Kathleen Venema Launching Bird-Bent Grass: A Memoir

Thu. Feb. 15, 2018

Book Launch | McNally Robinson | Friday Apr 20 2018 7:00 pm, Winnipeg, Grant Park in the Atrium

Bird-Bent Grass chronicles an extraordinary mother–daughter relationship that spans distance, time, and, eventually, debilitating illness. Personal, familial, and political narratives unfold through the letters that Geeske Venema-de Jong and her daughter Kathleen exchanged during the late 1980s and through their weekly conversations, which started after Geeske was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease twenty years later.

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.