In the eight years that Sonja has been teaching English literature at UTSC, she has watched students struggle with texts full of elisions and ellipsis — stories that won’t answer back, no matter how hard we shake them, stories that don’t give the clear and easy answers we seek, but instead leave us with silence, with evasion, with “maybe,” with dot-dot-dot… In fact, Sonja seeks out these frustratingly elliptical texts and inflicts them on her students, because she believes in the importance of silences that ask for noise — texts that not only give ideas to us, but demand ideas from us in return.
Sonja Nikkila grew up in Detroit, watching the CBC Windsor feed of Don Cherry making inflammatory statements in incendiary suits. She fled eastward, chasing education to Boston and then Scotland, little knowing that she would wind up back in the grips of the CBC broadcast zone.