Womens Studies International Forum, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp.

225 234, 2002

Copyright D 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd
Printed in the USA. All rights reserved
0277-5395/02/$ see front matter

PII S0277-5395(02)00232-7

WHO IS SHE? INSIDE/OUTSIDE LITERARY COMMUNITIES

Pauline Butling
Liberal Studies Department, Alberta College of Art and Design, 2707 Chalice Road NW, Calgary, AB,
Canada T2L 1C7

Synopsis This essay combines a personal memory narrative of my involvement with literary
communities in Canada with an analysis of the memory processes which produced that narrative.
Referring to both individual and communal memory, I explore how and why individual memory is shaped
by hegemonic forms. My personal narrative is then reformulated within a history of womens
communities. This is done as a conscious attempt to reshape my individual memory and to recuperate a
collective feminist history. D 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

For most of my life I have assumed that communities

were by definition good. Whether I was thinking of
the 1960s ideal that communal living could produce
social change, or the modernist notion that avantgarde literary communities were crucial in supporting
radical aesthetics, or the feminist practice of establishing collaborative structures to nourish and support womens activities, I did not question the basic
value of community. I myself have spent thousands
of hours doing volunteer work in various literary
communities. I have organized readings, hosted visiting writers, helped plan workshops and conferences,
cooked party meals and cleaned up party wine spills,
made posters, written press releases, helped with
magazine productionall the while taking part in
the on-going dialogue, gossip, debate, and argument
that is the life-blood of any community. Community
was an expanded home, even a safe haven, a place to
meet like-minded people, a context wherein my life
and work had value.
Recently, however, I have come to see that this
sense of comfort and belonging is not the whole story,
that communities are exclusive as well as inclusive.
Viewed from the inside, they seem expansive, open,
and welcoming to everyone. I had not noticed the
exclusions, nor the internal hierarchies, nor that the
general feeling of bonhomie often camouflages sexist
and other oppressive and/or subordinating structures.
Of course I have known for some time, with the 1960s
being been increasingly analyzed and scrutinized, that
even supposed counter-culture communities have
unequal power relations. But I had not seen them at
work in MY communities.
I first began to question my assumptions about
community when I began working on a book about
225

recent experimental poetry in English Canada with my

friend and research partner, Susan Rudy.1 Because we
are a generation apart, we felt we should first understand each others history of why and how we became
interested in reading and writing about contemporary
poetry, and so we wrote out our respective stories in
the form of letters to each other. It was a useful
exercise in which I first articulated the importance
of my life-long involvement in literary communities
to my sense of self. But I also saw that that memory of
myself, as a figure with power and agency within
those communities, was somewhat illusory and that I,
in fact, mostly occupied a subordinate position.
The subordinating and/or exclusionary mechanisms that I examine in this paper have to do with
the selective operation of both individual and communal memory. What is included? What is excluded
in the historical record, in the communal memory,
in literary history, in individual memory? Why and
how are womens literary productions often forgotten? Why do my own memories of my actions as
cultural worker/reader/critic tend to skip over my
feminist work and emphasize my connections in
male-dominated groups? What are the mechanisms
of self-subversion?
Michael Lambeks essay on Memory as Moral
Practice (1996) identifies some of the key issues for
my analysis of memory processes. First he questions
the tendency among memory theorists to qualify
individual memory as direct, literal, and subjective
and quite distinct from communal memory, or what is
usually called history, which is seen as narrated,
imagined, and objectified. It seems more interesting, he suggests, to take these ideal typical pictures
of memory as poles and to focus on the movement

226

Pauline Butling

between them, on how one goes from the one to the

other and back, how private experience and public
narrative mutually inform each other (Lambek,
1996, p. 241). He then introduces the term situated
distance in order to emphasize that memory is
perspectival (Lambek, 1996, p. 242) and points out
that neither personal memory nor scholarly history
[is]. . . literal. Both are narrativized constructions
and thus open to continuous reformulation or
reinterpretation. Such fluidity, in turn, raises the
crucial question of how such changes are legitimated (Lambek, 1996, p. 243). Lambeks theorizing
raises two central questions for my analysis of how
historical narratives can be reformulated or reinterpreted. First, who has agency, how does one successfully introduce new narratives in this process of
continuous reformulation and second, how indeed
are these reformulations legitimated?

