Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme (E-Journal, York University)

Ritchie, Genevieve

CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME132
plebiscite, which proves that traces 
of modernity could also be found 
outside of the major centres. 
This volume gives the English 
speaking reader a glimpse into sig-
nificant developments in prominent 
places and societies, but it does not 
offer a deeper insight into less-known 
areas of the empire. Its multiethnic 
and contradictory character can 
be best understood by looking at 
both centres and peripheries. This 
approach surely would have even 
more widened the horizon of this 
remarkable project, which can be 
read as a stimulating introduction 
into the gender history of the late 
Habsburg Empire. 
Adrian Mitter is a Ph.D. student in the 
History Department at the University of 
Toronto. His research focuses on Central 
and East European history. 
“The woman question” in its various 
articulations and cultural expressions 
has historically been bound up with 
notions of national identity and 
nationalism. Through developing 
and unpacking the concept of state 
feminism Laura Bier grappled with 
the complex and contradictory 
discourses that shaped hegemonic 
notions of womanhood in the Nasser 
era. Drawing upon policy studies, 
political speeches, women’s press, 
REVOLUTIONARY 
WOMANHOOD: 
FEMINISM, 
MODERNITY AND 
THE STATE IN NASSER’S 
EGPYT
Laura Bier
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 
2011
reviewed by genevieve 
ritchie
film, and literature the study was 
grounded in a cultural history, and 
fleshed out the connections between 
the construction of national wom-
anhood and the conceptual framing 
of revolution. In short, the primary 
focus of the study was the relation 
between the construction of feminine 
identity and the modern nation-state.
State feminism is the central point 
of analysis, which was then explored 
through a descriptive problematiz-
ing of four themes: the ideological 
framing of working women, secu-
larism and law, family planning and 
reproduction, and international 
feminism. As a category for inquiry 
state feminism was located in the 
Nasser regime’s modernizing project, 
but had its historical roots in the 
earlier period of colonial control. 
As such, state feminism was framed 
by the interlocking discourses of 
modernity, inclusion, and political 
participation, which were then set 
against traditional modes of social 
organization. State feminism, then, 
must be understood as a constella-
tion of practices and ideologies that 
aimed to transform women into 
modern political subjects. Thus, for 
Bier state feminism was at its core a 
didactic project.
Noting that the Nasser regime 
did not significantly transform the 
number of women in the workforce, 
Bier put forth the argument that the 
discursively constructed figure of the 
working woman played an important 
role in the articulation of the public 
sphere as modern and secular. The 
reconfiguring of the public sphere 
also shaped images of the home 
around a bourgeois model of domes-
ticity. As such, the image of working 
women as a sign of modernity did 
little to destabilize the patriarchal 
organization of domestic labour. In 
fact, Bier gave extensive examples of 
state policies and incentives that were 
designed to create the conditions for 
women to access the tools of modern 
living, thereby creating a prescriptive 
model of femininity that drew upon 
imagery of both domesticity and 
professionalism. 
Policies that dealt specifically with 
the family drew multiple conflicting 
perspectives into the public debate, 
which then had adverse outcomes 
for women generally and working 
class women in particular. Through 
her discussion of the personal status 
laws, Bier delineated the manner in 
which contrasting perspectives (the 
Nasser regime and religious tradition) 
coalesced and ultimately undermined 
the work of feminist reformers. In this 
respect, her analysis provided a clear 
and detailed description of the pro-
cesses by which patriarchal power was 
reproduced and newly created during 
periods of national re-definition. Sim-
ilarly, her analysis of family planning 
highlighted the manner in which 
women’s reproductive capacities have 
put our bodies at the centre of the 
national and international discursive. 
Here again her analysis emphasized 
the complex and contradictory con-
sequences of state initiated family 
planning programs, which increased 
women’s access to contraception, 
while concomitantly denigrating their 
traditional knowledge. 
The final point explored by 
Bier was the relationship between 
Egyptian subjectivity and women’s 
liberation trans-nationally. She put 
forth the argument that middle 
class and elite Egyptian women 
articulated their own womanhood 
and liberation through the imag-
ery of post-colonial progress. Her 
analysis here was framed by fluid 
models of identity and subjectivity, 
which fragment social context by 
emphasizing the disciplinary power 
of de-historicized universalist dis-
courses. Conversely, framing her 
analysis in terms of consciousness 
and feminist consciousness-raising 
could have opened the conceptual 
space to engage more complexly with 
VOLUME 30,  NUMBERS 2,3 133
UNIONS, EQUITY AND 
THE PATH TO RENEWAL
Janice R. Foley and Patricia L. Baker, 
Editors.
Vancouver, ubc Press 2009
reviewed by hans 
rollman
It is open season on unions not just 
in the political arena, but in the 
ivory tower as well. The ‘crisis’ fac-
ing organized labour—an ongoing 
experienced elsewhere in the world, 
much of which can be attributed to 
the significance of regional policy 
(and cultural differences), and covers 
a broad swath of research and activism 
taking place under the equity banner 
within organized labour. The twelve 
papers comprising the collection 
provide both broad overviews of 
equity gains and histories within the 
Canadian labour movement, as well 
as more focused critiques on particu-
lar dimensions of identity and equity 
and the shortcomings of organized 
labour in Canada on these fronts. 
The editors do not fall into the trap 
of focusing solely on women’s equity 
struggles: the section “Black Trade 
Unionists Speak Out” comprises no 
less than a quarter of the book, while 
fascinating and critically important 
conceptual models are theorized 
in Linda Briskin’s contribution on 
cross-constituency organizing and 
Janice Foley’s effort to theorize a 
conceptual model for equity, drawing 
in part on social movement theory. 
The final section even offers interna-
tional and comparative perspectives 
on the themes explored in the book, 
drawing from Australian, American, 
and British examples. Anne McBride 
and Jeremy Waddington’s contribu-
tion on the importance of addressing 
women’s and equity group represen-
tation in union merger processes is 
particularly salient given the ongoing 
merger between the CEP and the 
CAW in Canada.
The contributions in this collec-
tion ought to be required reading 
not just for researchers but for union 
organizers, leaders, and activists as 
well. Jan Kainer’s masterful overview 
of the contribution of women’s equity 
activism to union growth and renew-
al, and Anne Forrest’s assessment of 
the historical and ongoing relevance 
of economic equality (organized 
labour’s traditional forte) to broad-
er equity issues cast an important 
foundation for several of the key 
the history, and potentials of women’s 
trans-national solidarity.
As a history of Egyptian women 
and feminisms the strength of this 
analysis lies with the rich detail that 
Bier gave to the ideological supports 
of patriarchal domination. Bier, 
therefore, cogently described some 
of the processes by which patriarchy 
becomes embedded in practices of 
governing, which then normalized 
the control and regulation of women’s 
bodies and labour. By expanding 
her analysis into both the earlier 
period of colonial control as well 
as the current period of neoliberal 
capitalism, her analysis emphasized 
the social unfolding of women’s sub-
ordination to the nation-state as well 
as the implications of this history for 
current feminist struggles. In other 
words, the policies and discourses 
that were specific to the Nasser era 
were problematized in a manner that 
allows feminist research to grapple 
more generally with the protracted 
history of women’s subordination 
across historical moments and cul-
tural contexts.
Genevieve Ritchie is a community or-
ganizer who works with environmental 
and migrant justice movements. She 
writes about anti-racist feminism and 
critical praxis.
loss of membership, density, legal 
protection, and political influence—
has been experienced differently in 
different jurisdictions around the 
world, but just as it has set unions 
on an increasingly urgent course to 
respond and adapt to the challenges 
they face, it has also fomented a 
great deal of intellectual inquiry as 
academics and researchers assess and 
analyze unions’ responses, and what 
these efforts can help us to understand 
about the present and future state 
of the labour movement, and about 
workers’ experience more broadly. 
Thus the growth of a burgeoning 
body of literature under the moniker 
of ‘union renewal’ or ‘organized-la-
bour-in-crisis’. There are, of course, 
no easy answers to the question of 
how unions can most effectively 
renew themselves (nor even to the 
question of what purpose they 
should be renewing themselves 
for) but feminist researchers in the 
field—of which, thankfully, there 
are no small number —have flagged 
one important question: what is 
the role of equity in rebuilding and 
revitalizing the labour movement? 
Indeed, this reviewer would suggest 
the union crisis/renewal literature 
typically addresses equity in one of 
two ways: either as a distraction from 
(what some consider) more primary 
goals such as an intensified (albeit 
romanticized and under-theorized) 
return to street militancy and class 
analysis; or, by contrast, as funda-
mental to reversing the decline of 
organized labour and correcting the 
failures of white masculinist labour 
‘organizing’ of the past sixty years.
Foley and Baker’s collection 
Unions, Equity and the Path to 
Renewal falls firmly into the latter 
camp. Their focus is primarily 
Canadian (rightly so: while union 
activists have been keen to exchange 
strategies internationally, the fact is 
that Canada has not encountered 
the same sort of ‘crisis’ or ‘decline’ 


