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Born in Tisdale, Saskatchewan in 1946, Sharon Thesen came to B.C. in 1952 and lived in several towns including Prince George and Kamloops before settling in Vancouver in 1966. As a teacher at Capilano College and poetry editor of The Capilano Review she published Artemis Hates Romance, Holding the Pose and Confabulations. Later poetry books include The Beginning of the Long Dash and The Pangs of Summer. She has edited New Long Poem Anthology (2000) and Phyllis Webb's award-winning The Vision Tree.
Sharon Thesen moved to the West Okanagan and is professor emerita of creative writing at the University of British Columbia -- Okanagan in Kelowna. Three of her books have been finalists for the Governor-General's Award for Literature -- The Good Bacteria (2006), The Beginning of the Long Dash (1987) and Confabulations (1984). She has also won the Pat Lowther Award (for A Pair of Scissors, 2006), and been a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (for Oyama Pink Shale, 2011, and The Good Bacteria).
Voices in Thesen's collection Oyama Pink Shale (House of Anansi, 2011) include an 'indebted adult friend to artists, cold documentarian of a haunted sanitarium, and an engaged contemporary ticking off beauties'. The poems are intended to convince us of the 'thread of spirit that links all our lost bits'.
The Wig-Maker is a long poem told in the voice of Janet Gallant (a wig-maker in real life), transcribed and lineated by Thesen. The story gathers and weaves together themes and incidents that accumulate toward "the moan" of racism, sexual abuse, maternal abandonment, suicide, mental illness, and addiction. The twists and turns of the narrative gather a range of topics and incidents: the human hair industry, Black immigration to Alberta and Saskatchewan in the early 1900's, maternal abandonment, the stresses of military life, adoption search websites, the suicide of Gallant's teenage brother, the sudden death of her young husband, the stress-disorder of alopecia and the loneliness of surviving all this but never finding answers. But some answers have been given and received as a result of Gallant's research being inspired by the mysteriously healing process of the telling itself.
Janet Gallant (a professional wig-maker) co-wrote the long poem about her life, The Wig-Maker (New Star $16), with Sharon Thesen, who transcribed and lineated Gallant's narrative, as Gallant's own voice. Janet Gallant is the mother of two grown daughters. After thirty years in Calgary where she worked as an office administrator, most recently in the renewable energy sector, she re-located to Lake Country, BC, where she has a home business making wigs for alopecia and cancer patients. After her relocation to Lake Country, Gallant and Thesen, neighbours at first, became friends after spending an evening together waiting to know if they would be evacuated because of a wildfire in the area. Gallant wanted to tell her story, Thesen wanted to hear it. Gallant insisted she wasn't a writer; Thesen is an established Canadian poet and editor. Thus began what has turned out to be this tale. The Wig-Maker gathers and weaves together themes and incidents that accumulate toward "the moan" of racism, sexual abuse, maternal abandonment, suicide, mental illness, and addiction. The twists and turns of the narrative gather a range of topics and incidents: the human hair industry, Black immigration to Alberta and Saskatchewan in the early 1900's, maternal abandonment, the stresses of military life, adoption search websites, the suicide of Gallant's teenage brother, the sudden death of her young husband, the stress-disorder of alopecia, and the loneliness of surviving all this but never finding answers. But some important answers have been given and received as a result of Gallant's research being inspired by the mysteriously healing process of the telling itself.
BOOKS:
Artemis Hates Romance (Coach House Press, 1980)
Radio New France Radio (Slug Press, 1982)
Holding the Pose (Coach House Press, 1983)
Confabulations: Poems for Malcolm Lowry (Oolichan Books, 1984)
The Beginning Of The Long Dash (Coach House Press, 1987)
The Pangs Of Sunday: Poems (McClelland and Stewart, 1990)
Aurora (Coach House Press, 1995)
News & Smoke: Collected Poems (Talonbooks, 1999)
A Pair of Scissors (House of Anansi, 2000)
The Good Bacteria (House of Anansi, 2006)
Oyama Pink Shale (House of Anansi, 2011) $22.95 9780887842726
After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff (Talonbooks, 2014) $24.95 9780889227064. Co-edited with Ralph Maud.
