“I’ve often idly wondered why people make some of the smallest decisions: Does it matter which cookie I pick up from the plate or which stall I choose in a public bathroom? Will my choice change the course of my life?
“On November 27, 2003, at 3:30 p.m., I make one of those random choices. I work at my desk until about 2:00 p.m. At around 2:45, I run a brush through my hair and swish a dollop of toothpaste around my mouth. By 3:00, I’m picking up my younger daughter from her elementary school. At 3:15, we’re rushing into her big sister’s high school, unaware that by 4:30 I’ll be signing in at the emergency department of the local hospital….
“The door opens at precisely 3:30. The teacher says goodbye to the previous parents and hello to me. I follow her across the room, where she seats herself on one side of a table and motions to two chairs on the other side.
“I choose the nearest, and that choice changes my life.”
All too often, this is exactly the way a brain injury starts—not specifically with a parent-teacher meeting or a chair, but with a random action at a random time. Contrary to common belief, most concussions—the lay term for mild traumatic brain injury—do not happen to professional athletes or occur in motor vehicle accidents. Most mTBIs happen to random people doing random things at random moments in their lives.
I can’t review my own book, but I can give you a sample of what you’ll learn if you read it:
In Canada, 400,000 people aged twelve and older sustained at least one mTBI in 2019.
While 70–85% of mTBI sufferers recover within days or weeks, at least 15% and as many as 50% have symptoms for months or years.
It is not necessary to lose consciousness or have amnesia to have had an mTBI. In fact, only about 10% of mTBIs include loss of consciousness.
It is not necessary to have taken a hit to the head to have had a concussion. The problem is not what happens externally, but what happens when the brain is bounced around inside the skull, and that can easily happen during any rapid acceleration-deceleration (whiplash-type) event.
Despite facts like these, people who suffer so-called mild traumatic brain injury are often treated dismissively, even by their own physicians.
Facts like these—and many more—gave rise to my book’s title. As concussion experts who are far more learned than I have noted, there’s no such thing as a “mild” traumatic brain injury. I support this contention with research on mTBI that I updated roughly annually and on the challenges of taking such an injury through a personal injury lawsuit, which are even greater now than they were when I was doing so.
No Such Thing is a must-read for anyone who might one day make a random choice in the middle of an unremarkable meeting. Which is to say all of us.
Stephen Kimber
I believe my book is well written and compelling, but rather than taking my word for it, read these words from Stephen Kimber, the award-winning journalist and author who co-founded and formerly directed the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing at University of King’s College in Halifax, from which I graduated in 2015:
“One day in the middle of an ordinary life, Lynne Melcombe went to what should have been an unremarkable meeting and made a random choice. No Such Thing: A True Story of “Mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery is her account of what followed that random choice—from the gaslighting, indifference, and ignorance of healthcare professionals to the gotcha tactics of shareholder-driven insurance company lawyers. No Such Thing is a painfully personal but powerful memoir of Melcombe’s struggle to heal from a so-called “mild” brain injury, but it is also a well-researched indictment of medical, legal, and political failure. It’s a must-read for anyone who might one day make a random choice in the middle of an unremarkable meeting. Which is to say all of us.”
No Such Thing will be published by Iguana Books imminently. Check back with this page or contact me directly at lynne at lynnemelcombe dot com to get your copy as soon as it’s released.
I’ve done my banking at a credit union since the late 1980s. I used to belong to Modo, a cooperative carsharing enterprise. I’ve found some of the best prices on organic produce at a cooperative grocery store. Many friends live in cooperative housing, an option I might pursue as I get older.
Corporate histories are generally commissioned by the companies whose histories they recount and are meant to be read by people who have an interest in that company. Like any other corporate history, Bruce’s book was commissioned (by the Cooperative Council of Nova Scotia). But a book about a cooperative movement is inherently different because cooperatives are inherently different.
The history of any cooperative venture is more than the story of an individual’s rise from rags to riches because it’s the history of a philosophy made manifest. Cooperatives came into being out of a belief that when people who are underserved by conventional institutions come together with purpose, their joint venture can not only serve them but others like them—people who are not wealthy and generally have no desire to be, people who just want fair shake in a world that often ignores them.
