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.
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.
It’s a big day. Impact is going out into the world after years of work. It carries with it the hearts of 21 writers who share what their lives are like after their concussions and traumatic brain injuries. I am so grateful to each and every writer who made this book possible and offer special thanks to my co-editor, E. D. Morin. I could not have a better partner in this work.
Our thanks also go out to the Canada Council for the Arts for supporting the creation of this work and the University of Alberta Press who believed in it and have done so much to make this dream come true.
Join us for our launch tonight if you can. It will be recorded and available on the University of Alberta Press website.
Also please view and share our videos about the project. They are amazing and another labour of love by the participating writers and by our film editor, Junyeong Kim.
It’s an incredible feeling when one of your dreams, something you had barely articulated even to yourself, becomes real. The work that I do with E. D. Morin (Elaine) is being studied. By academics. By scientists. Because women’s stories are an important source of knowledge.
I used to work in academia. I studied, took graduate degrees (though never a PhD) and taught Women’s Studies as a sessional at the college/university level. My discipline was marginalized, as were so many emerging disciplines like Indigenous Studies or Post Colonial Studies. (Thank goodness much as changed.)
In the academy, claims must be supported. That’s a good thing. In hard science, that happens with experimentation that is repeatable and verifiable. In social sciences, it often means finding precedent for what you want to say and finding others (usually more established thinkers) who agree with you. But in a system that is enmeshed with patriarchy and colonialism, it was difficult to find corroboration for what, to me, seemed self-evident. At the time, academia was very much a system that had no interest in furthering the kind of thinking I liked to explore.
Finally, I decided that there are lots of ways to know. One is through art. I set my sights on writing fiction, creative non-fiction, and personal essays to say the things I felt were true.
Now the work Elaine and I have done together with so many contributing writers, is being studied. By academics. By social scientists. By medical science. It’s pretty great.
Cover Image of Writing Menopause
Elaine recently spotted Writing Menopause in a paper by Dr. Veronica Schuchter called, “The future is menopausal’: Un/Learning with Feminist Menopause Imageries in Canadian Writing.” She says lovely things about Writing Menopause in an academic way. She says the work serves to “destabilise discourses informed by biological essentialism around the normative female body and post-reproductive age.” Then she goes on to say that using our work and the work of others, she “explores how the creative realm is a crucial element in the process of un/learning and thinking beyond sexist, racist, and ageist perceptions of those experiencing menopause and instead presents ethical and inclusive ways to write about late middle-age.”
How much do I love this? More than you can imagine. When I was an academic, un/learning and thinking beyond sexist, racist, and ageist perceptions was my goal. It still is.
Our next book, “Impact: Women Writing After Concussion” is already the subject of a research project at St. Michael’s Hospital Head Injury Clinic. Delayed last year because of the pandemic and a shift in resources towards Covid-19, we just learned that the study is on again. We are, of course, delighted that the work may influence the way women with concussion and traumatic brain injury are treated.
That’s the dream. I feel such gratitude to Elaine, the best colleague ever, and to every writer who contributed to these books. It’s been great to collaborate with all of these writers. I’m not an academic anymore, but I’m still kind of part of it, and in a way that is much more authentic for me.
