Literary Criticism of the Cowrie Novel Series: A Documentation

Some Thoughts on Talkstory in Carolyn Gammon’s Reviews of the Cowrie Novels
Cathie Dunsford

One of the most prominent literary critics of the Cowrie novel series is Canadian-Berlin literary critic, academic, author, researcher, editor, activist and Jewish History Tour Guide, Carolyn Gammon. I first met Carolyn Gammon when Keri Hulme launched the Cowrie novel series at the International Feminist Bookfair in Melbourne in 1994. She expressed an interest in the books and later reviewed them for the International Lesbian Review of Books, USA, and for Hecate: The Australian Women’s Book Review in Australia. Her reviews have also appeared on amazon.com and in many other magazines globally. Carolyn is one of the people I have met through the publication of the Cowrie novel series who have later become friends. However, her book reviews reflect the integrity of her own cultural and literary vision and all were written independently of me.

Carolyn Gammon was one of the first literary critics to break the boundaries and include some of her own talkstory in the first review of Te Haerenga Kainga: The Journey Home for a USA publication in 1997. She innately understood talkstory from the novels without us ever discussing a definition of this until Toronto, 2007, after she had worked on editing Nora Neumann’s Master of Arts thesis. Furthermore, she included her own talkstory within the reviews, so that she was responding and becoming involved in the narration in just the same way as Talkstory was later taken up by academics Dr. Katherine McKittrick and Dr. Liz Millward and their students at Queen’s University, Kingston and the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, respectively, while teaching the novels.

It has only been in the process of working on this book with Global Dialogues that the full implications of Carolyn Gammon’s early literary critical reviews, published internationally, and used by many academics in their university classrooms, have dawned on me. The radical way she interacted with the texts clearly paved the way for others to follow and finally came to fruition in the rich Talkstory sessions held at both Manitoba and Queen’s Universities while on the 2007 Canadian Book Tour and in the classrooms before we lectured or performed for the students and staff. Professor Ahimsa Bodhran, teaching from the Cowrie novels at a New York University, also emailed me and said how deeply the students interacted with the novels and how much they had gained from the talkstory elements as well as the cultural layering in the novels. Dr. Carole Ferrier, teaching from the Cowrie novels at the University of Brisbane, Australia said the same. Similar responses came from other university lecturers in the UK and Canada. There are many more professors who have taught from the novels all over the globe who have not emailed or contacted me and so we can only guess at what responses may have happened in the university and school classrooms where the books have been studied.

However, I feel indebted to Carolyn Gammon for her early insights into the novels and her bravery in defying the usual criteria for literary critical reviews to get inside the stories themselves, to interact with the notion of talkstory and apply it to the field of literary criticism in much the same way that Booker Prize Winner, Keri Hulme, indicated the stories also came from the etched rock drawings on the cave walls and these were integral to understanding the pre-European context of the narrative, when launching the first novel in the Cowrie series at the International Feminist Bookfair in Melbourne Australia in 1994. Keri Hulme stressed the originality of this new literary genre in the novel saying “Cowrie is quite an extraordinary work. There’s been nothing like it published in New Zealand before and I deeply suspect not elsewhere.”

Carolyn Gammon also emphasised the original nature of the Cowrie novels and the importance of coming to grips with this new literary genre. Furthermore, she broke new ground in academic literary criticism of the time by interacting with the talkstory in the novels and even providing talkstory of her own. In her review of Te Haerenga Kainga: The Journey Home for the International Lesbian Review of Books, she breaks into talkstory to better describe what she sees as unique descriptions of the erotic in the book, where the cultural connexion is established through the sharing of creation stories between Peta and Cowrie and then the love scenes reflect the imagery of the novel, evoking fire, water steam and spray, making the reader unsure as to whether s/he is in a dream, an erotic fantasy or someplace other. Gammon then describes an experience she and her lover had “on the mighty St Lawrence River” when finback and beluga whales “popped up like corks out of the depths” and also became a part of their love-making that night and links this all to a definition of the erotic by Black Carribean-US author Audre Lorde in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” from Sister Outsider. Little did Carolyn Gammon know at that stage how deeply this essay had affected me and influenced me during my time in the USA and ever since.

Her own talkstory adds a vital element to her review that describes with precision exactly what this crucial element of the novel is about. During the Canadian Book Tour, Professor Katherine McKittrick also inserted talkstory into her academic paper on the novel in a new and very effective way to get across the energy, humour and various layers of this device as a literary critical tool as well as one for use by an author and for her students in the classroom.

Later in the same review, Carolyn Gammon connects the student activism in the novel with her own talkstory: “To share a bit of my own talkstory, in working five years to develop Lesbian Studies in Canada, it was students attacking in Gorilla Girl style on the fringes of the academy that finally moved the Women’s Studies program to include core courses in Lesbian Studies.” She affirms the vital importance of student activism in this process of change. One talkstory in fiction talks to and affirms another talkstory from real life. This is the novel as a subversive tool, talkstory as a subversive act, as indeed it became during classes at Queen’s and Manitoba universities. This is indeed the work of a “punk rock earth warrior” and literary activist. Kamaho’o. Wunderbar!

Carolyn Gammon even takes talkstory further in her review by adding to and offering advice on the recipe of roasting marshmallows in the book, in true Canadian style. This is how our cultures interact, just as Queen’s university student Trevan David later analyses perceptively the role of kai moana, cooking and food in Te Haerenga Kainga in his women’s studies class and in this book. The food of literature, culture, literary analysis and the nourishment of our souls when being involved in producing or critiquing literature is lusciously described through this talkstory and interaction of the text and reader on levels not available to those who are only capable of experiencing a book mentally and not physically and involving all our senses that true literature should. Carolyn Gammon broke new ground and began a process by including her own talkstory connected to the novel in this early review of The Journey Home published in 1997 and later in her review of Song of the Selkies, that is still taking place a decade later in university classes in 2007. Long may this talkstory process of reading and interacting with literary texts continue.

The following are published literary critical reviews by Carolyn Gammon of the two novels in the Cowrie series that deal primarily with Talkstory, and where her own talkstory enters her literary critical review, since this became such a strong theme of the 2007 Canadian Conferences based around the Cowrie novels.

Review of Te Haerenga Kainga: The Journey Home
Carolyn Gammon
Published in the International Lesbian Review of Books,
Editor: Loralee McPike, Volume IV, No.2, Winter 1997-1998, USA.

The Journey Home: Te Haerenga Kainga, Cathie Dunsford, Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press, 1997, 301pp, US $13.95. ISBN 1-875559-54-X

For those of us who met Cowrie in Cathie Dunsford’s first novel [Cowrie, Spinifex Press, 1994], The Journey Home is a joyful return to familiar places and people who, even after only one book, begin to feel like friends or family. But this second book, although perhaps enriched by reading Cowrie, also stands on its own. Enough clues and details are given about the passions which stirred Cowrie in her first adventure to catch up on the story lines and characters.

The Journey Home is many things. It is a criticism of current academic practices that prioritize theory over original texts. It is in itself an answer to the critique as it takes on many of the issues raised in the academy [post-colonial literature, questions of voice, which stories get told, etc] in a way that demands action, not just passive inspection. It is an up-to-date survey of the pressing themes of the nineties-indigenous politics, sexual abuse issues and healing communities, the ongoing struggle of women fighting for custody of their children, the nuclear “war” being waged against Pacific islands, lesbian play and politic, and much, much more.

On top of this, The Journey Home is not just a love story but many love stories. It is sensual, spiritual, and as exciting as a detective story. It is all this in a book of fiction: entertaining, funny, passionate, sometimes hard, sometimes about mourning, and yet always uplifting. In the end, The Journey Home is a book about hope – hope for new ways of interacting in personal and professional relationships, between individuals and between cultures. The characters in this book “gain hope from the work that is being done rather than depressing themselves in contemplating the vastness of what still needs to be accomplished.”

The “journey” takes place in various locations: Cowrie’s birth home [Aotearoa New Zealand] and ancestral home [Hawai’i], as well as in her temporary residences in San Francisco and on Great Turtle Island. With narrative swings that feel like a highly tuned television camera zooming in on different scenarios, and through personal letters addressed to Cowrie, the many story lines are webbed together between these locations. “Chapters” are four to eight page vignettes, not unlike pearls on a string.

It is the mid nineties and the time frame is approximately one year, although the year is clearly part of a time span which reaches back and forward many generations. There is no one plot line. Cowrie’s battle in the academy for the right to do her work with integrity in a way which will be true to her Pacific Island sources is but one. How far can the academy be pushed? Whose interests are at stake? Will lesbian feminist colleagues prove to be allies or will they betray? Each character in The Journey Home has equally pressing issues, and Cowrie gets drawn into their lives and hearts with her great ability for passion.

Meet Cowrie, who describes herself in a moment of self-doubt, and from the perspective of her oppressors, as “too large, too loud, too much energy, too much life.” She is a boundary-breaker from birth and also a bridge builder, a “large, handsome woman” who can be knocked off her feet by a lehua blossom. She is a Fulbright scholar and tutor at the University of California at Berkeley. Those close to her call her Turtle, or, when feisty, Snapping Turtle. Meet Laukiamanuikahiki, Turtle Woman, who rises up out of the sea to save a drowning child with powerful strokes of her fins. She carries stories under her shell.

Meet the radical dyke students of the nineties. DK is an Alison Bechdel “Lois” type, out for sex, irreverent but subject to political pangs and eventual soul entry into activism. Attractive for her outlandishness, she manages to display her fatism in her first encounter with Cowrie; after a dressing down she courts the first fat woman she meets – successfully! Meet Uretsete, a young, at first quiet Chumash student who gathers courage and voice as she goes along, eventually becoming an enthusiastic contributor to “Siliyik”, a student talkstory group formed to counter the disembodying influence of postmodern theory. Uretsete ends up teaching the teacher to find the renewal offered through loss. Meet Ruth, the infectiously vivacious Jewish student activist and Siliyik member with Yiddish tales to tell. And Suzanne, DK’s catch, a southern white woman who learns that her stories have value too.

On Great Turtle Island meet Peta, Chumash woman from Santa Cruz Island who tells of her people crossing to the mainland on a Rainbow Bridge. Her gifts of sweet grass and shells welcome Cowrie to her new setting and seduce her. Peta is Sacred Fire, Cowrie is ocean waves, and when the two meet it is like Pele’s lava flow meeting the sea: “The water is on fire.” From the Big Island of Hawai’i meet Koana, Cowrie’s sensuous and solid friend and cousin. This main actor from the Cowrie novel returns in the companionship of Ela. Both have children who have the benefit of being raised with the opportunity of learning Hawai’ian. But Ela’s children are endangered by a custody suit initiated by her former husband, now in Texas. Will the relationship between Koana and Ela be seen as lesbian and therefore detrimental to the case? Is it lesbian? And who can better help than Nanduye, Peta’s old friend and partner in the struggle for indigenous rights. Nanduye has already successfully won a case in Kahnawake, Mohawk territory back on Great Turtle Island, and will do her best for Ela. But what does Cowrie think of Peta taking off to be with Nanduye in Kahnawake? Can their sizzling love endure the separation?

During the semester break, Cowrie returns to Aotearoa. Meet Mere, her Mum, who adopted Cowrie from the orphanage and continues to give her the best mothering. Warm, wise, and honest, Mere is a born feminist who would never think to call herself that. Meet Kuini, who left a lucrative position at the University of Waikato to co-ordinate a Maori-orientated sexual abuse program which aims to heal the entire community. She lives on the sand dunes in a caravan with stained glass windows and decorated with traditional Maori carvings. Kuini stands as a reminder to Cowrie that there is life outside of and after academia. And meet Maata, who watches her mother beaten to death by her father. Little Maata further survives near-drowning by learning Turtle Woman’s “lessons of the waves.”

Back in San Francisco, meet Cowrie’s overseeing professor Rita. Torn between two lovers – well not exactly, but that too – torn between the academy and being true to her feminist politics, Rita breaks her sobriety and ends up on Cowrie’s couch. Rita represents the battle for our souls.

Honu, [meaning turtle] the pickup truck from the novel Cowrie, makes a cameo appearance. Willemina Wombat appears for a vital cuddle. And many other characters come to grace this book with stories of their own, stories to help us and to help Cowrie on this journey home. If this might seem like a lot of different people and issues to handle, it is! For the first part of the book I had to be patient to find out just who was who and how they were connected. By book’s end, not only had all these characters taken on personalities and meaning for the central story, I found myself wanting more. [Fortunately for Cowrie fans, the sequel is on the way.]

San Francisco. Motorcycle babes and deli delights, six locks on the door and communal fridges, Amazon Films [Motto: “We’ll come in your face!”] and Mama Bear’s Bookstore. The Bay Area is alive with creative electricity, radical happenings, and dykes into S/M. Cowrie sees Berkeley as “[t]he sixties revisited with a layer of New Age veneer.” She enjoys the lobster and oyster feed for $5 but is reminded that it’s “free back home.” She likes the talk about cunt energy in power places around the U.S. yet can’t quite shut out the freeway roar above the flat where she stays. She feels welcome in the Black neighbourhood; but after the holidays back home in Aotearoa, the level of poverty hits her like a wall. San Francisco and Berkeley are the main sites of Cowrie’s struggle. It’s a postmodern world, and even the invited Fulbright scholar may be too much of an upstart for free-speech Berkeley.

