An Interview with Margaret Clarke (Helen M. Buss)

This interview was conducted by CASP in February, 2004.

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Margaret Clarke

Could you tell us about the various contexts that led to the genesis of Gertrude and Ophelia?

When I wrote G and O in the mid 1980s I had already written a prize-winning novel ( The Cutting Season, 1984) and was in the middle of studying for my candidacy exams for a PhD in English. Writing the scenes of the play acted as a way to stay in touch with the part of me that liked writing as much as reading and gave me a break from my candidacy reading lists. The play writing also sent me back to Shakespeare's play to do the kind of close reading and theorization that a PhD is all about. I found it a satisfying combination of my two kinds of intellectual work: creative writing and critical writing. In later years I realized that the fact that I chose to write a Shakespearean based play (when I was studying 20th -century literature) may well have been an act of nostalgia for the earlier days of my graduate studies when I had intended to study Shakespeare as my special area. I had switched to a twentieth-century topic because of a dissatisfaction with the teaching and critical writing in the Shakespeare field which at that time was not friendly to feminism. Ironically, nowadays some of the most interesting work on gender is happening in the Early Modern specialties.

How would you characterize the ways in which the figure of Ophelia now works as a cultural trope? How do you think your play has added to the discursive resonances around Ophelia?

Ophelia is the stereotypical female victim. If you look closely at Shakespeare's play she is a girl neglected by all who should hold some responsibility for her: her father, her brother, her boyfriend and the court. I wanted to take that figure (as well as the other female stereotype of Gertrude the whore/queen), not fully developed in Shakespeare's plays because they are secondary to his purposes, and show that the typical female victim is not so by nature, but by circumstance and sexual politics. Shakespeare's Ophelia is smart (her knowledge of the natural world is sound), but her loyalties are conflicted and her position ultimately powerless. I believe that Shakespeare's depiction of her madness is accurate, however its causes are implicit, not written fully into Hamlet since the play is not really about women. I think her madness comes not only as a result of her treatment by the men in her life (her father using her as a pawn, her boyfriend casting her off, her brother not concerned until too late), but also because she lacks a mother to guide her through the "system."

Critics have taken note of the feminist poetics evident in the play. Some ten years later do you think that the landscape round these feminist poetics has changed significantly? Are you happy with that kind of critical perception of the work?

Since I have always asserted that a "poetics" contains both aesthetic and ethical values intimately intertwined, I need to make a statement of my "poetics" which includes my "politics" in order to answer your question. When I used the word "system" in the previous answer I mean the patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system of societal organization that advantages men through its institutions and practices, and disadvantages women. Patriarchy has existed in many forms and for many eras. We confront different faces of patriarchy then 500 years ago, but the core values have not changed so much. This belief makes me a feminist. A feminist is someone who believes that societal structures and practices need to be more women centered and less men centered and that true equality only arrives with the recognition of the different needs of men and women and children and a true balance of those needs. The very fact that I find it necessary to define what "patriarchy" and "feminism" are means that the intellectual "landscape" has changed considerably in the last ten to fifteen years. A generation ago such words were part of current discussion. Now they are not.

Everything I write (right up to my most recent book on women's memoirs) has a feminist poetics as its foundation and taps into aesthetic values that support that foundation. For example, G and O has been criticized by theatre people for being too much like a critical piece, and by literary critics for falling into a imitative tragic structure when it should critique and deconstruct that structure (in the way postmodern rewritings of Shakespeare do). I think feminist poetics compels me to cross generic and conventional ideological lines to create a different form, but maintain the elements of the past that still fit. Shakepeare was right about the fate of the Ophelias of this world, why should I pretend otherwise merely to give people a "postmodern" experience of irony and satire? I think all artists produce out of an ideological commitment. We don't always recognize the ideology of many artists because they, despite their talent and accomplishments, parrot the dominant ideology which surrounds us all the time like the air we breathe. We do recognize a feminist inspired work because we are definitely not surrounded by feminism.

