Wanting Everything presents the collected works of Vancouver writer Gladys Hindmarch. In addition to reproducing newly revised editions of her book-length works (The Peter Stories, A Birth Account, and The Watery Part of the World), the volume collects unpublished works of prose as well as correspondence, criticism, oral history interviews, and occasional writing. Spanning over five decades, this diverse work challenges the conception of what constitutes a prolific literary career, extending the notion of writerly activity to include work that is social, collaborative, and dialogic. Hindmarch has made significant contributions to innovative feminist writing, covering topics such as the embodied experience of pregnancy and birth, working-class women’s labour, and the intimacies of domesticity, all while sustaining an engagement with local places and social economies.
Hindmarch’s work embodies the notion of proprioception that was so central to the poetics of the TISH group and other experimental writing in the West Coast tradition. However, in Hindmarch, "sensibility within the organism" is revisited as a feminist stance that connects the experience of the body – moving through space, breathing, labouring, connecting with others – with a keen observational reading of situations, the self, and others. Wanting Everything recognizes Hindmarch’s significant contribution to Canada’s literary and cultural fields, making her work accessible to new readers and literary scholars, and framing it within the history of avant-garde writing, feminist production, and labour issues. Edited by Karis Shearer and Deanna Fong, this remarkable volume concludes with a brand-new, in-depth interview with the author.
Wanting Everything continues Talonbooks’ affordable and carefully curated Selected Writing series.
Born in 1940 to parents Taimi (Aho) and Robert Hindmarch, Gladys Maria Hindmarch became known as a central figure in the TISH community and the Vancouver literary scene in the 1960s and 1970s. As an editor, she was involved in the little magazine Motion (a prose companion to TISH); the second editorial phase of TISH, which she co-edited with Peter Auxier, David Cull, David Dawson, Daphne Marlatt, and Dan McLeod; and issues 7–9 of The Capilano Review. She attended and participated in major literary events including the Vancouver Poetry Conference (1963), the Berkeley Poetry Conference (1965), and Women & Words (1983). Her writing has appeared in a number of local and national journals and little magazines dedicated to innovative prose, Canadian literature, and women’s writing, including Iron, Imago, Periodics, boundary 2, Writing, and The Capilano Review, and in the anthologies Cradle and All: Women Writers on Pregnancy and Birth (1989), Words We Call Home (1990), and Islands West: Stories From the Coast (2001). She is the author of three books of prose: A Birth Account (New Star, 1976), The Peter Stories (Coach House, 1976) and The Watery Part of the World (Douglas & McIntyre, 1988). Her collected works, Wanting Everything (Talonbooks), edited by Karis Shearer and Deanna Fong, was published in 2020 . An active member of Vancouver’s literary, academic, and activist communities, Hindmarch taught English at Capilano College from 1974 to 2002. Until the late 1990s she wrote under the name Gladys Hindmarch, but then prefered to use her middle name, Maria, pronounced the Finnish way with emphasis on the first syllable. She died in 2026.
Deanna Fong is a Postdoctoral Fellow in English and History at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, where her research focuses on the intersections of auditory media, ethics, and listening. She is a member of the federally funded SpokenWeb team, who have developed a web-based archive of digitized sound recordings for literary study. With Ryan Fitzpatrick and Janey Dodd, she co-directs the audio/multimedia archive of Canadian poet Fred Wah, and has done substantial cataloguing and critical work on the audio archives of Japanese Canadian poet and painter Roy Kiyooka. She is the author of chapters in the forthcoming books Canlit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (McGill-Queens UP, 2020) and Pictura: Essays on the Life and Work of Roy Kiyooka (Guernica Editions, 2020).
Karis Shearer is an associate professor in English & Cultural Studies at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. Her research and teaching focus on literary audio, the literary event, the digital archive, material culture, and women’s labour within poetry communities. She has published on a range of cultural production, including Sina Queyras’s feminist blog Lemonhound, George Bowering’s little magazine Imago, and Michael Ondaatje’s The Long Poem Anthology. At UBC Okanagan, she directs the AMP Lab and leads the UBCO team within the SpokenWeb Partnership.
