Memoirs from Away: A New Found Land Girlhood

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

Memoirs from Away stems from academia’s relatively new interest in
life writing, a genre as old as the act of writing itself. The
subcategory “Women’s Life Writing” has been encouraged for several
decades by academics teaching and writing in women’s studies
departments. Public appetite for good autobiographies is also
increasing. Helen Buss, an English professor at the University of
Calgary, won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for her book Mapping Our Selves
(1993). Her current research centres on women’s diaries and memoirs.

Both authorial names belong to one author, christened Helen Margaret
Clarke and married to Richard Buss. The self-conscious duality reflects
the author’s sense of the multiple roles most women play—wife,
mother, etc. In Helen’s case, the etcetera represent writer, feminist
academic, and her inner child, “the imaginative part of me that needed
to be hidden, protected from a cruel world.” Helen/Margaret’s loose
style weaves in and out of memory and current happenings as she explores
both past and present during a trip back to the Avalon Peninsula, the
part of Newfoundland where she spent her childhood years.

The writer hopes that her niece, another Margaret Clarke, will live to
see a time when women’s lives are not portrayed as “merely a
backdrop to the histories of men.” Memories from Away is an act of
weaving memory and reflection into new patterns, new wholes, new
meanings. All writers weave words, memories, and ideas; this particular
weaver understands well the emerging patterns of her loom.