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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
“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…
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…
You can’t, grammatically, have more than one best friend, but Brian Fawcett was one of my best friends. I met him in 1973, when I arrived in Prince George to start work as an instructor at the college. We were introduced by another of my best friends, Barry McKinnon. Brian was bigger, better-looking, and…
Prince George recently suffered the loss of its best-known literary chronicler. Chickenbustales plans to celebrate his life and capture his spirit in a series of reminiscences, articles, and snippets of poetry and prose, material that is both fresh and archival. We start with reminiscences by Barry McKinnon. Brian left Prince George in 1966, after…
Michael Walzer’s piece in the February 28 Persuasion is a timely caution against “Woke” historical revisionism — against, to use one of Walzer’s examples, the idea that Thomas Jefferson was not a hero but a moral monster because he owned slaves and took one as a mistress. The revisionists tend to argue that, because he…