Under the Surface Q&A with Elisabeth Belliveau

“In Birth Story, Elisabeth Belliveau has captured the terror and confusion, but also the conflicted beauty, of new motherhood. The story is raw and intimate, unflinching in its depiction of childbirth and beyond. Nobody will tell you the truth like she has in these stunning pages.”
– Teresa Wong, author of Dear Scarlet and All Our Ordinary Stories

Birth Story is a graphic memoir about pregnancy, birth, postpartum depression, and new motherhood as an artist. It explores the physical and psychologically altering birth process: pain, transformation, trauma, healing, and the window of time around the birthing body. Struggling to find representations of birth and postpartum depression in popular culture and art, the author interweaves other’s stories, friendship, and travel to help make sense of it all. This personal birth story is an effort to remember and contribute to sharing strength in all women’s voices.

Q&A:
Birth Story really treats the act of birth as the trauma-infused event that it can be. Your birth plan of lots of drugs and a playlist goes out the window. How difficult was it to recreate those emotions and spend time with them, drawing and writing about them in hindsight?

The experience of pain, trauma, and birth is hard to hold. Staying with the images and replaying my own experience of birth and postpartum depression, to remember the story visually involved equal parts dissociation, repair, grief, and an immense gratitude for surviving it all. It was disturbing to realize that the timelines, how it felt then, how it feels now, and the facts; don’t square. It took three years to complete this book, in part because my time is so limited/full with childcare/love, and my teaching career. It was unreal to leap back into those dark times, using the scraps of studio time I could access, and focus. Then, I would try to leave it on the page in the studio and return to the joy of my child, home life, and partner. Throughout the work, I was actively reading and seeking the birth experiences of others, many were more complex and painful to understand than mine. I found comfort in the work of other creative birthing parents who mastered their own stories through writing and art, courageously articulating the violence, love, and ambivalence of birth and postpartum depression. Their work held forgiveness and humanity, rendering my feelings safe even for a minute, and some minutes felt like lifetimes.

In the beginning of the book, you describe talking to new mothers who tell their birth stories before they forget. It feels as if this is the inspiration for you making this book. To have a document of a time and the feelings which evolution is basically designed to wipe out (so human reproduction will continue). Is this accurate?

One extremely accomplished artist and brilliant friend called me during COVID-19 lockdown to tell me her birth story. She said something to the effect that she needed to put it somewhere in case she forgot, I was 7 months pregnant. Her birth story was a gripping hour of horror, strength, and the most powerful secret world of our world. Her story helped prepare me, I fell less alone, less angry, and more connected. Knowing she made it through to the other side was both unreal and hopeful.The trauma of the experience, followed by the immediate demands of nursing, keeping a baby alive and recalibrating your entire identity, mind, body, and relationship to time and access to it, make it pretty necessary to leave trauma behind and throw all of your physical and mental cells into the activity of healing and learning to parent. The hormonal waves and sleep-deprivation pushed the extreme limits of my mind and body. To rejoin the working world, or social world, I can fully understand the biological or basic need to forget. As an advanced maternal age mother, I entered parenthood with a life well-lived and a strong sense of myself, and ownership of my body, time, and goals. I remain shocked at how having a child has altered all of this. Birth and parenting can be isolating. It really can go wrong, it really can be dangerous, and it can be the greatest responsibility and love. Not everyone has access to family, doulas, midwives, or supportive health care, birth stories are one way to share vital information, experience and to empower birthing parents.

Your book discusses postpartum. Other than your own experiences, were you able to find resources to help navigate this?

Yes, so many courageous writers and artists were enormous resources for me. The Nursery by Sylvia Molnar, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem, by Julie Phillips, My Work by Olga Ravn, A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk, Dear Scarlet by Teresa Wong, Motherhood by Sheila Heti, Like A Mother: A Feminist Journey Through The Science And Culture Of Pregnancy by Angela Garbes, just to name a few. Artists like Dea Trier Mørch, Miriam Cahn, Louise Bourgeois, Camille Henrot, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill. Also, friends — friends you might not expect, the ones who showed up, said things that needed saying, and shared their experiences. I also have a therapist who specializes in pre-natal and postpartum support.

Your trip to Italy (with baby and partner) is almost the “cure” for your postpartum. As an academic you reassess the entire history of women in art, specifically mothers. I found it very interesting that you notice the look in the eyes of Madonna and Child and see the depression you felt. This is a powerful observation. What role does art play in your life?

Art has always helped me to learn and make sense of the world. I was raised catholic, and the reverence for Mary (the Madonna and child) and immaculate conception and the celebration of a virgin mother really confounded me. I have always been curious about the lives women may have led, if they had more choices, freedoms, basic birth control, do-overs. As taboo as questioning the assumed joy of motherhood may be today, it must have been inconceivable in other times. Stories of women who subverted or rejected expectations and norms have always piqued my interest. Catholicism is loaded with symbols and transformation. I am not Catholic now, but appreciate meeting familiar images like the Madonna and Child with a critical eye, and with more life experience. It is refreshing to see this iconography as artwork decontextualized from the religious teachings, and to remember that actual people painted actual people to create these representations, and always, some real life leaks in.

You’re a professor at an art school in Edmonton. The city seems like a new hub of artistic activity. Conundrum has published many graduates of the school you teach at. How does that environment fuel your art-making?

I am jump-up-and-down, thrilled, to be the Chair of Studio Arts at MacEwan University, where Chris Twin, Halie Finney, and Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet studied. All three have lived, or currently live in Amiskwaciwâskahikan – Edmonton, and have books with you, Conundrum Press! I am meeting many incredible artists and writers here,I notice a lot of collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and sincere support for one another. We have a fantastic Edmonton Arts Council and long, cold, dark winters. Right now, my art making is fueled by deadlines, and trying to honour the opportunities and privileges I hold to work and live here.

This book could easily fall under the umbrella of graphic medicine. Is your goal to help educate/warn would be artist mothers? To use comics as a medium of education?

I wish I was that intentional! Improvisation is important in my work, discovery and curiosity in my process is essential, so I don’t always know the end goal. But you are right, I do want to warn people, so that birth and postpartum might be a bit less lonely and shocking. To share that recovery and healing are necessary, and that the unutterable thoughts and feelings are human and sometimes there is help, time, transformation and meds. In a province where we recently fought book bans and where education and healthcare are underfunded, I believe sharing stories is essential for health, connection, and education. Honesty about parenting, maintaining an art practice, and pursuing a career is also needed. I’m not familiar with many models for this. I feel deep gratitude to the people who share stories about the reality of time, care, and money. It is inconceivable how much I love my child, and how recovery works. Bodies are so smart, and so are babies and children. Three years ago, I could not have imagined the shape my life would take, and how much joy was to come.

Birth Story is currently available for PREORDER, and launches April 2026