news | Monday April 6, 2020

Gladys Hindmarch reads from A Birth Account, included in Wanting Everything

In today’s excerpt, Gladys Hindmarch reads from her 1976 book A Birth Account, in conversation with Deanna Fong. This work has recently been published in Wanting Everything, Hindmarch’s complete works, co-edited by Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer.

Gladys Hindmarch was a central figure in the Vancouver literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Wanting Everything, her first major publication in over thirty years, contains newly revised editions of The Peter Stories, A Birth Account, and The Watery Part of the World, unpublished works of prose, correspondence, criticism, oral history interviews, and occasional writing. Spanning five decades, Wanting Everything recognizes Hindmarch’s significant contribution to Canada’s literary and cultural fields.

In their introduction, editors Fong and Shearer contextualize this work through the unpacking of the volume’s title. “’[W]anting everything” refers to a kind of largeness, a desire to push against the constraints of language, time, and competing forms of labour to document, to connect, and to love, without sacrifice or hierarchy,” they write. “‘Wanting everything’ means wanting to be a writer and a professor; to be a lover and a mother; to be a critic and a confidante. In Hindmarch’s work there is an appetitiousness that wants to bring everything into its ambit without compromise, and it is from this sense of appetite that its feminist politics radiate – an additive ethos that invites solidarity, generosity, and openness.”

Watch Hindmarch reading from A Birth Account, and order your copy of Wanting Everything today.