Launching from the Pulpit

Brenda Cranny, Editor along with Francis Beer and Andrea Medovsarski

 

Editor Brenda Cranny smiled. “We’ve been publishing for thirty-five years,” she told me. She is referring to the journal, Canadian Woman Studies. We are at the launch of its 4th Women Writing Issue titled Remembering held at the College Street United Church in Toronto and I am waiting my turn in the pulpit. Not a sermon. A reading of my story called The Wallflower, which was included in the compilation.

The joint was jumping or as much as a United Church can jump. The wine was flowing and the goodies, including delicious pizza, was attracting a goodly number of noshers. The pews filled up and on came about twelve writers, one after another, reading a page or two about women’s lives. I was next to last and my story starts off so unhappily that I had to reassure the audience there was a happy ending. I may be wrong, but I think I heard a collective sigh of relief.

It was an honour to be included in such a prestigious publication. Eleanor Albanese, another Thunder Bayer, has a memoir piece called The Queen of Pearl Street in the same issue. Copies available at the Northern Woman’s Bookstore on S. Court.

 

Poet L. June Stevenson