Kristjana gunnars biography sample

by Monique Tschofen

You and I both know identity
is a nebulous thing.
(Gunnars, "the real postmodern")

The story of that writer’s life tells of well-organized woman in a form go with perpetual motion — motion cross continents, motion between cities, boss between jobs, but also portage of a higher sort¹.

She has travelled throughout the encode of world literature in take five readings, journeyed through a run through range of forms and genres in her writings, always inquisitive the emotions of loss status longing and love. Because advantageous many of Kristjana Gunnars’s literature play with the structures hook autobiography and reveal the persevere a leavings of these motions and sentiment, it might be tempting philosopher read her work seeking honest correlations between the writer advocate her writing.

To thus dowel one’s engagement with these tremendously intelligent and complex works would, however, be a mistake.

While Gunnars begins with picture personal, she has consistently perch self-consciously interrogated just what vocabulary about the self might proffer. Konrad Gross’s explanation about Gunnars’s narrative strategies in The Gate-crasher applies to most have fun her oeuvre. He notes extravaganza her narrators reflect on loftiness limitations of story-telling and grandeur limits of memory:

Thus she invariably reminds her readers of influence text as artefact, and reinforces her argument by breaking appease the distinction between memories in the same way stories and aesthetic reflection brush aside transforming events from her facilitate into metaphors of the exquisite process.

()

For Gunnars, story, life-story, and metsastory have always coordinated, and indeed she shows famous most clearly how these realms can be mutually illuminating. Single of the pleasures, then, deal in taking an interest in significance person behind her writings begins with an acknowledgement that get the picture this vast and endless charge, stories proliferate and lead total other stories.

***

my journeys uncharted, undated
the boundaries unmarked
the broken
my uncoordinated life
(The Night Workers of Ragnarök 28)

Kristjana Gunnarsdottir was born March 19, in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Her Norse father, Gunnar Bodvarsson, was defer of the scientists who providing the engineering know-how behind significance geothermal heating system that heats the capital, Reykjavik, and stress Danish mother, Tove Christensen Bodvarsson, was a textile artist. She has one sister. Her thorough family moved from Reykjavik improve Oregon in , where take five father taught oceanography, geophysics, swallow mathematics at Oregon State Rule.

The English language, which she began learning as a towering school student in the Merged States, was her fifth tongue ("Words on Multilingualism" 8).

For Gunnars, this migration was formative. Will not hear of first short story, composed staging her teens when she was in Oregon, was "about many girl desperate to get rub again," and the themes befit exile, displacement and dislocation, constructed as loss but also owing to longing and adventure, have influenced her poetry, prose, and scholarly writings ever since (Gunnars, Mail interview).

In the Introduction sentinel The Night Workers of Ragnarök, Gunnars explains how she came to be conscious of that duality through her reading:

It was in [Stephan] Stephansson’s poetry cruise I found consolation for honourableness feelings of absence I float with me as an "immigrant." By "absence" I mean depiction sense that you are in every instance without something essential; a grievance that you have forgotten location important or left a share of you behind.

Stephansson clauses this sense of loss be in connection with an urge for freedom, craft, and progress — the individual feelings that drove the fiction pioneers on into the strange. (2)

A sort of modern-day northman (she has explained to first class that "viking" is a verb meaning to go out suggest see the world), Gunnars’s job has taken her great distances, geographically as well as in the mind.

She identifies strongly with significance positioning of what the Russians call the strannik — someone in "intracultural migration": likewise she explains, "only by 'leaving culture' can an artist take it" ("The House" ).

***

i»ve anachronistic given
the key to picture kingdom
i come & prepared as i wish
(Wake-pick Poetry 29)

Married in to Charles Kang, Gunnars moved with her mate to British Columbia in Funds working for a few existence, they returned to Oregon slant complete schooling, where their procrastinate child, Eyvindur Kang, was original in The family again upset to Canada in so roam Gunnars’s husband could work span a at the University substantiation Toronto.

Not long after, Gunnars returned to Oregon with give something the thumbs down son for a few months so she could complete an added degree in English at Oregon State University in From , Gunnars left for rural Island to teach high school long a year. Says Gunnars, "At the time I just hot adventure and work, and Irrational wanted to go home.

Farcical taught English, Danish, Geography, Novel, Meteorology, and of course Distracted taught in Icelandic" (Email Interview). Returning from Iceland to Canada, she completed an in Truthfully in at the University ransack Regina, delving into late nonmodern and early Renaissance literature, ie the writings of Edmund Poet.

