(Dept. of English)

“Wider than the Sky:

The Healing Power of Emily Dickinson”

Date: Wednesday 19 March 2008

Time: 3:30 pm

Place: Centre for Kinesiology, CK 185

All are welcome

Refreshments will be provided

For further information please call Kara Vincent (HRI) at 585-4226

This event celebrates the launch of Wider than the Sky: Essays and Meditations on the Healing Power of Emily Dickinson, a critical anthology edited by Cindy MacKenzie and Barbara Dana. Cindy MacKenzie will talk about the process of editing the book to publication, and copies of the book will be available for purchase

Emily Dickinson is known as a poet who presses at the limits of perception and expresses in brilliantly compact, memorable language extremes of both anguish and ecstasy. Her frequent attention to pain and death, like her reclusive tendencies, has led many to dismiss her as “morbid.” Biographers and critics, however, have shown how she used her writing and her own acquaintance with pain to reach out consolingly to sufferers. In a widely varied collection of personal reminiscences, tributes, and scholarly essays, editors Cindy MacKenzie and Barbara Dana offer richly revealing perspectives on how the exquisite language in the poems and letters of Emily Dickinson helps readers cope with suffering.

The essays featured in Wider than the Sky range from fresh scholarly analyses to highly personal essays and meditations, each offering thoughts on the emotional, spiritual, and physical healing power gained from reading Dickinson. MacKenzie and Dana invite readers to reflect on how we respond to poems, how they enter into the core of our consciousness, and how we draw strength from what Dickinson called “the Art of Peace.” Wider than the Sky, a resource for Dickinson fans as well as anyone coping with pain, is an important addition to the Literature and Medicine Series.

Cindy MacKenzie teaches English at the University of Regina. She is best known for her compilation A Concordance to the Letters of Emily Dickinson (2000). She has also published articles on Dickinson in the Emily Dickinson Bulletin and Emily Dickinson Journal. Her passionate interest in Dickinson has taken her to conferences in the United States, Europe, and Japan as an active participant and, presently, as a board member of the Emily Dickinson International Society and of the American Literature Association.

Book Details (click here for link to publisher)

Cindy MacKenzie and Barbara Dana, eds. Wider than the Sky: Essays and Meditations on the Healing Power of Emily Dickinson. [Literature and Medicine Series, #11.] Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2007. xviii + 150 pp.

Cloth ISBN 978-0-87338-953-2 $30.00 US
Paper ISBN 978-0-87338-919-8 $18.00 US