Congratulations to Petranella Daviel, this year’s winner of the Candis Graham Writing Award at the University of Victoria!
In her own words:
“My current project is a graphic memoir exploring my own experience of fully acknowledging my bisexuality, and the circumstances surrounding that time. In perhaps classic bisexual behaviour, I was in love with my best friend, a girl, and I was also in an emotionally abusive relationship with a boyfriend who both found my attraction to women something sexual that he could fantasize about, and erased it entirely and dismissed it to others. The blurring between romantic female friendship and the bone-deep knowledge of love and attraction is something I am interested in and am currently exploring, along with the self-erasure I myself engaged in at the time — if nobody knows or believes I am bi, am I still really bi? The work also explores my decades-long experiences with depression and anxiety, and how those interacted with an affected my behaviour in these relationships, and how I continued to engage in self-erasure out of self-hatred. Overall the project is one of love. My research interests overall are in comics, zines, and other underground, queer-focused artforms, fiction, creative nonfiction, mental health, bisexuality and queer identity.
Great work, Petranalla! Congrats again!