Home > Reviews > Prose > Archive for Non-Fiction ( > Page 2)

Redefining Home: A Review of Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant

Dear Current Occupant 

Chelene Knight

BookThug

Review by Mormei Zanke

Chelene Knight’s new memoir Dear Current Occupant, defies traditional genres of writing through its inherent hybridity and fragmentation. The book delves into Knight’s childhood past, exploring her experience of growing up while moving in and out of twenty homes in East Vancouver. Knight weaves poetry, essays, letters, and photographs together to create a work that is halting and profoundly moving. Knight’s fragmented approach succeeds in exploring the truths of her past more than any conventional, linear method could.

Continue reading Redefining Home: A Review of Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant

Decolonial Confession: A Review of Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries

Heart Berries
Terese Marie Mailhot
Doubleday Canada
Review by Cody Caetano

Often when I’m reading memoir, I’ll remember a quote from a misguided Neil Genzlinger, who penned “The Problem With Memoirs” for The New York Times in 2011: “There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir… Sure, [Amazon] has authors who would be memoir-eligible under the old rules. But they are lost in a sea of people you’ve never heard of” (italics mine). It is important to note that marginalized memoirists, especially early-career Indigenous women, Two-Spirit, and queer folks, have fraught histories with Genzlinger-types, their “old rules” and antiquated tastes that mar the merit of writing, publishing, and participating in the predominantly white spaces of the literary world. And then along comes Terese Marie Mailhot, a Salish First Nation woman from Seabird Island Indian Reservation with the assertion that memoir “functions as something vulnerable in a sea of posturing” (137). And it is in vulnerability that Mailhot effectively rejects the moth-eaten straightjacket that would otherwise restrict the inventive, decolonial confession of Heart Berries.

Continue reading Decolonial Confession: A Review of Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries