I’m intrigued by Sarah Hampson’s visceral reaction in “When is telling all too much? Drunk Mom memoir pushes the boundaries” [in the Globe and Mail], which is supposed to be her interview with Jowita Bydlowska. Bydlowska is the author of Drunk Mom, a recent tell-all memoir about a taboo subject, motherhood. The reason why Hampson is so upset about Drunk Mom isn’t really about alcoholism or addiction, a subject that has been written about by many memoirists, from Hunter S. Thompson, to James Frey to Chelsea Handler, the author of Are You There Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea. And there are a lot of memoirs in print about motherhood, including Kelly Oxford’s recent bestseller Everything is Perfect When You Are a Liar. No one seems to get that upset about these kinds of books, unless the author exaggerates or lies.

So what’s the difference here? It’s the combination of the two things, motherhood and addiction, and the refusal of the author to create a moral from her story which makes everything alright. Memoirs about alcoholism and other addictions are written in two ways: they are about the idea of treatment and cure (think about Patrick Lane’s brilliant There is a Season, or Frey’s A Million Little Pieces) or they make light of addiction somehow in order to make it “fun” or at least interesting (Thompson, Handler). Memoirs about motherhood often have to be uplifting or comic in the same way. In Canadian society, we appear to need and want stories about motherhood and addiction (or disability, or racism) to be uplifting or amusing, partly because so often, in real life, that’s not the case. So what happens when a writer decides to publish a tale about addiction which is neither?

What happens is that media pundits and members of the public take it personally. They are outraged. They question the ethics of the author and attack her ability to parent. They wag their fingers and pronounce judgements. Sarah Hampson begins her interview by saying that “this is not just an interview.” She’s right that it isn’t: Hampson excoriates Bydlowska for being too revealing in her memoir, claims that she wants to protect her, and then attacks her. She muses about Bydlowska’s therapist and what he or she might say. She accuses her of acting like an alcoholic because she decided to tell the whole story. She criticizes Bydlowska’s taste in clothes, as if her fashion choices represent a kind of moral failing. She even writes, “I feel both protective of her and annoyed by her – which is not what an interviewer is supposed to feel.” She’s right about that too. But she clearly feels outraged by this memoir and this memoirist because motherhood is not supposed to be written about in this way. A person recovering from an addiction who parents is supposed to reassure the rest of us (and by this I mean the Canadian middle-class rest of us) that recovery is possible, that children are protected, that motherhood remains the sacred institution that it has been since the nineteenth century. The comments on Hampson’s article echo all this: most of them recommend interventions by service agencies, accuse Bydlowska of mental illness and make other kinds of ethical pronouncements.

It is in the nature of memoir in our time to be confessional, particularly when it is written by people who are not public figures. In the United Kingdom, there is a whole genre dedicated to this kind of writing, called “Misery Memoirs.” If the authors are not celebrities or artists or politicians or saints, what we want to see is what Frank McCourt gave us in Angela’s Ashes, an elegant confession of someone’s suffering and inner life. This is what makes people read about the lives of others. We see what they see. Perhaps we even feel what they feel. But when someone like Bydlowska steps over an ethical line and gives us too much suffering or too much confession without enough redemption to make readers feel alright again, then the desire to see someone confess becomes revulsion. That revulsion is an expression of guilt or shame at having been a witness to that confession, and not having been given a sentimental or even an easy way out of its dark message. The result for Hampson was a confession of her own as her feelings spilled over and overwhelmed the interview itself.

Julie Rak is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. In addition to Boom! she is the author of Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (2004), the editor of Auto/biography in Canada (WLU Press, 2005), and co-editor, with Anna Poletti, of Identity Technologies: Producing Online Selves (forthcoming).

Tweet This Post

Tweet This Post

Holocaust Remembrance Day is being celebrated today around the world. In Halifax this evening (April 8), WLU Press author Israel Unger will give the keynote speech and celebrate the publication of his new book, The Unwritten Diary of Israel Unger, a collaboration with Carolyn Gammon. For more events in the Atlantic region, see the press release and tour schedule.

The book is the latest in the Life Writing series from WLU Press, which “promotes autobiographical accounts, diaries, letters, and testimonials written and/or told by women and men whose political, literary, or philosophical purposes are central to their lives.”

