Announcing The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1

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The L.M. Montgomery Reader 1Announcing the forthcoming publication of The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print, which will be published by University of Toronto Press in October 2013.

An exciting new collection, The L.M. Montgomery Reader assembles significant rediscovered primary materials on one of Canada’s most enduringly popular authors throughout her high-profile career as the author of the resoundingly successful Anne of Green Gables (1908) and after her death. Each of its three volumes gathers pieces published all over the world to set the stage for a much-needed reassessment of Montgomery’s literary reputation. Much of the material is freshly unearthed from archives and digital collections and has never before been collected in book form.

The selections appearing in this first volume focus on Montgomery’s role as a public celebrity, giving a strong impression of her as a writer and cultural critic as she discusses a range of topics with wit, wisdom, and humour, including the natural landscape of Prince Edward Island, her wide readership, anxieties about modernity, and the continued relevance of “old ideals.” These essays and interviews are joined by a number of additional pieces that discuss her work’s literary and cultural value in relation to an emerging canon of Canadian literature, with nearly one hundred selections in all.

Each volume is accompanied by an extensive introduction and detailed commentary by leading Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre that trace the interplay between the author and the critic, as well as between the private and public Montgomery. This volume – and the Reader as a whole – adds tremendously to our understanding and appreciation of Montgomery’s legacy as a Canadian author and as a literary celebrity both during and beyond her lifetime.

CFP: L.M. Montgomery and War (26–29 June 2014)

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University of Prince Edward Island, 26–29 June 2014

Please note that the deadline for submissions is now 15 June 2013

“And you will tell your children of the Idea we fought and died for—teach them it must be lived for as well as died for, else the price paid for it will have been given for nought.” — Rilla of Ingleside (1921)

“I am thankful now, Jem, that Walter did not come back … and if he had seen the futility of the sacrifice they made then mirrored in this ghastly holocaust …” — The Blythes Are Quoted (2009)

The year 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, a global conflict that would prove life-changing for L.M. Montgomery and millions of her contemporaries. For the eleventh biennial conference hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island, we invite proposals for papers that consider war in relation to L.M. Montgomery’s fiction, poetry, life writing, photographs, and scrapbooks, and the range of adaptations and spinoffs in the areas of film, television, theatre, tourism, and online communities.

Montgomery’s 1921 novel Rilla of Ingleside is one of the only contemporary accounts of Canadian women’s experience on the homefront during the First World War, but the War is evoked and implied in direct and indirect ways in many of the novels, short stories, and poems that precede and follow it. The Blythes Are Quoted, Montgomery’s final published work, bridges the years between the First World War and the Second World War, complicating Montgomery’s perspectives and thoughts about war and conflict. Montgomery’s work has met with a variety of responses world-wide during times of war and rebellion, from post-WWII Japan to today’s Middle Eastern countries. Different kinds of wars and rebellions also permeate her fiction and life writing—class conflicts, family disputes, gender and language wars—sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic. This conference seeks to take stock of the complex ways in which war in all its forms has influenced Montgomery’s works and their reception, both in Canada and around the world.

Possible topics include: the Great War anticipated, revisited, remembered, and re-imagined; the politics of gendered witnessing; Montgomery’s reception in times of war and conflict; chivalry, patriarchy, conflict, and romance in poetry and fiction; war as an agent of change; internal and external rebellion in relation to war; the psychology of war in battle and on the homefront.

Proposals should clearly articulate the proposed paper’s argument and demonstrate familiarity with current scholarship in the field (please see http://lmmresearch.org/bibliography for an updated bibliography). For more information, please contact the conference co-chairs, Dr. Benjamin Lefebvre (ben@roomofbensown.net) and Dr. Andrea McKenzie (acmcken@gmail.com). Submit a proposal of 200–250 words, a biographical statement of 70 words, and a list of A/V requirements by 15 June 2013 by using our online form at the L.M. Montgomery Institute website at http://www.lmmontgomery.ca/. Proposals for workshops, exhibits, films, and performances are also welcomed. Since all proposals are vetted blind, they should include no identifying information.

The “Buxom Blonde” Controversy of 2013

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Guest Post by Melanie Fishbane

“Yes, it’s red,” she said resignedly. “Now you see why I can’t be perfectly happy. Nobody could who had red hair…I cannot imagine that red hair away…It will be my lifelong sorrow.”

Well, even if Anne had been happier as a “buxom blonde,” it seems that her fans have a definite opinion about her lifelong sorrow.

Controversial AGG coverWhen Josie Leavitt’s piece on how the cover on a recent Anne of Green Gables e-book collection could ruin a book went viral, it caused an international reaction that was so intense that it might have had Anne rethink her stand on red hair. The new edition, released in November under Amazon’s CreateSpace self-publishing operation, featured a blonde woman probably in her early 20s, dressed like a farm girl out of a 1980s jeans ad, and leaning over provocatively.

CBC Radio was one of the first to pick up the story on their show “As it Happens,” which aired on the 6 February, and featured Mary Beth Cavert, who had some interesting things to say about how Montgomery felt about the cover. I loved it when she joked about meeting Gilbert behind the hay stacks and if Montgomery had had an iPhone she would have “pitched it.”

After that everything from the local newspaper to the evening news, you couldn’t escape this story. Even This Hour Has 22 Minutes (a satirical news hour program on CBC) wrote a hilarious sketch that led to some troubling hair dye issues. It even drowned out another amusing anecdotal story on Boing Boing that suggested that a middle-aged Anne of Ingleside had herpes. (A week later CBC tried to rekindle the flame, but it seems that being blonde was more controversial than having an STD.)

Interestingly, this cover is just one of many odd Anne covers surfacing online through digital channels. Many of Montgomery’s books are now in the public domain so any e-book publisher can slap on a cover and use it. I suspect that CreateSpace didn’t make a conscious decision about what cover to use, but was most likely blind merchandising without awareness of what kind of kerfuffle it could create. Perhaps it just so happened that the blonde beat out the three-year-old in the red-poppied garden because it just made a better news story.

At the last Montgomery conference, L.M. Montgomery and Cultural Memory, there was a lot of discussion around how Montgomery and Anne are remembered as part of our cultural Canadian consciousness. And while some articles, such as The Toronto Star, used a stock photo from Kevin Sullivan’s version of Anne played by Megan Follows as a way to compare our collectively approved version of Anne to the blasphemous one, what seems clear is that the public has a very specific idea of who Anne Shirley is and woe betide anyone that re-imagines her otherwise.

The public wants the image of a red-headed dreamy and deviant orphan girl looking out to the precipices of what will be, because that is the Anne people remember from their childhood. And memory is more precious than e-book sales.

Complete Journals 1901–1911 Available in March 2013

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The next volume of Montgomery’s unabridged journals, The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1901–1911, edited by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2013! It is available for pre-order on Amazon.ca and on Chapters.Indigo.ca, and more information can be found on the website for Oxford University Press Canada.

L.M. Montgomery and Cultural Memory: Day 4

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Guest post by Vappu Kannas

My name is Vappu Kannas and I’ll be giving you my impressions on Day 4—sadly the final day—of the wonderful L.M. Montgomery and Cultural Memory conference. I came to PEI all the way from Helsinki, Finland, where I’m doing my Ph.D. on Montgomery’s journals.

As seems to be a habit among the guest bloggers, I too was a bit late for the first session of Day 4. Like Melanie, I’m not a morning person and sometimes wish conference sessions happened late at night (perhaps in a pub). However, I was able to catch the last few minutes of Kate Sutherland’s talk on Montgomery’s legal battles. I’ve heard Kate’s earlier papers and I’m always so fascinated about her insights on this aspect of Montgomery’s life. Then, Adeline Carrie Koscher from Massachusetts talked about the New Woman in our cultural memory and aptly demonstrated that Anne of Green Gables is a New Woman character. The panel was completed with Emily Woster’s great talk on her Ph.D. project on Montgomery’s ”reading autobiograhy”. I can’t wait to get my hands on Emily’s dissertation! (By the way, Emily’s sister’s name is Anne.)

The second and last panel of the day was a special one. Dana Gerberi and Sandy Wagner talked about the very concrete aspect of Montgomery’s cultural memory: her handiwork, or, more specifically, hooked mats and quilts. Dana connected the hooking of rugs with the hooking of stories, and showed us that many of Montgomery’s fictional characters (as well as herself) are characterized through their quilts, needlework, and so on. We also heard a nice piece of local folklore which states that Ewan and Maud stood on a hooked rug made by Maud’s grandmother, when they were married in Park Corner in 1911. Sandy showed us some elaborate patterned quilts with names such as ”Flying Goose” and ”Rising Sun”; somebody in the audience even mentioned a ”Tuxedo pattern”. I wonder what that looks like.

That’s the end of my ”serious” notes, but this is where the fun field trip part begins! The now-famous Bus Tour of Montgomery Places took off around midday. With our brown paper bags (containing lunch), we ventured out of Charlottetown to visit or re-visit all the important Montgomery-related places: Park Corner/Silver Bush (Anne of Green Gables Museum), Montgomery’s Birth Place in New London, Green Gables, and the Macneill Homestead in Cavendish. It was great to be back to those enchanting places that I saw for the first time in 2010 with my new LMM friends and my parents. In addition to visiting the museums, I enjoyed some nice chatting time with Mary Beth Cavert in the bus, and getting to know William (Bill) Thompson from Edmonton, who was visiting the LMM places on PEI for the first time.