When I look briefly at other cooperative histories, I see similar things: many of them started in the early 1900s, were driven by the efforts of a passionate few, may have gone through a period of decline, but have come back to life in the last few decades and are defying the belief that business can only be successful if it lacks heart and human interest.
As Father Moses Michael Coady, the father of Nova Scotia’s cooperative movement, said,
“It has been said that credit supports the borrower the way a rope supports the hanged. Many an unfortunate debtor has found this to be true. One of the chief arguments that proponents of private business advance against the co-operative system is that they give credit while the co-operative does not. They feel that after they have ‘carried’ so many people for such a long time, it is ungrateful of the people to seek to establish their own business.”
Poppycock, he said. It’s not ungrateful to want to house, feed, and clothe your family on your own terms. As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, credit is in the eye of the lender. If the lender is of sound moral character, invested both in his own and his community’s welfare, there’s nothing wrong with it. A credit union, he said, is perfectly designed to help people get out of the messes private businesses had put them in.
This has been my experience of all types of cooperatives: credit unions (the one I use in Vancouver and the one my brother uses in Toronto), cooperative associations that deliver weekly bins of organic produce at reasonable prices, cooperative housing for people who need housing security but can’t buy a house.
The place for cooperatives in our society these days, where costs seem to be perpetually spiralling out of control, is almost limitless. I’ve patronized many cooperatively run worker -owned businesses, which give workers a real sense of investment in where they make their living. I’ve read about the power of cooperative structures lifting people in the majority world (a term I prefer to more value-laden terms like “third world” and “developing world) out of what seemed like hopeless poverty.
To me, this has always seemed like a brilliant idea, and Alec Bruce has done an admirable job of sharing the history of Nova Scotia’s cooperative movement in a way that can benefit anyone with an interest in exploring the coop philosophy—and maybe starting a coop of their own.
I’m a firm believer that every emotion humans have, even the ones that feel difficult, is the result of evolution—like every other aspect of human biology and psychology, emotions are adaptive. They have survived because they’ve helped us survive. So, unpleasant feelings like guilt, remorse, sadness, jealousy, and grief have purposes that have helped keep the human species going.
That’s an important aspect of The Power of Guilt: Why We Feel It and Its Surprising Ability to Heal(HarperCollins, 2025) by Chris Moore, PhD (class of 2024). I’m what Moore would likely refer to as guilt-prone; anytime things aren’t going well in a relationship, I tend to blame myself and feel guilty until I find something about it that I can apologize for.
I always know when guilt is making my brain chatter worse because I’ll start to ruminate—whatever it is I’m feeling guilty about, I will go over it ad infinitum. That’s how I know that what’s bothering me is guilt. Once I figure out what I’m feeling guilty about, I’m able to do whatever is necessary to a) make amends and seek forgiveness, b) forgive myself, or c) realize I don’t have any real reason to feel guilty and there’s nothing to forgive myself for.
The Power of Guilt is a thorough examination of the role guilt plays in child development, adult relationships, parent-child relationships both during the growing years and with adult children, and how guilt can go awry and cause various mental health issues, as well as broader social guilt—guilt in religion, guilt in criminal behaviour, and the collective guilt some of us feel for social wrongs such as racism and the climate crisis.
But it’s his final chapter, Making Friends with Guilt, that I want to quote from:
“No one wants to feel guilt because it is so unpleasant. It is part fear and anxiety, part sadness, and part anger. On their own, each of these emotions us unpleasant; together, they’re awful. But there’s a good reason we feel negative emotions: they move us to act to protect ourselves and to protect others. Think about pain. No one likes to be in pain, but pain is important and helpful—it signals to us when there might be tissue damage. If we didn’t feel pain, we would suffer many more bruises, cuts, burns, and all forms of bodily damage. Pain motivates us to protect our bodies form injury and repair harm that has occurred. In the case of guilt, its purpose is to signal that we may have put our relationships at risk, and we should do something to protect and heal them. …
“We all need a network of relationships to lead happy and fulfilled lives. At the core of this network are those communal relationships that are most meaningful to us—in most cases, our natal family, the family we may acquire through romantic relationships, and a circle of close friends. Beyond that core, relationships characterize the human condition, from individuals to nations. Some of these relationships are given to us, some we choose, but all can be at risk of damage when we act, as we almost inevitably will at some point, in ways that are selfish and uncaring.
