Awards

• Short-listed for Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-fiction, Manitoba Book Awards 2019 (Canada)

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9781771122900

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Reviews

An extraordinary and deftly written memoir, Bird-Bent Grass: A Memoir, in Pieces is an inherently compelling read from beginning to end. Complex, candid, and offering an intrinsically fascinating account that will prove to be an enduringly valued addition to both community and academic library Contemporary Biography collections. -- Margaret Lane -- Midwest Book Review, 20180622 Bird-Bent Grass is a rich contribution to memoir and epistolary literature. As in the letters of Paul in the Bible and Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, for example, Venema explores the rich literary potential of changing and interweaving perspectives as well as the intrigue of letters gone astray. This book contains lush language on global themes of conflict, abuse, estrangement and death, and reminds us of the significance of what a letter once was. I want to clap a glass case on it; letters have become museum artifacts, and this project shows what has been lost since the first emails were sent seven years after these first letters were written in 1987. Venema has done a marvellous job of examining the significance of letter-writing in cementing bonds across mother-daughter, African-North American and historic-past-present relationships. - Faith Eidse, co-editor of Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global and author of Healing Falls (forthcoming) Readers who are walking the journey of Alzheimer's with a loved one should find a sense of rapport with this story. Venema describes the progress of the disease in an honest and straightforward way, tinged with sadness, but always spiced with laughter. -- Barb Draper -- Canadian Mennonite, 20181101 It's a deeply beautiful, thoughtful, celebratory book ... important and elegant. -- Charlene Diehl, Director, Winnipeg International Writers Festival I felt [...] both moved and enlightened by the documenting of two such curious and articulate and inclusive intellects--by the conversations that move through this memoir, and link its disparate parts--by wise and profound detailing of this auto-ethnography. The image of bird-bent grass from the title evokes for me both a close observation of affect and a contemplation of impermanence, and I was invited to experience both of these states inside a lively, articulate, and sensitive account. Karen Hofmann, Prairie Fire Bird-Bent Grass is a compelling memoir that offers a thoughtful and evocative engagement with questions of identity, memory, and the relationships that help to shape and define a person. -- Canadian Literature (web), 20181114 [Bird-Bent Grass] demonstrates that, and how, a substantial, complex memoir can be fashioned out of domestic life writing (personal correspondence, diaries, and recorded conversations and reminiscences). Such an achievement is especially welcome at a time when the family archive is endangered by the broad shift to electronic communication and social media. -- G. Thomas Couser -- Biography

An extraordinary and deftly written memoir, Bird-Bent Grass: A Memoir, in Pieces is an inherently compelling read from beginning to end. Complex, candid, and offering an intrinsically fascinating account that will prove to be an enduringly valued addition to both community and academic library Contemporary Biography collections. - Margaret Lane - Midwest Book Review - 20180622 Bird-Bent Grass is a rich contribution to memoir and epistolary literature. As in the letters of Paul in the Bible and Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, for example, Venema explores the rich literary potential of changing and interweaving perspectives as well as the intrigue of letters gone astray. This book contains lush language on global themes of conflict, abuse, estrangement and death, and reminds us of the significance of what a letter once was. I want to clap a glass case on it; letters have become museum artifacts, and this project shows what has been lost since the first emails were sent seven years after these first letters were written in 1987. Venema has done a marvellous job of examining the significance of letter-writing in cementing bonds across mother-daughter, African-North American and historic-past-present relationships. - Faith Eidse, co-editor of Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global and author of Healing Falls (forthcoming)

An extraordinary and deftly written memoir, Bird-Bent Grass: A Memoir, in Pieces is an inherently compelling read from beginning to end. Complex, candid, and offering an intrinsically fascinating account that will prove to be an enduringly valued addition to both community and academic library Contemporary Biography collections. -- Margaret Lane -- Midwest Book Review, 20180622 Bird-Bent Grass is a rich contribution to memoir and epistolary literature. As in the letters of Paul in the Bible and Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, for example, Venema explores the rich literary potential of changing and interweaving perspectives as well as the intrigue of letters gone astray. This book contains lush language on global themes of conflict, abuse, estrangement and death, and reminds us of the significance of what a letter once was. I want to clap a glass case on it; letters have become museum artifacts, and this project shows what has been lost since the first emails were sent seven years after these first letters were written in 1987. Venema has done a marvellous job of examining the significance of letter-writing in cementing bonds across mother-daughter, African-North American and historic-past-present relationships. - Faith Eidse, co-editor of Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global and author of Healing Falls (forthcoming)

Bird-Bent Grass is a rich contribution to memoir and epistolary literature. As in the letters of Paul in the Bible and Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, for example, Venema explores the rich literary potential of changing and interweaving perspectives as well as the intrigue of letters gone astray. This book contains lush language on global themes of conflict, abuse, estrangement and death, and reminds us of the significance of what a letter once was. I want to clap a glass case on it; letters have become museum artifacts, and this project shows what has been lost since the first emails were sent seven years after these first letters were written in 1987. Venema has done a marvellous job of examining the significance of letter-writing in cementing bonds across mother-daughter, African-North American and historic-past-present relationships. - Faith Eidse, co-editor of Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global and author of Healing Falls (forthcoming) An extraordinary and deftly written memoir, Bird-Bent Grass: A Memoir, in Pieces is an inherently compelling read from beginning to end. Complex, candid, and offering an intrinsically fascinating account that will prove to be an enduringly valued addition to both community and academic library Contemporary Biography collections. - Margaret Lane - Midwest Book Review - 20180622

An extraordinary and deftly written memoir, Bird-Bent Grass: A Memoir, in Pieces is an inherently compelling read from beginning to end. Complex, candid, and offering an intrinsically fascinating account that will prove to be an enduringly valued addition to both community and academic library Contemporary Biography collections. -- Margaret Lane -- Midwest Book Review, 20180622 Bird-Bent Grass is a rich contribution to memoir and epistolary literature. As in the letters of Paul in the Bible and Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, for example, Venema explores the rich literary potential of changing and interweaving perspectives as well as the intrigue of letters gone astray. This book contains lush language on global themes of conflict, abuse, estrangement and death, and reminds us of the significance of what a letter once was. I want to clap a glass case on it; letters have become museum artifacts, and this project shows what has been lost since the first emails were sent seven years after these first letters were written in 1987. Venema has done a marvellous job of examining the significance of letter-writing in cementing bonds across mother-daughter, African-North American and historic-past-present relationships. - Faith Eidse, co-editor of Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global and author of Healing Falls (forthcoming) Readers who are walking the journey of Alzheimer's with a loved one should find a sense of rapport with this story. Venema describes the progress of the disease in an honest and straightforward way, tinged with sadness, but always spiced with laughter. -- Barb Draper -- Canadian Mennonite, 20181101

Author Information

Kathleen Venema spent several years as a junior-high teacher in northern Manitoba before joining a teacher-training college in post-civil-war Uganda. Now an associate professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, she publishes on early Canadian exploration texts and imperial women's letters; researches narratives of conflict, aging, disability, and care; and pursues a lifelong interest in transformative pedagogy.

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