We have been fortunate here to have worked with a number of survivors of the Holocaust and to hear their stories firsthand. Without exception these men and women have been deeply principled, humble about their accomplishments, and an honour to know.

Elisabeth Raab: Elisabeth M. Raab was born in Hungary in 1921. In 1944 she was deported with her mother, father and daughter to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. She alone survived and was liberated by the Americans in 1945. Her book And Peace Never Came paints a brief yet moving picture of her idyllic life before her internment and the shock and the horrors of Auschwitz, but it is in the images of life after her liberation, that Raab imparts her most poignant story — a story told in a clear, almost sparse, always honest style, a story of the brutal, and, at times, the beautiful facts of human nature.

Israel Unger: At the beginning of the Nazi period, 25,000 Jewish people lived in Tarnow, Poland. By the end of the Second World War, nine remained. Like Anne Frank, Israel Unger and his family hid for two years in an attic crawl space. Against all odds, they emerged alive. Now, after decades of silence, here is Unger’s “unwritten diary.”

Johanna Krause: Persecuted as a Jew, both under the Nazis and in postwar East Germany, Johanna Krause (1907–2001) courageously fought her way through life with searing humour and indomitable strength of character. Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted is her story.

Michael Englishman: 163256: A Memoir of Resistance is Michael Englishman’s astonishing story of courage, resourcefulness, and moral fibre as a Dutch Jew during World War II and its aftermath, from the Nazi occupation of Holland in 1940, through his incarceration in numerous death and labour camps, to his eventual liberation by Allied soldiers in 1945 and his emigration to Canada. Surviving by his wits, Englishman escaped death time and again, committing daring acts of bravery to do what he thought was right—helping other prisoners escape and actively participating in the underground resistance.

Imre Rochlitz: Accident of Fate is a first-hand account of persecution, rescue, and resistance in the Axis-occupied former Yugoslavia. At the age of thirteen, Imre Rochlitz fled to Yugoslavia from his childhood home in Vienna following the NaziAnschluss, leaving his family behind. In January 1942 the Ustashe (Croatian Fascists) arrested and interned him in the Jasenovac death camp, where he dug mass graves. On the verge of death, Rochlitz was released due to the extraordinary intervention of a Nazi general. He escaped to the Adriatic coast, where he and several thousand other Jewish refugees were protected by the army of Fascist Italy. After Italy’s surrender, he joined Tito’s Partisans, becoming an officer and army veterinarian, and rescued dozens of downed Allied airmen. In 1945, he fled Yugoslavia’s Communist regime and reached liberated southern Italy. In 1947, at the age of twenty-two, he emigrated to the United States.

Tweet This Post

For a historical look at the Olympic games, see Gerald Schaus and Stephen Wenn’s Onward to the Olympics, a collection that bridges the historical divide between the ancient and the modern, discussing the origins of the games and some of the troubles that have plagued the modern games, such as financing such a large event, and the participation (or the troubling lack of it) by women.

Marusya Bociurkiw addresses the topic of the Olympics from the perspective of affect theory, looking at how the games inform our national pride and general sense of “Canadian-ness,” albeit a nostalgic view of Canada and its “national domestic hearth, a national family, and walls to keep the warmth and family in and the cold and foreigners out” (Applegate 22). The trope of “believe” as proliferated by the theme song and multiple-times-daily advertising, turned the Vancouver games into site of faith. Not watching the games became unpatriotic. Bociurkiw says, “those of us who maintained our activist stance about the games found ourselves shunned by more than one Facebook friend or sports fan.” For more on this topic, be sure to check out Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism, and Affect, by Marusya Bociurkiw.

The contributors to Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada,  edited by J. Keri Cronin and Kirsty Robinson, present a history of radical artistic practice in Canada. Kirsten Forkert’s chapter considers a number of actions that have been organized against the Olympics in Beijing, Vancouver, and London. “Although actions against the Beijing Olympics tended to conglomerate around human rights issues and the presence of China in Tibet, Forkert notes that there is often an assumption that liberal democratic countries such as Canada and England are ‘innocent,’ and that the Olympics in these locations tend to be seen as celebrations of fun, pride, and the human spirit. Not so, argues Forkert, who participated in a series of actions designed to highlight theway that the building of Olympic venues can obliterate poor neighbourhoods, and, in the case of Vancouver, misappropriate Native customs for purposes of grand spectacle” (Cronin and Robertson 15).