“Guilt is the best signal we have that we need to work on our relationships. When we feel it, we should pay attention and use it as a guide. Sometimes, this means owning up to a transgression and apologizing. There’s no better way to restore a relationship than to make an authentic apology—sorry really shouldn’t be the hardest word! Even if we didn’t do anything wrong or hurtful, guilt can mean that we just haven’t put in the effort to nurture the relationship. Sometimes, dealing with guilt just means showing the other some TLC….
“If there is one lesson that I would want this book to convey, it is that guilt needs to shed its image problem. Yes, guilt is horrible, but like the best medicines of old, it is good for you. It helps us to identify when our relationships may be at risk, and it guides us to work on them and to restore them. Caring for our relationships, from the intimate to the global, is the most important task we face in life. So, let’s welcome guilt into our lives and make friends with it. Our relationships, and indeed our society, will be stronger for it.”
Grief is not defined in the DSM V as a mental health issue, but I’m including it in my thematic series on mental health for two reasons: First, during several episodes of profound grief in my life, I was never quite in my right mind; and second, surviving grief calls on deep mental health reserves, without which one is at risk of diving into the bottomless pit of mental illness.
Lesley Buxton has been visited by more grief than most—enough to know that to survive and continue finding joy in life, she must have deep reserves of mental wellness. Buxton’s book, One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, tells the story of watching her only child die, over the course of years, of a rare neurological illness. Yet even amid her grief, she finds joy.
One Strong Girl is a deeply personal and moving memoir of living with loss. It’s no wonder this heartbreaking yet inspiring book won the inaugural Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction.
Mary Jane Grant is another person who has survived more episodes of grief than most. But when her husband suddenly left her after decades of marriage, something inside her demanded more attention. So, she went off to Europe and, in a tea shop one day, when taking in the fragrances of various blends, she started on the path that led to her book, A Cure for Heartache.
This slim volume recounts how she worked through her grief by teaching herself to experience “life’s simple pleasures, one moment at a time.” After my marriage ended, given that I was the one who ended it, I was surprised at the depths of my grief. A big part of my path out of it was learning the practice of mindfulness through, among other things, a course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which teaches a secular approach to meditation whose effectiveness in mental and physical health is supported by decades of properly executive research.
While Grant doesn’t write about attending any mindfulness programs or even use the word “mindfulness,” that is indeed what she describes. It is amazing to me that she learned to do this almost instinctively. That is mental health, and during Mental HEALTH Awareness Month, we need to be as mindful of using mental health to prevent mental illness as we are of specific mental illnesses like those discussed in last week’s post.
Laura Pratt’s Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition is another study in surviving the loss of a partner. After a passionate, six-year affair ends suddenly and without explanation, the author crawls through the rocky emotional terrain of her grief. What differentiates Heartbroken from many other books about grieving is the way the author has, in lyric prose, braided together the story of the love affair and her profound grief after it ends with psychological research and artistic depictions of love and loss.
This is one of the most poetic grief memoirs I’ve ever read. It amazes me that Pratt didn’t win a bucket or two of awards for it.
Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care, by Susan MacLeod, is less about the grief of losing a mother than of trudging day by day through the process of watching a mother die, slowly, while trying to find a safe and loving place for her to spend her final days. I remember this part of my mother’s life so well—her decline, searching for a nursing home, pushing emotions away until a more appropriate time.
After she died, it was as if each of those losses caught up with us one at a time; every time we thought we were finally adjusting to the permanence of her absence, another tidal wave of grief would wash over us. It was as if we were finally grieving each smaller loss in sequence over the year or two after her death. This is what I found myself reflecting on as I read MacLeod’s moving memoir, depicted in drawings that blended whimsical thoughts and self-deprecation with the pain of loss.