I think the most important feminist statements in this play are two: 1) that young men who are our heroes, good at sports, intellectually promising, privileged in their daily life by their class, or accomplishments, or their future prospects can also be the oppressors, even the rapists of women, because culture allows them, even encourages them to feel they are entitled to such privileges. 2) What young women need more than anything, to protect them in patriarchy, are strong mothers and mother surrogates, mothers they can respect, who can guide them through the perils of a culture not shaped in their interests. It is almost 20 years since I wrote this play and I feel the need for these feminist truths in our culture is greater now then when I wrote it. Although feminism has become the new "f" word for many people, I think this is because our culture has not turned off feminism, but is merely in a lull between the "waves" of feminism. I am still proudly a feminist of the second "wave" and optimistically waiting for the "third" wave that will be lead by young women who will find the way, with help, to avoid becoming Ophelias. More importantly, perhaps the third wave can make them into mothers who can avoid becoming Gertrudes. I hope my play can be a small part of creating that new wave of feminism. Perhaps this interview can help readers, critics and theatre "people" approach the play in the spirit in which it was written.

The play, in a crucial scene, has Ophelia recount her rape by Hamlet to Gertrude. What sorts of challenges did this present in the staging of the play and what has been the reception of this scene by the actors playing it––and the audiences watching it?

I was an observer and advisor of two productions of G and O, one by the University of Manitoba Drama department in 1987 and one by Calgary's Maenad Theatre in 1992. This gave me opportunities to observe and interact with directors and actors staging my play. This scene is indeed crucial since it contains both the most intimate moment of trust between Gertrude and Ophelia and the seeds of the betrayal of that trust. The tone of the scene is complex. The women are consolidating their devotion to one another, caught as they are, trying to make the best of the central act of female oppression: sex without choice. So there must be grief and pain, but also tenderness and love.

At the same time, there is the betrayal implicit in Gertrude's downplaying of the rape, one which is the fault of her own son. In Gertrude's experience, lack of choice in sex is inevitable and a smart woman must immediately turn it to use. Like most women who have done well in the world, she does so by surviving patriarchy, not defying it. She thinks they can both survive if they play the cards they've been dealt with skill. Yet she must not come off as merely a conniving woman. She is making the best of a bad bargain, as women often do. She must both be the plotting woman and the woman who does have a genuine affection for this girl. She is a woman always thinking of her son's safety first, but able to protect this helpless girl as well (and of course assure her own safety as the mother and now potential grandmother of heirs to the throne).

Ophelia must make us feel her victimhood, but also feel her insight into the situation, an insight that is greater than Gertrude's, despite her young years. She knows that her identity has been changed forever through the violent act of another person. She intuits the threat to her integrity as a human subject, understands the appeal of suicide as a dangerous solution when we are robbed of what makes us who we are. Gertrude is her last chance: "If I had not told you, I think I would have killed myself," she says. Through Gertrude she hopes to make her way to some new personhood. She imagines a retreat from the world of the court, into a rural paradise with no violent men and Gertrude's full devotion to her. Her child-like, daughterly yearning cannot be satisfied given the world she lives in.

I found that actors and directors wanted to talk about this scene a lot, but in an enthusiastic way, finding their talents and techniques challenged by all that the very few words of the scene imply. The director of the Maenad production, Joyce Doolittle, made a wise choice when she had Gertrude in bed as the scene begins, and had her take Ophelia into bed with her, as a mother might a young child. I once remarked to Barbara Campbell-Brown, the actor who played Gertrude in the Maenad production, that this was her hardest scene since she must establish the opposites of Gertrude's situation, her love and her political scheming, her divided loyalties, her strength and her ultimate helplessness. Having, in the past, played Gertrude in Shakespeare's play, Campbell-Brown asked me if I had ever counted the scenes in which Gertrude stands silent in Hamlet , in which the woman playing her part must act only with her body, never her voice. She said it was wonderful to finally have words to work with!

I think audiences felt the intensity of this scene especially with the physical image before their eyes of two very different women who are symbolically in the same "bed" as far as their gendered positions are concerned.

A key   feature of the play is the play within the play trope and the consequent doubling up of characters.  The move transforms a standard Shakespearean plot device in unusual ways that comment on Shakespearean adaptation generally (with characters actually making comments about that process of adaptation). How important was it to you dramaturgically to make evident the play's mechanics in this way? Could you discuss some of the writing and production issues that may have ensued from your decision to frame the play in this way?