Another special moment was a joint endeavour to clean Frede Campbell’s grave in the Geddie Memorial Cemetary, where we stopped briefly. Frede was a very important friend of Montgomery’s and she describes Frede’s death, which devastated her, in a long entry in her journals. Initiated by the always vigilant Vanessa Brown, it was a touching moment to see these friends of Montgomery, and thus of Frede, scratching off the lichen from the gravestone with their bare hands. We all went back to the bus with a little bit of cultural memory under our nails.

The day ended at the Macneill Homestead in Cavendish where Montgomery used to live from 1876 to 1911. Unfortunately the actual house is not there anymore, but a walk around the grounds and what used to be the old apple orchard brings Montgomery’s times vividly back. There’s something very soothing and peaceful in the atmosphere at the Homestead. We took the same little short cut path that Montgomery used to take to go to church, and heard some wonderful Island poets (Deirdre Kessler, Judy Gaudet, David Helwig, and Hugh MacDonald) recite their own poems among Montgomery’s and Milton Acorn’s poems in the Cavendish United Church, where we could also see Montgomery’s old organ, so instrumental in her meeting her future husband Reverend Ewan Macdonald…

Through the misty (and a bit ghostly) evening we headed back to Charlottetown, after a short visit to Montgomery’s grave. Luckily, this wonderful conference does not have to end in the rather sad sight of Montgomery’s final resting place, but in the new beginnings of people flying off to their various destinations. We all leave PEI with our own unique but shared memories of the last four days. With ideas for fan fiction and Emily and Anne spin-offs (Anne meets Tarzan, Emily turns into a vampire, Walter meets Dean Priest etc.), I can’t wait for the next conference in 2014 to continue all the conversations began here.

L.M. Montgomery and Cultural Memory: Day 3

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Guest post by Christine Chettle

My name is Christine Chettle, I’m a Ph.D. student at the University of Leeds in the UK, and this is my first time at an L.M. Montgomery conference. As a lifelong fan of L.M. Montgomery’s work, and particularly of her Emily trilogy (I named my pet hedgehog after Ilse Burnley because she kept climbing out of her cage), I was really excited to attend the 2012 Conference on L.M. Montgomery and Cultural Memory and share some of my work on Charlotte Brontë and the Emily books. However, I also felt quite shy, as I hardly knew anyone. But I shouldn’t have worried. L.M. Montgomery is a writer who knows all about the dynamics of community—both the pros and the cons—and because of this, perhaps, L.M. Montgomery lovers seem to share her sense of community, and in a particularly kind way. At this conference, there have been no Josie Pyes or Miss Brownells!

Throughout Day 3 of the conference, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on L.M. Montgomery’s connections with a number of differing communities. First of all, the educational community: Jennifer Litster, Benjamin Lefebvre, Tara Parmiter, Diane Tye, and Åsa Warnqvist all provided complementary insights into her interactions with various entities, discussing her connections to, respectively, an ambivalent Scots heritage, fluctuating audience receptions, traditions of ghost stories, processes of memory, and the dynamics of folklore. Later, thanks to the presence of Jean Ledwell and Lesley Clement in my panel session, I discovered her links to New Zealand literature and to visual art. Miss Stacy and Mr. Carpenter would definitely have approved.

Mr. Carpenter, with his enthusiasm for Emily’s PEI heritage, would also have enjoyed Sarah Gothie’s presentation on the Green Gables museum and Judy Plum (of the Pat books) would have loved Jean Mitchell’s exploration of Park Corner, PEI through the light of Silver Bush. A presentation from the Lucy Maud Montgomery Society of Ontario gave an inspiring view of Montgomery’s influence beyond PEI in Leaskdale, Ontario. In the spirit of matriarchs Rachel Lynde and Miss Cornelia, they have nurtured Montgomery’s home in the Leaskdale community from a forgotten derelict to a thing of beauty (and with these ladies at the helm it will quite possibly be a joy forever).

At the conference banquet this evening, we had the opportunity to hear about Åsa and Stefan Warnqvist’s lovely romance. The conference coincides with a number of their anniversaries, falling as it does around the important Swedish celebration of Midsummer’s Eve: nine years ago they met, five years ago they became engaged, and four years ago they came to PEI for their honeymoon. This is a happily-ever-after that I can imagine Valancy and Barney Snaith enjoying!

