Weil, Lise

Lise Weil is an award-winning editor and translator whose memoir In Search of Pure Lust has just been published with Inanna Press. In Search of Pure Lust has been called “a poetic memoir of feminist history” and “intimate, personal, visionary.” Her short fiction, essays, reviews, literary nonfiction and translations have been published widely in journals in both Canada and the U.S. Beyond Recall, a collection of the last writings of Montreal artist and writer Mary Meigs, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Lise was founder and editor of Trivia: A Journal of Ideas and its online offspring Trivia: Voices of Feminism, both important venues for feminist inquiry. At Goddard College in Vermont, where she has taught for over twenty years, her areas of focus are embodiment studies and ecology.

Uppermost in Lise’s mind these days is our relationship as humans to the nonhuman world, which is going to have to change radically if we’re to have a liveable future. Her most recent publishing venture, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing www.darkmatterwomenwitnessing.com which has a large global following, grew out of this belief. She is interested in offering a class on communing with nonhuman intelligences featuring writings in the form of poetry and short prose, some of them from Dark Matter.

Lise has been teaching writing in non-traditional settings since 1988. Since 2005 she has been offering day-long and weekend-long retreats for women writers centered around dreamwork. Dreams are important to her as a writer (they inform the narrative structure of her memoir), and she loves helping students figure out how to either fold them into their writing or get them to generate new writing. She would like to offer a dream/writing workshop in the CEGEPS.