Persephone's Children is genius in its containers for storytelling. The misshapen ways in which our own worlds unfold scream for McCandless's knowing hands. Blood memory, truth, pain, and reconciliation with self pour through these pages. Piecing together fragments of history, residual trauma, and hope, Rowan McCandless not only discovers how to exist in this world made new, but she shows us how to suture our own wounds with expertise and love.
Chelene Knight, author of Dear Current Occupant and winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award
Rowan McCandless is a masterful storyteller. These compelling offerings create a spell-binding book of revelations — riveting, inspiring, and enchanting. Brimming with lush language and a powerful voice, full of sentences crafted with surgical precision and captivating pages containing soul-soaring insight, this memoir ushers in an exhilarating era for readers and writers everywhere.
Eufemia Fantetti author of My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me: A Memoir
In Persephone’s Children, Rowan McCandless brilliantly mimics the way memory can fragment during trauma by recounting her own experiences through a variety of experimental forms. Essays housed as archaeological field notes, a quiz, a tree guide, a screenplay, and — my favourite — notes on a con game, weave together divergent reflections of her life as a biracial woman and a survivor within oppressive societal structures. Bold, inventive, and lyrical, this debut introduces McCandless as a courageous writer who is most definitely one to watch.
Lauren Carter, author of This Has Nothing to Do With You
In Persephone’s Children, Rowan McCandless innovates, challenges, and dares. Here is an interrogation on race, kinship, history, and future, told with a poetic whimsy that refuses boundaries of genre and theme. McCandless’s writing is incisive and inventive, a true literary gift. A brilliant, meditative, necessary book.
Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related; A Memoir and co-editor of Adoption and Multiculturalism
Women understand the story of Persephone, abducted by her uncle Hades while her mother Demeter’s grief creates a winter where nothing grows — each of us is Persephone. Rowan McCandless fled an abusive marriage but it meant leaving a beloved garden behind and she still negotiates with the systemic racism that confines her every day. But she brought these essays up out of the underworld, each one a gleaming pomegranate seed. Deftly written and structurally innovative, Persephone’s Children is a heartbreaking debut.
Ariel Gordon, author of Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests
In Persephone's Children, Rowan McCandless redefines what's possible with creative nonfiction. She shows us how many ways one person's story can be told and re-told, how many entry points there can be, and therefore, how many ways we can reflect on what makes each of us who we are. Her use of form is sometimes surprising, often ingenious, and always wondrous. This is a book that you will revisit again and again, always finding new moments of insight as you track the kaleidoscopic shifting McCandless effortlessly dazzles us with.
Alicia Elliott author of A Mind Spread Out On The Ground
Persephone’s Children is a book like no other — a beautifully strange collection that defies literary conventions and dazzles with ingenuity and vitality. With luminous, lyrical prose, Rowan McCandless boldly tells the story of her rise from an abusive relationship, weaves the historical with the deeply personal, and explores themes of identity, religion, colonialism, mental illness, and racism. Rowan McCandless is a fierce writer, and her writing will move and haunt you.
Ayelet Tsabari, award-winning author of The Art of Leaving
In Persephone’s Children, Rowan McCandless innovates, challenges, and dares. Here is an interrogation on race, kinship, history, and future, told with a poetic whimsy that refuses boundaries of genre and theme. McCandless’s writing is incisive and inventive, a true literary gift. A brilliant, meditative, necessary book.
Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.: A Memoir
In these dazzlingly inventive essays, Rowan McCandless doesn't just play with traditional forms, she blows right past them to fashion an aching account of trauma and survival. I needed to read this utterly original, gorgeous book — and so do you.
Kathy Friedman, co-founder and artistic director of InkWell Workshops, and author of All the Shining People
In Persephone's Children, Rowan McCandless stands up and says, "Enough!" And in the process of disentangling herself from relationships of abuse, she reinvents herself to reclaim herself. She sets boundaries that center her needs as a form of self-love. With these raw, real, and personal stories, she constitutes a statue of her personhood — humanizing herself — blending her scars with her strengths and her vision for herself, rejecting the lies that had previously depicted her as lesser than. In Persephone's Children, McCandless rises and becomes a revolutionary scaffold that centers her Self. Her own healing and self-validation: a form of resistance. She takes control of her story and tells it in her own way. She reminds us that it is okay to love yourself and to lose yourself in your own embrace. And in that cradle, she deconstructs her form, rebuilding it into something that makes more sense to her. In her defiance, she forces us to not only behold her story but storytelling as a whole, creating the conditions for us to also dissect our literary instincts and other borders of abuse that have colonized our bodies and minds. Though Persephone's Children may be her life in fragments, McCandless inspires readers to also experiment with their own lives in order to create beyond the limits of the forces that have for far too long told us to sit down, shut up, and follow the rules.
Julián Esteban Torres López, creator of The Nasiona and author of Ninety-Two Surgically Enhanced Mannequins: A Micro-Poetry Collection
A powerful, moving book.
Midwest Book Review
Persephone's Children is genius in its containers for storytelling. The misshapen ways in which our own worlds unfold scream for McCandless's knowing hands. Blood memory, truth, pain, and reconciliation with self pour through these pages. Piecing together fragments of history, residual trauma, and hope, Rowan McCandless not only discovers how to exist in this world made new, but she shows us how to suture our own wounds with expertise and love.
Chelene Knight, author of Dear Current Occupant and winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award
Rowan McCandless is a masterful storyteller. These compelling offerings create a spell-binding book of revelations — riveting, inspiring, and enchanting. Brimming with lush language and a powerful voice, full of sentences crafted with surgical precision and captivating pages containing soul-soaring insight, this memoir ushers in an exhilarating era for readers and writers everywhere.
Eufemia Fantetti author of My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me: A Memoir
A powerful, moving book.
Midwest Book Review
A powerful, moving book that will haunt you.
suanneschaferauthor.com
Winnipeg author Rowan McCandless's glowing debut, Persephone's Children, pushes the boundaries of memoir and personal essay… The result is a deeply moving literary life 'in fragments.'
Quill and Quire
Emotional connection for the reader. The invocation of the Persephone myth ties the material together.
Winnipeg Free Press
[McCandless] doesn’t have the answers and she’s not meant to, which is what makes this thoughtful book so powerful.
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