Full Description
What is memory, and where is it stored in the body? Can a room be symbolic of a lifetime?
Memories are like layers of your skin or layers of paint on a canvas. In The Queen of Peace Room, Magie Dominic peels away these layers as she explores her life, that of a Newfoundlander turned New Yorker, an artist and a writer - and frees herself from the memories of her violent past.
On an eight-day retreat with Catholic nuns in a remote location safe from the outside world, she exposes, and captures, fifty years of violent memories and weaves them into a tapestry of unforgettable images. The room she inhabits while there is called The Queen of Peace Room; it becomes, for her, a room of sanctuary. She examines Newfoundland in the 1940s and 1950s and New York in the 1960s; her confrontations with violence, incest, and rape; the devastating loss of friends to AIDS; and the relationship between life and art. These memories she finds stored alongside memories of nature's images of trees pulling themselves up from their roots and fleeing the forest; storms and ley lines, and skies bursting with star-like eyes.
In The Queen of Peace Room, from a very personal perspective, Magie Dominic explores violence against women in the second half of the twentieth century, and in doing so unearths the memory of a generation. In eight days, she captures half a century.
Contents
The Queen of Peace Room by Magie Dominic
Acknowledgments
Liturgy of the Hours
Introduction
Chapter 1: Friday, Midnight
Chapter 2: Saturday Morning
Chapter 3: Sunday, 7 a.m.
Chapter 4: Monday, 6 a.m.
Chapter 5: Tuesday, Dawn
Chapter 6: Wednesday, Pre-dawn
Chapter 7: Thursday, 9 a.m.
Chapter 8: Friday. Rain
Epilogue
Works Cited
Afterword: Reading The Queen of Peace Room As Witness: An Ethics of Encounter Sharon Rosenberg
Selected Texts of Related Interest (Canadian emphasis)