MEMORY NARRATIVE #1
The story that I told to Susan begins in Vancouver in
1960 1961 when I was in my final year of a
Bachelor of Arts program, majoring in English and
History, at the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver. That year I took professor Warren Tallmans now famous Studies in Poetry English
class2 where I was astonished and delighted to
discover that English classes could deal with contemporary writing and that poetry could be a place
for addressing contemporary issues. (One of the
course texts, for instance, was the just published
New American Poetry: 1945 1960, (Allen, 1960). I
was also delighted to discover a community of
writers on campus, some of whom were in Tallmans
class that year. Through Tallmans class, I (and my
boyfriend, Fred Wah, a poet who also took Tallmans
class that year) became part of a group of students/
writers/professors who sat around in bars and coffee
shops and talked about poetry and life in the same
breath, who went to numerous poetry readings and
parties, invited San Francisco poet Robert Duncan to
come to Vancouver to talk about the precursors and
current practitioners of the new American poetics,
organized a summer study group, and, in the fall of
1961, started the magazine Tish: A Poetry Newsletter.3 We argued about why and how poetry could
make a difference in Vancouver, how much we hated
the University upper crust, how to put Vancouver on
the literary map, what was wrong with this or that
line-break, why mimeographed, newsletter-style
magazines (such as The Floating Bear from New
York City) were better than glossy ones, how to

shake up the central Canada stranglehold on literary

culture, and so on and so on.
These were heady times. I remember explosive
arguments, lots of laughter, many parties, and a general
feeling of bonhomie. When Warren Tallman suggested
I apply to graduate school, I quickly shelved my plans
to travel in Europe for a year, went to see the English
department Head, and found myself embarked on an
MA in English the following September. My involvement in this community continued via marriage to poet
Fred Wah (1962), via deepening friendships with
fellow graduate students and others in the community,
by going to the many poetry readings and festivals of
that period, and by joining in the arguments and
discussions around the production of Tish. As a graduate student, I had an office in the temporary/trailer
offices where Bowering and Daveys shared office
became the Tish production centre. These are the
founding moments in my memory of my life as a
reader/writer/critic of contemporary writing. Although
I was not a poet, nor was I directly involved in either
editing or producing the magazine, I saw myself as an
essential member of the community.
The same themes of community-the-good and
myself as an active, productive member persist as
my story continues on from the 1960s to the present.
We went from Vancouver to Albuquerque, New
Mexico and then Buffalo, New York, where Fred
and I both did graduate work as well as had our first
child. In the West Kootenay region of Western
Canada, we taught at a small community college for
20 years, raised two daughters, and maintained a doit-yourself style country life (gardening, harvesting
and canning, house renovating, road maintenance,
etc. etc.). Since 1989, we have worked in Calgary
(I at the Alberta College of Art and Design, Fred at
the University of Calgary). In Albuquerque and
Buffalo, I typed, collated, licked stamps, and did
other production-related tasks. Ditto in the West
Kootenays, where we also drove up and down winding, snowy roads to go to various peoples houses and
backwoods cabins to share poetry. Over the years, I
hosted dozens of writers, organized events, published
reviews and essays, gave conference papers, completed a long abandoned PhD dissertation (1987), and
published a book on the poet Phyllis Webb (Butling,
1997). In my memory narrative, community involvement provides both intense personal pleasure and a
strong sense of social value. I remember these groups
as expansive and myself positioned inside constructs
which by their very existence had social value
because they generated enabling fictions of place,
politics, and poetics (Davidson, 1989, p. 7). That is
to say, as locally based communities, they helped to

Who is She?

empower regional writers and to realign literary

power structures.
It gave me great pleasure to tell my story to Susan
because it establishes an I that is involved, important, productive, connected. The memory of these
events has been essential to my sense of self as a valued
member of a community and the community in turn has
been crucial to my individual work. My masters thesis
on Robert Duncan (The Poem as Process 1966), for
instance, was not so much informed by academic study
as by the readings, discussions and arguments that went
on outside the classroom, and by attending the very
non-traditional summer Poetry Workshop in 1963 at
the University of British Columbia.4 My education in
Canadian literature likewise came from going to readings, scanning the many little magazines and the smallpress books that have appeared over the years, and
participating in the ongoing conversations over food
and drink that took place at ours and others kitchen
tables. Likewise, the community that formed in conjunction with the writing program at David Thomson
University Centre in Nelson, BC, where I taught from
1979 to 1984, was crucial to my completing my longabandoned PhD dissertation. In short, my story links
the individual to the communal narrative by emphasizing a meaningful inter-relationship between the two. It
would seem that, as Lambek explains, [we] create
imagined communities. . . and imagined selves and
then attempt to live accordingly (1996, p. 244). And
further that to remember is never solely to report on
the past so much as to establish ones relationship
toward it (Lambek, 1996, p. 240). My memory
narrative establishes a mutually beneficial relationship
between self and community.

