Connected Understanding: Stories, Lives and Texts

The Association for Bibliotherapy and Applied Literature, Annual Conferences, 2010,

in conjunction with the Congress for Humanities and Social Sciences (http://congress2010.ca)

Sunday May 30-Tuesday June 1, 2010

Sunday, May 30th

10-11:30 (H1 154)
 Helen Hoy:  Reading Clinically and Critically: Sherman Alexie's Porcupines and China Dolls  from a Fetal-Alcohol Perspective

    with responses by Deanna Reder and Tara Hyland-Russell

                                     

1:30-2:45 (CL235)

Author Meets Critics: A Joint Session between Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literatures and Language Studies (CACLALS) and Association of Bibliotherapy and Applied Literature (ABAL)

    Taking Back our Spirits:  Indigenous Literature, Public Policy and Healing by Jo-Ann Episkenew

    with responses by Kristina Fagan, Daniel Heath Justice, and Allison Hargreaves

                                   

Monday, May 31st

 

8:30-9:30 H1154    Informal gathering, Coffee, Registration

 

9:30-11:00 H1120    Indigenous Literature: Reading(s) for Implication, Panel Chair: Michelle Coupal

Fiona Lemon, "Becoming an Implicated Reader: a Settler’s Perspective on Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road"

Dolores van der Wey, "Constructing a Shared Truth about a Colonial past: Knowledge Mobilization, Coalition Building, Aboriginal Literature and Pedagogy"

Karis Shearer, "Staging Language and Oppression in Francophone Quebec: Tomson Highway's Une Truite Pour Ernestine Shuswap at Théâtre Espace Go

 

1:00-2:00  (H1120)    Tall Tree Theatre Workshop, Panel Facilitator: Jo-Ann Episkenew

This unique theatre company combines oral history with contemporary theatre techniques to share stories from an Aboriginal perspective

 

2:00-2:30 (H1154)    Break: Refreshments

 

2:30-4:30 (H1120)    Community Connections, Panel Chair: Dolores van der Wey

Sennait Yohannes, "Health Promotion Perspectives: How to Separate Health From Lifestyle"

Linda Goulet, Warren Linds, Jo-Ann Episkenew, "De-Colonizing Workshops: Joint Action Through Forum Theatre to Overcome Oppression"

 

Tuesday June 1

 

8:30-9:30 (H1154)    Informal gathering, refreshments, networking

 

9:30-11:00 (H1120)    Connected Understanding: Stories, Lives and Texts, Panel Facilitator: Tara Hyland-Russell

Melissa Morelli LaCroix and Henriette Morelli, "Remembering Blanche: Intergenerational Narrative Therapy and Alzheimer’s Disease"

 

1:00-2:30 (H1120)    Constructing Memory and Narrative, Panel Chair: Deanna Reder

Michelle Coupal, "Storied Lives: Trauma and Narrative Veracity"

Nathan Dueck, "The Irony of Empathy in David Foster Wallace's 'The Depressed Person'"

Jennifer Andrews, "Transformation and Spirituality: Reading Humour and Irony in Louise Halfe’s The Crooked Good"

 

2:30-2:45 (H1154)    Refreshments

 

2:45-3:45 (H1120)    Hoi Cheu, Transformation as the Literary Universal: A Workshop, Facilitator: Allison Hargreaves

                                   

4:00-5:00 (H1120)    AGM

 

6:00    Dinner: L'Academie Crescent, 2100 Crescent St., Montreal 514-664-4455 The reservation is under ABAL

 

Jennifer Andrews (University of New Brunswick)

Transformation and Spirituality:

Reading Humour & Irony in Louise Halfe’s The Crooked Good

 

            Louise Halfe uses poetry to articulate a concept of religious transformation that relies upon readers to negotiate and make sense of her evolving relationship with her Roman Catholic education and Cree roots. Educated from the age of seven at residential school, her three poetry collections focus on reclaiming female voices, specifically the Cree female voices of her ancestors whose experiences have been lost or forgotten. By attending to the bones of her foremothers, Halfe ironically seizes upon the Roman Catholic Church’s historical reverence for the relics of saints to create her own homage to these women who were marginalized because of their race and spiritual beliefs. In particular, Halfe’s latest collection of poems, The Crooked Good, extend and complicate the concept notion of religious transformation by producing a series of texts that rework “The Sacred Story of the Rolling Head,” part of an epic Cree account of Creation that Halfe first heard as a child (Halfe 2006, 66).

