“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” — Virginia Woolf

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Category: activism

Pandemic Journal 20 March 2022 — I felt nostalgic about life writing

20 March, 202222 March, 2022 janice williamsonLeave a comment

What happens during the war to autobiography by those who are neither warmongers nor victims?

Posted in activism, anti-racist feminism, autobiography, autobiography, death, desire, grief, memoir, Russia, Ukraine, war, writing, Yoga

Pandemic Journal 11/1/21: a retiree remembers classrooms students hallways colleagues gardens mentors

11 January, 202220 February, 2022 janice williamsonLeave a comment

Sheena and I (May Day, 2019) Two years after retirement she finds this five-year-old journal entry —Sept 5, 2015: the serendipity of today Such a beautiful first class day. Two courses began - and I returned home to pass out in a deeply pleasurable nap of sheer exhaustion at how intense these initial encounters can… Continue reading Pandemic Journal 11/1/21: a retiree remembers classrooms students hallways colleagues gardens mentors

Posted in academia, activism, aging, Alberta, an ethics of care, creative nonfiction, Department of English & Film Studies, friendship, humour, memoir, mentor, mourning, pleasure, politics, retirement, teaching, the measure of things, University of Alberta, women in academia

Pandemic Journal 19/7/20 — Summer in the city bricolage: masks and masculinity, two gardens, a nearby beach, a Chinese grocery, a market, and David Suzuki

21 July, 2020 janice williamsonLeave a comment

Summer in the city bricolage: masks and masculinity, two gardens, a nearby beach, a Chinese grocery, a market, and David Suzuki

Posted in academia, activism, COVID-19, David Suzuki, Edmonton, Edmonton, environment, Food, friendship, gardens, grief, haptic, history, Internment, Justin Trudeau, neighbours, pandemic, pleasure, science, the measure of things, touch, Uncategorized, University of Alberta, writing, WWII Japanese internment

Split

21 February, 202021 February, 2020 janice williamson4 Comments

Two things are happening simultaneously. A propellor whirls. My being is moving in two directions. My body is twinned in two places at once. The present tense and my long ago past collide every morning. I am in 2020 Oaxaca City, Mexico City. And in my great grandmother’s nineteenth-century English home.

Posted in activism, aging, Alberta, Alzheimer’s, Berkshire, creative process, England, environment, femicide, Indigenous, Jason Kenney, memoir, Mexico, Mexico City, Mothering, mourning, Oaxaca City, revolution, settler colonialism, writing

Love

25 December, 2019 janice williamson1 Comment

Love means to learn to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things. For you are only one thing among many. (A poem by Czeslaw Milosz)

Posted in activism, adoption, aging, an ethics of care, creative process, Czeslaw Milosz, David Young, friendship, poetry, the measure of things, writing

Mill Creek War Room Communique #2— ‘AxeIt’, the new ‘Wexit’

23 December, 201923 December, 2019 janice williamsonLeave a comment

AxeIt (After Kafka) Franz Kafka on the prairies But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone.... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. Franz Kafka, Letter to… Continue reading Mill Creek War Room Communique #2— ‘AxeIt’, the new ‘Wexit’