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How does the imagination entwine the shreds of memory of family, place and culture to root a self in the fluid experience of the present?
Daughter, wife, mother, teacher, writer and feminist academic, Helen M. Buss / Margaret Clarke has lived in many parts of Canada and writes from a life of multiple perspectives full of contradictory loyalties and obligations, of opposing histories and identities. For this woman, whose sense of a unified identity is so tenuous that she even writes under two names, writing memoirs becomes the way to bring together the diverse strands of her life.
A Newfoundland girl who awakened to the public world just at the moment her homeland joined Canada, she writes of her childhood, of the effects of war, technology, the politics of nation and gender, and of the private world of several generations of her close-knit family. From the perspective of a woman from “away”, she discovers a New Found Land of “girlhood” that weaves past and present in a narrative that delights in questioning its own making.
Helen M. Buss is a professor of English at the University of Calgary. Her book on Canadian women's life writing, Mapping Our Selves, won the Gabrielle Roy Prize. As Margaret Clarke, she has published novels, short stories and poetry. Three of her most recent books published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press are Memoirs from Away: A New Found Land Girlhood, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives, edited with D.L. Macdonald and Anne McWhir, and Working in Women’s Archives edited with Marlene Kadar.
Table of Contents for Memoirs from Away: A New Found Land Girlhood by Helen M. Buss and Margaret Clarke
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
People Live Here: Imagine That
War: Mother’s Child
Peace: Daddy’s Girl
Avalon: Knowing My Place
School: Losing Mary Lou; Finding Sally
History and Politics: My Brother Dave, His Friend Sid and Louis St. Laurent
Postscript