Title: The Queen of Peace room
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)
Subjects: Adult child sexual abuse victims, Biographies, Biography, Case studies, Enfants victimes d'abus sexuels devenus adultes, Violence against, Violence contre les femmes, Women, youth, sexual abuse, rape, nature, God, New York City, Newfoundland, Canada. poetry, epilepsy, nightmares, HIV, AIDS, Caffe Cino, off Off-Broadway, Newfoundland and labrador, biography, Women, crimes against, Affect (psychology), Women, psychology, Self, LGBTQ HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ biography and memoir, collection:judy_grahn_award=finalist, Abused wives
Places: Newfoundland, Greenwich Village New York City, New Foundland, Canada, New York City, West Village, Vancouver Canada
People: Magie Dominic (1944-), Joe Cino, Neil Flanagan, Kenny Burgess
Time periods: last half 20th century, beginning years 21st cebtury, mid Twentieth Century North America