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Making Contacts
Gaining support for the need to do
these educational and making the appropriate contacts has been more problematic
than the presentations themselves. We started with the legal profession because
our personal educational backgrounds included degrees in law, and our
experience included criminal work as well as family law.
We made our first contacts with the local Provincial Court
Judges. We knew well the frustration experienced by women appearing as
witnesses in criminal courts. We also knew some members of the Provincial Court
personally. The Judges we contacted accepted our invitation for an informal
coffee session. We attended this session with supportive facilitators from the
local program for abusive men, and this exchange of ideas and problems provided
us with the structure for a workshop.
We then approached Prosecutors and offered to do a workshop at
their annual conference. By this point we had developed written material for
use in the workshops, which provided a way to "market" our work. Legal
practitioners who had attended our workshops indicated that the material
presented would be important for lawyers to have at the outset of their
careers. As in other provinces, each graduate must pass a provincial bar exam
and most people wishing to practice in the province attend an annual bar
admission course prior to writing the examinations. Our association was
interested in reaching this group because many will practice family and
criminal law and because, if we could get material included in the bar course,
it would be published in binders which are available to and widely purchased by
all members of the legal profession.
The written bar course materials are important also because
they are often used as precedents by lawyers when drafting documents or
researching practical ways of proceeding on individual cases, and they are
updated annually. We developed a bar course session which differed markedly
from traditional legal presentations, and it received high evaluations from the
group which first attended.
Setting a framework to reach most of the legal profession in
Saskatchewan was not difficult because we were familiar with what opportunities
for education existed. We were also fortunate that participants at our original
workshops came from several different types of legal practice. After our
initial sessions in the legal community, we simply had to respond to requests
for more of this work.
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the passenger
door
(for Monique)
we
counted on me to steal lunchmeat from safe way it was always cheaper in your
little car: no insurance, the passenger door sealed/broken shut and ten dollar
gas for the week snatching milk crates from stores not yet open i was just less
of a risk and naive enough not to fear the absolute consequences the bottom
line on the bills never spelt out to me while you were already constructing
means of avoidance long before the mail came but you said that this you could
intuit by the way i drank milk straight from the carton at my place where you
came to pick me up for our first intimate meeting that evening later confirmed
my tarot's fool when i offered a sip of my beer to you at the pin-ball machine
which, out of age and abuse, gave us free games you would say, months later,
that you could always tell by the way the white ones either kept to their own
glass or, in the case of me, drank heartily from yours my original attempts
were to decipher this meaning but there remained a loss in translation so then
i tried to surround and inhale and grope it out in my mind i have since
reconsidered now i witness the navigations of our defiant caress even still, it
is always your eyes i see first and now when we sleep and your brown arm curves
down against mine, it is only in the golden deepness of summer that i feel
nearer to your equal in the beauty that the skin becomes upon waking
catherine lake
Toronto, Ontario |
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