The "frame" scenes that show the playwright/Gertrude character in conversation with the actor/Horatio character were added for the second production of G and O. After the Manitoba production I had a lot to think about. Seeing your play staged for the first time, reading the reviews and discussing it with people allows you to see it quite differently. I saw that some people's reaction to the play was too firmly held within the older play. After all, along with Lear, Hamlet is a central engine of our culture. I felt that some viewers were not "getting" the fuller cultural inquiry my play wanted to engender, because they saw me as merely giving the two women in Shakespeare's play more air time. By the time I moved to Calgary to take up an academic position I had decided that what was lacking in the play was a level at which I could bring the present moment and our own ideological situation into conversation with some age old problems of gender, problems that predate Shakespeare and will certainly outlive me.

Despite my feeling that much postmodern literary technique leaves texts at the level of playful cultural critique without any ethical substance, I have always felt that feminists can make good use of the deconstructive, satirical, and playful mimicry elements of postmodern literary production. I was happy when I hit upon the framing scenes technique as a solution, since it was so nicely "Shakespearean," and part of my revisionary critique of this cultural icon was to respect my source, therefore I decided to write the "play" that "surrounds" the play (rather than a play within a play) for the second production. Reaction to the framing scenes was mixed. Some see it as a distraction from the important moral message of the tragic action of the play, some love its playful feminism. I generally feel it did what I wanted it to do, but I have two reservations about the device. At times, the part of the "Actor" can steal the scene and do exactly what the "Playwright" is trying to avoid, let the men and their interests take center stage. The part was so easy to write, so easy to get drawn into since such young men are all around us in our contemporary world; they feel loudly entitled to dominate while cozying up to women; they amuse with their mastery of language, they are seductively critical of more conventional men. Often figured as gay, or at least young and opposed to older more patriarchal men, as a trope of the modern male they are quickly populating and begin to gain dominance in our culture. They are an interesting twist on the Hamlet figure, one made by our postmodern times. They are often the allies of women early in their careers, but once they gain their "rightful" places they become the new representatives of the patriarchy.

In our ideological moment, we recognize these playful figures, and want more, more, more of their seeming subversiveness, expressed as it is in a postmodern playfulness. As a writer, I really felt the way the dominant ideology seduces me back into the mainstream through this figure. He was hard to control once I started writing him! I'm afraid I gave him too many good lines!

The second reservation I have about the framing scenes is perhaps more subtle, but also more serious. During the rehearsals of the Maenad production I was asked why the actor who played Ophelia was not given a voice in the frame scenes. I answered that my decision to just allow her to be on stage, but silent, was a reminder of the more serious center of the play. Her silence also reinforced my belief that the "Ophelias" of our own time are still largely unheard, unrescued. But I took the critique seriously, and added, almost at the end of rehearsals, the small exchange at the end of the play between the two women left on stage after "the guys have all gone." It is understated, and I still wonder if it is enough. But that is part of the creative process.

One never produces a completely satisfying piece of work. I like to imagine Shakespeare sitting at rehearsals of his Hamlet, wondering if there is really any other way he can manage the ending without all that unwieldy swordplay and almost comic array of bodies on the stage! But perhaps there was no other way he could make his ideological point, except through violence and bodies and a not very convincing Fortinbras picking up the pieces of patriarchy. Perhaps there is no other way I can make my feminist point except through an understated moment of "hope."

Could you reflect on the extent to which Shakespearean influences figure in your work as a playwright and writer generally?

Shakespeare is part of the ideology that I was raised in, that I live in every day, that lives in and through me. I can no more overthrow this cultural force than I can pretend to live outside of capitalism or the dominance of monotheistic religion. On the other hand, Shakespeare, as part of my cultural inheritance, helps make me possible as a writer. My twentieth century experience of being a woman (in what I hope is late patriarchy) makes me both love his art, because he, more than so many male writers cannily recorded women who reflect the female condition, and chaff at the fact that he often leaves those women so underdeveloped, especially in the tragedies. This is not a weakness in his art, that he centers his plays on men, just as it is not a weakness of my art that I center my work on women.

I suppose you could call my play a "counter discourse to the dominant discourse." But having seen how many pretentious postmodern "counter" discourses are really just the same old male-centered stuff in newer, cuter garments, I am not going to claim such a status. All I claim is what I think Shakespeare would have claimed, to be performing acts of writing that are as artful as my abilities allow and as truthful as the market will bear about living in the world.

To what extent is theatrical/literary culture in Canada (in your reading of it) a function of Shakespearean theatre?

