WEDNESDAY, MAY 18, 2011 THE VANCOUVER COURIER
EW23
entertainment
Handy anthology celebrates unexpected joys of aging State of the Arts with Cheryl Rossi
For her 40th birthday, Shari Graydon asked her older friends to forego gag gifts and instead share their stories about the benefits of aging. “You’d have thought I’d insisted they all devote their next day off to reliving the rigours of drug-free childbirth,” she writes in the introduction to the book of personal essays and poems she compiled and edited, I Feel Great about My Hands (and Other Unexpected Joys of Aging). A decade later in 2009, a woman newspaper columnist Graydon normally read with interest wrote a lengthy piece that itemized “wrinkleprone” and “gravity-challenged” parts of a woman’s body and the derogatory nicknames for each. Graydon, an award-winning women’s advocate,
veteran print and broadcast journalist and bestselling author of two media literacy books for youth, Made You Look: How Advertising Works and Why You Should Know and In Your Face: The Culture of Beauty and You, couldn’t restrict her response to the newspaper’s 250-word limit. So she invited women age 50 and older to submit poetry and prose that celebrate the silver lining, or hidden gems, that accompany deepening wrinkles and going grey. Now Douglas and McIntyre has published the insights of 41 notable Canadian women on the dilemmas and riches of aging, which include increased wisdom, confidence and security. Mary Walsh of This Hour Has 22 Minutes fame jokes that she spent decades playing “an endless series of big, loud, opinionated old bags” only to realize she’d become one. Susan Musgrave demonstrates the writing prowess that has seen her awarded for poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and children’s literature in a difficult to forget piece about how she dresses. Readers get glimpses into the lives of senior CBC cor-
respondent Alison Smith, history-making Green Party leader Elizabeth May and the indignities of life as a mature student as laid bare by Susan Delacourt and Susan Harada. Graydon says she was particularly struck by Susannah Cohen Dalfen’s piece on life beyond her husband’s unexpected death, Senator Sharon Carstairs’ deeply personal essay on her experience of finding her voice as a child, only to face public derision for it as a groundbreaking woman politician, and “My Last Erotic Poem” by Lorna Crozier. “Who wants to hear about two old lovers/slapping together like water hitting mud... my bunioned foot sliding/up your bony calf... our faithless bums crepey, collapsed?” Crozier writes. “How Drooping Breasts Led Me to a Truck-driving Life of Adventure,” by Marlaina Gayle, a businesswoman and award-winning multimedia journalist, sets the anthology off on a jaunty note. The book ends with Graydon’s title piece, a tribute to filmmaker and bestselling author Nora Ephron’s book of essays I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts
on Being a Woman. “I Feel Great about My Hands” highlights all that her hands have improved and shaped. “This book and my media books or seminars are a drop in the bucket against the multibillion-dollar industries that are selling the other message that yes it is all about how you look,” Graydon said. “We know what we do is more important intuitively... but it’s pretty hard to resist the imaging and the messaging that suggest otherwise.” Proceeds from I Feel Great about My Hands will go to
Media Action (formerly MediaWatch) and Informed Opinions to, among other things, foster more public commentary by women. Gayle will be one of more than half a dozen contributors to read at the Vancouver launch tonight (May 18) alongside writers that include Frances Bula and Lillian Zimmerman. It starts at 7 p.m. in the Alma VanDusen Room in the lower level of the central library, 350 West Georgia St. crossi@vancourier.com Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi
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