Bird-Bent Grass chronicles an extraordinary mother–daughter relationship that spans distance, time, and, eventually, debilitating illness. Personal, familial, and political narratives unfold through the letters that Geeske Venema-de Jong and her daughter Kathleen exchanged during the late 1980s and through their weekly conversations, which started after Geeske was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease twenty years later.
In 1986, Kathleen accepted a three-year teaching assignment in Uganda, after a devastating civil war, and Geeske promised to be her daughter’s most faithful correspondent. The two women exchanged more than two hundred letters that reflected their lively interest in literature, theology, and politics, and explored ideas about identity, belonging, and home in the context of cross-cultural challenges. Two decades later, with Geeske increasingly beset by Alzheimer’s disease, Kathleen returned to the letters, where she rediscovered the evocative image of a tiny, bright meadow bird perched precariously on a blade of elephant grass. That image – of simultaneous tension, fragility, power, and resilience – sustained her over the years that she used the letters as memory prompts in a larger strategy to keep her intellectually gifted mother alive.
Deftly woven of excerpts from their correspondence, conversations, journal entries, and email updates, Bird-Bent Grass is a complex and moving exploration of memory, illness, and immigration; friendship, conflict, resilience, and forgiveness; cross-cultural communication, the ethics of international development, and letter-writing as a technology of intimacy. Throughout, it reflects on the imperative and fleeting business of being alive and loving others while they’re ours to hold.

Kathleen Venema spent several years as a junior-high teacher in northern Manitoba before joining a teacher-training college in post-civil-war Uganda. Now an associate professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, she publishes on early Canadian exploration texts and imperial women’s letters; researches narratives of conflict, aging, disability, and care; and pursues a lifelong interest in transformative pedagogy.

Kathleen Venema's profile page

• Short-listed, Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-fiction, Manitoba Book Awards

[Bird-Bent Grass] demonstrates that, and how, a substantial, complex memoir can be fashioned out of domestic life writing (personal correspondence, diaries, and recorded conversations and reminiscences). Such an achievement is especially welcome at a time when the family archive is endangered by the broad shift to electronic communication and social media.

G. Thomas Couser, Biography

A vital contribution to [...] 'matriography' [...] and a unique contribution to the autobiographic illness narrative genre, because it not only addresses the highly personal lived experiences of illness but it also highlights the interdependence of different illness experiences. [...] Venema both models and compels the reader to experience the 'fleeting business of being alive and loving others in the long or very short time they're ours to hold.

Jesse Hutchison, Journal of Mennonite Studies

It’s a deeply beautiful, thoughtful, celebratory book ... important and elegant

Charlene Diehl, Director, Winnipeg International Writers Festival