My reading of Canadian culture is that we are both respectfully traditional which means we probably have more than our share of bardology going on, and that we are also beautifully subversive, ironic, satiric of those traditions, especially as they are acted out by the more powerful national cultures who share our traditions. Thus we are good at honouring Shakespeare, witness everything from the Stratford festival to our typical high school curriculum and good at deflating bardology, witness everything from Wayne and Shuster's old TV skits to the ongoing genre of "adaptations" which offer various new, and subversive, readings of old materials. Like a good Canadian and a good feminist I try to practice a "both/and" art rather than an "either/or" oversimplification. I hope that I critique and honour at the same time.

Is adaptation a way of overwriting Shakespearean source texts? Do you care to comment on the political and ideological stakes of this overwriting––especially in relation to Gertrude and Ophelia?

I don't know if I understand what is meant by "overwriting Shakespearean source texts" but I certainly have been commenting on the "political and ideological stakes" involved with writing G and O throughout this interview. The biggest ideological risk I took in this "adaptation" was that I would offend my audience with the suggestion that one our culture's central heroic figures, Shakespeare's brilliant representative of modern man caught up in a changing world, is also a bully and a rapist. For me it wasn't much of a stretch, as I think Shakespeare suggests that part of being a modern man is to be so unsure of your position that you have to bully and blame women to reassure yourself that you have some power in the world.

Shakespeare may have made lots of gaffes in stage craft, was far too wordy at times (slipping in all those sonnets when he needs to get on with the play), but he was great at the psychology of character. Just as I take a risk, with that last sentence, of offending the bardologists, when I wrote G and O I took a risk or offending people who hold Shakespeare as some sort of original moral as well as artistic genius, rather than what he was, a really talented writer who was fortuitously prepared by his class, education and career to write wisely of his time in a genre (plays) that remain central to our culture today. If he had not needed to earn a living in the theatre and had wrote only sonnets (don't you get the feeling sometimes that he finds theatrical forms burdensome and would rather we writing poems?), we might not hear as much of him.

I said what I think is obvious about women in Hamlet and I know it was successful at a local level because word of mouth alone filled the theatres in which my play was produced with packed houses every night the play was performed. However, when I offered this play to various professional theatres across Canada, the fact that it would attract audiences gave it no advantage. It was called "non-theatrical" or unsuitable for production. Perhaps I too am impatient with theatrical form, as I am often with novelistic and critical forms. At any rate, the risks of speaking truth to power are no different today then they ever were. The people can like your art, but the gatekeepers of artistic power have to also like your art if it is to be widely available. Shakespeare has been really lucky in his gatekeepers!

What are the problems facing a playwright who undertakes a Shakespearean adaptation?

I think one of the principal problems in doing an adaptation is deciding how true you are going to be to the Shakespearean "original". Some Shakespeare based plays, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, take a largely ignored moment or character in the play and build outward and away from that seed idea into a direction, which while complementary, is also a plot and character departure from the original. I like this play and its satire on class, but it uses Shakespeare as only a mounting point for dramatic action and although the play critiques the original it does not really act as an "adaptation" as I understand the word. Neither do pastiches such as Good Night Desdamona, Good Morning Juliet, which bridge plays and characters and deliberately flaunt the Shakespearean norms, in the case of this play proposing a world where women are empowered. I like this play and it's optimism, but it is more a postmodern feminist fantasy then an adaptation.

So, when I say my play is more of an adaptation than these plays, I am not making an aesthetic judgment on these plays. Rather, I am merely saying that I think G and O is more an adaptation in the evolutionary meaning of that word (as in evolution, something new is made that contains both the true pattern of the original while also evolved into a changed reality). These may seem small differences in definition of "adaptation," but writers, need to think about what genre they are writing in, what genres they are blending, what genres they are escaping. It is part of making the writing work. My play deliberately echoes Hamlet in plot, character, theme and mood etc. This does not make it less "original" in the artistic sense than Hamlet or the plays mentioned above, but it does make it more directly a political artistic act. If you read my play in concert with Hamlet, you will find that all the scenes fit between scenes of that older play, and I believe I have not been untrue to those characters and scenes from the "original." I think my characters and their actions fit logically into the older play and are an enrichment of the older play in that I extend ideas, characters, and events to their logical conclusions. And therein lies the real power of a "faithful" adaptation. I wrote this play with my collected works of Shakespeare always open. Each of my writing acts were deliberately and carefully inserted into and were worked to extend the action and character development, image patterns and symbols of the original. His play imbricates my play, my play his.

