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Silence and Seizure

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Stewart-Nuñez recounts chasing a diagnosis for her son’s seizure disorder and learning to be his advocate while confronting her my own lack of knowledge about disability. With the wisdom of disable...
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  • 15 September 2026
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Silence and Seizure is a memoir about raising a son with a rare epilepsy syndrome—about the fear of seizures and the fear of unknown futures.

The story starts when Christine Stewart-Nuñez’s plan for a stable life disintegrates. She chases a diagnosis for her son Holden’s odd behavior and lapses in language, and she watches her marriage to Holden’s father end, understanding these changes through the lens of illness and its silences.

Seizing in ditches, apple-picking, appetizing shards of glass, a Picasso at the Tate, midnight ambulances, panic attacks at 37,000 feet, and mini-ninjas. Epilepsy impaired Holden, but for a time, Christine’s lack of knowledge created a barrier that disabled him. As she learns to be an advocate, her parenting process begins to parallel her artistic practice: observe, research, reflect, create, revise. With the wisdom of disabled writers serving as touchstones for reflection, Silence and Seizure captures how the lens of disability helped Christine frame the nuances of her experience as she developed tactics for living a more complex life where both mother and son can flourish.

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Price: $29.99
Pages: 300
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Imprint: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication Date: 15 September 2026
Trim Size: 8.00 X 5.25 in
ISBN: 9781771127332
Format: Paperback
BISACs: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs, Memoirs, FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Parenting / Motherhood, HEALTH & FITNESS / Diseases & Conditions / Nervous System (incl. Brain), Family and health, Parenting: advice and issues
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"Christine Stewart-Nuñez’s story is an essential one that fills a gap in family disability narratives in Canadian literature. In Silence and Seizure, Stewart-Nuñez incorporates the ideas of key disability scholars and seamlessly draws insights from her own lived experience to highlight our common humanity and the ways we are interconnected. She resists problematic “good/bad” dichotomous thinking about disability, and introduces readers to novel ways of perceiving the disability caregiving experience. Stewart-Nuñez leans into the liminal spaces of the in-between with her son Holden, she loves him unconditionally, and finds personal resolve in the process. Approached with academic vigour, these pages are filled with a fierce intellect embossed with tenderness. This book is a manual of hope for caregivers who remain focused on “the Plan” of life, while simultaneously providing an illuminating look through the window of the caregiver experience for the wider world. Fresh, original, and necessary, Silence and Seizure is poetic, gorgeously rendered, and deeply moving. A must-read."   - Adelle Purdham, author of I Don’t Do Disability And Other Lies I’ve Told Myself
Christine Stewart-Nuñez is the author of Chrysopoeia: Essays of Language, Love, and Place (2022) and The Poet & The Architect (2021). She is a professor at the University of Manitoba in Women’s & Gender Studies and Disability Studies. From 2019-2021 Stewart-Nuñez was the poet laureate for South Dakota.

Preface. Inter: prefix noting between
Prologue. Intersection: a cutting between
Chapter One. Interrupted: a process stopped
Chapter Two. Intercept: to seize en route
Chapter Three. Intertwined: twisted together 
Chapter Four. Interfere: to intervene without invitation
Chapter Five. Internecine: destructive to both sides in a conflict
Chapter Six. Intermittent: stopping unpredictably
Chapter Seven. Internal: situated on the inside
Chapter Eight. Intercourse: exchange, communion, connection
Chapter Nine. Interlocution: to speak between
Chapter Ten. Interictal: occurring between seizures
Chapter Eleven. Interstitial: a narrow opening
Chapter Twelve. Internalize: to incorporate within oneself
Chapter Thirteen. Interface: a point of meeting
Chapter Fourteen. Interdependent: mutually dependent
Epilogue. Interlucent: shining in the midst of other things
Acknowledgements