Monday, July 11, 2011

The Factory Reading Series: A reading/talk with Janice Williamson,‏

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:
The Factory Reading Series
 

A reading/talk by Janice Williamson (Edmonton)
lovingly hosted by rob mclennan

mother tongue books, 1067 Bank Street (at Sunnyside), Ottawa ON
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
doors 7pm, reading 7:30


link to facebook event here


Janice Williamson: mothers a teenager, writes, and teaches at the University of Alberta's Department of English and Film Studies, latitude 53, Edmonton, Alberta.

Her blog/website: the pomegranate (http://pomegranatewomenwriting.wordpress.com) is devoted to Canadian women writing nonfiction and issues of equity.

She is at work on a series of linked creative nonfiction essays. Her story "Fu: the turning point" about adoptive mothering was published in Dropped Threads 3. "The Turquoise Sea,"an essay about suicide and mourning, was originally published in AlbertaViews Jan/Feb 2010. The essay won a Silver Medal in the 2011 National Magazine Awards and was a finalist for the Jon Whyte Essay Prize in Alberta.

She is completing an interdisciplinary and multi-genre anthology about the case of Omar Khadr (see http://omarkhadranthology.wordpress.com). This explores human rights, torture, Canadian domestic and foreign policy, writing in a state of exception, the limits of tolerance, anti-racism, Islamophobia and the culture of fear.

Two of her five books are image/text works. Through family photography and memory work, a memoir Crybaby! investigates trauma, infertility, and a father's suicide. Tell Tale Signs used found images and engravings to tell cryptic stories. Her chapbook a boy: named won the national bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Over almost three decades, she lectured widely and published innovative essays on: mothering and adoption; twentieth-century Canadian women's writing including hybrid genre-blurring work; feminist cultural studies (women's trauma narratives, feminist performance and women's film); nonviolent civil disobedience & peace activism; and popular culture including written and video readings of West Edmonton Mall.

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