The Door at the End of Everything By Lynda Monahan
Lynda Monahan’s new poetry collection The Door at the End of Everything
gives voice to and honour those living with mental illness
In her new poetry collection The Door at the End of Everything, releasing August 13, Prince Albert writer Lynda Monahan draws on her own experience to give voice to and honour those living with mental illness.
”The Door at the end of Everything was written during the recent years I was hospital writer-in-residence at the Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, working often on the adult and youth mental health wards,” Lynda says. “I also facilitate a Writing for Your Life group with Canadian Mental Health Association. It has become a huge part of my life, working and writing with people with mental health problems. I don’t feel separate from it at all, and I don’t write as an observer, but as a participant.
“It is my desire that these poems give voice to those living with mental illness and speak to not only the suffering but the courage and hope that is so clearly there as well. It is my desire to give voice to those who are often sidelined. These are tight, pared poems that speak of hope and courage, and it is my belief that many readers are interested in a genre’ whose power is derived from its conciseness.”
Several of the poems and poetry sequences have previously seen publication in various literary journals, including Grain, The Society, The New Quarterly, Transition, Bareback, and Dalhousie Review, and in the poetry anthologies Writing Menopause (Inanna Publications), Lummox Anthology of Canadian Poetry, Worth More Standing (Caitlin Press), the Apart pandemic anthology (SWG), and Line Dance(Burton House Books), and in various tanka publications such as Atlas Poetica, A Hundred Gourds,and Gusts.
A series of online readings from this manuscript, created with the help of a Canada Council grant, are available on YouTube.
Praise for The Door at the End of Everything
“This is a terrific poetry collection. The poems are presented in a variety of styles, but always with a light, lyrical touch, notwithstanding the seriousness of the content of many of them: the poems explore mental illness, not in a clinical way, but from the inside, as well as aging, grief, loneliness, and loss. Despite the grim subject matter, the poems are infused with lovely imagery and a sense of hope . . . filled with vivid, arresting images and well-turned lines, coloured by shades of darkness and light.” – Dave Margoshes
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lynda Monahan, author of The Door at the End of Everything, is also the author of four other collections of poetry, A Slow Dance in the Flames (Coteau Books, 1998), What My Body Knows (Coteau Books, 2003), Verge (Guernica Editions, 2015), and a cowritten collection, A Beautiful Stone: poems and ululations (Radiant Press 2019). She facilitates a number of creative writing workshops and has been writer-in-residence at St. Peter’s College facilitated retreat, Balfour Collegiate in Regina, and the Prince Albert Public Library, and writer-on-the-wards at Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert.
She is editor of several books, including Second Chances: stories of brain injury survivors, Skating in the Exit Light, a poetry anthology, and With Just One Reach of Hands, an anthology of the writing of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Writing For Your Life group, which she also facilitates. She has served on the council for the League of Canadian Poets, the Sage Hill Writing Experience, and the Saskatchewan Writers Guild.
She recently completed a year as lead artist for an Artists in Communities project through the Sask Arts Board, mentoring local artists to develop long-term community arts programming.
