Dropped Threads 3: Beyond the Small Circle.

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

This fat volume offers a great many hours of good reading, thanks to 37 professional contributors and a good editor. One of the editor’s decisions was that the contributors should all be women, and this serves to create intriguing links of experiences and feelings. In her foreword, Anderson notes that she invited established women writers and asked them to consider the topic “This I Know.” Curiously, the results were not focused on what women have learned about men, but rather on the importance of other connections, including the experience of motherhood, a topic central to one-third of the submissions. Other common experiences were those of victim, addict, rebel, and celebrity: “Women’s remarkable affinity for endurance and peace surfaced in all thirty-five of the selected stories.” Anderson found the courage and creative wisdom of the contributors to be fresh and enriching.

Topics range widely and include birthing, writing, and friendships. Varied beyond imagination, they include work habits, a typically shared sense of humour, and, using June Callwood’s superb image, “the glue of relationships.” In “Conspicuous Voices,” Frances Itani writes of her aunt’s house burning down, and of how, in years to come, when she told the story to her mother and her aunts, they would laugh until their eyes overflowed with tears. Cathy Stonehouse’s essay, “In the Presence of Grace,” smoothly connects the experiences and feelings of a woman waiting in hospital with labour pains to the loss of her stillborn baby, and the subsequent experiences of “gradually letting go.” Initially, in hospital, the baby’s name, Grace, helps to hold her together. Her extended pain binds her closer to her husband and to friends who have lost babies.

Dropped Threads is an unusual collection of stories around several themes, all of them linked to women’s experiences, and all of them thoughtful and emotionally moving. It will have a special place on my bookshelves, and will be reread from time to time as feelings prompt and memories surge.