June 2, 1952

Janice Kulyk Keefer, the Canadian writer, was born  June 2, 1952. Her award-winning fiction includes titles like Rest Harrow (1992) and The Ladies Lending Library (2007).  Honey and Ashes: A Story of Family (1998) looks at her Ukrainian heritage and combines personal and public history in a family biography which connects the Ukraine (then Poland) and Canada. Keefer also teaches at the University of Guelph, in Ontario.

Keefer wrote an essay for a collection titled Lost Classics (2011). This volume,
Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission was edited by Michael Ondaatje, among others.

Keefer's contribution consists of her recollections of

a school primer book she had, printed about 1923....she had as a child though it was a novelty, it was Russian, and has two illustrations of a school boy, in one the boy drips ink from an inkwell on the back of a white cat on his desk; this is adjacent a picture of the same white cat spilling the ink onto the boy's desk.

For Keefer, her lost classic was lost images.