Cowrie finds that her doctoral proposal on Pacific lesbian and gay talkstory doesn’t quite work on the page. As a tutor, she aligns more and more with her students, who complain that theory is taking over the use of primary texts. Ruth argues, “It’s also a class and race issue…It’s about who has access to this kind of theorising and what relevance it has to effect radical change.” Uretsete makes the analogy that it is like having her culture “infiltrated and dissipated through the eyes of Kevin Costner…We get a skewed picture via their appropriation…it’s as if the author doesn’t exist. My culture lives that every day,” she concludes.

Dunsford is right on in putting the most searing arguments into the mouths of students. To share a bit of my talkstory, in working five years to develop Lesbian Studies in Canada, it was students attacking in Gorilla Girl style on the fringes of the academy that finally moved the Women’s Studies program to include core courses in Lesbian Studies. Students are not so heavily invested in the system – yet; and Dunsford cleverly crystallises the challenge to the academy in the tutor-student character of Cowrie. She thinks of ways to get the committee to agree to accept oral interviews and cassettes as part of her doctorate. “It’s the ritual, the sense of presence, the atmosphere, that’s so hard to create on the page.” Friends applaud and support her via letters from various homes. But some, like Kuini, who has already seen the limits of the academy too closely, warn that she may not be able to carve a place there. In lighter moments, Cowrie and Peta dream of turning San Quentin prison into the “San Quentin Retirement Retreat for postmods.” I can see why this book might be unpopular with some scholars!

But lest the reader fear that The Journey Home is a dry discussion of the debates raging within Women’s Studies, let her feast her eyes and lips on the erotic/food parts of the book, because it is impossible to know where one begins and the other ends. Savor this for a moment:
“Cowrie carefully slices the mango with her fingernail, right around her fleshy rim. She then peels back the dappled red skin as if it is a hide, all in one piece, sucking on the inside to make sure she has not wasted any juice. Then she holds the mango to Peta’s mouth, its dazzling orange and gold flesh inviting her seductively. The juices rise in Peta and she moves her lips toward the fruit. Cowrie does the same. Together, they eat mango Pacific style.”

From tuatua [shell food] feasts, urged out of the sand with one’s toes, to beach-side smoked mussels and salads with eight different lettuces, The Journey Home is also a journey in celebrating the rituals of growing, gathering, giving, and sharing food. Fresh fish is sent by mail between friends. Instructions are given to collect seafood properly to always ensure sustainable growth. Recipes are passed on for many dishes, from a cuppa tea to the perfect toasted marshmallow. [The one thing I would add to the marshmallow recipe is that after toasting the outer layer to a golden brown, one should actually pull off that layer with puckered lips and toast the next soft inner layer. In this way, the one and same mallow can be toasted and eaten three or four times.]

The sharing of stories is also returned to the realm of ritual and intimacy where it belongs. Peta and Cowrie first share their people’s creation stories before sharing their bodies. And then, when they do kiss and they do make love, the images are those of the stories. Fire, water, steam, rainbow spray [and even saran wrap!]. Sometimes it is impossible to tell: am I in a dream here? An erotic fantasy? Or some other place altogether, invented by the author? A kiss turns into a rainbow, naked bodies into waterfalls, orgasms [was that an orgasm?] into the cavernous chanting of many women’s voices. I’ve never read erotica quite like this before, but I have lived it.

Once on the mighty St. Lawrence River, which for a rare day in summer was glassy smooth, my lover and I saw whales from a tiny fishing boat. Ninety foot long finbacks and dozens and dozens of white belugas popped like corks up out of the depths. That night we made love; we were belugas, round whale bodies bumping and popping, eerie finback wailing. The lovemaking was infused with, inseparable from, the day’s images. This is the essence of Dunsford’s erotic. It is woven into the myth, the talkstory, the very fabric of the text. It doesn’t always include sex, and it doesn’t deny that that sometimes passion must remain unfulfilled. The writing of the erotic here is responsible to the total life. It calls up Audre Lorde’s definition:

“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire!”
Because it is responsible, it includes issues pertinent to so many lesbians, such as our ongoing recovery from rape and abuse. Cowrie offers Peta “non-sexual touching” after Peta comes out with her story of repeated molestation as a child. Peta is moved: “Would you really do that for me, Cowrie? That is one of the most beautiful things that anyone has ever offered.”
The indigenous communities portrayed in this book are depicted in their sometimes harsh realities but also with an eye to constructive self-sustaining projects. Outside of San Francisco, Cowrie visits Tomales Bay, where an authentic Miwok village has been reconstructed and oyster farming is under way to reclaim coast tribal traditions after the land was depleted by cattle farming. In Aotearoa a nursery grows plants and flowers indigenous to the soil. To show the more combative side of fighting back, Kuini reports in one of her newsy letters that “the spirit of Hone Heke is alive and well and cutting heads off statues honouring the colonisation of Aotearoa by the Brits.”

Complex personal and political realities of indigenous life are put across in accessible narration, such as when Cowrie is to meet Peta’s family for the first time. Peta says about her Mom: “She works making buckskin shoes and bags for the local trading post…They’re not on the phone, so I just have to chance it. Unless it’s bingo night, Mom will be around. Cowrie responds, “I’ve been dying to meet them,” to which Peta replies, “Most of my friends don’t want to know. The non-Indians feel guilty that most of the Indian families live in such poverty, so they don’t want to visit or actually see it for themselves.” Cowrie empathises as the two compare their communities. Across oceans there are often the same forms of prejudice to deal with; indigenous cultures “are celebrated now, often for the wrong reasons and more to do with the idealization of their culture which has replaced the guilt.”

Despite Cowrie and Peta’s sharing, however, Peta must acknowledge to herself, as she tries to chose between Cowrie and Nanduye, that “Cowrie, despite her empathy and indigenous links will always remain an outsider in Indian eyes.” There are no formulas here to automatic alliances but instead a realistic approach to how we can aim at being allies to one another.