English

Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminism, Modernity and the State in Nasser’s Egpyt

L’eau a joué un rôle significatif dans la l’histoire de Miriam dans la Bible. Elle surveille son frère au bord de l’eau, elle danse à la Mer, une légende juive l’identifie à un puits et elle est associée symboliquement à la naissance. Miriam comme un modèle ancien, est une inspiration pour les femmes d‘action.Water plays a significant role in the Biblical story of Miriam the Prophetess, the sister of Aaron. She watches her brother Moses by the river, and provides him with a wet-nurse; she leads the dance when the Israelites successfully reach the far shore of the Sea, in Jewish lore a well follows her, and she is symbolically associated with conception and birth. An ancient role model, Miriam is again inspiring women to action

Wouk, Judith Maeryam

Re-Calling Our HerStory: Miriam the Prophetess

Le problème persistant pour plusieurs Premières Nations au Canada se traduit par le manque de sécurité autour de l’eau du à une implication limitée de la gestion de l’eau. Le savoir traditionnel des Anishinaabekwe peut prendre en charge une approche équilibrée et sa protection en suggérant des principes qui reconnaissent, maintiennent et établissent des relations socio-écologiques essentielles

Longboat, Sheri

First Nations Water Security: Security for Mother Earth

Maranda, Jeanne

Water Front: Un documentaire par Elisabeth Miller

Hau, Daigle

VOLUME 30,  NUMBERS 2,3 141
emerging gaga feminist approach. As 
gaga feminism is more “speculative” 
than prescriptive, the book focuses 
more on potential forms for social 
and political transformation as op-
posed to ends, including: embracing 
childishness, resisting the traditional 
marriage models (including gay mar-
riage), and creating new approaches 
to family and kinship. In order to 
make these arguments, Halberstam 
utilizes a cultural archive that consists 
of recent romantic comedies and, 
similar to their other recent book 
The Queer Art of Failure, children’s 
movies and television. Halberstam 
also draws on personal experiences, 
both within the academy and from 
their private life including their role 
as a parent. 
As intended, Gaga Feminism is 
a quick, light read, perhaps best 
described as guilty pleasure beach 
reading for the queer theory inclined. 
The book is commendable for 
broaching “of the moment” issues 
in less clichéd ways, for example, 
finding meaning behind the Lady 
Gaga phenomena as opposed to dis-
missing her as a Madonna derivative, 
or, acknowledging the long-term and 
far-reaching implications of Occupy 
and related movements instead of 
pro-nouncing them short-lived and 
inconsequential. Although many of 
arguments are not highly original 
(indeed, many are identical to those 
made in their previous book), do 
have a talent for weaving recent 
theoretical trends into a clear and 
cohesive narrative. Halberstam also 
brings an enthusiasm and positivity 
to their writing that is often absent 
in queer and feminist theory.
The promise of gaga feminism, 
however, often feels disingenuous the 
book focus on what gaga feminism 
is or what it can be without demon-
strating what gaga feminism can do. 
If Halberstam structured their book 
this way intentionally as a reflection 
of their “quasi-academic” aims, they 
have not given their readers enough 
credit. The book is a quick read, but 
it is also not as accessible as intended 
because Halberstam often relies on 
anecdotal evidence from academia 
(including extended descriptions of 
two conferences and a veiled critique 
of an unnamed anthropologist) that 
would lack relevance for those reading 
from outside the academy. The high 
degree in content- overlap from their 
last book, however, makes the book 
less compelling for those within the 
academy who are already familiar 
with Halberstam’s work. As a result, 
Gaga Feminism is largely a fun read, 
but it is definitely not a “must read” 
unless you haven’t read anything else 
by Halberstam recently and need a 
quick refresher. 
Danielle Cooper is a Ph.D. student in 
Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies 
at York University. Her research focuses 
on lgbtq grassroots information or-
gan-izations and the queer information 
activities found therein. She also holds 
a Masters degree (M.I.) from the Fac-
ulty of Information at the University 
of Toronto in collaboration with the 
Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual 
Diversity Studies.
COLD WAR COMFORTS: 
CANADIAN WOMEN, 
CHILD SAFETY, AND 
GLOBAL INSECURITY
Tarah Brookfield
Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University 
Press, 2012
reviewed by caralee 
daigle hau
Cold War Comforts is an engaging 
study of Canadian women’s domestic 
and international activism in the early 
Cold War period. Brookfield success-
fully argues that between the end of 
the Second World War and the Viet-
nam War, Canadian women utilized 
the twin concepts of maternalism (as 
either literal or symbolic mothers) and 
internationalism to engage with the 
policy-making process surrounding 
children’s safety and welfare. In the 
early post-Second World War years, 
Cold War tensions created an urgent 
sense that women needed to prepare 
for a potential nuclear war, through 
civil defence and potentially investing 
in a home fallout shelter. Cold War 
Comforts examines how, as the nature 
of the conflict altered and the realities 
of a potential nuclear conflict became 
clearer, women’s activism shifted from 
wanting to protect their families from 
the effects of nuclear war, to demand-
ing, through disarmament and peace 
activism, that war never happen. In 
her study, Brookfield divides the sub-
ject into two parts: domestic and in-
ternational, and examines Canadian 
women’s involvement in the United 
Nations, through such organizations 
as the United Nations Association 
and unicef, foster parenting plans, 
activism during the Vietnam War, and 
international adoption. Brookfield 
convincingly maintains that their 
responsibilities and roles as mothers 
and Canadian citizens spurred these 
women on and made it possible for 
them to engage with child safety. 
Although this study is thoroughly 
researched and well-executed, there 
are two relatively minor issues with 
which Brookfield might have engaged 
in more depth. In chapter two she 
uses some American-made civil 
defence materials, such as Duck and 
Cover featuring Bert the Turtle, to 
demonstrate Canadians’ engagement 
with civil defence planning. Howev-
er, there is little discussion of how 
American-made materials were used 
in Canada, nor does she distinguish in 
a meaningful way between Canadian 
and American materials. While this 
may seem a minor issue, her main 
argument circles around how Cana-
CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME142
dian women were acting from a keen 
awareness of their status as Canadian 
citizens and mothers. Did Canadian 
women view themselves differently 
from American? Were civil defence 
measures in Canada different in any 
real way from those in the United 
States? If not, how might that change 
her overall approach? She does engage 
with this concept of a unique Cana-
dian identity elsewhere in the book. 
When discussing Canadian women’s 
reactions to the war in Vietnam she 
stresses that protest came from frus-
tration that the Canadian government 