The Reciever (New Star, 2017) $19 9781554201402
Co-authored with Janet Gallant: The Wig-Maker (New Star, 2021) $16 9781554201716
Refabulations: Selected Longer Poems (Talonbooks, 2023) $24.95 9781772015102
[BCBW 2021]
+++
The Wig-Maker by Janet Gallant and Sharon Thesen
(New Star $18) Review by Caroline Woodward
[BCBW 2021]
magine neighbours gathering during a hot, dry summer in a home high above Lake Okanagan to wait for a fire evacuation order. A wildfire bears down on them but they are hoping for the wind to change, for their homes to be cupped in the hands of a merciful God.
In the meantime, the hosts serve chips and salsa and wine. The hours tick by and two women begin a conversation that will continue for months, one that will change their lives and that will result in a remarkable book, The Wig-Maker.
One woman is the wig-maker, Janet Gallant, who works from home on her painstaking creations. Black and white photos of Gallant’s wig-making are featured throughout this slim book of connected poems that charts her journey overcoming a tragically abusive upbringing.
Gallant starts telling her life story to one of the wildfire party hosts, Sharon Thesen, who happens to be an editor and poet with a dozen books to her credit, no less than three of which have been nominated for the Governor-General’s Award. The two decide to work together on a book about Gallant.
“I remember how easy it was to talk to Sharon. There was no small talk. I can’t explain it, my heart trusted her heart,” says Gallant.
“I could not, would not, try to write it in the third person,” says Thesen. “Janet’s telling was going to compose the entirety of the text—her telling processed through my ears, my heart, my hands.”
Janet Gallant’s life story to date is about surviving as the daughter of a Black woman with a mental illness who abandoned the family when Janet was three years old. Gallant and her siblings were left in the care of their father: a white, poorly educated, binge-drinking soldier who found ways to physically, sexually and emotionally abuse his children and future adult partners.
Doreen, another Black woman with a young daughter of her own, answered his ad for a ‘housekeeper’ and moved in as a stepmother. Doreen was the kind who ignored blatant child abuse happening right in front of her. So, these poor kids were, in a sense, abandoned yet again by a mother figure to the miseries of life with a monster.
No faraway family intervened. No concerned friends stepped up on behalf of these children. The frequent transfers of army life mitigated against any sort of outside investigation by social agencies outside the military bases of that era.
Gallant’s story is about wanting to find a way to remember her brutalized older brother, Billy, who committed suicide just before his fourteenth birthday after a particularly horrible beating. It’s about finding a way to memorialize her older sister Penny who absorbed the worst of the sexual abuse from the erstwhile father but this did not shield the two younger daughters for long.
Gallant’s story also leads us to her kind young husband, a best friend, confidante, and father of her two beloved daughters to whom this book is dedicated. Tragically, Gallant’s husband is struck down by the ticking time bomb of a hereditary condition.
The autoimmune disorder of alopecia then claims Gallant’s glorious African mane of hair within the next six years. Ill-fitting wigs bought off-the-rack only add to the discomfort of this inner/emotional and outer/physical health condition.
After working in Calgary businesses as an executive assistant for twenty-five years, Gallant takes up the nearly-solitary world of wig-making. By knotting up to 80,000 hairs in singles, doubles and triples to create one transformative wig, Gallant contemplates larger life issues yet again. She wants to find family members. She wants to know the truth; she wants photos and any stories family members may or may not choose to share.
She is rejected countless times in this search but Gallant is made of tough stuff and she persists in her search, including DNA ancestry sources. These investigations are included in Gallant’s and Thesen’s memoir-poem, ultimately leading to a mysterious healing process through the telling itself.
Janet Gallant found Sharon Thesen by chance. Thesen’s husband, Paul, and Jim, Janet’s current life partner both love to cycle year-round, solid bicycling buddies. At the time of the threatening wildfire in 2017 however, Sharon and Paul were aware that Janet Gallant’s partner was away on business in Alberta. So, although they don’t know Gallant well, she is the first of the neighbours to be invited down to wait among friends and acquaintances.
It proved to be fortuitous as Gallant had been searching for the right person to tell her story to. Fortune had led her to Thesen, a master poet with an acutely sensitive ear for language, its rhythms, its hesitations and how an empathetic soul might be a skilled conduit to transfer those lines of speech and the heartbreaking stories therein to the page. Gallant and Thesen’s conversations took place over the next two and a half years.
