Composing: The Work of Geraldine Moodie

L'auteure etudie la vie des femmes artistes et des ecrivaines et se rapporte a leur biographiepour en faire despo'emes ou des recits. Geraldine Moody, la premiere femme photographe dans l'Ouest canadien a la fin du 19e siecle, fait l'objet de son plus recent travail. Geraldine est lapetite-fille de Tecrivaine emblematique lapionni'ere Suzanne Moody. At sixteen I borrowed a reel-to-reel tape recorder and dragged it to Edmonton to interview my great-aunt Emily who remembered escaping from Russia and emigrating to Canada. I still have that afternoon's conversation, now digitized, where Emily's voice with its rich rolling accent recollects when she was no older than I at the time of the interview, describing the family's travels across the ocean and over half a country to live in the prairies--a landscape that was not yet a province. Before I heard the term research, before I knew that fascination with learning from other's stories could be called curriculum theory, I was engaged in the work of understanding experience through the biographies and life histories of those around me. Now my studies often centre on story--how people understand their experience through literature and how they interpret those understandings through writing. While much of my research has been with groups of women across all ages, exploring different forms and technologies of writing (e.g., Luce-Kapler 2004, 2007, 2008), it is in my biographical studies that I develop writing practices to bring to these collectives. I examine the lives of women artists and writers, developing responses to their biographies through poetry and narrative (e.g., Luce-Kapler 2003). The interview with great-aunt Emily signaled this nascent interest, which grew to include Emily Carr, Margaret Bourke-White, Kate Chopin and others, the most recent being Geraldine Moodie, the first woman to have a photography studio in western Canada late in the nineteenth century. Geraldine was granddaughter to the iconic pioneer writer, Susanna Moodie. Married at 24 to a distant cousin, John Douglas (J.D.) Moodie, Susanna had a peripatetic life as J.D.'s work in the Northwest Mounted Police took them from post to post across the Prairies and into northern Canada. Limited biographical information about Geraldine suggests that life with J.D. was challenging, the one constant being her camera. Only recently, thanks largely to the work of Donny White, has the full extent and quality of her photography has become known. What follows are five poems from my collection that speculate about her emergence into photography. Bloodlines (Brandon, 1880, 26 years old) she searched the prairies for a trace never having lived where the land marks were unreadable where the slight rise of a hill did not remember carriage rides and Sunday strolls a circle of smooth white stones scorched patches of earth the carcass of an animal memory marked in rhythms she could not hear not England where she travelled garden paths, walking the palimpsest of ancestral footsteps, ancient voices rising from old walls not Ontario where gossamer threads like the silk of a spider in morning frost shone softly etching a history in stone but here buffeted by winds from unseen mountains swirling grains of dust dismantling the unattached even the plentitude of stars swallowed her in their bowl of light Silhouette (Calgary 1886) Last light of the day she walks toward the shadow of mountains imagining a camera behind her framing her journey across the field. For the past month she has had visions in the night, stronger than dreams where she watches herself stumble through hallways, opening doors that lead nowhere, climbing stairs that dissolve into air. She sees the edges of her life, a narrow maze that closes behind her. …

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