Walking the Camino: On Earth As ItIs, by Maryanna Gabriel, is another story of losing a mother, about as different from the previous one as it could possibly be. The back cover reads: “For Maryanna Gabriel, the unexpected death of her artistic mother would change everything in her life. More than just overcoming this loss, she felt that she needed answer, not from other, but from within herself …. At times meditative yet punctuated with humour, the story takes place in a compelling European tableau where legends of saints and miracles abide.”
Walking the Camino is not the first book I’ve read about this pilgrimage taken by thousands of people from across the globe every year. More than a decade ago, I edited a manuscript about an author’s years of long-distance hiking with his wife, part of which was completing the Camino walk in three stages over three consecutive years. I was compelled to want to do the same; I still haven’t done that, but Gabriel’s book is a welcome reminder that there are many ways to integrate life’s losses and move forward.
Many of us have sibling relationships that waver between love and tolerance (or worse) over the years. Most of us don’t have to face the tragic loss of a sibling far too young. Thompson’s memoir is a moving study in mental illness (her sister’s addiction) and mental wellness (integrating the loss of the same sister to cancer into her life).
April 22 is Earth Day. Here are some great books about the environment by Canadian authors to commit to reading.
I live in the Pacific Northwest, where two things are ever-present on people’s minds: how bad the wildfires will be this summer and when the next big earthquake will hit. Although Aaron Williams (class of 2017) wrote Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir (Harbour Publishing, 2017) as a memoir of one summer (of many) on a firefighting crew in the dense forests of British Columbia, it wouldn’t be possible to write such a memoir without touching on the impacts of a warming planet on creating the conditions that are making wildfires worse every year (2023 was Canada’s worst season on record). From hectares of dry brush where forests were clearcut to fire seasons that begin earlier and end later each year, Chasing Smoke not only describes a wildfire fighter’s lifestyle but a problem that must be addressed if we don’t wish to see our planet go up in flames.
One might not think climate change influences earthquakes, and that’s not where Gregor Craigie (class of 2019) focuses his attention in On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake (Goose Lane Editions, 2021). But science acknowledges that as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires increase in frequency and severity, so too does global warming contribute to the frequency and severity of earthquakes. “As a result of the man-made global warming, the melting of land ice, mainly in Antarctica and Greenland, occurs in an accelerating process and sea levels are rising worldwide” as are increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. “Both phenomena also have an impact on earthquake risk since they lead to a small but notable increase in pressure on tectonic faults in the subsurface due to hydrostatic load….” And “sea-level fluctuations of just a few decimetres are enough to trigger earthquakes.” (https://www.gfz.de/en/press/news/details/mehr-erdbeben-durch-menschengemachten-klimawandel) Reading Craigie’s deeply researched book provides frightening insight into what can happen when the next Big One hits.
In Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis (ECW, 2019) Andrew Reeves (class of 2016), an award-winning environmental journalist, tackles the eponymous environmental crisis head on. When I began reading Overrun, I’d never heard of Asian crap, much less the crisis they’ve caused. But as I read Reeves’ entertaining account of how, with all good intentions, this voracious and prolific fish was introduced to control invasive water weeds in aquaculture farms in the southern US, I became increasingly aware of just how dangerous it can be to import any species of life to any part of the world where it lacks natural predators. From a few fish in the 1950s, several species of Asian carp have taken over river systems from the mouth of the Mississippi River watershed north to where they’re a handful of miles now threatening the ecology of the entire Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River system. This is what happens when humans, with all the best intentions, believe they can improve on billions of years of evolution and try to take nature into their own hands.
Of the books I’ve reviewed to date, these three are the ones I’d recommend most highly as Earth Day reading. But they’re not the only ones to touch on environmental themes, even though the environment is not the main thrust of the book. I also highly recommend Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness (ECW, 2023) by Virginia Heffernan, which advocates for a different approach to resource extraction, one that is more environmentally safe and concerned with the welfare of Indigenous Peoples. The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest (ECW, 2018) by Helena Moncrieff (class of 2016) focuses predominantly on community sharing of the harvest of fruit trees within any city, but in so doing it also speaks to feed the human population by stopping our environmentally stupid wasting of nature’s bounty just because it sits on privately owned land.
