"Education, Faculty of"@en . "Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCV"@en . "House, Liisa Terell"@en . "2009-12-03T22:14:53Z"@en . "2004"@en . "Master of Arts - MA"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "The thesis, In my Backyard: Stories of Identity, Community, and Curriculum\r\nthrough Creative Writing, is a collection of three narratives of finding voice and\r\ncommunity through creative writing and using these discoveries to shape a vision for\r\nwriting in the classroom. Themes that emerged through this personal and pedagogical\r\nresearch included: the dichotomy between in and out of school writing, writing as an\r\nexploration of identity, and the ability of a classroom writing community to promote\r\nreflection and risk-taking.\r\nThe thesis is written in three parts. The three parts in summary are an archive of\r\nmy learning, a record of student voices on creativity and writing, and a practical teaching\r\nand learning tool for teachers of creative writing. Each part of the thesis vividly paints the\r\nlandscape it represents and captures the characters who play with words in each context.\r\nPart One is an exploration and an archive of my matrilineal roots and what I learn\r\nfrom the writing on the dog-eared index cards in my grandmother's recipe box. I am\r\ntransported back to a time when wives and mothers cooked dinner and desserts, like my\r\ngrandmother's lemon squares, and kitchens were places of female wisdom.\r\nParts Two and Three tell the story of students learning about their identities\r\nthrough creative writing. This research included personal observation, the experience of\r\nco-teaching, student interviews and student surveys. I learned that our classrooms are\r\nimportant places for creative writing as self expression can build self esteem. This can\r\nultimately lead to a sense of community and personal freedom for young writers. Part Four is a curriculum for a new course, Creative Writing 10, inspired by\r\nAtwell's writing workshop approach (1998; 2002). Students look at English through the\r\nlens of writer and learn to play with words in the context of a cooperative teacher and\r\nstudent writing community. Together, as students and teachers, we hone the craft of\r\ncreative writing; the stories in our bones becoming the curriculum from which we learn\r\nabout who we are and the world we live in."@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/16287?expand=metadata"@en . "7176130 bytes"@en . "application/pdf"@en . "IN M Y BACKYARD: STORIES OF IDENTITY, COMMUNITY, A N D CURRICULUM T H R O U G H CREATIVE WRITING By LIISA T E R E L L H O U S E B.A., McGill University, 1995 P.D.P., Simon Fraser University, 1996 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL F U L F I L M E N T OF T H E REQUIREMENTS FOR T H E D E G R E E OF MASTER OF ARTS In T H E FACULTY OF G R A D U A T E STUDIES (Literacy Education) The University of British Columbia December 2 0 0 4 \u00C2\u00A9 Liisa Terell House, 2 0 0 4 A B S T R A C T The thesis, In my Backyard: Stories of Identity, Community, and Curriculum through Creative Writing, is a collection of three narratives of finding voice and community through creative writing and using these discoveries to shape a vision for writing in the classroom. Themes that emerged through this personal and pedagogical research included: the dichotomy between in and out of school writing, writing as an exploration of identity, and the ability of a classroom writing community to promote reflection and risk-taking. The thesis is written in three parts. The three parts in summary are an archive of my learning, a record of student voices on creativity and writing, and a practical teaching and learning tool for teachers of creative writing. Each part of the thesis vividly paints the landscape it represents and captures the characters who play with words in each context. Part One is an exploration and an archive of my matrilineal roots and what I learn from the writing on the dog-eared index cards in my grandmother's recipe box. I am transported back to a time when wives and mothers cooked dinner and desserts, like my grandmother's lemon squares, and kitchens were places of female wisdom. Parts Two and Three tell the story of students learning about their identities through creative writing. This research included personal observation, the experience of co-teaching, student interviews and student surveys. I learned that our classrooms are important places for creative writing as self expression can build self esteem. This can ultimately lead to a sense of community and personal freedom for young writers. Part Four is a curriculum for a new course, Creative Writing 10, inspired by Atwell's writing workshop approach (1998; 2002) . Students look at English through the lens of writer and learn to play with words in the context of a cooperative teacher and student writing community. Together, as students and teachers, we hone the craft of creative writing; the stories in our bones becoming the curriculum from which we learn about who we are and the world we live in. T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S Abstract Table of Contents List of Figures Preface Acknowledgments and Dedication PART O N E : Voices from the Kitchen 1.1 The Poet's Landscape 1.2 Composting Identities 1.3 Archiving Recipes of Mothering and Widowing 1.4 The Archivist and the Archived: Intertwining Objects and Subject 1.5 Connected Landscapes 1.6 Rewriting Kitchen Wisdom 1.7 When It Falls Apart, I Return to the Kitchen 1.8 A New Community of Kitchen Table Wisdom: The 2 a.m. Collective PART T W O : Learning Through Someone Else's Eyes 2.1 Transforming Student Esteem Through Writing 2.2 Research Questions and the Literature Review 2.3 Creative Writing as a Tool of Self Expression and Empowerment 2 . 