A line from The Wig-Maker describing the storytelling, alludes to a form of grace that Gallant so deservedly finds: “The music is indeed here. Lyrics of truth, and notes of healing, are there….You and Sharon are singing together.” 978-1-55420-171-6
Caroline Woodward’s most recent book was A West Coast Summer (Harbour, 2018), a children’s picture book about summer on the Pacific Northwest coast illustrated by Carol Evans.
Sharon Thesen moved to the West Okanagan and is professor emerita of creative writing at the University of British Columbia -- Okanagan in Kelowna. Three of her books have been finalists for the Governor-General's Award for Literature -- The Good Bacteria (2006), The Beginning of the Long Dash (1987) and Confabulations (1984). She has also won the Pat Lowther Award (for A Pair of Scissors, 2006), and been a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (for Oyama Pink Shale, 2011, and The Good Bacteria).
Voices in Thesen's collection Oyama Pink Shale (House of Anansi, 2011) include an 'indebted adult friend to artists, cold documentarian of a haunted sanitarium, and an engaged contemporary ticking off beauties'. The poems are intended to convince us of the 'thread of spirit that links all our lost bits'.
The Wig-Maker is a long poem told in the voice of Janet Gallant (a wig-maker in real life), transcribed and lineated by Thesen. The story gathers and weaves together themes and incidents that accumulate toward "the moan" of racism, sexual abuse, maternal abandonment, suicide, mental illness, and addiction. The twists and turns of the narrative gather a range of topics and incidents: the human hair industry, Black immigration to Alberta and Saskatchewan in the early 1900's, maternal abandonment, the stresses of military life, adoption search websites, the suicide of Gallant's teenage brother, the sudden death of her young husband, the stress-disorder of alopecia and the loneliness of surviving all this but never finding answers. But some answers have been given and received as a result of Gallant's research being inspired by the mysteriously healing process of the telling itself.
Janet Gallant (a professional wig-maker) co-wrote the long poem about her life, The Wig-Maker (New Star $16), with Sharon Thesen, who transcribed and lineated Gallant's narrative, as Gallant's own voice. Janet Gallant is the mother of two grown daughters. After thirty years in Calgary where she worked as an office administrator, most recently in the renewable energy sector, she re-located to Lake Country, BC, where she has a home business making wigs for alopecia and cancer patients. After her relocation to Lake Country, Gallant and Thesen, neighbours at first, became friends after spending an evening together waiting to know if they would be evacuated because of a wildfire in the area. Gallant wanted to tell her story, Thesen wanted to hear it. Gallant insisted she wasn't a writer; Thesen is an established Canadian poet and editor. Thus began what has turned out to be this tale. The Wig-Maker gathers and weaves together themes and incidents that accumulate toward "the moan" of racism, sexual abuse, maternal abandonment, suicide, mental illness, and addiction. The twists and turns of the narrative gather a range of topics and incidents: the human hair industry, Black immigration to Alberta and Saskatchewan in the early 1900's, maternal abandonment, the stresses of military life, adoption search websites, the suicide of Gallant's teenage brother, the sudden death of her young husband, the stress-disorder of alopecia, and the loneliness of surviving all this but never finding answers. But some important answers have been given and received as a result of Gallant's research being inspired by the mysteriously healing process of the telling itself.
BOOKS:
Artemis Hates Romance (Coach House Press, 1980)
Radio New France Radio (Slug Press, 1982)
Holding the Pose (Coach House Press, 1983)
Confabulations: Poems for Malcolm Lowry (Oolichan Books, 1984)
The Beginning Of The Long Dash (Coach House Press, 1987)
The Pangs Of Sunday: Poems (McClelland and Stewart, 1990)
Aurora (Coach House Press, 1995)
News & Smoke: Collected Poems (Talonbooks, 1999)
A Pair of Scissors (House of Anansi, 2000)
The Good Bacteria (House of Anansi, 2006)
Oyama Pink Shale (House of Anansi, 2011) $22.95 9780887842726
After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff (Talonbooks, 2014) $24.95 9780889227064. Co-edited with Ralph Maud.
The Reciever (New Star, 2017) $19 9781554201402
Co-authored with Janet Gallant: The Wig-Maker (New Star, 2021) $16 9781554201716
Refabulations: Selected Longer Poems (Talonbooks, 2023) $24.95 9781772015102
[BCBW 2021]
+++
The Wig-Maker by Janet Gallant and Sharon Thesen
(New Star $18) Review by Caroline Woodward
[BCBW 2021]
magine neighbours gathering during a hot, dry summer in a home high above Lake Okanagan to wait for a fire evacuation order. A wildfire bears down on them but they are hoping for the wind to change, for their homes to be cupped in the hands of a merciful God.