            In an interview about the story of the Rolling Head, Halfe asserts that “[w]e are the dreamers of this rolling head. We continue on” (Andrews 2004a, 4). Halfe overtly acknowledges the ironic and humorous dimensions of this self-positioning by describing her own engagement with the Rolling Head narrative and providing a model of reading for others who encounter her texts. She explains that “[m]y efforts to unravel the story’s philosophy, its psychology and spirituality in my language did not lead me any closer to definitive truths. If anything, I am left with more questions….I will be scratching ‘my head’ for a long, long time” (2006, 73). This willingness to explore her own vulnerability as a creator and listener, and her realization that change and persistence are valuable but may not bring easy answers, embodies the need the tell the stories of women who have been silenced or relegated to the status of a fallen woman, like the Rolling Head, in new ways. In particular, in The Crooked Good, Halfe employs a narrator called “Turn-Around Woman,” based on the Cree term “kwêskî,” which is to “turn around or change; change your ways.” And it is through her voice that Halfe explores the legacy of the Rolling Head, offering an(O)ther account of a Cree woman’s cross-cultural exploration of her religious, sexual, and cultural identity. With The Crooked Good, Halfe employs the concept of spiritual transformation to literally rewrite the Biblical story of Creation through a figure that has affinities with Eve but is willing and able to perceive her crooked goodness as a source of creative empowerment. The careful juxtaposition of texts and images, in combination with code-switching, enable Halfe to undercut the presumed dominance and righteousness of Catholicism, as imposed through residential schooling, with a series of alterna(rra)tives that return the reader to a female-centered vision of the world that is grounded in traditional Cree beliefs and practices. Through this latest collection, Halfe asserts the sacred power of the Rolling Head and Turn-Around Woman, dreamers who are decidedly Cree and unwilling to be subsumed in any way, shape, or form by Christianity or the English language; that strategy has important implications for what transformation might mean for Native and non-Native readers alike.

 

 

 

 

Hoi Cheu (Laurentian University)

Transformation as the Literary Universal: a Workshop

 

            Ever since the introduction of post-structuralism and anti-humanism in literary theory, the attempts to characterize literary universals have been considered as a conservative act informed by reactive ideologies.  The critique of humanist universality is correct in the sense that “universals” in classical thinking often come with the baggage of certain indoctrinations and interpretative values that are repressive to the ex-centric others.  At the same time, however, the need to cope with cultural conflicts, neo-colonialism, and global environmental crises require some common grounds for human understanding and empathy in which the issue of the literary universal constantly returns to haunt the critics: what is “universal” in literature that will provide the possibilities of human connection?

            I would like to present a 50 minute workshop to invite rethinking of the literary universals and human emotion.  The workshop will include a 15 minute paper to introduce to the issue of literary universals.  I will translate a very short Zen Buddhist story from the 13th Century China for the audience to write a response, and then we will analyze our responses to explore what allows a translated story from a distant culture to navigate changes and exchanges.

 

 

Michelle Coupal  (University of Western Ontario)

"Storied Lives: Trauma and Narrative Veracity”

 

            Memory believes before knowing remembers. –William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)

 