4 Creative Writing as a Way of Seeing and Making Sense Of the Writer's World 2 .5 The Classroom Writing Community: A Microcosm of Society 2.6 The Inclusion of Adolescent Students' Voices in Writing Research 2.7 The Significance of this Creative Writing Research 2.8 My Research Project PART T H R E E : Journeys on a New Curricular Landscape 43 3.1 The Landscape at First Glance 43 3.2 Room 421 47 3.3 The Main Characters: Erin, Clancy, Tzitel, Crim, and Hint 51 3.4 Supporting Characters 58 3.5 The Plot Thickens: Interviews and Emerging Themes 63 3.6 Theme One: In and Out of School Writing 64 3.7 Theme Two: Writing as an Exploration of Identity 71 3.8 Theme Three: The Ability of a Classroom Writing Community to Promote Reflection and Risk-taking 75 3.9 Conclusions 81 3.10 Wading Through the Muddied Waters: What Are the Implications for my Teaching? 83 PART FOUR: Through the Looking Glass: Teaching Creative 85 Writing English 10 4.1 A Not-So-Modest Proposal 85 4.2 Through Writers' Lenses: Our Course Creation 87 4.3 The Spirit of a Writers' Workshop 89 4.4 Year One: When These Walls Talk Q O V References 92 Appendix 1: Recipe for Lemon Squares 95 Appendix 2: Research Methodology 96 Appendix 3: Visuals and Writing Unit Outline 98 Appendix 4: The VSB Art and Writing Exhibit Documents, 2 0 0 2 99 Appendix 5: Student and Teacher References for Teaching Creative Writing 101 Appendix 6: Sample Lesson on Teaching Students about 103 Sensory Language Appendix 7: Components of Atwell's Writer's Workshop 106 v i LIST OF FIGURES Woman with Egg #1 Woman with Egg #2 Woman with Egg #3 Woman with Egg #4 Index Card Recipe for Lemon Squares PREFACE To the Reader The manuscript, In my Backyard: Stories of Identity, Community, and Curriculum through Writing, is a collection of three narratives of finding voice and community through creative writing and using these discoveries to shape a vision for writing in the classroom. My backyard is expansive; it includes the landscapes of my matrilineal history, the classroom I dwelled in during my research project, and the curriculum I created for my own creative writing community in the secondary school system. These territories are charted by words; some of them mine and many of them belonging to other scholars and students. The map to my backyard is a maze of paths and landmarks at which you may choose to stop and ponder. These are written as poems, journal entries and quotes that mark my landscape. In writing these stories, I have garnered the hope that writing and the creative writing classroom can be a place where students and teachers find their unique voices, work together in a writers' community, and connect both private and public genres, audiences, and topics for writing. By experiencing my own life as my curriculum for this paper, I have learned the importance of allowing students' stories to become the curriculum of the writing classroom. By sharing our lives with each other, we are able to create a community of writers unlike anything else that exists in the public school system. As Connelly and Clandinin (1998) explain, There is no better way to study curriculum than to study ourselves. When we have a grasp of the difficulties, for example, of figuring out something simple such as how we think and feel as a component of the personal, we will understand the really serious difficulties of trying to figure out how someone else, our students, think and feel (p. 31). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND DEDICATION Becoming a writer has been a long but welcomed journey for me. Learning the importance of finding your spirit through artistic expression - be it writing, cooking, painting or any other creative endeavour - connects us with who we really are and helps us interact with the world with a sense of wonder. The best thing I've learned from this adventure is to ask the question \"what i f . What if I took a year off and lived the life of a writer? What if we allowed students to write their own stories and valued this as curriculum in our classrooms? What if I took the time to live in moments - not days -and noticed all that delights my senses? Thank you to Carl Leggo who started me on this journey by giving me permission to research my own stories and make them the curriculum for this thesis. His sense of wonder with the world made me want to live poetically. Thank you to Renee Norman and Theresa Rogers, two accomplished women, for reading my poetry and prose and giving me the confidence that my stories in and outside the classroom mattered. Thank you to my husband and partner, Vu who named me \"writer\" before I ever could and who delights in every word I share with him. His support of this thesis, by caring for our daughter on many late nights and weekends, and by encouraging me when I thought I'd never finish, is the only reason that the final project came to fruition. X Thank you to J , my mother, for recounting the stories of my grandmother, even the difficult ones, so that I could tell her story honestly; for letting me write at your kitchen table for inspiration; and for never doubting the worth of this crazy idea of writing a chapter that revolved around a recipe for lemon squares. This document is dedicated to my daughter, Ciara. May she know her great grandmother and the line of strong women she comes from through Voices from the Kitchen and may she find her own sense of freedom, like so many students I interviewed did, in the English classroom. X I PART ONE Voices from the Kitchen Cookbooks are cultural histories written primarily by women for women that can transport us to a different era (Haber in Alfroyd, 2 0 0 2 ) . The recipe box is nothing special, nothing ornate; its simple metal casing tells you nothing about its owner, my grandmother. But it holds secrets and it holds stories that began more than 65 years ago when she got married and end when we received the box upon her death in 2 0 0 0 . The only recipe that I know well is her version of lemon squares. I made them with her so many times in that yellow Formica kitchen on Transit Road. I can still imagine myself there, sifting the icing sugar onto the tops of the golden brown dessert, my hands sticky from the sweet lemon filling. Sometimes I still rifle through that box hoping I'll find the secrets that wil l tell me more about her, but all I ever find are recipes, most I've never tasted, and crumbs; remnants of the life of a wife and mother so long ago. At twenty-nine years old, a year after my grandmother's death, I am a wife, a newly proclaimed writer, an English teacher, and a graduate student taking her last course towards a Master's degree in Language and Literacy Education. The course, taught by Rishma Dunlop, is \"Women, Writing and Imagination\", and our time together has led to the formation of a community of nineteen female poets who call themselves the \"2 a.m. Collective\". Through the readings by feminist scholars and writers and through our writing assignments, we have shared many personal stories of mothering and researched what it means to be a woman, a writer and a poet. The stories of my grandmother, Mary 1 Elizabeth Botterell, surface and resurface as I listen to Rishma Dunlop's ( 2 0 0 2 a ) poetry about childhood and mothering: ...I sit by the window watching the night sky the mother writing poems of girls the art on white sheets like love this one will be strong and fierce this one will be tender and she will sing shaping angels, prophets for the world such terrifying beauty... (Excerpt from \"Stories from Boundary Bay\", p. 84) My grandmother's stories are obsessions that I have been trying to put into words since I started graduate work. While on educational leave for a year from my job teaching Secondary English in an inner city high school, I have lived the life of a writer. In a room of my own - when there aren't guests to accommodate, bikes to store, or a husband that needs to study for his medical exams - I sit daily to write. I stare at my mantra: Have faith, the thesis will come, and write my morning pages. Taking long walks through the woods off 33 r d Avenue, I fill my senses with the reds and coppers of fall leaves, the smell of wet grass and ferns, and the sight of endless rain drenched paths for poetic inspiration. When I return home, I email my WB, writing buddy Paige Hansen Davis; we share our writings online and talk about sending our work out for publication. 2 l.i. The Poet's Landscape I am sitting in my apartment, on a sunny July day, inside my blue office, with laundry drying on the rack beside me and two bookshelves overflowing with research books on writing: anthologies by women poets including Rishma Dunlop and Adrienne Rich, and a collection of emerging women poets in Breaking the Surface. Passages in my copy of Virginia Woolf s A Room of One's Own are marked. Feminist texts on being a writer by bell hooks and Nancy Mairs, and my writing notebooks are all stacked horizontally and vertically on my writer's chair, on the carpet, and in the bookshelves. I am the eye, the \"I\" in a storm of alphabets. I have gathered so many words over the past year that my collections are spilling out of my husband's bookshelf too. Amidst Campbell's Urology, The Synopsis of Psychiatry, his patient files, and his class notes from medical school, are two books that my grandmother left me in her will: Some Poems (1946) by W . H . Auden and a Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature (1910) by John W. Cousin. It is what is stuffed between the published pages that I covet most: my letters to her when I went away to McGill University, an old drawing of her house in Victoria, and a Christmas card from 1955 when she was happily married to my grandfather. This space where I sit surrounded by archives of women's lives - my own, my grandmother's and others, including Virginia Woolf - is the closest I have been able to come to \"a room of one's own\". I am immersed in women's words and family keepsakes, laundry and bills to pay; my writing life and my married life inseparable even in the midst of writing my graduate thesis. 