The L.M. Montgomery Institute's 14th Biennial Conference University of Prince Edward Island
June 24- 29, 2020
Our Co-Chairs for LMMI’s L.M. Montgomery and Vision Conference 2020
Dr. Lesley Clement
Dr. Lesley Clement, the current Visiting Scholar, will be responsible for our 14th Biennial conference in 2020—L.M. Montgomery and Vision. Lesley has held teaching and administrative positions at various Canadian universities. She has published on visual literacy, empathy, and death in children’s literature. She is currently working on artists’ biographies in children’s nonfiction picturebooks. Her work on Montgomery appears in Studies in Canadian Literature and L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s). Recent projects include co-editing, with Rita Bode, L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-1942 (MQUP 2015) and, with Leyli Jamali, Global Perspectives on Death in Children’s Literature (Routledge 2016). She is currently co-editing a volume of essays, L.M. Montgomery in Conversation about Children and Childhood(s), with Rita Bode, Holly Pike, and Margaret Steffler.
Emily Woster
Emily Woster is the past Visiting Scholar for the L.M. Montgomery Institute and current co-editor of the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies. She is an assistant professor in the department of English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth and earned her Ph.D. in English Studies at Illinois State University. Emily’s work has focused primarily on the reading lives and textual worlds of L.M. Montgomery, including a chapter in L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-1942. Her broader research interests straddle the worlds between women’s life writing, children’s literature, and English Studies.
Update L.M. Montgomery and Vision Conference
- We considered but rejected moving the conference to a later date, such as June of 2021. We were concerned that a new date would not fit the travel availabilities or scholarship timetables of some presenters, we did not want to interfere with Montgomery events which are deliberately scheduled off-year to our conference, and we remain uncertain how desirable international travel will be until a vaccine and immunity are widespread.
- We considered but rejected moving the L.M. Montgomery and Vision program to 2022, not wanting to hold back the scholarship created for this June by so long, and wanting to keep open the pathway for a fresh conference theme that conference year.
- We made detailed plans for the possibility of hosting a virtual, online, conference this June, with livestreamed and recorded presentations over the scheduled conference dates. We sorted out how that could work technologically, and until recently, I would have guessed that is the way we would go. But we have come to believe that a virtual conference this summer is not the best choice for our community. One reality is that we have all witnessed reports of great tragedy, sometimes very close to Montgomery community members, and we expect that losses may only grow in the weeks to come. Perhaps this is a time to make way for witnessing grief, and for honouring loss.
- Another reality is that many of our presenters are feeling worn down, drained by relentless Zooming and videoconferencing. Like so many, our presenters carry the stresses of uncertainly, financial concern, worry for parents and grandparents, working from home while homeschooling little ones, and so on. Members of our community are of course in different physical and psychological spaces; while preparing for and presenting virtually in June would be a fit for some, we did not want to add burden to, or exclude, those for whom this is just not the time.
However, the wonderful news is that there is a way to ensure that the scholarship and the ideas being readied for conference presentation can still be shared with the Montgomery community in due course, and that is through the many mechanisms within the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies. Options include peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed articles, shorter notes, video, visual arts, and creative writing. Some people will be ready to make submissions in June, and for others submission in later weeks and later months will be a better fit. Journal Editor, Dr. Kate Scarth, and Co-editor for L.M. Montgomery and Vision submissions, Dr. Lesley Clement, will be in touch with conference presenters about opportunities.
Lesley had developed a wonderful mentorship program which already has linked new and emerging scholars accepted to present at the conference with more experienced mentors. She will be in touch will all those participants about furthering their relationships.
For those who have already registered for the conference, full refunds (with no administrative fee deducted) will be processed for all tickets purchased, including conference registrations, pe-conference workshops, banquet tickets, and bus tour tickets. These will appear as credit card refunds. Accommodations booking should be cancelled directly by those who have made them.
Many people have worked to develop the L.M. Montgomery and Vision conference. On behalf of our community, I want to express a special thank you to Dr. Lesley Clement and Dr. Emily Woster, conference Co-Chairs, for their extraordinary intellectual contributions and hard work in creating the conference program. We so wish we were all able to join with them in person to celebrate in June.
On behalf of the L.M. Montgomery Institute, thank you for your understanding. We look forward to learning about the work of presenters through the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies, in such time as is a good fit. We wish good health for you and for yours, for your place and your country. And we do look forward, not so far away, to welcoming you to Montgomery’s Island in June of 2022.
Philip Smith, Chair
L.M. Montgomery Institute Committee
9 April, 2020
Call for Papers: L.M. Montgomery and Vision
CFP: L.M. Montgomery and Vision
The L.M. Montgomery Institute’s Fourteenth Biennial Conference
University of Prince Edward Island, 25-28 June 2020
“My fingers tingle to grasp a pen—my brain teems with plots. I've a score of fascinating dream characters I want to write about. Oh, if there only were not such a chasm between seeing a thing and getting it down on paper!” –Emily Climbs (1925)
“If for Montgomery Nature was eternal and eternally present, then the memory pictures of Nature reflected were perhaps meant to help her and her viewers to transcend time and, in entering the imaginative landscape, initiate generative seeing and fresh reverie.” –Elizabeth Epperly, Through Lovers Lane: L.M. Montgomery’s Photography and Visual Imagination
The 2020 conference invites proposals for research pertaining to L.M. Montgomery’s life, writings, and/or scholarship through the lens of vision. Montgomery found inspiration in what she saw around her, and she spent a lifetime translating what she saw into her writing and other creative works. The word vision derives from the Latin videre, “to see,” but as Montgomery knew, there is never a direct or straight line between the observing eye and the object that is seen (or not seen). Beyond topics relating to “visuality,” “vision” might also suggest, among others, (in)visibility, prescience, dreams, wisdom, imaginary or supernatural phenomena, apparitions, and the visioning and re-visioning of material – including her own life – for which Montgomery is renowned.
The conference theme might inspire papers that explore:
- Montgomery’s visual descriptions and aesthetic; how she “sees” the world through her writing
- Adaptations or revisions of Montgomery’s life and works on/in film, stage, art, new media, and beyond
- The art and artistry of the illustrators of Montgomery’s works
- Connections between vision and other senses in her fiction
- Sight/seeing and the limitations of it or the enhancements and physical aids to it (e.g., glasses, binoculars, telescopes, camera lenses, etc.)
- Metaphors of vision (e.g., re/views, perspectives, visionaries, reflections, blindness, opacity/transparency, etc.) in and around the world of Montgomery
- Re-seeing, revision, remembering, and nostalgia in Montgomery’s creative and/or autobiographical processes
- Things unseen, invisible, imaginary, or otherwise out of sight
Please submit 250-300-word proposals by 16 August 2019. Proposals should clearly articulate a strong argument, but they should also situate that argument in the context of established Montgomery scholarship. Proposals that view Montgomery’s life and art from different cultural and theoretical perspectives are welcomed. All proposals are blind reviewed. Proposals for pre-conference workshops, special exhibits, films, performances, or other visual displays are encouraged and welcomed.