“I’m a Dirty Girl” Linda M. Morra (bio) I’m a dirty girl—sometimes literally, if not literally at this moment. I spend hours upon hours in archives, not exclusively in formal collections housed in official institutions but also in informal ones, including people’s basements. The dust and sometimes literal dirt that accrues in those spaces means that, when I immerse myself therein, I do get dirty—literally. That dirt, however, also carries symbolic registers. I work both inside and outside authorized, institutional spaces to track the material traces that Canadian women authors have left behind and that were also sometimes willfully omitted from “sanitized” or official archives. As ecocritic Anthony Lioi observes, I want to “give dirt its due” by breaking down the assumptions that undergird socio-cultural networks by which women were at one point “cleansed” from the historical record and that threw their very legibility as citizens and their status as authors into question, when it did not entail their disappearance altogether (17). In short, I want to locate the detritus left behind by Canadian women writers and render it visible to others. I therefore don’t only “get down and dirty” because of the literal spaces to which I travel; rather, I also do so because of the socio-political material I am looking for and sometimes encounter. I get the dirt on the lives of [End Page 5] various Canadian women authors and their associations with publishers, agents, family, and friends, and then I engage in ethical decisions that determine how much I will dish in my publications and presentations. My archival research demonstrates that the dirt I am looking for extends beyond questions of gender and carries valences that encompass questions of race, sexuality, class, and economy. In making those ethical decisions, I must acknowledge, even so, that women were already regarded as “embodiments of shame” and that “the female socialization process can be viewed as a prolonged immersion in shame” (Bouson 2). In each encounter with the archive, therefore, I must stage my work carefully, to avoid further perpetuating this process of immersion and to consider how my own acts might be characterized in this process. To illustrate my point, I will refer to an author whose archive has been the subject of my study: that of M. NourbeSe Philip. In January 2011, Philip visited Bishop’s University to give a poetry reading for the Morris House Reading Series. After the reading, we had supper together, during which time we spoke of her archive, which she told me consisted of a series of boxes she was storing in her own basement. We discussed various issues related to the development of her career and she thereafter granted me permission to view five boxes from the totality of what she has thus far preserved. I rented an office in Toronto where I looked through these five boxes, after which time I appreciated the full gravity of what I had asked to examine and what she graciously allowed me to see. Much had to do with a public broadcast made by Michael Coren, a journalist for cfrb 1010 radio on 7 September 1995, when Philip was denounced for the recognition bestowed upon her as the recipient of the 1995 Toronto Arts Award in writing and publishing. At the time of his remarks, Philip was already a celebrated poet, academic, essayist, activist, playwright, and novelist, nationally and internationally renowned for her literary endeavours as much as her attention to issues of social justice and her pronouncements against discrimination. In his broadcast, he quoted Philip, who had publicly spoken about the award she was to receive. In particular, he voiced concern about the financial reward he believed was attached to the award when, in fact, no author was to receive monetary gain at all that year. He argued that she has received through taxpayers’ money, the Toronto Arts Award. That means she’s contributed a great deal to the Toronto arts scene. This is a woman who came here in 1968 and has done nothing but defecate upon this country and this [End Page 6] city and the Canadian culture since she came here. This is...