CanLit Author Spotlights

Sensing Different Worlds: Author Spotlight – Forum Authors

December 15, 2021

Forum

“Reading and Teaching Canadian Auto/biography in 2021: On Eternity Martis’ They Said This Would Be Fun: Race, Campus Life, and Growing Up and Samra Habib’s We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir

 

Abstract

This forum is an edited version of a conversation recorded on February 12, 2021. We decided to do this book review as a conversation, because we are the co-authors of the forthcoming Routledge Volume on Auto/biography in Canada, the first volume to be written about different forms of life writing in what is currently called Canada, also known as Turtle Island. Doing the work for the volume has made us very aware of the role we have as editors—and as teachers—not only to think through the importance of personal non-fiction in Canada, but also to consider carefully the role auto/biography plays and has played in struggles against racism and colonialism. Since we work as a collective, and because we don’t think the same way about everything, we also feel that it is important to bring multiple voices into conversation; after all, there is more than one way to read the story of Canadian non-fiction. Because we are located in four different time zones, from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts, this conversation took place on Zoom. We transcribed and then collaboratively edited the resulting text.

 

Sonja Boon

Sonja Boon is Professor of Gender Studies at Memorial University. Passionate about stories and storytelling, she has published on a variety of topics, from considerations of gender, embodied identity, and citizenship in eighteenth-century medical letters, to breastfeeding selfies and virtual activism, autobiographies of infanticide, auto/ethnography and the embodiment of maternal grief, and craftivism in the feminist classroom. Her literary work appears in ROOM magazine, The Ethnic Aisle, and Geist, as well as in edited collections. She is the author of four books, most recently Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge: Unsettled Islands (co-authored with Lesley Butler and Daze Jefferies, Palgrave 2018), and What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2019). In October 2020, she was awarded the Ursula Franklin Award in Gender Studies by the Royal Society of Canada.

 

Laurie McNeill

Laurie McNeill is a Professor of Teaching in the Department of English Language and Literatures at UBC. Her research in auto/biography studies focuses on the production and reception of life narratives and testimony in digital and archival spaces. She is co-editor (with Kate Douglas) of Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives (Routledge, 2017), and, with John David Zuern, Online Lives 2.0, a special issue of the journal Biography (2015). Her most recent articles and chapters have been published in the journals a/b: Autobiography Studies and English Studies in Canada and in the collection Inscribed Identities (Routledge, 2019).

 

Julie Rak

Julie Rak holds the Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her latest book is False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction (2021). She has written many other books, collections and articles about auto/biography, life writing and other nonfiction, popular culture and print culture.

 

Candida Rifkind

Candida Rifkind is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg, where she specializes in graphic narratives and Canadian literature. She is co-editor of Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage (Palgrave, 2020); Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2016), which won the 2016 Gabrielle Roy Prize; and a special issue of a/b: Auto/biography Studies on “Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Narratives” (2020). Her monograph Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada (2009) won the 2010 Ann Saddlemyer Prize.

 

Canadian Literature issue 244, Sensing Different Worlds, is available to read at online or to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.

 


Sensing Different Worlds: Author Spotlight – Ulrike Narwani

December 8, 2021

Ulrike Narwani’s poetry has been published in literary journals, chapbooks, and anthologies, most recently in Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds, Voicing Suicide and Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page (forthcoming in 2021), haiku in Last Train Home and The Wanderer Brush, a book of haiga. She is a past winner of Freefall’s contest. A haiku won the 2020 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational top award for BC. A poem has traveled on BC Transit. Collecting Silence is her debut volume of poetry (Ronsdale Press, 2017). She lives near Sidney, BC. You can visit her website at www.ulrikenarwani.com.

 

Her poem “Mistaking Nike for Niobe” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/mistaking-nike-for-niobe/.

 

Canadian Literature issue 244, Sensing Different Worlds, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.


