Encountering Maternal Silence

Writing Strategies for Negotiating Margins of Mothering in Contemporary Canadian Prairie Women’s Poetry

De: Kelly M. Brown

Narrado por: Emily McIntyre

This study explores how contemporary Canadian Prairie women poets negotiate the silences, gaps, and margins surrounding maternal experience through innovative writing strategies. The audiobook examines how poets from the Prairie provinces challenge dominant narratives of motherhood, giving voice to experiences often excluded from literary and cultural discourse—including maternal ambivalence, loss, Indigenous mothering, queer mothering, and the intersections of motherhood with labor, landscape, and identity.

The audiobook analyzes the work of Prairie women poets who employ experimental forms, fragmentation, silence as technique, and alternative narrative structures to represent maternal experiences that resist conventional representation. It investigates how these writers use poetry as a space to explore the tensions between maternal idealization and lived reality, between personal experience and cultural expectation, and between silence and speech.

Drawing on feminist theory, maternal studies, ecocriticism, and Prairie literary criticism, the study examines how regional identity—particularly the relationship to Prairie landscape, rural communities, and Western Canadian cultural contexts—shapes maternal representation. It explores how poets navigate multiple marginalizations based on geography, gender, Indigenous identity, class, and sexuality, using writing as a tool for resistance and transformation.

©2025 KELLY M BROWN (P)2026 KELLY M BROWN