Aoife and I chilling out in the Montfort Hospital after my second bout of postpartum pre-eclampsia/mild HELLP. Magnesium sulfate drip on tap to prevent me from having a seizure.
Today is World Preeclampsia Day which I shouldn’t let pass unnoticed. There’s much more information on the U.S. Preeclampsia Foundation’s website here about Preeclampsia Awareness month. I had postpartum preeclampsia/mild HELLP twice which is documented in Toxemia (which is the old word for preeclampsia). I chose that title specifically because of the memoir’s focus on preeclampsia but also because the book goes into my experience with mental health, with negotiations within the medical system, chronic illness, and societal expectations for the body. How we see ourselves. How we are kind or not. (A note that May is also Mental Health Awareness Month although Mental Health Awareness Week was earlier this month. Also quite relevant for multiple reasons.)
Preeclampsia Foundation Canada is the hardworking Canadian branch of the organization that has supports research and awareness. It’s possible to make a direct donation here, which I’ll do later today.
In previous years, I co-coordinated the local Ottawa Promise Walk for Preeclampsia though I’ve been stymied by health stuff since 2019 when my heart condition showed up. I was able to work on a walk in 2019 though I was very sick. And then pandemic. And then even post-pandemic, my energy crashes if I do too much. So there was a 2023 Ottawa walk but I haven’t been able to help with one since. Everything in my life screams for me to slow down when I want to speed up. It’s impossible to explain how saturating that is to my day to day. I do strongly believe that this underfunded area of research is worth supporting. A description from the Canadian Foundation’s Canada Helps page:
“Preeclampsia affects 5-8% of all pregnancies and approximately 10 million mothers will develop preeclampsia across the world each year, yet according to the World Health Organization (WHO), preeclampsia is one of the least funded areas of research. We need your help to realize our vision of a world where preeclampsia no longer threatens the lives of mothers and babies. “
There’s an illumination event tonight from coast to coast where landmarks and monuments across Canada will be illuminated in honour of World Preeclampsia Day—raising awareness for preeclampsia, HELLP syndrome, and eclampsia. Here in Ottawa, it will be the Byward Market Ottawa sign.
I’ve been lucky enough to have some recent radio and podcast interviews to link related to Toxemia.
The wonderful Susan Johnston was kind enough to have me and Brecken Hancock on CKCU’s Friday Special Blend to talk preeclampsia, writing life/motherhood, mental health, working in hybridity and Toxemia. Listen to the archived show here.
The indefatigable Hollay Ghadery was willing to chat with me on her New Book Networks podcast, for which I’m very grateful. The episode can be listened to here. I offer a 10 min reading, and we speak about the memoir, choosing form, acknowledging mortality, archival concerns in documenting, writing the body, and darkness. The podcast has such a wealth of different authors and interviews — you should check them all out.
The generous Bruce Kauffman published a recording of the November 2024 drift/line reading series organized by Wanda Praamsma featuring myself, Allison Chisholm, rob mclennan,, and musician Megan Hamilton on his CFRC Kingston’s radio show “Finding a Voice”. You can list to my reading and Megan’s performance here. And you can listen to rob and Allison here.
I’m reading again with the lovely Amanda Earl and rob mclennan in Ottawa on Sunday, June 1st (about a week from now) at the Lieutenant’s Pump. Description: “a reading sponsored by the Writers Union of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts — three local writers share recent and forthcoming work. Doors open at 1:30pm.”
After that — I’ll be reading with rob in Dublin in July as we follow our eldest’s choir to Ireland. I’ll have a reading in Nova Scotia in November. And I would love to do a few more readings in the summer/fall. Keeping that pinprick of energy in mind — the energy, the energy, the energy.
I’m a few months into the launch of Toxemia, my hybrid poetic memoir with Book*hug Press and feel lucky to have had a few readings and reviews along with some private messages and correspondence from folks I admire. It’s such an oddly tender thing to put out a book like this. I can’t always read people at the best of times and with this work it feels like it cost more in the production. Cost more to write (emotionally), cost more to finish (time-wise in time of ongoing medical stuff) and costs more to sit in front of it (in terms of vulnerability). I hope the book will find the readers that get it. And I’m always appreciative when anyone tells me what they think of it because it is such a lonely thing in some ways.
Hollay Ghadery was kind enough to extend the panel discussion at The & festival at Sheridan College with Paige Maylott and Maurice Vellekoop into a three-way interview on navigating vulnerabilities in life writing. (As aside — https://quillandquire.com/omni/students-writers-rally-to-support-sheridan-writing-program-facing-suspension/. Support those rallying.) I truly appreciated the initial discussion and then reading my co-panelists responses to these post-panel questions. A bit from one of my answers to Hollay’s question about our respective chosen forms: “I’ve noticed during the readings that I’ve been doing that I’m still seen as ‘poet’ but the book itself is very much not entirely that. There are some things that play with prose poetry and I do play a bit in the margins but it’s just that the prose isn’t always linear. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it is poetry. The word choices are strange. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m just strange. I like things to be compound and alchemical.”
