NOWW member Marion Agnew launches first book

The Northwestern Ontario Writers Workshop (NOWW) is pleased to announce the launch, celebration, and book signing for Reverberations: A Daughter’s Meditations on Alzheimer’s, by longtime NOWW member Marion Agnew.

The event will be held on Saturday, November 23, at the Prince Arthur Waterfront Hotel in Thunder Bay, from 2 to 4 p.m. with a reading at 3. Books will be available for purchase at the event. Published by Signature Editions, a Winnipeg literary publisher, Reverberations collects personal essays about Agnew’s mother’s dementia and her family’s response.

“My mother died nearly twenty years ago, and more information about dementia is available today,” Agnew says. “But each person with dementia is unique. My mother often felt unsettled and asked to go home, so ‘home’ is an underlying theme in these essays.”

Agnew’s mother was born Jeanne LeCaine in Port Arthur in 1917. She attended Queen’s University and Radcliffe/Harvard, and worked as a mathematician in Montreal during World War II. With her historian husband, she taught and raised five children in the U.S.—and came to the family camp on Lake Superior every summer. Agnew now lives with her husband, writer Roy Blomstrom, in a house next to the 1920’s camp, which remains in her family.

Agnew served on NOWW’s Executive for many years. Her work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Canada, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a National Magazine Award, and received support from the Ontario Arts Council. This is her first book.

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