Jane is a writer currently living in Victoria BC. She grew up in Toronto and also spent many years in Calgary where, among other things, she taught Women's Studies at Mount Royal College (now Mount Royal University). Her work is about women on the brink of transformation.
Thanks so much to the Calgary writing community and readers for making Patterson House a bestseller two weeks in a row and for pushing it to the #1 spot this week.
I started Patterson House in Calgary. Both me and the book were nurtured by a whole bunch of writing classes and teachers. I took classes through Continuing Ed at the University. I went to a women’s writing week at U of A too which was excellent. Inge Trueman’s writing group and several writing retreats at Strawberry Creek (thanks Brenda, Tena and Rudy Weibe, and Astrid Blodgett and the Alberta Writers’ Guild) helped me too. And I had a really good week at Banff with Joan Clark as my mentor. There are many other Alberta-centric writing experiences too! I got to try sections out because Rona Altrows and others hosted ”Writing in the Works,” which allowed writers like me to read in public, and test the reception of work in progress. Such a gift!
We are thrilled that Impact: Women Writing After Concussion has won the BPAA’s Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year! It was a highly competitive category with four other exceptional books shortlisted. Any one of us could have won and it’s truly an honour to be in such good company. Here is a look at the shortlist.
Thank you to the BPAA and to the jury. We also thank all of our contributors who bared their souls in Impact. I am grateful, as always, to my friend and colleague and co-editor, Elaine Morin. Our thanks also go to the University of Alberta Press who believed in this book from the moment the proposal first crossed their path.
Finally I thank our many readers who have taken the time to contact us and tell us what Impact means to them. There is nothing better than getting these notes. As more people face neurological problems as a result of Covid, I fear that Impact will become even more relevant. I can’t say all brain fog is the same, but there are similarities and I think we can help each other.
What I have learned through this experience is no matter what is going on for you, you are not alone. There is always a community that can help you. I really believe that.
Save the date! September 13 at 7pm, Tracy Wai de Boer and I will be at Books and Shenanigans 347 Cook Street, Victoria BC in conversation with Susan Olding about Impact: Women Writing After Concussion.
Tracy and I will both be reading from our work in the anthology and we are looking forward to a great conversation with both Susan Olding and the audience! Susan is a wonderful memoirist and non-fiction writer—a perfect person to talk about this anthology.
Coincidentally, Susan Olding’s most recent book, Big Reader, is short-listed along with Impact for the Book Publishers Association of Alberta’s Trade Non Fiction Book of the Year.
The awards will be given out September 16 in Calgary, just a few days after our event.
Please join us. Many thanks to Books and Shenanigans for hosting.
As Roe v Wade is overturned in the US, it’s hard not to ponder what this means for reproductive rights in Canada, and of course, for our fellow humans south of the border.
The Abortion Monologues
I have a substantive body of work about abortion and frankly, I always hope I will never have to return to it. I want our rights to bodily autonomy to be secure. They never are. Nothing is. There’s always some patriarch, some autocrat, some fascist, ready to upend democracy and any social progress we have made to assert their will. The will to power. So here we go again.
My play, The Abortion Monologues, is out there and I offer it free of royalty payments to reproductive rights organizations and equity seeking groups who want to produce it. Get in touch. (Seriously, get in touch. We’ll still need to do a contract.) My old blog associated with the play is archival now. But it’s still there, and aside from some language that I would now make more trans inclusive, it’s still pretty spot on. You’ll find a lot of info there.
We’re going to have to step up our work again. That is, I am going to have to step up my work again. I hope you will join me. Without doubt, my next offering to the world, Patterson House, is pro-choice. It’s clear what happens to women who don’t control their bodies or their choices.
There are those in Canada who would send us backwards. We are a long way from Pierre Trudeau saying, ”The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” I’m not even sure his son Justin would make such a bold statement. And that new Pierre is a threat to all of us.
Feminism is a theory. Feminism is an ideal. But feminism is also an action. It’s time to take action. As my friend Marnie reminds me, we can’t just hope for the best. Quoting David Orr, she says, ”Hope is a verb with its shirtsleeves rolled up.” So take action. Roll your sleeves up. We need you.
What a great headline: Impact: Women Writing After Concussion is shortlisted for the Book Publishers Association of Alberta Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year! Thank you to BPAA for this honour.
E. D. Morin and I are grateful to all of our contributors, to the University of Alberta Press, and to everyone who is part of getting this book out into the world.
We are also thrilled to see that Alan Brownoff is nominated in the category of Book Cover Design for his excellent work on Impact.
According to an article in The Guardian, men generally don’t read books about women. They tend not to read books by women either. M.A. Sieghart reports that ”men were disproportionately unlikely even to open a book by a woman.”
That’s a darn shame. I don’t want to go to any sexist Venus and Mars place, but I think about this and wish I could speak to the dearest men in my life about some of the dearest fictional women in my life. I think they might get insight into the lives of women. That is, I think they might get insight into me. Sometimes these fictional women say the things I cannot. Read the first page of Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, for example.
Recently, my husband read Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. I was on a real Strout binge and was prepping Olive, Again for my book club. Olive was in my mind and even in my dreams. I would wake up and be in the passenger seat of Olive’s car, her big black purse crowding me. When I had concerns, I would wonder what Olive would think. Oh, let me tell you, I was in deep. There are so many ways I relate to this difficult and imperfect woman. There is Olive in me. This I know.
Frances McDormand as Olive
What a treat it was to be able to discuss her. Olive makes me feel normal. Or sort of normal.
Similarly, I was just watching the new show on Julia Child, Julia (HBO) and in the first episode of season one, there is Julia, all hot flashy and having a conversation about menopause with her doctor. When she finally tells her husband she is changing, it is a moment of great tenderness.
Ad for HBO’s Julia
It’s lovely thinking about men watching this show (if they do) and witnessing a conversation like this and adding it to their general experience. That way, when such a time crops up in real life, they are not in a conversation that seems to come from Venus, but from this very earth. Maybe it will help all earthlings along the spectrum of sex and gender communicate just a wee bit better. Isn’t that what fiction is for? To help us understand each other?
Sieghart writes, ”If men don’t read books by and about women, they will fail to understand our psyches and our lived experience. They will continue to see the world through an almost entirely male lens, with the male experience as the default. And this narrow focus will affect our relationships with them, as colleagues, as friends and as partners. But it also impoverishes female writers, whose work is seen as niche rather than mainstream if it is consumed mainly by other women.”
As a woman about to release a book about women, this matters to me.
