(Not So) Safe in Hell: The Working Class Heroines of Pre-Code Hollywood
By Heather Babcock
Like many women, I was inspired and empowered by the Me Too movement but it also brought back a lot of painful memories. Most of us have probably encountered a “Harvey Weinstein” at some point in our professional lives. I know I have. This type of sexual...
By Heather Babcock
Brundibár: Children’s Opera Performs With a Moth by Ilona Martonfi
In this Inanna author blog we follow poet Ilona Martonfi, who was born in Budapest, and now resides in Montreal, who, decades after she lived in a war refugee camp in Austria went back to construct her memorials. A sgraffito excavation, scraping through layers of...
Women Environmental Warriors by Gail Benick
The election of Annamie Paul as leader of the Green Party of Canada comes as no surprise. She is the third woman to lead the Greens since the party was founded in 1983. It is worth remembering that the new Green leader stands on the shoulders of countless women who...
COVID-19 and Patriarchy in the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife by Salimah Valiani
In an effort to shed light on the vital but undervalued labour of predominantly female health professionals, the World Health Organisation named 2020 the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife. It is an irony and sickening reality that 2020 turned out to be the...
FINDING MEANING / The Void by Mary Rykov
I wake from a lucid dream in which I’mwatching another COVID-19 television newscast. I, a daughter of the Holocaust, shudder at the thought of mass graves on Hart Island. Or anywhere. The sound and visual images are so vivid that I wake relieved to know I’m dreaming....
Jean Harlow: My Kind of Dame by Heather Babcock
Every Wednesday evening as a child, my mother would force me into an itchy, ugly brown polyester dress and thick woolen stockings and take me – kicking and screaming – to the local community center for my weekly Brownies meeting (for those not in the know, Brownies...
Van Gogh’s Irises Meet a Shrike in a Play by Ilona Martonfi
The Shrike “These hook-beaked songbirds with a raptor’s habits skewer their prey of small birds, lizards, and insects with thorns, the spikes on barbed-wire fences. This helps the shrike to tear the flesh into smaller, more conveniently sized fragments, and serves as...
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mom
by A. S. Compton
Words, slow in coming, slow in thinking, slow in painting a worthwhile picture in the mind. Words, slaved over, loved deeply, churning, building, breaking and remaking. Hours...
by A. S. Compton