Erin Soros Talk

“Eyes, Birds, Walnuts, Pennies”: Trauma and Testimony

“The phone rings, and no one speaks. All you hear is someone breathing.
It happens again, and again—then there are the e-mails, the innuendoes just skirting the explicit.
Or the phone rings and this time he says what he will do.
There are gifts too, left on the doorstep, at the workplace, in the hardware store around the corner.
Housewarming, he says.”

A hybrid creative-critical performance, “Eyes, Birds, Walnuts, Pennies” attends to the psychological effects of criminal harassment—otherwise known as stalking—and the vertiginous extremes of language that can occur in response and in resistance to the threat of sexual violence, an assault that does and does not take place, a dreaded future that can at any moment arrive.

Erin Soros has published fiction and nonfiction in international journals and her stories have been produced for the CBC and BBC as winners of the CBC Literary Award and the Commonwealth Award for the Short Story. Her articles weaving psychoanalysis, philosophy and narrative have appeared in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, The Journal of Intercultural Studies, The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, and The Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, with new work in Literatures of Madness and in Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness. She has been a visiting writer at four universities, most recently Cambridge, and has just finished a position as an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto.