Telling Silences

Telling Silences

A review of Margaret Yocom KIN S FUR (Deerbrook Editions, 2018)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Margaret Yocom was the person who first introduced me to erasure poetry, so I am extremely excited that her erasure poem KIN S FUR has been published. KIN S FUR transforms the fairy tale All Kinds of Fur, revealing the voice of the daughter between the lines, in that interstitial space where ideas are formed. Yocom sorts through words, sifting them until she finds the silenced voice within the fairy tale.

Fairy tales have power and part of their power is their ability to adapt, to transform, to shift and change, and Yocom combines the metamorphosing power of these tales with the transformative quality of erasure poetry. Yocom searches through the fairy tale All Kinds of Fur to find what is left unspoken and devoiced and she finds that voice at the margins, hidden within the words fo the fairy tale and pulls these words to the surface, casting her own spell of discovery over the text.

Yocom brings up the voices of women, highlighting words like wife, daughter, mother, she, and her, focussing the reader’s attention on the role of women and their significance to fairy tales (even ones like All Kinds of Fur where female characters remain unspoken). Yocom proves that even the seemingly silent speaks and that sometimes the oppressed speak their strongest through silence.

To discover more about Margaret Yocom, visit https://margaretyocom.com

To find out more about KIN S FUR, visit http://www.deerbrookeditions.com/kin-s-fur/

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An Interview with Margaret Yocom

Through the Twisted Woods interviews folklore scholar, poet, and specialist in women’s folklore Margaret Yocom. Dr. Yocom took time out of her busy schedule at the American Folklore Society Conference to talk to us about feminist folklore studies, searching for women’s voices in fairy tales where female characters are silenced, and her work on the fairy tale All Kinds of Fur both as a scholar and as a poet since these roles are interlinked and scholarly insights can be gained through the process of creative writing. Dr. Yocum discusses the power of erasure poetry to find powerful messages.

 

Dr. Yocom has been kind enough to provide us with some example pages from her erasure poem “Kin s Fur” below.

 

 

Explore our interview with Margaret Yocom at the link below

You can visit Margaret Yocom’s websites at:
http://mason.gmu.edu/~myocom/
https://margaretyocom.com/

To find out more about the work of the interviewer, Derek Newman-Stille, you can visit his website Speculating Canada at http://www.speculatingcanada.ca