May 9th, 2024
Ebru Ustundag: Neta, when did you start working on Ann-Marie McDonald?
Neta Gordon: Well, Ebru, I was starting my MA, and for my professional skills class, we had to do a PhD proposal. I didn’t have one, but I had just read Fall on Your Knees, which came out a few months before I started my PhD.
E: What was the year?
N: 1996. I’d learned a bunch of new terms in my theory class, and I created a “PhD project” on this novel, calling the framework “feminist genealogy.” When I decided to stick around and do a PhD, my dissertation was on MacDonald, alongside the work of Barbara Gowdy and SKY Lee, and it was on writing genealogy and feminist Canadian literature. So, she’s been with me in various ways for a very long time. But in 2021, I needed permission to copy something and contacted her people, and about a week later, I got an email from her which said, “I’ve read some of your work, and would you like to chat sometime?” We met and talked a lot about scholarship and different ways of writing.
At that time, I had already started talking to our wonderful Brock colleague Aaron Mauro about digital humanities methods, and he helped me develop the idea of “Mapping Ann-Marie McDonald.” Around then, I asked you if we could have a coffee to talk about the vocabulary of space and feminist geographies, and you said, “Sure,” as you always do. We sat in the sunshine and talked about –
E: Intimacy and space.
N: Yes, and space versus place and the idea that space is not a static container.
E: It’s a process and a set of relations –
N: and it was just crucial vocabulary. So, when it came time to write a grant proposal, Aaron and I asked if you would be willing to collaborate, and then the real stroke of genius and luck was when we asked Ann-Marie to collaborate, she said, “Sure.” Because she’s a scholar as much as she is everything else, and that’s where it started.
E: Can I go back? Let’s unpack mapping because it is in the title of the project. Is it special? It’s literary geographies and mapping. Why was it essential for you and Aaron to include this idea of mapping?
N: That’s a great question. Because there’s tons of stuff you can do with her work, and I did want to take a holistic approach and deal with the networking of all her plays and novels. But when thinking about a DH project, the question became: What are we visualizing? What are we showing? And place is very important in her work. Setting is not just a background, it’s integral – and after talking with you, I had a set of words.
E: It’s not just background, it’s not just the location, it’s embodied living.
N: It really is. Her work offers a way of thinking about how our perceptions, our ways of being in the world, and our ways of being with other people connect to the spaces we inhabit, and how those spaces impinge upon us. Mapping is an expedient way of thinking about visualization, although right from the beginning, I knew you would not be involved if it was just mapping locations. That would not be interesting to you at all! So, it’s mapping in ways that consider relationality and sense of place.
E: Part of the project is not only mapping, but also archiving. Archiving the research that she has done – we have places, we have objects, we have drawings, we have books. So, you are talking about the layering of different objects and mediums in conversation.
N: Yes, and that is one more part of bringing together the team I haven’t mentioned yet, which is the library. Tim Ribaric from the Brock library has very generously agreed to collaborate.
E: And there are two RA teams, and one team building an archive of all the scholarly paraphernalia that precedes the literary text. So, the mapping has become this frame – a thing that has a surface to it – but the key element of the mapping is to figure out all the layers behind the surface.
N: Yes, and we’re thinking about how a digital pin on a map is a doorway to so many other things, including literary analysis and interpretation, but also objects.
E: And also, we ask: how does this pin on the digital map get there?
N: Right! So, first, it got there because it’s in the book –
E: But how did the place get there in the book? That’s her trajectory –
N: How did the pin get onto the digital map? Well, because one of our students saw something in the space of the text and wanted to think about it.
To be continued…
