News & Reviews
Review of Jon Swainger’s The Notorious Georges: Crime and Community in British Columbia’s Northern Interior, 1909 – 25. UBC Press, 2023. $32.95. Swainger sets out to prove four points. The first is that the early history of Prince George shows how the town quickly (by 1910 – 11) acquired a reputation for its “alcohol-fuelled…
Read More...
Unlike painters, lyric poets don’t do self-portraits. That would be redundant. But they do sometimes create alter-egos: Pound’s Mauberley, Olson’s Maximus and Berryman’s Poor Henry. Talking about yourself, in the third person, may have something to do with getting outside of the (Wordsworthian) repetition of settings, personal circumstances and attitudes, allowing for more objectivity. …
Read More...
Viv and I lost an old and good friend, Barry McKinnon, in October of this year. He was one of the founding faculty of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George, and among those who hired me to teach there in 1972. I was immediately caught up in the whirlwind of his literary activities.…
Read More...
Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre called the Hunka affair “the biggest single diplomatic embarrassment in Canadian history.” I’m not sure if he’s correct, or even what he means exactly, but Putin was gleefully able to use the affair to argue that there seem to be a lot of Nazis in Canada, and that maybe, if Canadians…
Read More...
Dickson, Lisa, Shannon Murray and Jessica Riddell. Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning. University of Toronto Press, 2023, 198 pp, $29.95C. This book is a sort of transcript of a series of reading-club meetings. The club has three members, and they are discussing four Shakespeare plays, King Lear, As You Like It, Henry…
Read More...
A Review of So Help Me God (Simon and Shuster, 2022) By John Harris Mike Pence is no thinker. So Help Me God is more interesting for its contradictions and lacunae than for what it says. It’s an emotive appeal to Pence’s base, a celebration of the profundity and efficacy of his religious and political…
Read More...
I’m a big fan of the Times Literary Supplement that, no longer content to be associated in the public mind with a periodical focused on ephemera (news and public opinion), now calls itself by its acronym alone: TLS. For us bespectacled eggheads with an obsession with books, a love of elegant prose, and an intimate…
Read More...
Vancouver Opera’s The Pearl Fishers (October 22 – 30, 2022) has a prologue wherein a screen projection informs the audience, in writing, of the exceedingly obvious fact that Bizet and the “Frenchmen” who wrote the libretto were privileged men absolutely ignorant about the opera’s setting (Ceylon) and about the culture and religion of its characters.…
Read More...
In Prince George, Brian Fawcett is considered royalty, a scion of the family that owns Kelson Group, one of the largest owners of rental property in western Canada. The company started here, and the town is thickly sprinkled with Kelson apartments. He is also the town’s most famous writer. Since much of his writing is…
Read More...
“Recently I was interviewed by the CNC Student Association” said Graham Pearce, Creative Writing instructor and co-ordinator of the English Program at CNC. “Damon Robinson and Anubov Sharma asked me how I developed my teaching style. I told them my formal education had some bright spots, but, overall, the postmodernists had taken over the classroom. “When I…
Read More...
I first met Brian Fawcett during a visit to Vancouver for Expo ’86. I was a reporter for The Medicine Hat News at the time. Earlier in 1986, during a trip back to Medicine Hat, I had picked up a copy of The Globe and Mail in an airport newsstand. I was fascinated by a review in it of…
Read More...