Suture: Women’s stories voiced through memoir and poetry

This article emerged from a collaborative presentation at the 2023 AAWP conference in Canberra, “We Need to Talk …”, where we combined poetry and prose in a presentation titled “We need to talk about how poetry offers restitution of women’s historical voices”. Connections were forged between our research areas – Carson’s poetic biography of George Sand, Costi’s Cypriot women embroiderers, and Williams’ US pioneering women. We wove our voices around these different women’s stories, finding commonality and difference, and experimented with stitching together their three distinct poetic voices and research areas. Although this involved three disparate countries (France, Cyprus and USA) and disparate foci (novelist, embroiderers and pioneering women), there were common threads such as social activism. A female diplomat emerged as a fitting voice to carry this experiment; she would be posted to different countries long enough for cultural immersion, and for engagement in particular poetic projects. We named her Aka, after the first letter of our first names, as well as a pseudonym capturing the meaning of “also known as”, referring to how women working at the fringes often use aliases.