Marni Jackson

What if some of the artists we feel as if we know—Meryl Streep, Neil Young, Bill Murray—turned up in the course of our daily lives? This is what happens to Rose McEwan, an ordinary woman who keeps having strange encounters with famous people. In this engrossing, original novel-in-stories, we follow her life from age 17, when she takes a summer writing course led by a young John Updike, through her first heartbreak (witnessed by Joni Mitchell) on the island of Crete, through her marriage, divorce, and a canoe trip with Taylor Swift, Leonard Cohen and Karl Ove Knausgaard. (Yes, read on.) With wit and insight, Marni Jackson takes a world obsessed with celebrity and turns it on its head. In Don't I Know You?, she shows us how fame is just another form of fiction, and how, in the end, the daily dramas of an ordinary woman’s life can be as captivating and poignant as any luminary tell-all.

Don't I Know You?

Nights of no sleep, steeped in equal parts love, resentment and bodily fluids. The most intense tenderness warring with the deepest despair. The biggest question on a new mother’s mind: WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME IT WOULD BE LIKE THIS? Marni Jackson’s touching, funny and provocative journey through the terra incognita of motherhood will help you survive it and won’t let you forget. Ten years after its first publication, The Mother Zone is still fresh, still original, still the one book that every mother (and father) needs.

The Mother Zone

Explores modern medicine's changing attitude toward pain and what it means, chronicling the lives of patients who live with chronic pain, the work of pain researchers, and the experiences of doctors, nurses, and scientists.

The Fifth Vital Sign

Pain

Factory Theatre Lab Archives

Bob White

Clichettes

She Devils of Nicaragua

Janice Hladki

Factory Theatre Lab Archives (University of Guelph)

Johanna Householder

Louise Garfield

She-Devils Of Niagara

Theatre Passe Muraille Archives

Fall Guys

Theatre Passe Muraille Archives (University of Guelph)

Hrant Alianak

Rochdale College

American Cathedral in Paris

Half Human Half Heartache

Horseshoe Tavern

Half Human, Half Heartache

The Clichettes

From the author of the best-selling The Mother Zone, comes a comic narrative about an over-anxious mother and her twenty-something over-adventurous son. Home Free is about the last secret lap of parenting: getting through your kids' twenties and learning how to let them go at the same time. The twentysomethings who invented the generation gap in the nineteen sixties have grown up to become hyperinvolved parents who can't stop worrying abouttheir adult kids. Many of the kids are still living in the basement, bussing tables instead of going to business school, and depending on their parents for emotional support. Just when they thought family life was on the wane, parents are back on deck with their children; at the same time many are often coping with their own frail or dying parents. Is this the new, improved face of family, where kids still depend on their parents for stability, friendship and guidance in an increasingly unforgiving world? Or has this era of over-invested parents, living vicariously through the achievements of their children, bred dependency in the new generation? Home Free is an intimate, candid, reflective and comic memoir that focuses on this new and undefined stage of family life: the challenges of helping our kids navigate their twenties - while learning how to let go of them at the same time.

The Myth of the Empty Nest

Home Free

Home Free is an intimate, candid, reflective and comic memoir that focuses on this new and undefined stage of family life: the challenges of helping our kids navigate their twenties – while learning how to let go of them at the same time.

Major Jackson, Ellen

Despite the number of parenting books flooding the marketplace, Marni Jackson discovered she wasn’t prepared when she became a mother at the age of thirty-seven. Nights without sleep, steeped in equal parts love, anxiety and bodily fluids, combined with the most intense tenderness warring against a sea-change of self forced her to ask the question: why didn’t anybody tell me it would be like this? A national bestseller when it was first published, The Mother Zone remains fresh and relevant today, as Jackson gives us a touching and excruciatingly funny companion to help anyone survive the terra incognita of modern motherhood. From the Hardcover edition.

Love, Sex and Laundry in the Modern Family

Love, Sex & Laundry in the Modern Family

Explores the dark side of motherhood--the fatigue, the mood swings, and the conflicting emotions--offering an intimate look at the trials and tribulations of being a mother in the modern age

Love, Sex, and Laundry in the Modern Family

Tony Whittome

A collection of the best poems and short stories written about various, sometimes risky wilderness experiences and adventures around the world, written for The Banff Centre's Mountain and Wilderness Writing program.

The Best of Mountain and Wilderness Writing

Rock, Paper, Fire

A compulsively readable explorer’s journal of the hidden territory of pain, as profound and insightful as the work of Oliver Sacks and Sherwin Nuland. A bee sting on the lips was the tiny lance that set Marni Jackson off on a four-year exploration of the many ways in which we suffer. Exiled for an afternoon in the country called pain, she realized that no one had the words to describe her condition although it was as familiar as a headache. A fusion of emotion, nerve and memory, pain inspired only questions. “Why do we still distinguish between mental pain and physical pain,” she asks, “when pain is always an emotional experience? Why is pain so poorly understood, especially in a century of self-scrutiny? Hasn’t anyone noticed the embarrassing fact that science is about to clone a human being but still can’t cure the pain of a bad back?” North Americans spend $24 billion a year on pain relief while chronic pain is on the rise. If pain is the reason why most people visit the doctor, why are most doctors so bad at addressing the problem of suffering? Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign dives back into the history of pain and forward into the possibilities of pain genetics, bringing us stories of both people in pain and the pain pioneers: eccentrics and artists, wrestlers and writers, ministers and mothers, psychologists and philosophers, nurses and doctors. Marni Jackson has created a definitive, heartfelt, funny and beguiling portrait of a condition we can’t live with -- and can’t live without.

The Science and Culture of Why We Hurt

Why is pain so poorly understood? Why do we still distinguish between mental pain and physical pain, when pain is always an emotional experience? How can it be that science is about to clone a human being but still can't cure the pain of a bad back? If pain is the reason why most people visit the doctor, why are most doctors so bad at addressing the problem of suffering? Marni Jackson's PAIN: THE FIFTH VITAL SIGN is a witty, personal and groundbreaking inquiry into the nature, treatment and definition of human pain, one of the most misunderstood and elusive subjects to challenge humankind. In the questing and narrative manner of Oliver Sacks, Jackson takes us back into the history of pain and forward into the possibilities of pain genetics, Jackson brings us stories both of people in pain and the pain pioneers: eccentrics and artists, wrestlers and writers, psychologists and philosophers, nurses and doctors. Above all, Pain makes an elusive subject vivid and readable. We all know what pain is. Now Marni Jackson has given it a voice.

Marni Jackson

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