While Jenn Thornhill Verma’s (class of 2019) Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys (Nimbus Publishing, 2019) is a memoir of a family’s lost way of life, one that had endured for generations in many families, it’s also a tale of the consequences of overfishing, not only to the environment but to those who depend on the sea for their living. And for those of us currently living in the Pacific Northwest, it’s a cautionary tale about the way deal with dwindling salmon populations. And finally, The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons (Pottersfield Press, 2019) by Suzanne Stewart (class of 2016) is more directly about the link between different people’s food-producing labour with a particular month, it’s also a compelling series of essays about how people can and do choose to live in harmony with the seasons. And it’s hard to imagine anything more environmentally advantageous than that.
I remember all too well my mother’s dying process. My father predeceased her by almost 20 years. Five years after he died, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She went 15 years later, outlasting her doctor’s predictions by five years.
By the mid-1980s it had become apparent that she’d no longer be able to live on her own. It was her choice to move into long-term care; she didn’t want to be a burden and nothing my sister or I said could change her mind. And, it would have been difficult. I had two young children with chronic illnesses; my sister was working full-time and working on her bachelor’s degree. So, at our mother’s insistence, we began investigating nursing homes.
We were going on tours of different facilities for four to six months before she found the one she’d move into. It was a newer facility in a lovely part of Vancouver, and the residents had private rooms. The staff were kind and competent and obviously cared about her. If she ever felt unhappy with the choice she’d made, she didn’t share it with us.
As I read Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care (Conundrum Press, 2021) by Susan MacLeod (class of 2021) in a single sitting, I was reminded that not every older person receives the loving care our mother did. Not all families are attentive or involved, as we were, and not all facilities take particularly good care of their residents.
Perhaps because it’s written as a graphic memoir, MacLeod is able to draw an unapologetically stark picture of the problems not only with long-term care but with the ageism that seems endemic to our culture. (Chapter 1 is called “I’ve Always Disliked Old People” and Chapter 2 is “I’ve Always Disliked Death.) She’s also unflinchingly honest about the flaws in her family of origin, including her own merciless bullying of her younger brother when they were children and her realization that just because she’s ready to be forgiven doesn’t mean he’s ready to forgive her.
Yet Mac Leod periodically lightens the tone of what could be an unrelentingly depressing topic with self-deprecating humour. For example, about once per chapter, we see a motif of a banner framing a cartoon tile that says, “Susan Seeks an Expert” or “Solution Susan Strikes.” My personal favourite: SYSTEMS THAT MAKE HUMANS INHUMANE. This comes up several times in the book and reminds me very much of the problems my sister and I have had with the care home our older brother is now living in.
With such a visual medium, it’s impossible to insert an excerpt of text and make it make sense, so instead I’ve included some of MacLeod’s full-page drawings to give a sense of her story and her skills as an artist/author.
Dying for Attention is such an easy read yet at the same time such honest and compelling reading that I think it should be available to anyone who’s considering a nursing home for an older loved one. At the very least, it should be required reading in programs for care aides.
As a little girl, I had a pink and turquoise satin kimono. I can’t remember why I had it or where it came from; it likely had something to do with the dance classes I took for several years, and it was likely a gross misrepresentation of what it was meant to be. But until I was much older, it was all I knew of Japanese culture.
I was likely not alone in that. Yet the Japanese Canadian community has a rich history in Canada, a history that includes far more than the tragic and shameful chapter in Canadian history of the internment of all Japanese Canadian citizens during World War II and the confiscation of their property, for which they only received redress in 1988.
In The Nail That Sticks Out: Reflections on the Postwar Japanese Canadian Community (Dundurn Press, 2024), Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann (class of 2021) combines family history and details of traditional Japanese culture with personal memoir. The result is a compelling account of a community that has endured through racism and hardship but must, Hartmann argues, be defined as far more than that.
There is a touching account of her grandfather, who painted beautiful watercolours but never considered his art good enough for more than scraps of newsprint and saved none of his paintings. There is the story of the cousin who, fearing academic disappointment, gave up all her dance classes—except traditional odori dance because she’d seen it give her grandmother so much joy.
There are also the notes of persistent and systemic racism: the lack of Asian representation in theatre and film paired with underpayment of Asian actors when they do appear. The thoughtless souls who pop up everywhere with the ridiculous question every biracial person hears far too often: “What are you?” (To which Hartmann flippantly replies, “I’m still human, the last time I checked.”)
