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

Lindo, Laura Mae

VOLUME 28, NUMBERS 2,3 87
On oublie trop souvent que les soi-
gnantes membres de la famille d’une 
cancéreuse luttent aussi contre le can-
cer. Leurs histoires. quoique reconnues 
au passage et présumées existantes dans 
le cadre de celles qui sont malades, sont 
reléguées en marge du discours et des 
discussions sur la maladie. Cette aut 
obiographie est une de ces histoires, en 
fait, c’est l’histoire d’une soignante.
In “Killing Joy: Feminism and the 
History of Happiness,” Sara Ahmed 
writes, “When the exposure of vio-
lence becomes the origin of violence, 
then the violence that is exposed is 
not revealed” (584). To walk away 
from a man dying of cancer was and 
is not the “right” thing for a woman 
to do. Not for the man. Not for 
the children. Not for the self. The 
wife, Ahmed’s analysis suggests, has 
historically been situated as the per-
fect caregiver for she devotes herself 
entirely to the man’s wellbeing, no 
matter what his wellbeing might 
do to hers. Always smiling. Always 
happy. Always ready to take on 
more. Her duty is to care. However, 
it is the plastic smile, the distanc-
ing of self, and the consistent being 
“there” at his side that, in the words 
of Ahmed, allow the violence that is 
exposed to not be revealed. This is 
the less becoming story being shared 
here, for it tells of a woman who 
shatters the expected, by noticing 
the violence and naming it, dusting 
She Re-membered
(A Story of Care)
laura mae lindo
herself off. and caring for someone 
else: Caring for her self.
She sat staring out the window as 
the train moved steadily forward 
through the dense fog. An aimless 
stare? Maybe to an outsider, but not 
to her. She remembered. She re-
membered like it was yesterday.
* * *
“It’s cancer isn’t it?” 
She has asked the doctor in the 
Emergency Room. 
“You’re testing for cancer, right?” 
She could hear him moaning in 
the background. His pain was more 
intense by the minute. 
“You’re checking for cancer aren’t 
you?” 
At first she was calm. Calm, and 
self-assured. She had read the stories, 
and she quickly rehearsed the lines: 
“We can beat this. We can beat this 
with a positive attitude…” 
“You’re testing for cancer, right?“ 
Something inside her wanted 
to scream, but she was good. She 
was calm. She pushed it down and 
tucked the desire to scream away 
into a little compartment made 
especially for it. She was calm. And 
she remembered.
* * *
She ran downstairs for a coffee 
and a plain tea biscuit. “Break-
fast of champions,” she thought. 
“No—breakfast for this champion.” 
She smiled. She had been there all 
night. How could she leave him? 
She brought her computer with her 
and whenever he dozed off, she got 
to work. She wanted him to know 
that she was there. He wasn’t fight-
ing this alone. So she stayed. 
He yelled and screamed. 
She stayed.
He moaned and complained. 
She stayed. 
He refused the painkillers. 
She stayed.
He refused to eat and drink.
She stayed. 
He looked up and smiled. 
She stayed. 
She stayed, and she remembered. 
* * *
She walked into the resource library 
in the hospital and asked for books 
about aml. She grabbed everything 
she could find. dvds, novels, pam-
phlets, autobiographies—she took 
it all. She was going to uncover the 
secrets of this “cancer” and beat it 
with knowledge. She was going to 
find out everything she could about 
it and destroy it. She was going to 
annihilate the cancer by unmask-
ing every inch of it with the power 
of information. She would master 
its course, pre-empt its attack, and 
bring it to its knees. With knowl-
edge. And dvds. And novels. And 
pamphlets. And autobiographies. 
88 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
Especially autobiographies. She re-
membered.
 
