Preparing the penultimate draft of Hand Over

Historic Joy Kogawa House Residency, September 2026

Since 2017, I have been trying to write something about having moved with my Welsh partner from Canada to London at the age of fifty to live the queer intellectual life I’d longed for, but I kept bumping up against the parts of me that didn’t fit in my new life, and the losses I’d experienced to make it happen.

Not only was I queer and an intellectual, I was also a person assigned female at birth and a parent who, for more than twenty years, had lived a putatively heterosexual life. In solidarity with queer and intersectional feminist thought, I wanted to write about my experience as a woman who had never felt like one, a putatively straight woman who had taken more than twenty years to come out as a lesbian, a mother whose children had been parented at least as much by their father as they had been by me, a citizen who had become an immigrant and left home many times, but I wasn’t satisfied with any of my drafts. How, in one book, could I evoke the complexity of my experience? 

To address this formal problem, I generated a draft by focusing on the sentence as the unit of composition, the words of others as much as my own, and the practice of writing alphabetically as the solution to my dilemma about how to juxtapose disparate times, spaces, and emotional registers. Searching through my materials – including an archive of early poetry, academic essays, aborted drafts, journal entries, and more than 500 research notes - I selected 1000 sentences which spoke to me as I sat at my desk in a Leighton Studio in Banff. A manuscript of 165 pages emerged when I sorted the sentences alphabetically, inserted spaces between each of them, and created 26 sections by using the first letter of each alphabetized section as a title. As I have been adding references to the more than 350 sentences which are not my own, the manuscript has extended to over 200 pages. 

While in residence, my goal will be to bring to completion the writing project described above, which would involve one practical task (completing the sentence references), one substantive editing task (taking on feedback from friends and colleagues), and one emotionally and intellectually demanding task: the criticism from a Canadian poet that my analysis of gender and sexuality in the manuscript does not take on my whiteness. Being based at Kogawa House gives me the opportunity to connect with the diverse local community in Vancouver.

In London, the analysis of race arises out of historical contexts that did not shape me emotionally or intellectually, but in Vancouver I have the opportunity to reconnect with writers with whom I have collaborated in the past, many of them key figures in articulating the impact of racism in Canada, including Fred Wah. Interacting with them and their work will give me the opportunity to think about what these voices mean for what I am trying to achieve with my manuscript in the present. 

My aims are entirely in line with those of Kogawa House. Although the ‘obstacles’ against queer women are ‘still immensely powerful’ (241), as Virginia Woolf put it in 1931, in my work I seek ‘to tell the truth about my own experiences as a body’.  

In its support of marginalized voices and social change, Historic Joy Kogawa House has given me exactly what I need to complete the project. In the words of C.E. Gatchalian, from your website: ‘a place for us writers to free ourselves from the distractions of our normative environments for a few months’. It also gives me a place to focus on the racial complexity of the literary environment that has shaped me. To complete my final draft, I need, not only the support of the community of writers in Vancouver, but space to reflect on what it feels like to bring back to Canada, again, the thinking I have done in London. I need what theHouse would offer: shelter in Vancouver, support from other writers, courage.