Kathleen Venema

Title: Associate Professor
Email: k.venema@uwinnipeg.ca

Biography:
I received both my undergraduate degrees (B.Ed. Secondary Pattern; B.A. Hons English) from the University of Winnipeg and both my graduate degrees (M.A. Language and Professional Writing; Ph.D. Language and Literature) from the University of Waterloo. My previous research, on early Canadian literature, especially exploration writing and imperial women’s epistolary writing, has evolved into an inquiry into narratives of illness, aging, disability, and care. My current scholarship considers the intersection of auto/biography, life writing, comics, memory, and critical disabilities studies, and among other focuses, examines how autobiographical texts – especially graphic texts – of aging, disability, dementia, and care navigate religious traditions and spiritual practices as they narrate end-of-life meaning-making. My 2018 critical memoir examines how issues related to international development, spiritually-grounded commitments to social justice, and loss associated with dementia’s devastations are negotiated in epistolary discourse.

Teaching Areas:
Canadian literature, life writing and auto/biographical studies, representations of disability, representations of peace and war, biblical texts in literary and cultural studies

Publications:

Publications (selected)

Books
Bird-Bent Grass. A Memoir, in Pieces. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018. 354 pp. Audiobook 2022.  (Shortlisted for the 2019 Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-fiction.)

Journal articles and book chapters
“’See this scar on my hand?’ Women’s Graphic Narratives of Ageing and Care.” Women’s Narratives of Ageing and Care, edited by Emily Jeremiah and Shirley Jordan, De Gruyter, Cultures of Ageing and Care Series. Vol. 1, 2025, pp. 55-79. 

“Picturing What Happens at the End: Graphic Narratives of Ageing and End-of-Life.” The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film, edited by Sarah Falcus, Heike Hartung, and Raquel Medina, Bloomsbury, 2023, pp. 75-90.  

“‘I wrote letters? To you?’: Letters as Memory Prompts in Dementia Care.” Journal of Epistolary Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2022, pp. 29-44.  

“Remembering Forgetting: Graphic Lives at the End of the Line.” Life Writing Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas, edited by Eva C. Karpinski and Ricia Anne Chansky, Routledge, 2020, pp. 169-189. 

“Remembering Forgetting: Graphic Lives at the End of the Line.” Lives Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas, special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2019, pp. 661-684. 

“And then, nothing”: Alzheimer’s Archives and the Good (Enough) Death.” Life's End: Ethnographic Perspectives, special issue of Death Studies, vol. 42, iss. 5, 6, 2018, pp. 298-305. 

“Untangling the Graphic Power of Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me.”  Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives, edited by Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2016, pp. 45-74.  (Canadian Graphic was awarded the 2016 Gabrielle Roy Prize.) 

“‘You can do with all this rambling whatever you want’: Scrutinizing Ethics in the Alzheimer’s Archives.” Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women's Archives, edited by Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl, Wilfred Laurier UP, 2012, pp. 281-301. (Nominated for the 2013 Hilda Neatby Prize.) 

Academic blog posts
“Graphic perspectives on caring, ageing and end-of-life.” Invited blog post for The Polyphony, Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, 4 July 2022. https://thepolyphony.org/2022/07/04/graphic-perspectives-on-caring-ageing-and-end-of-life/