June

Based in part on the author’s mother’s handwritten memoirs, this novel is an act of bricolage in which the narrator keeps finding gaps in the materials. We desire to regain the past, but every time we attempt it we fabricate it anew. Through various narrative voices, the author discovers a different sense of her mother than she held during her lifetime. This is a type of biographical revisionism. We cannot know the past, especially that of our mothers, but we can re-member them. Meticulously researched, this book constitutes an extended meditation on memory, the strength of memory and its fallibility.

Author Biography

Helen May Williams lives in South West Wales, where she regularly leads poetry workshops including the Poetry Society Stanza group in Carmarthen. Her poetry sequence, The Princess of Vix, was published by Three Drops Press in 2017. As Helen May Dennis, she formerly taught at the University of Warwick and published on twentieth-century North American literature and poetry, including on: Elizabeth Bishop, H.D., Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Willa Cather, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison and contemporary Native American novelists in Native American Literature: towards a spatialized reading (Routledge 2007). Her first poetry collection, Catstrawe, was published in 2019.