3 1.2. Composting Identities As I read bell hooks' (1999) chapter, dancing with words, Rumi's words, \"Do you want the words or will you live what you know?\" (p. 45), resonate. I want to write myself into existence, I want to dance the words of who I am and who I am learning to be through the act of writing. I want to research, in the sense of the French word recherche: I want to look again, in order to reexamine the multiple identities of woman. This process begins for me through the viewing of artwork by artist Nicole Porter (1999 /2000) ; a series of paintings that had a profound impact on my view of who I want to be as a woman. Compost There she is goddess and mother fossilized in the rough canvas and plaster -thyme and lavender embedded in the skin of her wrists and fingers rosemary for remembrance she looks up, eyes closed towards the crimson and ochre flames she, at the centre of a burning sunset seed packages for sweet peas and winter pansies sweet basil and white sage scar her shoulders and neck, burned in the twilight, embodying her garden she composts kindred souls her face is a milky yellow -skin crackled with shards of shells a crumbling complexion in both hands she cups a perfect smooth egg, her amulet. 4 I grew up in a home surrounded by coastal artists; my parents hung Bill Reid masks in our living room and Rachel Gourlay's serigraphs of Sooke Inlet and Hernando Island throughout the main floor. Carl Larson's drawings of children in Swedish gardens graced my bedroom walls. But none of these ever moved me; I found them beautiful but I did not yearn for these works like I did for Nicole's. In many ways, her painting was a reflection of a part of who I am. In this artwork, I see myself dancing in the sunset of the twilight of experiences, a daughter becoming her mother and a granddaughter with her hands in the soil, fumbling below the surface for her roots, her histories. I ached for this piece because of what it revealed in me; how it made me understand the woman dancing and becoming - breaking free from the earth, strengthened by the egg, a sign of motherhood: remembered rapture reminds me of Nicole's \"Woman with Egg\" and how I longed to be in that painting, to be that woman, fiery with passion lost in the flames, hands above her head like she is receiving a quenching spring rain. The earth, her history is embedded in her body, rosemary, lavender, seed packages and egg shells, the composting of her past. I feel this woman's strength, passion, femaleness and remember this part of me- the strong sensuous woman rejoicing, capturing, in awe of the moment. (Course Notebook, July 11, 2002) Although her art was reasonably priced, my rational side did not allow me to purchase right there; I needed time to think about how I would pay for it and if I could afford it. Much to my disappointment, while I debated money versus soulful art, the painting was purchased; my reflection of self, bought by another woman. I had missed my chance. 6 1.3. Archiving Recipes of Mothering and Widowing I am still working on a poem about my grandmother's lemon squares for the collaborative piece that we are doing in \"Women, Writing and Imagination\". I have the drafts, five so far, paper clipped together and scribbled over in blue ink next to me. I want my words to make a life emerge from the piece, allowing the reader to live what I know of my grandmother: First Draft Somewhere a woman is writing a poem ancient recipes for mothering hidden tart and sweet in the lemon squares a gift that she makes from memory and packages for her granddaughters. Through the reading of Eavan Boland's Object Lessons (1995), I have been returning to objects that personify elements of my being and who my grandmother was to me. In the context of my matrilineal history and identity, objects are the evidence I possess of my foremothers' personal lives. These objects- archives of my roots and her life- were given to me after my grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Botterell, passed away in 2 0 0 0 . 