Quilt

Donna E. Smyth

Quilt is a remarkable work. With a unique and compelling voice, Donna Smyth tells a story that is full of complex relationships, raw domestic violence, and a saving compassion. As I read I kept thinking, “Why have I heard nothing about this novel?” —Budge Wilson, author of The Leaving and The Courtship

Quilt affirms that women’s creativity has a long tradition, that it has always been collective, a web of women remembering the traces of the past, reworking them, interweaving them. — Barbara Godard, writer and critic, York University

In Quilt the inhabitants of Dayspring are presented without verbal embellishment or apology… The narrative shifts from passages of unvarnished dialogue or exposition to pools of consciousness reflecting the redeeming stillness and rootedness of the natural world. Smyth relishes the real… In showing the “good neighbourliness” of the women who assemble to make the quilt and to unlock the stories latent in the bits of cloth with which they work, Smyth breaks the tradition of depicting rural women as silent in their sexuality. —Janice Kulyk Keefer, Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction

About the Author

Donna E. Smyth lives on an old farm in Hants County, Nova Scotia. She has published two novels, Quilt and Subversive Elements, as well as numerous short stories, including Among the Saints, poems and non-fiction pieces. Her novel for young adults, Loyalist Runaway, won the 1992 Dartmouth Library Fiction Award.

Smyth has also worked as a playwright with Mermaid Theatre for Young Audiences, originally based in Wolfville, N.S. Her one-woman play celebrating the life and work of the poet Elizabeth Bishop, Running to Paradise, was produced by the Studio Group in Wolfville and Halifax in 1998 and published by Gaspereau Press in 1999.

Her two-act play, Sole Survivors, was produced by the Ship’s Company Theatre in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, in 2000 and published by Broken Jaw Press in 2003.

She is the founding editor of Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal and teaches English and Creative Writing at Acadia University, Wolfville, NS.