This Is What Happens

This Is What Happens

by Chris Wind
This Is What Happens

This Is What Happens

by Chris Wind

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Overview

How is it that the girl with straight As ends up scrubbing floors for minimum wage, living in a room above Vera's Hairstyling, in a god-forsaken town called Powassan? She didn't marry the wrong guy. She didn't have kids. She wasn't an immigrant, uprooted and transplanted. So what happened?

Feminist theorist Dale Spender wrote, in Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, "We need to know how patriarchy works. We need to know how women disappear…." Although Spender spoke of women who disappear from the historical record, women all too often seem to disappear from any sort of public life as soon as they leave high school: so many shine there, but once they graduate, they become invisible.

Where are all the straight-A girls from high school? Why, how, have they 'disappeared'? Marriage and kids is an inadequate answer because married-with-kids straight-A boys (of which, let's acknowledge, there are fewer) are visible. Everywhere. Even the straight-B boys are out there. So what happens?

This is what happens provides several answers as it traces this disappearance with a microscopic examination of one woman's life. There are three voices juxtaposed throughout the novel: the fresh, impassioned protagonist speaking through her journal entries from the age of fifteen; the sarcastic, now-fifty protagonist commenting about the events of her life, occasionally speaking to her younger self; and the dispassionate narrator.

The novel's audience is primarily women—it will resonate most with older women, but it is younger women who most need to read it. Because this is what happens.

 

*

 

"An interesting mix of a memoir and a philosophical work, together with some amazing poetry. … This is what happens ranks in my top five of books ever read."  Mesca Elin, Psychochromatic Redemption

 

"An incisive reflection on how social forces constrain women's lives.  … Great for fans of Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook."  Booklife

 

"The self-analysis is astounding."  Claudine Leonhardt

 

"A seriously powerful novel."  C. Osborne

 

"This book is so amazing. I was so enthralled that I just kept reading …."  JB

 


Product Details

BN ID: 2940164099923
Publisher: Magenta
Publication date: 05/30/2020
Sold by: Smashwords
Format: eBook
File size: 488 KB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

chris wind has degrees in Literature, Education, and Philosophy.

Her poetry has been published in Alpha, The Antigonish Review, Ariel, Atlantis, Bite, Bogg, Canadian Author and Bookman, Canadian Dimension, Canadian Woman Studies, Contemporary Verse 2, The Free Verse Anthology, Girlistic Magazine, grain, Interior Voice, Kola, Mamashee, The New Quarterly, Next Exit, Onionhead, Poetry Toronto, Prism International, Rampike, Shard, The University of Toronto Review, The Wascana Review, Whetstone, White Wall Review, Women's Education des femmes, and three anthologies (Clever Cats, ed. Ann Dubras; Going for Coffee, ed. Tom Wayman; Visions of Poesy, ed. Dennis Gould). "Luncheon on the Grass" was the motive poem for an exhibit by Brooks Bercovitch and Colton at the Galerie Schorer, Montreal (1998).

Her prose has been read on CBC Radio and published in ACT, Alpha, American Atheist, The Antigonish Review, Canadian Woman Studies, event, Existere, (f.)Lip, Herizons, Herstoria, The Humanist, Humanist in Canada, Hysteria, The New Quarterly, Other Voices, Secular Nation, and Waves.

Her theatrical works have been performed by 27th Letter (UK), Creative Curve (UK), Venus Theatre (US),  Laurel Theater, Alumnae Theatre, Theatre Resource Center, Theatre Asylum, Buddies in Bad Times, and A Company of Sirens (all in Canada).

chris wind has received thirteen Ontario Arts Council Writers' Reserve grants based on publisher and theatre recommendation.

chris wind was a panellist at the Canadian National Feminist Poetry Conference (Winnipeg, 1992), and featured in an article in The Montreal Gazette (1994).

Lastly, chris wind is listed in "Who's Who in Hell" (probably because of "Faith," "The Great Jump-Off," and Thus Saith Eve).

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