was acting against its international 
reputation as a peacekeeper. Since 
this internationalism is a key pillar 
of her argument, Brookfield needs 
to equally apply this attention to the 
word’s meaning throughout her study.
In addition, since Cold War ten-
sions and undercurrents are a key 
part of the setting of this story, a more 
thorough discussion of their effect on 
women in this period would be useful. 
When discussing women’s activism, 
for example, during the height of 
civil service purges of suspected sub-
versives, Brookfield briefly mentions 
that these women’s status as mothers, 
interested only in safeguarding their 
children, protected them from accu-
sations of communism. Indeed, the 
founders of Voice of Women delib-
erately stressed their roles as mothers 
interested only in peace, in order to be 
able to continue their work without 
suffering the same sort of censure as 
more radical groups. Therefore, the 
argument about the maternal nature of 
the work of these early activists needs 
clarification through a more thorough 
analysis of their self-presentation 
as maternal figures. What language 
did these women use in literature 
and correspondence? How did that 
self-conscious presentation change 
as second-wave feminism and wom-
en’s liberation movements became 
prominent in the 1960s? Though the 
connection between motherhood and 
protection from the state security ap-
paratus is linked in Brookfield’s study, 
a more in-depth discussion would 
strengthen the argument.
These minor issues aside, this is 
overall an impressive examination of 
women’s activism in the Cold War 
years. It is thorough, well-researched, 
and clearly written. While individual 
parts of the text, such as the material 
on civil defence, do not break new 
ground, this work shines by bringing 
together various histories of women’s 
activism in one work. The explora-
tion of the real, lived experiences of 
children both in Canada and abroad 
is nicely complemented by her 
examination of the symbolic child. 
Brookfield excellently demonstrates 
how concern over children became 
another front of the Cold War. In 
this sense, Brookfield’s is a significant 
contribution to the growing body 
of literature which is expanding our 
understanding of the far-reaching 
effects of the Cold War.
Caralee Daigle Hau completed her 
Ph.D. at Queen’s University in 2011. 
Her research looks at Canada’s experi-
ence of the Cuban Missile Crisis and 
the Cold War. She is currently teaching 
Canadian history at the Royal Military 
College of Canada.
Rethinking Professionalism: Women 
and Art in Canada, 1850 – 1970 is, 
surprisingly, the first collection of 
RETHINKING 
PROFESSIONALISM: 
WOMEN AND ART IN 
CANADA, 1850-1970
Kristina Huneault and Janice An-
derson, Eds.
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univer-
sity Press, 2012
reviewed by michelle 
gewurtz
scholarly essays to focus on women, 
art, and history in Canada from 
multiple vantage points. Especially 
noteworthy is the volume’s focus on 
historical work produced by women 
working in a variety of disciplines 
ranging from painting and photog-
raphy to architecture and traditional 
handicrafts. As the editors Kristina 
Huneault and Janice Anderson note 
in their preface, in Canada there is a 
gap in scholarship when it comes to 
critically engaged studies of women’s 
cultural production. This is the con-
text for this publication, organized by 
the Canadian Women Artists History 
Initiative, a collaborative endeavour 
based at Concordia University involv-
ing a wide range of scholars. 
This volume, which is the out-
come of the Initiative’s inaugural 
conference held in 2008, attests to 
the importance of a collaborative 
ethos that has yielded the rich variety 
of perspectives showcased here. The 
other framing device employed by 
both editors and authors is the issue 
of professionalism. While the editors 
acknowledge professionalism as a 
synthetic art historical framework, 
it is an atypical one used here to 
explore new understandings and 
perspectives stemming from the 
study of women as cultural producers. 
Organized into four sections that 
cover professionalization in the arts, 
careers for women, and the limits 
of professionalism for women, the 
volume opens with an introductory 
essay by Kristina Huneault that 
explores the relationship and lim-
itations between women, art, and 
professionalism. She draws attention 
to the idea of professionalism itself 
and interrogates its role as a critical 
concept. Noting the pitfalls of priv-
ileging “professional” practice that 
can further marginalize women in the 
writing of art’s histories, Huneault’s 
study addresses the historiographical 
and methodological implications of 
professionalism as an analytic device 


Cold War Comforts: Canadian Women, Child Safety, and Global Insecurity

Stafford, Elizabeth

VOLUME 30, NUMBERS 2,3 101
Mom, I love you
And I will take care of you
as you wish at home
you are the woman who gave me life
and with the love I have for you
I will try not to let you down
I say, dad you need to hold her hand
She needs your love too
Because the woman who gave me life 
Needs you
And my love will not let her down
Brother and partner please understand
I need to follow doctor’s orders
Because the woman who gave me life
My love will not let her down
Sister dear don’t be angry with me
I know you want mom with you 
But my love I have for mom 
will not let her down
Auntie dear she cannot have everything she 
wants
It breaks my heart to withhold
Indeed I want to give in to her too
But my love I have for my mother 
will not let her down
Minister of Health you have let her down
I am angry and I fight for her rights
Despite being tired and beat-up
Because the woman who gave me life 
My love will not let her down
ELIZABETH STAFFORD
My Love for My Mother Will Not Let Her Down
Uncle dear you travel miles to visit and see
That I’m doing the best that I can
Because the woman who gave me life
My love will not let her down
My dear partner is there to help 
He understands and shares
It helps me to help my dear mother
The woman who gave me life
And my love will not let her down
Dad please don’t be angry with me
All of this is new to me too
Because the woman who gave me life 
My love will not let her down
Doctor I will not let you take her away from me
You just don’t see
Because the woman who gave me life 
My love will not let her down
Family don’t leave me alone near her end
She needs you here too 
but I am here alone
And I’ll do right by her
Because the woman who gave me life
My love will not let her down
Mom don’t leave while I’m not holding you
Can you see me beside you in the dark?
I hear your last breath and 
I cry out to you, “I love you, mom”
The woman who gave me life
My love never let her down
Elizabeth Stafford is currently the Treasurer on the Board of Directors of one of Canada’s few surviving women’s 
organizations, the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women. She is also a Senior Research Analyst at 
Lakehead University.  In May 2010, Elizabeth graduated with a Master of Science in Management degree from Lakehead 
University. She was the first Master’s student in the Faculty of Business to utilize a feminist methodology in research. 
The future may mean the pursuit of a PhD degree. Elizabeth lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario with her partner, Dan.


