News & Reviews
The book’s introduction explains why “lives” in the title is plural, and why the subtitle is “A Memoir of Sorts.” The explanation is confusing, but in an intriguing way. You might think at first that “lives” is plural to account for all the lives intertwined with Atwood’s: parents, children, lovers, associates, other writers…
Liberation of the Netherlands This is a letter that my mom wrote to her email address list in April 2005. I was included. It was 60 years ago then. It was 80 years ago today that Friesland, the Netherlands was liberated. I have attached photos of my mom, dad and my tante Annie… …
Sid Marty’s best poems tell stories about his job as a ranger in Yoho, Banff and Jasper National Parks (1966 – 1978). His job was in a captivating (beautiful and dangerous) place, and he had to do rare, exciting and / or interesting things like dangling from helicopters, repelling down cliffs, tracking rogue grizzlies who’d…
James Pew, a Canadian historian and Woke-Watch commentator, is a reluctant Jeremiah. He is convinced that the pro-Palestinian protests in the western world indicate the beginnings of a war of Christians against Muslims, in which war the Jews, in particular the state of Israel, are Christian allies. He views the protests as indicative of the…
In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against “the author of the Satanic Verses book,” arguing that the book “is against Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur’an.” The Ayatollah continued, “all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all the Muslims to execute them…
I first met Stan Persky in 1976, when he gave a poetry reading in Prince George. The reading was at the College of New Caledonia, where I taught, and it was organized by our creative-writing instructor, Barry McKinnon. Before the reading, Barry told me that Stan had been one of the instigators of the Georgia…
It’s common knowledge, in western democracies, that banning and burning books, and shaming, beating or burning those who read them, signals a nation’s descent into anarchy or tyranny. Book-burning was a common practice of the German Nazi party. Mao’s Red Guards featured it during the Cultural Revolution. And the Khmer Rouge destroyed just about every…
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…
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. …
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.…
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…