Sensing Different Worlds: Author Spotlight – Daniela Janes

December 1, 2021

Daniela Janes teaches Canadian literature at the University of Toronto Mississauga. A life-long re-reader of L.M. Montgomery’s works, she has taught the novels Anne of Green Gables, Rilla of Ingleside, and Emily of New Moon in classes on Canadian literature, children’s literature, the First World War, and the artist novel. She has presented her work on Rilla and the print culture of WWI and on Rilla and trauma at conferences in Charlottetown and Toronto. Daniela is a member of the steering committee of “Conversations about L.M. Montgomery,” a virtual discussion series launched during the pandemic to connect Montgomery readers. She has also published articles on historical fiction, social reform writing, the castaway narrative, and the short story cycle. 

Article

“The Clock Is Dead”: Temporality and Trauma in Rilla of Ingleside

Abstract

L.M. Montgomery’s First World War novel, Rilla of Ingleside, is a text preoccupied with time. The novel paces through the harrowing years of war along a horizontal axis, chronologically following its young heroine from youth to maturity. Its structure, though, illustrates the gap between two modes of experiencing and representing time: standard time, a system of measurement that is external and objective, and autobiographical time, which is wrapped up in the personality and perceptions of the experiencing subject. Montgomery’s novel juxtaposes standard time and autobiographical time to capture the individual, subjective experience of war and to register the war’s private traumatic impact. The disjunction between standard time and autobiographical time in Rilla of Ingleside demonstrates the slipperiness of time as a human experience, emphasizing its abstract, individualized nature in the context of war-time trauma. I argue that through characters’ processes of organizing and understanding time, we witness the ongoing battle to make meaning out of the war.

 

Canadian Literature issue 244, Sensing Different Worlds, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.


Sensing Different Worlds: Author Spotlight – Ayo Okikiolu

November 24, 2021

Ayo’s full name is Ayooluwanimi Okikiolu–but you can call him Ayo. Currently, he is a Nigerian-Canadian fourth-year student at the University of Alberta. When he is not involved in school-work, he is likely volunteering, writing, doing some research, eating, sleeping, talking, spending time with family, and doing other human things. He spends much of his time writing poetry or, alternatively, thinking about writing poems.

 

His poem “Stand with You.” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/stand-with-you/.

 

Canadian Literature issue 244, Sensing Different Worlds, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.


Sensing Different Worlds: Author Spotlight – Nicole Go

November 17, 2021


Nicole Go is a faculty fellow at the University of King’s College, where she teaches in the Foundation Year Program. She completed an Hon. BA and MA in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto and held a Nippon Foundation Fellowship at Stanford’s Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, Japan. She is a current PhD candidate and former sessional lecturer in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, where she is completing a dissertation on how language and translation are theorized in novels, poetry, and photography by Asian Canadian and Japanese authors. More broadly, her research considers the links between language, nation, and race, as well as the intersections of Asian Studies and Asian American studies.

Article

The “retinal-world” of Roy Kiyooka’s Wheels

Abstract

Roy Kiyooka’s (1926-1994) Wheels: A Trip Thru Honshu’s Backcountry (1981) documents his travels around Japan, but while the text ostensibly presents him as a Western tourist who gazes upon the non-West, his hybridized subjectivity complicates the native/foreigner dichotomy. This liminal state is reflected in photographs mediated by train windows and car windshields separating the camera’s eye from the landscape. Additionally, his constant references to the act of photography—winding up film, brushing dirt off the lens, clicking the shutter—effectively put his own body into the viewfinder. In demonstrating an acute awareness of being seen, Kiyooka implicates a white, hegemonic, Anglophone Canadian audience in his racialization: first, in the exoticization and tokenization of his work within the predominantly white fields of Canadian art and literature; and second, as an “enemy alien” under national surveillance during WWII.

Canadian Literature issue 244, Sensing Different Worlds, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.


Sensing Different Worlds: Author Spotlight – Chantel Lavoie

November 13, 2021

Chantel Lavoie has published three books of poetry: Where the Terror  Lies (Quattro Books in 2012), Serve the Sorrowing World with Joy (with Meg Freer, Woodpecker Lan, 2020) and This is about Angels, Women, and Men (Mansfield Press, 2021). Originally from Saskatchewan, she now lives in Kingston, Ontario, where she teaches at the Royal Military College of Canada.

