Writing The Everyday: Women's Textual Communities In Atlantic Canada

In Writing the Everyday Danielle Fuller analyses writing by Atlantic Canadian women from diverse backgrounds. Drawing extensively on original interviews with writers, editors, and publishers, Fuller investigates how and why communities form around texts that record women's everyday realities, histories, and traditions, showing that prose writing and poetry performances combine oral story-telling, family history, and other aspects of local cultures with popular literary genres to address issues of racism, sexism, and poverty.

Prose works examined include Bernice Morgan's best-selling novel Random Passage, short stories by Helen Porter and Governor General's award-winner Joan Clark, as well as poetry by Mi'kmaq Elder Rita Joe and "People's Poet" Maxine Tynes, and the adult work of well-known children's author Sheree Fitch. Fuller demonstrates how these writers overturn regional stereotypes to present a complex and intriguing portrait of women's lives in Canada's most eastern provinces.