This essay examines gendered nature and female agency in Canadian children's author L. M. Montgomery's Emily trilogy. Focusing on the spruce and maple grove known as "Lofty John's bush," this essay argues that the trilogy frames nature as a site of feminine power under heteropatriarchal control. In Emily of New Moon (1923), the heroine leverages social authorities to defend the bush from male dominance. In Emily Climbs (1925), she associates the bush with her childhood sweetheart while an older suitor begins leading her towards other, more oppressive, spaces. Finally, in Emily's Quest (1927), she comes to believe that environmental preservation necessitates participation in the capitalist institutions that threaten nature. By entwining Emily's bodily autonomy with her defence of feminized landscapes, the trilogy reimagines nature not merely as background but as the foundation of female agency. Ultimately, Emily's struggles with men and social expectations reveal how agency, belonging, and environmental stewardship are intertwined with-and ultimately constrained by-gendered authority.
This interview by Margery Fee focuses on Sherrill Grace's academic career in Canadian literary studies. The introduction outlines her many awards and gives an overview of the major figures about whom she has written. In the interview, Sherrill Grace discusses stages in her career from her early years in Quebec, her education, and her career at the University of British Columbia from 1977 to her post-retirement research and writing. Her identification as a Canadian inspired her research trajectory, as she moved from her work on Malcolm Lowry to Canadians, including Margaret Atwood; dramatist Sharon Pollock; Mina Hubbard, an explorer; Timothy Findley, an actor and author; and Tom Thomson, a painter. She also discusses how she learned as she taught and conducted research, from her colleagues and graduate students in particular, but also from her international conference participation as a speaker.
This essay is an autotheoretical reflection on the experience of teaching life writing in programs outside of English and creative writing. Structured as a series of notes or fragments, it explores competing accounts of subjectivity by braiding personal narrative together with theoretical excursions on the body, place, and language. Arguing for decomposition as a term analogous to decolonization and deconstruction, the essay challenges assertions of selfsovereignty-ego, individuality, and success-that too often underpin creativity within an academic context. Using research from fields as disparate as ethology and psychoanalysis, it reimagines the writing classroom as a heterotopic space that is its most generative when it destabilizes students' fixed notions of themselves as fully present and autonomous. In its commitment to both dissolution and failure, it offers new modes of collaboration-inter-and intrapersonal, human and more-than-human-as an ethics of care and solidarity.
This article discusses how the protagonist of Marian Engel's first novel, No Clouds of Glory (1968) revises her roles in her past relationships to reimagine her future possibilities. The conversation in Engel's novel, retitled Sarah Bastard's Notebook when it was republished in 1974, reflects the author's own anxiety about being a woman but also lends itself, almost sixty years after its first publication, to ongoing conversations about female bodies, gender identities, and sexuality. Scholarship about the novel has generally touched on nationality, gender and identity, and writing and feminism. More recent scholarship discusses the female professor trope in Canadian fiction written by women and imposter syndrome. Building on these conversations, this essay shifts attention to how romance in the novel attaches to what Engel's protagonist experiences as "the ugly." Engel, through her mode of critique and the novel's irritated aesthetic, decentres beauty and patriarchal femininity as a woman's sole measure of value. Moreover, Sarah's abortions function as a ritual cleansing of the female-coded self, removing the sterile and potentially dangerous material of romance's reproductive mythology from the body.
In winip & ecirc;k (Winnipeg), Indigenous women poets like Denise Cook, Brianna Jonnie, katherena vermette, Cambria Harris, and Emma LaRocque have been theorizing the intersection of colonial violence and misogyny since the 1980s, offering both analysis and resistance strategies that transform how we understand urban Indigenous experiences. Yet their voices often go unheard- not because they aren't speaking, but because settler audiences have learned to hear Indigenous women's words as noise rather than knowledge. This crisis of listening has material consequences, from policy failures to ongoing violence against Indigenous women. This paper builds on Warren Cariou's concept of critical humility to argue that some of the violence against Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and their families in winip & ecirc;k could have been avoided if settlers learnt how to listen to Indigenous women, and it will argue that Indigenous women poets offer us nuanced understandings of the systems of colonial power that make their safety precarious.
This article by Christine Campana engages three poems from Sto:lo writer Lee Maracle's collection Talking to the Diaspora (2015) to query the term diaspora and to consider what different diasporas may gain from listening to Maracle's "talk." Analyzing Maracle's representations of diasporas, in relation to Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's concept of "constellations of coresistance," discussed in As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (2017), reveals that Maracle not only speaks back to white settlers; she also encourages creative conversations with communities of colour. The poems "Talking to the Diaspora," "On the 25th Anniversary of Martin Luther King's Death," and "Remembering Mahmoud 1976" demonstrate how Maracle invites Black and Palestinian peoples rendered diasporic by settler colonialism to join her in reimagining belonging on Turtle Island in a way that prioritizes care for Indigenous lands. Without negating differences between peoples, Maracle's poems reorient potential coresistors across time and space, reminding them of moments of coresistance and the futurities they can create together.
Literature is full of things-autonomous, historical things which speak in their own language of thingness. This thing theory essay by Alex Prong demonstrates how literary things afford a propinquity to the past and the dead that is unique in its sensuous materiality and essential for the study of history. Prong discusses the practice of situating oneself among the imaginary things of literary fiction, demonstrates how one can come to understand the dead body as constituted among the order of imaginary things, and discusses the encyclopedic form. Through this theoretical analysis, Prong also provides a (brief) encyclopedia of materiality as it is presented in Hazel Jane Plante's 2019 novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian).
Since 2001, Canadian poet, artist, and performer bill bissett has, in public statements and interviews, and in his poetry and art, explored the faraway planet of lunaria as his autobiographical origin. In 2001, bissett published the ambitious work lunaria, a book-length poem in which a speaker recounts their origin on lunaria and desire to return, as well as providing an account of the lunarian ways of life, geographies, relationships, and lifecycles. This article by Drew McEwan explores the mythical planet both in lunaria and in the lunarian autobiographical paratexts as critical developments in bissett's work and ideas. Further, it argues that these texts articulate a mad and queer temporality that provides a critical perspective on normative "erthling wayze." bissett's poetic and extra-poetic lunarian texts elaborate a utopian state of temporality, community, and nurturance borne in relation to the failures of those deemed too crazy, too queer, here on Earth.
foot is sinking deeper, deeper - Quick! Draw stroke, pull to his side so he can balance! Bare foot recovered but saridal left behind in the mud. The Mazama Ash layer found along Edmonton's river valley records one of the most catastrophic events on Larth since the end of the last lee Age, I was furning away from the river to head back up to the main path when SLIP! arms jut out, one foot shoots into air, body tits backwards like a stick figure in one of those warning signs about slippery ground, and Taughter brings me back to my body, this place. I aimed to determine the in-stream environmental characteristics most associated with the crayfish's occupancy in the North Saskatchewan River and determined which currently unoccupied tributaries are most prone to future invasion. The only reported death was that of an infant who slipped from the arms of its mother, who was walking precariously along a Hoating sidewalk and dropped her baby into the rushing water. This study aimed to investigate the microbial response of North Saskatchewan River water to diluted batimen (DH) and conventional crude (CC) during the freeze-thaw-refreeze cycle The missionaries met at Buttalo Lake and continued travelling between the North and South Saskatchewan Rivers to
