In the Flesh: Twenty Writers Explore the Body. The idea for a book of writing about the body first came to me over ten years ago, and I worked for a while on it with my friend Sue Thomas. It went through various metamorphoses, lay dormant for a while and then, in collaboration with another friend, Lynne Van Luven, it was distilled into its current form and taken up by Brindle & Glass.
Each writer was invited to choose (or, in some cases, gently steered towards!) a particular body part and asked to write a candid personal essay exploring that part and their relationship with it. The assumption was that writers had to possess (or have possessed) a particular part in order to write about it. However, we abandoned this rule in the case of two very significant parts, as you will see below.
The twenty essays that resulted from our invitations are fascinating and utterly distinctive in content and tone. Witty, sad, quirky, passionate: each one reads beautifully alone; put together, they create a fascinating, multi-dimensional portrait of the human body and our experience of living within it.
Buy In the Flesh:
In Canada: Munro’s Books Amazon.ca
In the UK: Amazon for paperback and Kindle W H Smith
In the USA: Amazon.com
Here’s the contents page:
Introduction: Prison and Paradise by Kathy Page and Lynne Van Luven
Face, Hair, Tongue . . .
Reading Faces, by Julian Gunn
120,000 Strands, by Caroline Adderson
The Tongue, from Childhood to Dotage, by Madeleine Thein
Skin, Eyes, Ears . . .
What I Think of When I Think of Skin, by Taiaike Alfred
Eyes, by Trevor Cole
The Covert Ear, by Margaret Thompson
Brain, Hands, Feet . . .
The Human Brain, by Lorna Crozier
Hand Over Hand, by Kathy Page
Pas de Deux, by Dede Crane
Vagina, Penis, Womb, Breasts, Ass . . .
My Vagina, by André Alexis
Twenty Questions, (Eight, really. It’s never as long as you think), by Merilyn Simmonds
My Womb Works, by Heather Kutai
Life With My Girls, by Lynne Van Luven
My Flat Cree Ass, by Candace Fertile
Bones, Blood, Heart, Back . . .
Cage of Bones, by Brian Brett
Blood Typing, by Susan Olding
A Serious Arteriopath, by Kate Pullinger
BAD Back, by Richard Steel
Kidney, Pancreas . . .
The Frankenstein Syndrome, or Giving Away the Body, by Stephen Gauer
And Inside, Silence, by Sue Thomas