RIP: Gabriele Helms, PhD.

In the early 1990s, I enrolled in a graduate seminar on Malcolm Lowry. About the seminar the less said the better, with the exception of then-PhD. candidate Gabi Helms, whose ferociously insightful mind and intellectual generosity made showing up every Thursday afternoon such a pleasure.

My term project consisted of a Lowry pastiche in a cardboard box: twenty-eight pages of text with no footnotes in twelve or fourteen different fonts, accompanied by a BC Ferries boarding pass, a gin bottle, rocks from Gabriola Island, a Greyhound ticket, a photo of the Nanaimo Bastion, & etc.

While my instructor's frown kept deepening the longer she stared at it, Gabi was hooting laughter from the other end of the table. Later on we had coffee, and a long discussion about Bakhtin, at the end of which Gabi generously and thoroughly took my multimedia extravaganza apart trope-by-trope.

The UBC English Department also organized, from time to time, afternoon salons where the creative writers in the pack could read from their works-in-progress. These events were no one's idea of a good time, least of all the writers', but a few of the same faces could be seen at each event, including Gabi's, who was, so far as I know, unique in her attendance at a series she never read at, being content to merely show up, listen carefully, and then, during the infamous feedback-from-your-peers portion of each afternoon, provide thoughtful, concise, and to-the-point criticism of what she'd heard.

Critical intelligence is a rare gift, and Gabi had it in spades. Her published works -- including many terrific Canadian Literature reviews, and some crossdisciplinary pieces on visual art -- were distinguished by their concision, thoughtfulness, and respect for the object(s) of her inquiry. I'll miss her.

- posted by cjb @ 10:26 PM