227

discussions published in 1978.5 In fact, her questions

and comments are so sporadic as to almost seem
intrusive. I imagine a reader of these discussions might
stumble at the points when she speaks and mumble
to themselves who is she? Even her name is
uncertain: in the first, she is identified as Pauline
Wah, in the second as Pauline Butling. This was
3 years after she had started using the name Butling
for all professional activities.
She is more visible when she becomes the
subject of a poem. In the following poem by Fred
Wah (written for our 22nd wedding anniversary),
she is presented as a complex, active figure:
PAULINES HOUSE
Her mind and life
time, yearning
for her lifes
mind on it, heart
dance, literal
with her mouth
shoulders too
today years ago
I married her
Outside, the distant glaciers
crack and groan
with the same desire
(Wah, 1984, 1991)

WHO IS SHE
. . . the question of who am I?, has already
generated a small industry as theorists turn to
themselves, their own difference, trying to explicate the world metonymically from their own. . .
In arguing for the positivity of experience and the
possibilities of using the self in theory, . . .we must
articulate the question who am I? and the
question who is she? (Probyn, 1992, p. 503)
When I shift from I as an individual subject to
she as a historical subject, however, I discover a
very different relationship between the individual and
the community. In the literary publications and historical accounts of the communities that I have briefly
described above, Pauline Butling rarely appears.
She makes only a few brief comments in two

In a poem by George Bowering, she provokes a

range of responses:
Pauline Butling in Campbell Lake
The water of Campbell Lake is very cold,
& Pauline Butling is in it.
Her limbs are long & white, the glacier
is white, her one-piece bathing suit
is pale. She is still here
thirty years after our adult lives began,
doing breast stroke in Campbell Lake.
I have never been in love with her
but I would kill anyone

228

Pauline Butling

who tried to drown her. I would like

the sun to take the time to tan her,
to warm the water a little.
(Bowering, 1987)
In the published accounts of the Tish group activities
(Niechoda & Hunter, 1991), only Gladys Hindmarch
mentions her name.6 In the literary magazines of the
period, she publishes only two or three reviews
before the mid-1980s. Probyns question Who is
she? leads me to see that, in the historical record,
she occupies the familiar, subordinate position of
women, on the periphery of male-dominated public
space.7 She is reader, listener, friend, muse, supporter,
lover, wife, hostess, and behind-the-scenes organizer.
In the self-narrative, I feels empowered and experiences the self in a productive role; in the community
narrative, she is peripheral if not invisible. It seems
that private experience and public narrative do not
mutually inform each other (Lambek, 1996, p. 241).
The subject does not see the exclusions, nor does she
see her own self-delusions. Her memory selects data
that emphasizes a productive role.

REMEMBERING
However, this need not be simply a victim story. Other
versions can be formulated based on a reselection and
reinterpretation of the data. Yes, she occupies a peripheral position within the communal/historical records;
yes, individual and communal memories construct
different identities; yes, there is false sense of power
in the autobiographical narrative because the I does
not see that her self-narrative unwittingly reproduces
the prevailing power structures, does not see her own
self subversion. But an alternative story can be constructed, beginning with Wendy Browns very useful
question what does politicized identity want?
Brown (1995, p. 209) explains:
If we are interested in developing the contestatory, subversive, potentially transformative elements of identity-based political claims, we need
to know the implications of the particular
genealogy and production conditions of identitys
desire for recognition. We need to be able to ask:
Given what produced it, given what shapes and
suffuses it, what does politicized identity want?
(my emphasis).
In my case, politicized identity wants/needs both
to understand its particular genealogy and produc-

tion conditions and to imagine a different future to

paraphrase Webb (1990, p. 77). This means reselecting the data to create a story based on a feminist
genealogy as well as foregrounding the alternative
production conditions that supported (rather than
subordinated) mine and other womens writing. Then
I, she and we occupy similar subject
positions and the narrative trajectory becomes one
of emergence and empowerment. To repeat Lambeks
terms, private experience and public narrative do
mutually inform each other (1996, p. 241). This
also means taking memory, not as a neutral
representation, more or less accurate, of the past,
but as a claim or set of claims, more or less justified,
more or less appropriate, about it (Lambek, 1996,
p. 239). In other words, I can reselect and reformulate
past events according to a revised set of claims.
My revised self-narrative still claims that community
activities are crucial to the formation of a vital literary
culture, but I refocus on womens communities and I
revise my claims to show how female subjects
acquire power and agency.

MEMORY NARRATIVE #2
This story begins about a decade later than my first
memory narrative, in the early 1970s, when, for the
first time in almost 10 years of married life, I found
myself in the conventional role of stay-at-home wife
and mother. Feeling isolated, disconnected, and
devalued, I sought out womens groups, including
the newly formed West Kootenay Status of Womens
Council.8 As a member of that group I helped
organize a series of lectures on abortion, birth control,
womens sexuality, and womens legal rights. These
were big events for us; we felt bold and brash to be
speaking about supposedly private matters in a public
forum and were exhilarated by a new feeling of
power, power to put womens issues on a public
agenda, power to speak and have an impact in a
public space.
I also began teaching evening classes on womens
literature, where the discussions often branched out
into talk about how to improve relationships, why
some women accept the doormat role, how to get out
of bad marriages, or how to find new pleasures. I read
Sisterhood Is Powerful (Morgan, 1970); I sought out
poems and stories by women that were appearing in
increasing numbers in little magazines and smallpresses. Yes, I thought as I read Laurences The Fire
Dwellers (1973) and The Diviners (1974), there are
others out there like me. Although I had felt a few
consciousness-raising jolts in the 1960ssuch as
hearing Levertov (1962) read her poem about cunts

Who is She?

and other unmentionable female body parts, or hearing Webbs Naked Poems (1965) and their painful
articulation of womens desiremy liberation did
not begin until I started doing things with other
women, started forming intellectual, emotional, and
political connections with womens communities.
Prior to my stay-at-home housewife/mother phase, I
did not see a need for what Rich (1986) calls
women-identified activities (p. 51). In fact I
resisted them. I saw myself as the exceptional
woman, the one who stands apart from the group.
Only when I began to identify with a female collectivity, did I recognize the disempowering effects of
being labeled exceptional. Such a position, I realized,
brings isolation and disconnection and thus in effect
undermines rather than enhances. By contrast, forming connections to a feminist collectivity brought a
genuinely empowering alignment.
This alternative memory narrative (of emergence
and empowerment), however, is not simply one of
moving quickly onward and upward. I did not feel
immediately empowered when I became involved
with womens communitiesas I had by the UBC
writing community in the early 1960s where power
(albeit illusory) was automatically conferred
because the womens community was itself struggling to establish its social and discursive space. My
individual memory narrative reflects the instability of
the group. In a process that would involve both
individuals and groups in learning a new languageas Brossard (1985) would later explain so
well9learning to inhabit public space, to risk exposure, failure, and censure, only gradually did I find
both the collective identity and the material conditions necessary to sustain my individual activities.
The process was often painful. When Daphne
Marlatt asked me to review Audrey Thomass wonderfully nuanced novel of a womans intense emotions
and desires as she negotiates a complicated love affair
(Thomas, 1979), I was both excited and terrified. The
novel seemed so revealing of a womens intimate
thoughts, as did my own act of putting words on paper
for all to see. When I saw my first reviews in print, I felt
exposed and vulnerable. At the Women and Words
conference in Vancouver in 1983, while I was energized and exhilarated by the collective presence of so
many women, I still hesitated to speak out in this very
public space. But the sheer numbers as well as the great
diversity of women who attended Women and Words
buoyed me up. Seeing the energy and the commitment
to change, not only from women like myself (i.e.
middle class, academic, heterosexual, white women)
but also from women of colour, lesbian women, working class women etc.many of whom had many more

