely vary in content, angle of view and literary quality. Readers looking for stories of mothering that push the boundaries of what’s polite to say will find work here that approaches mothering in all its rawness, overwhelmingness and immediacy. A number of pieces here sound like the work of writers very new to their task. Others feel like fully realized works. The majority, though, read as promising drafts. As a reader, I would have liked a higher degree of editorial consistency among the pieces, but the varying degree of writerly skill and polish from piece to piece helps to create the anthology’s sense of capacity, its archival quality, the sense that this is not the whole story—though many parts of it are reflected here in differently sized mirrors.
Readers will find jolts and gems here, such as the startling connection poet Jessica Gigot makes between a newly birthed lamb and her own pregnant body in the shower, or the metaphor I won’t forget anytime soon that Joan Crate offers us through an image of a pregnant belly as “A snowball /… rolling downhill.” Or Kim Mannix’s question: “What if all connections run deeper than we know?” There are even, beyond the testimonial mode that predominates, pressure-tested pieces of original thinking such as these lines, addressed to a young child struggling with their big emotions, from Melanie Jones’s lyric essay “SicknessSoftnessThunderJoy”: “I decided that it serves no one to hide the reality of big, deep work. It serves no one for me to hide my labour or yours. Becoming a human is major.”
I wished for more light, more of the delight of mothering. The book accumulates story after story of trauma—cancer, stillbirth, overdose, more cancer. While some of the pieces that tell these stories are among the strongest work in the book—notably Shannon Kernaghan’s devastating and skillful poems about a teenage daughter’s fentanyl overdose, and Kelly S. Thompson’s “Here and There, Everywhere in Between,” about a woman mothering her sister’s young children after that sister’s death—the cumulative weight of the disclosures of trauma in the less skillfully realized pieces is heavy.
And there is surprisingly little in the anthology to truly balance that out. Notable exceptions include Barb Howard’s short story “Bigfoot Therapy,” a restorative fantasy that still believably assuages the bereaved loneliness of a mother with a newly empty nest, and Louisa Howerow’s “What Feeds Us,” a poem that begins with a mother who doesn’t want to be fed but reveals its transformative material swiftly in an image, the way only poems can.
However broadly we might conceive the subject, it seems that when we talk about mothering, we are still mostly talking about the hard stuff.
Lisa Martin is co-editor of How to Expect What You’re Not Expecting: Stories of Pregnancy, Parenthood and Loss.
