Stachniak, Eva 1952-

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Stachniak, Eva 1952-
(Eva Maria Stachniak)

PERSONAL:

Born November 27, 1952, in Wroclaw, Poland; immigrated to Canada, 1981; daughter of Jerzy Jerzmañski (a geologist) and Anna (a paleontologist; maiden name, Madej) Jerzmañska; married Zbigniew Stachniak (a professor), November 11, 1975; children: Szymon. Education: Wroclaw University, M.A. (with distinction), 1977; McGill University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—School of Business, Sheridan College, 1430 Trafalgar Rd., Oakville, Ontario L6H 2L1, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Sheridan College, School of Business, Oakville, Ontario, Canada, teacher, 1988—.

MEMBER:

Writers' Union of Canada.

AWARDS, HONORS:

First novel award, Amazon.com/Books in Canada, 2000, for Necessary Lies.

WRITINGS:

Necessary Lies (novel), Dundurn Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2000.

Garden of Venus (novel), HarperCollinsCanada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2005.

Contributor of stories to periodicals, including Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Grain, and Antigonish Review, and essays and articles to Canadian Ethnic Studies andNWSA Journal.

Writings have been translated into several different languages and published in numerous contries.

SIDELIGHTS:

In 1981 Eva Stachniak moved to Canada to attend McGill University. She remained in Canada after martial law was declared in her native Poland. She fictionalizes her efforts to come to terms with her past in her debut novel, Necessary Lies. In the story, a graduate student named Anna earns a scholarship from the University of Wroclaw to study at McGill. Leaving behind her husband, she begins her studies, her only ties to Poland being the letters she receives from her husband, letters that evidence the increasing anti-Communist sentiment that will ultimately inspire Lech Wałęsa and his independence movement. Ultimately, she remains in Canada and makes a new life with her second husband, a college professor. However, Julie Keith noted in Books in Canada, themes of betrayal—both political and personal—continue to surface, rekindle doubts and shadowing possibilities for the future. As its title implies, Stachniak's novel deals with this theme on several levels, considering "both the seeming inevitability of betrayal and its relationship to displacement as experienced by people of middle Europe," wrote Keith. Noting that Necessary Lies is "clearly bound up intimately" with the author's own past, Globe and Mail reviewer Jim Bartley wrote that "Stachniak's honed voice of authority, and the palpable authenticity of her characters and settings, arrest attention," drawing readers into a world that is "convincing and carefully wrought."

Stachniak's second novel, Garden of Venus, is the story of the beautiful daughter of a Greek peasant who, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rose to become Sophie Potocka, a countess and confidante to the royalty of Europe.

Stachniak told CA: "I am fascinated with what happens to people living on the borderline of cultures and ethnic identities. People facing conflicting loyalties, thrown into contact with ‘the other,’ people in the cultural crucible where new identities have to be forged. Immigrant stories often do just that, but since cultural isolation is hardly sustainable anywhere on earth, the issues of cultural borderlines have become the universal stories of our century.

"I often go to Polish stories for inspiration. … Poland tried, through centuries, to be a multicultural state, with rather disastrous results, and the lessons drawn from these disasters often are the starting point of my writing. I like to bring back these stories, examine them from another culture's point of view, and see if they can survive this examination. If they do, they often surprise me.

"For inspiration, I find myself constantly watching my own bi-cultural identity for hints of tensions, not always obvious and often very misleading. When probed, areas of these tensions often yield surprisingly rich results."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Books in Canada, September-October, 2001, Julie Keith, review of Necessary Lies.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), July 21, 2001, Jim Bartley, review of Necessary Lies;August 6, 2005, Beatriz Hausner, review ofGarden of Venus.

Quill & Quire, August 2005, Caroline Skelton, review of Garden of Venus.