The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: trauma

  • Another Form of CNF True Crime: Trauma and Abuse Memoirs

    This isn’t material I would teach as mandatory reading in a creative writing class, and probably also not in a literature course, no matter how well crafted. Teaching fiction that deals with childhood violence has offered me enough instances where undergraduate students, many of whom are still teenagers, react strongly and not always predictably to…

  • “The Beating of a Child Was By No Means Reprehensible”: Alice Munro, Freud, and the Long Aftermath of Crimes Against Children

    A question from a student about Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? (the question being whether it’s autobiographical) sent me back to her terrifying story “Royal Beatings” this morning. Then an interview that I read recently had me searching for Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten.” This will become a longer critical piece. Just…

  • Writing Trauma in Crime Fiction

    This is a brief post as I grapple with two very significant texts that inform my thinking about crime and trauma: Erin Wunker’s Notes from a Feminist Killjoy is a book of essays and in these varied pieces Wunker offers moving and critically rigorous hybrid personal/academic writing. It’s a book that I’ve returned to several…