* * *
“He’s just not himself. He’s so angry.” 
“You’d be angry too if you were 
going through what he’s going 
through.”
“But he’s not himself. He’s giving up. 
He’s giving into his anger.”
“He’s just tired. You’d be tired too 
if you were going through what he’s 
going through.”
Nobody was listening, but she 
knew better. He was changing. 
Cancer was changing him and not 
like in the books she read. This was 
no happy story of overcoming and 
beating cancer and making their life 
better, and that meant cancer was 
winning even when he was in remis-
sion, didn’t it? 
“You can’t let it win,” she used to 
tell him. “You can’t let it win. We have 
to keep fighting.”
“We? Who is ‘we’? You’re not 
fighting anything! I’m fighting 
cancer—what are you fighting? I’m 
fighting cancer!”
But wasn’t she fighting too? Wasn’t 
she on the team? Wasn’t she fighting 
cancer? 
She felt uncomfortable in her 
healthy skin… 
Her hair had not fallen out. It grew 
longer. (At least she believed it had when 
she had time to comb through it.)
Her joints did not ache. (Except 
from the fatigue. But it wasn’t the 
same…)
She didn’t feel nauseous when she 
ate. (Except when she had to argue with 
the insurance company, and fight with 
the doctors to help him get through this 
more comfortably, and rush home to 
face the kids and tell them that daddy 
was okay…)
She didn’t cry out in her sleep 
(Except when she was haunted by the 
nightmares…)
She felt uncomfortable in her 
healthy skin. And she remembered.
* * *
“I’m scared.”
“I know,” she replied. So was she, 
but she said nothing. 
She was the strong one. She was the 
healthy one and she had to remain 
strong. She looked at him and said, 
“It’s going to be okay.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know,” she replied. So was she, 
but she said nothing. 
She had to be strong for the kids. 
They needed her more now than ever. 
She looked them in the eyes and said, 
“It’s going to be okay.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know,” she replied. So was she, 
but she said nothing. 
She had to be strong for their 
friends. They didn’t have the oppor-
tunity to visit as much as they’d like, 
and they needed her reassurance that 
everything would work out. They 
tried to find time to visit between 
work and time with their own fami-
lies, and they worried that he might 
take that the wrong way. She looked 
them in the eyes and said, “It’s going 
to be okay.”
She would fight to keep her prom-
ises. She would fight to make sure 
they were reassured. 
She was scared, and she said noth-
ing, but she remembered.
 
* * *
As her train moved through the 
dense fog she remembered that it 
was a story of care. Caring for her 
husband. Caring for the kids. Caring 
for the friends and family near and 
far. It was a story of care for everyone 
but herself. She had read somewhere 
that it was important for the care-
giver to think of themselves—set 
some time aside to replenish their 
spirits and their strength. You were 
supposed to build in time to put 
yourself first, but how? The guilt 
was far-reaching.
Cancer had taken away her hus-
band. He was no longer the man that 
she knew. He was alive and healing, 
but things were different now. The 
fear had turned to rage, and the rage 
was directed to the one that stayed. 
And so one day she had to make a 
choice. Continue to stay, or save her 
self. She had stayed, and stayed, until 
she could not stay anymore. 
Cancer had taken away her family. 
The kids were safely back on track—
cancer had ruined their routine, but 
she managed to re-create a semblance 
of normalcy for the kids. Dance class, 
and play dates, and birthday parties, 
and martial arts. They had all begun 
again, but after each visit with daddy, 
they returned home with mom. 
Cancer had taken away her spirit. 
She was going to fight it with knowl-
edge, bring it to its knees. But it was 
she that was brought to her knees. 
She rose slowly and decided to rid 
herself of the guilt. 
She rose slowly and decided to hold 
her head up. 
She rose slowly, but she rose up. 
And as her world spun around 
her, she picked up the pieces and 
re-membered. 
It was a story of care.
Laura Mae Lindo is a lecturer at the 
University of Prince Edward Island 
in the Faculty of Education. S Her 
Masters in Education at York Univer-
sity examined the theoretical founda-
tion of the recently implemented high 
school philosophy program in Ontario 
secondary schools. She is currently 
enrolled in the Doctoral program in 
Education at York University where 
she is investigating the pedagogical 
value of discourses of race as presented 
by African American comedians, hy-
pothesizing that “race comics” act as 
critical race theorists, making use of 
public stages to interrogate, critique, 
and discuss the current state of race 
relations.
References
Ahmed, Sara. “Killing Joy: Femi-
nism and the History of Happi-
ness.” Signs 35 (3) (2010): 571-
594.


