Five Years a Writer

The Woman who Swallowed West Hawk Lake by Deborah Schnitzer London, ON: Ardith Publishing 2026 available through Amazon Review by Amanda Le Rougetel This highly original and creative novel, presented in multiple layers of memory and textual artifacts, challenged me to think beyond what I expect to see on the pages of a book, and to hand myself and my reading experience over to the unfolding storylines within its cover. Two young children, a girl and a boy, suffer a sense of isolation from their extended family members when their mother is taken ill and taken away from them. When they visit her, they sense she is no longer the mother they thought she was to them. Meanwhile, the man they call ‘nazi’ — spelled lower case when referenced by the children but upper case when the adults discuss him — is hanging around, apparently taking photographs. Why? Who is he? And what has really happened to their mother? The children’s deepening sense of unease is coupled with a growing understanding o...

  January 1985: Hecate's Players performing in Fort McMurray,  Alberta, at the invitation of  Women of the North.  From left, Amanda Le Rougetel, Kathryn Ivany, Lisa Walter.  Look at at those serious faces (and bad hair) from more than four decades ago. Oh my goodness. I want to believe we didn't take ourselves as seriously as these pics suggest, but in 1985 we had so many things to say about the plight of women in this world, and say them we did. To each other, the general public and to politicians, at meetings, around tables and from stages. I have always enjoyed performing on a stage (ever since I played the shoemaker’s wife in Grade 2), so establishing a feminist theatre collective in the early 1980s with a bunch of university friends was not a stretch for me. Indeed, it was a natural outlet for my burgeoning politics. We named ourselves Hecate’s Players, after the goddess in ancient Greek religion and mythology “variously associated with crossroads, night,...