My table at the banquet was the “international” table, representing Montgomery’s worldwide reputation in communities across five different countries (the conference included delegates from seven countries) apart from Canada. The international table included sa We laughed and talked exuberantly, sharing our passionate love of Montgomery, our earlier adventures with Montgomery-inspired YouTube clips and fan-fiction, and our speculations on vampires as cultural texts. Maybe at the next conference, we’ll start a newspaper, like the King children in the Story Girl books, or tame a lion, like Jane and her friends in Jane of Lantern Hill. But for tonight, we limited our adventures to the dance floor, where I tried out moves I generally only use in Zumba class to the sounds of Meaghan Blanchard’s inspired musicianship. If Anne Shirley had been there, I’m certain she would have done the same.

Throughout the whole conference, we’ve all been aware of Simon Lloyd’s and Pauline MacPherson’s fantastic guidance, and and this evening, all the delegates paid enthusiastic tribute to their work above and beyond the call of duty in nurturing and organizing this event. Like Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, they’ve made sure that everyone has found a home—however briefly—at the 2012 conference.

And then, of course, we all went to the pub….

L.M. Montgomery and Cultural Memory: Day 2

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Guest post by Melanie Fishbane

My name is Melanie Fishbane and I am thrilled to be writing my first blog post for the L.M. Montgomery Research Group. I’ll be giving you my impressions of the second day of the L.M. Montgomery and Cultural Memory Conference. By the way, if you want a more in-depth play-by-play of the day’s events, do follow the #lmmi2012 or #lmmipei hashtags on Twitter.

Alas, I was a little behind today with my tweeting, having walked to the conference with my travel companion and roommate and was a little late for the first speaker. Those who know me know that I am not a morning person. Getting anywhere for 9 AM is a feat in itself. But arrive we did and listened to papers that both stimulated and stirred our imaginations.

The first special panel was on Memory, Communities and Readers.  From memories of family vacations that led to lobster trap coffee tables, to finding that rare edition in the most unlikely of places,  Davida Mackay, Christy Woster, Jeanne Kaye Speight and Mary Beth Cavert recounted how L.M. Montgomery’s works had influenced their lives.

The Keynote panel that followed was a mixture of sadness and joy for us.  Because of a recent death in the family, one of the rockstars of Montgomery scholarship, Elizabeth Waterston, was unable to attend the conference. However, her editorial buddy and dear friend, Mary Rubio, read Waterston’s paper, “L.M. Montgomery’s Journals: Changes in Cultural Landscape, 1982–2012″ out loud, providing her own commentary as well. I shall not lie: when Rubio held up the newly revised The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900, I did a little jig in my seat. I simply cannot wait until tomorrow when there will be a book release party with Rubio signing copies of the new edition. The geek girl in me is squealing.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Epperly followed with a brilliant discussion on “Remembering Home: Memory, Meaning and Metaphor in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Ingleside,” which was so amazing that it made me want to run home and read it right away. Also, just when she started to talk about the last two paragraphs of the last novel that Montgomery published in her lifetime, the lights went out.

The afternoon panel discussions continued to delight us as we discussed concepts of memory, re-interpreting truths, and asking ourselves “what is Montgomery’s ‘true voice’?”  Vappu Kannas discussed versions of memory while editing Montgomery’s selected journals and William Thompson explored social resistance and psychic re-visioning in the Emily books. While Cynthia Sugars talked about hauntings and ghost stories in The Story Girl, giving me pause when thinking about this morning’s “electric failure.”

The final panel of the afternoon were two fascinating papers by Andrea McKenzie and Yoshiko Akamatsu about Montgomery’s posthumously published novel, The Blythes Are Quoted. And our blogger from yesterday, Vanessa Brown, did an excellent job describing her detective work in finding a ledger that is connected to Montgomery’s suicide note. (See, Vanessa? No reason not to be kind!) These insightful papers give us much to ponder about Montgomery’s last novel and her final days.

Then we all brown bagged it and hopped on the bus to Belfast for a quick visit to the Sir Andrew Macphail Homestead,  where Montgomery once visited and met Canada’s Governor General, Earl Grey—the story has to do with them sitting on the steps of an outhouse and people avoiding it as they didn’t want to disturb the GG in his discussion.  We really wanted to know where that outhouse was, but there were way too many mosquitos out tonight to do an adequate search of the property.

The night ended with an intimate evening of music at St. Paul’s Church for the Festival of Small Halls, a local musical festival where musicians from Atlantic Canada play at local small venues. Built in 1824, the church still had some of its original markings. It was beautiful and the sound was incredible. Dylan Guthro, Irish Mythen, Nathan Wiley and Matt Minglewood charmed the audience with their folk and blues medleys and good humour. L.M. Montgomery conference attendees were specifically welcomed by the organizers who mentioned that Montgomery’s husband, Ewan Macdonald, had lived in the area before they were married  and that one of the members of the church actually lived in the house!

I cannot wait for tomorrow which not only includes a silent auction and our banquet, but more informative and interesting papers on this fascinating topic of Montgomery and cultural memory.