She Re-membered (A Story of Care)

Martonfi, Ilona

VOLUME 28,  NUMBER 1 13
functioned as Chair of the Steering Committee) and 
a City Councillor who is co-chair of the tpsb. Other 
high-ranking police officers attended meetings but were 
not part of the committee.
9Margaret Corion was our excellent facilitator/mediator 
and works through St. Stephen’s Community House. 
She was selected through an interview process in which 
police personnel and community members of the Steering 
Committee took part. Her skills and services allowed for 
better communication with the tps/tpsb, although they 
refused to partake in conflict resolution when it arose. Her 
fee was paid by the tpsb. 
10As is standard practice, the Auditor General of Toronto 
conducted a review of his 1999 audit to determine if 
changes had been made as per his recommendations. His 
scathing follow up report blasted police inaction and con-
travened then Chief of Police Julian Fantino’s November 
2003 report to the tpsb that all recommendations had 
been implemented. The Auditor General also criticized 
police failure to consult with community-based women 
working in the area of sexual assault.
11A fuller elaboration of this difference in perspective was 
set out in documents prepared for the use of the Steering 
Committee by the community members.	See note 1. 
12Over the years support for the work of the Steering 
Committee grew to include the African Canadian Legal 
Network, Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, 
Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres, egale 
Canada, Ernestine’s Shelter for Women, Maggie’s: The 
Toronto Sex Worker Action Project, Native Youth Sexual 
Health Network, Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres, 
Parkdale Community Legal Clinic, Sistering, Toronto 
Police Accountability Coalition. Urban Alliance on Race 
Relations, Voices of Positive Women, and more—and 
with apologies to anyone not mentioned.
13Personal correspondence from the Chair of the tpsb 
(May 2008). 
14Steering Committee members who were salaried em-
ployees of community organizations did not claim the 
honorarium.
References
Bain, Beverly, Jane Doe and Wendy Komiotis. Sexual 
Assault Audit Steering Committee: Community 
Summary Report. Toronto: Toronto Police Service 
Board, 2007. 
Griffiths, Jeffrey. Review	of	the	Investigation	of	Sexual	Assaults	
:	Toronto	Police	Service.	Toronto: City of Toronto Audit 
Services, 1999.
Jane	 Doe	 v	 Board	 of	 Commissioners	 of	 Police	 for	 the	
Municipality	of	Metropolitan	Toronto	(1998), 39 O.R. 
(3d) 487 (Ont. Ct. Gen. Div.)
Police	Services	Act, R.S.O. 1990c.
ILONA MARTONFI
THE COMMON DANDELION
Vater praises me.
He says: “My daughter is smart.”
My father doesn’t know
my teacher in fourth grade touches me.
My father doesn’t ask.
I don’t tell anyone.
I say: “I have my report card.”
I pick buttercups, yellow dandelions.
Two-room school beside a cloister.
Nine year old Magyar refugee girl.
I play jump rope:
“Eins, Zwei, Drei.”
Shoot marbles with Ingrid
I shop for the groceries.
Grandmother Kisanyuka says:
“Buy bread, potatoes. Coffee.
And five kilos of sugar.
Tell the grocer to put it on credit.”
Bavarian Forest foothills:
Bombed military airport Neutraubling.
Father’s grey Opel truck.
Unfenced scrap iron yard.
I say: “Mama, braid my hair.”
I see her in the kitchen.
I eat breakfast grandmother prepares:
homemade raspberry marmalade
slathered on black bread.
Tin cup of milk.
Ilona Martonfi’s first book of poems, Blue Poppy,  was 
published in 2009. A chapbook, Visiting the Ridge, 
was published in 2004. Martonfi’s poems have appeared 
in Vallum, The Fiddlehead, Poetry Quebec, Carte 
Blanche, Headlight Anthology, Accenti, Bibliosofia, 
(Italy), Arcade, Helios, Serai, Carve, Soliloquies, 
Poets Against The War. Poet, editor, creative writing 
teacher, Ilona is the founder, producer/host of The Yellow 
Door and Visual Arts Centre Poetry and Prose Readings 
and co-founder, producer/host of the annual Lovers & 
Others.


