Foreword
JOAN BARFOOT—Starch, Salt, Chocolate, Wine
LORNA CROZIER—What Stays in the Family
ISABEL HUGGAN—Notes on a Piece for Carol
ANNE HART—Lettuce Turnip and Pea
BONNIE BURNARD—Casseroles
SUSAN LIGHTSTONE—Hope for the Best (Expect the Worst)
MARNI JACKSON—Tuck Me In: Redefining Attachment Between Mothers and
Sons
JOAN CLARK—How Do I Look?
CLAUDIA CASPER—Victory
JANET E. BRADLEY—Middle-Aged Musings on Retirement
BETTY JANE WYLIE—The Imaginary Woman
ROSALIE BENOIT WEAVER—Life's Curves
JUNE CALLWOOD—Old Age
JAQUELINE McLEOD ROGERS—Grace After Pressure
MARGARET ATWOOD—If You Can't Say Something Nice, Don't Say Anything
At All
CHARLOTTE GRAY—Gilding the Dark Shades
LILY REDMOND—Mrs. Jones
ISLA JAMES—Edited Version
DEBORAH SCHNITZER—Just a Part
MIRIAM TOEWS—A Father's Faith
MARTHA BROOKS—One Woman's Experience with the Ecstatic
SHARON BUTALA—Seeing
MARGARET SHAW-MACKINNON—Birth, Death and the Eleusinian
Mysteries
ELEANOR WACHTEL—Speechless
HELEN FOGWILL PORTER—Juliet
RENATE SCHULZ—Hidden in the Hand
KATHERINE GOVIER—Wild Roses
CAROL HUSSA HARVEY and KATHERINE C.H. GARDINER—Reflections from
Cyberspace
SANDY FRANCES DUNCAN—I Have Blinds Now
KATHERINE MARTENS—The Joys of Belly Dancing
THE HONOURABLE SHARON CARSTAIRS—Politics: Is It a Woman's Game?
BLANCHE HOWARD—The Anger of Young Men
ANNE GIARDINI—Still Life with Power
NINA LEE COLWILL—The Worth of Women's Work
Afterword
MARJORIE ANDERSON is the seventh of eight children born to Ásdis
and Thorsteinn Anderson, Icelandic-Canadian fishers, farmers and
storytellers who farmed in the hamlet of Libau, on the edges of
Lake Winnipeg. She has a Ph.D. in English literature and taught
writing and literature at the English department of the University
of Manitoba before moving to the university’s I. H. Asper School of
Business, where she is now director of communication programs. Her
teaching specialties at the Asper School include interpersonal and
intercultural communication, oral presentation skills, mediation
and negotiation strategies, and conflict management. Through her
company, Wordwise Communication, she conducts seminars and training
sessions for professional and business organizations. She has been
awarded the Faculty of Management’s Achievement Award for
Excellence in Teaching and has been chosen to teach in a number of
international programs, the most recent one being an MBA program in
the Czech Republic in the spring of 2000. She and her husband,
Gary, live in Winnipeg and have four daughters and five — soon to
be seven — grandchildren. .
Anderson has had a lifelong interest in writing and storytelling
and has been involved in editing and teaching editing skills for
approximately twenty years; therefore, the task of editing Dropped
Threads was a comfortable one for her and the collaboration with
her friend Carol Shields was a great pleasure.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1935, CAROL SHIELDS moved to Canada
at the age of twenty-two, after studying at the University of
Exeter in England and the University of Ottawa. She started
publishing poetry in her thirties, and is now the author of over
twenty books, including plays, poetry, essays, short fiction,
novels, a work of criticism on Susanna Moodie, and a new short
biography of Jane Austen. Her work has been translated into
twenty-two languages.
