Disconnect

Abstract

This creative prose poetry manuscript challenges the boundary between fact and fiction through the story of a displaced narrator and other unnamed characters, all of whom are disconnected from chronological time. Beginning in Windsor, Ontario, and continuing to Calgary, the second-person narrator interrogates the events that occur both before and immediately following her cross-country move in an attempt to feel connected to both cities. Disconnect interrogates the validity of memory and how one goes about creating a life from a handful of seemingly unrelated events, questioning whether the story is really yours if you remember it from a different point of view. The introductory essay examines the roles of autobiography, biotext, and confessional writing in contemporary Canadian women's literature through the works of Lynn Crosbie, Nicole Markotic, Damian Rogers, and others, and well as the influence of genealogy on the works of Daphne Marlatt and Robert Kraetsch.