Degrees: AB, MA (Michigan, PhD (Manitoba)

In Alice in Wonderland, Alice wonders "What is the use of a book...without pictures or conversations?" In a similar vein, I might be inclined to ask "What's the use of books if you don't have conversations about them?" Teaching and scholarship, both fundamental delights of my life, are conversations about everything from the enlightenment subtext of Austen's Pride and Prejudice to the beauty of Hardy's "Neutral Tones" or the ideas (not to mention the beauty) infusing T.S. Eliot's Wasteland and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, or the aesthetics of Zadie Smith's On Beauty.
I came to the collegial department at the University of Regina in 1990, principally to teach British literature written between 1893 (the date of Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women) and the present time. I've taught classes on Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf; I use the theoretical perspectives provided by new historicism, feminism, gender theory, narratology and aesthetics. One of my favourite classes is designed to help students create a nuanced conversation between history and literature by focussing on Britain in the Sixties. (Yes, we look at ‘serious' literature along with the Monty Python skits and Beatles' lyrics.) I seldom fail to read the novels nominated for Britain's Man Booker Prize, and will teach a class on contemporary British fiction in the coming term.
I've published two books of poetry, Without Benefit of Words (Turnstone Press 1991) and Time's Body (Hagios Press, 2005), and a book of literary criticism, The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood: Initiation and Rape in Literature (McGill Queens UP, 1988). My articles on Ishiguro, Woolf, Kroetsch, Atwood and Munro have all been reprinted; most recently, my essay on Virginia Woolf's novel Jacob's Room was reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of the novel. That essay will form part of the book on Virginia Woolf's aesthetics that I'm currently working on. In 2001, I won the University of Regina Alumni Award for teaching.
Is there a life beyond such conversations? I might say instead that there is a life that feeds these conversations. Mine includes long walks with my husband, Bill; photographic expeditions with my daughter, Veronica; making quilts and taming cats.