This graphic memoir looks at intergenerational experiences of domestic and gender-based violence through a maternal gaze. The book’s 13 chapters document a mother’s attempts to reconcile violent incidents through visual representation, psychically reordering them in the context of her changing temporal body. The unexpected return of trauma memories captured in mixed media reveals an intricate balance between remembering and forgetting. Snippets of memory collide on the page, illustrating in bold graphics and fragmented text how maternal bodies react to claim or reject the stories memory brings. At question is how violence interacts with mental health, addiction, disability, gender, and language, and where or if accountability for transgressions exists except in the author’s mind. While pushing the boundaries of ethical storytelling, this research-creation text explores trauma memory in a textured overlay of images and text. The textured hand-made paper cradles a constant search for identity, opening up the body surgically and metaphorically while pieces are changed, damaged, and removed. Violent acts entrenched in the social fabrics of domestic life disrupt mothering practices rendered in circular frames to symbolize mothers’ resilience and their life-giving wombs.

Lorinda Peterson is an author, poet, and artist living in Kingston, Ontario. She recently graduated with a Ph.D. from Queen’s University where she currently works as an academic assistant for online writing courses. Her graphic novel My Kind of Crazy comprises part of the research-creation for her dissertation together with a poetry collection, Catastrophic Imaginaries. Lorinda has four children, eight grandchildren, two dogs, and a horse that occupy her spare time.

Lorinda Peterson's profile page