            The connection between stories and our lives pivots, in part, on the reconstructive nature of memory and identity. As James Olney says in Memory and Narrative, “. . . memory spreads out the text of our lives for us to read again and again, but I would recall and reemphasize the etymological origin of text in texere, ‘to weave,’ for the text is never fixed or single: it is ever rewoven, constantly renewed or reconstructed, constantly evolving, a story and a work in progress” (344). Moreover, Paul John Eakin asserts, in How Our Lives Become Stories, that “[w]hen it comes to autobiography, narrative and identity are so intimately linked that each constantly and properly gravitates into the conceptual field of the other” (original emphasis, 100). Neither subjectivities nor memories are fixed, yet, for life-writers who make traumatic childhoods the subject of their reconstructive narratives, questions about the truth status of their testimonies often arise as acts of remembering and storying collide. Susanna Egan, for example, questions the distinction between narrative and reality in Rudy Wiebe’s collaboration with Yvonne Johnson in Stolen Life, arguing that Wiebe’s novelistic and protective intervention into Johnson’s story elides the “discrepancy between messy experience and deliberate narrative experience” (24). Another case in point is Nicola King’s scrutiny of Sylvia Fraser’s incest memoir, My Father’s House. Despite the fact that Fraser acknowledges in her “Author’s Note” that she employs “many of the techniques of the novelist,” King maintains that “the ‘truth’ about the preserved and rediscovered past only emerges as an effect of narrative itself” and that the narrative that Fraser “has produced is so highly and tightly constructed, and the recovery and representation of memory so apparently complete, that doubts arise about the truth status of the events she reconstructs and the appropriateness of . . . novelistic techniques for this material” (62). While it is legitimate to question the veracity of any document claiming to be non-fiction, this paper argues that it may not be possible to articulate traumatic events, particularly childhood traumas, without recourse to narrative structures. Focusing primarily on the work of Sylvia Fraser, I make the case that the nature of traumatic memory precludes any attempt at a straightforward retrieval of childhood events. Memoirs such as Fraser’s are more productively seen as acts of memory rather than acts of fact. In the end, what matters is not the “truth” of the story, but the “truth” of the story for Fraser, and the profoundly healing strategy of narrating that “truth.”

 

Nathan Dueck (University of Calgary)

The Irony of Empathy in David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person”

 

            “The Depressed Person,” a short story by David Foster Wallace, depicts a paradox of depression therapy. Although the eponymous person feels compelled to “write” about her “terrible and unceasing emotional pain,” such communication only aggravates the “essential horror” of her depression (Wallace 37).  Putting her experiences with depression into words makes her increasingly self-conscious. The reason the depressed person prefers to remain anonymous is that she is primarily concerned about what others think of her. The persuasive rhetoric of the writing seems to indicate that Wallace shared his character’s suspicion of the “talking cure.” 

            Although the editor of Harper’s Magazine titled the article a “story,” it could qualify as the type of essay the magazine printed up to the Great Depression. With “The Depressed Person,” Wallace follows the American belletristic tradition to write about a state of mind where, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s words, “the Actual and Imaginary may meet” (107). The paper proposed here will consider Wallace’s mental landscape in several ways: first, Wallace explores the topic of depression with a short story; second, he expresses his own experiences with therapy through an “imaginary” character’s therapy; and third, he expands on the possibility of understanding the pain of depression through empathy. The insidious irony of empathy in “The Depressed Person” is the anonymous woman’s overwhelming fear of appearing “pathetic” (Wallace 45, 49, 58, 68), which only compounds her suffering. Her problem, then, is partially due to “a solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum” (Wallace 99). By the end of the essay, the depressed person finds a brief moment of relief from her pain when she listens to a friend’s experiences with cancer. In this way, Wallace points his readers – and, perhaps, himself – to understand empathy by considering how others suffer as well. Drawing upon Dominick LaCapra’s notion of “empathic unsettlement” (History 136), this paper will attempt to illuminate how Wallace articulates that empathy is the way out of depression.


 

Linda Goulet (First Nations University of Canada), Warren Linds (Concordia University), Jo-Ann Episkenew (University of Regina), Karen Arnason (File Hills Qu’Appelle Tribal Council)

De-Colonizing Workshops: Joint Action Through Forum Theatre to Overcome Oppression

 

            The subject of our presentation is the research project that the File Hills Qu’Appelle Tribal Council (FHQTC), the First Nations University of Canada, and Concordia University have undertaken with Indigenous youth in the FHQ area. In our research, we use the “Forum Theatre” (Boal 1979, Diamond 2007) workshop approach to help Indigenous youth in the FHQTC area critically examine the choices they make that affect their individual health and the health of their communities. 

