Download or read book Dead Woman Pickney written by Yvonne Shorter Brown and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dead Woman Pickney chronicles Yvonne Shorter Brown’s life growing up in Jamaica between 1943 and 1965 and teaching in Canada from 1969. Told with stridency and humour, the stories include both personal experience and history. Taking up the haunting memories of childhood, along with persistent racial marginalization of Black people, both globally and in Canada, the author sets out to construct a narrative that at once explains her own origins in the former slave society of Jamaica and traces the outsider status of Africa and its peoples. The author’s quest to understand the absence of her mother and her mother’s people from her life is at the heart of the narrative. The author struggles through life to discover the identity of her mother in the face of silence from her father’s brutal family. In this updated edition she adds a coda, “finding mother”, constructed from archives, genealogy, letters, and journals. Initially published in 2010, this second edition includes expanded text and a foreword by Sonja Boon, author of What the Oceans Remember.

Download or read book Dead Woman Pickney A Memoir of Childhood in Jamaica written by and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dead Woman Pickney chronicles life stories of growing up in Jamaica from 1943 to 1965 and contains both personal experience and history, told with stridency and humour. The author’s coming of age parallels the political stages of Jamaica’s moving from the richest Crown colony of Great Britain to an independent nation within the British Commonwealth of Nations. Taking up the haunting memories of childhood, along with her astonishment at persistent racial marginalization, both locally and globally, the author sets out to construct a narrative that at once explains her own origins in the former slave society of Jamaica and traces the outsider status of Africa and its peoples. The author’s quest to understand the absence of her mother and her mother’s people from her life is at the heart of this narrative. The title, Dead Woman Pickney, is in Jamaican patois, and its meaning unfolds throughout the narrative. It begins with the author’s childhood question of what a mother is, followed by the realization of the vulnerability of a child without its mother’s protection. The term “pickney” was the name for slave children on sugar plantations, and post-emancipation the term was retained for the descendants of enslaved Africans and the children of black women fathered by slavers. The author struggles through her life to discover the identity of her mother in the face of silence from her father’s brutal family. A wonderful resource for teachers of history, social studies, cultural studies, and literature, this work could be used as a starting point to discuss issues of diasporic identities, colonialism, racism, impact of slavery, and Western imperialism around the world. It is also an engaging read for those interested in memoir and life writing.

Download or read book The Best of Lady Churchill s Rosebud Wristlet written by Kelly Link and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2007-08-28 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unexpected tales of the fantastic, & other odd musings by Nalo Hopkinson, Karen Joy Fowler, Karen Russell, Jeffrey Ford, and many others Contains stories by the amazing Jeffrey Ford, the fabulous Karen Joy Fowler, the unlikely Kelly Link, the thrilling Nalo Hopkinson, the shockingly good Karen Russell, the unnerving James Sallis, and dozens of uncanny others, as well as useful lists of many kinds and straight-shooting advice from Aunt Gwenda. Edited by Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant Introduction by Dan Chaon Contents include: “Travels with the Snow Queen” by Kelly Link “Scotch: An Essay into a Drink” by Gavin J. Grant “Unrecognizable” by David Findlay “Mehitobel Was Queen of the Night” by Ian McDowell “Tan-Tan and Dry Bone” by Nalo Hopkinson “An Open Letter Concerning Sponsorship” by Margaret Muirhead “I Am Glad” by Margaret Muirhead “Lady Shonagon’s Hateful Things” by Margaret Muirhead “Heartland” by Karen Joy Fowler “What a Difference a Night Makes” “Pretending” by Ray Vukcevich “The Film Column: Don’t Look Now” by William Smith “A Is for Apple: An Easy Reader” by Amy Beth Forbes “My Father’s Ghost” by Mark Rudolph “What’s Sure to Come” by Jeffrey Ford “Stoddy Awchaw” by Geoffrey H. Goodwin “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow” by Theodora Goss “The Wolf’s Story” by Nan Fry “Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland” by Sarah Monette “Tacoma-Fuji” by David Moles “Bay” by David Erik Nelson “How to Make a Martini” by Richard Butner “Happier Days” by Jan Lars Jensen “The Fishie” by Philip Raines and Harvey Welles “Dear Aunt Gwenda, Vol. 2” by Gwenda Bond “The Film Column: Greaser’s Palace” by William Smith “The Ichthyomancer Writes His Friend with an Account of the Yeti’s Birthday Party” by David J. Schwartz “Serpents” by Vernoica Schanoes “Homeland Security” by Gavin J. Grant “For George Romero” by David Blair “Vincent Price” by David Blair “Music Lessons” by Douglas Lain “Two Stories” by James Sallis “Help Wanted” by Karen Russell “’Eft’ or ‘Epic’” by Sarah Micklem “The Red Phone” by John Kessel “The Well-Dressed Wolf: A Comic” by Lawrence Shimel and Sara Rojo “The Mushroom Duchess” by Deborah Roggie “The Pirate’s True Love” by Seana Graham “You Could Do This Too” “The Posthumous Voyages of Christopher Columbus” by Sunshine Ison