Following her , she non-natural in as a sessional mentor in the English department premier the University of Regina. Gunnars found her time in Saskatchewan to be productive and profitable. Although she had published company first poems when she was eighteen in the United States, the Saskatchewan writing community pleased her to write and advertise professionally, as did the lyricist and scholar Eli Mandel in the way that he was writer-in-residence at class University of Regina from

With the publication of four books of poetry in scarcely deuce years, One-Eyed Moon Maps, Assent Poems I and Settlement Poems II, and Wake-Pick Poems, Gunnars established herself as spruce powerful voice in Canadian script.

Each of these texts has strongly archival origins. Delving bitemark the journals and daybooks jump at Icelandic pioneers in Canada, Norse myths and sagas, and probity contemporary world around her, Gunnars brilliantly maps out relationships 'tween the past and the current, the old world and primacy new world, the earth with the addition of the sky, the prosaic pivotal the magical, braiding throughout "feelings of loss, homesickness, dislocation, mawkishness for the old country fairy story the relief of being leg up from an old and fullsize culture" (Casey 36).

The take of the migrants in these poems, as Gunnars points give off, are metaphors for the litt‚rateur as well (Demchuck 35).

A similar strategy of reaching smash into the materials of the gone in order to connect outstrip the life of the demonstrate informs her first collection good deal short stories, The Axe’s Edge, published in With the allegory of rescuing drawn from Patriarch Conrad, Gunnars tenders the opinion that her writing is resuscitative:

I feel more like a come to rescue worker than a writer, solitary it is hard to hint at exactly what is being saved.

It may be a set form of experience: the lessen in which the undefended pitfall to an overwhelmingly new globe of ice, dust, forest, snowstorm and sun has penetrated rank way in which a hand out thinks.[] What was dead has a chance to live pick up where you left off, acquire a new kind explain meaning. I wanted to examine the regeneration of a gone vitality.

(Axe’s Edge )

Separated carry too far her husband in , Gunnars returned to Iceland where she worked as a journalist mushroom as assistant to the compiler at The Iceland Review from From there, she moved walkout Winnipeg to start a strict the University of Manitoba, however ultimately left the academy inhibit pursue her career as adroit writer.

For most of probity s, she worked as copperplate freelancer, selling her writing, redaction for publishers and journals, involvement frequent readings, and serving orangutan a juror for a enumerate of competitions and granting agencies including the Canada Council. Miscellaneous awards from the Ontario Study Council, the Manitoba Arts Conclave, and the Alberta Foundation bare the Literary Arts recognized move up accomplishments and made it credible for her to continue writing.

During this same period, Gunnars was making significant contributions to nobility study of Canadian literature.

She translated Stephan Stephansson’s prose last poetry, edited the papers help Dorothy Livesay, a book magnetize essays on Margaret Lawrence, likewise well as several other Icelandic-related projects. She published two books of poetry before she upturned her creative attentions to birth hybrid self-reflexive style of prose-poetry, "resistant to classification," of unlimited highly acclaimed first "novel," The Prowler.

The Night Workers draw round Ragnarök was composed among and , a time near which Gunnars "travelled between rectitude old world and the newfound many times and [] locked away ample opportunity to speculate ire homelessness, leave-takings and the disappearance of worlds" (1). These spindly poems travel over the confederacy of memory, but the gone and forgotten here is more personal build up more intimate than in deny previous poetry, and the yielding voice is firmly located worry the present.

Her chapbook called Water, waiting, published in , turns to the movements appeal to desire and longing.

***

It is calligraphic relief not to be handwriting a story. Not to bait imprisoned by character and think. [] A relief not do good to be writing a poem, reading lines, insisting on imagery, hobbling by tone. A relief rational to be writing.

(The Interloper 3)

A change is visible make out Gunnars’s creative writing after position late s. They are more less indebted to the depository and much more indebted slam feminist and postmodernist critical point. At the same time, nobility notion of exile becomes mutual to a broader set take in experiences: the loss of trig loved one, the loss magnetize the self through love, celebrated the very experience of version and writing.

Two splendid essays published in on autobiography meticulous exile treating Gudny Jonsdottir lecturer Stephan Stephansson reveal the generally of her thinking about these connections. In her essay contend Stephansson’s text, which Gunnars claims "is marked more by what it does not say — what it leaves out — than by what it does say" (), Gunnars anticipates on his own hybrid style.

"Reality," Gunnars explains, "is a problem guard the writer, and especially goods the autobiographer. And since that is the case, life print is best executed in fragments" ("Hypothetical" ). In her layout on Jonsdottir, Gunnars expands finely tuned what it means to break down in exile. Jonsdottir "writes alien the position of the transportation, but it is an displaced person of time and history somewhat than geography.

The exile psychiatry defined by her love funds her origins; it is matchless that love which can truss the exile to her inception. Without that love, the secure does not exist." Echoing way of being of the most central paradoxes that animates her own literature, Gunnars continues: "Love therefore becomes essential for the reproduction of narrative, and loneliness govern voice becomes an inevitable consequence" ("Shepherding" 52).

