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…
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests against systemic racism, happening now all over the western world, feature something that didn’t characterize the American civil-rights protests of the 1960s — the toppling, defacing, beheading and removal of statues of historical figures, in a series of events referred to by some as “the statue wars.” What’s interesting…
Jeanne Clarke Local History Awards ceremonies drew about 120 people to the Central B.C. Railway and Forestry Museum. There were four awards presented for publication of history books centring on Northern B.C. One was given to Curt Garland for Uphill Both Ways. The second was for Tyler McCreary’s Shared Histories: Wetswit’en — Settler Relations in Smithers, B.C. The third…
I played baseball a couple of times with Ken Belford. It was in the 1980s, in a league where our team of writers, which had George Bowering, Mike Barnholden, Norm Sibum, and bookseller Jim Allen, played against other print-related teams—Duthie Books had a team, there was a team of newspaper guys run by Vancouver Sun…
I knew Ken through Barry McKinnon, my colleague in the English Department at the College of New Caledonia (CNC). Barry regularly included Ken in his series of Canada Council readers, a series that started in 1969 and ran into the mid 1980s. Starting in 1972, I worked as Barry’s factotum in this enterprise, printing posters,…
“Postnorth brings together experienced poets and emerging writers,” said Graham Pearce, College of New Caledonia creative writing instructor, in his introductory remarks. He continued: Postnorth is an attempt to hustle passion and trouble onto the page. . . . Postnorth is a moment where anything can happen . . . . To the writers, I say this:…
Fred Speckeen’s talk, part of CNC’s 50th birthday celebration, was a personalized, humorous, and necessarily abbreviated account of some rather complex history. That history started about a decade before Speckeen turned up at CNC, with UBC President John B. Macdonald’s 1962 report on post-secondary education in BC, a report that recommended the establishment of two…
Fawcett’s “enquiry” is “impolite” in the sense that it attempts objectivity in a context that isn’t currently welcoming it. As he says, cultural appropriation and misappropriation is “a hot-button question.” However, it’s “a sub-issue of the cultural self-determination that every minority in a multicultural society has the right to pursue” and, as a sub-issue, “it…
edited by Rob Budde. Prince George: Wink Books (at the UNBC Copy Centre), 2019. 28 pp. $10.00. This chapbook, containing the work of fourteen poets, begins with a quotation from Wong, “jail the stories & the storytellers, but they will keep speaking the night, until empire expires.” This is followed by an appeal from…
A significant cross-section of northern B.C. literary and artistic talent is showcased in the Summer 2019 issue (Vol. 4) of the literary magazine, ThimbleBerry, edited by Kara-lee MacDonald of Fort St. John and Rob Budde of the University of Northern B.C. This cross-section is primarily, as the editorial introduction explains, the work of only…
Race” for the purposes of Dr Alexis Mootoo’s speech means Mootoo’s own ethnicity, African, described as “black (visible)” and studied in its interaction with the dominant colonialist ethnicity, which is European (Anglo-Saxon in the U.S. and Portugese in Brazil), described as “white.” “Tensions” are non-violent in the sense of attitudinal and institutionalized (“structural”). In liberal…