My Love for My Mother Will Not Let Her Down

Leung, Carrianne K. Y.

VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 129
Une fillette raconte ses expériences aux mains d’un écolier, une 
petite brute raciste que son père avait engagé pour tondre le 
gazon. Il avait découvert que le gamin avait été abusé mais 
avant qu’il ait pu faite quoi que soit, le garçon a assassiné 
son propre père. 
It all went down in the summer of ’78 when the parents 
were killing themselves. Leo Manaro’s mother got up be-
fore sunrise one glorious June morning and drank a litre 
of bleach in their garage. Two weeks later, it was Carolyn 
Finley’s father. He had coached me in softball and was a 
real brute. “Winning is everything!” he would scream at 
us, the line of ten-year-old girls nervously chewing our 
gum and avoiding eye contact. Mr. Finley off-ed himself 
with one of the hunting rifles he displayed in their living 
room, among all the taxidermied animals that hung on the 
walls. After Mr. Finley, Manuela Bevis’s mother dropped 
dead. No one said the word “suicide,” but we read between 
the lines. Rumour was she had hung herself.
It was the talk of the neighbourhood. The adults con-
versed through the fences as they watered their yards and 
spoke in hushed tones so the children couldn’t hear. Their 
garden hoses forgotten, they flooded large puddles in the 
grass. They were more interested in the “whys” of the 
situations while we kids gathered on the streets with our 
road hockey and baseballs, guessing at the gory details. 
Mr. Finley’s brain was supposedly splattered in a million 
pieces in the basement. Jimmy Laker said, “You can’t clean 
brains out completely. That stuff sticks.” 
Nothing like this had yet happened in our quiet Scar-
borough neighbourhood. Our street, Winifred, was brand 
new, like the rest of the subdivision. Most of us had moved 
Grass
carrianne k. y. leung
in at the same time when construction on our houses was 
completed. That was just four years ago. What it was before 
didn’t matter. It was a place that didn’t have a past, only 
a wide gaping mouth of a future. The neat grid of streets, 
the wired fences that divided our properties but didn’t 
obscure the views into the neighbours’ yards, the young 
crab apple trees lining our block. You could almost smell 
the new car smell. We began traditions, with everyone 
pitching in money to buy fireworks on Victoria Day, and 
street barbeques during the August long weekend. We 
politely shoveled each other’s driveways, hung tasteful 
Christmas lights and bought Girl Guide cookies. This 
spate of deaths was baffling to everyone. It stained our 
otherwise unblemished record. It had all been going so well.
The kids watched their parents carefully, taking note of 
unusual things just in case theirs was next. Sometimes, 
we reported back to each other. Cindy Taylor told us that 
her father, who cared a lot about how he looked, went 
to work at the car dealership with a wrinkled white shirt 
underneath his blue blazer and forgot to shave. Did this 
mean something? Stephanie Papadakis said her mother 
forgot to put garlic in their moussaka last night. Was that 
the beginning of the end? We were gripped with both ter-
ror and excitement. My parents were their regular selves. 
I couldn’t detect a thing, which bored me silly. My dad 
didn’t talk to me much, waving me away from him like I 
was a fly while he watched the news. My mother told me to 
stop staring at her because I made her nervous. It was like 
I said, regular. About the deaths, my mother said, “There’s 
more than meets the eye.” She liked English sayings. She 
felt they were profound and great conversation closures. 
It was around this time that my dad met Larry Lems, 
130 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
the school bully. Larry had come to our door one day and 
asked my dad if he could mow the lawn for him or do any 
odd job. I ran upstairs to my room like a scared rabbit at 
the sound of his voice. At school, we all knew to give him 
a wide berth. Larry tortured kids. He called us by all sorts 
of names depending on what bothered him about us the 
most. Manuela was Fatso, Damian was Retard, Carolyn 
was UglyFace, Jane was Negro, Jimmy was Faggot, Seema 
was Paki, Linda was MotorMouth, Leo was wop, Albert 
was Chink 1, and I was Chink 2. He stole our lunches, 
to do and gave him a dollar or two each time. He even 
showed Larry how he sharpened the blades on his Lawn 
Boy. Larry paid close attention as my dad squirted oil on 
the bolts and gently removed the blades. He then taught 
Larry how to hold the blades at the exact angle they needed 
to be for the grinder to scrape at the edge. Larry actually 
looked like a kid and not some middle-aged serial killer. 
My father also seemed to enjoy this time with Larry, giving 
him a lot more attention than I ever remembered getting. 
I wasn’t sure if I was more motivated by jealousy or 
pushed us over if we were in his way, and challenged all 
the boys to fights after school. He nearly always won. 
Needless to say, Larry didn’t have friends. 
So I was horrified when my dad actually gave Larry the 
job. He even let Larry use his prized 1974, twenty-one-
inch, Model 7263 Lawn Boy with the two-stroke engine. 
He never let me or my mom touch that thing because he 
claimed we didn’t understand the power of the machine. 
The Lawn Boy was my father’s true baby. He purchased 
it from Sears the first summer we were in the house. He 
was pretty lazy about actually mowing the lawn, but he 
liked to maintain it. The engine was well-oiled and the 
blades were kept as sharp as Ginzu knives. Larry used it 
to cut the grass and even weeded the gardens for a dollar. 
All day he worked. Our backyard was a jungle of neglect 
but by late afternoon it was pristine. The shorn grass 
looked neat and inviting. The flower gardens were free of 
the choking dandelions and clover. It was as if the whole 
backyard heaved a sigh of relief. When my dad went out 
to talk to him, I braced myself for the name-calling. My 
dad had a lot of nervous ticks. His left eye twitched, his 
arms sporadically shot up in the air, he often elbowed 
himself in the ribs three times in intervals. All this plus 
the fact that my dad was also a chink added up to choice 
meat for Larry Lems. But it never came. I peered at them 
from my bedroom window above. My dad with his arms 
akimbo surveyed Larry’s work, nodding with approval. 
Larry, swigging the can of Pepsi that my dad had given 
him, was actually smiling. He looked different. It occurred 
to me that I had never seen him smile before.
From that day on, Larry came over often. I still scrambled 
away at the first sign of him. My dad found him odd jobs 
fear of death, but I tried to forbid my dad from letting 
Larry come over. I told him what a bully he was, how he 
terrorized all the kids at school, how he hit a teacher once 
with closed fists. My dad didn’t listen. Instead, he told me 
that people needed chances to show who they really were. 
I didn’t buy it. I screamed and cried, slammed doors—to 
no avail. My father wouldn’t budge while my mother just 
said, “Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones.” 
I had no idea what she meant.
I heard dad tell mom once that he had seen long welts 
across Larry’s back when Larry lifted his shirt to wipe his 