But even that history is slowly being erased, Hartmann writes:
From Camille’s [her daughter’s] perspective, most Torontonians “don’t know JCs exist, let alone the historical context” of the relocation after the war and how JCs became resettled … “Our trauma is only amplified. Only internment is ever talked about … “
In many ways this reality is reflected in the larger community. Despite Japanese planting roots in Canada more than a hundred years ago, JC history is slowly being erased. Each generation adds their own perspective on identity and culture. Camille’s generation—the gosei, or fifth generation—are almost entirely biracial. To the untrained eye, kids like Camille or their cousin Samantha easily pass for white. Just as my sister and I loosely resemble our parents, there are glimpses of us within our kids too. Our ethnicity may appear ambiguous, yet we share a rich cultural inheritance.
Canada’s only Japantown in Vancouver is long gone. But here, in places like Markham’s J-Town and the downtown Toronto strip called Little Tokyo a string of savvy entrepreneurs have stepped in to serve up Japanese-infused shopping experiences Do consumers ever ponder the roots of our community as they stand in line with their matcha lattes and mochi ice cream, hoping to get their pork belly ramen or stamped cheesecake before they sell out? Unlike these stores, which offer the latest trends and tastes of modern-day Japan, other long-established cultural and religious institutions scattered throughout the Greater Toronto Area reflect the perseverance of JCs who were determined to rebuild their lives after the war.
Will anyone remember their struggles or history decades from now? With so few Japanese in Canada, will anyone care? When searching for information, I discovered a dark void, a dearth of evidence, and little mention of our Japanese congregation or the people who dedicated their lives to it. A lost legacy in a disappearing community.
March 8 was International Women’s Day, and the month of March is International Women’s Month. With a nod to both, with this post I acknowledge several books from the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program that further the cause of justice and equality for women.
It’s hard to pick just a few books. The program is dominated by women, all of whom I’d describe as feminist, and many of their stories are about women’s lives, whether their own or others. But if I’m going to stick strictly to books with a decidedly feminist theme, I’d choose these five:
Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America by Sheima Benembarek. This book was eye-opening for me. It honestly never occurred to me that a blue-haired, niqab-wearing, orthodox Muslim woman might be polyamorous. It doesn’t surprise me that a child from a Muslim family might be just as likely as a child from any other family to be transgender. But I have to admit some surprise—the good kind—in reading about a same-sex couple, both comedians, one a Palestinian-born Muslim the other a Jew from Montreal who perform individually and as a pair who starred in a Crave comedy special called Marriage of Convenience. The title of the book, Halal Sex, comes from a term for sex practiced within a heterosexual Muslim marriage. But Benembarek put a decidedly feminist twist on it by redefining it as “all consensual sex between adults.”
Every Boy I Ever Kissed: A Memoir by Nellwyn Lampert. I started calling myself a feminist at the age of 13. I was in way too much of a hurry to lose my virginity, which I did at 14. I had no idea of the connection between the two. But there is a connection, a pretty important one. And that connection is a major part of what Lampert wrestles with in this coming-of-age memoir. As the cover blurb says, “for Nellwyn Lampert, losing her virginity would turn out to be anything but simple. Her chosen partners struggled with porn-induced erectile dysfunction and other crises of masculinity. And in the bedroom, nothing went according to plan.” So, in that regard, our experiences were entirely different. But in terms of “the realities of sexual liberation, female empowerment, and masculinity,” the issues are not that different at all than the ones I was too young to realize I was doing with more than 50 years ago that sexual freedom and gender freedom are two very different concepts.
Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid. It’s a grim fact that Indigenous women make up only about 4% of the female population in Canada but accounted for 16% of all female homicides between 1980 and 2012. And a disturbing number of those women are abducted, raped, and murdered along a strip of highway in northern BC called the Highway of Tears. From the back cover: “Journalist Jessica McDiarmid investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate where Indigenous women and girls are over-policed, yet under-protected.” As difficult as this book was to read, it was just as difficult to put down. I can’t imagine a better lens through which to examine the intersection of racism and misogyny than through the horrific impacts of colonization by patriarchal white, European culture on Indigenous women and girls.
F Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism by Lauren McKeon. It’s always surprised me that when I say I’ve been calling myself a feminist since I was 13 but I haven’t always felt that feminism welcomed me, what many people seem to hear is that I don’t think feminism is necessary or relevant. In fact, I’m saying exactly the opposite—that feminism remains as relevant today as ever and that’s why it’s so important to ensure that ALL sorts of women feel a sense of belonging within the movement. That was my read on McKeon’s book. She recognizes that too many women have moved in the wrong direction instead of understanding that feminism is for every woman—that, indeed, until we are all free, none of us are free. Why has this happened? That, as McKeon points out, is a question for feminists to answer. And as women’s rights are being eroded daily, it’s becoming increasingly urgent that we answer it and ensure that all women feel that the arms of feminism welcome them.
Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening by Renée Pellerin. No woman in the western world isn’t familiar with the unique joy (she said sarcastically) of having her breasts pulled and twisted and squished between cold metal plates for their regular mammogram. In this book, Pellerin, an award-winning producer with the CBC, does a deep dive into the evidence supporting and opposing regular mammography screening. And her conclusion is that the evidence weighs strongly in favour of less screening. It’s supported by vested interests, false positives can lead to invasive overtreatment, false negatives can give women a false sense of security, its effectiveness differs significantly for different age groups, and regular exposure to radiation can, in a small number of cases, increase risk of cancer. It’s an eye-opening book that every woman should read and consider carefully before assuming that doctor’s orders should never be questioned.
Happy International Women’s Month and enjoy the reading!
On May 29, 2016, I tried to end my life. It wasn’t the first time I’d tried, but it was the closest I came to succeeding. My reasons are not the point here. The point is that, during my long, slow climb back to mental health, I learned that I needed to stop living my life in the past and the future. If I was going to stay alive, I needed to live my life one moment at a time.
The therapist I found to help me through that period of my life is trained in a well-researched and fully secular practice of meditation called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). One of the techniques she taught me for pulling myself out of depression and anxiety, though not meditation, is a simple practice, of going through the five senses, one at a time, and noticing five things I see, five things I feel, five things I hear, taste, and smell. It’s meant to break the cycle of rumination over past experiences one finds depressing and anxiety over future experiences.
It’s meant to bring the person back to the physical world around them in each moment.
This is what I thought about as I read Grant’s book, as she explained her process of minding her senses, learning to wander, learning to let go, loving what you do, and learning to appreciate and to connect. Here’s how Grant describes her experience of getting reacquainted with her five senses:
I entered the reading room. Morning light streamed through tall windows. The walls were filled from floor to ceiling with books, and a dozen or more freestanding shelves took up the remaining space. To the left of the entrance door were counters with computer stations. Above, a bulletin board was covered in notices, local advertisements and sign-up sheets for local classes and lectures. A couple of round wooden tables filled the rest of the space. People sat here and there, reading books and newspapers. I went to an empty table, quietly unpacked my things, sat down and closed my eyes.
I could hear the occasional rustling of a newspaper and the soft hum of the heating system.
I took a deep breath through my nose. I detected a faint floral hint from the hand lotion I’d applied before leaving my room. Lately, I’d switched my allegiance from lavender to rose. Maybe it was the influence of England. After all, what was more English than a rose?
I settled into place, connected my laptop, opened the internet and started my search. My first question was simple: why, when I immersed myself in the present, did I feel so much better? By pulling my attention to the five senses, I gave myself no choice but to focus on what was happening in the moment. I was not stuck in the past or worried about the future. Yesterday, I had learned first-hand that the senses held the key that opened the gate to my present experience. They admitted me to the garden of earthly delights—sights, sounds, smells, tastes and physical feelings—right here, right now. By being in the body, I could calm the mind and soothe the spirit. It felt neither self-indulgent nor hedonistic. It felt beautifully, blissfully ordinary.
When I was recovering after my suicide attempt, I read Full Catastrophe Living, a 650-page volume by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a world-renowned mindfulness researcher and originator/teacher of MBSR. I took the MBSR course twice, and underwent a one-year program called Dialectical Behavioural Therapy.
