ESSAYS
“hear, here: fragments towards an imagined autobiography of my great-great-grandmother, indentured labourer, travelling from India to Suriname in 1873.” The Fiddlehead. (forthcoming)
“Writing in a Collective Voice: The political power of pseudonyms in women’s letters to Smallwood,” Newfoundland Quarterly, Fall 2024.
“on archives as oceans as archives,” stay here stay how stay: daze jefferies, pp. 26-29. St. John’s: The Rooms, 2024.
“Prairie Blackness, Home, and Belonging,” a commentary on Karina Vernon’s The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology. Prairie History 5 (2021): 79-80.
“Stopping the Hearse,” Riddle Fence, #40 (Spring 2021).
“Bitter / Love: A Mixed-Race Body Archive.” Life Writing, 18.3 (2021): 417-428.
“Body Lessons,” in Body Stories: In and Out and With and Through Fat, eds. Jill Andrew and May Friedman, pp. 133-36. Bradford: Demeter Press, 2020.
“Plucked Chicken,” ROOM Magazine. 43.1 (March, 2020): 45-51.
“Fifty Shades of Fat: An Inventory,” in Big: Stories of Plus-Sized Life, edited by Christina Myers, pp. 81-88. Vancouver: Caitlin Press, February 2020.
“Telling Stories with Gold.” Re-imagining the Guyanas, eds. Lawrence Aje, Thomas Lacroix, and Judith Misrahi-Barak, pp. 73-90. PoCoPages: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2019.
“God’s Will.” Cultural Studies <–>Critical Methodologies, 18.3 (2018): 228-235.
“Dusting for Fingerprints.” Life Writing, 14.1 (2017): 69-82.
“Thirteen Litres,” Geist: Ideas + Culture, 101 (Summer 2016): 13-15.
“French Kiss,” Don’t Talk to Me About Love: An Online Magazine, 2016.
“But Where Are You Really From?,” The Ethnic Aisle, Fall 2015.
“Autobiography by numbers; or, Embodying Maternal Grief.” Life Writing, 9.2 (2012): 91-102.
POETRY
fair wind: as ships. chapbook. Pinhole Poetry. 2025.
“this linen harbour.” The Dalhousie Review. Winter 2025.
“forgettings.” Janus Unbound. 3.2 August 2024.
“salt the page.” Unlost: Journal of Found Poetry and Art. Issue 32. February 2024.
two poems: “possible ground” and “hold my wake” Pinhole Poetry. Issue 2.4 January 2024.
three poems (from PatchWork Poems series): “work and mendings,” “this strange embroidering,” “threads of knowing” Dark Winter Lit, January 2024.
GUEST BLOGS, MAGAZINE ARTICLES, AND OP-EDS
“Soft Ooze; or, Here Be Danger,” Guest blog post for the Allard Pierson Museum, University of Amsterdam, 2025.
“Thinking with the Ocean: Twelve questions and a meditation to accompany the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Guest blog post for the Centre for Human Rights Research, University of Manitoba. March 2025.
(with Marlene Kadar), “Autobiographical Tracing and the Politics of Life Writing,” Guest blog post for WLU Press. September 2024.
“Speculation, Magic Realism, and Minding the Gaps.” Guest blog post for History Workshop Journal Online, September 2020.
“What the Oceans Remember: Thinking and Writing with Music.” Guest blog post for The Authors Book Club, February 2020.
“A Cocoon of Books, Music and Friendship,” in the larger article “Advice to Keep You Feeling Well Throughout the Year” in University Affairs, January 2020.
“Begin Anywhere,” Guest blog post, WLU Press, October 2019.
“What Stories Can Yarn Tell? Thinking About Creative Scholarship.” Op-ed, The Gazette, Memorial University, October 2019.
“Thinking with Oceans.” Guest post, SSHORE: Social Sciences and Humanities Ocean Research and Education Blog, May 2019.
“Creative Histories: Vulnerability, Emotions, and the Undoing of the Self,” guest post for storyingthepast.wordpress.com, a blog for creative histories, October 2017.
“International Women’s Day: Politics, Passion, and Pussyhats.” Op-ed, The Gazette, Memorial University, March 2017.
SCHOLARLY ESSAYS, ARTICLES, AND BOOK CHAPTERS
(with Deirdre Connolly) “The Knot Itself: Tangling with Multiculturalism.” Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies. Vol. 19, no. 2 (2022): 9-28. https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-4467.40692
“It’s Not Over Until the Fat Professor Sings: Teaching Fat Studies in the “Fattest Province in Canada” Talking Bodies III, eds. Michelle Ravenscroft, Bee Hughes, Charlotte Dann and Paul Nixon. University of Chester Press, 2021.
