It came in the mail

Yesterday was a good day. Apart from my husband's birthday, a family dinner and baking a cake with my granddaughter who also sang Happy Birthday (the two year old version), three of my works from the Remnants series were published in a local magazine.

The Newfoundland Quarterly magazine began publishing in 1901 when Newfoundland was an independent country. It is the province's oldest magazine, and the second oldest in Canada. The NL Quarterly in now owned by Memorial University and is published through the Newfoundland Quarterly Foundation, established in 1982.

My work appeared in conjunction with an article called First Impressions. Tim Marsh, a Californian, was asked to remember his first impressions of Newfoundland. Tim is a poet, essayist, and a graduate student in Folklore Studies at Memorial University in St. John's. He recalled the tensions and fear experienced by many, including his family, during the Rodney King riots in 1992, and how this was the backdrop for his first glimpse of Newfoundland on the cover of a calendar in his mother's "dream basket". I could identify with his mother, a third grade teacher, who exposed her students to the broad world that existed outside their neighbourhoods. The only difference was that I lived and taught in the other world of predictability and safety. This paragraph says it all.

"There are 10 million people in the city of Los Angeles; approximately 500,000 in the whole realm of Newfoundland. One cannot easily imagine what an incredible difference of human presence that is. It is the difference between living in a community, linked by common heritage, and living in an aggregate of communities, ready to fall apart at the first serious shock." pg. 14, Volume 101, #4, 2009 Newfoundland Quarterly

While my images did not relate directly to his article, they related to my memories of life as a young teen growing up in Newfoundland.