Mine is, by its careful mimicry, a serious act of subversion, not of Shakespeare, but of our shared culture. If you read my scenes in concert with their "brother" scenes in Shakespeare's play, they will not conflict; they will fit together like two sides of a coin, like male and female, men's concerns and women's concerns. I have written my story between the lines of Shakespeare, and if you read the two together, it is my hope and belief that you will never be able to read Gertrude and Ophelia as minor characters again, never read them as mere appendages to male characters whose lives are without the human complexity of their wordier relatives, never read Gertrude as worse than her son, never read Ophelia as a mere weak, suicidal pawn. And if that happens, if I were to accomplish such an act with even one reader, then "adaptation" in the sense of a permanent change in one's way of thinking about the world would have truly occurred.

Adaptation of Shakespeare in Canada is a flourishing genre. The CASP research team has found close to 500 plays that are clear adaptations dating back to pre-Confederation. To what extent does this tradition of adapting define specifically Canadian theatrical practices (if one can even speak of such practices with any validity)?

As someone who has written novels, short stories, literary criticism, and only two plays (one never performed or published) and as one who has spent her academic years studying non-dramatic literature, I do not feel I can comment on Canadian theatrical practices with any confidence.

What are the uses of Shakespearean adaptation? In your work specifically?

The adaptations I like tend to critique the assumptions of the world order that Shakespeare's plays assume. For me, there would be no point in adaptation if it were not to open up established ideas and interpretations to question.

Does adaptation necessarily place the playwright in a compromised position (in terms of reinforcing theatrical tradition) or does it afford opportunities to remake that tradition? Are there examples in your own work you would point to as part of your response?

Writing itself places the writer in a "compromised" position. The minute you put fingers to word processor you call up the whole tradition and ideology of which you are a part. At least when you take up adaptation you are constantly made conscious of how the tradition seduces you back into itself, and you can therefore dare to seek change on terms you understand. You are not in the false position of the "author" (as opposed to writer) who thinks he is producing something absolutely original. Too much art that seeks spectacular departure from tradition through formal and linguistic experimentation still merely parrots the most conservative norms of our tradition through its content.

What theatrical techniques do you see as most useful in the adaptation of Shakespeare genre?

I have mentioned previously that my play has been seen as not really a theatre piece but as a critical piece, and therefore not suitable for production. This begs the question of why it was so popular when it was performed. The technique I was using might be called "reading theatre." It   brings together what happens to me, and many resistant readers, when they read Hamlet, with the very dramatic form used by Shakespeare to make a new reading. I cross the genres of literary criticism (though a kind of deconstructive feminism) and dramatic form (through the construction of an alternate female reality in the Hamlet story). This appeals to audiences who are also readers of Shakespeare, which must include most people who have attended high school in English language culture (although I actually met playgoers who had not read or viewed the Hamlet play and who claimed to be able to follow the action of my play with ease). I think we need to consider that everyone already knows Shakespeare's major plays, even when they have never read them, because their plots and characters are replicated constantly in our culture. Therefore, adaptations can use these plays and their dominant role in our culture as jumping off places for new insights, new art, new experiments in writing.

What ideological / political implications do you see to adapting Shakespeare in a Canadian context?

None that are especially different than adapting Shakepeare to a Australian, Singaporean, or other national context. We share a world wide English language culture and Shakespeare is a part of that. Writers inevitably contend with their culture directly or indirectly. This will be inflected by nationality, just as it is by gender, race, ethnicity sexual orientation and other factors.

It has been said that adaptation is a way of talking across cultures and across time––a way of relating to other authors and contexts intertextually--would you agree with this sense of adaptation in relation to your own work?

As a writer I am always talking to the present moment, to people alive and thinking in the same world as I am in. When I take up a text from another time, it is for the purposes of talking to the people in my own time, those who might more easily be reached through our common cultural icons. Texts cannot speak to one another, and we cannot talk to the dead, but the works of the past are useful as starting points for talking to one another.

How far would you be prepared to go in defining what an adaptation is? To what extent must some form of Shakespeare be present in an adaptation for it to be called Shakespearean?

