Every September since 1997, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival presents THIN AIR, a celebration of books and ideas. Their curated line-up is a perfect fit for curious readers who are ready to discover strong voices and great storytelling in practically every genre. For 2023, they're presenting a hybrid festival featuring more than 60 writers, in-person events, and a destination website.

To watch video content Kerry Ryan has prepared for THIN AIR, visit the festival website here.

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I’m interested in writing about motherhood that doesn’t pull any punches. Give me the crumpled birth plans, the episiotomy scars, the wrecked nipples, the regrets. I’m here for pain, paranoia, the heartbreak-heartlift rollercoaster of it all. There are so ways to be a mother (including choosing not to be mother) and ways to be a mother-who-writes. Here are a few of the books that helped me find, and name, my own.

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Sweet Devilry, by Yi-Mei Tsiang

Is there a more perfect stanza than the opening of “How to Dress a Two Year Old”: “Practice by stuffing jello into pants./Angry jello.”? No, there is not. These poems are frank, fierce, and full of heart.

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Beyond the Pale, by Emily Urquhart

In this gorgeous memoir, a new mother applies her training as a folklorist and researcher to understand her daughter’s genetic condition. I was particularly struck by the way Urquhart’s experience of motherhood—which I think of as both forward- and inward-looking—burrows deep into family history while simultaneously opening to a wider community.

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Motherhood, by Sheila Heti

A book that calls itself a novel though the protagonist shares the author’s name and many other characteristics, Motherhood asks the question that plagues so many women: should I have a baby? It’s a thoughtful, completely relatable, meditation on the unanswerable question.

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Quiet Night Think, by Gillian Sze

I love the way Sze plays with the strengths of form here, using both the grounding of essay and delicacy of poetry to explore motherhood, family, and language. To read it is to sit in middle-of-the-night cribside vigil with something precious in your hands.

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Hump, by Ariel Gordon

I first read this glorious collection of pregnancy and motherhood poems at a point in my life when seeing the word cervix in a poem still felt kind of risqué (ie, before motherhood, when the insides of my body remained firmly on the inside.) It was a pinhole of light into what motherhood, and writing about motherhood, could be.

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Little Labours, by Rivka Galchen

These scrapbook-like essays on motherhood remind me of my own scattered, snatched-time writing when my daughter was an infant and I wondered if I could really be a mother and writer. I was particularly moved by Galchen’s list of notable twentieth century women writers. None of whom, she points out, had children.

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The Push, by Ashley Audrain

In this psychological thriller, Audrain nails the constant-self-doubt phase of new motherhood. Layer that on top of an already reluctant mother, post-partum depression, past family trauma, and a completely terrifying kid and, hoo-boy: motherhood at its gnarliest.

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Learn more about Diagnosing Minor Illness in Children:

Diagnosing Minor Illness in Children is a striking third collection by one of Canada’s most essential poets. Kerry Ryan stares without flinching at everything in her path: family, grief, dog obituaries, fine-toothed lice combs, quotidian gore, a water slide that is “not a slide, it’s a throat closing in,” and herself as mother. The collection is replete with self-doubt and thorny humour, as when the speaker struggles to suckle a wolf pup while admiring the softness of her daughter’s cheek. The poet, while staying close to home, sees herself (and us) in birds blown thousands of kilometres off course, and in reindeer defending their young. Ryan’s vision of motherhood and midlife is fierce, edgy, and tender.