Overview
Heather Spears (September 29, 1934 – April 15, 2021) was a Canadian-born poet, novelist, artist, sculptor, and educator. She resided in Denmark from 1962 until her death in Copenhagen in 2021. She returned to Canada annually to conduct speaking and reading tours and to teach drawing and head-sculpting workshops. She published eleven collections of poetry, five novels, and three volumes of drawings. She specialized in drawing premature infants and "infants in crisis".
Early life, education, and family
Heather Spears was born in 1934 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She began drawing at the age of 5. She received her formal training at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver and the University of British Columbia. After graduating from university, she traveled on an Emily Carr Scholarship to study art in Europe for two years. They lived on the island of Bornholm, which had a large tourist trade. After her children grew up, She died in Copenhagen on April 15, 2021.
Poetry
Spears published her first book of poetry, Asylum Poems and Others, in 1958. Her poems are generally classified as "non-genre". She often combined poetry and art, as in her books Drawings from the Newborn, The Panum Poems, and Required Reading, which present both poems and line drawings, and Line by Line, which depicts drawings of Canadian poets along with sample poems. Her poem "The Danish Portraits" lyricizes the thoughts of a painter on his relationship to his portrait subjects.
Novels
Spears wrote a science fiction trilogy about conjoined twins, and a crime fiction novel.
Drawings
To support her children as a single parent in Bornholm, Spears sold oil paintings and drawings, and also taught. She also studied infant muscle structure and began modeling babies' heads in clay. Spears began accepting private commissions from parents to draw their stillborns and babies who had died after birth. In addition to her infant portraits, Spears sketched dancers, musicians, athletes, and lecturers. In spring 1989, during the First Intifada, Spears spent six weeks in the Palestinian National Authority to draw children injured in the conflict. She funded her trip with $1,000 in grants from the Canadian Council of Churches and a peace fund in Denmark. Spears produced 300 pencil and chalk drawings of wounded children in hospitals, surgeries, refugee camps, West Bank villages, and military courts. A diplomat helped her take the drawings out of the country.
She published 75 of the drawings in a paperback book titled Drawn from the Fire – Children of the Intifada, which includes an Arabic-language explanation of how each child was wounded. Spears gave slide presentations of the drawings before schools and peace groups to initiate discussion of the Arab–Israeli conflict; however, her public school lectures were often cancelled after complaints by parents that her presentation lacks "balance". Spears owned the Galleri Upper Canada in Copenhagen.
Memberships
Spears held memberships in the League of Canadian Poets, Writers' Union of Canada, and SF Canada; the Society of Authors; and Tegnernes Forbund, the Danish Graphic Artist's Federation.
Awards and honours
Spears won three Pat Lowther Awards – for her 1986 poetry collection How to Read Faces, her 1988 poetry collection The Word for Sand, and her 2000 book of drawings Required Reading: A witness in words and drawings to the Reena Virk Trials, 1998–2000. The Word for Sand was also the winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. In 2016, Spears received a Naji Naaman Literary Prize (honour prize for complete work).
Personal life
Spears was divorced from Leonard Goldenberg (born 1937), a native of Montreal, with whom she had three sons. The University of British Columbia is the repository for the Heather Spears archive.
Poetry
* * * *How to Read Faces (1986) * * * *
Novels
* *The Children of Atwar (1993) * * (republished in England as A Muted Voice, 2009)
Drawings
* *Drawn from the Fire, Children of the Intifada (1989) *Massacre, Drawings from Jerusalem (1990) * * * (illustrated edition pub. 2012) *
External links
*Homepage * *"Drawn from the Fire – Children of the Intifada" by Heather Spears (video)