In some ways every work of art is an adaptation of past works of art. Creative writers often say that our task, since there is truly nothing new under the sun, is to make the world new for our own generation. In this sense adaptation can have a very broad meaning. For my purposes adaptation means knowing the "original" so well that you can make something new while embracing and embodying the old.

An old professor of mine, also a creative writer, once said that we who write in English carry the heaviness of Shakespeare around with us like a burden on our shoulders. For me, as a feminist, a writer like Shakespeare who saw women clearly, if not completely, is not a burden, he is a starting point for my creativity. But for the purposes of your website's goal, I think the phrase "Shakespearean Adaptation" needs to be defined more carefully. I am sure your materials will guide you to a useful definition.

Could you reflect on your own cultural background in relation to your writing and in relation to being "Canadian"?

I have written a memoir whose title is Memoirs from Away: A New Found Land Girlhood, in which I am considerably preoccupied with my identity as a woman and a Canadian. I became a Canadian when Newfoundland joined Canada and as a little girl I thought this new citizenship would give me a firm and positive identity to replace the inferiority that defined me in my colonial education. It did not, and being a Canadian has proved a much more difficult and a much more creative task than I would have imagined as a child.

Without firmly held national myths to hold us together, Canadians must constantly choose what being a Canadian means to them as individuals. In my memoir I say: " Some days now I feel like the only Canadian. Some days I feel like the last Canadian. I feel that being a Canadian is impossible. I like to think that all of these feelings are essential to being a Canadian. Every Canadian must feel this alone. All Canadians must feel that their own personal history is the one that makes them Canadian and since no one else has had quite the same history, they live alone in their Canadian identity. When we talk of being Canadian we speak not of national myths, but of our own lives. To be a Canadian is to be an autobiographer."

For me, as a Canadian and a feminist, as a creative writer and an academic, I always feel I am working with slightly "foreign" materials, whether I write plays, novels, scholarly research, or memoir. Perhaps that is why so many Canadians write what you call "adaptations." We have been called "survivors," "masters of compromise" and other not so "nice" things ("nice" being America's favorite word for us, implying that as nice people we are neither very bad nor very good!). Maybe we are also a nation of adaptors.

In so many cases being Canadian becomes a way of talking about elsewhere spaces that get mapped onto Canada. What role do you think theatre plays in that mapping of local and international identities that seems to be so crucial to discussions of Canadian identity?

Since my theatre education is not as extensive as my education in prose, poetry and life writing, I would not like to comment directly on the theatre scene, but certainly much of Canadian literature is about bringing identities formed in other places home to a Canadian context. As well, the peripatetic Canadian writer/traveler is a common trope in our literary production. Ironically, for one whose work as a creative writer and a scholar has been very much locally inspired by my experience of Canada and Canadian literary production, writing G and O allowed me to escape the boundaries of the local and become transnational in a way that only my most recent books (one on women's use of the memoir form, Repossessing the World and one called Undelivered Letters about personal letters that make a long journey to Canada) have allowed. I include a short list of my published books to indicate my own various "mappings" of what it means to be "Canadian."

PUBLICATIONS

(* indicates authored under the name Margaret Clarke)

• Undelivered Letters to Hudson's Bay Men on the North West Coast of North America, 1830-1857, (with Introductions and Narratives by Judith Hudson Beattie and Helen M. Buss.) Eds. Judith Hudson Beattie and Helen M. Buss. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003.

• Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002.

• Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives. Ed. by Helen M. Buss, D. L. Macdonald, and Anne McWhir. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001, 330 pp.

• Working In Women's Archives, Researching Women's Private Literature and Archival Documents. Ed. by Helen Buss and Marlene Kadar. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2000, 120 pp.

•  Memoirs From Away: A New Found Land Girlhood. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1999, 153 pp.*

• Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women's Autobiography in English. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1993, 227 pp. plus index). [paperback edition 1994]. (Winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize for best critical work on a Canadian subject)

 

• Canadian Women's Autobiography: A Guide for Researchers and Teachers. Ottawa: Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, 1991, 50 pp.

• Healing Song. (a novel). Edmonton: NeWest, 1988, 175 pp. *

• Mother and Daughter Relationships in the Manawaka Works of Margaret Laurence. Victoria: University of Victoria Press. English Literature Series, 1985, 88 pp.

• The Cutting Season. (a novel). Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1984, 180 pp. * (Winner of the Manitoba "search for a new novelist" competition)