Marlene Kadar has brought together an interdisciplinary and comparative collection of critical and theoretical essays by diverse Canadian scholars.

"A collection of essays by poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf focusing on aspects of Mennonite life. Essays examine issues of gender, cultural, and religious identity as they relate to the emergence and exercise of literary authority"--Provided by publisher.

In light of materialist revisions of the Cartesian dual self and the increased recognition of memoir and autobiography as a crucial cultural index, the physical body has emerged in the last twenty-five years as an increasingly inescapable object of inquiry, speculation, and theory that intersects all of the various subgenres of life writing. New Essays on Life Writing and the Body thus offers a timely, original, focused, and yet appropriately interdisciplinary study of life writing. This collection brings together new work by established authorities in autobiography, such as Timothy Dow Adams, G. Thomas Couser, Cynthia Huff, and others, along with essays by emerging scholars in the field. Subjects range from new interpretations of well-known autobiographies by Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Lucy Grealy, as well as scholarly surveys of more recently defined subgenres, such as the numerous New Woman autobiographies of the late 19th century, adoption narratives, and sibling memoirs of the mentally impaired. Due to their wide, interdisciplinary focus, these essay will prove valuable not only to more traditional literary scholars interested in the classic literary autobiography but also to those in Women’s Studies, Ethnic and African-American Studies, as well as in emerging fields such as Disability Studies and Cognitive Studies.

“Jenny is the future of nonfiction in America. What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch.” —John D’Agata “Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without ‘complete and unified action with a beginning, middle, and end.’ Jenny Boully has done it.” —Mary Jo Bang “Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer—in the best way.” —Ander Monson Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience. Betwixt and Between is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live. Jenny Boully is the author of The Body: An Essay, The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Essays, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, and other books. Born in Thailand, she grew up in Texas and holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She teaches creative writing and literature at Columbia College Chicago.

Life writing, in its various forms, does work that other forms of expression do not; it bears on the world in a way distinct from imaginative genres like fiction, drama, and poetry; it acts in and on history in significant ways. Memoirs of illness and disability often seek to depathologize the conditions that they recount. Memoirs of parents by their children extend or alter relations forged initially face to face in the home. At a time when memoir and other forms of life writing are being produced and consumed in unprecedented numbers, this book reminds readers that memoir is not mainly a "literary" genre or mere entertainment. Similarly, letters are not merely epiphenomena of our "real lives." Correspondence does not just serve to communicate; it enacts and sustains human relationships. Memoir matters, and there’s life in letters. All life writing arises of our daily lives and has distinctive impacts on them and the culture in which we live.

“Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably. . . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.” In these twelve deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up black in the south with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a white man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily white New England college town. Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it. "Black Is the Body is one of the most beautiful, elegant memoirs I've ever read. It's about race, it's about womanhood, it's about friendship, it's about a life of the mind, and also a life of the body. But more than anything, it's about love. I can't praise Emily Bernard enough for what she has created in these pages." --Elizabeth Gilbert WINNER OF THE CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PROSE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND KIRKUS REVIEWS ONE OF MAUREEN CORRIGAN'S 10 UNPUTDOWNABLE READS OF THE YEAR

"The body knows a language the mind never wholly masters." In this remarkable debut collectionessentially a memoir in essay formBrenda Miller creates an autobiography that locates her body as its central reference point. Single and unable to bear children of her own, Miller details a life in relationship to the extended human family, a journey that traverses realms physical, emotional, and spiritual. From her training in massage and reflexology, to her volunteer work in a hospitals infant ward, Miller remains a constant seeker and humble teacher. Raised in a suburban Jewish household in the sixties, Miller grows up to find herself sitting in meditation for hours at a time, both bemused and intrigued by Buddhist precepts. Or she engages in her own ironic brand of mindfulness while caring for two little girls or attending the birth of her godson. She brings us to Portugal, Syria, Israel, and the deserts of southern Utah, but these are no mere travelogues: they become, instead, maps by which to navigate the intricate maze of our lives. These personal essays vary from the lyric to the narrative to the humorous, but always we warm to Millers authentic voice as she explores personal joys and heartbreaks within a larger domain. Organically shaped, never forced, these award-winning essays arrive with the pleasant snap of physical detail and leave with unforgettable insights on birth, prayer, and human resilience. Nurturing, yet uncommonly honest, Season of the Body articulates the unspoken losses, the desires held deep in the mute chambers of the heart.

Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing “Grace Talusan writes eloquently about the most unsayable things: the deep gravitational pull of family, the complexity of navigating identity as an immigrant, and the ways we move forward even as we carry our traumas with us. Equal parts compassion and confession, The Body Papers is a stunning work by a powerful new writer who—like the best memoirists—transcends the personal to speak on a universal level.” —Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that her family’s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were “illegal.” Family, she’s told, must be put first. The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remove her breasts and ovaries. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher. On a fellowship, Talusan and her husband return to the Philippines, where she revisits her family’s ancestral home and tries to reclaim a lost piece of herself. Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of this debut memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating such abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This is the first book-length exploration of the thoughts and experiences expressed by dementia patients in published narratives over the last thirty years. It contrasts third-person caregiver and first-person patient accounts from different languages and a range of media, focusing on the poetical and political questions these narratives raise: what images do narrators appropriate; what narrative plot do they adapt; and how do they draw on established strategies of life-writing. It also analyses how these accounts engage with the culturally dominant Alzheimer’s narrative that centres on dependence and vulnerability, and addresses how they relate to discourses of gender and aging. Linking literary scholarship to the medico-scientific understanding of dementia as a neurodegenerative condition, this book argues that, first, patients’ articulations must be made central to dementia discourse; and second, committed alleviation of caregiver burden through social support systems and altered healthcare policies requires significantly altered views about aging, dementia, and Alzheimer’s patients.

Memoirs about being sick are popular and everywhere and only ever contribute to pop narratives of illness as a single event or heroic struggle or journey. Visceral: Essays on Illness as Metaphor is not that. Visceral, to the extent that it is a memoir, is a record not of illness but of the research project being sick became. While rooted firmly in critical disability and queer practices, the use of personal narratives opens these approaches up to new ways of writing the body-ultimately a body that is at once theoretical and unavoidably physical. A body where everything is visceral, so theory must be too. From the gothic networks of healthcare bureaucracy and hospital philanthropy to the proliferation of wellness media, off-label usage of drugs, and running off to live a life with, these essays move fluidly through theoretical and physical anger, curiosity and surprise. Arguing for disability rights that attend to the theoretical as much as the physical, this is Illness Not As Metaphor, Being Sick and Time, and The Body in Actual Pain as one. A sick body of text that is-and is not-in direct correspondence to an actual sick body, Visceral is an unrelenting examination of chronic illness that turns towards the theoretical only to find itself in the realms of the biological and autobiographical: because how much theory can a body take?