Leaders, All: Women in the Canadian Armed Forces 1950 to the Present (working title – manuscript in progress for Dundurn Press)
Artist Statement
You may find it strange that I don’t love writing. It’s a compulsion, my coping tool. I cannot make art or music; only with words can I make sense of my life and the world around me.
My mother was a reluctant feminist, a cultured European lady who quickly developed a core of tempered steel when she found herself a single mother in the 1960s. Her influence worked its way into me in reverse. I presented as masculine––back then we would say I was a tomboy––gravitating toward boys and their pursuits as a would-be peer. Boys had all the fun: careening through life, taking up space, smashing things. Girls shone brightest when pleasing others. I did not want to be male but wanted their nonchalant power.
Puberty began a war inside me. Now I wanted to kiss the boys and play hoops with them. I wanted to share the privilege they assumed by birthright, but I also wanted to please them so they would want me. This inner conflict would become a defining feature of my life. It both drove and complicated my resolve to attend military college and pursue a career in the armed forces when women were still a novelty. It also played out in my decisions surrounding marriage and children.
It fuels the stories I am compelled to write. In trying to solve the riddle of my life I have encountered truths common to all women. My work weaves together memoir and research to explore how women have made their way in a man’s world and the cost of doing so. How do we maintain femininity when it is viewed as a liability? How do we forge personal identity under the weight of shifting gender expectations? I interrogate how we can be, and raise, strong women vulnerable enough to love and be loved, and stay strong when love ends. I am intrigued by the struggle for freedom and agency in the face of the instinct––or conditioning––to put others before ourselves. I am fascinated by the lies we tell to convince ourselves and others that we are ok when we really are not.
My writing brings together the personal and the political to acknowledge the difficult truth of where women have been and to point with hope to where we are going.