num_pages: 128
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."
language: English
title: The Queen of Peace Room
titlecomplete: The Queen of Peace Room
genres: Memoir
ratings_count: 8
series: Life Writing
awards: awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: The Publishing Triangle Award
category: The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press