Grace Shiver

Grace Shiver is a multivocal meditation on violence, trauma, loss and renewal which wrestles with the seeming incommunicability of extreme experiences and the possibility that, as Heidegger suggests, What is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said. The manuscript is divided into six sections, each of which employs different poetic strategies to engage with a wide range of personal and historical issues and the silences that surround them. Grace Shiver explores, through many stances, the place of the mother. This can be in terms of many elements: absence, inadequacy, frustration and a sense of being overwhelmed–as well as in terms of what Stonehouse calls “mother-like capacity” and “milk work”–in other words, as a compassionate witness. She uses the vantage point of motherhood in a variety of forms to examine a series of themes: loss, violence and renewal.

AUTHOR

Cathy Stonehouse

Cathy Stonehouse is the author of a poetry collection, The Words I Know (Press Gang Publishers, 1994). Her writing (poetry, fiction, nonfiction) has also appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers and anthologies including The Globe and Mail, The Literary Review of Canada, Descant, Grain, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Dropped Threads 3: Beyond the Small Circle (Random House 2006), White Ink: Poems on Motherhood (Demeter Press, 2006) and Best Canadian Stories 09. Between 2001 and 2004 she edited the award-winning literary journal Event and in 2008 co-edited the well-received creative nonfiction anthology Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (McGill-Queens University Press, 2008). Born and raised in the UK, she holds a BA in English from Wadham College, Oxford and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. A tutor, editor and creative writing instructor she lives in East Vancouver with her husband and daughter.