Of Water and Wings

Poems of Truth and Healing Between Mother and Daughter

This collection was written in tandem by Kim Birdsong and her daughter, Stephanie Schilling, in a process of reflection and discovery.

Each poem began with a shared title, theme, or memory—an invitation more than an instruction. From there, each woman wrote separately, without reading or discussing the other’s work until both pieces were complete. Only then did they trade words, meeting one another anew through what was created.

What emerged was an intimate conversation across generations—a dialogue between silence and speaking, pain and reclamation. These poems explore the inherited patterns of trauma, the ways we learn to protect ourselves, and the courage it takes to unlearn what once kept us safe through a lens of compassion. In their pairing, mother and daughter trace the echoes that pass through bloodlines, and the moments of healing that become possible when those echoes are finally named.

This poetry collection is both tender and fierce.

This is a topic that is difficult and challenging and is also rarely discussed, yet it is more prevalent than most people realize. We need to speak more about it, more often and more openly. Shame thrives in silence, and it is the hope of these authors that his volume of poems begins to dissolve a portion of it.

We have navigated this complex path together, and now we invite you to join us—to bear witness to our truth and our healing, through the voices of this mother and daughter finding their way.

Coming Spring 2026

  • "It is no small thing to 'turn toward the wounds,' as Kim Birdsong writes, but in this remarkable book, both mother and daughter write their way toward 'raw pain, raw truth, raw beauty, raw joy.' My heart aches reading these poems of surviving sibling sexual assault. At the same time I celebrate how both women have found a way, as Stephanie Schilling writes, to 'walk forward, steady in the light.' Of Water and Wings is a book of unexpected beauty—the kind that comes from facing together what hurts the most and daring to walk forward."

    Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and All the Honey

  • "Of Water and Wings weaves reckoning, redemption, and healing power in a form and magnitude I've never yet experienced. It lands as no less than a miracle that from such individual and overlapping trauma would rise the desire and capacity for an emergent conversation this skillful between mother and adult daughter. To say the healing in this book is expressed in an artful way would miss the mark - the artistic brilliance of these poems and the real-time transformation are one indivisible, medicinal thing. How can the terrible be transmuted and the transcendent realized? Stephanie and Kim bring the bravest truth-telling with a willingness to stay in the burning. Together, through individual and relational genius, they leave us with this offering: the mind-stopping beauty of that which can never be harmed in the human soul - no matter what. I am certain this book will profoundly benefit countless beings."

    Brooke McNamara, Poet & Zen teacher, author of  Feed Your Vow and Bury the Seed

  • "This is a brave book. The poems do not flinch. They take you into places of pain and bewilderment. They also take you into places of beauty, grace and courageous love. Having the same gut-wrenching horrors written about by both the mother and the daughter creates an incredibly deep, textured exploration of how we find our way back from things that never should have happened. Having stories of healing told by both is a powerful thing."

    Dave Rock, writer, storyteller, Flow Speaking teacher

  • Kim Birdsong and Stephanie Schilling’s focused, provocative, and fiercely tender and compassionate collaboration is not only unsparingly confrontational in its accounts of familial sexual abuse but is rooted in revealing the “golden marks of survival” and what “persists beneath the fractures.” The poems, sprung from prompts Birdsong and Schilling share and weave into separate reflections, become intertwined as the collection rumbles unflinchingly forward, and readers—enfolded in lines where “the tangible and intangible meet” and “no lies survive”—discover not only the places where mother and daughter have “refuse[d] silence,” but also triumphantly, become witnesses to the profoundly arduous journey in locating “hope smouldering in the cracks.” Of Water and Wings offers a pathway out of tragedy and trauma, illuminating lives that while “stitched into a shape that will never return” to what they were, have nevertheless found “healing [that] seeps like water through the mortar.” These poems are a testament not only to the courage it takes to tell the truth, but to the powerful knowledge that “survival has teeth,” that “even silence remembers song,” and that a “wound unhidden” is for the “healing of us all.” This collection rings with a clarion call that “every girl who hid in the shadows will open her mouth and find music there.”

    Maya Stein, author of How We Are Not Alone and Belfast, Maine Poet Laureate (2023-2025)

  • What makes Of Water and Wings remarkable is its refusal to stay small. The personal wound opens outward — into the state of the world, into injustice, into the wild earth itself — as if the work of turning toward one's own damage teaches, finally, how to turn toward everything broken with compassion. These poets are both petal and stone, fragile and unyielding, each one teaching the other what it means to stay. Of Water and Wings is a brave and necessary book — proof that healing is not erasure, that the body continues, and that love, when it finally tells the truth, can become something worth surviving for.

    Laurie Wagner, 27 Powers www.27powers.org

Excerpts from Of Water and Wings

The titles of Kim’s poems are listed in all caps. Stephanie’s are shown in bold.