Beloved wife of Stephen Slemon; stepmother to Allie Slemon (Andrea Eadie); grandmother to Arbor Eadie; sister to Nancy Wallace, Catherine Wallace, Laura Howcroft (Ian Howcroft); sister-in-law to Sally Thorne (Mary Adlersberg), Mark Slemon (Jennifer Day), Jane Slemon (Bob Ennenberg); aunt to Tanya, Bradley, Carly, Leah, Michael, Kathleen, Geoffrey, Douglas and Megan.
She was a gardener, bird-watcher, lover of landscapes, and champion of all living things, including her beloved dogs Hamilton, Jessie, Picos, and Bodhi, and the cats she named after movie characters played by the actor Robert DeNiro.
A popular, and enormously celebrated professor of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Jo-Ann chaired her home Department during a time of intellectual reorientation, curriculum overhaul, and graduate program expansion. When the University’s Woman Studies program fell under threat of cancellation, she took on the role of Chair, and then worked to transform the program into a full, independent Department. She edited the scholarly journal English Studies in Canada, in the process reshaping its look, its content, its professional impact, and its social relevance.
Her scholarship, always feminist in approach, focused on early British modernism, and especially on women whose lives and works did not fit easily into accepted literary critical moulds. With Bridget Elliot she published a monograph on women writers and visual artists at the intersection of their art forms. Her work on the overlooked novelist and polemicist Edith Ellis, one of the founders of the Fellowship of the New Life in the 1880s, made an argument for a different way of writing the history of modernist socialism, feminism, and sexology. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway accompanied her through most of her professional life, which resulted, among other achievements, in the publication of a new, scholarly edition of the novel, with Broadview Press, in 2012.
From typing out the entire text of Mrs Dalloway, word by word, for the new edition, Jo-Ann learned something about the interplay between literary imagination and memory, and wrote about it in the London Review of Books. Like Woolf, she could pelt with laughter – a skill she deployed during the Covid years by trolling the so-called Freedom Convoy protesters on Facebook and on TikTok. She was a master of dry humour, of pointed understatement, of the perfect, capturing phrase.
Jo-Ann threw herself into life, and she crafted hers beautifully. She relished social engagement. She noticed people. She listened deeply, and sought to understand. When asked, she gave wise counsel. She overflowed with ideas, and shared them generously.
One of those ideas resulted in the creation of a memoir-writing group, which included, among others, the late Margaret Ann Armour, Pat Clements, Isobel Grundy, Margaret Mackay, and Jeanne Perreault. From her writing for that group, Jo-Ann produced a book-length memoir, entitled A Life in Pieces. It will be published by Thistledown Press in August, 2024.
We thank her care providers at BC Cancer, and at the Medicine Shoppe on Fort Street in Victoria, for their years of attention to Jo-Ann. We thank the many students who have carried her spirit forward in their own spectacular academic careers. We thank her many fast and enduring friends, to whom she brought her undivided attention, her loyalty, and her genius for nuance.
Her green burial will take place at Royal Oak Burial Park in Victoria, followed by a small, informal gathering of local friends and neighbours at her home.
Condolences may be offered to the family below.
McCall Gardens
www.mccallgardens.com
37 Responses
Like many, I would not be where or who I am but for Jo-Ann. As a colleague, as Chair, she pushed me to do things I thought I could not do, and supported me throughout the doing. Her advice, like her sense of humour, was both invaluable and utterly reliable. She lives on not just in her published words but also in those spoken words and gestures that guided so many of us.
Dear Stephen
Our thoughts are with you at this time of great loss. Jo-Ann was a scholar of great b distinction and although we didn’t have the chance to meet her often given the great distance that separated us your love for her was palpable. A life well lived ended but not forgotten.
I thought of Jo-Ann particularly during this year of being Chair, and wish I could have benefitted from her wisdom and humour as I did the job, the way I did years ago when I was so new in the profession. She was an original, and has no equal. Love to all of you, as you remember her.
Jo-Ann was a great friend and mentor. She was a dog-whisperer par excellence (I spent a weekend with her watching her patiently train the new Bodhi). I will miss her wit, her incisive reads of institutional politics, her amazing food, and most of all, those afternoons of too much wine at the Faculty Club. We shared a love of Edith Ellis. I was crying this afternoon in my office in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Without her, we never would have reached such a milestone. I look forward to Life in Pieces so that we can all find some way to stay close to her. Dear Stephen, I send you my sincere condolences and love.
Stephen and family, please accept my condolences. Jo-Ann with her lovely gentle smile was always a welcoming figure during grad school years ago. I had great respect for her work and character.
Stephen, my friend, while this news is not unexpected, it does come with a crushing blow. I have the greatest admiration for her determination to keep on looking forward and enjoy the best of the present. What a steadfast partner you have been and that too has my admiration. The birds have gone quiet in the neighbourhood, maybe they are in reflection as well. My condolences.
The act of listening entails both skills and arts. Jo-Ann was the best listener I knew, hearing both expressed and unexpressed details. She not only heard, but also reflected and remembered. Those of us who experienced the grace of this powerful attention benefited greatly from her creative consideration of our words and our silences. My gratitude to her for conceiving of the memoir group and inviting me to join will be life-long. Terry and I send our profound condolences to Stephen and all the rest of her family.
Dear Steve, I am shocked and grieved to hear the news of dear Jo-ann’s death. She was always a favorite colleague of mine, so smart and always so full of good sense. Do I detect your prose style in the beautiful obituary? You were a wonderful couple, just right for each other.
I will miss her greatly. And my heart goes out to you.
My deepest condolences. Although we never met, based on what I read, Jo-Ann clearly had “spunk”. Stephon and family, I am thinking of you and family during one of life’s challenging passages.
A beautiful life lived, and gone too soon. I will always remember her most for her quiet wit and special smile. So thankful to have been together last fall. Paul and I send our love.