Bringing It Home: Women Talk About Feminism in Their Lives is a kitchen sink to corporate boardroom collection of essays that peels away the rhetoric from feminist discourse.
Thirty-something years after the resurrection of the modern Women's movement--at the height of skepticism about the relevance of feminism (some say it's dead)--this lively gathering of deeply personal narratives brings feminism home and sits her down with twenty-four other interesting women to discuss life, love, motherhood, daughterhood, work, art, sex, science, sports, and community.
Editor Brenda Lea Brown has brought together an impressive roster of contributors-from different generations, different walks of life, different geographical, ethnic, and religious communities.
"I wanted to hear from women who are not regular spokespeople for feminism and to find out how they negotiated the sometimes intractable waters between their lives and their ideals," she says.
"It was a relief to discover that I wasn't the only woman in the world who felt as though she was living in the shadow of an impenetrable monolith called feminism. It was empowering to learn that individual feminist women do not all think alike--they have not all read the same books or made themselves aware of each others' issues."
In her foreword to the collection, Rosemary Brown, former British Columbia MLA and Chief Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission writes: "The personal lives recorded in this book clearly outline how . . . we are resurrecting our histories, restoring our ancestors to their rightful place, and preparing our children and grandchildren to ensure that the path to the future continues to right the wrongs of the past."

Brenda Lea Brown's profile page

Larissa Lai was born in La Jolla, California, grew up in St. John's, Newfoundland, and currently lives in Vancouver, where she is an Assistant Professor in Canadian Literature at the University of BritishColumbia. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Calgary and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She was awarded an Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers Award in 1995. Her novel When Fox is a Thousand was first published by Press Gang Publishers in 1995; a new edition, featuring an afterword by the author, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2004. In 2009, she published Automaton Biographies (Arsenal Pulp), her first solo poetry book that was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize at the BC Book Prizes. She is also the author of Salt Fish Girl (Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002), as well as a book-length collaborative long poem with Rita Wong called sybil unrest, published by Line Books in 2009.

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Larissa Lai is the author of two novels, When Fox is a Thousand, shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and Salt Fish Girl, shortlisted for the Tiptree Award, the Sunburst Award and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award; one book of poetry Automaton Biographies, shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award; and a chapbook, Eggs in the Basement, shortlisted for the bp Nichol Chapbook Award.

Through the 90s, she was a cultural organizer in feminist, GLBTQ and anti-racist communities in Vancouver. Now, as an English professor at the University of British Columbia, she teaches courses on race, memory, and citizenship, as well as on biopower and the poetics of relation.

Rita Wong teaches in Critical + Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she has developed a humanities course focused on water, with the support of a fellowship from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. She is currently researching the poetics of water, supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: http://downstream.ecuad.ca/ .

Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, Visions of British Columbia (published for an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery), and Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. She has a passion for daylighting buried urban streams and for watershed literacy. Wong can be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/rrrwong.

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Kate Braid worked as a receptionist, secretary, teacher’s aide, lumber piler, construction labourer, apprentice and journey-carpenter before finally “settling down”? as a teacher. She has taught construction and creative writing, the latter in workshops and also at SFU, UBC and for ten years at Vancouver Island University (previously Malaspina University-College). She is the author of A Well-Mannered Storm: The Glenn Gould Poems, Covering Rough Ground, To This Cedar Fountain and Inward to the Bones: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Journey with Emily Carr. In 2005 she co-edited, with Sandy Shreve, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry. Braid’s second book of poems about her carpentry experiences, Turning Left to the Ladies, was published by Palimpsest Press. She lives in Burnaby, BC, with her partner.

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