face of sweat. And there were bruises, purple like plums on 
his arms and legs. My mother shook her head in disbelief, 
the way she did whenever those commercials of starving 
children in Africa came on. 
One day, I gathered enough courage to venture down-
stairs when Larry was over. He was in our kitchen, bent 
over a birdhouse that my dad had bought with his Canadian 
Tire money, but never got around to putting together. My 
dad was beside him, reading the instructions aloud. When 
I popped in, Larry lifted his head and said, “Hi June.” Just 
like that. Like a normal human being. Not “Hey, Chink 
number 2. What chinky thing are you doing today?” 
It surprised me that he even knew my name. I said, 
“Hallo.” My dad gave me a told-you-so kind of grin.
Summer holidays came. It was an especially humid one. 
While our parents vacated the neighbourhood to their 
nine-to-five jobs, we filled the days with running through 
the sprinkler, daily trips to Chuck’s Smoke Shop for freezies 
and Lolas, hanging out in each other’s basements watching 
Love Boat and Fantasy Island and staying cool. Once in 
a while, games of Truth, Dare, Double Dare, Promise to 
One day, I gathered enough courage to venture downstairs when Larry 
was over. He was in our kitchen, bent over a birdhouse that my dad had 
bought, but never got around to putting together. When I popped in, Larry 
lifted his head and said, “Hi June.” Just like that. Like a normal human 
being. Not “Hey, Chink number 2. What chinky thing are you doing today?” 
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 131
Repeat would break out. I spent five minutes in a closet 
with Damian Jones in a dare once. We kissed a few times 
and his soggy mouth tasted like tuna fish melts. He even 
reached into my John Travolta t-shirt to cop a feel of my 
mosquito bite-sized breasts, but we didn’t tell anybody 
that part. I kneed him in the groin for that. The haze of 
days lulled us into forgetting the suicides ever happened. 
We relaxed into the summer heat like a comfortable, 
swaying hammock. 
Larry didn’t come over as much. He told my dad that he 
spent a lot of time with his mother in Mississauga during 
the summers. His parents were divorced. Everyone in the 
neighbourhood could guess that Mr. Lems was a drunk. 
There were days he would come out of his house topless, 
raging about the damned squirrels on the roof waking him 
up. Once, he spent the entire morning shooting at them 
with a bb gun. No one knew much about his mother, but 
the women on the block agreed that no one could blame 
her for leaving that. They only blamed her that she had 
left Larry too. We all knew that Larry probably didn’t have 
it so good. But still. He didn’t have to be such a bully. 
One day, my dad found his lawn mower missing. He knew 
where to check first. My dad didn’t return until the sun was 
already down. When he did, he was rolling the Lawn Boy 
up the driveway. My mother and I watched him from the 
front door. All it took was a slight nod to my mother to 
confirm that Larry had indeed taken it. My mother sighed 
and said, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” He pushed 
past us inside. We followed him to the living room where 
he slumped into the lazy boy. In the light, my dad looked 
real tired. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands. 
“That Mr. Lems is a rough man,” he began. It seemed 
that Larry denied everything until his father dragged him 
to the garage and found the lawn mower stored behind 
some lumber. My dad watched helplessly as Mr. Lems called 
Larry all kinds of names that children shouldn’t even ever 
hear. He would have given him a whooping except that 
my dad was there. I guess my dad took them inside and 
tried to work something out. Mr. Lems wouldn’t hear of 
anything less than some kind of corporal punishment and 
even invited my dad to give Larry a slap. No way, no way, 
my dad had said. He suggested that Larry come over and 
work for him for free as punishment. Mr. Lems thought 
that was too easy but agreed. It took a long time, my dad 
said, on account that he wanted to make sure Mr. Lems, 
who reeked of Jack Daniels, was calm before he left. Larry 
Lems was apparently sobbing, and pleading for his life. 
Empty bottles and fast food wrappers filled the place, my 
dad told us. “Poor kid,” he repeated over and over again. 
The next week, Larry did come over. The problem was 
he didn’t come over to help with the backyard. It was a 
Sunday afternoon, and we were scaling fish in the sink. 
The silvery bits flashed in the air like rain. We had just 
gone fishing up near Lindsay and gotten lucky with some 
big-mouthed bass. My dad heard some sound coming 
from the garage and went through the backyard door to 
check. He found Larry by the lawnmower. Larry startled 
when he saw my dad.
“Stay away from me you fucking chink!” he screamed. 
My dad froze. “Stay out of my life, or I swear I’m going to 
kill you and your whole fucking chink family.” Larry was 
crying, tears and snot streaming down his face. He then 
turned and ran out of the garage and down the street, his 
knapsack dangling beside him. My dad gazed down the 
road. He then examined the Lawn Boy and discovered 
the blades had been removed. I observed the whole scene 
from the backyard. It made me feel like throwing up. 
Four days later, Mr. Lems was dead. He was found in 
his living room in a huge pool of blood. Apparently, he 
slashed his wrists. His neighbour Mr. Farley found him 
when he thought he smelled something gone bad. No one 
came to the door when he rang, and he found the door 
unlocked. Damian Farley reported back to us kids what 
his father saw. The place was filthy, full of garbage and 
bottles. Mr. Lems was lying on a couch, and the tv was 
still on. It was officially ruled another suicide although 
the cuts in his wrists looked more like deep, clumsy gashes 
that an ax would have accomplished rather than what 
someone would do to kill themselves. Plus the police 
couldn’t find what he used to do that damage to himself. 
“I don’t know,” Damian repeated his father’s words. “I ain’t 
an expert but I watch Quincy.” Larry was nowhere to be 
found. His mother surfaced later and told the cops that 
Larry hadn’t been near the scene because he had been with 
her in Mississauga. We never saw him again.
The next day, my dad packed up the Lawn Boy and drove it 
to the dump. When he came back, he sat out in the backyard 
gazing into nothing for a long, long time. My mother and I 
joined him, pulling up lawn chairs beside him. I wanted to 
say something to him. But I was only a kid and I didn’t have 
these kinds of conversations with my parents. It was dusk 
and the sweet scent of the grass enveloped us. The white 
roses gleamed in the half-light and crickets began to chirp. 
We heard distant voices of neighbours having a barbeque. 
I looked across the fences to the expanse of green that was 
our neighbourhood. It looked like it went on forever. My 
mother combed her fingers through my hair and murmured 
softly, “As beautiful as the day is long.”
Carrianne Leung is a fiction writer, educator and business 
owner who lives in Toronto. She is co-editor, with Lynn 
Caldwell and Darryl Leroux, of Critical Inquiries: A Reader 
in Studies of Canada. Her first novel, The Wondrous Woo 
will be released by Inanna Publications in the fall of 2013.