Download or read book The Routledge Introduction to Auto biography in Canada written by Sonja Boon and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-29 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada explores the exciting world of nonfiction writing about the self, designed to give teachers and students the tools they need to study both canonical and lesser-known works. The volume introduces important texts and contexts for interpreting life narratives, demonstrates the conceptual tools necessary to understand what life narratives are and how they work, and offers an historical overview of key moments in Canadian auto/biography. Not sure what life writing in Canada is, or how to study it? This critical introduction covers the tools and approaches you require in order to undertake your own interpretation of life writing texts. You will encounter nonfictional writing about individual lives and experiences—including biography, autobiography, letters, diaries, comics, poetry, plays, and memoirs. The volume includes case studies to provide examples of how to study and research life narratives and toolkits to help you apply what you learn. The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada provides instructors and students with the contexts and the critical tools to discover the power of life writing, and the skills to study any kind of nonfiction, from Canada and around the world.

Download or read book Academic Well Being of Racialized Students written by Benita Bunjun and published by Fernwood Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-30T00:00:00Z with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Canadian universities have an ongoing history of colonialism and racism in this white-settler society. Racialized students (Indigenous, Black and students of colour), who would once have been forbidden from academic spaces and who still feel out of place, must navigate these repressive structures in their educational journeys. Through the genres of essay, art, poetry and photography, this book examines the experiences of and effects on racialized students in the Canadian academy, while exposing academia’s lack of capacity to promote students’ academic well-being. The book emphasizes the crucial connections that racialized students forge, which transform an otherwise hostile environment into a space of intellectual collaboration, community building and transnational kinship relations. Meticulously curated by Dr. Benita Bunjun, this book is a living example of mentorship, reciprocity and resilience.

Download or read book Dreams of Archives Unfolded written by Jocelyn Fenton Stitt and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-18 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: Archival dreams and Caribbean life writing -- 'Autobiography in a graveyard' : doors of no return and revolutionary failures -- Speculative autobiography : ghosts and feminist fugitivity -- Repicturing the picturesque : genealogical desire, archives, and descendant community autobiography -- Ashes to ashes, dust to dust : Indo-Caribbean archival impossibility -- "Put my mom in there" : Memorialization as Caribbean counter-archive -- Coda: Untelling history.

Download or read book Basements and Attics Closets and Cyberspace written by Linda M Morra and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women’s letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women’s archives in Canada. The essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not only to research the lives of women but to create archival deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and critical absences in narratives of past and present. From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to challenges related to the interpretation of material, the contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to feminist commitments; how archival material is organized, restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae—missing or fragmented documents, or gaps in communication—that then require imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.

Download or read book Prison Life Writing written by Simon Rolston and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prison Life Writing is the first full-length study of one of the most controversial genres in American literature. By exploring the complicated relationship between life writing and institutional power, this book reveals the overlooked aesthetic innovations of incarcerated people and the surprising literary roots of the U.S. prison system. Simon Rolston observes that the autobiographical work of incarcerated people is based on a conversion narrative, a story arc that underpins the concept of prison rehabilitation and that sometimes serves the interests of the prison system, rather than those on the inside. Yet many imprisoned people rework the conversion narrative the way they repurpose other objects in prison. Like a radio motor retooled into a tattoo gun, the conversion narrative has been redefined by some authors for subversive purposes, including questioning the ostensible emancipatory role of prison writing, critiquing white supremacy, and broadly reimagining autobiographical discourse. An interdisciplinary work that brings life writing scholarship into conversation with prison studies and law and literature studies, Prison Life Writing theorizes how life writing works in prison, explains literature’s complicated entanglements with institutional power, and demonstrates the political and aesthetic innovations of one of America’s most fascinating literary genres.

