Buy Artifact : Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives at wvupress.com
Interview by Justin Hargett
Sadly, mass shootings touch every aspect of our modern life, but your book specifically focuses on educational institutions. As someone who started high school the year of the Columbine shooting, and who was enrolled at a major public university during the Virginia Tech shooting, these specific tragedies still carry such a visceral, emotional weight for me. I’m curious how your own experiences in Montreal weighed on you as you researched the L’École Polytechnique shooting?
I was seventeen when the Montreal Massacre took place. I remember learning about it from the television news at home in the suburbs of Toronto. I moved to Montreal about eighteen months later to study at McGill University. Canadian culture and politics were deeply affected by those events, though, as I write in the book, diverse communities and regions had different responses to that terrible event. My generation of young anglophone (i.e., English-speaking) women understood the attack to be rooted in misogyny. We sounded the alarm about gendered violence and took part in (by then, longstanding) movements like Take Back the Night. In my first year at McGill, I joined a campus student group called “Walk Safe.” It was less political than Take Back the Night—quieter. Once a week, a friend and I made ourselves available to accompany anyone who felt unsafe walking home from campus in the dark, whether from the library or the campus bar. The idea was for students to look out for one another and to take responsibility for each other’s safety. Only in retrospect have I understood that this initiative, too, was a response to the Montreal Massacre. We young women wanted to claim our space on campus, our right to professional and intellectual ambitions, and to be safe regardless of how we looked or dressed.
Working in the archives for the Polytechnique chapter was difficult. It was, by far, the most challenging chapter to write, because I identified and continue to identify so strongly with the young women who were killed there. We were so close in age and in temperament. Like them, I too was a driven, ambitious student, exhausted by early December after a long semester of work. I remember in my bones how it felt to trudge to campus (even if it was a different campus in the same city; even if we studied in different languages) through snow, ice, and frigid winds. Reading the Montreal coroner’s report affected me deeply, as did reading Colleen Murphy’s beautiful and devastating play, The December Man.Read More »