229

oppressive structures to deal with than I would ever

encounterwas both humbling and inspiring.
Also, by the early 1980s, there were more and more
women out there in the public domain, working as
editors, critics, poets, musicians, novelists, and publishersand their presence encouraged me. I felt
empowered, too, by my own shift in economic position
that came with starting a full-time job in the mid1970s, especially as I had to fight to get it.10 The
material and ideological shifts that I experienced at an
individual level, combined with the material and
ideological support of the emerging feminist communities, provide the springboards that launched me into
the public domain. In this revised memory narrative, I
begin to publish reviews and articles, many of which
were on womens texts and published in magazines
edited by women. I also completed the PhD that I had
abandoned in the 1960s because I could not imagine
myself fitting that august category. My rationalizations
were that I did not want/need it, that I was a nonconformist, that I had found back-door approaches that
worked just as well, but in the end I recognized the
self-defeating (and self-demeaning) sub-text in that
story. In any case, in this re/membered story, I become
part of the historical record; I acquire a history that
extends beyond the personal.
Yet even now, armed with my new, politicized
awareness of how memory narratives can enact or
subvert the dominant codes, I find this story difficult
to re member. It keeps disappearing into the historical
mists as my memory veers toward the hegemonic. I
have to concentrate on deliberately constructing a
genealogy of women,11 on reselecting past events to
foreground a narrative of womens collective activities. I have to keep reminding myself that such
stories of womens collective struggles for a share
in the discursive field are important, that they provide
a much needed sense of historical continuity and
momentum, they help to prevent each generation
having to begin again because not much is carried
forward via literary history. These are the spurs that
keep me on track.

REFORMULATING
For we think back through our mothers. . . It is
useless to go to the great men writers for help,
however much one may go to them for pleasure.
(Woolf, 1929 A Room of Ones Own, pp. 72 73)
A longer version of this reformulated memory
narrative would describe the emergence of Canadian
magazines edited and published by women, such as

230

Pauline Butling

Room of Ones Own, Fireweed, Atlantis, Tiger Lily,

Periodics, f.)lip, Tessera, and CV II; would include a
history of womens presses (such as Press Gang in
Vancouver, Womens Press and Sister Vision Press in
Toronto); and a discussion of anthologies of women
writers, such as Perreault and Vance (1990) Writing
the Circle, which brings together first nations women
writers; or Neuman and Kamboureli (1986), Amazing
Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing; or Godard
(1987), Gynocritics=Gynocritiques: feminist approaches to Canadian and Quebec womens writing.
It would also include an account of womens literary
conferences and festival such as The Dialogue Conference at York University in 1981 (where the idea
for Tessera magazine began),12 or the Women and
Words Conference in Vancouver in 1983 which
brought together over 1000 anglophone and francophone women involved in traditional and alternative
forms of literary activity (Dybikowski, Freeman,
Marlatt, Pulling, & Warland, 1985, p. 9), or the
cross-cultural conference, Telling It: Women and
Language Across Cultures, held at Simon Fraser
University in 1988.
In this necessarily shortened version, I will focus
on three events that represent significant feminist
interventions/disturbances in the hegemonic and thus
can function as benchmarks in a historical narrative
of Canadian womens literary activities. The first is
the Women and Words/Les Femmes et Les Mots
Conference in Vancouver in 1984 when more than a
thousand women gathered together for readings,
formal and informal papers, and panel discussions
which explored alternatives to existing power relations and cultural institutions. The second is an
anthology of essays selected from the feminist
magazine Tessera titled Collaboration in the Feminine: Writings on Women and Culture, published in
1994 (Godard, 1994a); and the third, a celebratory
issue of the magazine Fireweed (Issue 56: Going on
TwentyA Celebration, late Winter, 1996). The
importance of the Fireweed and Tessera publications
lies in the fact that they are commemorative publications and as such perform the important feminist memory-work (Godard, 1994b, p. 281) of
reiterating and celebrating a collective history. Repetition is a well-known mnemonic device and celebration an effective mythologizing tool. Overall,
both collections celebrate a community of women
of letters (Godard, 1994b, p. 258). The importance
of Women and Words, on the other hand, lies more
in its ground-breaking effects: it significantly
expanded the material and ideological contexts for
womens cultural production for both anglophone
and francophone writing in Canada. Both types of

eventsfounding moments and celebratory/commemorative activitiesare crucial ingredients in a