Grass

Taylor, Gail

118 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
L’expérience de deux sœurs qui ont passé leur enfance à la 
Mispec Beach sur la baie de Fundy près de St John, au Nouveau 
Brunswick,  nous est racontée ici par le biais de photos.  Ce 
texte nous révèle non seulement ce que ces instantanés  mon-
trent mais aussi tout ce qui peut être évoqué  en dehors  du 
cadre de ce qui a été inclus. Les parents et les grands-parents 
sont omniprésents  ainsi que le caractère inusité des grandes 
marées et de la géologie de la région sans oublier l’ombre de 
la Guerre  Mondiale  qui plane sur leur passé. 
 A small rectangle 3.5 by 2.5 inches, this photo 65 years old 
in black-and-white bleached out with age to the same pale 
yellow that topped the milk laid out by the mother, Rosa 
(who may have been the one to snap it), in her perpetual 
naivété of hope: Slurp it down, Johnnie Brown! The black 
is now pale charcoal and there is a limed, olden, overcast 
air to the photo that belies what may be going on. When 
depiction is read so long after it was made, subjects are 
elusive and their interactions must be inferred from the 
tableaux by various strategies and vantages.
In the one given here, the photographer faces eastward 
onto a wedge of Mispec Beach toward industrial Saint 
John on the Bay of Fundy, where the busy dry dock 
was; and from the age of the baby, it’s August 1948, so 
just three years after the Japanese surrender that finally 
ended the war. Imagine the smoking flues of the city 
beyond the fringe of rocks that look like prehistoric 
spiny extrusions, which in a way they are, being igneous 
or maybe metamorphic from eras gone by, and pretty 
much impervious to erosion.
Rearing up from a receding tide, a stack of mnemonic 
rocks that look, however, only like themselves—implacable 
In the Basin of Fundy, 1948
gail taylor
outcroppings of mute witness battered by millennia of 
ocean, these rocks are poised to achieve the same renown 
geologically as the massive tides already have. The direction 
has been chosen to focus on two sisters, the older girl of 
four or five, pressed now into the sand on all fours, flanked 
by the one who sees but probably is not seen—at least, by 
one of the children. Then there’s the shadow, a negative 
head-and-shoulders portrait flourished at one side of the 
head looming into the children’s space by what might be 
a Rosie the Riveter head scarf slipped sideways. The older 
girl Deirdre (called Dee-Dee by her father) wears not a 
swimsuit but a brief dress rucked up around the waist, a 
print weathered by being hung out most often in a briny 
fog, with puffed sleeves that Rosa would have ironed for 
practice, muttering Devilish! between her teeth. This was 
before the family moved out of the grandfather’s house 
where his housekeeper Hattie asserted her authority 
through tutoring her prodigious household skills in which, 
it would seem, the young wartime wife was unschooled. 
You can tell Dee-Dee’s dress is smocked from the way it 
bunches out from the eyelet-edged collar, but since her 
own mother is dead, it might have been smocked by Rosa’s 
mother-in-law, who did not come to the beach. Dutch-
cut with bangs, Dee-Dee’s dark hair swings forward in 
humid blooming waves that impart to the photo a physical 
sensation of motion. In one hand, the blunt-tipped tin 
head of a shovel, its face born down with the weight of 
her small right hand into the everlasting sand.
The shovel is not in use because a tow-headed toddler is 
clambering onto her big sister’s back, the shutter catching a 
rout by baby Violet of her sister’s act of digging, performed 
with characteristic gravitas, abandoned on demand. Dee-
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 119
Dee would serve a long tenure as a rapt, captive big sister, 
grace in her very bones, a tenure the baby must fledge into 
herself within a few brief years when she will apprentice 
herself by example and slow degrees to such forbearance as 
she is shown. Now, Dee-Dee steadies herself by spreading 
her weight into the crawl position that she tactfully resumed 
when the baby preferred to crawl even after learning to 
walk, so they could discover things low-down that had it 
been known would surely have been forbidden to them, 
although banning does requires naming and the adults 
might have been hard put to describe just what the children 
would find, down there. Discovery as one kinetic unit of 
two, suborning beneath the surface of domestic life to 
ken what clings to its underside: no accident the father, 
by his own account, would hide his ménage underneath 
floorboards and draped delicate as lingerie over the hinges 
that hold up the table’s leaves. 
In the picture, the toddler scrambles with her face full 
of adoration and salt sun, one leg doubled over her sister’s 
back while the one eye of Dee-Dee seen by the camera 
suggests that both are scrunched shut—whether to with-
stand the assail of the baby, or the sun, can’t be told; but 
the clamberer has her eyes open and gazes at her sister 
like a little cat concentrated on holding the assembly of 
molecules together that make up her provider. Violet is 
wearing a dress, too, but with rompers underneath. The 
two are like one creature born of sea-light in the leagues 
of rock pummelled to crystal sand and edged by the 
agency of a living tide. No others appear on this beach 
only recently relinquished by the navy for the use of a 
gladdened and boisterous population, post-war: only the 
two-in-one sisterlings, and the shadow thrust into their 
ambit from behind, so it must be between five and six 
o’clock, the afternoon of mid-August 1948. The mother 
packs extra food so they can loiter while the sun pauses 
before its final careen into the bowl of the sea.
A cornet of sunshine strews cumulus, sending hot cones 
of trendresse / to caress / the girls’ flesh … and hissing like 
seabirds or reptilian amphibians, the tide sprawls out in 
a lacework of foam, scooping up jewels to return to the 
deep. It must have been this way when mammals were 
seduced from land to water seven times throughout the 
fathomless history of evolution, plucked from a hungry 
privilege on land and no match for the working over of 
an amniotic sea that turned them to marine mammals. 
Beyond the uneven white margin of the photo, dulse 
has been ritually laid out to crinkle-dry on a particular 
pocked, purple rock under the father Harry’s auspice, 
whose job this invariably was. Performing one of hers, 
Rosa unwraps damp tea towels and crumpled wax paper 
to dole out the leftover sandwiches from their lunchtime 
picnic: peanut butter, bleeding tomatoes, and chunks of 
white iceberg lettuce—anything to keep them here a bit 
longer. Carried out to sea by the breeze, their sentences 
are pulled mercifully into morphemes that require nothing 
by way of response. 
What it is, is an outing to Mispec Beach in the grandfa-
ther Arthur’s car, purveyor of pleasure that he was and the 
one catered to by his daughter Rosa, who it was already 
known in the bones would rather stay in his house, with 
Hattie to help, and the three meals each day perfectly 
predictable, than go forth with her husband. Harry, after 
all, has been back from his wartime radar operations 
overseas for long enough to make and grow Violet, who 
is no longer an infant, so it’s nearly to the point of being 
unseemly for the family to go on living in Rosa’s father’s 
house, although Arthur, who wears his widowhood hard, 
avers otherwise. Harry is off-frame but ubiquitous, aloft 
in the elemental sea, the uncontested enchanter and 
dancer of the household and handsomer by far than the 
grandfather, whose planed horse face hangs down from 
a sanguine brow topped up by lavish white hair. The old 
man’s concession to recreation is a straw boater to shade 
the sweet, complacent face, and suspenders tautened over 
a striped shirt with meticulously rolled-up sleeves, ironed 
to perfection by Hattie, who would recognize in the baby 
girl a natural ironer, by golly, and teach her young how 
to steam out the devil wrinkles from tucks and corners. 
Arthur is excessively lean, though not as militarily erect 
as the younger men home from the war. His war has long 
since come and gone, in which he refused to gallop with 
drawn sabre down a field converted to training grounds 
for ww1 soldiers. Why should he, a medic, hurtle down 
the field waving his drawn sword—on horseback, no less! 
What it is, is an outing to Mispec Beach in the grandfather Arthur’s car, 
purveyor of pleasure that he was and the one catered to by his daughter 
Rosa, who it was already known in the bones would rather 
stay in his house, with Hattie to help, and the three meals each day 
perfectly predictable, than go forth with her husband.
120 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
Nobody could ever make Arthur do what he set his mind 
not to, whereas his son-in-law, who defied the random 
manipulations of military hierarchies and civic privilege 
alike, never did so with impunity.
Arthur is a doctor whose education was made possible 
by the earnings of the only girl in a family of seven boys, 
her hollowed-out eyes in all the frames, who stayed home 
with the girl-hating mother to teach school in Tabusintac, 
tithing her wages so all the clever boys could go off and 
away! to make good, Arthur graduating from Medicine 
of rejoiced relief when Harry dunks for the long, long 
