Heather Spears (September 29, 1934 - April 15, 2021) was a Canadian-born poet, novelist, artist, sculptor, and educator. She resided in Denmark from 1962 until her death in Copenhagen in 2021. She returned to Canada annually to conduct speaking and reading tours and to teach drawing and head-sculpting workshops. She published eleven collections of poetry, five novels, and three volumes of drawings. She specialized in drawing
premature infants
Preterm birth, also known as premature birth, is the birth of a baby at fewer than 37 weeks gestational age, as opposed to full-term delivery at approximately 40 weeks. Extreme preterm is less than 28 weeks, very early preterm birth is between 2 ...
and "infants in crisis".
Early life, education, and family
Heather Spears was born in 1934 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The daughter of Robert and Dorothea Spears, she was born to her father's second wife and had two brothers and a half-sister.
She began drawing at the age of 5. She received her formal training at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver and the University of British Columbia. After graduating from university, she traveled on an Emily Carr Scholarship to study art in Europe for two years. There she met a fellow Canadian, Leonard "Lenny" Goldenberg, a ceramist. They married and had three sons.
In 1962, the family moved from Canada to Denmark for a year so Goldenberg could study Danish pottery-making. They lived on the island of
Bornholm
Bornholm () is a Danish island in the Baltic Sea, to the east of the rest of Denmark, south of Sweden, northeast of Germany and north of Poland.
Strategically located, Bornholm has been fought over for centuries. It has usually been ruled by ...
, which had a large tourist trade. The family remained in Denmark from a combination of "poverty, put-it-offness and apathy", remaining in the country even after the couple divorced. Spears learned Danish but continued to speak English at home. She studied anatomical drawing at the Panum Institute and Arabic at the University of Copenhagen.
After her children grew up, Spears began returning to Canada annually to conduct reading and speaking tours, and teach drawing and head-sculpting workshops.
She died in Copenhagen on April 15, 2021.
Work
Poetry
Spears published her first book of poetry, ''Asylum Poems and Others'', in 1958. Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye called it " most disconcerting and haunting little book". Her poems are generally classified as "non-genre". She often combined poetry and art, as in her books ''Drawings from the Newborn'', ''The Panum Poems'', and ''Required Reading'', which present both poems and line drawings, and ''Line by Line'', which depicts drawings of Canadian poets along with sample poems. Her poem "The Danish Portraits" lyricizes the thoughts of a painter on his relationship to his portrait subjects.
To support her children as a single parent in Bornholm, Spears sold oil paintings and drawings, and also taught. She catered to the summer tourist trade by sketching individual and family portraits. At first she had difficulty drawing babies' faces, so she honed her skill by sketching infants in a local hospital at night. She became fascinated by
premature infants
Preterm birth, also known as premature birth, is the birth of a baby at fewer than 37 weeks gestational age, as opposed to full-term delivery at approximately 40 weeks. Extreme preterm is less than 28 weeks, very early preterm birth is between 2 ...
, a subject she had not learned about in her anatomy classes, and produced many pencil and chalk drawings of preterm infants in the
neonatal intensive care unit
A neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), also known as an intensive care nursery (ICN), is an intensive care unit (ICU) specializing in the care of ill or premature newborn infants. Neonatal refers to the first 28 days of life. Neonatal care, as kn ...
. She also studied infant muscle structure and began modeling babies' heads in clay. Later she traveled to maternity and neonatal intensive care wards in hospitals in North America, England, Sweden, and the Middle East, to sketch women in childbirth and critically ill newborns.
Spears began accepting private commissions from parents to draw their stillborns and babies who had died after birth. She was invited to serve as artist-in-residence at the Dalhousie University medical school in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1998. During her time there, she produced about 50 drawings of babies and older children at the IWK Health Centre. In 2016, she mounted an exhibition at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford called "Drawing the First Breath", showcasing sketches of more than 100 childbirths and 25 neonatal infants that she had drawn over the previous three decades. Spears also taught head-sculpting and exhibited her sculptures.
In addition to her infant portraits, Spears sketched dancers, musicians, athletes, and lecturers. She also did courtroom drawings. Among the cases she documented are the Reena Virk murder trial and the Midwifery Trial.
In spring 1989, during the
First Intifada
The First Intifada, or First Palestinian Intifada (also known simply as the intifada or intifadah),The word ''intifada'' () is an Arabic word meaning "uprising". Its strict Arabic transliteration is '. was a sustained series of Palestinian ...
, Spears spent six weeks in the Palestinian National Authority to draw children injured in the conflict. She funded her trip with $1,000 in grants from the
Canadian Council of Churches
The Canadian Council of Churches (French: ''Conseil canadien des Églises'') is a broad and inclusive ecumenical body, now representing 26 member churches including Anglican; Eastern and Roman Catholic; Evangelical; Free Church; Eastern and Orient ...
and a peace fund in Denmark. Spears produced 300 pencil and chalk drawings of wounded children in hospitals, surgeries, refugee camps, West Bank villages, and military courts. A diplomat helped her take the drawings out of the country. She published 75 of the drawings in a paperback book titled ''Drawn from the Fire – Children of the Intifada'', which includes an Arabic-language explanation of how each child was wounded. Spears gave slide presentations of the drawings before schools and peace groups to initiate discussion of the Arab–Israeli conflict; however, her public school lectures were often cancelled after complaints by parents that her presentation lacks "balance".
Spears owned the Galleri Upper Canada in Copenhagen.
SF Canada
SF Canada was founded as an authors collective circa 1989 under the title Canada’s National Association of Speculative Fiction Professionals. Several Canadian science fiction authors have made public claim to be "founding members" of the organi ...
; the Society of Authors; and Tegnernes Forbund, the Danish Graphic Artist's Federation.
Awards and honours
Spears won three
Pat Lowther Award
The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is an annual award presented by the League of Canadian Poets to the year's best book of poetry by a Canadian woman.Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. In 2016, Spears received a Naji Naaman Literary Prize (honour prize for complete work).
Personal life
Spears was divorced from Leonard Goldenberg (born 1937), a native of Montreal, with whom she had three sons. One of their sons, Daniel Goldenberg (born 1960 in Canada), is a self-taught artist living and working in Copenhagen.
The University of British Columbia is the repository for the Heather Spears archive.
Bibliography
Poetry
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*''How to Read Faces'' (1986)
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Novels
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*''The Children of Atwar'' (1993)
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* (republished in England as ''A Muted Voice'', 2009)
Drawings
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*''Drawn from the Fire, Children of the Intifada'' (1989)
*''Massacre, Drawings from Jerusalem'' (1990)
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* (illustrated edition pub. 2012)
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