narrative of empowerment in that they help to
legitimate that narrative.
As a 3-day conference at the University of British
Columbia, Women and Words/Les Femmes et Les
Mots first and foremost created a shared social/
discursive space that fostered community building.
As well, the sheer size of the conferencetogether
with the publicity it received as the first all-women
conferencehelped to increase the visibility, credibility and legitimacy of womens writing. The interventionist nature of this event was not so much in its
content, although radical feminist poetics were certainly discussed, both informally and formally. One
of the six panel discussions, for instance, featured
presentations by some of the most experimental
Canadian women writers of the 1980sLouky Bersianik, Louise Cotnoir, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Nicole Brossard, Gail Scott, and Barbara
Godard. But its importance was as much in the fact
that the event itself constituted an insertion of
womens issues into mainstream institutional, social,
and discursive formations. The invasion of the
hegemonic space of the University by so many
women, for instance, for the express purpose of
challenging its authority, was in itself a major event.
The furor over the fact that only women could attend
the daytime sessions is one measure of the extent of
that disturbance. The confidence, energy, and commitment to new directions that the conference generated for the more than a thousand woman who
attended, and for many more who felt its impact, is a
further indication of its watershed role in Canadian
feminist history.
The Fireweed publication, as I said above, was
more of a commemorative than an initiatory event.
The editors invited previous contributors to join them
in celebrating the magazines 18-year existence. In
their editorial, they situate the publication within a
genealogy of women and offer it as a commemorative
act that will link two generations:
This issue is a gift from a generation of women to
the one that follows. A coming together of women
in celebration and in support, women who value
our cultural institutions (n.p.).
The editorial is both celebratory and polemical:
And here is Fireweed, pulsing with womens
creativity, already 18, verging on 19, preparing
for 20. Fireweed, still edgy, still fresh, still
eclectic, still independent. Celebrating the years

Who is She?

that have passed and the work that has been done.
Ready for new risks, new writers, new artists, new
issues (n.p.).
Indeed, from its inception in 1978, Fireweed has
presented itself as a working ground for experiment
and adventure. Its subtitle, A Feminist Quarterly,
together with its epigraph of fireweed as the first
growth to reappear in fire-scarred areas and as a
troublesome weed which spreads like wild-fire
invading clearings, bombsites, waste land and other
disturbed areas, creates both an imaginary realm and
a material site for feminist innovation. The metaphor
transforms the supposed troublesomeness of
women into a transformative act, while the physical
presence of the magazine provides a material space
and fosters a discourse community where such
troublesome/transformative writing can become public. A sampling of subtitles for issues of Fireweed
shows some of the diverse areas of reclamation:
Blood Relations (#12, 1982); Fear and Violence
(#14, 1982); Feminist Aesthetics (#15, 1982);
Women of Colour (#16, 1983); Atlantic Women
(#18, 1984); Class is the Issue: The Issue is Class
(#25, 1987); Lesbiantics (#28, 1989); Asian
Canadian Women (#30, 1990); Sex and Sexuality
(#38, 1993); and Revolution/evolution girl style
(#59/60, 1997).
What I particularly like about the birthday issue
is the way it foregrounds individual excellence
while celebrating a collective history. It presents a
generation of Canadian women writers who have
become well-known as individualsNicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Susan Swan, Makeda Silvera,
Claire Harris, Lillian Allen, Cecile Cloutier, Kate
Braid, Libby Scheier, Erin Moure and Margaret
Atwood among otherswhile also documenting a
shared history. Its publication is an act of community building.
Collaboration in the Feminine (Godard, 1994a),
selected texts from previous issues of the magazine
Tessera, is also a commemorative publication which
emphasizes a shared history and generational continuity, first by its titleCollaboration in the Feminineand second by Barbara Godards reiteration of
the original project of Tessera, which was
to constitute a space for women to exchange
images and ideas in writing. . . [to] create the
conditions of possibility for the constitution of
women as speaking subjects. . . [and to] constitute
the horizon of a discursive order in which she
is determined as subject or author-function.
(Women of letters Godard, 1994b, p. 258)

