Women Writers' Archive

Women Writers' Archives - Expanding Systems of Enunciability

Linda Morra — 2022-12-05

This inaugural issue of the journal, The Women Writers’ Archive, grew out of and was the culmination of a graduate course offered through the English Department at Simon Fraser University on the territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. The course, titled Books, Bodies, and Borders: Women Writers’ (Trans)national Archives & Practices, took place in the winter of 2022 and featured four female authors as the focus of study: Pauline Johnson (Kanyen'kehà:ka, 1913-1861), Emily Carr (1871-1945), Jane Rule (1931-2007), and Sheila Watson (1909-1998). Collectively, these essays show the fascinating elements to women’s publications—the impediments to finding publication, the crucial interactions that informed their publications, the socio-political contexts that shaped what they produced and why they did so. They demonstrate how meaningfully archives shape our understanding of women writers—their lives, their contexts, and their contributions to the field of literature in Canada.

The Production and History of Daisy Turner’s Moose Factory Cree

Robin Mitchell Cranfield — 2022-12-05

^{In 1974 Daisy Turner released the first edition of her book Moose Factory Cree, an ililîmowin (Moose Cree) syllabic primer illustrated by children from Moose Factory Elementary school. Almost fifty years later, Moose Factory Cree remains in print. This essay will detail the significance of Turner’s contribution to children’s literature published in Canada and consider her contributions to Cree language, Indigenous print cultures, and Moose Factory history through her work translating and recording her community’s histories. As part of this project, I will consider Moose Factory Cree’s relationship to (i) the efflorescence of Indigenous writing released by Canadian publishers in the 1970s, (ii) the emergence of new reproductive technologies that accommodated syllabic type and lettering, and (iii) the emergence of Indigenous language programs in Canadian elementary schools.}

Writing Selfhood

Olivia Visser — 2022-12-05

As one of Canada's most recognized painters, Emily Carr has elicited widespread recognition in relation to Canadian national identity. Her writing and artwork reflect modernist conceptions of Romantic wilderness spaces, which was foundational to her status as an artist. Carr's autobiography Growing Pains depicts her efforts to acheive artistic recognition by establishing a narrative centered around Western Canadian landscapes, where she recognizes painter and Group of Seven member, Lawren Harris, as integral to her artistic development. Harris' letters to Carr, as included in her autobiography, affirm his aesthetic contributions to her artwork. However, Carr's decisions to use excerpts of his letters suggest her paradoxical stance in relation to asserting her identity as an artist.

Karl Marx, Lucretius, and the Other Residents of Lisa Robertson’s Archives

Donald Shipton — 2022-12-05

This paper analyzes the connections between rectos and versos within Lisa Robertson's Fonds at Simon Fraser University. Specifically, it focuses on an early manuscript of the 2010 poetry collection, R's Boat, and the paper it is printed upon. Rather than being printed on its own fresh leaves, it is printed on Karl Marx's dissertation on atomism. Since many of the figures named in this esoteric text also surface in Robertson's collection, these papers enable an intertextual form of reading and a method for reconsidering how the archive serves as a site of reinscription. Following Ann Laura Stoler's method of reading "against the grain," this paper makes legible the sociality of archival materials, and the texts which permeate R's Boat.