At five and six years old, lying in the long grass and wildflowers near her family's house on the outskirts of 1940s Toronto, Judith Cowan was certain that what she experienced was the permanent nature of everything. Little by little, she comes to recognize threats: a leering neighbour asking strange questions about her gender, a lady who has died of an illness not revealed, the smell of something dead in the ditch. Her disapproving, resourceful, and frustrated mother, born to Methodist missionaries in China, tells frightening tales: how a pig will kill and eat a little girl, or how she herself as a small child was shot at by pirates on the Yangtze. Sharing memories from the nineteenth century, her grandparents recount their youthful follies, and she realizes that all of us are swept along in time's passing stream. But books seem permanent, and give access to a world of pleasure even if, because of her red hair, the boys torment her on the road to school, and she has to fight. A meticulous memoir of growing up in a Canada scarcely aware of itself as a country, The Permanent Nature of Everything rescues recollections from a vanished time and traces the emerging awareness in the emotional world of a child.

Judith Cowan was born in Nova Scotia, but grew up in Toronto. She graduated from the University of Toronto with a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures. She received an M. A. in French literature from the University of Toronto, followed by an M. A. in English literature from York University. She received a Ph. D. in Canadian Comparative Literature from L’Université de Sherbrooke, Québec, and went on to teach literature in English at L’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivères until the end of the twentieth century.Her stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines, including Quarry Magazine, Queen’s Quarterly, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and The Antigonish Review. In French translation, they have also been published in Liberté, XYZ : la revue de la nouvelle, and L’Atelier du Roman (Paris). She was one of the original contributors to Ellipse magazine, where she has published English translations of individual poems by many Québec poets. She is the only English-language writer in Trois-Rivières, Québec.

Judith Cowan's profile page

"It's rare to find an outspoken girl's-eye view like this, of family life in postwar English Canada. Judith Cowan's memoir draws on her passionate, almost eidetic memory of the moments that become the landmarks of childhood." Marni Jackson, the author of The Mother Zone

"A haunted narrative … not a conventional elegy; instead it is constructed out of the scar tissue of childhood memories of growing up in a dislocated middle class family in 1940s and 50s English Canada." Canadian Literature