231

Certainly Tessera has in my view been instrumental

in expanding the discursive space for women writers
in the Canadian context. Putting some of the essays
together into book form13 gives wider circulation to
some of the most useful discussions of feminist issues
in Canada of the past decade. Essay topics include
Theorizing Fiction Theory (p. 288); the resistance to theory in the Anglophone Canadian literary
institution. . . and how this works to marginalize
feminist attempts to theorize gender in that institution (p. 285); the connections between feminist
activists and theorists(p. 286); the feminist we, as
a political and ethical issue (p. 287); the problem of
Essentialism(e); the issue of Translating Women (p. 291); and other ongoing debates about
language, representation and legitimation.
The effect of Tesseras efforts to build a discursive
community where women are subjects rather than
objects, where women work coalitionally rather than
competitively can be seen in the seismic shifts in the
representations of women in the Canadian cultural
field of the 1980s and 1990s. Women became producers of knowledge, producers of representations,
and agents of change. An equally important effect
was the shift from the essentialized feminist discourses at the beginning of the 1980s, which positioned women as an homogenous group, to the
much more complex (and often fraught) discussions
and negotiations of differences later in the decade.14
This narrative of womens collective subjectivity,
agency, and community, like my individual narrative
of empowerment, is a much abbreviated story, but
long enough, I hope, to show how subjectivity can be
differently constituted by a reselection and reinterpretation of the past and to show how that reselection
can legitimate alternative histories and subjects. As
Cotnoir (1994, p. 10) so eloquently puts it, feminist
subjectivity is given life and substance by womens
collective activities:
I am, we are, women of memory. By its presence,
Tessera has and will contribute, I hope, to leaving
traces of womens History, Thought and Imaginary. Because we have dreamed, we still dream, of
a world where we will be visible and vital, I
am, we are women of words, and it is undoubtedly on this territory that Tessera has and will be
for me most necessary. I have discovered in its
pages, along with other women, intelligence,
imagination, the literary wealth of women, and I
have had many amorous encounters with their
texts, their hopes and their ideas which each, in
her own way, has nourished my reflections, my
fictions and my desires.

232

Pauline Butling

As indeed, for myself, this act of re/membering

my feminist self is nourished by many amorous
encounters with other womens texts. Those encounters, in turn, provide a base for reformulating a
collective history, complete with founding moments,
celebratory events, and identifiable social effects.
Only then does the constitution of the collective
subject work analogously to the constitution of the
individual one (Lambek, 1996, p. 245). Only then
can I override the subordinating, exclusionary, and
self-deluding mechanisms that came into play in my
first story and kept me aligned with the hegemonic.
To repeat Lambeks comment cited earlier, to
remember is never solely to report on the past so
much as to establish ones relationship to it (p. 240).
As here, this discursive act of speaking15 and writing
an alternative memory narrative places I, she
and we on mutually enhancing, parallel tracks.

ENDNOTES
1. Dr. Susan Rudy is a Professor in the English Department
at the University of Calgary. She and I have been working
together for several years on a book titled At the
Moment. Alternative Poetries and Communities in English Canada since 1960: Essays and Interviews.
2. It was famous in the sense that it served as a catalyst for
discussion of The New American Poetry (1960) and
because so many of the writers in Vancouver in the late
1950s and early 1960s took Tallmans course.
3. The name Tish is a phonetic inversion of shit and reflects
the adolescent, nose-thumbing attitude toward the literary
establishment of its founding editors.
4. I had a summer job as the administrative assistant for the
course. I also went to all the lecture sessions and readings
(though not the writing workshops) not to mention the
numerous social events, including an infamous party at
our apartment where more than 100 people were jammed
together. The course was 3-week long and consisted of
lectures three mornings a week, writing workshops three
afternoons a week, and evening readings several times
each week. It was organized by Professor Warren Tallman
and poet/professor Robert Creeley (who taught at University of British Columbia for a year) through the
Extension Department at UBC. What was unusual about
the course was that the instructors were counterculture figures not normally part of the University ranks
(including Charles Olson, Allan Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Margaret Avison, and Robert Duncan). Audio tape
recordings of the lectures and readings are available in
the Simon Fraser University Library, Special Collections,
Burnaby, BC, Canada.
5. They were both published in the same issue of Open
Letter magazine: One was an discussion with Fred Wah
and myself by Nichol (1978); the second was a discussion with Steve McCaffery and myself initiated by Fred
Wah (McCaffery, 1978).
6. See A Tishstory, edited by Irene Niechoda and Tim
Hunter from an afternoon discussion at Simon Fraser
University in 1985. The participants were Warren Tall-

