The View From Here:
Lynne Fukuda

“And Jehovah Proceeded To”

Dan Lukiv, M.Ed.
English and Creative Writing
McNaughton Centre, Quesnel, BC, Canada
E-mail: lukivdan@shaw.ca

1.
Abraham also offered you,
Little turtledove, perhaps
Snaring one of your skinny legs,
As you pecked away at grain or
Seeds or clover, between your
“Turr-r-r turr-r-r,” your plaintive
Cry of freedom and shyness and
Quick escapes into the sweet
Sky.

With your head nipped off
And your blood drained on the
Altar’s side, your sacrifice
(A poor mother’s cost)
Would stand by sons and daughters
Born crooked,
Even by a greater Isaac born
Straight.

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Power, Education and Recovery with Mental Illness

J. Karen Reynolds, PhD
Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology
Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada
E-mail:  karen.reynolds@shaw.ca

In this paper I explore key relationships between education and recovery with mental illness from the perspective of a group of consumers/survivors. The term consumer/survivor refers to individuals who have been “diagnosed with and often hospitalized for serious mental health problems, such as schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and bipolar disorder and who participate in self-help/mutual aid organizations” (Nelson, Ochocka, Griffin, Lord 1998, p. 6).  Within this context, participatory action research offers opportunities for consumers/survivors to confront stigmas and act as agents of change in their own lives and in the lives of others who are directly affected. Participatory action research empowers participants by amplifying their voices and concerns. Members of a community take part in the process.

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From Silence to Speech: An Assessment of Indian English Fiction by Women

Asha Choubey, PhD
Reader in English
Head, Department of Humanities
MJP Rohilkhand University, India E-mail: asha.choubey@yahoo.com

We have to know where women are, why women have to write the novel, the story of their own domesticity, the story of their own seclusion within the home and the possibilities and impossibilities provided by that.(1)

Women write to celebrate their womanhood; they sing women’s dream and speak their bodies. For as long as women did not write they were not heard. Women’s writing then, is like a raising consciousness. Their writing impacts their very existence in the socio-cultural milieu as it expedites their shift from a marginal position to a central one. Literature is impacted by reality, but its corollary, that reality is molded by literature, is also true. The Indian literary scene, dominated by men as active forces, always had a gap—it told the story of half of humanity through the voice of the other half. In a country where even the political power in the hands of rural and urban uneducated women is used by their men, it becomes very significant to explore the changes brought about in the literary scene by women writers. The shift from women as seen and projected by men, to women as lived and experienced by women was most welcome. This essay proposes to take stock of the ways in which the fiction scene is impacted by the Indian women writers of English.

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