 

Her poem “Saskatchewan” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/saskatchewan/.

 

Canadian Literature issue 244, Sensing Different Worlds, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.


Sensing Different Worlds: Author Spotlight – Keah Hansen

November 3, 2021

Keah Hansen is a doctoral candidate in the Communication and Culture program at York University. She previously completed her Master’s of Arts degree in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, and her Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature at McGill University. She currently studies the intersection of affect and finance and is bilingual in English and French.

 

Article

Getting to Resurgence through Sourcing Cultural Strength: An Analysis of Robertson’s Will I See? and LaPensée’s Deer Woman

 

Abstract

Many Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples contend that the Canadian government has failed Indigenous peoples in addressing missing and murdered Indigenous women and in encouraging Canadians to respond to the Calls to Action made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In my paper, I examine how two Indigenous graphic novels—Deer Woman by Elizabeth LaPensée, Will I See by David A. Robertson et al.—and one non-Indigenous-authored graphic novel—Secret Path by Gord Downie and Jeff Lemire—provoke empowerment and shame, respectively, in their readers, in order to incite action to counter failures of the government in addressing colonial violence. While pre-existing work has addressed Indigenous storytelling through graphic novels (Tiger) and the potential of graphic novels to represent trauma for justice (Crawley and Rijsijk, Donova and Ustundag), my paper is novel in examining how emotionality in graphic novels can function to subvert government inaction in addressing violence against Indigenous peoples.

 

Canadian Literature issue 244, Sensing Different Worlds, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.


Sensing Different Worlds: Author Spotlight – Stephen Bett

October 27, 2021

Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 24 books in print. His upcoming book, Broken Glosa: an alphabet book of post-avant glosa, will be published by Chax Press later in 2021. His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. His website is stephenbett.com.

 

His poem “Fred Wah: A Floating Space” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/fred-wah-a-floating-space/.

 

Canadian Literature issue 244, Sensing Different Worlds, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.


Sensing Different Worlds: Author Spotlight – Morgan Cohen

October 20, 2021

Morgan Cohen is currently pursuing her M.A. in Rhetoric and Communication Design at the University of Waterloo. Her research interests encompass understanding the “how” and “why” of structures of knowledge, that is, the “what” that may reflect its content, yet distorts the possibilities of meaning. She hopes to use these understandings to change the mechanisms by which information is obtained and disseminated to create a vibrant body politic.

 

Article

“can you tell the rhetorical difference?”: Foraging and Fodder in Rita Wong’s forage

 

Abstract

In Forage, Rita Wong explores the subversion and lexicon of “familiar” neoliberal culture with its less-familiar harmful consequences. The definition of forage is to conduct a “wide search over an area in order to obtain something, especially food or provisions” (Oxford). By “forage,” Wong largely means the process of “scouring” to locate the source of cultural malaise, the result of this capitalist influence. However forage has another layer of meaning in its Germanic origin, also pertinent here: it means “fodder,” that is, “a person or thing regarded only as material for a specific use” (Oxford). This essay shows how the imagery related to fodder represents national political ethea of subverting responsibility and cultural apathy. Wong highlights the individual’s search and need for sustenance, and how the same individual caught within the capitalist system and its deployment of “status quo stories” that are used as “fodder” for the functioning of neoliberal machinery.

 

Canadian Literature issue 244, Sensing Different Worlds, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.

 


Sensing Different Worlds: Author Spotlight – David Martin

October 13, 2021

David Martin works as a literacy instructor in Calgary and is an organizer for the Single Onion Poetry Series. His first collection, Tar Swan (NeWest Press, 2018), was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Book Prize. David’s work has been awarded the CBC Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the Vallum Award for Poetry and PRISM international’s poetry contest, and has appeared in numerous journals across Canada.

 

His poem “Holy Trinity, Bankhead” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/holy-trinity-bankhead/.

 

Canadian Literature issue 244, Sensing Different Worlds, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.