B. Lorraine Smith
Go east, young woman!
She attended Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick (Canada) where she majored in German and Religious studies. While at Mount A her writing continued in parallel to her schoolwork, as she produced numerous narrative pieces for the school paper, The Argosy. * She also worked as editor of the paper’s features section and produced a recipe column that she recalls with some chagrin as being heavily reliant on things that came out of a can.
Her short stories fell into two categories. There were the Jonathan Swift-inspired Modest Proposals, exploring such obvious yet absurd solutions as returning to horse transport to reduce pollution and congestion and producing energy from cardio workout equipment. These were a harbinger of sustainability writing and research efforts to come years later, before she knew there was a field called “sustainability” to wander into. Both still seem like pretty good ideas to her.
The other works were fictional accounts of two young women, Bethany and Alexis, making their way through the muddy mysteries of life, love and the universe.
During the final year of her Bachelor of Arts degree, she wrote a novella in German for her Honours thesis. The story is a modern retelling of Christ's Resurrection, Nach dem Leeren Grab (“After the empty tomb”) exploring how much of faith lies in the teaching (e.g. be good to one another) versus the myth (e.g. rose from the dead), using Christian allegory and a lip-synching scandal set in the 1990’s to test a few ideas. One of these days, she hopes to translate this piece into English and give it some more thought.
*Although this link does indeed take you to the school paper’s website, back when Lorraine worked at the Argosy, there was of course no website. Those were the days when “cut and paste” meant cut (with scissors) and paste (with glue). Good times.