The Perimeter Dog
- Publisher
- Libros Libertad
- Initial publish date
- May 2011
- Category
- Essays
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781926763149
- Publish Date
- May 2011
- List Price
- $18.00
Add it to your shelf
Where to buy it
Description
An eloquent and moving collection of essays about defining the places where memory and imagination meet. Places that try to contain a family of "trained" adults that keeps losing the children, a witch's weighstation in Holland, a child in a confectionary, a passport caught up in a mixed media, cross-border pursuit, a human rights observer team in Esgenoôpetitj, the compartments of a sewing cabinet, an artist fighting the hypothetical in law school, drug runners dancing with privilege in Colombia, and a fishing community that plays catch and release. Creative non-fiction writer Julie Vandervoort examines how these places shift between safety and danger. Where are the lines drawn–and who are the perimeter dogs?
About the author
Julie Vandervoort has received several awards for her creative non-fiction essays and her biography of Dr. Elinor Black, Tell the Driver. She produced a piece called "Moving from Coping to Creating" for a national law conference and was recently invited as a keynote speaker at the conference Imagining Amsterdam: Visions and Revisions.She has given many public readings across Canada and in Mexico, served on the board of The Writer's Federation of Nova Scotia and as associate fiction editor for The Antigonish Review. She has worked extensively in human rights law and as an environmental activist and singer with the international Gaia Project. This project produced a double CD in 2003 (O Beautiful Gaia: Love Songs to Earth) and a 2007 CD of music inspired by the Earth Charter (My Heart is Moved). She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Excerpt: The Perimeter Dog (by (author) Julie Vandervoort)
The Debit Slips
The best time to ask my mother for something was around four o'clock in the afternoon when she was just waking up. She was a night nurse and her schedule fixed mine – come home from school, put the kettle on and take Mom a cup of tea. So far the four o'clock strategy had achieved some fairly major things, including her signature on a cheque for a cherry red Kawasaki motorcycle. I had the money, I just didn't have a chequing account. And I wasn't about to go off to the city carrying a wad of cash, jeez, what if I got in an accident? Fully awake, my mom might have tried arguing against it. She worked emergency and knew. I was only sixteen and therefore passionate about formal justice. I knew only this: Tony has one. Paul had one. I sat there holding out eight one-hundred dollar bills and her pen. I was hell bent. At seventeen I'd gone off the bike twice, gotten scraped by gravel. Burned too, by falling under the exhaust pipe. The bandage was barely off when I carried a cup of tea over to the bedside table and suggested to my mother that I get what I couldn't live without that year – a Spanish-speaking exchange student from South America. Here's what she might have done: spilled the tea on herself, thrown it at me, chosen an immediate sleep relapse. She could have slowly put the tea down and explained her take on the request: "I drag myself up that goddamn hill every night to feed the kids I already have. You may not have noticed but your brothers, when they are not killing each other, are going through one loaf of bread a day. Each. Do I look like I need another teenager in this house, especially one who's seventeen and probably looking for trouble like all of you – and doesn't speak a word of English?
Editorial Reviews
Reading Julie Vandervoort is like being a child eavesdropping on an adult party. The world comes rushing up unfiltered through the air vent: love, sex, fear, loneliness, death, delight, regeneration. You know you're supposed to be sleeping, but how can you pull yourself away?
Richard Cumyn
