“Felice”: The Polish Beginning
Abstract: W*E DECIDED on an extended honeymoon. I had a sabbati- cal year coming up and wanted to attempt yet again ...
“General Ludd”: A Satire on Decadence
Abstract: ILN THE FIFTEENTH CHAPTER OF General Ludd, a satire on a writer’s solitary, somewhat crazy battle against the forces of ...
“God in his Blank Spaces”: Quantum Theology in Tim Lilburn’s Names of God
Abstract: The five-poem sequence that concludes Tim Lilburn’s first collection Names of God (1986) embodies fundamental aspects of his poetics and an early version of the intensely contemplative desire that characterizes so much of his later work. A series of Gedankenexperimente on the nature of God, the cosmos, light, mind, and matter, these early poems metaphorically entwine related aspects of quantum physics and apophatic theology, particularly as regards the dualistic nature and the indeterminacy of matter, consciousness, and language.
“Has Anyone Here Heard of Marjorie Pickthall?” Discovering the Canadian Literary Landscape
Abstract: ICAUGHT MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Canada in May 1940 from the deck of the Sobieski, a Polish ship that was ...
“Helena’s Household”: James De Mille’s Heretical Text
Abstract: ?(RiTiCAL STUDIES OF JAMES DE MILLE have tended to centre almost exclusively on Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder ...
“How the World Burns”: Adults Writing War for Children
Abstract: Writing about war for children? The challenges and responsibilities of such a project raise questions that resist easy answers. First ...
“I didn’t hear the birds singing”: Beth Brant’s Echoes of Condolence
Abstract: This article considers Bay of Quinte Mohawk writer Beth Brant’s stories, poetry, and editorial work in the context of the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace, specifically the episode involving the widower Aionwahtha and the first Condolence Ceremony. Through an Indigenous literary nationalist lens, the article traces echoes of the Condolence Ceremony in the concept of “witness” that Brant develops throughout her work. I analyze Brant’s prison correspondence, her essay “Writing as Witness,” the short story “Home Coming,” and the poem “Her Name is Helen,” each of which address the issues of grief and suicidality in Indigenous communities. In these moments, Brant invokes the Condolence Ceremony as a gesture of care and empathy towards those who, as she writes, are lost in “the throes of the unnatural.”
“I diverge / you diverge / we diverge”
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“I had never seen such a shed called a house before”: The Discourse of Home in Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush
Abstract: “I had never seen such a shed called a house before”: The Discourse of Home in Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It ...
“I write this for all of you”: Recovering the Unpublished RCMP “Incident” in Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973)
Abstract: In a 1989 interview, Métis author Maria Campbell complained to Hartmut Lutz that a section of her autobiography, Halfbreed, first published in 1973, was removed by the publisher against her wishes. During a chance meeting with Campbell in Dublin in 2017, and following Indigenous protocols, Deanna Reder and Alix Shield asked her for permission to search for early versions of Campbell's text. With Campbell's blessing, Alix Shield conducted an archival search for any early material, and discovered the excised passage that revealed that when Campbell was a teenager, she had been raped by RCMP officers. This article includes the found text and discusses the impact of its excision.