CanLit Author Spotlights

House, Home, Hospitality Author Spotlight – Michael Penny

July 11, 2019

Michael Penny was born in Australia, but has lived his adult life in Canada. He has worked as a lawyer and consultant and been active as a volunteer board member for numerous arts and literary organizations. He has published five books, and now lives on Bowen Island.

His poem “Automobilia” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/automobilia/.

Canadian Literature issue 237, House, Home, Hospitality, is available to order through our online store.


House, Home, Hospitality Author Spotlight – Jane Boyes

July 4, 2019

Jane Boyes is a PhD candidate in English at Dalhousie University, where she specializes in contemporary experimental literature, with emphasis on digital techniques, Canadian contexts, and marginalized perspectives.

 

Article
“Non-Recognition in the Colonial Archive: Rachel Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia: Errant Adˆent$res in Ultima Thule

Abstract
In her 2014 poetry collection Janey’s Arcadia: Errant Ad^ent$res in Ultima Thule, Rachel Zolf thinks through the role of the archive in legitimizing colonial aims by playing with the source material of the archive itself. Zolf takes as a basis for her poems texts from the settler Canadian archive and feeds them through Optical Character Recognition software, which transforms scanned images of print texts into “malleable language” (Janey’s Arcadia 117). This study situates Zolf’s text in relation to archive theory and Canadian feminist innovative poetics, before moving on to argue that the OCR glitch in Janey’s Arcadia exposes, stirs up, and disrupts the workings of power in the archive, whereby the mis- and non-recognition of Indigenous and other racialized groups is mobilized to support the capitalist and colonialist aims of settler Canada.

Canadian Literature issue 237, House, Home, Hospitality, is available to order through our online store.


House, Home, Hospitality Author Spotlight – Sabyasachi Nag

June 27, 2019

Sabyasachi Nag is the author of two books of poetry: Bloodlines (Writers Workshop, 2006) and Could You Please, Please Stop Singing (Mosaic Press, 2015). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in several anthologies and publications including, The Antigonish Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Crosswinds, Grain, Emerge, Perihelion, R.kv.r.y Quarterly, The Squaw Valley Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Void, and the VLQ. Native of Calcutta, West Bengal, Sachi lives in Mississauga, Ontario with his wife and son. He is a member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and a graduate of the Writer’s Studio at Simon Frazer University. He works in Human Resources and Education.

His poem “Maria After the Concert” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/maria-after-the-concert/.

Canadian Literature issue 237, House, Home, Hospitality, is available to order through our online store.


House, Home, Hospitality Author Spotlight – Alec Follett

June 20, 2019

Alec Follett is a white settler PhD candidate in literary studies at the University of Guelph who writes about Indigenous and Canadian environmental justice literature. He serves as co-editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada and works with various community organizations that promote local literary culture and environmental knowledge.

 

Article
“‘A life of dignity, joy and good relation’: Water, Knowledge, and Environmental Justice in Rita Wong’s undercurrent

Abstract
Environmental activism often centres Western knowledge to the detriment of Indigenous peoples’ efforts to define and enact environmental justice on their own terms. In undercurrent, Rita Wong’s poetry centres Indigenous knowledge and approaches to water, while maintaining that non-Indigenous knowledges may be deployed strategically in support of Indigenous peoples’ fights for justice.

Canadian Literature issue 237, House, Home, Hospitality, is available to order through our online store.


House, Home, Hospitality Author Spotlight – Hendrik Slegtenhorst

June 13, 2019

Hendrik Slegtenhorst is the author of The Cantatas of J.S. Bach: Trinity I-VII, On the Cantatas of J.S. Bach: Trinity VIII-XVI, and On the Cantatas of J.S. Bach: Trinity XVII-XXVII, the first three volumes of the series on the cantatas of J. S. Bach; Surviving Government: Municipal Powers and Surviving Government: Municipal Functions, the first two parts of the series on local government; and, of Caravaggio’s Dagger, the first book of the series on ethics and right action.