Personal relationships are a microcosm for the larger political ones. Peta and Cowrie’s love affair is central to The Journey Home. No sooner has Cowrie arrived in San Francisco than a “striking woman…tall and self-contained” greets her with a bundle of sweet grass and a kiss on the cheek. They move fast into the erotic and out of it again as injuries surface. They seek that ultimate lesbian union – a balance between marriage and independence. At Bridal Veil Falls in Yosemite, Peta asks casually – or is it casual? – “Wanna get married?” Cowrie is stunned and speechless. She looks into Peta’s eyes to make sure she is not joking. They are sparkling. While both are committed to each other, neither has ever wanted to be together in traditional ways. They each enjoy their time alone too much. And does commitment mean forever after? When Peta moves to work with Nanduye and picks up on former passions, it is the new lover who urges Peta to deal honestly with Cowrie. And in the way that the whole book stresses continuums and moving through life rather than hacking it off in bits, there is love and eroticism after the breakup. As their individual life’s work pulls them to different parts of the globe, they discuss how to remain “soul lovers.” Love, the erotic, and one’s life tasks are inseparable. Cowrie finds herself in pain and alone again, but with hopes this time of not losing the intimacy gained through having been lovers with Peta. Dunsford’s take on relationships here is refreshing and provides good food for thought.

But the heart of The Journey Home is talkstory. What is talkstory? Sorry, not in my dictionary — but maybe it will be after this book. It is about telling lives, not just our lives but those of our ancestors. It is about weaving our past into into our present so that we may benefit from generations of wisdom. It is about creating words for the miracles around us. It is about dreaming and relying on those dreams to inform our working reality. It is about grounding ourselves in the life swirling around us. It is “[s]tories that carry the power to perceive life differently, to transform one’s vision, simply by coming from another place. Stories that link us all, culture to culture, person to person, with their shared myths and symbolism.” It is the answer to too much theory. Siliyik, the student group which first meets at Cowrie’s apartment, then at the university, then breaks out of those bonds and goes on tour, is but one example of the hopeful projects that animate this book.

Talkstory comes, of course, in whichever language the storytellers talk. It is no coincidence that this book has a glossary for words stemming from six different language sources. In the beginning, I made good use of the glossary, but about halfway through the book I found myself letting the words wash over me like a wave does as you float at shore. I didn’t quite know the meaning, yet the intent was clear. By book’s end, some of the words had entered my consciousness, not as translations but as Maori words or Hawai’ian words or even some of those “Noo Zeeland” words like gumboot tea or anzac bickies [which for some reason weren’t in the glossary anyway!]

Dunsford’s talkstory is amazingly diverse and up to date. The personages she summons to share the stories reads like a who’s who in lesbian culture of the past decades – Judy Grahn, Paula Gunn Allen, Beth Brant, Barbara Hammer. There is a challenging interaction with mainstream sources as well, from Crocodile Dundee to The Beauty Myth. The successful New Zealand film The Piano is exposed as “a joke among locals…the colonial depiction of Maori in the film as noble savages… riled more than a few feathers.” Nor is lesbian or queer culture left unscrutinised. One example of a difficult theme dealt with in a drama-in-real-life fashion is that of lesbian S/M. The protagonist is clearly anti S/M. “You into S/M, honey?” asks Cowrie’s new San Fran housemate. “No. I work with survivors in many fields and I find I’m too close to the pain to want more in my private life, thanks.” Young dykes Lori and Squish inform her that as abuse survivors they “see S/M as a way of working the abuse through, not perpetrating it.” With the self-analysis and humor vital to this character, Cowrie is then caught “goggling” at the S/M gear while visiting a housemate. She finally assigns her students the issue as a term paper topic and arranges for the assignments to be marked anonymously. In the end, the characters “agree to disagree.” There is no final word, and that seems to be a basic of talkstory.
Stories which reach Cowrie through dreams offer yet another level of meaning. The book opens with Cowrie dreaming of a girl climbing, the wind whipping her body; her mother reaches for her, but at the moment of contact she turns into a pine nut. We learn the significance of this dream only much later. Tayo shares takstory with Cowrie:
“In my tribe, it is a Miwok tradition that each elder gives birth to a child to be the next elder and she has to spend a year under the blanket. That is part of her training. She cannot speak or dance or sing or respond. She has to learn to listen, for listening well is true wisdom…One day the girl in training to be an elder, just like my mother and her mother before, is lying under the blanket when a group of little girls come to play. Every other day for eleven months she has resisted them. She only has one month to go. But this day, her mother is washing clothes down at the river and the girls get her to dance and sing with them…Once she realises she has broken the sacred bond, she runs with the other girls over the fields to a large pine nut tree, just like this one. They climb the branches, the little girl wanting to reach the top first. Then a wild wind rages, and the other girls scramble off the lower limbs, leaving the child swinging high in the upper branches, afraid for her life. She screams…Down at the river, her mother hears her cry and is angry because she knows eleven months of training are lost, her daughter will not be an elder. But she naturally rushes to rescue her child. Once she reaches the tree and sees her daughter clinging to the weak upper branches, she scales its trunk. The wind is raging through the branches and it is a very difficult climb. Just as she reaches out to grab her daughter, the child turns into a pine nut…And here she is. Look at her sad little face, forever inscribed in every nut.”

Cowrie looks at her own life to see if she has learned the lesson of listening. Stories, mottos, dreams: helpmates for living. “Clay will not stick to iron”, Kuini reminds Cowrie as she counsels her not tro try to press herself into an academic mold she is not made for. There is power to be found here for any reader who dares to join in Cowrie’s vision. It is not a holy world. Rita, the lapsed alcoholic, finds being with a Black woman lover just too much hard work. Peta, for all her talk of trust and love for Cowrie, wakes up in bed one day across the continent with another lover. Cowrie, with best intentions of caring for an abused girl, ends up nearly drowning her. Cowrie’s world is one of everyday problems met with passion. The multitude of stories gives us ideas for how we might deal with some of our own.
Did I like The Journey Home? I loved it. I cried many times, usually because of the vision I was seeing. I thought of Adrienne Rich’s line from “Twenty One Love Poems”: “Without tenderness we are in hell.” Cathie Dunsford offers us the possibility of finding tenderness, of finding that one calm shore, that eddy which lets you rest the canoe. It is portrayed not as permanent but as a resting spot to recharge. It is not home but moving to home.

As an East Coast Canadian who misses my land of birth daily, keenly, I have chosen to live in Berlin because my partner, who is an historian doing work on Afro-German history, has her work cut out for her here. The Journey Home offers me a message. Wonderful dykes, inspiring people are out there struggling, failing, and more often succeeding the world over. It’s only page twelve and the story is about to begin, but the women of the writers’ hui look around and realize that “[t]he new era they dreamed has already begun.”

Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, from Sister Outsider, New York: Crossing Press, 1984.

