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Travel report - Alex Ramon |
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Report on BACS Travel Award, May 2009
By Alex Ramon, University of Reading
I attended the Inaugural Carol Shields Symposium on Women’s Writing (8-10 May 2009) which was held at the University of Winnipeg and organised by Marjorie Anderson and Debbie Schnitzer. The Symposium proved a stimulating and highly enjoyable event that went far beyond the usual academic meeting, reflecting Shields’s status as both a popular and a literary author by combining the scholarly with the whimsical and the celebratory. Participants included undergraduate students, Shields’s family, and some of the most respected names in contemporary Canadian fiction and literary criticism. As such, the event enabled me to meet and network with Shields scholars from around the world and, through our conversations, to identify several new areas for research, teaching and possible collaborative projects.
The Symposium encompassed writing workshops, readings and dance, music and theatre performances, and culminated with the opening of the Carol Shields Memorial Labyrinth in King’s Park. These events took place alongside more traditional academic sessions that explored issues ranging from the presentation of male characters in Shields’s work, memoir-writing, the future of the novel, and women and power. The most successful panels placed Shields’s work in the context of other authors and wider debates on contemporary Canadian literature and women’s fiction. Joan Barfoot and Aritha van Herk led a lively discussion which explored the societal expectations and limitations placed on the content of women’s writing, while my own paper, “Writing About A Woman Writer’s Writing: Reflections of a Male Critic of Carol Shields’s Work” reflected upon my experience as a British male researcher of a Canadian female writer’s work.
A particular highlight of the Symposium, for me, were the performances of Shields’s plays Departures and Arrivals and Thirteen Hands. As I am currently working on an article on Shields’s drama, this was an invaluable and much appreciated opportunity for me to see these plays performed. Observing the audience response to the plays was also enlightening and has given me further material for this project.
The Symposium also saw the launch of the latest publication on Shields, Aritha van Herk and Conny Steenman-Marcusse’s Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo, a collection mixing tributes and ficto-critical responses to Shields’s writing to which I have contributed a piece based on Larry‘s Party. I was also grateful for the chance to promote my own book on Shields at the Symposium.
Overall, the sheer diversity of events resulted in a rewarding and enjoyable Symposium that allowed me to reflect on my work on Shields up to this point and inspired a number of new ideas and projects. I’m extremely grateful to BACS for making this trip possible.
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