Everything about Barbara Gowdy totally explained
Barbara Gowdy CM (born
25 June 1950) is a
Canadian novelist and
short story writer. Born in
Windsor,
Ontario, she's the long-time partner of poet
Christopher Dewdney and resides in
Toronto.
Literary Career
Gowdy's novel
Falling Angels (
1989) was made into a film by director Scott Smith, from an adaptation written by Esta Spalding, in
2002. The novel focuses on a nuclear family in a
1960s Ontario suburb. The main characters are three sisters who come of age in a house run by their abusive and womanizing father and must constantly find ways to take care of their
depressed and
alcoholic mother. Gowdy says her inspiration for the book was the idea of a Canadian family living during the
Cold War and practicing using their bomb shelter in the back yard. In the novel and movie, the family spend two weeks trapped in the bomb shelter as an "exercise" rather than going on a family trip to
Disneyland.
Authors such as
Alice Munro and
Carol Shields look at the everyday, but the bulk of Gowdy's work reflects upon the opposite. Gowdy's stories look at the extreme - the strange and the abnormal - and she's able to make her characters relatable and poignant. She often uses
magic realism as a writing style, combining the fantastic or unusual with realistic and believable descriptions. The narrator and main character of the title short story of her
1992 collection,
We So Seldom Look On Love, for instance, is an assistant embalmer at a funeral home who makes love to the bodies of attractive young men before they're buried. The story was the inspiration for the
1996 Canadian
independent film Kissed, directed by
Lynne Stopkewich and starring
Molly Parker. The story is based on Frank O'Hara's poem "Ode to
Necrophilia", and was inspired by a newspaper article Gowdy read about a young
California woman who hijacked a hearse on its way to a funeral, took the corpse of the young man inside the coffin to a motel room and made love to it for several days before being caught by the police.
We So Seldom Look On Love is meant as a compilation of
circus-type characters and their quest to find connection with others. Another story features a two-headed man who removes one of his heads. A third story in that collection, "93 Million Miles Away" involves a woman who
masturbates and exposes herself through the window of her apartment to a man in his apartment across the street. This story was made into the film
Arousal.
Gowdy's novel
The White Bone is written from the perspective of an
elephant. Yet, her work isn't about the shock value, but finding what is universal in us, as readers, to each of her characters.
See also a
Southern Ontario Gothic.
Recognition
Gowdy was nominated for a
Governor General's Award for her novels
Mister Sandman (
1995),
White Bone (
1998), and
Helpless (2007).
White Bone was also nominated for the
Giller Prize.
The Romantic (
2003), a best-seller in Canada, was nominated for several awards.
She was appointed a member of the
Order of Canada effective
5 October 2006.
(External Link
)
Bibliography
Further Information
Get more info on 'Barbara Gowdy'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://barbara_gowdy.totallyexplained.com">Barbara Gowdy Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
