ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study has been a long journey, and could not have been completed without the aid and encouragement of many individuals and institutions over the last decade. I would like to thank the Calgary Institute for the Humanities and the Calgary Women’s Writing Project for receipt of the Winnie Tomm Memorial Scholarship, as well as the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Fund for Advanced Studies and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose research fellowships originally enabled me, in the form of a doctoral dissertation, to explore the memoirs gathered here as a means to share the authors’ voices and experiences with a larger audience.

The financial support noted above allowed me to work full-time on this project while living with my family in Kamloops, British Columbia, but the project itself would never have been conceived in the first place were it not for the supportive and inspirational atmosphere of the English Department at the University of Calgary. I would like to thank the Department for considerable financial contributions to my research and writing activities. Most especially, I am deeply indebted to Dr. Helen Buss, whose presence at the University of Calgary drew me to Alberta, and whose encouragement, advice, criticism, and patience illustrates her knowledge of the subject and her dedication to the project of advancing education.

I would also like to acknowledge that I have previously published some of the materials that make up this study. Portions of Chapter One and Chapter Two have been published as “(Nearly) Sacred Achievements: Culinary Place in Women’s Prairie Memoirs,” in a Special Issue of Essays on Canadian Writing titled “Food, Cooking, and Eating in Canadian Literature,” with Guest Editor Kathleen Batstone, 78 (2003): 16–41. Portions of Chapter One and Chapter Four have been published as “The ‘precarious perch’ of the ‘decent woman’: The Spatial (De)Construction of Gender in Canadian Women’s Prairie Memoirs,” in History, Literature, and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies, edited by Alison Calder and Robert Wardhaugh (University of Manitoba Press, 2005), 141–74.

I would like to thank everyone at University of Calgary Press for the attention to fine detail that occurs when assembling such a book, and especially to Donna Livingstone, whose persistence and vision has ultimately enabled these womens’ voices to be heard. Finally, to Dania Sheldon, whose careful and efficient gaze graced the manuscript in its final stages in order to create a comprehensive index.