The Voice Is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive

SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

Guest Bios: 

Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, where her research focuses on podcasting as scholarly communication, systemic barriers to access in the Canadian publishing industry, and the history of middlebrow periodicals. Her work can be found in various journals including Participations, Modernism/modernity Print+, the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and Studies in Canadian Literature; she is also the co-editor of the book Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug 2018). Hannah is the co-creator of Witch, Please, a feminist podcast on the Harry Potter world, and the creator of the weekly podcast Secret Feminist Agenda, which is currently undergoing an experimental peer review process with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. She is also the host of the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast, an experimental collaborative research podcast created through the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership.

andrea bennett is a National Magazine Award–winning writer and editor. Their writing has been published by The Atlantic, the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, Hazlitt, Vice, Reader’s Digest, Vogue Italia, Quill & Quire, and many other outlets. andrea’s first book of poetry, Canoodlers, came out with Nightwood Editions in 2014. Their Moon Travel travel guide to Montréal is now available, as is their guide to Québec City. Their first book of essays, Like a Boy but Not a Boy, is forthcoming with Arsenal Pulp Press in Fall 2020. 

Katherine McLeod researches and teaches Canadian literature through sound, performance, and archives. Her recent publications include a chapters in the books Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics, Moving Archives (Wilfrid Laurier UP), and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (MQUP), which she also co-edited with Jason Camlot. Currently, she is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Concordia University, where she researches CBC Radio recordings and where she is organizing SpokenWeb’s Ghost Reading Series. Follow the site she curates for Montreal readings at WherePoetsRead.ca and @poetsread.

Jen Sookfong Lee's books include The Conjoined, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award; The End of East, and Gentlemen of the Shade. Jen teaches writing at The Writers’ Studio with Simon Fraser University and co-hosts the podcast, Can’t Lit.

Episode Resources: 

bennett, andrea. Excerpt from “The People's Poetry.” The essay appears in the book Like a Boy But Not A Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood outside the Gender Binary to be published by Arsenal Pulp Press, fall 2019.

Camlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. "SGW Poetry Remix" MP3 file, 12 Dec 2018.

MacEwen, Gwendolyn. “Dark Pines Under Water.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaHTMxvxNGc

MacEwen (a performance)." Resurfacing: Women Writing across Canada in the 1970s. Mount Allison University & Université de Moncton, 26-28 April 2018.

--- "Performing the Archive: A Remix." Performed with Jason Camlot. Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, Montreal, 5 May 2019.

MacEwen, Gwendolyn. “Dark Pines Under Water.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaHTMxvxNGc

---  Reading with Phyllis Webb at Sir George Williams University, Nov 18 1966. https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/gwendolyn-macewen-at-sgwu-1966/

--- "Past and Future Ghosts." Afterworlds. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.

McLeod, Katherine. "(Un)Covering the Mirror: Performative Reflections in Linda Griffiths’s Alien Creature: A Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen and Wendy Lill’s The Occupation of Heather Rose." Theatre and Autobiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice. Eds. Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman (Talon, 2006). 89-104.

--- "An Archival Remix" Performance by Katherine McLeod and Emily Murphy. Toronto: Modernist Studies Association, 18 Oct 2019.

Music:

“Flamenco Rhythm” by Sunsearcher: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Sunsearcher

"Soothe", “At Our Best Alone,” “A Certain Lightness,” “The Bus At Dawn,” “Slow Slow Sky” all from https://www.sessions.blue/