Just Being

Essay Canada 2017 English 0:05:33

All night, Antouka had been thinking about death and dying. Fourteen years into cancer and some years into writing about that experience, Verena Stefan met Lorna Boschmann through the Cancer Margin project. They teamed up to translate into video what Verena had envisioned as a writer and visual artist. Antouka, the writer’s alter ego, takes an irreverent and philosophical look at everyday transformations, her lesbian love of 20 years and the question of the afterlife.

Verena Stefan Verena Stefan was a Swiss-German writer, translator and creative fiction teacher. She lived in Berlin from 1967-75 and elsewhere in Germany before she moved to Montreal in 1998.
Her first book Häutungen (1975) was translated into six European languages. English: Shedding & Literally Dreaming (1976/1994), French: Mues (1976). She is the Co-translator of Adrienne Rich’s poetry collection The Dream of a Common Language and of Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig: Lesbian People. A Dictionnary. Her novel Fremdschläfer (2007) on lesbian love, immigration and cancer has been published in French as D’ailleurs (Éd.Héliotrope, 2008). Qui maitrise les vents connait son chemin, the French translation of her latest novel, was released in 2017 (Éd.Héliotrope).
In memoriam.