7 Object l : Letters from Granddaughter The letters that I wrote to her while I was away at university are stuffed behind the faded orange cover of Auden's book of poems. They are distant thank yous for her care packages full of homemade baking. They tell filtered versions of my student life in Montreal. Dear Granny, Thanks for the lemon squares; they arrived just in time to be shared with friends at graduation. The ceremony was at Place des Arts and then there was a really nice cocktail reception outside on the main campus, they had a jazz trio and all! After the event, we did a lot of sightseeing and a lot of eating; Mom took us to Swartz's Deli on Saint Laurent for smoked meat... a real Montreal experience. I also took Mom on a walk through Westmount and we walked to Linda Redpath's place on Elm Street. It reminded me of you... (House, excerpt from personal correspondence, 1995) As I reread my letters and cards to her, I am reminded of the gaps her voice needs to fill to colour and contour the landscapes of these memories. Object 2: The Industrial Recipe Box Her dark green, stainless steel recipe box and her yellowed hand written recipe for Lemon Squares are next to my chair. These are the only words I have from my grandmother's life of 82 years. Last night, I looked through all the cards, hoping but not finding even one that had notes in the margin or indications of whether the recipe was tasty or terrible. I thumbed through each recipe card, opened folded notes and magazine clippings as I ached for clues to my grandmother's life behind these recipes and beyond her yellow kitchen. In a last attempt to find out more, I emptied the box of all its cards hoping there would be a secret hidden somewhere under the recipes. All that remained 8 was flour and a lone paper clip; dusty remnants of all the times that this box was thumbed through with her baking hands, flour, egg and sugar underneath her nails. But there are no other words, no emotions for me to read and savor. The words are mine to write; she has left me with her life stories in these objects and it is my responsibility to write her story from an alphabet of memory. 1.4. The Archivist and the Archived: Intertwining Objects and Subject In remembering, she became an artist, creating each landscape from the archives of memory, until her personal world expanded, swelling and resonating beyond itself, beyond herself, into the endless recollection and intersecting narratives that are history. (Dunlop, 2002b , p. 13) Archive derives from the Greek word arkheia meaning public records. However, these records that I possess are not public. The term is defined as: \"a collection of documents or records such as letters, official papers, photographs or recorded material kept for their historical interest; place where these are kept\" (MSNDictionary Online, 2002) . However, recipes are not included in this definition. The archivist is \"somebody employed to collect, catalogue, and take care of the items in an archive\" (Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 1989). This is my role but most of the time I am not sure who is the real archivist and who is the archived; I am learning my life by living moments of her life. As I read her recipes for lemon squares and venison stew, I write her recipes of mothering and widowing, her life objects also archives of my life history. 9 Woolf states (2001/1929) \"... that a woman writing thinks back through her mother\" (p. 114) and Leguin (1995) adds, \"that we have many mothers, those of the body and those of the soul\" (p. 192). My grandmother is a mother of my soul and my writing obsession. In her recipe box, I seek to collect, catalogue and take care of her untold stories trapped in these archives. I am learning who I am and who she was by exploring landscapes of memory and writing about this. I write and write and she continues to surface in my consciousness as a mother, a wife, a widow on the page. I seek to know why she never remarried after her husband died in 1958 and she was left alone with three children, aged two, thirteen and fifteen to care for and provide for. There was no time to look for a husband between working full time as a social worker and caring for the children. Mrs. Walker, my friend and housekeeper, was the only reason that I survived this turmoil. I want to know what it was to fall into such a deep depression that she lost her hair permanently and wore a wig ever since. I was in shock; Hugh had been given a clean bill of health at Dr. Buffam's office the week before. I was making eggs around the corner in the kitchen when he died suddenly of a heart attack at the breakfast table... right in front of the children. As Anne Cameron (2002) wrote, \"I did not come apart tidily\". I could not contain my grief; my body betrayed me when my hair fell out and I became numb. I want to know how she coped socially in Oak Bay, Victoria in the 1950s as the only single mother in her neighborhood. Soon after I realized that I could not maintain the life I wanted for myself and my children unless I went back to school, I rented out my house, left Oak Bay with 10 my youngest son and Mrs. Walker, and moved to Vancouver to complete a law degree. I want to know why she decided that she would never take a lover again. I did take lovers at first. In fact I fell in love with a man whom I would have considered marrying, had he not resided in another city... but it was too complicated and I had become accustomed to providing for myself and living in my home. I was too old to change my life for a man. These words, divulged slowly through years of conversation with my mother and through the one formal interview I was able to conduct with my grandmother in 1992 for a women's studies course, tell a version of events: the public censored one. Now, through my own writing, I imagine the words whispered in the silences between these lines over and over, the private lives of my grand mother. 1 . 5 . Connected Landscapes Language is the very voice of the trees, the waves, the forest. (Merleau-Ponty in Dunlop, 2002b , p. 4) Montreal, Winter 1994. I am in my third year of a BA at McGill University, the same school that my grandmother attended in the 1940s to become a social worker. This geography is our bond; two women living similar academic lives in the same city 51 years apart. She wanted me to be here, in a place that is now as much mine as hers. Langue Maternelle (forMEB) Two scholars learn the contours ofwrought-iron gates and worn out brownstones walk the broken pavement cracked from cold at McGill au centre-ville. 11 In the 1940s in the 1990s grandmother and granddaughter spend days in lecture theatres mapping mahogany tables charting green chalk boards echoing antiquated knowledge of graying professors. They spend weekends wandering in Westmount two generations apart breathing in the same old English society rooted in tea roses and Earl Grey on Redpath Crescent. The grandmother's journey begins forging footprints into brittle pavement of academia where wild daisies and dandelions will grow in another season in another city when she becomes a social worker. The grand daughter retraces maternal roots reads the imprints of her ancestors on pages ofSimone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf finds her own lines in English and French essays that inspire her to be a teacher in both languages. In seasons of ochre maple leaves worn into soles of boots ice stuck on eyelashes mauve crocuses protected in palms two women with the history of cedars and arbutus trees drenched in their skin flourish here. They learn to whisper their own alphabets and to transcend two generations. I am at the row of metal post boxes in the lobby of my four storey brick apartment building on Sherbrooke and Aylmer in the student ghetto. The building is old and drafty. A single light illuminates the narrow lobby and corkscrew stairs that lead up to my second floor 1 V 2 : a bachelor suite. It's minus 20 outside and I'm huddled against the hot water 12 radiator in my Gortex parka and toque. With mitts in mouth and backpack lodged between my feet, I fumble through my keys looking for the right one to open my mail slot, my hands still numb from the three block walk from the Milton gates in the wind and snow. My key turns slowly in the mail box lock and I know there is a package from the West Coast inside. I shake my key and bang the box in anticipation of the surprise and the package is dislodged, the mail slot open. Wrapped in brown paper and masking tape and sent five days ago according to the blurred ink of the postage stamp, are my grandmother's lemon squares all the way from Victoria. I know this even before opening the wrapping because I recognize her handwriting- blue scrawl on the brown paper. The package is sticky and full of crumbs. The squares are wrapped in crinkled wax paper. They are stale and some are slightly moldy but I covet this gift like I would a handwritten letter full of vivid descriptions of every detail of life back at home. I imagine the ritual; her thin hands mixing, pouring and tasting the sweet lemon squares before she sent them off to Montreal. There is never much of a note with these squares; I open them up and find, as usual, a newspaper clipping on something political and a scrap with, \"What do you think? Much love, Granny\". This is how I knew her; through her brown paper packages full of baking, not through long letters or expensive birthday gifts. This food was my only window into the private woman she was and the love she had for me as her granddaughter. 13 T h i r d Draft Somewhere a woman is writing a poem as she adds ingredients beyond the yellowed, hand written recipe card bittersweet memories the flavor of her secrets to each batch of lemon squares ancient ritual of mothering sweet lemon for her granddaughter to taste. Vancouver, July 25th, 2000. I a m i n m y house o n Vancouver's west side packing boxes to move into an apartment w i t h m y partner. It is late afternoon, the part of the day that I l ike best because there is s t i l l enough natural l ight f i l tering through the screen door for me to continue packing without having to t u r n o n the electricity. I a m seated o n the h a r d w o o d floor surrounded by flattened cardboard boxes, books a n d layers of dust. W h e n the phone rings a n d I f inally locate i t i n the corner of the r o o m , the l ine is silent.... a n d then, m y mother who is o n the other e n d i n V i c t o r i a begins. I don't know how to tell you this. Your grandmother, we found her this morning... she died last night in the kitchen... of a heart attack. I just thought you'd want to know. I'm sorry. I'll let you know about the memorial arrangements. I a m n u m b . She h a d been i n the hospital a n d h a d just re