A reading by award-winning Ottawa writer and scholar Heather Menzies is the second in the Spring Reading Series of the SC Arts Council Saturday, March 26, at 8 p.m. in the Doris Crowston Gallery of the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre.
Beginning with the 1996 best-selling Whose Brave New World, for the past two decades Heather Menzies has written extensively about the impact of technology on Canadian society, both in our workplaces and in our homes. In much the same vein, her more recent No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life, the winner of the 2006 Ottawa Book Award for non-fiction, details how individuals and groups suffer a disintegration of focus, of relationships and of mental health.
But now, something entirely different -in a most personal story, Menzies has written a very moving account of her journey with her mother into the maelstrom of dementia.
It's a story that ends, necessarily, with the inevitable death of her mother, but it's also a story that has left Menzies with a profound new understanding of family, both its bondage of guilt and its bonds of love.
Enter Mourning: A Memoir on Death, Dementia, and Coming Home was featured in The Globe & Mail's 2009 "Globe 100."
Currently adjunct professor (School of Canadian Studies and Women's Studies) and lecturer at Carleton University in Ottawa, Menzies is a long-time activist in the women's movement, social justice and cultural politics. She has served on the board of the National Council of the Writer's Union on three occasions and is currently co-Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. She contributes articles to international and North American journals and newspapers.
Admission to this event is free, thanks to the generosity of the Canada Council for the Arts and The Sunshine Coast Arts Council.
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