Download or read book Erasing Frankenstein written by Elizabeth Effinger and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who gets to write poetry? Whose voices are made public? Whose voices are heeded? Erasing Frankenstein showcases a creative exchange between federally incarcerated women and members of the prison education think tank Walls to Bridges Collective at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario, and graduate and undergraduate students from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. Working collaboratively by long-distance mail, the artists and contributors made the first-ever poetic adaptation of Frankenstein, turning it into a book-length erasure poem, I or Us. An example of “found art,” an erasure poem is created by erasing or blacking out words in an existing text; what is left is the poem. The title reflects the nature of the project: participants have worked as “I”’s, each creating their own erased pages, but together worked as an “us” to create a collaged “monster” of a book. Erasing Frankenstein presents the original erasure poem I or Us alongside reflections from participants on the experience.

Download or read book Just a Larger Family written by Mary F. Williamson and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second World War had been under way for a year when Marie and John Williamson welcomed two English brothers to join them and their two children in their small house in north Toronto for the duration of the conflict. Marie wrote over 150 letters to the boys’ mother, Margaret Sharp, imagining that she could make Margaret feel she was still with her children. She shepherded the boys through education decisions and illnesses, eased them into a strange new life, and rejoiced when they embraced unfamiliar winter sports. The letters brim with detail about family holidays, the financial implications of an extended family, their involvement in their church, and the games and activities that kept them occupied. Marie’s letters reflect the lives and concerns of a particular family in Toronto, but they also reveal a portrait of what was then Canada’s second-largest city during wartime. The introduction is by Mary F. Williamson, Marie’s daughter, and Tom Sharp, Margaret’s youngest son. The book features a foreword by Jonathan Vance that puts the letters in historical context.

Download or read book Burdens of Proof written by Susanna Egan and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autobiographical impostures, once they come to light, appear to us as outrageous, scandalous. They confuse lived and textual identity (the person in the world and the character in the text) and call into question what we believe, what we doubt, and how we receive information. In the process, they tell us a lot about cultural norms and anxieties. Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in Autobiography examines a broad range of impostures in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and asks about each one: Why this particular imposture? Why here and now? Susanna Egan’s historical survey of texts from early Christendom to the nineteenth century provides an understanding of the author in relation to the text and shows how plagiarism and other false claims have not always been regarded as the frauds we consider them today. She then explores the role of the media in the creation of much contemporary imposture, examining in particular the cases of Jumana Hanna, Norma Khouri, and James Frey. The book also addresses ethnic imposture, deliberate fictions, plagiarism, and ghostwriting, all of which raise moral, legal, historical, and cultural issues. Egan concludes the volume with an examination of how historiography and law failed to support the identities of European Jews during World War II, creating sufficient instability in Jewish identity and doubt about Jewish wartime experience that the impostor could step in. This textual erasure of the Jews of Europe and the refashioning of their experiences in fraudulent texts are examples of imposture as an outcrop of extreme identity crisis. The first to examine these issues in North America and Europe, Burdens of Proof will be of interest to scholars of life writing and cultural studies.

Download or read book We All Giggled written by Thomas O. Hueglin and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2011-09-28 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We All Giggled tells the stories of two families that came together when the author’s parents met and married in 1945. The Hüglins had lost most of their fortune in the course of two world wars, and the Wachendorff s had survived the Nazi years despite their Jewish ancestry. The families’ roots are traced back to a vineyard in southern Germany, a jail in Geneva, the Conservatory in St. Petersburg, and the hometown of a Jewish merchant in Silesia. This engaging book centres on the author’s recollections of his grandparents, his parents, and his own growing up in postwar Germany in an environment of bourgeois stability and comfort. As the author chronicles his family’s ups and downs and abiding love for music, food, and art across several generations, a rich tapestry of anecdotes unfolds—about opera singers, restaurants, and travels, and about family relations, romance, and the kind of “impromptu reactions to people, places, and situations that often result in uncontrollable giggles.”

Download or read book Accident of Fate written by Imre Rochlitz and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2011-07-07 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accident of Fate is a first-hand account of persecution, rescue, and resistance in the Axis-occupied former Yugoslavia. At the age of thirteen, Imre Rochlitz fled to Yugoslavia from his childhood home in Vienna following the Nazi Anschluss, leaving his family behind. In January 1942 the Ustashe (Croatian Fascists) arrested and interned him in the Jasenovac death camp, where he dug mass graves. On the verge of death, Rochlitz was released due to the extraordinary intervention of a Nazi general. He escaped to the Adriatic coast, where he and several thousand other Jewish refugees were protected by the army of Fascist Italy. After Italy’s surrender, he joined Tito’s Partisans, becoming an officer and army veterinarian, and rescued dozens of downed Allied airmen. In 1945, he fled Yugoslavia’s Communist regime and reached liberated southern Italy. In 1947, at the age of twenty-two, he emigrated to the United States. With unique personal photographs and documents supporting the text, this eyewitness narrative covers little-known topics and provides a revealing historical account of the period. The book helps clarify and render accessible the complexities and contradictions of conflict and genocide in wartime Yugoslavia.