            The youths’ dramatic creations have shown that they are embedded in community and family systems that are profoundly affected by historical colonization and ongoing oppression with resultant lack of volition and agency in decision-making. The youth reported that participation in the theatre workshops developed their self-confidence and their ability to exercise agency.  

            As facilitators, we need to be flexible in the applications of theatre processes to move beyond an individualist approach with youth to one that focuses on joint action that builds on the strengths (Wilson 2008) youth identify. When portraying the strengths of their communities, the youth create images of tightly interconnected relationships.

            This coming year, we plan to conduct a workshop with Indigenous youth using Image theatre and modified constellation work based on The Rainbow of Desire (Boal 1995) to explore how they can create joint action to deal with oppression. Our paper will analyse the results of this workshop beginning with a re-creation of an image of the systemic oppression faced by Indigenous youth. The presentation will then describe the theatre techniques and responses of the youth followed by a critique of our practice to raise questions regarding the function of theatre as a therapeutic form of applied literature by supporting decolonization efforts with marginalized youth. 

 

Melissa Morelli Lacroix, Henriette Morelli (University of Saskatchewan)

Remembering Blanche: Intergenerational Narrative Therapy and Alzheimer’s Disease

        

    Blanche Letendre was an esteemed Saskatchewan high school teacher of French and English composition and literature.   She loved words and language, talking, reading, finding the “mot just” in crossword puzzles and conversations. 

    Blanche was also a parent, and as a mother, she introduced her children to books and stories.  In one of her children, Dr. Henriette Morelli, Blanche saw a gift for elocution and an interest in literature.  She spent evenings teaching the young girl poetry and the art of public speaking. 

    Blanche was a grandmother too.  Her descendants became actors and artists, engineers, teachers and professors.  One of them, Melissa Morelli Lacroix (M.A.), became a writer who often draws upon the everyday stories of Blanche’s life in order to create new narratives. 

    Teacher, parent, grandparent: these are but three of the many words that describe Blanche Letendre.  Victim of Alzheimer’s Disease is another.  Together, her daughter and granddaughter provide a forty-minute connected narrative of Blanche’s life and illness.  In “My Mother's Hands: Alzheimer's Disease, Bibliotherapy, and Care-giving,” Morelli explores the efficacy of environmental enrichment, (a program recommended by Dr. Jack Diamond, the science director of the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada) and shares how reading with and to Blanche enabled the women to maintain a deep and abiding connection even in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease.  In “Once Upon My Grandmother: The Transformative Power of Story,” Lacroix examines how the production of fiction and poetry inspired by Blanche’s life and illness was therapeutic for herself and others.  “Remembering Blanche” will conclude with a twenty-minute discussion between mother, daughter and conference participants in order to connect lives and stories even further and to implicate the audience.

 

Fiona Lemon (Simon Fraser University)

Becoming an Implicated Reader: a Settler’s Perspective on Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road

 

    Sumara (2002) argues that the relationship between the reader, text and context is a site for knowledge production and that stories are an important and unique way to explore the human condition.   In this presentation, I take up Sumara’s notion of the text as performative by reading Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road (2006) as a “commonplace book” (Sumara, 2002, p. 101): a way to continuously re-think and re-present the understandings that emerge from one central text as it intersects with other texts, discussions and experiences.

    My engagement with Three Day Road emerged from a course titled “Writing from the Margins: Pedagogical Possibilities of Indigenous and Other Peoples’ Literature”, which sought to create a space for Indigenous and settler graduate students to explore the possibilities and constraints of becoming implicated readers of Indigenous narratives.  This presentation links my literary analysis to how the course interrogated my implication as a White settler reader and engaged participants in coalition politics (van der Wey, 2007).  In particular, I recontextualize my use of Sumara’s approach in light of the ethical, personal and political consequences of Episkenew’s (2009) work on the socio-pedagogical potential of Indigenous narratives to challenge oppression, and Dion’s (2007) discussion of the process of learning through disrupting accepted narratives of history and identity. 

    I also look beyond my own experience to other critical intersections which reveal the multiple discourses in Indigenous literature, orature and theory (LaRoque, 2002; Maracle, 2009; van Toorn 2004) and which problematize notions of constructing and consuming “otherness” (hooks, 1992).

