text bookSection Sullivan Rosemary aut I have spent a decade of my life reclaiming the past by writing biographies of extraordinary Canadian women writers. I have also spent the last dozen years as the director of a creative writing program at the University of Toronto dedicated to nurturing the future. These two activities are intimately connected in my mind. In writing biographies, I have discovered that a central theme of a writer’s life is how to claim the confidence to believe in oneself as a writer. I have written about the lives of three women. Elizabeth Smart struggled against self-doubt and fell into silence; Gwendolyn MacEwen struggled against secrecy and died tragically. Margaret Atwood’s career coincided with a new surge in Canadian literature, and in women’s writing in particular, that gave her the confidence to be, fully, the writer she was meant to be. Their stories informed my sense of what the creative writing workshop can achieve—dialogue, collaboration, and a sense of historical context, such that you can feel the generational pressure of writers behind you, sustaining you as you dedicate yourself to the exacting and lifelong claims of the writer’s art. Canadian literature Criticism, interpretation, etc Canadian literature (English) Canadian literature (French) French-Canadian literature Women authors Women authors History and criticism eng fre OCLC: ocn887390772 Library of Congress ISBN book Demers Patricia edt Carrière Marie J. edt First edition Edmonton, Alberta, Canada The University of Alberta Press 2014 monographic 978-0-88864-627-9 PR9194.5.W6 R44 2014 Copyright © 2014 The University of Alberta Press