A Woman Clothed in Words (18 page)

“Carrying the Stone”: Anne's play
Z
(1994) drew on her experience of working for the British Red Cross in newly liberated concentration camps in 1945-6. In its published form,
Z
contains an interview by Bruce Sinclair in which Anne described meeting young women who had managed to survive the camps: “They told me the stories which I related in
Z.
I haven't forgotten them. They're always present in me... It doesn't really matter how many years have passed. It doesn't fade off. It is still present as the present. I've always felt that this was a kind of stone in my breast, and when I was writing
Z
I hoped to put this down and not carry it with me.”

~~~

Three Women at the End of the World,
the excerpts from
Prairie Mass,
most of
A State of Grace,
and many of the shorter poems and prose pieces (including all those not mentioned above) are published here for the first time.

About the Editor

Mark Abley
is a Canadian poet, journalist, editor and non-fiction writer. He has published three books of poetry,
two children’s books and several works of non-fiction. He has won Canada's National Newspaper Award for critical writing and received a Guggenheim Fellowship for research into language change. He is Anne Szumigalski’s literary executor.

Born in Warwickshire, England, he moved to Canada as a small boy, won a Rhodes Scholarship from the University of Saskatchewan and has been a contributing editor of both
Maclean’s
and
Saturday Night
magazines, and a regular contributor to the
Times Literary Supplement
. For sixteen years he worked as a feature writer and book-review editor at the
Montreal Gazette
. He lives in Montreal.