My first
discovery
of the universe a word can hold happened on a December night in rural Manitoba, where I lived with my seven siblings and our parents. I had been at a sleep-over with a cousin who lived a half mile down a bush trail. In the middle of the night I was struck by a wave of loneliness so powerful it forced me out of bed, into my clothes and, stealthily, out the door of my cousin’s house. The path home, familiar in the daytime, had been transformed into foreign territory with its alternate strips of moonlight and tree shadow stretching over mounds of snow. I felt as though I had never been on that trail before and, moreover, that no one knew I was there. At that moment, I was outside every known person’s awareness—and I was
inside
the word
alone
. I knew it intimately and totally.

The next week in school I learned that a classmate, an only child, had lost both parents in a boating accident. Immediately I understood that she too had crossed over to the interior of the word
alone
but, with a start, I recognized that her invisible landscape was vastly different from mine. My eight-year-old mind did the transference, and I was left unsure and wobbly where earlier I’d been certain I had discovered the absolute, shining truth about aloneness.

These two experiences strongly shaped my relationship with language, and with what language builds—knowledge. Never again could I feel the charmed security of knowing something totally. Truth and meaning became provisional, someone’s small claim on a vast landscape of possibilities, one dot in a pointillist painting. My initial sense of loss was replaced by a fascination with the personal stories of others and their claims on what a word signified or an experience held. I sensed that if I listened closely and gathered in as many “dots” of meaning as I could, I might, just might, come close to the marvel of that mid-winter epiphany of 1952, when the gap between language and complete understanding vanished.

I’ve come to understand the force of women’s interest in personal narratives as a collective version of that impulse born in me when I was eight. We need to know how to read the world beyond our experience of it, and we trust firstperson accounts, perhaps more so because of the lack of faith in political and corporate declarations of truth and meaning. Personal stories are one means of getting a trusted inside view—
This is how wisdom, love, joy, betrayal, fear, regret have been for us
. No assertions of absolute truth, no earth-shaking revelations or attempts to manipulate another’s belief, just individual voices making individual claims on the discovery of meaning.

Several years ago Carol Shields and I had the privilege of tapping into this passion for an inside view of women’s experiences when we collaborated on editing the first two
Dropped Threads
anthologies. These collections of intimate stories on surprise and silence in women’s lives have been embraced by readers with an enthusiasm that left all of us—contributors, editors and publishers—amazed at the size of the community of shared interest we found. The fact that Carol’s wisdom and generous spirit were central to that community gives those paired books an especially treasured quality.

And yet there has been an ongoing insistence for more, from both readers and writers. In the three years since the publication of the second
Dropped Threads
anthology, personal essays have continued to come in “just in case,” and in every women’s gathering or discussion group I’ve attended, inevitably there was the question “Will there be another collection?” The decision to go ahead with a new anthology was a way of honouring the creative fervour swirling around me and, happily, keeping connected to it. The idea for the new theme came easily when I thought again of how varied our encounters inside language can be. Instead of having women focus on what they
haven’t been told
, I wanted them to write about their significant discoveries of meaning, to pass on what they
have to tell
all us enthusiastic dot collectors.

In direct invitations to established writers and in a cross-Canada call for proposals placed on the
dropped threads
website and in the
Globe and Mail
, the publishers and I asked women to consider the topic “This I Know.” The responses were immediate, as women released their well-earned wisdoms into stories, which rose up from across the country like happy vapours too long confined. The only hesitancy was with absolute truth-telling, with the ring of certainty that “know” suggests. Many writers obviously felt far more comfortable with a stance one of them referred to as “this I suspect.” Advice-giving too came in on a slant, delivered with humour and a clear-eyed view of the limited benefits of unsolicited counsel, no matter how well intended.

There also seemed to be limits on the kind of stories women wanted to tell. None of the three hundred proposals and submissions dealt with what women have learned about long-standing love relationships with men, and only a few were about their experiences of professional work in the traditional haunts of men. As if … well, as if these topics have had adequate coverage, or verge on dangerous territory.

What women did want to write about was the importance of other connections—to nature, to animals, to dance, to lives beyond the familiar, and above all to the varied choices and experiences of motherhood, a topic central to a third of the submissions. Another common theme was a sense of place: discovering it within families and in the world, but also asserting it by showing the unique experiences behind common terms such as victim, addict, rebel, celebrity. Women’s remarkable affinity for endurance and peace surfaced in all these accounts. Whether they shared intimate moments of grace and beauty or charted paths through minefields of personal pain, these writers left blueprints for ways of being that others could follow.

The thirty-five pieces I’ve selected from this rich array of stories stood out for me because of the particularly fresh, engaging ways they provide the sustenance we tend to look for in narratives. Each story either places us in a landscape we can experience anew—
Ah, yes, I recognize that feeling, that thought, that phase
—or takes us to new territory where we’re left altered in understanding and empathy—
So that’s what it’s like inside an experience I’ve never had
. Either way, we’re enriched.

An eighty-two-year old friend of my sister commented when she heard I was working on this collection of women’s personal essays, “Tell her to lighten things up a bit for us.” Well, Rose, I hope you and all others come away from reading this book buoyed up by the courage and creative wisdom of the contributors. And by the fresh glimpses they offer of what might otherwise lie just beyond our own small circles of meaning and sight.

INTRODUCTION
ANN-MARIE MACDONALD

When I was
in elementary school, teachers would commonly assign to the class the task of writing a piece of fiction—a “composition”—with the advice “Write what you know.” This directive always gave me a sinking feeling, as if the teacher were attaching concrete blocks to my imagination. “What do I know?” I’d think. “I’m nine years old!” Leaving aside the fact that a writer’s point of view is pretty much forged by the age of five, and the templates for most of experience are cut by the time one is nine, I was not in a position, at that tender age, to mine my own experience and shape it in a way that might speak to others. What I understood from the teacher was that she or he was advising a concrete, literal approach: “Write about what you did on your summer vacation.”

While, as a much younger person, I didn’t know what I knew, I did know what I could imagine, and I had no trouble authorizing myself to travel infinite distances from the concrete “known.” I didn’t have the words to describe it, but I know now that metaphor—with all its bright trappings of myth, fairy tale and fable—was my native clime, the universe in which I felt at home; and of course my stories about headless horsemen, nine-year-old spies and daring rescues at knifepoint said far more about the concrete facts of my life than any forensic description could have. As I matured as a
writer, my stories became more and more rooted in the “here and now.” I didn’t need such elaborate masks to convey my meanings and I strove for a deceptive realism: a layer of what looks like solid ground that, in fact, is afloat on a sea of metaphor—the inverse of magic realism. In a sense, I started way outside of the “small circle” and worked my way back in. Or perhaps I dove down, spiralling into the centre of it, toward the vanishing point that suddenly opens up, like a wormhole, onto a strange new world.

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