An Intimate In-Person Conversation with Poet Eleanor Stanford on Midwifery, the Maternal Body, and Menopause in the Poetic Form

Postpartum Production

Eleanor Stanford is the author of four books of poetry, all from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her most recent, Blue Yodel, is forthcoming this fall. Eleanor’s interest in birth- not just in a personal context but through a global lens, through the ways that people and other cultures experience it- brought her to Brazil, where she was a Fulbright fellow. Here, she researched and wrote about traditional midwifery in rural Bahia. She was also a Peace Corps volunteer in Cape Verde, an experience which also impacted her poetry and life trajectory.

In today’s conversation, recorded in-person together in Philadelphia, Kaitlin and Eleanor read poetry from Eleanor’s recent works and discuss:

1. Writing as a way to connect to other people and explore the world
2. Her experience as a Fulbright fellow in Brazil, in a community with an interesting convergence of both highly medicalized birth experiences with a strong tradition of midwifery
3. How Eleanor approached writing and sharing the stories of local Brazilian midwives, given her status as an “outsider” to the Brazilian culture and community.
4. The ways in which the lived bodily experience of motherhood and birth translates to her writing

Find more of Eleanor’s work here:

• Bartram’s Garden
• The Book of Sleep
• The Imaginal Marriage

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