Clare - The M word: conversations about motherhood

Contributors

HEATHER BIRRELL is the author of two story collections, Mad Hope and I know you are but what am I? Her work has been honoured with the Journey Prize for short fiction and the Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction and has been shortlisted for both National and Western Magazine Awards. Birrells stories have appeared in many North American journals and anthologies, including The New Quarterly and Toronto Noir. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Toronto, where she teaches high school English by day and creative writing to adults by night. Learn more at www.heatherbirrell.com.

JULIE BOOKER is a Toronto writer whose short-story collection, Up Up Up , came out in 2011. Her twins are finally allowing her to work on a novel.

DIANA FITZGERALD BRYDEN s first novel, No Place Strange , was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and longlisted for the IMPAC/Dublin Award. She is at work on a second novel, Tunapuna , and is the author of two books of poetry: Learning Russian , shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award, and Clinic Day .

KERRY CLAREs essays have appeared in a number of Canadian magazines and newspapers, including Readers Digest, Todays Parent, and The Globe and Mail . Her essay Love is a Let-Down was shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and appeared in Best Canadian Essays 2011 . She is editor of the Canadian books website 49thShelf and writes about books on her blog, Pickle Me This . She lives in Toronto.

MYRL COULTERs adoption memoir, The House With the Broken Two , won the 2010 First Book Competition, sponsored by the Writers Studio at Simon Fraser University, and the 2011 Canadian Author Associations Exporting Alberta Award. Her work has been published in several anthologies and Geist magazine. Myrl lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

CHRISTA COUTURE has established herself as a singer-songwriter with sharp-shooting wit, effortless grace, and heart-on-sleeve intensity. Since her critically acclaimed debut album, Fell Out of Oz , and her sophomore record, The Wedding Singer and the Undertaker , she has explored intimate spaces with a frank confidence that avoids clich and melodrama. In September 2012, she released her third album, The Living Record , produced by Steve Dawson and picked by CBC Music as one of the Best Albums of 2012. In addition to being a touring and recording artist, Couture is a graduate of the Vancouver Film School, the managing editor of RPM.fms Indigenous Music Culture, a knitter, a blogger, a graphic designer, a Scotch drinker, and then some.

NANCY JO CULLEN is a Journey Prize-nominated fiction writer and the author of three critically acclaimed collections of poetry with Calgarys Frontenac House Press. Her most recent book, the short-story collection Canary , was the winner of 2012 Metcalf-Rooke Award. Cullen was the 2010 winner of the Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBT Writers. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph Humber.

MARITA DACHSEL is the author of Glossolalia , Eliza Roxcy Snow , and All Things Said & Done . Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and the ReLit Prize and has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies. Her play Initiation Trilogy was nominated for the Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding New Script. She is the 2013-2014 Artist-in-Residence at UVics Centre for Studies in Religion and Society. After many years in Vancouver and Edmonton, she and her family now live in Victoria.

NICOLE DIXONs first book, the collection of stories High-Water Mark , was shortlisted for an Atlantic Book Award. In 2005, she won the Writers Trust of Canada RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. An electronic resources librarian at Cape Breton University, Nicole lives in New Waterford on Cape Breton Island. From January to March, 2015, shell be the writer-in-residence at the Pierre Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon. Please visit nicoledixon.ca.

ARIEL GORDON is a Winnipeg writer. Her second collection of poetry, Stowaways , will be published in spring 2014 by Palimpsest Press. Most recently, her chapbook How to Make a Collage won Kalamalka Presss inaugural John Lent Poetry-Prose Award. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

AMY LAVENDER HARRIS is the author of Imagining Toronto , which was shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian literary criticism and won the 2011 Heritage Toronto Award of Merit. She is a contributing editor with Spacing magazine, for which she writes a regular column on urban literature. Amys next book, Acts of Salvage , explores what the contemporary city compels us to cling to or discard. She lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter.

FIONA TINWEI LAM is the author of two poetry books, Intimate Distances (a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award) and Enter the Chrysanthemum, and, most recently, the illustrated childrens book The Rainbow Rocket . Her poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction appear in over twenty anthologies. Her poems have been twice selected for BCs Poetry in Transit program. She co-edited the literary non-fiction anthology Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood and edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poetry about Facing Cancer .

MICHELE LANDSBERG, a celebrated Toronto-born writer, feminist, and activist, wrote columns from a feminist perspective in The Toronto Star for 25 years. Her columns made a significant impact at the height of the womens movement and she won two National Newspaper Awards, including the first ever given for column writing. She also wrote columns for The Globe and Mail for three years while she lived in New York when her husband, Stephen Lewis, was Canadas ambassador to the United Nations. Michele has published four books, on topics ranging from childrens literature to feminism to New York life, and has been awarded seven honorary degrees from Canadian universities. In 2002 she was awarded the Governor Generals Medal in Commemoration of the Persons Case; in 2006, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, and in 2014, the Canadian Journalism Foundation announced a joint award (with the Canadian Womens Foundation) to be called The Landsberg, to honour a journalist who shines a light on womens equality issues in Canada.

DEANNA M c FADDEN s professional writing career has involved abridging classics for kids, publishing a few poems, writing some very odd short stories in university, hacking it up for the Internet, and completing one unpublished novel. During work hours, she develops content and manages an e-book program for a very large publishing house. At home, shes happily embedded in a family unit that consists of one amazing boy and an equally amazing husband.

MARIA MEINDL is the author of Outside the Box: The Life and Legacy of Writer Mona Gould, the Grandmother I Thought I Knew , winner of the Alison Prentice Award for womens history. The Last Judgment was published in 2011 by Found Press and Rules, an essay, in an anthology on death published by Creative Non Fiction . Her essays have appeared in The Literary Review of Canada , Descant , and Musicworks . She has made two radio series for CBC Ideas : Parent Care and Remembering Polio. She teaches movement classes in downtown Toronto. www.bodylanguagejournal.wordpress.com.

SALEEMA NAWAZ is the author of the short story collection Mother Superior and the novel Bone and Bread , which won the 2013 Quebec Writers Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in journals such as PRISM International , Grain , The New Quarterly , Prairie Fire , and The Dalhousie Review . Her short story My Three Girls, won the 2008 Writers Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize.