Danielle Schaub - Böcker

"I am a writer because I was a reader first." Alison Gordon. "Nobody has ever written who never read." Mavis Gallant. "Reading is a connection, at once a way and a goal, a liberating destiny." Robert Kroetsch. Over 160 Canadian writers, in English and French, write about their experiences of reading. With striking photographs of each writer, Reading Writers Reading offers a sublime voyage into the heart of literary creation. Foreword by Russell Morton Brown.

Trauma and Meaning Making highlights multiple practices of meaning making after traumatic events in the lives of individuals and communities. Meaning making consists both in a personal journey towards a new way to exist and live in a world shattered by trauma and in public politics locating and defining what has happened. In both perspectives, the collection evaluates the impact achieved by naming the victim/s and thus the right of the victim/s to suffer from its aftermath or by refusing to recognise the traumatic event and thus the right of the victim/s to respond to it. A range of paradigms and techniques invite readers to consider anew the specificities of context and relationship while negotiating post-traumatic survival. By delineating how one makes sense of traumatic events, this volume will enable readers to draw links between practices grounded in diverse disciplines encompassing creative arts, textual analysis, public and collective communication, psychology and psychotherapy, memory and memorial.

Traumatic experiences with an overwhelming life-threatening feel affect numerous people’s lives. Death and disablement through accident, illness, war, family violence, natural and human-induced disaster can be experienced variously at an individual level through to whole communities and nations. Traumatic memories are intrusive and insistent but fragmented and distorted by the power of sensory information frozen in time. This volume examines the ways individuals, families, communities and nations have engaged with representations of traumas and the ethical dimensions embedded in those re-presentations. Contributors also explore the work of recovering from trauma and finding resilience through working with narrative and embodied forms such as dance and breathing. The ubiquity of trauma in human experience means that pathways to recovery differ, emerging from the way each engages with the world. Sharing, and reflecting on, the ways each copes with trauma contributes to its understanding as well as pathways to recovery and new strengths.Contributors are Svetlana Antropova, Peter Bray, Kate Burton, Mark Callaghan, Marie France Forcier, Monica Hinton, Gen’ichiro Itakura, Danielle Schaub, Zeina Tarraf and Paul Vivian.