“I watch the day decide what to be. Will it be flopping laundry or blank pages filled?” Ann Elizabeth Carson is brilliant at capturing such moments in this deeply contemplative selection, attuned to the way things feel: frozen cracks in the boardwalk crackle/under blanket-muffled babies in big-wheeled strollers. Garden plants remind her of where we […]

In his [/her work], every memoirist leaves behind a better or worse likeness of the people he knew, alongside two self-portraits. The first of these two is painted intentionally, while the second is unplanned, accidental. It goes without saying that the first is more flattering than the second, and the second is more faithful than […]

Grab my walking sticks from the corner behind the back door, go round the edge of the cottage (# 9) past the windsock onto the rutted grass track to the gravel driveway, glance at my watch so I’ll know how long it takes this time to reach halfway up the hill that leads to the […]

Uncovering unspoken voices. This has been a consistent theme in my lifelong work as psychotherapist, author, artist and social activist. 87 years old, I was born in 1929 at a time when women were expected to keep silent about anything other than the mundane workings of domestic life. Alcoholism, divorce, single parenthood, suicide were taboo […]

February Reflections Mary Tabor, writing in Wattpad (Jan. 9, 2016), challenges “our” resistance to fiction in “How Does Autobiography Work in Fiction?” She writes passionately about the ways in which story as fiction is truer to an author’s experience than the “factual” storyline of memoir. In her book The Woman Who Never Cooked (published on […]

Gianna Patriarca writes about Laundry Lines, A Memoir in Stories and Poems: Click here to read more reviews of Laundry Lines, A Memoir in Stories and Poems. Ann Elizabeth Carson’s new collection, Laundry Lines: A Memoir in Stories and Poems, is as crisp as linens drying in the Manitoulin sunshine.  A born storyteller, Ann takes […]

Sonia Di Placido’s comments on Laundry Lines, A Memoir in Stories and Poems: Click here to read more reviews of Laundry Lines, A Memoir in Stories and Poems. This is one of Canada’s voices that lived through the Robertson Davies era; the Morley Callaghan, Dorothy Livesay, Margaret Laurence, Ethel Wilson and Anne Wilkinson years that returns to […]

Jasmine D’Costa has this to say about Laundry Lines, A Memoir in Stories and Poems (Inanna Publications and Education, 2015) Click here to read more reviews of Laundry Lines, A Memoir in Stories and Poems. Ann Elizabeth Carson travels into her past to understand how her soul/person was shaped. She stumbles upon the various silences […]