We’ve celebrated our honorary patron, Jane Urquhart, our honorary editors, Dr. Elizabeth Waterston, Dr. Mary Rubio, and Dr. Elizabeth Epperly, and our consulting editors, Dr. Jean Mitchell and Dr. Laura Robinson. Over the next weeks and months, we’ll be highlighting the other 31 members of our interdisciplinary, international editorial board . To give you a sense of our editorial board, we asked members a series of questions.
One question was: What was Montgomery's greatest accomplishment?
Margaret Steffler: Her journals are her greatest accomplishment. They reveal the amazing depth and complexity of her life as a woman and a writer. For me, the life recorded in those journals is an intimate and powerful gift.
Rita Bode: As an author, she created such enduring characters whose complexity continues to reveal things about human interactions, vulnerabilities and achievements.
Carolyn Strom Collins: There are many accomplishments, of course, but one is her perseverance -- writing/publishing 21 novels, over 500 stories, over 500 poems, many articles and essays, keeping extensive journals -- in spite of a great many hardships in her personal life.
Melanie Fishbane: Her greatest accomplishment is that she LIVED. Lived on in our collective memories, creating stories that still resonate today. She was involved in many early Canadian author moments, such as the Canadian Author’s Association, and provided a foundation for women writers in Canada, if not around the world.
Idette Noome: Her ability to capture the complexity of life, especially women's and children's lives, with all the poignant paradoxes of dreams and hopes and successes and disappointments, and leaving overall a sense of both human resilience and the fragility of every moment - through our living with, becoming friends with, her characters, she has made us SEE much of what would otherwise have remained in the periphery of our vision, and making us see through the lens of her fiction, she pulls our own experiences into the light, for us to experience more fully.
Acknowledgement: Banner image of Meet the Editorial Board. Alyssa Gillespie, 2019. Image of PEI Lilacs. Anne Victoria Photography, 2018.