The Common Dandelion

Woolfrey, Sandra

Classified

Andreae, Janice

CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME178
Verna Reid has many stories to tell 
of “women between,” especially 
a generation of Canadian women 
whose creative working lives extend 
well into the last-quarter century of 
their lifespan and into the new mil-
lennium. Her readers might expect a 
text heavily informed by theoretical 
analysis, for the artists and writers 
she examines – Mary Pratt, Aganetha 
Dyck, Mary Meigs, and Sharon 
Butala – have contributed much to 
the development of contemporary 
art and literature in this country. 
They are practically household names 
– certainly to academics and students, 
readers and viewers of Canadian art 
and literature. Or, her readers might 
expect a text structured within a tight 
feminist framework that leaves her 
reader wanting more about the actual 
visual and text work produced by 
each. What Reid delivers, however, 
is her own story of reading between 
disciplines and genres, between gen-
erations and life stories, of these artists 
and the work they produce.
Her story might not have been 
told, or known, before the advent 
of women’s studies courses and pro-
grammes in post-secondary educa-
tion. Indeed, this text suggests the 
valuable contributions of feminist 
education and feminist analysis to the 
activities of “making” and interpreta-
tion. Like Reid, the lives of her four 
subjects operate within the confines 
of Adrienne Rich’s “compulsory 
heterosexuality” and, as Carolyn 
Heilbrun suggests, the daily struggle 
too, are remarkable. In “Lull” and 
“Critique” the narrator compares 
herself to a bird. In “Lull,” she is 
vulnerable, “like a fledgling bird / I 
can fall in the limber space between 
us.” In “Critique,” an encounter 
with the department head of creative 
writing, she has become “a yellow 
parakeet on his shoulder.” “Critique” 
is one of many poems that evidence 
Lipszyc’s sensitivity to sonic elements 
of a poem. Here internal rhyme and 
monosyllabic words skewer the cre-
ative writing department head: “what 
he thought I ought to say.” 
Lipszyc’s “Teaching ESL (at a 
Branch of Shopper’s World)” lifts 
and transforms the experience from 
a tour of pronunciation and gram-
mar to an expression of hope: “And 
when we conjugate / past and present, 
we sense / how our lives move one 
tense to another, / turning over and 
back again like a coda / around this 
undefeated planet.” 
“Reading Braille” is an example of 
brilliant, breathtaking, daring use of 
line length and stanza breaks. The 
long single mid-line of the poem, 
following a single word line of the 
longest stanza—comments on the 
metaphor and simile in the first two 
stanzas as “poor intermediaries,” and 
then moves to the metaphor of the 
title. The last few words of the poem 
engage the reader in active interpreta-
tion through the sort of ambiguity 
noted by critic William Empson, as 
they join the struggle to comprehend 
with sudden clarity. The genius of the 
metaphor of reading braille finally 
resides in its essential tactile element, 
an irony when all that’s left of the 
absent lover are words on a page. 
Careful and casual readers will 
both find pleasure in reading 
Lipszyc’s Singing Me Home, which 
exemplifies well-crafted poems of 
keen observation and deep feeling.
Miriam N. Kotzin is the Director 
of the Certificate Program in Writ-
ing and Publishing, Department of 
English and Philosophy at Drexel 
University. 
 
