In this Book
- The Queen of Peace Room
- Book
- 2006
- Published by: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Series: Life Writing
What is memory, and where is it stored in the body? Can a room be symbolic of a lifetime?
Memories are like layers of your skin or layers of paint on a canvas. In The Queen of Peace Room, Magie Dominic peels away these layers as she explores her life, that of a Newfoundlander turned New Yorker, an artist and a writer — and frees herself from the memories of her violent past.
On an eight-day retreat with Catholic nuns in a remote location safe from the outside world, she exposes, and captures, fifty years of violent memories and weaves them into a tapestry of unforgettable images. The room she inhabits while there is called The Queen of Peace Room; it becomes, for her, a room of sanctuary. She examines Newfoundland in the 1940s and 1950s and New York in the 1960s; her confrontations with violence, incest, and rape; the devastating loss of friends to AIDS; and the relationship between life and art. These memories she finds stored alongside memories of nature’s images of trees pulling themselves up from their roots and fleeing the forest; storms and ley lines, and skies bursting with star-like eyes.
In The Queen of Peace Room, from a very personal perspective, Magie Dominic explores violence against women in the second half of the twentieth century, and in doing so unearths the memory of a generation. In eight days, she captures half a century.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xi-xii
- Liturgy of the Hours
- pp. xiii-xiv
- Introduction
- pp. 1-4
- Chapter 1 Friday, Midnight
- pp. 5-12
- Chapter 2 Saturday Morning
- pp. 13-24
- Chapter 3 Sunday, 7 A.M.
- pp. 25-44
- Chapter 4 Monday, 6 A.M.
- pp. 45-64
- Chapter 5 Tuesday, Dawn
- pp. 65-80
- Chapter 6 Wednesday, Pre-dawn
- pp. 81-90
- Chapter 7 Thursday, 9 A.M.
- pp. 91-94
- Chapter 8 Friday. Rain.
- pp. 95-98
- Works Cited
- pp. 101-102
Additional Information
Copyright
2002