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We’re coming up on our first anniversary in a couple of months, and we seem to be doing pretty well.  We’ve just surpassed 700 posts, and, much more tellingly, we drew more than 10,000 visitors during the month of May alone.

So we’d like to extend an open invitation to those visitors: we are always looking for Guest Bloggers.  If you’d like to submit a post, just drop us a line at fryeblog@gmail.com  Remember also that we’ve got a journal, so if you have a paper that hasn’t yet found a home, let us know.  We publish both peer-reviewed scholarship and articles of interest.

When the organizers of the conference coming up at Emmanuel College on May 14–15 first got together to discuss possible responses to Almuth Lutkenhaus-Lackey’s sculpture Crucified Woman, we tried to lay the field open. We invited responses from women and men of any faith, value, or belief system. Yet when it came down to it, we all agreed that our rising awareness of degradation to the environment, of the sex trade, and of the prison system was linked to both a feminine consciousness and to Aboriginal issues in Canada.

Marjory Noganosh, an Ojibwe elder who will open and close the event, is preparing a keynote address on the theme “Mother Earth and Women.” At the time of writing, the Federal Metal Mining Effluent Regulations of the Fisheries Act has redefined lakes as “tailing impoundment areas,” which allows the dumping of toxic waste into Sandy Pond, Newfoundland, and the destruction of land sacred to the Tsilhqot’in in British Columbia. The tailing ponds laced with arsenic, mercury, and cancer-causing benzene at the Alberta Tar Sands will, by 2020, have extended to one billion cubic metres of toxic sludge, continuing to destroy land the size of England and threaten the lives of the Chipewyan people – to name just some of the people adversely affected. If the white man cannot be at peace with the land, perhaps women can bring them to it, but it is hard to see how Marjory, or anyone else, might invoke the necessary miracle.

As for the prison system, Marian Botsford Fraser recently published a few stanzas of a poem by Renée Acoby, an Anishnawbe métisse from Louis Riel country, who has been incarcerated in the Edmonton Institution for Women for over ten years on a sentence now extended to over twenty years. The sub-committee gathering poetry decided to request permission to include this poem in our collection. Marian even encouraged me to write to the prisoner-poet myself. Renée’s response begins:

Thank you very much for your support and positivity.☺ This is the first time I have heard about the sculpture by Almuth Lutkenhaus-Lackey; I find it intriguing, uplifting, and empowering. Is this a yearly gathering? What a wonderful way to raise awareness and pay tribute to the suffering and strength of women … I am extremely honoured and humbled by your invitation to present my poem.

Such courtesy from a “dangerous offender”! We are equally honoured to include her poem and two others she has written in our compilation.

Professor Joan Wyatt is the Director of Contextual Education at Emmanuel College

In the spring of 1979 while living in Port Hope, Ontario, I read in the Globe and Mail that Almuth Lutkenhaus’s sculpture Crucified Woman had been installed at Bloor Street United Church. She was in the narthex during Holy Week and in the sanctuary on Good Friday. The outrage of some was expressed when someone at Toronto South Presbytery charged Cliff Elliot, the incumbent minister at the time, with heresy. The support of others helped Presbytery to dismiss the charges.

Last year, marking 30 years since this remarkable occasion, many gathered at Emmanuel College to hear Sophie Jungreis, a Jewish artist, Nevin Reda, a Muslim academic, and Margaret Burgess and Janet Ritch, literary scholars, reflect on what the image of Crucified Woman evokes today. Toronto lawyer and scholar Nella Cotrupi read a stunning poem.

The evening concluded with many walking by candlelight to Bloor Street United Church, where the Easter Vigil service celebrated images of women cruciform and rising. Johan Aitken, professor emerita from OISE and an original member of the committee who brought the installation in 1979, related her experiences of that time. Visual images of women suffering and rising around the globe enhanced the service.

I graduated in 1986, when Lutkenhaus’s gift of Crucified Woman was finally, after a protracted debate, accepted by Victoria University. Doris Dyke, a professor at Emmanuel College, along with a group of students who called ourselves the “Uppity Women,” planned an event to mark her installation in the garden behind Emmanuel College. The Friday evening showcased women’s stories, gifts, and accomplishments. The next day a well-attended outdoor worship service featured the hymns of the late Sylvia Dunston, liturgical dance under the direction of Alexandra Caverly Lowery, and preachers Doris Dyke and Cliff Elliot. I was the worship leader and was thrilled to complete my years at Emmanuel College, where the debate of what would it mean to have Crucified Woman at a theological School had shaped my understanding of the challenges of feminist thought. The service was a satisfying occasion, indicating that the academy and the Church recognized both the rights and the suffering of women.

May 14–15, 2010, women and men once again will gather to reflect on what the symbol of a cruciform Woman evokes in our culture today. Ojibway elder Marjory Noganosh will lead the opening ceremony and present, along with social activist Pat Capponi, and photojournalist Rita Leistner. Come listen, reflect, and join this ongoing conversation, a conversation that also invites submissions to be considered for publication.

Biographies of the speakers and workshop presenters, as well as of the dancers and musicians who will be performing at the event, after the jump.

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Rita Leistner, a graduate of the University of Toronto Centre for Comparative Literature and one of Canada’s leading photojournalists, will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming “Crucified Woman Reborn” conference taking place at Emmanuel College on May 14 and 15.  Her subject is the “The Photojournalism of Women.”

Asked in a recent interview what it takes to make a good photo, she referred to a Martin Parr image of Walmart employees saying, “it wouldn’t be a picture without the composition, without the harshness of the flash, the tone in the sky that allows these figures to pop off this bland background.”

Rita, who has worked embedded in combat zones in Iraq, has also reported on such subjects as American women wrestlers, female patients at Baghdad’s al Rashad Psychiatric Hospital and crack addicts in Vancouver’s downtown east side.  Join us at the conference to hear more!

Please join us at Emmanuel College on May 14 and 15 for “Crucified Woman” Reborn: Current Responses, a conference in honour of the sculpture by Almuth Lutkenhaus-Lackey and all that she represents.

Conference speakers and workshop leaders will include: Doris Jean Dyke, author of Crucified Woman (1991); Rita Leistner, photojournalist; Marjory Noganosh, Ojibway elder and healer; Pat Capponi, writer and activist; Noelle Boughton, author and editor; Marion Botsford Fraser, writer; Sophie Jungreis, artist; Samantha Cavanagh, artist and dancer; Property Smith, harm reduction worker specializing in work with at-risk youth, drug users, and sex trade workers; and Anne Hines, author and humour/lifestyle columnist.

We also invite submissions of poetry on topics related to and/or inspired by the sculpture. We hope to be able to publish a selection of the poems submitted (subject to their approval by a selection committee and the obtaining of a publisher) together with the proceedings for the conference.

Please pass on the information and the poster to anyone you think will be interested. (Click here for the registration form and here for the conference program.)

Warm regards and hope to see you there!

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