Whole Cloth Reading Series: Bronwen Wallace’s “Signs of the Former Tenant”
Speakers: Moderated by Elee Kraljii Gardiner, poet laureate of Vancouver, and Bronwen Tate, Creative Writing
This event is open to the general public and does not require registration (but please note that our seating is limited). Light refreshments will be served.
Bronwen Wallace
Born in Kingston, Ontario, Bronwen Wallace (1945–1989) published the poetry collections Marrying into the Family (1980), Signs of the Former Tenant (1983), Common Magic (1985), and The Stubborn Particulars of Grace (1987). Essays, short stories, and another poetry collection were published posthumously in the years following her death from cancer at the age of 44. Wallace founded a women’s bookstore in Windsor, Ontario, where she was also active in social movements for race, class, and gender justice. She was a mentor to many aspiring authors as a creative writing instructor at Queen’s University and St. Lawrence College. The RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, founded by friends of the poet and the Writers’ Trust of Canada, has recognized and help launch the careers of emerging writers since 1994.
Signs of the Former Tenant
Sings of the Former Tenant gives voice to the hidden lives of women. The collection begins in childhood memory, teasing out the sores and slights of gendered socialization alongside the hushed attention of games of red light, green light and searing moments of girlhood intimacy. A second section moves across domestic spaces, articulating the violence that can lurk behind ordinary living room curtains but also finding beauty and meaning in mundane acts of care and friendship. “The Cancer Poems,” a final section written while caring for her friend Pat Logan, uses dreams and fairy tales to reveal an intimacy with mortality that can hold the bitter with the sweet. As Carolyn Smart writes in her introduction to The Collected Poems, “Reading these poems is like sitting down to a long and necessary talk with a close friend.”