Where It Hurts

Finalist for the 2017 Governor General’s Literary Awards–Non-Fiction!
Finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize at the 2018 BC Book Prizes!

Where It Hurts is a highly charged collection of personal essays, haunted by loss, evoking turbulent physical and emotional Canadian landscapes. Sarah de Leeuw’s creative non-fiction captures strange inconsistencies and aberrations of human behaviour, urging us to be observant and aware. The essays are wide in scope and expose what–and who–goes missing.

With staggering insight, Sarah de Leeuw reflects on missing geographies and people, including missing women, both those she has known and those whom she will never get to know. The writing is courageously focused, juxtaposing places and things that can be touched and known–emotionally, physically, psychologically–with what has become intangible, unnoticed, or actively ignored. Throughout these essays, de Leeuw’s imagistic memories are layered with meaning, providing a survival guide for the present, including a survival that comes with the profound responsibility to bear witness.

AUTHOR

Sarah De Leeuw

Author or editor of more than ten books, Sarah de Leeuw is a poet, essayist, and geographer who works in a faculty of medicine on issues of health humanities and the determinants of marginalized peoples’ health. De Leeuw grew up in rural and northern BC, on Vancouver Island, Haida Gwaii (The Queen Charlotte Islands), and Terrace. She holds an appointment with The Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, has been a Fulbright Scholar, and is a Canada Research Chair (Humanities and Health Inequities): de Leeuw’s writing has been honoured with a Western Magazine Gold Award, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, two CBC Literary Awards in creative non-fiction, and a short-listing for a Governor General’s award in non-fiction. She divides her time between Lheidli T’enneh/Dakelh Territory (Prince George) and Syilx Territory (Okanagan Centre), BC.

Reviews

Praise for Where It Hurts:

“Sarah de Leeuw knows that a title is a promise and she delivers. Where it Hurts promises to be painful and honest without being tragic. These are not traditional essays, they are power-driven narratives documenting the lives of many women. Accusing the world of negligence, viciousness without articulating the accusation, it is there, under every black inked word and every laugh. We are not simply a reader but rather something of an accomplice. As we read, we document how many times we have told such a story and laughed. We don’t feel guilty, but we do want some kind of epiphany and transformation by the time we see the end of the collection. Powerful strategy and a great read.”
~ Lee Maracle, author of Celia’s Song and Memory Serves

“In her poignant prose, those who suffer are honoured and memorialized.”
~ Patricia Dawn Robertson, Quill & Quire

“Like ‘Soft Shoulder,’ the rest of the essays in Where it Hurts are tremendously moving. Beyond merely inviting empathy, they invite us to consider the wounds we don’t know are there.”
~ Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen, Winnipeg Free Press

“The essays in Where It Hurts are deeply felt, original, and a moving requiem for lives extinguished too early to have left a trace.”
~ Lauren Kirshner, Room

“Perhaps the most productive way to read the essays about missing and murdered women and children is to see them as crucial conversation starters. Here, ideally yet uncomfortably, readers become responsible for what they witness; they must face these cruelties and find ways to move forward.”
~ Susie DeCoste, Canadian Literature

“. . .the world needs more writers who are unafraid to write in ways that help us see as much and as clearly as Sarah de Leeuw does.”
~ Heidi Greco, BC BookLook