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Rachel McCrum

Rachel McCrum

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Rachel McCrum is a poet, performer and workshop facilitator. Her debut collection The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate was translated by Jonathan Lamy and published in a bilingual edition with Mémoire d’encrier in Fall 2020. It was a finalist for the Le Prix de traduction de la Fondation Cole from the Quebec Writers’ Federation in 2022. Along with Amélie Prévost, she is the co-author and co-performer of La Belle-mère // The Stepmother (published in a bilingual edition by L’Hexagone, 2024). Rachel is the vocalist for noise-poetry group Pigs&Wolves.

Belle-mère (La)/ Stepmother (The)

La Belle-mère / The Stepmother examine les complexités relationnelles, les responsabilités et les libertés propres à un rôle qui est aussi l'un des archétypes les plus malmenés par l'imaginaire occidental. Cette relecture intime prend la forme d'une suite de poèmes narratifs composés à quatre mains, en français et anglais, pour la lecture et pour la scène. La Belle-mère / The Stepmother examines the relational complexities, responsibilities and freedoms inherent in a role that is also among the most maligned archetypes in Western imagination. This intimate re-reading takes the form of a series of narrative poems co-written in French and English, for the page and for the stage.
03
May 2026

La Belle-mère / The Stepmother

In the aftermath of a crisis within her blended family, a stepmother weighs up her choices, past, present, and future. Fragment by fragment, she pieces together her story, with the honesty of a woman with everything to lose and everything to gain. Using words as a mirror, she tries to see herself as she is, not in the eyes of the society around her, but in the eyes of those who love her and who she loves.

La belle-mère / The Stepmother offers a complete re-reading of the stepmother archetype, a subject of the collective Western imagination for centuries. The challenges, duties, responsibilities, stakes, and freedoms of the role are weighed and analyzed without complacency, in this dynamic suite of narrative poems. The show will be performed in French, with English subtitles, by the co-authors themselves, Amélie Prévost and Rachel McCrum.