Beyond Recall

Description

An exquisite painter; intellectual; social activist; and articulate lesbian feminist, Mary Meigs began her writing career at age sixty. Mary Meigs suffered a stroke in 1999. Undaunted, she embraced her new discontinuous fate with both a penetrating curiosity and an utterly undiminished will to create. New, discrete forms of writing emerged; an incisively contemplative journal; a beautifully witty, illustrated fax correspondence; and a fascinating series of collaborative "free writing" sketches. Lise Weil has constructed a celebratory gathering of these magical pieces in Beyond Recall, Meigs's paean to the indomitable human spirit and its triumph over the infirmities and obstacles old age imposes on the human condition.

Mary Meigs (1917-2002) wrote her first novel, Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait (Talon-books, 1981), at the age of 60. With the success of her craft, which plays lightly with the barriers of life and art, Meigs has become a beloved fixture of Canadian literature. Lise Weil is a writer and literary scholar who currently teaches at Goddard College in Vermont.

" Beyond Recall ... is a beautiful, whimsical and detailed description of the last two years of Meigs' life. It also documents a woman's life after 80--a virtually unexplored territory. What sticks in Meigs' mind as chronicled here is both visual and visceral." -- Herizons " Beyond Recall provides an eloquent coda to Meigs' literary ouevre ..." -- Canadian Literature "Lise Weil compiled and edited all of [Meigs's] creative output into an elegant book so that the rest of us could have one last encounter with a remarkable writer." -- Geist "While [Mary Meigs's] body is palpably slowing down, her mind is very much alive, as evinced in her wit ... She is capable of word games and of creating a humorous dialogue between her fallible mind and index finger. However, her real strengths are virtues of drama, colour (a painter's mother tongue) and passion that are distilled in succinct images. Creativity trumps gerontology in her case." -- Globe and Mail