"I''ve worked on and off as a picture researcher for non-fiction
books," says K.I. Press, "during which time I looked at an awful
lot of archival photographs. A few years ago I came across a book
called Types of Canadian Women, Volume I, a 1903
illustrated biographical dictionary of society women ? artists,
nurses, missionaries, activists and philanthropists, as well as
plenty of women whose claim to fame was being rich or titled ? who
were more or less Canadian. The pictures grabbed me first, but the
biographies drew me in. They were so boring, yet there were phrases
that suggested what wasn''t being told. Some of these women had
been to war zones or lived through rebellions or performed heroic
feats that were alluded to in a single phrase. What if, I thought,
their biographies told just the good parts? I looked for the
book''s promised Volume II to no avail, instead finding a
librarian''s note in the catalogue: ''Volume II never published?''
I knew I had to write it."
Written as a fantasia of archetypes, Press''s collection takes a
jab at the notions of archetypes and gendered behaviour, and at the
patronizing undertones that coloured the original. Illustrated with
archival photos, this collection of prose and poetry is an album
devoted to a more ambiguously female experience of Canada,
stretched across several lives, the poet''s eye opening in a
different life and the same life with each turn of the page.
With subtle misunderstandings, quiet subversions and all-out
rebellions, Types of Canadian Women, Volume II uncovers
the psychological knots that once and still snag female ambition
and relationships. Using the turn-of-the-century occupations and
preoccupations that shaped the original collection, Press
illuminates her portraits of farming, pioneering, politics,
writing, painting, acting, athletics, childbirth, homemaking,
religion, education, romance and psychosis with fantastical and
symbolic elements to create a series of narratives that slip almost
imperceptibly from reality into imagination and back again.
Press''s women share an inventive interaction with the Canadian
landscape and its emblems, as well as with some of the landmark
events in colonial and Confederation history. Weaving practicality
and plain-spoken accounts together with dreamlike delusions and
escapist leaps, the Canadian women in this volume sidestep more
linear versions of events. Ultimately, it is with reverent
appreciation and irreverent mischievousness that Press upends the
project of naming and definition, and in the process locates many
more authentic sources of connection.