“While questions of illness and mortality are present in Toxemia, there is also such a great sense of hope in the celebration of persistence, and of surviving of difficult things [….] I suppose that’s what I loved most about this book: McNair writes of the pain and loss of control that comes with physical and mental health challenges, in how our bodies are frustrating animals (especially when we come to realize we have so very little control over them), and still it is also about resilience, bravery, and the need to formulate connections through time and space, and in our current lives. So, Toxemia speaks to the hard-won values of persistence and survival—of managing life’s challenges—but it also rises to celebrate the tenacity of the blooming that arrives alongside the struggle. There’s such beauty in that revelation, and perhaps that it why this work is so gloriously more about growth and strength than about destruction or weakness.” (excerpt from review)
“Christine McNair blends high and low cultures, arts and science, words and images, memoir and research to tell the story of her life as a woman with a body, a body that is so often wrong or dangerous, her symptoms and experience disbelieved, disregarded. [….] “I am now more afraid of telling doctors my history,” she writes. Though with TOXEMIA, she’s made art of that story, a moving and compelling narrative, strange and edgy, unsettling. Unputdownable.” (excerpt from review)
“Christine McNair’s Toxemia makes for harrowing reading. A memoir told in lyrical essays, prose poetry, photographs and more, this book takes the reader to the edge of life [….] I started with a vague sense that this was a story about complications from pregnancy. By the time I finished, I realized what an idiot I was — and I was drowned in respect for McNair for the numerous subtle turns, explanations, and descriptions she provides of multiple near death experiences and the mysterious, tenuous connections between cause and effect, especially as related to the fragility of life and the monstrous uncertainties that regulate (or not) the human body. [… ]The narrative is non-linear, looping back and forward, pulling in historical analysis and soaking in poetic reflection. These things happened. They put her life at risk. In past centuries, they killed many women. Modern medicine continues to find them mysterious. Narrative loose ends abound, as in this situation they must. The bottom line is life persists, the book was written. And it’s terrific. One line jumped out at me: “Every body survives something. Or they don’t.” Amen.” (excerpt from review)
My partner rob mclennan also wrote on Toxemia as part of his reading in the margins project on his Substack. He wanted to tackle it in a non-review way as he can’t really write on my work neutrally in other spaces as he could any other writer due to conflict of interest because spouse-love-life-adinfinitum. He gets what I mean when I say this in his piece: “I do see it as a poetic memoir rather than a book of pure poetry. Language is important to me in both prose and poetry and this book flexes between genres on purpose. Play can be found in prose, even non-fiction prose, even a memoir, even a health-historic-body-fueled memoir filled with tough things.”
As for my posts and such — I made a video that introduces Toxemia for the Book*hug YouTube channel made of some clips of the past few years, spliced together with my voice overlaid. A few snippets of time and space.
I also wrote a small list of recommended books for 49th shelf called A List for Lost Words that focuses on books that meant something to me when I was trying to make sense of the confusion of a difficult diagnosis.
And I pulled together a playlist of songs that I associate with the memoir in one way or another for the Book*hug blog. I may have spent far too much time on this and then cursed myself for not including things that I thought of later.
Earlier praise for Toxemia:
“Toxemia is simultaneously a history in/of medicine, a feminist rallying cry, and a raw but scalpel-sharp work of poetry. A genre-blurring text that boldly bloodies lines between poetic and reproductive bodies, between archive and lyric, between manifesto and song, between autoethnography and free verse. A bodypoem flex.” —Sarah de Leeuw, author of Lot
“How much pressure can build in language before the story of women’s health blows apart? In Toxemia, Christine McNair tests the narrative as if it were a problem patient. She charts the events that bring her close to death several times with the skill of the most intuitive midwives and rigorous clinicians, though representation is not diagnostic. This is a beautiful etiological study.” —Elee Kraljii Gardiner, author of Trauma Head and Against Death: 35 Essays on Living
“Toxemia is astonishing. It’s difficult to use positive adjectives for something so searing and widespread as toxicity in all its forms as it is portrayed in this book. But what can be said is that we need this book. We need ‘a pattern that is only legible’ to McNair. If nothing else, in this undetermined narrative, we may read our multiple selves, our own fragilities to systemic damage and unutterable forces beyond our control.” —Madhur Anand, Governor General’s Literary Award–winning author of This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart
UPCOMING EVENTS
FEB 28, 2025, VANCOUVER, BC: Off the Shelf Reading Series, details forthcoming.
MAY 2025, WINNIPEG, MB: Speaking Crow reading series, details forthcoming.
FALL 2025, WOLFVILLE, NS: details forthcoming
Hope to see some of you soon and hopeful to add more readings/events as they come up in 2025!
CHRISTINE MCNAIR 