By: Lorri Neilsen Glenn
ISBN: 978-1774712696
Nimbus Publishing Limited, 2024
2025 Sarton Finalist: Memoir
A powerful, lyrical collection of essays from an award-winning author, exploring the pivotal moments in her life, and how art and nature have shaped her.
Like both memory and the moon, what's written here aims to shed what light it can, bringing it home to now.
How does a woman compose a life? The Old Moon in Her Arms is a hybrid book of fragments, pivotal moments and images in the phases of a woman's life, turning points rendered in Lorri Neilsen Glenn's lyrical prose.
Like the shifting images in a kaleidoscope, these glimpses into the life of an ordinary woman lay bare the ways family, landscape, loss, and a lifelong pursuit of knowledge have forced the author in her later years to examine what really matters. Here, readers bear witness to the making of a daughter, a student, a wife, a friend, a teacher, a mother, a feminist, an award-winning scholar and writer. Neilsen Glenn's artistry weaves personal history, philosophy, pop culture, and contemporary thought to examine moments and people who've inhabited her life. "Over time and circumstance," she says, "haven't we all been various?"
Guiding her exploration are the Cree concept of wahkohtowin, the kinship in all of creation, and the elliptical path of the moon.
This hybrid collection of singular moments celebrates connection, wonder and endless curiosity.
About the Author
Lorri Neilsen Glenn was born in Winnipeg and lived in railway towns in Manitoba, Alberta,and Saskatchewan. An ethnographer, essayist, and poet, she studied at the Universities of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Harvard. Neilsen Glenn now lives and works in Halifax Nova Scotia. She was named Halifax Regional Municipality Poet Laureate for 2005-2009.
To learn more about Lorri Neilsen Glenn and her work, please see writersunion.ca/member/lorri-neilsen-glenn
