| Main entry | Livesay, Dorothy |
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| Birth place | Winnipeg, Manitoba |
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| Birth date | 12 October 1909 |
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| Death place | Victoria, British Columbia |
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| Death date | 31 December 1996 |
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| Identifier | 0424 |
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| Birth name | Dorothy Livesay |
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| Marital status | married |
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| Religious affiliation | Unitarian |
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| Degree and date | BA, University of Toronto (1931); thèse d'études supérieures, Sorbonne; honorary degrees from University of Waterloo (1974); Athabaska (1983); McGill (1985); Simon Fraser University (1987) |
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| Paid work | writer; university professor |
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| Other work | activist |
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| Biography | Dorothy Livesay (1909-1996) was born in Winnipeg to the poet and journalist Florence (Randal) Livesay* (1874-1953) and the journalist John Frederick Bligh Livesay (1874-1944). The family moved to Toronto in 1920, where Dorothy attended Glen Mawr, a private girls' school, and then took a four-year honours course in modern languages at the University of Toronto. At the age of nineteen, she published her first collection of poetry, entitled GREEN PITCHER. She travelled to France in her junior year of college, and later returned to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. She returned to Canada in 1932 with an increasing sense of social concern, and enrolled in a social work course, eventually working at the Family Service Bureau in Montreal. In 1933, she published a play, "Joe Derry," in the journal MASSES. She was active in the Young Communist League, the Progressive Arts Club, and the League Against War and Fascism. After a brief stint of social work in New Jersey, in 1935 she returned to the family's cottage in Clarkson (not far from Toronto, and close to the residence of Mazo de la Roche*). In 1936, she moved to Vancouver, where she married Duncan Macnair in August of 1937 and went on to raise two children. Her poetry was honoured with two Governor General's Awards, in 1940 for DAY AND NIGHT, and in 1947 for POEMS FOR PEOPLE. She spent three months in Europe after the war, reporting on conditions, and in 1947 was awarded the Lorne Pierce Gold Medal for her outstanding work over the years. After teaching a creative writing course at the University of British Columbia, in 1958 she left Vancouver to study at the Institute of Education, University of London. Widowed only six months later, she travelled to Zambia, where she did a three-year teaching stint. At the time of her return in 1963, Vancouver was experiencing a period of strong poetic activity. This environment, along with the growing women's movement, inspired her to write some of her strongest poetry. Already known as an uninhibited champion of female sexual experience, Livesay consolidated this reputation by continuing to write about her sexuality as an older woman, her experiences with a younger lover, and the same-sex relationships she experienced in her youth and returned to later. From 1965 to 1985 she enjoyed a demanding spate of teaching and writer-in-residence positions across the country. While in Winnipeg, she founded, subsidized, and edited a journal called CV/II in remembrance of Alan Crawley's CONTEMPORARY VERSE. After serving on such committees as the Committee for an Independent Canada, the League of Canadian Poets, the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English, World Federalists, Amnesty International, and the Unitarian Church, retired to Galiano Island and Victoria, where she died in 1996. |
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| Honours and awards | 1st place for "Fireweed," Montreal Poetry Contest (1926); 1st place for "Impuissance," Montreal Poetry Contest (1927); Award for DAY AND NIGHT, Governor-General's Award (1940); Award for POEMS FOR PEOPLE, Governor-General's Award (1947); The Order of Canada (1987); Governor-General's "Persons" Award (1984); Award, "For a significant contribution to Canadian literature," Lorne Pierce Medal (The Royal Society of Canada, 1947); 1st place, Poetry award, President's Medal (University of Western Ontario, 1954); Canada Council Fellowship (1958-1959); Senior Arts Grant (1977) |
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| Residences | Winnipeg (1909-1920) ; Toronto (1920-1931, 1932-1934) ; Vancouver (1936-1958) ; Zambia, Africa (1960-1963) ; Victoria (1983-1996) |