His poem “Legacy” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/legacy/.

Canadian Literature issue 237, House, Home, Hospitality, is available to order through our online store.


House, Home, Hospitality Author Spotlight – Aubrey Jean Hanson

June 6, 2019

Photo credit to Erin Burns, Avenue Magazine (avenuecalgary.com)

Aubrey Jean Hanson is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta and an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary’s Werklund School of Education. Her research interests span Indigenous literary studies, curriculum studies, and Indigenous and social justice education. Aubrey has previously published work in Studies in American Indian Literatures, the Canadian Journal of Higher Education, and The Walrus.

 

Article
“Holding Home Together: Katherena Vermette’s The Break

Abstract
This article reads Métis writer Katherena Vermette’s 2016 novel The Break in order to examine urban Indigenous women’s resilience in relation to understandings of home. As the women in this text gather around young Emily, who has endured a violent sexual attack, they embody a strength that resides in their kinship as well as in interconnected conceptions of home. This reading is significant given the issue of violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada, as well as the growing numbers of Indigenous people finding home in cities. As a Métis woman, I also read this text through my own experience. Through these analyses, this paper contends that portrayals of strong Indigenous women can help to shift dominant understandings of Indigenous people, making space for Indigenous women’s well-being in urban spaces. This article offers a timely and Métis-focused consideration of Vermette’s novel.

Canadian Literature issue 237, House, Home, Hospitality, is available to order through our online store.


House, Home, Hospitality Author Spotlight – Pauline Peters

May 30, 2019

Pauline Peters is a writer who works for the Toronto Public Library. She has written and published short stories and poems as well as having had plays produced. Her main writing interests include myths, women, race, and the natural world.

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

Canadian Literature issue 237, House, Home, Hospitality, is available to order through our online store.


House, Home, Hospitality Author Spotlight – Alix Shield

May 23, 2019

Alix Shield is a PhD Candidate and settler scholar in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her research uses contemporary digital humanities methods to analyze collaboratively authored twentieth- and twenty-first-century Indigenous literatures in Canada, and is primarily focused on E. Pauline Johnson’s and Chief Joe and Mary Capilano’s 1911 text Legends of Vancouver. Alix is also a Research Assistant for Dr. Deanna Reder’s “The People and the Text” SSHRC-funded project, and the recipient of an SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship for her doctoral work.

 

Article (co-authored with Deanna Reder)
“‘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.

Canadian Literature issue 237, House, Home, Hospitality, is available to order through our online store.


House, Home, Hospitality Author Spotlight – Deanna Reder

May 16, 2019

Deanna Reder (Cree/Métis) is an Associate Professor in the Departments of First Nations Studies and English at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches courses in Indigenous popular fiction and Canadian Indigenous literatures, especially autobiography. She is Principal Investigator of a five-year SSHRC-funded project for 2015-2020 called “The People and the Text: Indigenous Writing in Northern North America up to 1992.” She has co-edited several anthologies including Troubling Tricksters (2010), Learn, Teach, Challenge (2016), and Read, Listen, Tell (2017). The most recent is Honouring the Strength of Indian Women, a collection of the plays, stories, and poetry of Vera Manuel, forthcoming from the University of Manitoba Press.

 

Article (co-authored with Alix Shield)
“‘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.

Canadian Literature issue 237, House, Home, Hospitality, is available to order through our online store.


Lost and Found Author Spotlight – Sara Mang

April 16, 2019

Originally from Labrador, Sara Mang’s prose and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Quarterly, Room, Carve Magazine, CV2, and other journals. Since 2017, her work has been a finalist for numerous awards including The New Quarterly’s Peter Hinchcliff Award, The Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award, and the Bristol Short Story Prize. An alumni of the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal, Sara is an editorial board member at PRISM International and an MFA student at the University of British Columbia. She lives in Cornwall, Ontario with her husband, three children, and rabbit.

Her poem “Pithy” can be read here.

Canadian Literature issue 236, Lost and Found, is available to order through our online store.