 

 

Tall Tree Theatre Workshop (Edmonton, Alberta)

    A highly unique theatre company combining traditional oral history with contemporary theatre techniques. Tall Tree Theatre is committed to sharing stories from an Aboriginal experience and perspective, stories that you will not find in mainstream textbooks- for hundreds of years Aboriginal peoples have had their stories told for them in print and image, thanks to the likes of Buffalo Bill Cody and John Wayne. It was made illegal in 1895 with an amendment to the Indian Act for an event/gathering such as this to take place.... with a penalty of 6 months in jail- no less than 2 and/or a $25 fine, for an Indian to dress in his regalia, to dance, to sing, to drum.... Today society tolerates 'Aboriginal Culture'- it is granted that Indians can dress in their regalia, they can drum and even dance- but when it comes to First Nations exerting decisions as a sovereign nation for the betterment of our people - we are denied - as the language of the colonialists lives on....

 "The Great Mother wishes that good of all races under her sway. She wishes her Red Children, as well as her White people, to be happy and contended. She wishes them to live in comfort...."   excerpt from negotiations of Treaty 1

 

Dolores van der Wey (Simon Fraser University)

Constructing a Shared Truth about a Colonial past: Knowledge Mobilization, Coalition Building, Aboriginal Literature and Pedagogy

 

    A host of issues related to responsibility can be overwhelming when we consider knowledge mobilization involving Indigenous perspectives and epistemologies.  Having taught courses in Indigenous education that include Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students I am aware of the tensions and divisiveness that will inevitably erupt or percolate not too far below the surface in such contexts, tensions that in part may be attributable to issues of identity and differing epistemologies and ontologies among group members (van der Wey, 2007).

 

    While recognizing the challenge of coming to terms with one’s own biases and assumptions of others, and at once addressing within group conflict, I argue the imperative of learning to navigate these spaces of difference within intergroup contexts simultaneously, if a goal is receptivity to alternate conceptions of knowledge mobilization.  When literary genres by Indigenous writers, for example, are used as performative texts, interpretive possibilities open up when these works are read through the lens of relevant theoretical and philosophical texts and group discourses ( Sumara 2002).  What are the risks, considerations and possibilities in daring

to invoke Indigenous narratives in the light of Episkenew’s assertion that such texts serve a “socio-pedagogical function” (2009, 17) in that their objective is to change society by educating the settler readers about Indigenous perspectives of society?   What pedagogical approaches may be utilized to support students in living with and moving through the tensions created by literature and scholarship that reflects a reversal of the normative center/periphery pervasive in Western literature), while at once announcing that Indigenous students are rarely positioned as such?  These questions will be addressed in this paper as will the implications for doing so that extend well beyond the context of the classroom.

 

 

Sennait Yohannes  (McGill University)

“Health Promotion Perspectives: How to Separate Health From Lifestyle”

 

            Canadian Inuit are undergoing extensive change including a movement away from traditional foods. Arctic traditional foods are rich in micronutrients and were initially noted for their protective effects against heart disease and diabetes. However, as the traditional lifestyle begins to include more market foods, epidemiological trends of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are emerging.

            A community member in a Baffin Island community who was concerned about this trend contacted researchers from McGill University. Collaborations began and a health promotion project was envisioned where Elder stories about traditional foods would be used to promote health in the community.

            In accordance with traditional health promotion theory, sharing the stories would increase knowledge about traditional foods and their health benefits and therefore influence attitudes and, eventually, practices. The specific strategy for the project was to tease out three health themes from the interviews to promote to the community.

            Local elders were interviewed in Inuktitut and after the interviews were transcribed and translated it became clear that the western model of health promotion was not compatible with the stories the elders told. The western notion of health, which in contrast to the stories, involves many disconnected themes that comprise ‘health’. This differed from the wholistic perspective of health that the elders were discussing, where ‘health’ cannot necessarily be assigned themes or be separated from a way of life.

            Is there an intersect between western academic perspectives and traditional ways of learning, knowing and living? Further, how does traditional health promotion have to change to accommodate cultural differences in perspectives of health?