The Shape I Gave You

Martha Baillie was born in Toronto and educated in a French-English bilingual school. At seventeen she left for Scotland where she studied history and modern languages (French and Russian) at the University of Edinburgh. She completed her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Toronto. While at university, Baillie became involved in theatre. She continued to act after graduation, taking scene study workshops and classes in voice and movement, while supporting herself by waitressing and teaching private French classes. In 1981, she took an extended trip through parts of Asia including Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Burma, Nepal and India. This experience inspired her to switch her focus from acting to writing. Upon her return to Canada, she acquired an Ontario teaching certificate and briefly taught ESL to adults and French immersion to grade five students. Today, she has worked part-time for the Toronto Public Library for nearly twenty years and performs as a storyteller in schools, daycares, and at the Toronto Festival of Storytelling. Canoeing and hiking are two of her principal passions, along with visual art, the theatre and opera. Baillie’s first novel, My Sister Esther , was published in 1995, followed by Madame Balashovskaya’s Apartment in 1999. She has had poems published in journals including Descant , Prairie Fire and The Antigonish Review . Baillie has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. She lives in Toronto with her daughter and husband. About writing The Shape I Gave You , Baillie recalls: "The idea for the title came from remembering the experience of standing behind a statue of a crouching Venus in the Louvre. A child’s vestigial hand, tiny and perfect and severed at the wrist, was attached to Venus’ back, just to the left of her spine. The sight of that hand made me feel I was witnessing a child in the act of giving shape to his mother. It was an image that haunted me for quite a while after I first saw it. The tiny hand came as such a shock. Once, an entire cupid would have been clinging to his mother’s back, or climbing on for a ride. All that remained was his little, severed hand."

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