The Queen of Peace room

By Magie Dominic

Subjects: rape, epilepsy, Biography, Self, Newfoundland and labrador, biography, Women, Adult child sexual abuse victims, HIV, nature, off Off-Broadway, sexual abuse, AIDS, Biographies, Case studies, LGBTQ HIV/AIDS, Violence against, Newfoundland, Women, crimes against, God, Enfants victimes d'abus sexuels devenus adultes, LGBTQ biography and memoir, Caffe Cino, nightmares, Violence contre les femmes, New York City, collection:judy_grahn_award=finalist, Affect (psychology), youth, Women, psychology, Canada. poetry

Description: What is memory, and where is it stored in the body? Can a room be symbolic of a lifetime? Memories are like layers of your skin or layers of paint on a canvas. In The Queen of Peace Room, Magie Dominic peels away these layers as she explores her life, that of a Newfoundlander turned New Yorker, an artist and a writer — and frees herself from the memories of her violent past. On an eight-day retreat with Catholic nuns in a remote location safe from the outside world, she exposes, and captures, fifty years of violent memories and weaves them into a tapestry of unforgettable images. The room she inhabits while there is called The Queen of Peace Room; it becomes, for her, a room of sanctuary. She examines Newfoundland in the 1940s and 1950s and New York in the 1960s; her confrontations with violence, incest, and rape; the devastating loss of friends to AIDS; and the relationship between life and art. These memories she finds stored alongside memories of nature’s images of trees pulling themselves up from their roots and fleeing the forest; storms and ley lines, and skies bursting with star-like eyes. In The Queen of Peace Room, from a very personal perspective, Magie Dominic explores violence against women in the second half of the twentieth century, and in doing so unearths the memory of a generation. In eight days, she captures half a century. (description by publisher)