If I ever encounter someone going through a rough time, I might tell them, instead, to buy Grant’s 200-page A Cure for Heartache and read it slowly, mindfully, savouring each syllable, and then maybe go back and read it again. Because everything I learned in that difficult time is what I learned all over again from this meaningful little book.
Years ago, I attended a one-day workshop on racism. At one point, the workshop leader asked one person in the group to sit on the hotseat to learn about the experience of racism from a first-person perspective by talking about a time they’d experienced an “ism.” I volunteered.
I sat in the chair, closed my eyes, and—guided by his questions—recounted my experience with a long-ago boyfriend and his abiding misogyny. As the workshop leader led me slowly through a specific memory, I dove deeper and deeper into an incident that I needed thirty-five years to understand was rape.
Before I opened my eyes, after I had dissolved into heaving sobs, the leader brought me gently back to the present and translated my pain into a new level of awareness of the parallels—NOT the sameness, but the similarities—between all kinds of “isms” and “phobias,” in this case racism and sexism.
Not a day has gone by in the thirty-some years since then that I haven’t reflected on what I learned that day. I can’t ever know the pain of the constant “othering” that must constantly wear down the resolve of the strongest of individuals. I can only try to learn more, to understand more about racism when life presents me with an opportunity.
Gloria Blizzard’s (class of 2021) book of lyric essays, Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2024) presents such an opportunity. I’d like to say that once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down, but that’s not true. Rather, after I’d read almost every essay, I needed to put the book down and take some time to process and integrate what I’d just read. Like this passage, from an essay called “The Mathematics of Rage.”
Sitting at Northwood on Bloor Street West over a mocktail and beer, Gillian asks, “Did you notice suddenly becoming invisible to men around age forty?”
Me: “Nope.”
“Yeah, but you are beautiful.”
“So are you.”
“But I noted it and it was sudden.” Gillian is smart, gorgeous, accomplished, white, a writer, and one of my mentors during my MFA.
Good for her, I thought, as mostly I found myself far too visible. Still. A constant imposition or a weight lay upon me. Except, that is, when I wanted medical or legal care or psychological or academic care for me or my child—then I became eminently less visible, categorically unseen, a giant perplexity for someone who looked at me blankly, or with sexually laced assumptions or suspicion.
This is not unlike my trip to a walk-in medical clinic for extreme rib pain that had me hobbled. After an hour wait, I was sent to an examining room. The doctor entered. I sat twisted in pain and pointing at my chest. His face turned to scorn, the absence of concern. “Get out,” he said. “Just, just go,” he said, waving me and my pain away.
It happens to women of all ages and races, this shifting state of value and visibility. Gillian noted herself as suddenly unseen at a certain age. My Blackness, however, ensures that eyes remain on me. This disappears, however, when I am due for a promotion or in need of care. Then I am fucking invisible.
I did not respond in real time at the clinic. My thoughts were blunted by pain, shock, and confusion. This medical assault surprised and shocked me, and yet it did not surprise me at all. The doctor assumed I was there for opiates. …
The doctor got paid by our state for that visit. For my pain-infused walk to and presence in that clinic, I got nothing. The next day, after another pain-filled night, I took more time off from my job and visited a naturopath who was also a chiropractor. I paid for this visit myself. Upon a physical examination that took approximately two minutes, he determined I had a dislocated rib. “What have you done to yourself?” he asked. “This is a body response. Have you been under extreme stress?”
“You have no idea,” I responded.
That was exactly the lesson I learned at that workshop all those years ago: I can try my best to understand every day. And I do try. Every day. It’s literally the least I can do. But no matter what I do or how hard I try, I will never really have any idea.
That’s the reality that all of us need to integrate into our lives and reflect on every day for the rest of our lives. Adding this excellent book to the library of books and movies I continue to accumulate—not just in the years since that workshop, not just in the months after George Floyd’s murder, not just during Black History Month, but every month of every year I continue to be alive—is one small way to continue trying.
It’s not enough, of course. I doubt anything will be enough in my lifetime. But to paraphrase a very wise woman I once knew: How do you start fighting racism? You just start.