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| Geographic regions | Manitoba; Ontario; France; Africa; British Columbia |
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| Primary genres | poetry; life-writing |
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| Books | GREEN PITCHER (1928); SIGNPOST (1932); DAY AND NIGHT (1944); POEMS FOR PEOPLE (1947); CALL MY PEOPLE HOME (1950); NEW POEMS (1955); SELECTED POEMS, 1926-1956 (1957); THE COLOUR OF GOD'S FACE (1964); THE UNQUIET BED (1967); THE DOCUMENTARIES (1968); PLAINSONGS (1969); COLLECTED POEMS: THE TWO SEASONS (1972); A WINNIPEG CHILDHOOD (1973); NINE POEMS OF FAREWELL, 1972-1973 (1973); ICE AGE (1975); THE WOMAN I AM: BEST LOVED POEMS FROM ONE OF CANADA'S BEST LOVED POETS (1977); RIGHT HAND, LEFT HAND (1977); THE RAW EDGES: VOICES FROM OUR TIME (1981); THE PHASES OF LOVE (1983); FEELING THE WORLDS (1984); BEYOND WAR: THE POETRY (1985); SELECTED POEMS: THE SELF-COMPLETING TREE (1986); BEGINNINGS (1986); JOURNEY WITH MY SELVES (1991) |
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| Periodicals | CANADIAN BOOKMAN; CANADIAN FORUM; CANADIAN LITERATURE; CANADIAN POETRY MAGAZINE; CHATELAINE; CONTEMPORARY VERSE; EDUCATIONAL RECORD; FIRST STATEMENT; FULL TIDE; IMPULSE; JOURNAL OF CANADIAN FICTION; MASSES; MONTREAL POETRY YEAR BOOK (1930); POETRY (Chicago); NEW FRONTIER; NORTHERN REVIEW; TORONTO STAR |
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| Other publications | Anthologized in: Bennett, NEW HARVESTING (1938); Benson, MODERN CANADIAN POETS (1930); Brooker, YEARBOOK OF THE ARTS IN CANADA, 1936 (1936); Canadian Authors Association (Toronto), VOICES OF VICTORY (1941); Carman and Pierce, OUR CANADIAN LITERATURE (1934); Clarke, THE NEW TREASURE OF WAR POETRY: POEMS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1943); Fairley, SPIRIT OF CANADIAN DEMOCRACY (1945); Gustafson, ANTHOLOGY OF CANADIAN POETRY (1942); Robins, POCKETFUL OF CANADA (1946); Smith, BOOK OF CANADIAN POETRY (1943) |
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| Organizations | League of Canadian Poets |
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| Father's name | John Frederick Bligh Livesay |
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| Father's note | journalist; general manager of the Canadian Press; essayist; historian (1875-1944) |
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| Mother's name | Florence Randal |
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| Mother's note | poet; novelist; journalist; translator of Ukrainian literature (1874-1953) |
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| Marriage 1 date | 1936 |
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| Marriage 1 place | Vancouver |
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| Children number | 2 |
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| Children's names and dates | Peter; Marcia |
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| Biographical references | Dictionary of Literary Biography 68; Lee Briscoe Thompson, DOROTHY LIVESAY (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987). |
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| Bibliographic references | Wagner, BROCK'S BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CANADIAN PLAYS (1980); Watters, CHECKLIST OF CANADIAN LITERATURE...1620-1960 (1970), p. 115 |
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| Research references | complete |
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| Archival references | correspondence and manuscripts, Dorothy Livesay fonds, University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections; manuscripts and typescripts, business correspondence, Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta; business and personal correspondence, Dorothy Livesay fonds, Douglas Library Archives, Queen's University; correspondence, Macmillan Papers, McMaster University; correspondence, Patrick Lane Papers and other collections, University of British Columbia; correspondence, Robert Weaver Papers, National Archives of Canada; poetry, biographical articles, criticism, letters from Ethel Hume Bennett, Lorne and Edith Pierce collection, Queen's University Archives |
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| Image credits | Image from the Dorothy Livesay fonds, courtesy of the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections. |
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| Copyright | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. Please cite Canada's Early Women Writers. SFU Library Digital Collections. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. 1980-2014. |
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