Carolyn Gammon is a Canadian writer and activist living in Berlin. She was founder and co-organizer of the Lesbian Studies Coalition of Concordia [Montreal] responsible for setting up the first ongoing series of Lesbian Studies courses in Canada. Her book of poetry, Lesbians Ignited [Gynergy Books, Charlottetown, Canada, 1992] takes on lesbian politics and sexuality with humor but also uncompromising language and honesty. She dreams of an ongoing journey not unlike the one described in The Journey Home.

Selkie Talkstory
Carolyn Firth Gammon
Song of the Selkies by Cathie Dunsford: A Book Review
Published in the International Lesbian Review of Books and Hecate, Australian Women’s Book Review

The Orkney Islands lend to magic. Outsiders might see these islands off the top of Scotland as treeless and barren but those who have spent time enough there might have seen and felt something of the intrinsic magic of the place. A place where history is today, where the winds tell songs, where the people smile gruffly. A place that lends to legend, ideal for Cathie Dunsford’s latest novel: Song of the Selkies.
At first it might seemed far-fetched that this South Pacific writer has changed her setting from Aotearoa/New Zealand or Hawai’i of the first Cowrie novels to these wind-swept islands with summer highs of sixteen degrees. But there are a lot of similarities: island cultures, cultures where history and legend interweave and form a texture for now, and, as Dr. Dunsford has shown many times before in her work, strong women characters are found the world over.
The novel begins at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where other artists, storytellers from around the world have come to share stories, legends, visions. Sasha from Iceland tells a haunting Inuit creation story of a girl rejected by her community, clinging onto a lifeboat only to have her fingers slashed off. She drowns and her fingers become the sea animals and her body the great mother sea goddess. Indigenous storytellers compare creation stories and find commonalities: “Maybe it is in ancient storytelling that our shared roots can be found, where a common thread for the future lies, and all the stories require some form of sacrifice to achieve change.” (195) After the festival, to continue the spirit, Ellen from the Orkney Islands invites some of the storytellers to join her in Orkney. The group that assembles are dynamic, political feminists: Cowrie from the previous Cowrie novels, a Maori activist and academic; Sasha from Iceland with Canadian Inuit roots; DK and Uretsete, indigenous women from Great Turtle Island (North America) and Cowrie’s former students; and Monique, West Indian German. Only one woman, Camilla, who joins because she thinks she will be enjoying a free seaside B & B, doesn’t seem to quite fit the group. She is English with a capital ‘E’, Christian and quite uptight.
Then there is mysterious Ellen herself whose name suddenly changes to Morrigan as they arrive by ferry on the islands. Already on the way to Orkney we meet the seals Sandy and Fiona who keenly watch the ‘Nofin’ new arrivals. Morrigan has told them it is time to share the knowledge, that this day would arrive. But Sandy “is thinking about the consequences of too many Orcadian secrets being let loose on those who may not be ready to hear them. Coming to terms with one’s past, be it communal or individual, requires preparation and a willing readiness. Otherwise things can go very wrong.” (p.20) What secrets? What communal past? As the Nofin, i.e. humans, on board the St. Ola try to keep Camilla from vomiting upwind, the seals are already dealing on a different level. This is perhaps symbolic for the book as a whole: the animals or those in touch with the natural world have knowledge which can be shared with those willing to receive it. The seals wonder if Morrigan will be visiting them soon so we know that somehow this Morrigan is one of the communicators between the worlds.
The mystery begins. Who really is Morrigan and just what knowledge does she hold? If one turns to historical sources (The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets) Morrigan embodies the Great Goddess as trinity: virgin, mother, crone – a high calling for a character who at first appears to be a sexless butch dyke. According to her fishing buddy Squiddy, Morrigan: “fished like a man, drank like a man, smoked like a man and could haul up as many lobster creels as a man.” (40) She is, so to say, one of the boys. Her ‘knowledge’ seems at first glance to be limited to wry humourous opininated comments. When a local woman advertizes a weekend workshop, Morrigan at her best says: “‘Bloody wankers, those academics. Dotty couldn’t organise a pissup in a brewery.’” (63) Locals respect and fear her: “She’s bound to be a witch, or a dyke, or both,” says one. (183) Gradually we learn that there is more to this strange moody Morrigan than meets the eye.
In fact, Song of the Selkies, could easily be classified as a mystery à la Agatha Christie. Suspense is built up with classic attention to detail. First Cowrie discovers an oily sealskin in a trunk in one of Morrigan’s derelict sheds. Then a body is hauled out of the water. Suddenly Morrigan disappears only to be found nights later in a smoky shed cooing to a wounded seal like a lover. Morrigan herself adds to the mystery: “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to bring these Nofins back to Orkney after all?” (27) Nofins? Why is she talking like this? Short of donning tweed, Cowrie turns detective, determined to find out what is behind Morrigan’s erratic behaviour. Also in good detective genre, some mysteries are solved along the way, just enough to bait us to solve the next one. Morrigan’s nightly disappearances get explained: she fishes by night. But why is her boat still in the harbour when she is supposed to be out? And what about the seals that appear at crucial moments? Or the people who disappear, are ‘taken by the sea’ only to reappear in underwater scenes as selkie – seal folk?
For Song of the Selkies is based on legends about seals that transition from human to seal and back again. Throughout the story, Cowrie and her group of storytellers try to rationalize the legend. Perhaps Inuit fishers in sealskin kayaks made it to Orkney shores and were confused for beings half person, half seal. Some believe that selkies have the ability to shed their skins (a kayaker getting out of the boat?) and so lead a double life, on land or sea. “Folk around here are divided into the believers and non-believers” (36) Morrigan tells them. DK, who feels that anyone believing these stories must be “one sausage short of a barbecue,” (55) is encouraged by Sasha to think more symbolically. Perhaps the shed skin, often stolen and hidden by men, represented women needing their freedom. (55) It is the number of different stories and their accumulation which slowly woos the reader into believing. That and a healthy dose of skeptism provided by Camilla: “I think they make great fireside stories, but I don’t believe a speck of it myself.” (129) To throw us off the selkie scent, Morrigan herself joins the sceptics: “Bloody nonsense, if you ask me...tales told after too much whisky.” (59) Mind you, Morrigan loves whisky!  Perhaps it is Sasha’s level of believing that most fits a modern reader: “Remember, we are used to seeing life at surface level, literally and metaphorically. But our elders saw into people. They saw us from the inner out, rather than the outer in. And they made stories from what they saw inside us. These stories have an inner truth and wisdom.” (49) Whether one finishes the Song of the Selkies believing in selkies or not is not the point. Clearly the selkies are an offer to consider our lives holistically, from the inside and out, to take the spiritual and metaphyscial worlds around us into consideration.
