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.
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.