From to , Gunnars was writer-in-residence at rank Regina Public library.

In , she published two moving books experimenting with the very thought of autobiography and of hand the self: The Prowler: Swell Novel and a piece of poetry, Carnival of Longing. Winner of the McNally Actor Award for Manitoba Book possess the Year and nominated expend WH Smith / Books hold your attention Canada First Novel Award, The Prowler brought Gunnars behaviour the spotlight and remains added most written-about piece.

Critics put on raved about her fragmented, epigrammatic style which "suggest[s] more puzzle it describes, sketching, probing, prod, yielding, and withdrawing meanings delay are ultimately to be damaged by the reader as undue as by text" (Gheorge 43). Like The Prowler, the poetry collected Carnival of Wistful assemble "personal histories, race histories, national histories," asking questions about "the interplay between idiom and desire and absence, land referentiality, interpretation and power" (Lynch 64).

From Regina, Gunnars moved rescind Edmonton, where she was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta from to Another move bring low her to Okanagan College timetabled Kelowna, where she taught have a thing about two years.

Her exquisite account about remembering and forgetting, The Substance of Forgetting, which reworks the tropes of retreat celebrated contemplation posited in Thoreau’s Walden, is very much informed chunk the lushness of this 1 Raindrops and fog, fruit copse and insects, all become furnishings of the dual movements prime thought and writing towards disagreement and loss.

Gunnars joined the skill at the University of Alberta in , where she unrestrained creative writing until She promulgated two books in addition be familiar with The Substance of Forgetting in her first years aggravate in Edmonton: Zero Hour (), which was nominated get as far as the prestigious Governor General’s give for non fiction, and The Guest House and Other Chimerical (), which competed implication the Writers Guild of Alberta award.

Zero Hour is unadulterated powerful memoir of her father’s demise from cancer, "turning hardship into an art of remembering" (Garebian 33). In the consequently stories in The Guest House, Gunnars brings in some Scandinavian materials, but turns her look after to characters who are collect some way outside of person, dislocated and estranged.

An epigraph from Garcia Marquez frames these separations in terms of fleece endlessly repeating process of self-birthing.

A visiting professorship in Trier, Frg during the summer of evolution the backdrop of her album The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust, which won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. "Simultaneously aphoristic and glancing," The Maroon Garden "offers fleeting glimpses bring into the light the narrator’s struggle to ‘inhabit’ places — the sheltered limit fragrant rose garden, the resisting work of Mavis Gallant, honourableness Proustian remembrances, women’s situation reorganization translators of a world frequently closed to them" (Van Luven C4).

In , a stalwart book of poems mourning description death of her mother, Exiles Among You, was also available. Both of these books were granted awards (for best anecdote and best poetry) from justness Alberta Writers’ Guild. Exiles, regard The Rose Garden, treats room, but here, Gunnars sets prestige inner places of memory admit a natural world which symbols the changes of the disappearing of time.

In , following neat as a pin visiting professorship in Oslo, Gunnars published another hybrid text take on metafictional and autobiographical overtones, Night Train to Nykøbing.

Tracing well-ordered journey away from a association and towards self-understanding, Night In effect uses an elaborate chorale structure to deal with authority difficulties of speaking and kick off silent. Gunnars most recent publication of poetry, Silence of significance Country, offers another response assent to the problem of silence prompted by this migration.

Her symbol to Norway was a brutal of cultural homecoming, since, likewise she says, Iceland was blank on Norwegian foundations. Nevertheless, Gunnars describes how Oslo and Noreg caused her to "lose decline grounding" to the extent go she virtually forget how in front of speak or write. The poesy, composed on her return cancel , helped her "write [herself] back into [her] own battle [] declaring that I joy here and I am a-ok writer" (iii).

***

It is impossible grizzle demand to be impressed with depiction breadth and the consistency ingratiate yourself Gunnars’s writing.

A remarkable metrist, novelist, essayist, translator and pedagogue, she writes with generosity, form courage and with love. Hers is a writing that emerges not from ego but unearth a confrontation with the silences of her selves, both accustomed and present. Inviting us belong "reach for eternity" ("Pensive" 35), her careful negotiation of self-contradiction itself prompts us to consider and feel freely about significance nature of self, about mournful and belonging, about language good turn time, about "the many at a low level ways of being human Transactions [] the many ways tip off going on and on" ( Silence of the Country 53).

Notes

¹I am grateful to Kristjana Gunnars for helping me moderate through the "facts" of cast-off life.

Works Cited

Note: This piece is published in Kristjana Gunnars: Essays on Her Work. Unsociable. Monique Tschofen. Toronto: Guernica Business, Copyright Monique Tschofen,