WOMEN BETWEEN: 
CONSTRUCTION OF SELF 
IN ThE WORk OF ShARON 
BUTALA, AGANEThA DyCk, 
MARy MEIGS AND MARy 
PRATT
 
Verna Reid
Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 
2008
reviewed by janice 
andreae
between private domestic constraints 
and the public sphere of self-deter-
mination and agency. 
Reid began teaching literature at 
the Alberta College of Art and Design 
in 1967, then women’s studies at 
acad and the University of Calgary 
where she received her Ph.D. in 2003 
at the age of 75. Her intertextual 
and interdisciplinary doctoral work 
was inspired by the autobiographi-
cal content of her students’ work 
and the experiences they shared in 
her classroom but her interpreta-
tion and relational analysis were 
made possible by the critique and 
content of women’s studies courses 
and the body of feminist-informed 
knowledge she acquired through her 
studies. She cites the importance of 
Mary Kelley’s “On Sexual Politics and 
Art” in Framing Feminism: Art and 
the Women’s Movement 1970-1985 
(1987) edited by Roszika Parker and 
Griselda Pollock, and Pollock’s own 
Vision and Difference: Femininity, 
Feminism and the Histories of Art 
(1988) and Differencing the Canon: 
Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s 
Histories (1999).
Reading between the disciplines, 
Reid employs feminist scholarship 
and feminist theory to rupture exist-
ing androcentric, hierarchical canons 
of literature and the visual arts, and 
the historical and interpretative prac-
tices they advance (See Julia Kristeva, 
New French Feminisms, 1981). Reid’s 
strategies of interpretation echo 
Susan Stanford Friedman’s in her 
groundbreaking essay “Women’s 
Autobiographical Selves: Theory 
and Practice,” Heilbrun’s in Writing 
a Woman’s Life (1988) and Nancy 
Miller’s in Subject to Change: Read-
ing Feminist Writing (1988). Also 
evident is the influence of life-writ-
ing texts Essays on Life Writing: From 
Genre to Critical Practice (1992) 
and Autobiography and Questions of 
Gender (1991) edited, respectively, by 
Canadian academics Marlene Kadar 
and Shirley Neuman. 
Reid’s own investigation relies 
heavily on the concept of unraveling 
representation(s) of the self expressed 
VOLUME 28,  NUMBERS 2,3 179
in literary text and visual art. Struc-
turally, this text resembles Mary Ann 
Caws’s Women of Bloomsbury: Vir-
ginia, Vanessa and Carrington (1990). 
She too weaves together stories that 
cross disciplinary boundaries of the 
work and life of Virginia Woolf, Van-
essa Bell and Leonora Carrington. 
Caws uses psychoanalytical theory to 
tease out the relations between what 
she knows of their lives and their rep-
resentations of self, just as Reid does. 
However, Reid also draws from her 
vast background as a visual arts writer 
(and more recently, a painter) known 
for her well-written and highly acces-
sible essays, reviews, and interviews 
with/about Canadian women artists 
and writers. In Women Between, she 
makes good use of Meigs’s life-long 
painting practice in relation to her 
autobiographical text Lily Briscoe: 
A Self-Portrait (1981) and Pratt’s 
in connection with A Personal Cal-
ligraphy (2000). Characteristically, 
Reid’s discussions begin with the 
art or literary work itself and then 
explore direct connections and as-
sociations within and between works. 
Next her attention shifts to gathering 
the threads connecting differences 
between the lives of her subjects in 
relation to what she reads/sees and 
the work each produces inside or 
outside discipline or genre.
In the process of reading “between 
the lines” the reader finds Reid’s own 
life story, a story of survival, between 
as she phrases it “modernism and 
post modernism.” Reid sees Pratt, 
Meigs, Dyck and Butala as “freeing 
agents” and the inter-connections 
between their lives are vital to her 
text. What they share as a community 
of survivors connects them in spite 
of geographical distance; differences 
of sexual orientation, spirituality, 
class and ethnicity; and different 
strategies of their practice as artists, 
