Anderson - Dropped threads 3: beyond the small circle

For Gary, with love

part one

MARGARET ATWOOD

MARIE-LYNN HAMMOND

LORRI NEILSEN GLENN

PATRICIA PEARSON

M.A.C. FARRANT

NATALIE FINGERHUT

GILLIAN KERR

JODI LUNDGREN

MELANIE D. JANZEN

part two

BETH POWNING

BARBARA MITCHELL

JUDY REBICK

HARRIET HART

CHANTAL KREVIAZUK

TRACEY ANN COVEART

BARBARA SCOTT

SILKEN LAUMANN

LIANE FAULDER

part three

ARITHA VAN HERK

BARBARA MCLEAN

BERNICE MORGAN

HEATHER MALLICK

LAURIE SARKADI

MAGGIE DE VRIES

J.C. SZASZ

JANICE WILLIAMSON

JODI STONE

part four

FRANCES ITANI

CATHY STONEHOUSE

ANDREA CURTIS

SUSAN RILEY

NORMA DEPLEDGE

C.B. MACKINTOSH

LORNA CROZIER

JUNE CALLWOOD

My firstdiscovery of the universe a word can hold happened on a December night in rural Manitoba, where I lived with my seven siblings and our parents. I had been at a sleep-over with a cousin who lived a half mile down a bush trail. In the middle of the night I was struck by a wave of loneliness so powerful it forced me out of bed, into my clothes and, stealthily, out the door of my cousins house. The path home, familiar in the daytime, had been transformed into foreign territory with its alternate strips of moonlight and tree shadow stretching over mounds of snow. I felt as though I had never been on that trail before and, moreover, that no one knew I was there. At that moment, I was outside every known persons awarenessand I was inside the word alone. I knew it intimately and totally.

The next week in school I learned that a classmate, an only child, had lost both parents in a boating accident. Immediately I understood that she too had crossed over to the interior of the word alone but, with a start, I recognized that her invisible landscape was vastly different from mine. My eight-year-old mind did the transference, and I was left unsure and wobbly where earlier Id been certain I had discovered the absolute, shining truth about aloneness.

These two experiences strongly shaped my relationship with language, and with what language buildsknowledge. Never again could I feel the charmed security of knowing something totally. Truth and meaning became provisional, someones small claim on a vast landscape of possibilities, one dot in a pointillist painting. My initial sense of loss was replaced by a fascination with the personal stories of others and their claims on what a word signified or an experience held. I sensed that if I listened closely and gathered in as many dots of meaning as I could, I might, just might, come close to the marvel of that mid-winter epiphany of 1952, when the gap between language and complete understanding vanished.

Ive come to understand the force of womens interest in personal narratives as a collective version of that impulse born in me when I was eight. We need to know how to read the world beyond our experience of it, and we trust firstperson accounts, perhaps more so because of the lack of faith in political and corporate declarations of truth and meaning. Personal stories are one means of getting a trusted inside viewThis is how wisdom, love, joy, betrayal, fear, regret have been for us. No assertions of absolute truth, no earth-shaking revelations or attempts to manipulate anothers belief, just individual voices making individual claims on the discovery of meaning.

Several years ago Carol Shields and I had the privilege of tapping into this passion for an inside view of womens experiences when we collaborated on editing the first two Dropped Threads anthologies. These collections of intimate stories on surprise and silence in womens lives have been embraced by readers with an enthusiasm that left all of uscontributors, editors and publishersamazed at the size of the community of shared interest we found. The fact that Carols wisdom and generous spirit were central to that community gives those paired books an especially treasured quality.

And yet there has been an ongoing insistence for more, from both readers and writers. In the three years since the publication of the second Dropped Threads anthology, personal essays have continued to come in just in case, and in every womens gathering or discussion group Ive attended, inevitably there was the question Will there be another collection? The decision to go ahead with a new anthology was a way of honouring the creative fervour swirling around me and, happily, keeping connected to it. The idea for the new theme came easily when I thought again of how varied our encounters inside language can be. Instead of having women focus on what they havent been told, I wanted them to write about their significant discoveries of meaning, to pass on what they have to tell all us enthusiastic dot collectors.

In direct invitations to established writers and in a cross-Canada call for proposals placed on the dropped threads website and in the Globe and Mail, the publishers and I asked women to consider the topic This I Know. The responses were immediate, as women released their well-earned wisdoms into stories, which rose up from across the country like happy vapours too long confined. The only hesitancy was with absolute truth-telling, with the ring of certainty that know suggests. Many writers obviously felt far more comfortable with a stance one of them referred to as this I suspect. Advice-giving too came in on a slant, delivered with humour and a clear-eyed view of the limited benefits of unsolicited counsel, no matter how well intended.

There also seemed to be limits on the kind of stories women wanted to tell. None of the three hundred proposals and submissions dealt with what women have learned about long-standing love relationships with men, and only a few were about their experiences of professional work in the traditional haunts of men. As if well, as if these topics have had adequate coverage, or verge on dangerous territory.

What women did want to write about was the importance of other connectionsto nature, to animals, to dance, to lives beyond the familiar, and above all to the varied choices and experiences of motherhood, a topic central to a third of the submissions. Another common theme was a sense of place: discovering it within families and in the world, but also asserting it by showing the unique experiences behind common terms such as victim, addict, rebel, celebrity. Womens remarkable affinity for endurance and peace surfaced in all these accounts. Whether they shared intimate moments of grace and beauty or charted paths through minefields of personal pain, these writers left blueprints for ways of being that others could follow.

The thirty-five pieces Ive selected from this rich array of stories stood out for me because of the particularly fresh, engaging ways they provide the sustenance we tend to look for in narratives. Each story either places us in a landscape we can experience anewAh, yes, I recognize that feeling, that thought, that phaseor takes us to new territory where were left altered in understanding and empathySo thats what its like inside an experience Ive never had. Either way, were enriched.

An eighty-two-year old friend of my sister commented when she heard I was working on this collection of womens personal essays, Tell her to lighten things up a bit for us. Well, Rose, I hope you and all others come away from reading this book buoyed up by the courage and creative wisdom of the contributors. And by the fresh glimpses they offer of what might otherwise lie just beyond our own small circles of meaning and sight.