Song of the Selkies would not be a Dunsford book if it did not deal with a myriad of political issues. As always, she weaves them into her story and conversation with the dexterity of one who lives realistically in a mainstream world while forever aiming for ideals of how that world could be. And she knows that humour is the best medicine. Try seals discussing the virtues of vegetarianism! “There’s nothing more luscious than a taste of crinkled, frilly sugar kelp on a warm sunny day, or a bite of that delicate, olivy, ferny leaf of dabberlocks” (99) Fiona maintains. Or seeing the once fearful power of British colonialism reduced to a hen-pecked husband getting his thrills through binoculars as the ‘Botticelli bodies’ of women from former colonies toss in the surf.
Dunsford’s humour is sharp and can be taken at the surface, or for those engaged in the issues, carry extra meanings. We learn why the independent Scots mistrust the English Poms or why the Orkney oil terminal is a blessing and a curse. Issues are hotly debated by the visitors. Do people really talk like this? These women do. Morrigan chides her visitors for feeling squeemish about eating seafood roasted live on a peat fire: “You’re hypocritical wimps. You’ll eat smoked farmed salmon and packaged lamb which has led a miserable life fenced into wind-blown pastures, force-fed then taken to the slaughterhouse to be hacked into pieces with a chainsaw, but you can’t look at spoots cooked over a fire.” (38) Feminism, or perhaps better said, post-feminism where we can laugh back at ourselves, is never far from the surface. Camilla is the perfect anti-feminist foil. When Cowrie calls her a ‘crafty old witch’ in jest she takes the ‘insult’ seriously: “‘Do not ever, ever, ever call me a witch. That is no joke. It is evil and heathen.’” (31) That night, as Camilla closes her cottage door and bars it with a piece of furniture, Cowrie “is not sure whether Camilla is keeping her or the witches at bay. Maybe, to Camilla, they are one and the same.” (32) You read the book with a half smile from the wry humour coursing through it.
A politics of difference, seeing difference and diversity as positive and life-affirming, is one of the basic principles. Cowrie, who is past arguing every political point to dust, lets Camilla, who is originally shocked by the state of Morrigan’s cottages, get away with such statements: “It’s fine for you, Cowrie. You live in huts in New Zealand anyway. But I am used to a little more comfort.” (25) When Camilla scoffs at the idea of women raising standing stones like those of the Ring of Brodgar, Cowrie pleads for different version of history being allowed to stand side by side: “It’s not a matter of who is right or wrong but expanding our perceptions to include all possibilities.” (74) And Bessie, an Orcadian from Quoyloo who tells a selkie story is asked by a child: “‘Why was folks so horrid to the Finpeople?’” She answers: “‘People was scared of anything different in those days.’… “Has it changed now?’” the child asks and Bessie replies: “‘Some folk are always frightened by those who are different, who dare to stand oot among the crowd.’” (187) Her own son is gay. In a key scene near the end of the book, a local woman who feels personally wronged by Morrigan, lashes out at her and the strange women she has brought to Orkney: “‘Some say that they are the likes that prefer women, you know. Not that there’s nowt wrong with that, but they have strange ways, you know...They like to diddle-daddle with each other instead of how God made us – to be with men and to bear children.’” Morrigan assures her that two of them have children and adds: “‘Seems that you can choose to be with men or women and have children or not in a democratic society.’” (179) “‘It’s against God’s way,’” Moira continues, “‘and you know it Morrigan. And so is communing with them seals. The devil’s gotta make a person prefer an animal over his own kith and kin, or a woman instead of a man.’” (181)
Here we see the ‘sin’ of lesbianism paralleled to that of communing between the animal and human worlds. An interesting accusation which reminds me of the fact that in many cultures lesbians and gay or ‘two-spirited’ people of indigenous North American, the South Pacific or African cultures were assumed to have go-between status often serving as counsellors for their communities. It is interesting too that this scene occurs as Morrigan is waiting to unravel one of the main mysteries of the book. It occurs, so to say, in the margins of the main story and yet addresses most of the main issues. A hint to the reader that perhaps the ‘main’ stories of life happen when we least expect them, in the margins of time.
We have now passed the time when lesbian relationships have to be the focus of books by lesbian authors. Song of the Selkies takes these relationships for granted and even deconstructs them by having lesbians reflect on their own clichés. Morrigan, a classic butch, has had an affair with a man. Camilla, apparently a tight-assed heterosexual, shows an uncanny understanding for moody Morrigan and agrees to share a cottage with her, saying: “‘She needs a good woman to take care of her.’” Cowrie catches herself: “Until this moment, it had never occurred to her that it may be Camilla and not Morrigan who is the closet dyke after all.” (40) I’ve been searching for the perfect pithy phrase or word to sum up the ‘relationship’ between Morrigan and Camilla and all I can come up with is: a conundrum. If they were an egg and spoon, then one would be hitting the other over the head to crack it open. Yet somehow they fit. A thorn in your side which might have some acupuncturist healing qualities.
Their ‘relationship’ from one angle looks unconventional and from another classic butch / femme and yet it defies both of these attempts at classification. When Morrigan stays away tending the sick seal and on returning is morose and curly, Camilla thinks she needs to: “open herself to God."(82) Yet it is Camilla who understands the importance of Morrigan’s mourning and that to leave her in peace is to respect the process. The two compliment each other in backhanded ways: “‘You’re a very handsome woman when you clean yourself up.’” Camilla remarks trying to iron Morrigan’s fishing jumper. “‘She’ll be wanting to marry me soon.’” (63) Morrigan winks to the others. Camilla is the one of the group who drinks with Morrigan at the local inn. And though they never get further than holding hands, this strange couple will stay in my memory longer than classic love couples who flit through novels on cupids’ wings.
