Revisiting questions i asked my mother in Conversation with Di Brandt

Authors

  • Jeffrey Aaron Weingarten Fanshawe College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.v0i233.187503

Abstract

Reissued in Fall 2015 by Turnstone Press, Di Brandt's questions i asked my mother explores the ethical, moral, and existential queries of a lyric persona simultaneously youthful and adult, a woman whose perspective constantly oscillates between her footing in the past—surrounded by her family in Reinland, Manitoba—and in the immediate present, at a time when she experiences her distance from those times, places, and people. In its time, these aspects of the text brought Brandt into dialogue with topical issues such as second-wave feminism and Canadian multiculturalism. Thirty years later, Brandt’s sequence retains its power because of that dialogue. This interview with Brandt was conducted in June and July 2015.

Author Biography

Jeffrey Aaron Weingarten, Fanshawe College

J.A. Weingarten is a Professor of English and Communications at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. His research and teaching centre on twentieth-century Canadian literature and media with an emphasis on creative representations of cultural or personal histories in poetry, fiction, and theatre. In addition to his work on an edition of John Newlove’s letters and a book project on Canadian poets writing about history, he has recently published include reviews, articles, and interviews in Canadian Poetry, Canadian Literature: A Quarterly, and Studies in Canadian Literature. He is also the co-managing editor and co-founder of The Bull Calf: Reviews of Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Criticism.

Downloads

Published

2018-03-29

Issue

No. 233 (2017): Literary History

Section

Articles