And, finally, going into our backlist for Olympics commentary, Andrew Wernick details in “Canada, the Olympics, and the Ray-Ban Man” (from Slippery Pastimes, edited by Joan Nicks and Jeannette Sloniowski) how Curt Harnett’s role of spokesman for Ray-Ban during the Atlanta Olympics, portrayed the famous sunglasses not only as excellent, but transformed them into a “proud bit of Canada.”

Tweet This Post

There is no doubt that there is much work to be done, both internationally, as contributors to The Global Food Crisis (Clapp/Cohen) attest, and nationally, as shown in our social work texts, like Cruel But Not Unusual: Violence in Canadian Families (Alaggia/Vine) and Moving Toward Positive Systems of Child and Family Welfare (Cameron et al.). Also troubling are persistent cultural biases in media, as Cheryl Krasnick Warsh explores in her forthcoming collection Gender, Health, and Popular Culture.

But our books also explore the roles and celebrate the accomplishments of women in literature, the arts, politics, and other areas. On this day we celebrate the women who are the authors of these books and the women about whom they are written. Here is just a selection of our women’s studies titles:

The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers (Brenda Austin-Smith and George Melnyk, editors)

Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry (Di Brandt and Barbara Godard, editors)

Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures (Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O’Reilly, editors)

Minds of Our Own: Inventing Feminist Scholarship and Women’s Studies in Canada and Quebec (Wendy Robbins, Meg Luxton, Margrit Eichler, and Francine Descarries, editors)

Florence Nightingale on Women, Medicine, Midwifery, and Prostitution, CWFN Vol. 8 (Lynn McDonald, editor)

The Feminine Gaze: A Compendium of Non-Fiction Women Authors and Their Books, 1836–1945 (Anne Innis Dagg)

Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918 (Carole Gerson)

Beyond Bylines: Media Workers and Women’s Rights in Canada (Barbara M. Freeman)

Tweet This Post

“Even in Canada, a free country by world standards, books and magazines are banned at the border. Books are removed from the shelves in Canadian libraries, schools and bookstores every day. Free speech on the Internet is under attack. Few of these stories make headlines, but they affect the right of Canadians to decide for themselves what they choose to read.”

Being a Canadian university press means that we ship books into the US frequently. On one occasion our books were stopped and held at the Canada–US border, for no disclosed reason, enroute to a conference. They never did make it, and my colleague was forced to stand behind an empty table for a few days. On another occasion a mainstream American religious magazine refused to run an ad for one of our books. The fear of freedom of thought is rampant in many parts of the world, and those of us who enjoy that freedom need to cherish it and fight to retain it.

Books and magazines that have been challenged in Canada have invoked ire for a number of reasons, including depictions of sexuality, magic, the inclusion of racial epithets or racist views, the denunciation of religion, or an alternate recounting of disputed history or political situation.  Many of these challenges involve what we teach to our children, but increasingly there have been attempts to control the message in post-secondary education as well. Rather than through the banning of books, this has happened through the barring of speakers because of protest by a group with a conflicting interest.

Most recently US scholar Dr Norman Finkelstein was forced to move his lecture on Israel–Palestine relations off campus when Mohawk College imposed an extra security charge in response to protests from Jewish groups. An article in the Exchange reports that this approach has been common at universities lately that have used the excuse of increased security to deny speakers an on-campus venue. The group sponsoring the event, the CJPME, is “considering legal action to recoup losses and inconvenience related to Mohawk College’s breach of contract.”

In January 2009 respected scholar Bill Ayers was denied entry into Canada because of an arrest and conviction in 1969 related to an anti-Vietnam-War protest. He was scheduled to lecture at University of Toronto’s OISE on teacher activism, and faculty at that organization decried the Canadian government for not allowing him to enter and for preventing the  performance of  “one of the core duties of university life: freely exchanging ideas in a public forum.” Calling it an “attack on intellectual exchange and academic freedom,” the letter goes on to say, “A university has an intellectual obligation to provide fora that encourage honest debate of diverse opinions; the same must be said of a true and vibrant democracy.”