swims to which he is fairly beckoned: The only time I ever 
see your father at peace, she proclaims to the girls, while 
gesturing with one bare curved arm out to sea, is when 
he’s swimming in the Bay of Fundy. Her motion sweeps to 
starboard the morphings of war, onerous marriage vows, 
and the mysteries of temperament, romance, and chance. 
She makes things righteous so that each one of them is 
kindled into magnanimity that turns out to be enduring 
in her daughters’ lives. 
at McGill University in 1900, mere son of a wood hewer 
from the Miramichi (meaning, Mi’kmaq Land) where 
Scots and Irish settlers, and Acadians before expulsion 
and afterward when some intransigently returned, turned 
forest into timber, land to pasture and the planted field, 
and wives to prolific producers of labour: the women who 
made it through multiple childbirths and the strenuous 
homesteading had to be stalwart. If not, they were relegated. 
You could also be plucked to leisure and have a maid do 
all but the childbirth, but only if you were the daughter, 
or niece, or sometimes the sister, of a certain class of man. 
There is no counterpart in this snapshot to suggest the 
grandfather’s wife Iva, not even off-frame, the trained 
soprano from Boston who by now was so soundly dead 
that she was never invoked by the husband who had doted 
on her rich soprano solos in Saint John churches when she 
was a canary with four children singing for her lost operatic 
life in the industrial port; who did, herself, succumb; who 
could not be saved by her husband the doctor. Later, when 
the men had become dead enough themselves, her story 
would make something of a comeback.
Swimming back and forth parallel to the shore of this 
Bay where a hundred billion tons of water pour in and 
then out twice each lunar day from the Atlantic, Harry 
is not just off-frame, but out of reach and visible, a most 
beneficial condition for them all. The baby keeps him 
well within her ambit, though, kenning already that he 
could be occupied in some sleight-of-body, some species 
transformation. Each time they go to the beach in the 
grandfather’s car, his grown-up daughter Rosa, whose 
stenographic work for the wartime navy was so secret 
she never spoke of it then or after, recites the mantra 
Likely, Rosa took the picture for the amusement of the 
three adults, in their various permutations. The attach-
ment of Violet to Dee-Dee with her bottomless patience 
and tolerance, and the baby’s bright doggedness: these 
things the adults will comment on to one another when 
the print is developed, with wave-like nuances of facial 
expression—the arched eyebrow, or wonder-eyed laugh-
line-etching that takes the place of word cairns. Rosa’s 
smile will sweeten like her father’s at the way things have 
of turning out, because you don’t have any idea how the 
children will be in themselves, let alone with each other.
But for the girls themselves, their simian closeness 
served as a closure of ranks against the three-member 
crew who held sway over them and were aligned along 
the torsion of their triangle, and by the father’s kitbag 
of creatures dragged back from the war that he did not 
share with his father-in-law one iota. The way the girls took 
to one another, Rosa would say as the girls intertwined 
on all fours like elephants on safari, heads draped with 
crocheted dollies’ blankets, forging a trail into the under-
world below tables and chairs and chanting as faithfully 
as the Jesus Prayer, hour upon hour: Wa-wa-wa-waaah! 
An eighteenth-month old baby captivated by her older 
sister who is also her captive, with a patience of the ad-
mirable suffering kind learned in Sunday school of Suffer 
little children to come unto, who may only have wanted, 
strictly speaking, to foment the sand with idle stirrings, 
fling water from her freckled fist onto the sun-baked 
crenellations with a suave and expert gesture picked up 
from Hattie as she sprinkled an article of clothing before 
rolling it tight as a chignon to rest before steaming. 
Replete in the moment, was Deirdre, and sufficiently 
Each time they go to the beach in the grandfather’s car, his grown-up 
daughter Rosa, recites the mantra of rejoiced relief when Harry dunks for 
the long swims to which he is fairly beckoned: The only time I ever see your 
father at peace, she proclaims to the girls, while gesturing with one bare 
curved arm out to sea, is when he’s swimming in the Bay of Fundy. 
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 121
oblivious to the power of the Grand-Mummy alliance 
(though never of Daddy safe in the surf ) that the girl 
baby desired to partake of her like communion and 
become more innocent, too. 
The photo is one of rue and honour, righteousness, and 
adult envy; sea change.
The toddler taking a toehold in the sand to behold 
and beheld by a freckled big sister who notwithstanding 
her own contemplations turns just here and just now 
toward a quarter-century of commitment to her younger 
kin. Both of them perfect receptacles for the effusions of 
Mispec caused when the Bay rises and sinks the equiva-
lent of four stories per tide—sometimes a morphing that 
occurs during one of their languid trips while the restless 
blade of Harry cuts through the high water, and low to 
the beach, where Rosa declares everyone happy. All in the 
era before the desecrations of Canaport and then the rise 
of monstrous platforms for liquefied natural gas. One 
snapped frag of a summer’s day when the recent war was 
compassed to the soundly dead past by the mother (whose 
own mother was kept there as well), invigilated by a maze 
of adult agreements desperate, cynical, and wise; and only 
the Daddy, trained radar man and self-made magician, on 
active duty patrolling the shore. He would have known how 
staggeringly brief and direct, once Nova Scotia was out of 
the way, the journey between Fundy’s magnitude and the 
secret coves on Britain’s coast where radar was deployed. 
The shot moment configured by the one with the camera 
(Rosa the mother now seems an unlikely person to have 
taken the picture and we cannot know either if it was the 
anonymous, Rosie-scarfed, shadow) yields up an amplitude 
like potlatch for the history of this place and time: 
One girl born in wartime, the other post-war, of the 
cohort with a mandate to compensate for the unspeakable 
squandering of life in the war, spied on by the camera as 
all children must be, not quite in the Cold War world but 
within the basin of a dangerous deep sea with world-class 
tides that awed the adults into everlasting commentary. In 
a sea so cold that visitors never put more than their tootsies 
in, but not so glacial that the children raised there could 
not bob about in tidal pools when tiny, and soon enough 
with ample encouragement from the adults, enter the 
undertow and set their marine mammalian sails across its 
edge at high tide. This, when one tide lets in and out more 
water than the combined flow of all the world’s freshwater 
rivers discharged into global oceans! Where the resonance 
or oscillation made you feel as if you better grow flippers 
or fins fast, or be rocked out of the very world, the sob and 
roar of the sea within. Burials in sizzling sand to blanch 
your shivering, and then the plunge into iced surf to stop 
the action of burning again; imaginary games so good 
the mother might even slip you a cream-topped cup of 
Mispec Beach rocks, eastern edge. Photo: Gail Taylor
122 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
milk from the thermos and get it down the hatch. The un-
abridged delirium of touch, skimming over sand and rock 
and worked over by the roiling waves, all while toddling, 
crawling, clambering, tumbling, and watching—always 
the watching and listening for wordless sibilance and for 
the spectral that surrounds the father, tuned to the seiche 
of adults tided together for their children and their lives. 
Children do not know that they’re being framed, you 
see; and I, for one, had not understood that childhood 
was as pervious and hulking as the rocks on which we 
inter-tidally survived.
Gail Taylor is an educational writer and editing specialist for 
academic and community writers, with a particular interest 
as a writer in creative non-fiction, memoir and poetry. She 
was a 2011 finalist in the single poem category of the Writer’s 
Federation of New Brunswick, and her poems have been 
published in Contemporary Verse2 and Atlantic Books 
Today, as well as included in two anthologies, Voices and 
RENEE NORMAN
                 P
                 o
          Scrabble
                 t
                 r
                 y
I am writing this in bed
like Edith Wharton
not yet flinging pages
to the floor
for later arrangement
Edith’s process
perhaps I will invent
something new
cutting up the words
throwing them into the air
how do they land
on carpet canvas?
a Picasso poem
or closing my eyes
letting the written word
careen across a page
a sheet even
or poetry scrabble
each letter of each word
assigned a score
the winning poem gets published
on the Scrabble ™ app
where players can move letters
form new words
new poems   new scores
a never-ending board of trade
till bored of trade
we all get up
out of bed
face the day
the blank page
the next poem
ps. I have copyrighted these ideas©
Renee Norman’s poems appear earlier in this volume.
NEW FROM 
INANNA
Spring 2013
AUTUMN’S GRACE
 