turned home. W e h a d set u p a home care nurse for her so she could stay i n her house. I h a d not gone to visit her 14 because I was teaching Summer School and it seemed too difficult to find a substitute on short notice and after all, she would be fine, she was the toughest woman I knew. In the kitchen. I kept thinking of her there, feeling her heart constricting like it must have done once before when her husband died so suddenly in the same place in 1958. / remember the pastel yellow walls and the miniature stools just for us in the Formica breakfast nook. My sister and I would sit in our matching flannel nightgowns early on Saturday mornings while Gran toasted up her homemade whole wheat bread that she kept in a secret drawer. Out would come the plum jam made from the bounty of the backyard orchard and a piping hotpot of Celestial Seasonings tea, the aromas of chamomile and mint steaming from my mug and warming my hands and face. I kept thinking she must have chosen to go, to give up and just die, or she would've picked up the phone and tried to save her life. \"If ever I can't take care of myself, just kill me. I don't want to ever have to depend on someone else\"I heard her say only once, near the end. When my mother returned from packing up the contents of her childhood house, she brought me two things that had been left for me in my grandmother's will; the letters I'd sent Gran in response to her packages of lemon squares and two books of poetry. I'd never received words from her before and I craved more, needing not just to have her books of poetry but to have her stories, in her voice. The routine was always the same; brush your teeth, climb into bed and wait for Granny to come up and say goodnight. On the wooden stairs you could hear the hollow sounds of her heels as she walked up to the second floor. In hand, she would carry a red checkered bag of Dare mint toffees- humbugs- one for each of us. She would sit on the edge of the bed and say goodnight, the humbugs, our kisses. 15 Later, she shared with me the many keepsakes that she had kept from the house on Transit Road- but the simple metal recipe box intrigued me the most. 1.6. Rewriting Kitchen Wisdom I want a poem to grow old in. I want a poem I can die in. (Eavan Boland, p .209) The Matriarch Now she stands, wig positioned appropriately greyed for the occasion straw hat button down blouse and blue sweatshirt grey flannels and hiking boots glasses delicately balanced on the end of her narrow pointy nose Neighbourhood granddaughters gather and listen as she stands in front of her garden maze and recites the story of Theseus and the Minotaur Labyrinths of longing journeys on cobbled roads and dusty pathways previously unworn by women now fragrant with thyme and snow drops What I know about my grandmother is sweet lemon squares in brown paper sent through the mail to me in Montreal, toasted homemade bread slathered in sticky orange marmalade from the pantry, Saturday mornings at the yellow Formica counter Public eyes see her in sepia, fossilized woman wife widow Mrs. Hugh Botterell she is forty still slim Hollywood beautiful like Marlena Dietrich high cheekbones, hair rolled into style on both sides above her ears kneeling in the grass with baby Private details on the back of the yellowed snapshot revealing 16 bust: 36 waist: 26 hips: 32 dress Size: 6 whispers of the body her watermark concealed inside the flap of her late husband's wallet stored in the attic. Would my grandmother have been content to grow old and die in these poems? # * * I am trying to understand Eavan Boland's (1995) theory of women as objects and how it relates to my obsession with my grandmother's things. In Object Lessons, she argues that the woman has traditionally appeared as an object of men's desire in poetry and that women are: ... Reassembling a landscape where subject and object are differently politicized, where expression... may be an index of powerlessness. I intend them to suggest however sketchily, the distances and differences which open when these traditional elements are disassembled (p. 220-221). By making my grandmother's recipes her archives, I am reassembling her private life where her objects come to represent her as subject. Eavan Boland (1995) describes this experience when writing the poem, \"The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me\": I was writing a sign which might bring me closer to those emblems of the body... I had a clear sense of- at last- writing the poem away from the traditional object (p. 230-231). The most coveted item I possess of my grandmother's is her recipe box. In it are the recipes of childhood; my grandmother's, my mother's and mine. Her recipe for lemon squares is written in blue ink and is the only memento I have with her handwriting on it. It is stained with oils and yellow with age but it still smells of her kitchen, of baking and 17 flour and heat. I run my fingers over the tattered cue card feeling for the grooves her pen strokes, tracing the contours of memory, knowing that she sat writing, right on this surface, in order to preserve a family recipe1. L E M O