SFU Profiles: International Women’s Day

By Monica Miller
Photos courtesy of Carole Gerson and PAMR

Carole Gerson

Carole Gerson is a professor in the English Department at SFU, where she also received her BA. Her work has spanned three decades and focused on early Canadian literature, including literary history and women writers. In 2000 she was inducted as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for her work in literature.
Gerson’s interest in researching female authors initially began because of the grant money available from a “women and work” program in the late 1970s. Gerson’s early research explored “creative writing as women’s work” and over the years she has followed up from different angles exploring print culture, different eras, as well as particular authors such as L.M. Montgomery, Susanna Moodie, and E. Pauline Johnson.
What fuels the research is “tracking obscure people” — what Gerson calls “archeological-historical digging” — to find information that was lost or forgotten. Spending time deep in library archives and discovering that two different women were actually the same person, writing under a pseudonym or perhaps a married name later in life, is incredibly rewarding for her.
Many students don’t realize that not everything is digitized, explains Gerson. Her current research is part of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC), which has multiple projects investigating women’s writing in Canada including playwrights, non-fiction, cabaret, and writing in various eras. Gerson is the project leader for “Canada’s Early Women Writers” and the database is accessible through the SFU Library.
Carole Gerson’s research has also been published in several books. She was a contributor to all three volumes of History of the Book in Canada, covering pre-1800s to the 1980s, and co-edited the third volume. Gerson’s involvement in researching Mohawk author E. Pauline Johnson was incited by longtime friend and “Pauline Johnson addict” Veronica Strong-Boag, a historian and founding director of UBC’s Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. Together, they published two books on Johnson, who was not always well received in society. “She embodied numerous cultural concerns,” says Carole. “Her writing drew on white and native sources, and she forged an independent career as a single woman.”
This year is the centenary of Johnson’s death, and in honour of her cultural legacy and passing here in Vancouver, Herstory Cafe — which is co-organized by another SFU professor Lara Campbell — is hosting a couple of events in her honour with the City of Victoria’s Poet Laureate, Janet Rogers. “Poetry in the Park for Pauline: Poetry Offerings” takes place on Johnson’s birthday, March 10, in Stanley Park at Johnson’s Memorial at Ferguson Point.
Most recently, Gerson published Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918, exploring the authorship and contributions of Canadian women across literary history including compositors, bookbinders, fiction writers, journalists, adventurers, and educational texts in eras that were less welcoming to women in the workforce.
Following the research trail of overlooked Canadian authors, Gerson’s next project concentrates on lesser-known female authors from the 1920s–50s. They were left out of the Modernist canon because “they were seen to be insufficiently literary.”

Anne Giardini

Anne Giardini is a busy woman with many professional roles, including president of Weyerhaeuser Company Ltd., lawyer and executive, board member for the Vancouver Board of Trade, chair of the board of the Vancouver International Writers Festival, member of the Board of Directors for UniverCity, and deputy chair of the Board of Governors at SFU. She is also a mother to three children, married for more than 25 years, a critically acclaimed author of fiction, and daughter of the late Carol Shields. Yet she also finds time to be an active volunteer in the community.
Giardini has supported many organizations that help women and girls to achieve their goals, including Plan Canada, the Vancouver YWCA’s Women of Distinction Awards, and the Young Women in Business group. It was for her involvement with Plan Canada’s “Because I’m a Girl” campaign supporting females in Tanzania that Giardini was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal in early 2013.
Plan Canada “reaches out to marginalized people and countries, providing programs, formal structure and clear deliverables that help them manage their selves,” which Giardini respects, and her involvement is “a complete alignment of personal values.” Giardini feels that Rosemary McCarney, President and CEO, “understands and respects girls and women and why they don’t have power.”
Giardini has written two novels and is currently working on her third, each tackling a difficult theme facing society and humanity. The Sad Truth about Happiness (2005) addressed both happiness and unhappiness, and Advice for Italian Boys (2009) dealt with unwanted advice. Her current novel, with the working title Anguish Pie, centres on death “in a non-morbid way.”
“I write about issues and problems that interest me,” she explains, “and through writing I gain understanding and can pass on what I’ve learned through the novel.” Reflecting on learning through reading in fiction versus non-fiction, Giardini comments that “in fiction, we learn about the human condition — it is expansive.”
She recently finished re-reading Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, “the perfect book” which she reads again every couple of years, discovering something new about it or herself based on how she’s changed as an individual.
Giardini has been described as a “petite powerhouse.” She is an incredible role model for trusting in your own strengths and instincts, to be intelligent and read up on what you don’t know. “Have confidence that you do have something to offer. Every one of us does.”