But for those in need of hotter lesbian romance, Dunsford provides as well. Readers of previous Cowrie books who might be frustrated with Cowrie’s difficult and complicated loves of the past, can join in Cowrie’s joy already on page fifty when she and Sasha kiss and enter an erotic dreamworld together. For Dunsford, the erotic is powerful, healing and other worldly. “In this state of grace, they are invincible, alive, fired with erotic energy, surging with sensual desire, body, mind and soul in perfect harmony. They could emerge from this state to compose a symphony or catch fish with their fins. They could talk to their ancestors, cause peace to fall upon the earth like gold dust from the heavens. In this state of grace, they can do anything. The choice is theirs.” (169) A state of grace akin to Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic: “Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.” (from “Uses of the Erotic” in Sister Outsider, N.Y. Crossing Press, 1984, p. 57)
But Dunsford is not insensitive to the harmful powers of the erotic if it is so overpowering as to be used irresponsibly. The child Shelley watches “entranced and horrified at once” as she sees her father, Kelpie, with Morrigan: “humping on a blue dory...their bare bums floating through the air in an almost hypnotic movement.” (157) Despite the love that Morrigan and Kelpie have for each other being depicted as transcendent, it is clear that they hurt others badly by taking no heed of the social circumstances. The erotic is not a simple equation of good but one to be respected for its complexity.
It is also the role of legend that takes a major place in Song of the Selkies. The women who arrive in Orkney are not just a coincidental group of friends. To the local people, to the selkies and to Morrigan, they are the returning women of Skara Brae. Five thousand years before today, during the Stone Age, women in Orkney lived in an egalitarian commune with advanced, comfortable standards, “complete with stone furniture, hearths and drains.” (p. 28). They had no need for defense or weapons. They built their village into piles of refuse or ‘midden’ collected by the generations before, insulating them from the cold Orkney winds. Two of their spiritual leaders were buried within the village walls, only to be rediscovered in the nineteenth century when a sandstorm exposed the village. The women of Skara Brae talk to us through the millenia. They warn, cajole, inform us and, if we are open to their messages, they come to us in dreams. As Sandy tells us: “They hold all the secrets of the island and release them when needed. That ees why they weer buried between the walls of Skara Brae, to be witnesses to our ways of living from the Stone Age onwards, and to find living creatures capable of acting on the information they’ve heard.” (60)
Could this motley crew of mostly dykes be the chosen ones? It is their very humanness, their faults and foibles but also their engaged interest in the world around them that make these women susceptible to the ancient messages. Dismissed as ‘ferryloopers’ by some (tourists who come and go on the ferry after checking out the main sites), the storytellers do more than the average tourist. Armed with pen, camera, flute, stories, armed with intercultural knowledge and open minds, they approach the islands with questions. On seeing the drawings on the walls of Skara Brae, Cowrie compares them to ancient drawings by Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand. Are the archaeologists missing links because they miss the intercultural connections? If seafolk stories exist around the world, then is it a basic human need to recognize “the oneness of human and animals,” that to ignore these messages could be fatal? The ability to believe in more than what you can see or test in a laboratory, could be our clue to understanding and saving our world. The metaphor of the women of Skara Brae as a link to the ancient knowledge is a powerful one and we, the readers, could also be chosen as listeners. “The women of Skara Brae will always return in different shapes and forms until the world is healed again and peace is restored.” (111)
Lastly, Song of the Selkies is a homage to the Orkney Islands. For those who have visited the islands, the names ring bells of the rich natural, cultural and historical sites from the Stone Age to Viking and Pictish times.  The Brough of Birsay and its puffin colony, reached only at low tide; the old stone town of Stromness, once a thriving Viking trade centre; The Old Man of Hoy, a massive stone stack in the ocean is compared to the thirteenth century St. Magnus cathedral in Kirkwall:  “Both are living entities, full of spirit, one sculpted by sand and wind and sea and men, the other by nature alone.” (94) These ‘barren’ islands come alive under the author’s pen: “sweet smelling honeysuckle clings to wildflowers, bushes and ferns of fuschia, aspen, rowan, bracken, dog-rose...” (93) Of course, for a Pacific Islander: “The sun here is always cancelled out by the wind, no matter how strong it is” (48). If food can be considered part of the homage, one is tempted to fly next to Orkney for the: “cornbread laden with Orkney butter and delicious Swanney cheese, the oak-smoked salmon dripping with moisture as it cooks over the peat fire and a salad made from lettuce and fresh herbs.” (54) Even the Morrigan classic ‘clapshot’ (mashed potatoes and turnip) makes your mouth drool when Morrigan breaks a week-long fast with a heapful. We learn how to catch spoots (spitting shellfish) by walking backwards to fool them! And we learn that manure-smelling lumps are really dried peat for fires which suddenly smell heavenly when you realize they are the only fuel available for keeping you warm: “the most wonderful fragrance of wild flowers and earth, smoked fish and malt whisky.” (26) This is not an ordinary Orkney ‘guidebook’ but one which will leave you looking below the surfaces, perhaps into the waters around the islands, it might leave you talking to the seals…
I have had my own share of Orkney magic. At age twenty-two, my first time overseas from Canada, I backpacked to Orkney and found out that my middle name, Firth, was a common Orcadian one. Picked up hitchhiking, a generous man took me to his home and family and hosted me for days. He showed me around the islands with the love of a local and brought me to love the place. Seventeen years later I returned, this time armed with more precise information about my Orcadian ancestry. I went on Orkney radio to try and locate great great grandparents. The call that came in was from a man: did I remember him, he had picked me up hitchhiking years before? He was my closest cousin in Orkney. Now tell me, is Song of the Selkies legend or something more?
Song of the Selkies is a complex book posing as an easy read. The relationships, be it between Morrigan and Camilla, between the women of today and yesterday, between islanders and incomers, create a mosaic of possibilities of what we might learn from one another. The person of Morrigan is, in the end, the virgin, mother, crone, but the reader must be reading flexibly to see this. The mystery of the seal people is a test to our incredulity; it eases open our imaginations and offers us the chance to look for meanings beyond the obvious. Add to this the historical and cultural facts of a far-flung place, the written Orkney dialect (try reading it aloud!) and the links to Dunsford’s other books and you have a novel which is more like a symphony than a song. Read Song of the Selkies as a guide book to Orkney, as a first class mystery story, as a post-modern comment on lesbian feminism...or just read it for fun. It is a visionary book and Cathie Dunsford is a writer whose visions begin with today.