a novel by
BONNIE LENDRUM
“Autumn’s Grace is a rarity—a novel that gives the 
reader a close-up and at times blindingly honest 
view of a family’s end-of-life journey. This book is a 
valuable resource for anyone wanting to understand 
the complexity of emotions facing what for many of 
us is one of the most difficult times in our lives and 
one that few of us are ever prepared to face.” 
—janet napper, Past Executive Director, 
Hospice Association of Ontario
isbn 978-1-926708-88-1
June 2013 / 408 pp / $22.95
www.inanna.ca


In the Basin of Fundy, 1948

Patriarca, Gianna

VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 27
These portraits are of five queer women writers whose 
work inspired me as a gay woman.
Daphne du Maurier: I was drawn to her novel Rebecca 
because I grew up in a family where there were a lot of 
secrets and there was much that was hidden. The mystery 
of Rebecca was mesmerizing. 
Gertrude Stein: I loved her poetry and was intrigued by 
her relationship with Alice B. Toklas and the fact that 
they were living together and rubbing shoulders with 
all the great artists of bohemian Paris in the early part of 
the twentieth century. I was fascinated not only by her 
writing, but also by photographs of thier home and the 
world they had created for themselves.
Bessie Smith: When I first went to study at university 
in the United States, I was introduced to many African 
American jazz artists. I remember feeling that the pain and 
anguish they expressed with their music reflected back to 
me much of the conflicted and confusing feelings I had 
about love and attraction as a young gay person. Those 
songs expressed in their words and melodies all the longing 
I felt but could not admit to myself at that time.
Colette: In My Mother’s House is an evocative story about 
a daughter’s relationship to her mother as a young child. 
There is a touching description of her separating out 
from her mother for a moment and then being enfolded 
back in the safety of her mother’s small circle of life that 
encompasses her whole world as a young child. I was able 
to relate to that feeling of never wanting to be out of my 
mother’s reach or far away from her.
Willa Cather: I read her novel The Song of the Lark and 
related to the depiction of a young woman’s struggle to 
follow her dreams: to leave her family and find her way 
as an artist in the big city. I, too, was struggling to break 
away from my family and establish myself as a separate 
entity from those who had raised me. This novel really 
inspired me as an aspiring gay woman artist.
This series is ongoing and I plan to continue to explore 
queer artist portraiture depicting a variety of gay, lesbian, 
queer, bi, trans, and two- spirited figures from the historical 
past to the modern day.
Sarah Hunter is based in Toronto. She has been a visual 
artist and art educator for the past 20 years. She has had 
numerous art exhibits in Canada, the U.S., and abroad. 
Visit her website at: <www.turtleart.ca>.
GIanna PaTRIaRCa
maria Grazia and naples 
if i could
i would take you
back to the snow
Brunswick Avenue
where we grew up
take you back to
Jimmy in the backyard
pumpkins in October
mustard on your hamburger
and all those apple pies
the hills and sweet jasmine
linger here
stars idle on the
head of Vesuvius
among these ruins
love songs and tortured sea
a sadness
too deep to excavate
courage
keeps you young
beautiful
don’t surrender
to this place
don’t give your heart
completely
  
sweet tongued cherubs
hanging about in the
oleander gardens
have been known to
lie
Gianna Patriarca’s poetry and prose appears earlier 
in this volume.


Maria Grazia and Naples

Driedger, Diane

VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 95
other doctors are. After giving Tom 
a neurological examination he says 
that he knows the type of treatment 
Tom needs. Next month, he’s going 
to a brain tumour conference in the 
U.S. When he comes back, he’ll have 
a treatment to offer Tom. Please call 
him in a month.
A month later, I call. He has only 
a vague recollection of our conversa-
tion. “I’m not sure what you know 
about this tumour,” he says, “but 
there’s not much that can be done.” I 
don’t understand. I clearly remember 
DIANE DRIEDGER
Cyborg
picc line apparatus
removed
from my heart
can’t leave it behind
it’s part of me
like Seven of Nine
in Star Trek Voyager
I ask the nurse
can I have it?
you never know when it will come
in handy when making art
at home I look at the tubing
is this like artmaking with
nail clippings
or my hair?
Diane Driedger’s poetry appears 
earlier in this volume.
our discussion and his hopeful words. 
He asked me to bring Tom to London 
to see him with the understanding 
that he could help him. He received us 
in a humane and compassionate way. 
And now this complete disavowal. I’m 
totally disheartened.
And then it comes to me. Tom 
has a very rare tumour, one that is 
not well understood. By examining 
Tom, this doctor is able to further 
his medical knowledge. Is he doing a 
study and needing more participants, 
I wonder? He knows there’s no possi-
ble treatment he can offer Tom. He 
has enticed us to London with a false 
promise. I feel cheated and angry. 
And this is just the beginning of our 
desperate journey.
Karen Fejer is a personal historian. 
Previously, she was a freelance contrib-
utor to cbc Radio. She has written for 
Women’s Quarterly, Ontario Medical 
Journal, Canadian Jewish News, and 
other publications.
Diane Driedger, “Self-Portrait with Skeleton (After Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait 
with Parrot),” 2011, watercolour, 12 in. x 16 in.


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