Background
Quartermain was born in Toronto, Ontario and lived in a variety of locations in childhood before her family moved to Argenta, British Columbia.
(Poetry. "RECIPES FROM THE RED PLANET cooks books for deep...)
Poetry. "RECIPES FROM THE RED PLANET cooks books for deep space dining, rolls out the dough of language and shapes it into buttery crescents that are supernaturally textured and interactive with daily life. Meredith Quartermain's solar system blows asteroid dust through the patriarchy and oven roasts the alphabet to a lovely golden crisp. Whipped by interplanetary winds we meet the immortals of the ancient world inverted and propelled into negative space. Their ground delineates our figures, neatly attired in dresses we've sewn ourselves from Simplicity patterns. Here are the recipes that will free Rapunzel from her tower. Here are all the blue radishes you can eat"--Larissa Lai.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1897388659/?tag=2022091-20
( Journey along Vancouvers city streets, past its landma...)
Journey along Vancouvers city streets, past its landmarks, through the sounds and smells of Chinatown. Ramble along the seawall on English Bay, ride the curving streets to Kitsilano on a winter afternoon, and experience the vibrant sights and sounds of the citys history as it jostles for a place in the present.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1896300812/?tag=2022091-20
( In these quirkily imaginative short stories about writi...)
In these quirkily imaginative short stories about writing and writers, the scrivener Quartermain (our “Bartleby”) goes her stubborn way haunted by Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Robin Blaser, Daphne Marlatt, and a host of other literary forebears. Who is writing whom, these stories ask in their musing reflections – the writer or the written? The thinker or the alphabet? The calligrapher or the pictograms hidden in her Chinese written characters? Intimate jealousies between writers, wagers of courage and ambition, and histories of the colours violet and yellow are some of the subjects in the first section, “Caravan.” Struggles of mothers, fathers, and sisters (and the figures drawn in the Chinese written characters that represent them) unfold as tales of love, death, and revenge in the group of stories in the second section, “Orientalisme.” In “Scriptorium,” the third section, we find out how Bartleby’s father, a Caucasian cook specializing in Chinese cuisine, got Bartleby into writing in the first place. In the fourth series of stories, “How to Write,” we learn how Bartleby loses her I while meeting Allen Ginsberg, Alice Toklas, and a real Chinese cook who works in a fictional house of Ethel Wilson, and how Malcolm Lowry’s life came to an end. The fifth and last section, “Moccasin Box,” investigates how a Sebaldesque Bartleby is silenced by Pauline Johnson. Taking its cue from genre-bending writers like Robert Walser and Enrique Vila-Matas, I, Bartleby cunningly challenges boundaries between fiction and reality.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/088922918X/?tag=2022091-20
Quartermain was born in Toronto, Ontario and lived in a variety of locations in childhood before her family moved to Argenta, British Columbia.
She graduated from high school in Argenta, and after working for several years, attended the University of British Columbia, where she met her future husband Peter Quartermain.
She obtained a bachelor of arts in English literature in 1976, a Master of Arts in English language in 1978 and a bachelor of laws in 1989 from the University of British Columbia. During these years she taught English at University of British Columbia and the British Columbia Institute of Technology, worked as a computer systems analyst and freelanced as a journalist and technical writer This work included a contract in 1983 which led to the publication of a history of York House School, Not for Ourselves Alone.
From 1990 to 1993, she practiced law in a Vancouver litigation firm.
In 1993 she became an English instructor at Capilano College. During the 1980s and early 1990s she wrote novels, poems and journals but published nothing.
Quartermain was the 2012 writer in residence at the Vancouver Public Library. In 2014 she joined the Simon Fraser University writer"s studio program as poetry mentor.
( In these quirkily imaginative short stories about writi...)
( Journey along Vancouvers city streets, past its landma...)
(Poetry. "RECIPES FROM THE RED PLANET cooks books for deep...)