material- and technology-wise. In 
deciphering Reid’s textual strategies 
of weaving together performative, 
autobiographical, material, and in-
ter-textual connections, her reader 
weaves herself into the text.
Janice Andreae is a Toronto visual 
artist and writer whose interests are 
contemporary literary and visual art 
textual practices, informed by femi-
nist and queer theoretical perspec-
tives. Her reviews, essays, bookworks 
appear in Parachute, Canadian Art, 
Fuse, Mix, C magazine, Tessera, 
Resources for Feminist Research, 
and Canadian Woman Studies/les 
cahiers de la femme.
EDEN’S OUTCASTS: ThE 
STORy OF LOUISA MAy 
ALCOTT AND hER FAThER
John Matteson
New York: W. W. Norton, 2007
MARGARET FULLER: AN 
AMERICAN ROMANTIC LIFE
Charles Capper
Vol. 1, The Private Years; vol. 2, The 
Public Years. 
New York: Oxford University Press, 
1992, 2007
reviewed by gisela 
argyle
The two main subjects of these 
exhaustive biographies, Louisa May 
Alcott (1833-88) and Sarah Mar-
garet Fuller (1810-50), were the 
principal female members of the 
Concord Transcendentalists. They 
have recently appeared in this role in 
Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury 
(2006), reviewed here in an earlier 
issue. I shall refer to Alcott by her 
first name to distinguish her from 
her father, who shares the focus of 
Matteson’s book. Both women were 
educated by their fathers and raised 
to “heroic” ambitions, which neither 
achieved in her abridged life. Both 
regretfully came to see themselves 
excluded from motherhood and 
marriage (this condition changed for 
Fuller) and quested for a significant 
public voice. Matteson’s biography 
has won the Pulitzer Prize, Capper’s 
first volume won the Bancroft Prize. 
Both biographers work from rich 
published and archival sources, in-
cluding the conscientious journals 
and improving correspondence of 
their subjects’ circles, highly personal 
essays, and autobiographical fiction. 
This wealth of life writing, liberally 
quoted, occasionally reduces the bi-
ographer’s role to the adding of mere, 
in Matteson’s case even superfluous, 
explication. Matteson writes primar-
ily a family biography, of a detailed 
thoroughness that sometimes lapses 
into a daily chronicle. Capper con-
structs a “social biography [of ] Fuller 
thinking and acting with others” as 
well as with intellectual and political 
movements (preface to vol. 1). He 
dismisses all previous biographies of 
Fuller as unreliable and intellectually 
uninteresting.
Matteson’s subtitle acknowledges 
the fact that Amos Bronson Alcott 
(1799-1888) was mostly known as 
the “Father of Little Women, while 
the title extends to Louisa the spiritual 
interpretation that her father gave 
to his own life. However, the arcs of 
their lives were dissimilar: the father 
suffered repeated failures but late in 
life enjoyed a long period of public 
respect, good health, and satisfaction, 
whereas the daughter’s life was cut 
short just when she felt freed from 
uncongenial duties to pursue the 
great work she aspired to. Louisa died 
a few days after her father. Matteson 
recounts “Louisa’s two dominating 
raisons d’être had been to earn her 
father’s approval and to assure her 
mother’s comfort.” She obeyed the 
latter impulse by generally siding with 
her mother in marital conflicts and by 
continuously working as “the angel 
of the house” as well as through her 
commercial writings for the house. 
Louisa burnt most of her mother’s 
writings, but she memorialized her 
in her fictions, notably in Marmee 
of Little Women. Strong-willed and 
tempestuous but loyal wife of an 
acknowledged “saint,” Abba was a 
social activist in her own right. While 
sharing Louisa’s judgment of Abba’s 
merits and marital circumstances, 


Women Between Construction of Self in the Work of Sharon Butala, Aganetha Dyck, Mary Meigs, and Mary Pratt

Cairns, Rosemary

Gilbert, Daphne

Teaching Sexual Assault: The Education of Canadian Law Students

, Cancer de l'ovaire Canada

Cancer de l'ovaire: deux témoignages

Weston, Joanna M.