The Stone Diaries (1993), her fictional biography of an ordinary
woman who drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow and
mother, bewildered even in old age by her inability to understand
her place in her own life, received overwhelmingly favourable
reviews. The book won a Governor General's Literary Award and a
Pulitzer Prize, and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize,
bringing the author an international following. Another novel,
Swann, was made into a film, and two more screenplays based on
Shields’s books are in production. Larry’s Party, published in
several countries and recently adapted into a musical stage play,
won England’s Orange Prize, given to the best book by a woman
writer in the English-speaking world. Shields says it was “a
wonderful prize to get.”
Shields’ s novels are shrewdly-observed portrayals of everyday
middle-class life. Reviewers have praised the author for exploring
such universal problems as loneliness and lost opportunities.
Shields, who has lived with illness for a number of years, speaks
thankfully of her own fulfilling life; a former professor of
English at the University of Manitoba and chancellor of the
University of Winnipeg, she now lives in Victoria with her husband,
a retired engineering professor, and is the mother of five grown
children. Thanks to the success of The Stone Diaries, she was able
to buy a summer home in France, nicknamed “Château Pulitzer”
because the many literary awards she has received have dramatically
increased sales of her work around the world.
Shields has spoken often of redeeming the lives of ordinary people
by recording them in her works, “especially that group of women who
came between the two great women's movements. … I think those
women's lives were often thought of as worthless because they only
kept house and played bridge. But I think they had value.”
In an eloquent afterword to Dropped Threads, Shields says her own
experience has taught her that life was not a mountain to be
climbed, but more like a novel with a series of chapters.
Carol Shields passed away in July 2003.
“There are exciting and truly intimate entries in this book…these
women take ideas even secret ones, and infuse them with poetry,
scoured and buffed sentences and …stopwatch comic timing…The true
depth of the collection is found in these women’s clear memories
and their willingness to share.” -- Quill & Quire
“It’s a collection of revealing essays and short stories by 35
Canadian women at mid-life and beyond, reflecting on the life
events that caught them off guard and, somehow, haven’t been talked
about…As it turns out, there are many dropped threads in our lives.
Weave them together and you’ve got a tapestry.” -- Bonnie Schiedel,
Chatelaine, April 2001
“Dropped Threads … is a collection of 34 pieces by Canadian women
in which they describe…everything they never said or were not able
to say before, but which had tremendous power in their
lives…[Senator Sharon Carstairs’s] essay about women in politics
[is] clear-eyed and devastating …Miriam Toews examines her father’s
lifelong battle with depression, which culminated in his suicide …
with gentleness and insight … These are all the conversations we
would wish to have with friends and these essays stimulate the
sense of exuberance and relief that one always feels after a long,
self-revelatory talk.” -- Virginia Beaton, Halifax
Chronicle-Herald, 25 Feb 2001
“Dropped Threads is a much-awaited anthology of essays and stories
by Canadian women, including celebrated writers as well as women
who are neither writers nor famous … The angst of the women in
Dropped Threads covers a wide spectrum.” -- Paul Gessell, Ottawa
Citizen, 20 Jan 2001
“if the value of books were measured by the insights stored within
their pages, Dropped Threads would be priceless…[This] is a
wonderfully well-written and excellently edited book that offers
such intimate insights that it sometimes seems like a stream of
consciousness. The compositions frequently make the reader feel
like an eavesdropper -- and an extremely entertained one at
that…The stories in Dropped Threads cathartically tie up loose ends
for their writers, while providing readers with an exquisitely
crafted patchwork quilt of life experiences.” -- Winnipeg Free
Press
On Lily Redmond’s Mrs. Jones, writing about abortion:
“One of the most powerful essays... . So many of us can talk with
ease about the theory – our unwavering support for a woman's right
to choose – but no woman ever wants to make that tragic choice or
even admit to having once made it.” -- Pamela
Wallin,@globebooks.com
On Joan Barfoot’s Starch, Salt, Wine, Chocolate:
“Barfoot is always interesting and her take on female friendship is
clever and well observed. Loyalty, Barfoot feels, is the most
important gift of friendship, although spinoffs abound.” -- Nancy
Schiefer, The London Free Press
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