Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma

Notes on Contributors

Helen M. Buss is a Professor Emeritus of English, University of Calgary, and has published novels, literary criticism, and books on women’s autobiographical practices, as well as her own story, Memoirs from Away: A New Found Land Girlhood. Buss continues to read memoirs, but currently is occupied in writing a fiction based on her recent experience of the effects on self definition occasioned by the medical diagnosis of a chronic blood disorder. The study of Lauren Slater’s approaches to narrating her challenges with mental illness are instructive in this regard, as contemporary experiments in memoir are teaching fiction writers new strategies. Transferring insights from one genre to another has always been a form of cross-disciplinary discovery, yet the art of fiction has so dominated literary study that little attention has been given to the way in which autobiographical tradition has contributed to how fictions are made. Slater brings together various narrative strategies chosen from medicine , science, and psychotherapy, as well as from fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, to make her memoir texts. In doing so she allows us to appreciate how a personal story authorizes itself, and gains its readers’ trust and belief in the writer’s sincerity. Sally Chivers, who was at ubc during the Wall project, is now a member of the English department at Trent University, where she also teaches Canadian studies. Her essay is part of her ongoing research into the cultural and social connections between aging and disability, which are more complicated than one initially might expect. Representation continues to be central in her research, which combines literary and film analysis, 337 Notes on Contributors critical theory, focus group interviews, and work on social movements. In putting these elements together, narrative and narratology are useful in demonstrating the cultural and social stories that make disability and old age meaningful, in positive and negative ways. She is particularly interested in how artistic forms contribute to critical thought and social movements, especially in the growing field of disability studies and the Canadian disability movement. Hilary Clark (Department of English, University of Saskatchewan) has long been preoccupied with depression both as an ongoing condition in her life and a subject central to her research and teaching. She teaches a course for the Women’s and Gender Studies Department entitled “Women, Depression, and Writing,” focusing particularly on how personal narratives interpret and construct the experience of depression and the encounters depression entails with medication and therapies, an account of which is in Teaching Life Writing Texts, edited by Craig Howes and Miriam Fuchs (forthcoming). Her teaching includes the two narratives discussed in this volume, which analyze the experience of psychiatric hospitalization for depression. Her personal account of living with depression as an academic will appear in Illness in the Academy, edited by Kimberly Myers (forthcoming ). Currently, she is assembling a volume of essays by contributors from a wide range of disciplines on depression and narrative. She also works on modernist writing from the perspective of trauma theory. Pamela Cushing currently teaches courses in sociology, social justice, and peace, as well as disability studies, at King’s University College, University of Western Ontario. While rooted in critical anthropological theory and ethnographic methods, her research in the area of impairment has been cross-disciplinary by necessity, given her interest in caregiving and developmental impairment(s). In this area, experimental narrative approaches are emerging to address issues of voice and representation, especially for people who do not use words to communicate. In her contribution , Cushing examines the ways in which informal narratives about everyday life can help those who work and share life with people with impairments, by facilitating continuity and contributing to an understanding of the histories of those who need care. Her research was extended in 2005 by fieldwork done with youth with complex developmental impairments and their co-workers in Scottish Camphill residential schools, using participant observation and co-created narratives about the youths’ experiences of inclusion/exclusion there and elsewhere. 338 notes on contributors Lisa Diedrich (Department of Women’s Studies, suny–Stony Brook) is currently completing a book, Treatments: Negotiating Bodies, Language, and Politics in Illness Narratives (forthcoming, 2007, University of Minnesota Press). In it, she analyzes contemporary memoirs as both effective and affective histories, while being attentive to both the rhetoric and practices of politics as well as the poetics and practices of suffering. She calls her method for reading...