These are just two of the many instances where talks (from all points on the political spectrum) have been cancelled, ostensibly due to security concerns but many times related to pressure from one powerful group or another. We must find a way to combine the right to peaceful protest (to avoid the necessity of prohibitive extra security costs) with the right and responsibility of the university community to provide a free and public exchange of ideas.

Tweet This Post

In 1989 Canada signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In two books Katherine Covell and R. Brian Howe discuss how Canada has (or, more accurately, has not) kept their commitments to our nation’s children, reminding us that the obligation does not end with the signing but continues through ratification and implementation of recommendations into policy and practice.

Tweet This Post

“By remembering their service and their sacrifice, we recognize the tradition of freedom these men and women fought to preserve. They believed that their actions in the present would make a significant difference for the future, but it is up to us to ensure that their dream of peace is realized. On Remembrance Day, we acknowledge the courage and sacrifice of those who served their country and acknowledge our responsibility to work for the peace they fought hard to achieve.”

One way that many people like to pay tribute to the soldiers is by visiting the battlefields.  WLU Press distributes a number of battlefield guides published by the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies. Written by military historians and supplemented with full colour maps and photos, these guides focus on battles in Normandy, Italy, Northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.

Other titles in military history and engagement include Germany’s Western Front,  Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment, Afghanistan: Transition under Threat, A Nation at War, 1939-1945, and A Duffle Bag, Close Friends, and Lots of Memories.

Tweet This Post

Breastfeeding these days is associated with being a good mother. We have all this scientific evidence of all the benefits of breastfeeding and, on the other side, all the risks of formula feeding. So when, I think, women choose not to breastfeed … there’s a real sense of failure of not being able to live up to this ideal.

In a separate article, French feminist Élisabeth Badinter urges, “Stop pushing this model of a perfect mother.” According to the Globe,

her latest book, which questions today’s notion of motherhood. Le Conflit: la femme et la mère (Conflict: The Woman and the Mother) attacks the rise of an ecology movement that dictates a woman must breastfeed and spurn disposable diapers in order to be a good mother. Ms. Badinter fears this quest for perfection is transforming the baby into the “best ally of masculine domination.”

Also in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Margaret Somerville, founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, debates the ethics of reproductive technology, wondering,

What do we, as a society, owe to the resulting children, especially when we are complicit in their coming into being, by approving and funding the technologies used to create them? They are the people most profoundly and directly affected. They will live their lives as “donor-conceived adults,” “genetic orphans,” as many of them call themselves.

Contributors to the Laurier Press book Taking Responsibility for Children, edited by Samantha Brennan and Robert Noggle, grapple with these types of questions, especially in chapter 8, written by Laura M. Purdy, “Could There Be a Right Not to Be Born an Octuplet?” Other chapters debate the rights of children regarding parental smoking, political liberalism and education, and more.

And, finally, the Literary Review of Canada once again takes up the issue of multiculturalism in Canada in its review of Multicultiphobia by Phil Ryan. Our book Uneasy Partners: Multiculturalism and Rights in Canada was inspired by an essay by Janice Gross Stein in the LRC and developed when we invited other contributors to respond to her conclusions. The result is a conversation between leading names on this topic in Canada and includes essays by John Ibbitson, Will Kymlicka, David Robertson Cameron, Haroon Siddiqui, John Meisel, and Michael Valpy as well as Stein’s essay. With an introduction by The Honourable Frank Iacobucci, this book has become a staple in university classrooms.

Tweet This Post

The conference will address two broad themes. First, the impact of the current global economic crisis on the ability of various governance systems to manage globalization and policy priorities will be examined. Speakers will discuss the effects of the crisis on global finance, trade and investment, food security and poverty, and environmental challenges. Secondly, participants will debate the shifting role of the state in economic governance, the role of policy coordination and the long-term impact of short-term policy reactions to the crisis.

Launching at the conference is the newest co-publication from WLU Press and CIGI. The Global Food Crisis: Governance Challenges and Opportunities captures the debate about how to go forward and examines the implications of the crisis for food security in the world’s poorest countries, both for the global environment and for the global rules and institutions that govern food and agriculture.

“This fine collection of essays puts the food crisis into the ecological, social, political, global, and institutional context that the debate so urgently needs.” – Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System

Tweet This Post