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Judith Cowan, author of The Permanent Nature of Everything, participated in the most unique interview we’ve ever seen! Part of a special event to kick off the literary season with Culture Mauricie, Cowan rode in a bike rickshaw through Trois-Rivières to discuss her memoir with Anne-Marie Lemay of Radio-Canada’s Chez nous le matin.
Read more about the event here
The Permanent Nature of Everything is a meticulous memoir of growing up on the outskirts of 1940s Toronto, where Cowan explores her vivid memories and traces the emerging awareness in the emotional world of a child. The following is an excerpt.
My first faint memories are of Toronto, the earliest from a forest somewhere outside the city. I have a visual memory of being carried through trees and gazing up into a canopy of leaves at the light of the sky. A woman with us had a long pheasant feather sticking up from her hatband, and it became a part of the view. I studied that feather, observing the way it blended into the light and shade, and saw that it belonged there, matched against a woodland setting. Many years on, when I asked my mother about the lady with the feather, she didn’t remember her but thought she might have been one of group of friends with whom we went on a picnic. What my mother did recall was how impressed the others had been by her agility when she crossed a stream on a log, carrying me. I would have been about a year and a half old. And there’s a second memory, from little later, of a similar outing. This time I knew it was a picnic. I think I ate, but I was also looking around. We must have been close to a racetrack or a livery stable. Maybe it was a fairground because across a field I saw a row of stalls with glossy rumps tethered in them, and I understood that those were horses – the real live magical animals right over there. But my parents weren’t interested. They weren’t even bothering to look that way.
Later in childhood, I would hear Mother’s story about a horse that she’d tried to ride when she was a teenager. It was a heavy plough horse and it put its huge hoof, shod with a cleated horseshoe, down on her bare foot. When she told us the tale, usually she’d show us the scar on her foot, but I was never put off. I always wanted to ride, even on the day of that second picnic.
To learn more about The Permanent Nature of Everything, click here.
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