man, Roy Miki, Gerry Gilbert, Gladys Hindmarch,

George Bowering, Frank Davey, David Dawson, Lionel
Kearns, Fred Wah, Ellen Tallman, and Dan McLeod.
Hindmarch remembers:
I guess a thing that really pulled it [the Tish group]
together was the New American Poetry book, which
came out in 1960, but which people didnt really read
in Vancouver until 1961. I remember getting that in the
spring of 61. And through talking about that, Warren
told me that Pauline Butling had written a very
interesting essay on one of Robert Duncans poems,
and I read this essay; and then I read an essay by Fred
Wah, which I think was on William Carlos Williams.
Suddenly I wanted to meet these two people. (p. 86)
7. I do not mean to position myself here as simply a victim
of male oppression or as having been silenced by others. I
am more interested in my self-silencing. To the extent that
I can analyze why I was happy with this vague role, I
would say that it was a combination of my own hesitation
to take myself seriously as a professional person, reinforced by the prevailing uncertainty about womens role
in the workforce. While my mother worked as a full-time
physiotherapist for nearly 30 years and thus offered a
non-traditional role model, she characterized her work as
a fallback position, not a chosen career. For me, going to
University did not necessarily mean taking up a career.
But nor did I see marriage and family as my main goal. I
played out that ambivalence by a combination of doing
and not doing. I concealed my intelligence (I remember
the astonishment of a male student/friend at a party when
he found out that I was on scholarship) yet I continued
my education. I did not take myself seriously as a scholar,
yet bristled if others did not and was surprised if they did.
I did not plan a career, yet resented the fact that, for a few
years, I did not have one.
8. This was one of many organizations established across
Canada as a result of the Royal Commission Report on
The Status of Women (Royal Commission on the Status of
Women in Canada, 1970), which was the most comprehensive and radical report of its kind to that time. See also
Begin (1992).
9. This is a notion that recurs throughout the essays collected in The Aeriel Letter. In a subsection titled Having
an Accent, Brossard (1985) complains that the term
women as [r]ooted in foreign semantic earth and
asks how does one succeed in getting ahead of ones
thinking with foreign words? (pp. 105 106).
10. I had been recommended by the hiring committee for a
full-time teaching position in the English Department at
Selkirk College in Castlegar, British Columbia in 1974,
but the principal overruled the committee, saying that he
was opposed to nepotism (an argument that often
served, among other things, to keep wives in part-time,
temporary positions). Only when I threatened to appeal
to the BC Human Rights commission did the appointment go through. I also changed my name from Wah
(my husbands name) to Butling at that time. The
change was prompted by my fury at finding my job
contract in my husbands mailbox (he taught at the same
college). I saw this not as a simple mistake of confusing
the names, but as an act which relegated me to a
subordinate position, as an appendage of my husband,
not an employee in my own right.

Who is She?

11. This is not to essentialize the category of woman. As de

Lauretis (1989) explains, to construct a genealogy of
women is not a biological or metaphysical essentialism
but a consciously political formulation of the specific
difference of women in a particular sociohistorical
location (p. 31, cited in Knutson, 1994, p. 229).
12. As explained by Marlatt (1994), Tessera began with
conversations, both formal and informal around the
Dialogue conference Barbara [Godard] organized in
1981 (Collaboration in the Feminine 13). The Tessera
founding editorial collective of Gail Scott, Barbara
Godard, Kathy Mezei, and Daphne Marlatt met as a
group for the first time at the Women in Words Conference in Vancouver (Mezei, 1994, p. 16) and formulated
more specific plans and goals for the magazine.
13. In this connection, Godard (1994a, 1994b) reminds us
of the lesson Gwen Davies has drawn from the past
which is that magazine publication is often ignored in
charting the periods and genres of literary production
in Canada (cited in Godard 1994a, 1994b, p. 265).
Book publication, on the other hand, has more visibility,
credibility, and legitimacy.
14. For a detailed analysis of this shift, see Poulton (2000).
15. My first presentation on this topic was in oral form, at
Women and Texts, Les Femmes et Les Textes: Languages, Technologies, Communities/Languages, Technologies, Communautes, University of Leeds, July 1 4,
1997.

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