Amazing Grace | 20.2

1997

Digital only; out of stock in print.

This issue of Room of One’s Own is the first of a two-part series on the theme of aging. Within these pages you will read what women told us about time, and the changes we sometimes welcome and sometimes endure.

You will meet characters that will touch, entertain and impel you. Women who speak from the solid graduated steps of experience, beginning with the light but layered poem by Vera Jensen, whose Dickinson-like approach, I hope, will serve as a welcome mat to all who open this issue.

The writing here speaks to us of where we live, emotion­ ally, physically, and politically, and how we continually evolve in those directions at any age. Mavis Jones gives us a hardy emotional character that proves still pliable when she relents toward a life long adversary in her story “If You Want To Know Who I Am.” And our political vulnerability is epitomized in the rather eerie myth-like tale given to us by Marilyn Gear Pilling.

These pages roar, and sometimes whisper, of our experi­ences with time. From the potent outrage in Louise O’Donnell’s poem “Tribute,” to the tender familial details within Lyn Lifshin’s work; from the neighbourly alliance made in the rural and private lives within Sheila Peters’s story “Cultiva­ tion,” to the sensual new life beginning for “Addie” in Carolyn Shepard’s story “Addie Holds Herself Sideways.”

Although there is a diversity of voices here, and a varied museum of images, the thread that weaves this work to­gether is that women prevail; their spirit, and strength and creativity is sewn into each of these pieces. So, curl up with this literary quilt; I think you’ll find you’re in good company.