Carolyn Firth Gammon is a Canadian author living in Berlin. Her first poetry book sold out in Canada and her latest novel, Cleo Goes East, is currently with a Canadian publisher. She has lectured at the Berlin Free University and her tours of Berlin, incorporating its Jewish history, are internationally renowned.

Carolyn Gammon’s most recent project, the memoirs of a Holocaust survivor who also survived anti-Semitic persecution in post-war East Germany, a book called: Twice Persecuted, has been published in Germany and a film made from interviews with Johanna Krause. The English Edition, detailed below, is due to be released in Canada late 2007. Since we believe in supporting the talkstory of others, then this book feels like a perfect forum to preview the Krause text.

Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted Surviving in Nazi Germany and Communist East Germany, Carolyn Gammon, and Christiane Hemker $24.95 Paper, 160 pp. ISBN: 1-55458-006-4.
Persecuted as a Jew, both under the Nazis and in post-war East Germany, Johanna Krause (19072001) courageously fought her way through life with searing humour and indomitable strength of character. Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted is her story. Born in Dresden into bitter poverty, Krause received little education and worked mostly in shops and factories. In 1933, when she came to the defence of a Jewish man being beaten by the brownshirts, Krause was jailed for “insulting the Führer.” After a secret wedding in 1935, she was arrested again with her husband, Max Krause, for breaking the law that forbade marriage between a Jew and an “Aryan.” In the years following, Johanna endured many atrocities—a forced abortion while eight months pregnant and subsequent sterilization, her incarceration in numerous prisons and concentration camps, including Ravensbrück, the notorious women’s camp near Berlin, and a death march. After the war, the Krauses took part enthusiastically in building the new socialist republic of East Germany—until 1958, when Johanna recognized a party official as a man who had tried to rape and kill her during the war. Thinking the communist party would punish the official, Johanna found out whose side the party was on and was subjected to anti-Semitic attacks. Both she and her husband were jailed and their business and belongings confiscated. After her release she lived as a persona non grata in East Germany, having been evicted from the communist party. It was only in the 1990s, after the reunification of Germany, that Johanna saw some justice. Originally published as Zweimal Verfolgt, the book is the result of collaboration between Johanna Krause, Carolyn Gammon, and Christiane Hemker. Translated by Carolyn Gammon, Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted will be of interest to scholars of auto/biography, World War II history, and the Holocaust.

Born and raised in New Brunswick, Carolyn Gammon moved to Berlin in 1992. Her poetry, prose, and essays have appeared in anthologies in North America and Great Britain, and in translation. Christiane Hemker lived in various German cities before moving to Dresden in 1993. Her field is archaeology, in which she is widely published. Her volunteer work with union and social politics, focusing on women’s rights, introduced her to Johanna Krause and her story

Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 75 University Avenue West ,Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5, Phone: 519.884.0710 x6124 | Fax: 519.725.1399, E-mail:

Carolyn Firth Gammon introduces Cathie Dunsford’s Cowrie Novels
at the Frankfurt Bookfair, Trend Forum, October 2003

When I was asked to introduce the Cowrie novels I blocked. How could I possibly introduce four novels written over a decade with dozens of characters and dozens of cultural contexts and themes. Then I came back to what Karin said: be personal, just say what you like about the books.
So here it is, this is what I like about Cathie Dunsford’s work.
I’d like to begin by saying that I am a writer myself, I even have a degree in Creative Writing and this relates to the first point. Everything I had ever been told not to do in writing, what was not possible if one wanted to get published, Cathie has done. She mixes languages, she gets up on soap boxes, she writes love stories that don’t work out, she mixes genres – sometimes you don’t know if you’re reading a play, a murder mystery or a manifesto. And the worst sin of all, she insists on packaging all of this in a mixed form, using her own artwork, using letters, dream sequences, etc. In other words, what I like about the Cowrie novels is that they prove that you should do what you want, how you want and follow your own vision.
I like that the characters are diverse, extreme and unpredictable...like real people. Cowrie self-defines at one point as: “too large, too loud, too much energy, too much life.” Yes! And that’s what makes good fiction. An apparently sexless butch dyke turns out to embody the virgin, mother and crone. A student who bathes in political correctness insults the first fat woman she sees. I like that the characters agree to disagree and there is no hardcore finger pointing politics, just lots of good ideas to chew over.
I like getting information through reading fiction that is vital to my understanding the world. Year after year one hears about beached whales and how mysterious it is. How about hearing it from a whale’s perspective? A nuclear bomb detonated underwater in the South Pacific is not supposed to harm anyone because ‘no one is there’. Yet the locals can’t eat fresh fish without getting cancer. This is not news I get on CNN, but from Manawa Toa.
I like the offer the novels give to take the spiritual and metaphysical worlds around us into consideration. Whether we finish reading Song of the Selkies believing in the seal-folk creatures or not is not the point. Considering the possibility of a lifeform past that which we can see or find in a laboratory, is. I like the risk the writing takes to try and find words and concepts to give the animal world a voice.
I like the sense of travel...to Great Turtle Island (also known as North America), to Aotearoa (also known as New Zealand), to Hawai’i, to Scotland and the Orkney Islands. I like the sense in the end that the world is one and we who live internationally will always find a link to one another if we go back to the life-affirming parts of our culture.
It would be avoiding blushing if I did not admit to liking the erotic scenes. But with Dunsford you have to read carefully to see where dream, erotic fantasy and reality flow one to the other. A kiss turns into a rainbow, naked bodies into a waterfall, an orgasm into the chanting of ancient voices. Though the erotic is never simple, and I thank Dunsford for all its complexity including the pain of abuse that many women bring with us to the erotic experience.
I like my sense of taste being treated exquisitely. If you don’t like to eat, you maybe should avoid the Cowrie novels. From New Zealand fish feeds to northern Scottish cheese and scones, the books are a feast.
I like Cowrie herself. She is too large and too loud and sometimes too dramatic. But once you’ve taken her into your heart you feel you have a friend for life.
I appreciate Cathie Dunsford’s vision. The Cowrie novels offer a way of living life actively rather than just passing through it. They offer a vision how we might sustain our resources even while enjoying them. How to use our writing to change the world with words.
Last of all, I like the work because it’s a good read. And where else would I have learned a word like, Laukiamanuikahiki!?

A Selection of Highlights from Published Literary Criticism and Reviews in Literary Magazines and Periodicals of the Cowrie Novels

The following represents a small selection of book review highlights from literary magazines, journals, leading newspapers and periodicals where Cathie Dunsford’s novels are reviewed in English. For German, Turkish and other reviews, consult the internet. A study of the full reviews will reveal some fascinating insights to attitudes at the time of publication from many different gender and cultural perspectives. Full permission to quote from these reviews and from any part of this publication for educational purposes is granted. For a wide range of international responses to the Cowrie novels, performances and further work, key in “Cathie Dunsford” or “Dunsford Publishing Consultants” on Google or your preferred Internet Search Engine. Over 45,000 sites for Cathie Dunsford are currently listed on Google.

Cowrie, Cathie Dunsford, Spinifex Press, Australia, USA, Canada, UK, Europe, 1994.
Tandem Press, New Zealand, 1994 (rights now held by Random House, New Zealand)
Rogner and Bernhard, Hamburg, 1998 (German translation)
Okuyanus Yayin, Istanbul, 2003 (Turkish translation)

Cowrie listed as Number One Bestseller, Fiction, Nov, 1994, in Australia. [Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask is no.2]
Cowrie nominated in December, 1994 for the American Library Association’s Best Book of the Year.
Cowrie nominated for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize: Best First Book: South East Asia/Pacific.

Comments from Reviewers, Interviewers on Cowrie

Keri Hulme, Booker Prize Winner [the bone people] in her speech launching the book at the 6th