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No Kidding (Inside the World of Teenage Girls). Her ethnically-centered All Baba's Children, published in 1977, was critically acclaimed. World-wide-web sites indicate that her works have appeared in MacLean's and Chatelaine. She is currently Writer-in-Residence at the Regina Public Library in Saskatchewan. Janice Kulyk Keefer is the fourth Ukrainian woman writer to be mentioned in the Guide to Women's Literature Throughout the World. She is listed as a Canadian fiction writer, poet and critic. Keefer studied at the University of Toronto and holds a doctorate in English Literature from the University of Sussex in England. She is full professor of English literature at the University of Guelph and has published many poems and short stories. The Guide describes her novel Constellations as a "parodic description of community bondage and outsiderhood". The guide gives no reference to her Ukrainian background. In an interview given to Oksana Zakydalsky for The Ukrainian Weekly, Keefer addressed this issue: "I am starting to deal with my own background which I didn't want to touch for the longest time." She recalls how she needed to assert herself, first in her profession, before making her ethnic voice heard. In Green Library (Toronto: Harper and Collins, 1996), Janice Kulyk Keefer makes this voice heard. Dealing with the history of Ukraine and of Canada from the 1920's to World War II, the book tells the story of a 43-year old Canadian woman, Eva Chown, who receives a segment of a 1930's photo which leads her to uncover her family's history. In November 1996, Keefer received Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award for her novel. In the 1996 interview with Oksana Zakydalsky, Keefer said: "I am fascinated with the interaction between history, the brute events that just happen to people and history ... I wanted to find a form for this novel in which people could exchange stories. The whole book became a chain of stories." She insists on a very important point which is that the book was meant to appeal to non-Ukrainian readers as well as Ukrainian readers. "I knew that I wanted to write about Ukraine in a way that would make it comprehensible to your average Canadian reader who knew nothing about Ukraine." Ultimately, she addresses a very important issue concerning children of Ukrainian parentage, petrified by community expectations: "When I went to "Ridna Shkola" I was taught by people .for whom Ukrainian was their maternal language ... my Ukrainian was kitchen table Ukrainian. They believed that if I was of Ukrainian parentage I should have been bom speaking Ukrainian, and they refused to teach Ukrainian as a second language ... I always felt a sense of shame that I couldn't speak Ukrainian. The only way I could learn a language is to have no hang-ups and to wander into it - you make mistakes and people correct you and that is how I learned French and German. But with Ukrainian I always felt that there was a measuring tape on my tongue. To make a mistake was to betray a whole culture — the stakes were enormously high." Like many hyphenated Ukrainian children (Canadian- Ukrainians, American-Ukrainians, French-Ukrainians, Brazilian Ukrainians, etc.) living beyond Ukraine's borders, she admits to having felt caught "in between". It is a joy to find these four Ukrainian women writers listed in the current edition of the Guide to Women's Literature Throughout the World. It is worth remembering that guides of this nature are often reprinted and that additions are made for each edition. It is hoped that the human experience of Ukrainian women writers, from Ukraine and from the diaspora, will be even more widely represented in the next edition. John Carroll University Copyright Helene Turkewicz-Sanko, Ph.D., 1998. Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Culture Bibliography Buck, Claire, ed. Guide to Women's Literature Throughout the World. Bloomsbury Publishing Limited (England), 1993; paperback edition published by Columbia Marketing, 1994. Zakydalsky, Oksana. "Interview: Governor General's Award Nominee, Janice Kulyk Keefer." The Ukrainian Weekly, vol. LXIV, No. 45. Sunday, November 10, 1996: 5, 10. The XXVth UNWLA Convention will be held in Chicago , May 28 ~ May 31,1999 HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! ’’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ТРАВЕНЬ 1998 21
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