Dropped Threads 2

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1935, Carol Shields moved to Canada at the age of twenty-two, after studying at the University of Exeter in England, and then obtained her M.A. at the University of Ottawa. She started publishing poetry in her thirties, and wrote her first novel, Small Ceremonies, in 1976. Over the next three decades, Shields would become the author of over twenty books, including plays, poetry, essays, short fiction, novels, a book of criticism on Susanna Moodie and a biography of Jane Austen. Her work has been translated into twenty-two languages.In addition to her writing, Carol Shields worked as an academic, teaching at the University of Ottawa, the University of British Columbia and the University of Manitoba. In 1996, she became chancellor of the University of Winnipeg. She lived for fifteen years in Winnipeg and often used it as a backdrop to her fiction, perhaps most notably in The Republic of Love. Shields also raised five children—a son and four daughters—with her husband Don, and often spoke of juggling early motherhood with her nascent writing career. When asked in one interview whether being a mother changed her as a writer, she replied, “Oh, completely. I couldn’t have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of personality. It was a kind of biological component for me that had to come first. And my children give me this other window on the world.”The Stone Diaries, her fictional biography of Daisy Goodwill, a woman who drifts through her life as child, wife, mother and widow, bewildered by her inability to understand any of these roles, received excellent reviews. The book won a Governor General’s Literary Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, bringing Shields an international following. Her novel Swann was made into a film (1996), as was The Republic of Love (2003; directed by Deepa Mehta). Larry’s Party, published in several countries and adapted into a musical stage play, won England’s Orange Prize, given to the best book by a woman writer in the English-speaking world. And Shields’s final novel, Unless, was shortlisted for the Booker, Orange and Giller prizes and the Governor General’s Literary Award, and won the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction.Shields’s novels are shrewdly observed portrayals of everyday life. Reviewers praised her for exploring such universal themes as loneliness and lost opportunities, though she also celebrated the beauty and small rewards that are so often central to our happiness yet missing from our fiction. In an eloquent afterword to Dropped Threads, Shields says her own experience taught her that life is not a mountain to be climbed, but more like a novel with a series of chapters.Carol Shields was always passionate about biography, both in her writing and her reading, and in 2001 she published a biography of Jane Austen. For Shields, Austen was among the greatest of novelists and served as a model: “Jane Austen has figured out the strategies of fiction for us and made them plain.” In 2002, Jane Austen won the coveted Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction. A similar biographical impulse lay behind the two Dropped Threads anthologies Carol Shields edited with Marjorie Anderson; their contributors were encouraged to write about those experiences that women are normally not able to talk about. “Our feeling was that women are so busy protecting themselves and other people that they still feel they have to keep quiet about some subjects,” Shields explained in an interview.Shields spoke often of redeeming the lives of people by recording them in her own works, “especially that group of women who came between the two great women’s movements…. I think those women’s lives were often thought of as worthless because they only kept house and played bridge. But I think they had value.”In 1998, Shields was diagnosed with breast cancer. Speaking on her illness, Shields once said, “It’s made me value time in a way that I suppose I hadn’t before. I’m spending my time listening, listening to what’s going around, what’s happening around me instead of trying to get it all down.” In 2000, Shields and her husband Don moved from Winnipeg to Victoria, where they lived until her passing on July 16, 2003, from complications of breast cancer, at age 68.

Marjorie Anderson has a Ph.D. in literature and taught in the English Department and Faculty of Management at the University of Manitoba for twenty years. During that time she was awarded the University’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and was chosen to teach in a number of international programs, including an MBA program in the Czech Republic. Now, through her company, Wordwise, she works as a communication consultant and professional editor. She is the seventh of eight children born to Ásdis and Thorsteinn Anderson, Icelandic-Canadian fishers, farmers and storytellers who farmed in the hamlet of Libau, on the edges of Lake Winnipeg. Anderson and her husband, Gary, live in Winnipeg and take delight in their four daughters, four sons-in-law and seven grandchildren.Due to her lifelong interest in writing, editing and storytelling, as well as her passion for bringing women’s issues to the forefront, Anderson’s work on the Dropped Threads books came somewhat naturally to her. She became friends with Carol Shields in the 1980s when they were both teaching at the University of Manitoba, and later they collaborated on the first two Dropped Threads anthologies. The idea for the first collection came up over lunch when they started discussing what topics were “undiscussable” for women, and where there were holes in the fabric of women’s talk over the last thirty or forty years. The interest in the topic expanded beyond them to their other women friends, and from this conversational fervour the idea for a collection of personal essays was born. The contributors, a cross-section of women, would be asked to explore defining moments in their lives rarely aired in common discourse: truths they had never shared, subjects they hadn’t written about before or otherwise found a place for. What they wanted to hear about were the experiences that had brought unexpected pleasure or disappointment, that somehow had caught each woman by surprise.The pieces, so many “dropped threads” retrieved and woven together, would become a tapestry of stories about things women experience but don’t talk about. The resulting book, Dropped Threads: What We Aren’t Told, came out in 2001 and became an instant national bestseller. For Anderson, one of the best results of the book’s popularity was how it resonated with so many women and brought them together; as she explained in one interview, “One of the most gratifying experiences I’ve had as an editor of this book has been taking part in book clubs and bookstore gatherings of readers who want to talk about the theme of the book, in particular, and the benefits of storytelling and life writing in general. The energy in these rooms sizzles, the emotions and personal revelations flow freely, and we all leave with profound nourishment for our souls.” Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren’t Told was published in 2003 and was also very well received. Both books have since become staples for book clubs nationwide.