Epistolary Autoethnographies on Loss, Memory and Resolution

“This book opens our hearts and minds to a profound truth: most every species on this plant lives and survives because we have a mother. Some good, some bad, most layered and complicated. This is a book that pulls at the roots of how we fumble, experience and leave, and how to grow into our own humanity through the effluences of our mothers. The book takes up the archetypal and climatic stages of being a mother and to being a black mother’s child: from the multiple scenes of how we must leave and the forms of our return; how we labor to reveal (contest) the commodification and labels of black women’s bodies; how we enter the troubled and subjugated crossings of adulthood.

In all its abiding meanings and consequences, this book is more than another testament to motherhood. It is a witness of how consciousness is born. The reader is emotionally and intellectually engaged with the ongoing poetics of life as change. For me, one haunting question in the book is what do you do when the child of your child meets tragedy? What do you do when your child becomes a mother too that faces a mother’s greatest nightmare? Then your child must carry the burden; when the mother, grandmother is absent -silent, how is this forgiven? This is a book about mothers, yes, but it is also about how we were mothered to forgive, to revere, and to understand.

The book places the reader with two friends who put into epistolary poetics what they didn’t know or didn’t remember or didn’t know what they always knew until it was written and shared and written and shared again in the magic of a transcendental dialogue. In this deep abundance of dialogue, there is simultaneously a four-way conversation that includes the meeting between the two mothers evoked as a second layer, a spiritual union, between the mothers orchestrated by the letters of their son and daughter. These letters, in turn, giving their mothers another, different life. A life anew. Be it poetic.”

- D. Soyini Madison, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, School of Communication, Department of Performance Studies, Northwestern University, author of Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (SAGE) and editor of The Woman That I am: The Literatures of Contemporary Women of Color (St. Martin’s Press)

"'Same and not the same.'

So begins Bryant Keith Alexander and Mary E. Weems’ resonant and haunting Epistolary Autoethnographies on Loss, Memory and Resolution: Reflections on Black Motherhood, making clear that this is a book deeply rooted in personal experiences and a gesture gestures outward, toward us all. The authors expertly deploy the epistolary form—including beautiful epistolary poetry—to make sense of their maternal relationships and the painful gaps in those relationships. They also importantly demonstrate their new formation of ‘epistolary autoethnography’.

When Weems’ mother died in 2023, the friendship between the co-authors opened the door for Alexander to ‘re-excavate’ his mourning for his own mother, who died twenty years earlier. But both co-authors also travel the traces of their own children – or absence of children. Through their togetherness in storytelling, Alexander and Weems write raw truths about regret and sorrow as both children and (not) parents. Despite the pain, readers will appreciate their “collaborative spirit-writing” process, which not only holds these two friends and writers together in a bond of love and mutual protection, but also invites us as readers in, too. For teachers, the guiding/study questions and workshop guide at the end of the book provide useful exemplars for analysing and unpacking this form of writing.

Mirrors are a theme throughout the book, from cover image through the braided narratives, into what they describe as ‘intertwining dialogues’. Reflection, proximity, criticality, love. Hands as love-givers, hands as holders, hands as tools of outreach, embrace, and symbols of the materiality and embodiment of writing and co-writing. They extend this metaphor through their theorisation of intrapersonal empathy, as it emerges in collaborative autoethnography.

The book is deeply informed by and contributes to critical autoethnographic scholarship through the contribution of First Nations’ scholars and scholars of colour, who have charted so much of this field over the past 20 years. Like so much of their individual and collaborative performative works, this book again offers readers a chance to engage, not just receive, through their familiar call and response form. Their work instantiates and honours the rich Black traditions and relationships that inform this work through a uniquely African American invitation to readers and audiences who want to engage in these powerful knowledge transmissions. This is a book which celebrates mothers, Black culture, and perhaps more than anything, the power of friendship and artistry in processing grief."

- Stacy Holman Jones, Professor, Monash University and Daniel X. Harris, Professor, RMIT University

"Dear Reader:

I sure wish I had written you more often. But I wanted to tell you today that, once in a great while, a book comes along that could actually change the way you live in, reflect on, and communicate with your most significant others. In Epistolary Autoethnographies on Loss, Memory, and Resolution: Reflections on Black Motherhood, Bryant Keith Alexander and Mary E. Weems have crafted a powerful book that will make you think, may make you write, will most certainly force you to recalibrate how you relate with your mother. Every page rings true, resonates, evokes, and turns the reader both inward and outward, ever moving closer to what it means to be in relationship—and in intimate communication—with mother. You should read this book, and then read it again. And then write some letters, and some poems, and maybe a song or two."

- Christopher N. Poulos, Professor, University of North Carolina-Greensboro

"Dear Reader,

Time stops when you read this book. For me, suddenly an hour had gone by and I had been whisked away into Mary and Bryant’s lives. The engaging, evocative writing drew me into the tale and made me stop and think about inter-generational relationships, mothering, race, and identity. The development of epistolary autoethnography through dialogic letter writing in prose and poetry creates a weave of the two stories and voices, enticing the reader at moments where the stories overlap, and resonances appear (or don’t). Written throughout with an ethic-of-care. So, as you read you join the authors and their mothers in moments of sadness, triumph and love.

- Dr Alys Mendus, Independent Scholar and member of The Bodies Collective, Research Fellow University of Melbourne, Australia.