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Sara Graefe: Proud Queer Mom How Telling Stores Can Change Lives by Mary Ann Moore
Sara Graefe: Proud Queer Mom by Mary Ann Moore
Sara Graefe has been forging new ground through her own writing and with the non-fiction books she edits. “We’re giving room to other voices that haven’t been heard, including queer voices,” she says of the work that helps LGBTQ2 families feel less alone. Telling our stories is a powerful way to bring about change. “On a bunch of levels, it’s healing as we write them, and can be validating or illuminating for the audience.” Sara began chronicling her experiences as a queer mom on her blog in 2010. Gay Girls Make Great Moms is at queermommy.wordpress.com. While the blog is dormant now, it served its purpose when her son, now thirteen, was younger, she said. As our children get older, I agreed, they get to have a say in what gets told about them. She now vets the articles she writes about him.
The blog meant writing short prose, helping Sara feel “I’m still a writer” while her son was still a toddler. The email and comments she received were “really affirming,” and she realized the content was valuable to people.
A panel on LGBTQ+ pregnancy and birth experiences she attended made it clear to Sara “that she ought to tell her stories.” Rachel Rose, former Vancouver poet laureate (2014–2017) gifted Sara a copy of Between Interruptions: 20 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood by Cori Howard. “Rachel’s is the only queer story in the book,” Sara said. When Sara joined Howard’s writing workshops for writer moms, she was the only queer mom in the group. She realized she had something unique to say.
Swelling With Pride: Queer Conception and Adoption Stories (Caitlin Press/Dagger Editions, 2018), of which Sara is the editor and a contributor, “grew from that trajectory.” She had been laying the groundwork for a book she’s really proud of. “Swelling with Pride is the book I wish had been out there when my wife Amanda and I had our first conversations about making a baby.”
In her own essay in the book, “Best Laid Plans,” Sara describes having to go through three cycles of intrauterine insemination and various stumbling blocks before the eventual pregnancy that led to the birth of her son.
She wrote about trying for a second child in her blog: “Even though I’ve written intimately about our experiences as a queer family, my grief around my infertility is incredibly private.”
“I’ve never tried so hard to create something, and came away with nothing,” she said of her secondary infertility.
While very much appreciating the joy of raising her son, there’s still a twinge of that grief and loss all these years later.
Sara found the curating of the collection of essays in Swelling with Pride to be healing work. It was a privilege to work with queer women, trans and genderqueer folk who shared intimate stories and experiences that were life-altering. Those intimate moments she was allowed into reminded her of the joyful aspects of conception and birth during her own ongoing healing.
As a dramatic writer foremost (she’s an award-winning playwright and screenwriter), Sara says she is now exploring creative nonfiction forms which can help to focus when the possibility of being caught up with emotions is very real. She has taken online courses with Nicole Breit, one of the contributors to Swelling with Pride, who teaches CNF outlier forms in her online “Spark Your Story” workshops.
In the late eighties when Sara came out as a lesbian in Kingston, Ontario, she didn’t even think she’d be able to have a baby. Now she has a wife and a son and is inspiring others through the LGBTQ2 stories she is helping to be told.
Further Reading: Small Courage: A Queer Memoir of Finding Love and Conceiving Family by Jane Byers (Caitlin Press/ Dagger Editions, 2020).
Sara Graefe’s work is at queermommy.wordpress. com and saragraefe.com. Mary Ann Moore is online at www.maryannmoore.ca.
