Page 171 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015
P. 171

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION






After-Word: Deranged, Nora Jamieson (Weeping Coyote Press, 2015)* 

Patricia Reis




Deranged. The title grabs me. When I consult the dictionary I find definitions:


adj. mad, insane, disturbed crazed, demented, unhinged, certifiable, berserk, irrational;


verb. cause someone to become insane, throw something into confusion, or the more 


archaic, intrude or interrupt. Suddenly the ghost of Mary Daly rises up from wherever 



she is hopefully getting a well-deserved rest. Although it is not in her Webster’s First 


New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, she would surely love this word, 


turning its meaning inside out, pointing to the deep background where it belongs in “the 


Realm of Wild Reality; the Homeland of Women’s Selves and of all other Others; the 


Time/Space where auras of plants, planets, stars, animals and all other animate beings 


i
connect.”





The stories in Deranged are often heartbreaking, poignant and harsh. The uncanny 


events, the disconcerting connections between the human and other-than-human world 


may, from one perspective, appear as demented, a bit mad, even, one could say, 



deranged. When combined with Jamieson’s depiction of the crush of cultural 


expectations, the visceral experience of gender, as well as the blood-and-bone parallel 


between the treatment of animals and women, they work to reveal, redeem and restore 


the true implicate order of things.






Wildish, slightly suspect, a bit undomesticated, Anna, Sophie, and Louise, the three 


unforgettable women who feature in these short stories, prowl the outskirts. They are 


prompted by impulses often outside the ken of their neighbors, and sometimes even 


themselves. Each is in the business of recollecting, reckoning and remembering. They 


travel the beaten paths of their personal past and keep going, picking their way through






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