Download or read book Not the Whole Story written by Lea Caragata and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2014-04-18 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not the Whole Story is a compilation of sixteen stories narrated by single mothers in their own way and about their own lives. Each story is unique, but the same issues appear again and again. Abuse, parenting as single mothers, challenges in the labour market, mental health and addictions issues, a scarcity of quality childcare, immigration and status vulnerability, struggles with custody, and poverty—these factors, combined with a lack of support, contribute to their continued struggles. The themes that recur across stories illustrate that the issues the women face are not just about individual struggle; they demonstrate that major issues in Canada’s social system have been neglected in public policy. In order for these issues to be addressed we need to challenge the flawed public policies and the negative discourse that continue to marginalize single mothers—in terms of the opportunities in their own lives and in terms of how they are understood by other Canadians. The first-person narratives of the struggles and issues faced by low-income single mothers provide narrative richness and are augmented by introductory and concluding chapters that draw the narrative themes together and offer overarching discussion and analysis.

Download or read book Borrowed Tongues written by Eva C. Karpinski and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Borrowed Tongues is the first consistent attempt to apply the theoretical framework of translation studies in the analysis of self-representation in life writing by women in transnational, diasporic, and immigrant communities. It focuses on linguistic and philosophical dimensions of translation, showing how the dominant language serves to articulate and reinforce social, cultural, political, and gender hierarchies. Drawing on feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial scholarship, this study examines Canadian and American examples of traditional autobiography, autoethnography, and experimental narrative. As a prolific and contradictory site of linguistic performance and cultural production, such texts challenge dominant assumptions about identity, difference, and agency. Using the writing of authors such as Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Jamaica Kincaid, Laura Goodman Salverson, and Akemi Kikumura, and focusing on discourses through which subject positions and identities are produced, the study argues that different concepts of language and translation correspond with particular constructions of subjectivity and attitudes to otherness. A nuanced analysis of intersectional differences reveals gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, and diaspora as unstable categories of representation.

Download or read book Unheard Of written by John Beckwith and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2012-04-20 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Canadian composer John Beckwith recounts his early days in Victoria, his studies in Toronto with Alberto Guerrero, his first compositions, and his later studies in Paris with the renowned Nadia Boulanger, of whom he offers a comprehensive personal view. In the memoir’s central chapters Beckwith describes his activities as a writer, university teacher, scholar, and administrator. Then, turning to his creative output, he considers his compositions for instrumental music, his four operas, choral music, and music for voice. A final chapter touches on his personal and family life and his travel adventures. For over sixty years John Beckwith has participated in national musical initiatives in music education, promotion, and publishing. He has worked closely with performing groups such as the Orford Quartet and the Canadian Brass and conductors such as Elmer Iseler and Georg Tintner. A former reviewer for the Toronto Star and a CBC script writer and programmer in the 1950s and ’60s, he later produced many articles and books on musical topics. Acting under Robert Gill and Dora Mavor Moore in student days and married for twenty years to actor/director Pamela Terry, he witnessed first-hand the growth of Toronto theatre. He has collaborated with the writers Jay Macpherson, Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, and bpNichol, and teamed repeatedly with James Reaney, a close friend. His life story is a slice of Canadian cultural history.

Download or read book Boom written by Julie Rak and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of memoirs by celebrities and unknown people have been published, sold, and read by millions of American readers. The memoir boom, as the explosion of memoirs on the market has come to be called, has been welcomed, vilified, and dismissed in the popular press. But is there really a boom in memoir production in the United States? If so, what is causing it? Are memoirs all written by narcissistic hacks for an unthinking public, or do they indicate a growing need to understand world events through personal experiences? This study seeks to answer these questions by examining memoir as an industrial product like other products, something that publishers and booksellers help to create. These popular texts become part of mass culture, where they are connected to public events. The genre of memoir, and even genre itself, ceases to be an empty classification category and becomes part of social action and consumer culture at the same time. From James Frey’s controversial A Million Little Pieces to memoirs about bartending, Iran, the liberation of Dachau, computer hacking, and the impact of 9/11, this book argues that the memoir boom is more than a publishing trend. It is becoming the way American readers try to understand major events in terms of individual experiences. The memoir boom is one of the ways that citizenship as a category of belonging between private and public spheres is now articulated.