In the meantime, the hosts serve chips and salsa and wine. The hours tick by and two women begin a conversation that will continue for months, one that will change their lives and that will result in a remarkable book, The Wig-Maker.
One woman is the wig-maker, Janet Gallant, who works from home on her painstaking creations. Black and white photos of Gallant’s wig-making are featured throughout this slim book of connected poems that charts her journey overcoming a tragically abusive upbringing.
Gallant starts telling her life story to one of the wildfire party hosts, Sharon Thesen, who happens to be an editor and poet with a dozen books to her credit, no less than three of which have been nominated for the Governor-General’s Award. The two decide to work together on a book about Gallant.
“I remember how easy it was to talk to Sharon. There was no small talk. I can’t explain it, my heart trusted her heart,” says Gallant.
“I could not, would not, try to write it in the third person,” says Thesen. “Janet’s telling was going to compose the entirety of the text—her telling processed through my ears, my heart, my hands.”
Janet Gallant’s life story to date is about surviving as the daughter of a Black woman with a mental illness who abandoned the family when Janet was three years old. Gallant and her siblings were left in the care of their father: a white, poorly educated, binge-drinking soldier who found ways to physically, sexually and emotionally abuse his children and future adult partners.
Doreen, another Black woman with a young daughter of her own, answered his ad for a ‘housekeeper’ and moved in as a stepmother. Doreen was the kind who ignored blatant child abuse happening right in front of her. So, these poor kids were, in a sense, abandoned yet again by a mother figure to the miseries of life with a monster.
No faraway family intervened. No concerned friends stepped up on behalf of these children. The frequent transfers of army life mitigated against any sort of outside investigation by social agencies outside the military bases of that era.
Gallant’s story is about wanting to find a way to remember her brutalized older brother, Billy, who committed suicide just before his fourteenth birthday after a particularly horrible beating. It’s about finding a way to memorialize her older sister Penny who absorbed the worst of the sexual abuse from the erstwhile father but this did not shield the two younger daughters for long.
Gallant’s story also leads us to her kind young husband, a best friend, confidante, and father of her two beloved daughters to whom this book is dedicated. Tragically, Gallant’s husband is struck down by the ticking time bomb of a hereditary condition.
The autoimmune disorder of alopecia then claims Gallant’s glorious African mane of hair within the next six years. Ill-fitting wigs bought off-the-rack only add to the discomfort of this inner/emotional and outer/physical health condition.
After working in Calgary businesses as an executive assistant for twenty-five years, Gallant takes up the nearly-solitary world of wig-making. By knotting up to 80,000 hairs in singles, doubles and triples to create one transformative wig, Gallant contemplates larger life issues yet again. She wants to find family members. She wants to know the truth; she wants photos and any stories family members may or may not choose to share.
She is rejected countless times in this search but Gallant is made of tough stuff and she persists in her search, including DNA ancestry sources. These investigations are included in Gallant’s and Thesen’s memoir-poem, ultimately leading to a mysterious healing process through the telling itself.
Janet Gallant found Sharon Thesen by chance. Thesen’s husband, Paul, and Jim, Janet’s current life partner both love to cycle year-round, solid bicycling buddies. At the time of the threatening wildfire in 2017 however, Sharon and Paul were aware that Janet Gallant’s partner was away on business in Alberta. So, although they don’t know Gallant well, she is the first of the neighbours to be invited down to wait among friends and acquaintances.
It proved to be fortuitous as Gallant had been searching for the right person to tell her story to. Fortune had led her to Thesen, a master poet with an acutely sensitive ear for language, its rhythms, its hesitations and how an empathetic soul might be a skilled conduit to transfer those lines of speech and the heartbreaking stories therein to the page. Gallant and Thesen’s conversations took place over the next two and a half years.
A line from The Wig-Maker describing the storytelling, alludes to a form of grace that Gallant so deservedly finds: “The music is indeed here. Lyrics of truth, and notes of healing, are there….You and Sharon are singing together.” 978-1-55420-171-6
Caroline Woodward’s most recent book was A West Coast Summer (Harbour, 2018), a children’s picture book about summer on the Pacific Northwest coast illustrated by Carol Evans.