VOLUME 28,  NUMBER 1 145
DeANNA sTEPHENs VAUgHN
souvenir
JOANNA M. WEsTON
CREATION MYTHs
the woman contrived from calico half shells
       when she called you
crazy-glued at the hinges
into the shape of feminine, 
roosted on the windowsill, overlooking 
the driveway, the kitchen sink.
       it was about the decompression of
a southern fertility goddess, legless
beneath antebellum crenellations,
        her belly’s three-month swell
washed up from the Gulf of Mexico.
her starched billows began
at the hip. Feet and ankles absent
between scallops, hands bound 
in a pink pipe-cleaner muff.
       that her husband did not want
the pink smoothness inside her bonnet
grew varicose above missing ears
       because deaf women do not have babies,
       should not purvey deaf mother liquid
unlike the traveling pulchritude
on cartons of milk,
the South’s logo for lactic purity.
De Anna Stephens Vaughn holds an mfa from George 
Mason University. Her work has appeared in Feminist 
Studies, Natural Bridge, and Paper Street. She teaches 
writing and literature at Roane State Community College in 
Tennessee and edits poetry for Tar Wolf Review, a journal 
of poetry and art she co-founded in 2003.
god sits under a maple tree
spitting melon seeds
into her hand
singing winter songs
while lilac floats
through her hair
a wild wind pulls her skirt
drags her up and out
to walk gravel
dig concrete
and bring the main frame
out of its womb
wired and bitten
belching information
through its guts
god twists knobs
fiddles icons
before condemning herself
to push flowers
through the stratosphere
hurling imprecations
through curled fingernails
before she grabs a pail
and buries cyber garbage
under her chair
Joanna M. Weston’s poetry appears 
earlier in this volume.


English

Creation Myths

80 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
Johnson, Holly. “Measuring Vio-
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Statistical Trends 2006.” (Ot-
tawa: Statistics Canada, 2006) 
available at:  http://www.statcan.
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Kennedy, Duncan. “Politicizing the 
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ies. 4 (1995): 81-88 
Matas, R. and D. McCawley. Legal 
Education in Canada. Montreal: 
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McIntyre, Sheila. “Redefining Re-
formism: The Consultations That 
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ing Sexual Assault: A Decade of Le-
gal and Social Change. Eds. Julian 
V. Roberts and Renate M. Mohr. 
Toronto: University of Toronto 
Press, 1994. 293-326. 
McIntyre, Sheila with contribu-
tions from Christine Boyle, Lee 
Lakeman and Elizabeth Sheehy. 
“Tracking and Resisting Backlash 
Against Equality Gains in Sexual 
Offence Law.” Canadian Woman 
Studies/les cahiers de la femme 20 
(3) (2000): 72-83. 
MacKinnon, Catharine. “Main-
streaming Feminism in Legal 
Education.” Journal of Legal Edu-
cation 53 (2003): 199–212.
McMunigal, Kevin C. “Reducing 
the Risks and Realizing the Re-
wards: An Approach to Teaching 
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JOAnnA M. WeSTOn
Goodbye
the word lies bitter
in my mouth
it has the smell
of departing trains
sounds like the last call
for your flight
tastes of wet grass
and leaning gravestones
slides like old photos
against my lips
lingers under my tongue
sticks in my throat
this saddest word
rains on my face
Joanna M. Weston’s poetry appears 
earlier in this volume.


Goodbye

Maxwell, Caitlin

Moving Beyond Rape as a "Weapon of War": An Exploration of Militarized MAsculinity and its Consequences

Sinding, Christine

Wiernikowski, Jennifer

"One of my Better Operations": Older Women and Cancer

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