Wanting Everything: The Collected Works

Author: Gladys Hindmarch

Editors: Deanna Fong and Karis Sherer

Publisher: Talonbooks (2020)

Wanting Everything presents the collected works of Vancouver writer Gladys Hindmarch. In addition to reproducing newly revised editions of her book-length works (The Peter Stories, A Birth Account, and The Watery Part of the World), the volume collects unpublished works of prose as well as correspondence, criticism, oral history interviews, and occasional writing. Spanning over five decades, this diverse work challenges the conception of what constitutes a prolific literary career, extending the notion of writerly activity to include work that is social, collaborative, and dialogic. Hindmarch has made significant contributions to innovative feminist writing, covering topics such as the embodied experience of pregnancy and birth, working-class women’s labour, and the intimacies of domesticity, all while sustaining an engagement with local places and social economies.

Hindmarch’s work embodies the notion of proprioception that was so central to the poetics of the TISH group and other experimental writing in the West Coast tradition. However, in Hindmarch, “sensibility within the organism” is revisited as a feminist stance that connects the experience of the body—moving through space, breathing, laboring, connecting with others—with a keen observational reading of situations, the self, and others. Wanting Everything recognizes Hindmarch’s significant contribution to Canada’s literary and cultural fields, making her work accessible to new readers and literary scholars, and framing it within the history of avant-garde writing, feminist production, and labour issues. Edited by Karis Shearer and Deanna Fong, this remarkable volume concludes with a brand-new, in-depth interview with the author.