1 Toni Morrison, in her introductory essay “Strangers” to Robert Bergman’s book of photography, writes, “The resources available to us for benign access to each other, for vaulting the mere blue air that separates us, are few but powerful: language, image, and experience.” What does this mean? How specifically do these resources (language, image, and experience) relate to the story of the old woman Morrison tells in the first half of the essay? How does it construct our understandings of self and others?
2. How is trauma represented in Madeleine Thien’s “Simple Recipes” and/or in Eden Robinson’s (Haisla) “Queen of the North”? In answering this question, you may want to consider various textual elements, such as the formal qualities of the writing, the representation of narrative time, and/or the use of “doubles” and “doubling.” You may also want to consider how the notion of guilt/culpability is complicated/problematized by these texts.
