The Fire Of The Feminine Voice: Poetry And Midlife Women

We humans are natural storytellers. In the same way as our opposable thumbs distinguish us from other primates, our ability to create a narrative to convey things that matter to us as individuals and within a society is innate.

But what if we’re feeling unheard and unwanted? Or we’re busy all the time? Or we have something in our past that stops us from believing our stories matter and that passing through our world hidden under a cloak of invisibility serves us best? Or what if, like me a few years ago – as a forty-something mother of three in peri-menopause –  you’ve become so used to creating stories you think others wanted to hear,  you’ve become immured to your inner voice? In a world that often expects us midlife women to shrink or conform, poetry offers a powerful refuge while lighting the way for us to reclaim the value of our narrative.

Over the millennia most cultures have seen the wise woman as being an intrinsic part of the social fabric, the storyteller connecting her community around a blazing fire. We’re familiar with the tropes. The depiction of an older woman with warts on her nose and wiry red hair, and/ or wearing a cloak of many different fabrics and /or living in a crooked little house in the forest or even a red tent in the desert. Whether she appears in fairy stories, fantasy books or even historical retellings, her character is instantly recognisable. But there is another element all these depictions have in common. No matter how this older woman looks or where she lives, it’s within her gift to impact a story and change a situation. Whether for good or ill, as a weaver of apparent or inherent magic, her voice matters.

For the purpose of this piece (and so our voices don’t become as obsolete as our tailbones) I’d like to draw these two concepts together. In no small part due to the dominance of male voices in most recorded cultures (with notable exceptions such as mystics Julian of Norwich and Mother Shipton in the middle ages, or more recently sages such as Camilla Pinkola Estes in our Western one), many of us midlife women have forgotten how to access our inner voice.

For some, harnessing its creative power might prove to be a way of engaging with these unforgiving, polarised times by finding like-minded people to connect with in an authentic way. For others, it might need to be an entirely personal journey. Whatever the case, communicating our truth will have a significant impact on our individual and social landscapes.

And that’s where poetry comes in. To me it offers way of bypassing the ‘scold’s bridle’ through which many of us repeat received opinions and current thought in order to be heard rather than recognising the inherent ‘wise woman’ power our age and experience brings. But how can a collection of words, arranged around a particular rhythm and maybe even rhyme, incite this kind of visceral response? Well, the power of poetry has as much to do with our physiological wiring, as anything else.

Our language centres are at the front of the brain, our emotional brain (some call it reptilian brain) is by the brain stem. This distance between the two is representative of our brain’s evolution, which means they rarely meet. Writing poetry creates an information superhighway between the deepest of instinctive emotions and their outward expression. A study by James Pennebaker in 1986 identified language as being essential to healing, with the creative arts allowing us to find a way of being true to ourselves which in the best of circumstances we convey to others.

As a poet, I see it as a force that supercharges my self-awareness, shaping how I engage with the world through the lens of recovery and hope. Interestingly, despite writing poetry for many years, it was only in midlife that I truly harnessed its power. This realisation gave birth to the Crossing Places series. The Horse And The Girl, first published in 2022, explores the discovery of this voice. By allowing myself the time to honour the old ways and green places, I cultivated the stillness I needed to hear my voice. I found the courage to transform my inner dialogue into outer expression and to finally engage with the world on my own terms.

In Maiden Mother Crone, the collection I’ll be drawing from in my forthcoming Masterclass, I allow this to unfold, creating new truths and therefore a different path to the one I once thought I had no option but to walk. Engaging with others, while allowing my own poetic voice free reign, has enabled me to present trauma, motherhood and addiction without fear, while weaving in golden threads of recovery and ultimately, hope. This collection is my calling card, a way of inviting connection. Finally, planned for publication by Sea Crow Press in 2026, the third in the series will be Maiden Mother Crone: The Anthology. Committed to fostering intimacy between writer and readers, it aims to empower positive creativity by connecting us while inviting reader submissions.

So, come and place the burning twig of your story upon the hearth and share in the warmth of the others who have gone before. For no matter where we come from and whatever our experience might be, at the heart of our innermost selves is a generous, voluptuous creator who knows her worth and will go to the end of the earth to tell her story, not just for herself, but for others too.

Vibrant, courageous and beautiful 
we can Crones can be dutiful but we’re dangerous too. 
Fearless. In the face of happenstance we dance.

Madeleine F White is a poet, novelist and magazine editor. Living in Broadstairs in Kent, her debut novel Mother Of Floods was published by Crowsnest Books in 2020 and she is currently putting the finishing touches to a new one, ably supported by her horse Lucie who is immortalised in The Horse And The Girl poetry collection. Part of the Crossing Places series, Maiden Mother Crone is published by Sea Crow Press and is her second published collection.