About the Book

This Crisis, These Blessings is a series of twelve beautiful experimental essays on womens' experiences of crisis, illness, rape, motherhood, housework and family travel.

Essays tell us what to think about, and how to live. These sensory, lyrical narratives of decision-making show women turning suffering into understanding, grief into poetry and tragedy into renewal. The theme of This Crisis, These Blessings is: Women are who we are- unfinished, ill, well, biologically and culturally diverse, erotic, gorgeous, good, ever changing. We should fly like angels.

This book is helpful in medicine and counselling. Medicine and therapy improve if practitioners read about suffering and use literature in their practices.

Cathy Stonehouse, author of The Words I Know, and the essay "In the Presence of Grace" (Dropped Threads Three) says, "Out of the crisis that is contemporary womanhood, Deirdre Maultsaid's voice sings out sure and clear. Whether drawn from her life as teacher, mother, sexual assault survivor or traveler, Maultsaid's fragments and reflections illuminate through challenging, refuse to excuse themselves, choose instead to bless their reader with wounds. Ready to revolt? Stubborn, lush, combative and irreducible, Maultsaid's lyric rants invite us in to a world where too much is known, and like water, we rise."

Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Salvage King, Ya!, and 19 Knives says, "These essays are disturbing and cumulative and unexpected..."

About the Author

Deirdre Maultsaid won Third Place in Prairie Fire's 2003 Creative Non-Fiction contest, for her essay, "Crisis, wedding: a memoir". She has been published in Canada in Canadian Women's Studies, the Danforth Review, Other Voices, anthologies by Rippleeffect Press and Rowan Books, and others. She has been published on the Internet at The Barcelona Review (Spain), Conspire (US), Moxie (US) the Southern Cross Review (Argentina) and others. She has been published in the academic press at arts-informed (Canada) and at a healthcare education conference on patient voice.

Deirdre Maultsaid has a Masters of Education. She works for the Commonwealth of Learning, teaching writing for international humanitarian organizations.

Deirdre Maultsaid is now writing a book on medical ethics and patient-practitioner relationships, as they relate to beginning-of-life issues. She lives in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada with her children.

Visit the author's website: www.deirdremaultsaid.com

Excerpts