If you're at a party with friends or in the office chatting to colleagues, there are various acceptable topics to broach. Menstruation isn't usually one of them.
Sea to Sky author Heather Hendrie wants to erode that taboo. Why? Because (barring exceptional circumstances) every girl gets her first period. Every woman deals with them for decades as a routine part of life. For those born with two X chromosomes, menstruation is as normal as going to the bathroom is for everybody.
Hendrie is well-versed in challenging social stigma. The first entry in her Awfully Hilarious series, titled Stories We Never Tell, was inspired by an uncomfortable date. Her recent second instalment, Period Pieces, is about exactly what you'd expect.
"This actually is a potential tool and way of getting some really important social messages out there," Hendrie says. "Menstruation has historically been so stigmatized, received so little attention. There's been significantly less funding of women's health over the years … so I put out the call for submissions and very quickly was inundated with stories. We really hit a nerve."
Period Pieces has been well-received and then some. It won a 2024 Canadian Book Club Award (CBCA) in the anthology/short story division as the only independently-published work to do so.
"I'm really moved by this because [the CBCA] is a reader's choice award—the biggest reader's choice awards in Canada," Hendrie says. "This means people have read the book and given us a vote of confidence. Twenty-six of us contributed to the project and I'm so delighted that they now get to be called award-winning authors, many of them for the first time. Here's our 11-year-old: she's an award-winning author."
Turning the tide
As a creative nonfiction anthology, each poem or prose segment in Period Pieces reflects the true experience of its writer. A promotional blurb on Amazon states the book "explores menstruation through feminine (but not always female) archetypal milestones of the maiden, mother, and crone—and the many identities we embody in between."
The collection begins with an 11-year-old girl looking forward to her first period as a rite of passage: an idea that may baffle many.
"Kudos to her mom and the culture she's growing up in because she's excited about this life event," remarks Hendrie. "If you read the stories of the 60- and 70-year-old contributors, they're very, very different. For some people my age or slightly older—I'm 45—it's still really scary to say, 'I have my period.' Many menstruating people have the experience of hiding a tampon up their sleeve to go to the bathroom.
"Period products should be as ubiquitous as toilet paper in a washroom … but in some parts of the world, people have to choose between groceries or period products. That's just not OK. If it weren't for periods, none of us would exist, yet there's so little understanding and the medical establishment has yet to catch up."
Fortunately, the social tide appears to be turning towards a greater level of understanding.
Humour: the best medicine
Hendrie works as a clinical counsellor with True Nature Wilderness Therapy. She understands how to help folks heal from trauma. Period Pieces can, in her opinion, also provide a measure of healing.
"A few things really help with that: one is community, and another is being able to feel a sense of validation to put things in perspective. Humour is a really, really good tool for our nervous systems. Often you might feel a sense of relief after a good cry, and laughter can actually achieve something very similar. Some of these stories might make you laugh, some could make you cry, but that's very deliberate."
Indeed, an event wouldn't be Awfully Hilarious if there wasn't some element of "awful."
Hendrie also wishes to shout out Period Pieces editor Meghan Power for going outside the box. Instead of rigidly adhering to British English conventions, she took into account where each contributor learned to speak and read. Normally it would be odd for one poem to spell "color" without a "u" and the next to include a "u", but Hendrie thinks Power did an excellent job maintaining every writer's voice in this fashion.
Period Pieces is available locally at the Whistler Public Library, Armchair Books, Get the Goods in Creekside and Arts Whistler. The next Awfully Hilarious collection, Pillow Talk, is in production, too—it's meant to be an honest look at sexuality and intimacy. Submissions close April 15 and Hendrie encourages people to consider throwing their perspective into the hat.
"If you've got a story to tell and you feel shy, you're not alone," she elaborates. "Our intent is to give preference to historically marginalized or unrepresented voices. We really want a diversity of voices, but we're looking for suppressed stories. Somebody does not have to identify in any particular way in order to submit."
Learn more at awfullyhilarious.com.
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