You can listen to me share news about Don’t Lose Sight and read one of my recent poems here Iguana Books blog

Read Genevieve's review.

In October 2021 I made application to have Don’t Lose Sight available in the Toronto Public Library system. The library’s website indicates that the library receives “a large number of submissions” and purchases “very selectively.” What a thrill to find out that my book is now there. Thank you TPL!

Poetry Pause is the daily poetry dispatch program of The League of Canadian Poets. Genevieve's poem "After Wordsmithing" that was influenced by Robert Frost's "After Apple Picking" was featured on March 28, 2022. Read it below or on the league's website Poetry Pause March 28, 2022

The following review written by Heather Swartz will appear in the Spring 2022 issue of the Canadian Arbitration and Mediation Journal

In Don’t Lose Sight: Vanity, incompetence and my ill-fated left eye, esteemed arbitrator and mediator Genevieve Chornenki invites the reader into the pain caused by emergency surgery on her left eye, as well as her tenacious pursuit to safeguard others from similar harm. She shows what it is like to sit in the chair of a participant with a personal interest in a dispute rather than in the chair of a “neutral” who leads others through a settlement process. Genevieve’s intimate and relatable tale is woven with wit, wordplay, and vivid imagery that grasped my attention immediately and kept me engaged, without pause, for the next 125 pages.  

After her optometrist twice failed to diagnose a detached retina, putting Genevieve at risk of permanent vision loss, she decides to submit a formal complaint to the College of Optometrists. A proposed settlement of a guilty plea of professional misconduct and a quality assurance file audit fails to address Genevieve’s underlying motivation for her complaint. Seeking a resolution that will protect other patients from the risk of misdiagnosis, Genevieve declines an invitation to provide a victim impact statement, not seeing herself as a “victim,” and opts to attend the discipline hearing with counsel in order to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, she finds the process impersonal and incomprehensible.  

In 1996, as a student of dispute resolution, I read the practical and educational Bypass Court: A Dispute Resolution Handbook co-authored by Genevieve and Christine Hart. It opened my mind and my eyes to a new way of resolving conflict and created a foundation for my developing career. A quarter century later, reading the novelistic Don’t Lose Sight likewise provoked both professional and personal reflection and insight...Continue with the full review Heather Swartz reads Don't Lose Sight

Hermeneutical Injustice—A Fancy Term for Just Plain Wrong (This article appeared in the ADR Perspectives e-newsletter, an official publication of the ADR Institute of Canada.)

By Genevieve A. Chornenki, C.Arb, C.Med 

Dispute resolution practitioners use goal-oriented terms like substantive justice and procedural justice to describe the outcomes they hope to achieve. But what about hermeneutical injustice? What does that mean? As a complainant in a discipline process, the author learned firsthand that, simply put, hermeneutical injustice means “What you do not know that others know can hurt you”. 

In the late 1980s, I began studying and practising ADR, working to master not only the skills but the lingo—substantive justice, procedural justice, relational justice, restorative justice… But hermeneutical injustice? I had never heard of that until my pandemic reading brought me to Ace[i] by Angela Chen. Once I understood what she meant by hermeneutical injustice, I knew immediately that I had experienced it—not in Chen’s context but as a complainant in a discipline process. 

The term is intimidating. Hermeneutical, I learned, just has to do with interpreting experiences. Hermeneutical injustice, as initially conceived, occurs when a group lacks the concepts or words to allow someone to make sense of an experience. The term was coined in 2007 by British philosopher Miranda Fricker[ii] who thought of it as a systemic wrong “not perpetrated by individuals.” As an example, she applied the notion to a woman who, before “sexual harassment” was a recognized term, experienced unwanted advances from a man in her workplace, but lacked the vocabulary or concepts to express and process what was going on. 

Since 2007, other writers and thinkers have expanded and critiqued Fricker’s concept. In 2012, Alyssa Cirne[iii] questioned why hermeneutical injustice could only be systemic. She pointed to situations in which individual actors deliberately obstruct or manipulate knowledge to their benefit, to the disadvantage of another—like the father and husband who negotiated the bride price for a nine-year-old. The girl knew that something was not right but not the terms of the deal or that she was too young to be legally married. Cirne argued that Fricker’s “systemic” characterization left no space to hold accountable “malicious agents” like the father and husband for their abuse of power. 

So, hermeneutical injustice really means “what you do not know can hurt you” or “what you do not know that others do, can hurt you and benefit them.” 

Like the child bride, I too experienced the deliberate withholding of information by people in-the-know who were invested with social power. I wrote about this in my book, Don’t Lose Sight, only I did not know to use the hermeneutical label. 

In my case, an optometrist had misdiagnosed a detached retina, a painless but sight-threatening emergency. After two remedial surgeries, I made a formal complaint to the optometrist’s regulatory body. The regulator provided little, if any, information about its process except to tell me that, if I insisted, I could attend the discipline hearing to make a “victim impact statement”, provided I shared my remarks beforehand. At the public hearing, an expert’s report about my eye was put into evidence, but when I asked for a copy of the exhibit immediately after the hearing, I was actively opposed by counsel for the regulator and the optometrist together with special counsel hired to advise the discipline panel. I was not allowed to get a copy of the report, or to see it. Why? Because I did not add myself as a “party” to the proceedings at the time of the hearing and should have known to do so. Even today I marvel at this after-the-fact use of specialized procedural knowledge to withhold from me substantive information accessible to every other participant. 

Years later, the lawyers relented and the regulator released the report. When I finally read it, as dispassionately and objectively as I could, I was taken aback; I had not previously understood the magnitude of the optometrist’s mistake. But it was too late to do anything about it. 

Had the report not been withheld from me by those in authority, I would have been able to make more sense of what had happened to me as a patient. More importantly, since my motivation in making the complaint was the protection of other patients, I would have been capable of more informed participation in the process. I could, for instance, have tried harder to influence the outcome, arguing for stringent remediation—fundamental retraining— of the incompetent optometrist, instead of the gentler outcome that the panel accepted. 

Hermeneutical injustice is so much harder to say than “just plain wrong,” but I am glad I can now view my unpleasant experience as a complainant through that lens. It somehow makes it more acceptable. 

More broadly, the term is valuable to those of us who provide dispute resolution services. It reminds us that not everyone knows the terminology and acronyms that we use, like interests, ADR, and BATNA. More importantly, it reminds us to take care that all participants have equal access to information about the process and the topic under consideration. 

[i] See Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (Penguin Random House, 2020) 

[ii] See Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing by Miranda Fricker (Oxford University Press, 2007) 

[iii] See “Willful Hermeneutical Marginalization: An Account of Malicious Agency in Hermeneutical Injustice” Aporia vol 22 no. 1–2012

Earlier this year I read "Chorus of Entitlement" at an open mic, and I confess that it's a somewhat intemperate rant about human nature. That being the case, it's not likely to find a home in a literary journal any time soon. So, here it is. Feedback welcome.

Chorus of Entitlement

The following short essay was published at http://www.moorehype.com/2022 as part of a series called "Why I Wrote..."

I was a nursing mother, precariously self employed as a mediator, when a detached retina forced me home, immobile for two weeks. No lifting—pen, paper, baby. My husband, who’d taken leave from his own job, now had two infants on his hands. Our abruptly weaned son slept in a wicker basket in the bedroom. Around 9:30 each evening, my husband fed him by bottle. I watched with longing.For the first two weeks after surgery, my only contact with the baby was his brief rests beside me on the bed...

See the full text here Why I Wrote

You doubt me? See Flower shortages.