Join us virtually with Molly Peacock, Nicole Louie and Therese Shechter in Conversation Sunday, November 3 | 2 PM PST | 5 PM EST| 10 PM GMT

Zoom room and sign-up opens at 1:50 PDT

Please join the zoom room with the same email you used on Eventbrite. If you have any issues joining please email us at info@massyarts.com

Register HERE

About the Event:

Two generations of women without children, one friendship, and two remarkable new books with Nicole Louie and Molly Peacock

What happens when an exchange of tweets morphs into a richly layered writers’ relationship about the choice to not have children? Nicole Louie, in the midst of interviewing women without children around the world, reached out to Molly Peacock, who had written about her choice a quarter century before. A unique relationship evolved as the South American Nicole and the North American Molly began to correspond. Nicole asked Molly to mentor her through a process that resulted in Others Like Me. Molly, inspired by the reproductive rights issues in the next generation, said yes. During their Zoom conversations, Molly’s husband was ill and eventually passed away. She began the poems in The Widow’s Crayon Box, a book about a passionate marriage that began with an agreement to not have children. On different sides of the Atlantic, Nicole and Molly have made a tapestry of writing inspired by their own journeys as women who won’t become mothers.

Massy Books provides a perfect virtual stage to introduce these new books to a global audience. Filmmaker Therese Shechter, whose film My So-Called Selfish Life, takes its title from Molly’s memoir about her choice not to have children, Paradise, Piece by Piece, will moderate the discussion. Join us for a program of friendship, generational decisions, reproductive choices, childfree marriages, poetry and prose.

About the Authors:

Molly Peacock is a widely anthologized poet, biographer, memoirist, and New Yorker transplanted to Toronto, her adopted city. Her latest poetry collection is The Widow’s Crayon Box (W.W. Norton), a book-length sequence of poems that charts widowhood in the twenty-first century. She and her husband were a family of two. Her poems illuminate both the role of the caregiver and the loving situation of the childfree marriage. Paradise, Piece by Piece, her memoir about her choice not to have children was published twenty-five years ago, and it is still influencing women who wrestle with this choice, including Nicole Louie as she wrote Others Like Me and Therese Shechter as she titled her documentary, My So-Called Selfish Life. Peacock is the author of eight books of poetry and two books about creativity in the lives of women artists Flower Diary and The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72. Find her on Instagram @mollypeacockpoet.

Nicole Louie is a writer and translator based in Ireland. A former creative writer for virtual assistants, she holds a BA in advertising and postgraduate diplomas in literature and translation. When not writing, she is reading about the lives of women without children. Her essays have appeared in Oh Reader and Childfree Magazine and her curated collections of books, movies and podcasts about women who are not mothers by choice, infertility, circumstance or ambivalence can be found on Twitter and Instagram: @bynicolelouie. Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children is her first book.

About the Moderator:

Therese Shechter is an award-winning filmmaker and the founder of the production company Trixie Films. Over the past 20 years, she has created a body of work that fuses humour, activism, and personal storytelling to explore a host of thorny questions around women’s roles and identities. Her films have screened worldwide and have been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Elle, Q, and Ms Magazine, among others. Therese’s most recent film is My So-Called Selfish Life, a revolutionary documentary about reproductive freedom and one of our greatest social taboos: choosing not to become a mother. Find her on Instagram at @trixiefilms.

About the Books:

The Widow’s Crayon Box: Poems by Molly Peacock

A book-length sequence of poems that dares to affirm the vast variety of emotional colors in loss and rejuvenation.

After her husband’s death, Molly Peacock realized she was not living the received idea of a widow’s mauve existence but instead was experiencing life in all colors. These gorgeous poems―joyful, furious, mournful, bewildered, sexy, devastated, whimsical and above all, moving―composed in sonnet sequences and in open forms, designed in four movements (After, Before, When, and Afterglow)―illuminate both the role of the caregiver and the crystalline emotions one can experience after the death of a cherished partner. With her characteristic virtuosity, her fearless willingness to confront even the most difficult emotions, and always with buoyancy and zest, Peacock charts widowhood in the twenty-first century.

Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children by Nicole Louie

A deeply personal exploration of childless and childfree women in their own words.

Others Like Me is the story of fourteen women around the world, from different walks of life, who don’t have children. It’s also the story of why Nicole Louie had to find them and what they taught her. Part memoir, part exploration of childlessness through candid conversations, this book showcases the many ways in which people find fulfillment outside of parenthood. And because the social expectation to procreate weighs the most on women, Louie focuses solely on them, their experiences and how they flourish outside of motherhood. In doing so, she upends the stereotypes that diminish women who are not mothers and offers reassurance and companionship on a path less known.