(with Kate Lahey), “The Impossibility of a Future in the Absence of a Past: Drifting in the In-Between.” Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, vol. 40, no. 1 (2019): 32-44.
(with Gina Snooks), “Salt Fish and Molasses: Unsettling the Palate in the Spaces Between Two Continents” (co-authored with Gina Snooks), European Journal of Life Writing, vol. 6 (2017): 218-241. doi: 10.4362/ejlw.6.213
(with Beth Pentney).“Knitting the Feminist Self: Craftivism, Yarn-Bombing and the Navigation of Feminist Spaces” (co-authored with Beth Pentney), Global Currents in Gender and Feminisms: Canadian and International Perspectives, edited by Glenda Bonifacio. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2017, pp. 21-34.
“Governing in the Twitter Era.” The Democracy Cookbook. Eds. Alex Marland and Lisa Moore. St. John’s: ISER Books, 2017, pp. 144-47.
(with Jocelyn Thorpe + 11 others). “Reflections on the Intro Course: A Pedagogical Toolkit,” Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice. vol. 37, no. 2 (2016): 54-67. Open access: http://journals.msvu.ca/index.php/atlantis/article/view/54-67%20PDF/54-67
“Minuet as Method: Embodied Performance in the Research Process,” Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research, edited by Jocelyn Thorpe, Stephanie Rutherford and L. Anders Sandberg. 187-199. London: Routledge, November 2016.
“‘I did not mean to make away with the child, I did not know what I was about’: Autobiographical Traces of Infanticide in Eighteenth-Century Trial Records,” European Journal of Life Writing. ejlw.eu. vol. 4 (2015): 56-76. Open access: http://ejlw.eu/article/view/123
(with Beth Pentney). “Virtual Lactivism: Breastfeeding Selfies and the Performance of Motherhood,” International Journal of Communication. ijoc.org. vol. 9 (2015): 1759-1774.
“Mothers and Others: The Politics of Lactation in Medical Consultation Letters Addressed to Samuel-Auguste Tissot,” In The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century, eds. Raymond Stephanson and Darren Wagner. 258-277. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.
“Gender, Class and Epistolary Suffering: Narrating the Bodily Self in Women’s Medical Consultation Letters to Samuel-Auguste Tissot,” The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library vol. 90, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 143-162.
“Epistolary Labours: Reading Childbirth and the Politics of Reproductive Medicine in Two Eighteenth-Century Women’s Letters,” Journal of the Motherhood Initiative (formerly, Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering) vol. 5, no. 1 (2014): 160-171.
“I am very badly in need of help”: Promises and Promissory Notes in Women’s Letters to J.R. Smallwood,” in Creating this Place: Gender, Family and Class in St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1900-1950. Eds. Linda Cullum and Marilyn Porter. 221-241. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014.
“‘A lack of eyelids on the face of the soul’: Vulnerability, Longing and Stigma in Hélène Cixous’ The Day I Wasn’t There,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism vol. 42, no. 3 (December 2013): 85-104.
“Recuperative Autobiography and the Politics of Life Writing: Lineage, Inheritance and Legacy in the Life Writings of the Marquise de La Ferté-Imbault.” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 24, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 13-38.
“‘Just the kind of girl who would want a chap to be a man’: Constructions of Gender in the War Stories of Tryphena Duley.” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, vol. 25, no. 1 (2010): 73-90.
“Maternalising the (Female) Breast: A comparison of Marie-Angélique Anel Le Rebours’ Avis aux mères qui veulent nourrir leurs enfans (1767) and La Leche League International’s The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding (1963).” Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies vol. 15 (2009): 1-16. Open access:
“Performing the Woman of Sensibility: Suzanne Necker and the Hospice de Charité,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies vol. 32, no. 2 (2009): 235-254.
“Last Rights, Last Rites: corporeal abjection as autobiographical performance in Suzanne Curchod Necker’s Des inhumations précipitées (1790),” Eighteenth-Century Fiction vol. 21, no. 1 (2008): 89-107 (special issue: Death/La Mort). Winner of the Canadian Women’s Studies Association Graduate Essay Prize, 2008.
© Sonja Boon, 2026.
SONJA BOON 