SIOLENCE
by Penn Kemp (1992)


In her biography of Elizabeth Smart, Rosemary Sullivan writes: "Every witness leaves gaps, deliberate or not. A biographer learns to listen between the words for the potent silences." She describes how Elizabeth's sister, cutting out some of the information in material she was sending, left Rosemary to wonder at that gap with a cryptic note: "Eat your heart out."

But what if the biography is one's own memoir? One's own mind is then the site of potent silences to be examined: Mind the Gap. As Erin Mouré has said, the work is to decipher that anxiety, not to smooth it over too soon or to bury it.

Silence for me has been the background upon which my writing is figure. Writing is the arabesque back to recover what has been lost. Autobiographical fiction gives me permission to speak the obvious mysteries.

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Siolence is also featured in Womedia at Work Against War