Archive for the ‘Canada’ Category

Writers by the Dozen: Peter Wilkins’ Portraits

Posted: May 14, 2013 in Canada, Debra Martens, Letter from, London
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TARDIS at Canada House

Canada House behind that blue box. Some guy called Matt Smith…er…The Doctor.

Last night I was at Canada House to hear Angela Hewitt and Gerald Finley perform in an enchanted evening (that was the closing song). If you have never been to London, then you might not know that Canada House is a splendid building on Trafalgar Square, placing Canada right at the heart of things, which would be cool if it weren’t for the plethora of Canadian flags on the building that seem to announce a centennial or some other imperially important occasion, but do not. Before entering the large salon for the Canada Plus presentation, some people gathered in the reception room that also serves as an art gallery. A white room, very modern looking, quite unlike the grand old entrance that you see once you get past security. And on the walls of the room were people studying us. Not just any people, either, but Canadian writers. Almost as if they had been granted their wish to be the fly on the wall at a party. I’ve overheard varied reactions to the faces that move a little and to the writer suddenly standing up and leaving the chair. “What was she thinking? Look at the expression on her face.” And “Those eyes are giving me the creeps, like they are watching me, following me.”

Photo Peter Wilkins

Photo Peter Wilkins

The twelve kinetic portraits were created by Peter Wilkins, who held the writers in their contemplative positions for five minutes by getting them to think about their answers to questions he had already asked. I wanted to know what questions he asked them, and this is what he replied.

PW: There isn’t a set list of questions per se – each sitting is more like a conversation through which I try and find out enough information for me to get a sense of the sitter. Beyond the typical personal questions, which involve their upbringing, parents, siblings, university and home life – i.e. children/husband/wife, hobbies, pleasures and concerns – I would ask some questions specific to the writers. These questions were along the lines of when they first felt they were a writer, their feelings the first time they were published, and about the writing process.

Who is this guy Peter Wilkins? I love that feeling that something wonderful has been going on without my knowledge and this is the moment that I find out about it.

photographer

Peter Wilkins (head and photo credit)

Peter Wilkins is a multimedia artist who grew up in England. Artist- in-residence at Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland, in 2009, his portraits of prominent Newfoundlanders were exhibited that summer at the Confederation Centre for the Arts in Prince Edward Island. His 2011 exhibition at the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival in Toronto was based on architecture and his work at The Rooms Provincial Gallery as part of Newtopia from Sept 2008 to January 2009 was based on the design of Gander International Airport. His most recent exhibition,  About Turn: Newfoundland in Venice, Will Gill & Peter Wilkins, is showing in Collateral Events at the 55th International Art Festival of the Venice Biennale.

I asked him questions by e-mail and here are his answers.

CWA: When I look at the Series page on your website, the two sets of portraits stand out from the more geometric or abstract series. What compelled you to do the portrait series?

PW: I had spent a long time wondering how portraiture could be updated with modern technology – to use a flat, moving screen as a canvas yet try, in some way, to acknowledge the history of portraiture. So I thought about the idea of the “perfect moment” in great photographic portraits that capture a single instant of the sitter, often reflecting or reacting to a key moment of a life – but that doesn’t always capture the overall picture of the sitter. So I started thinking how it could be done in video, which would have to be silent and framed, like a traditional portrait. The idea with these portraits is that they should be viewed like a painted portrait: the more you see it, the more you might get from it. It’s not about watching it in a linear fashion – it’s something the viewer should return to, and on each viewing something else might be revealed. These portraits are made up of approximately 9,000 still photos, which happen to move in real time so the viewer can get a true sense of the sitter.

The other point is that like the great painted portraits, with which you feel the sitter is there and a life is captured on canvas, the artist and sitter have spent time together, and this relationship and time is reflected in the portraits.

CWA: You did the Newfoundland portrait series in 2004. The eyes that seem to follow, the sitters who leave the sitting… after nine years, are you fed up with the Harry Potter jokes about moving portraits?

PW: Ha ha! No, I quite enjoy them. Funnily enough it helps some people grasp what I’m doing when I describe it, if they haven’t seen a portrait! But they’re not quite the same so I don’t worry at all!

Wilkins' exhibition Canada House

Peter Wilkins: Portraits of 12 Canadian Writers

CWA: What took you from London to Canada in 1991? What was it like to live in St John’s Newfoundland in 1998 after growing up in England and studying in London?

PW: I lived in Toronto for a year in 1991 for a work experience placement. It was fantastic in many ways – I had a wonderful year. In 1994 I went to live in Prague, where I met my wife. We lived there until we moved to London in 1995 and had children in 1996. By the time we had our second child my wife was very keen on moving back to Newfoundland and there wasn’t a great deal I could do! I thought the move was very exciting and we’ve had a superb time. We lived in St John’s for the first four years and then moved an hour outside the city to live right on the ocean. It’s all rather idyllic. And while I do miss the UK, I am able to get back quite regularly and enjoy catching up with everyone then – and seeing as much art as I can!

CWA: Could you tell us a bit about your other exhibition now on in London? Does the fascination with the colour of wine have anything to do with your role as co-host in Dom Joly’s Happy Hour for Sky TV?

PW: The colour of wine is based on a long-standing fascination with the endless differences of colour within wine and how the colour shifts, even in the same glass. So I’ve spent some time trying to devise a way that will accurately capture the different colours of wine – but also present that in a new and intriguing way. So I like to view the wine artworks as both documentary pieces, but upon initial viewing they are abstract artworks too, perhaps calling on the history of Colour Field Painting.

The other works in the show are what I would call my music pieces – or 33s. They are based on what I think are classic or great album covers – and the key colours are taken from the cover and recomposed in a circular fashion – mimicking the shape of a record. This way I hope the colours will commemorate the music within the record yet also appeal in an immediate, eye catching way. Quietly, these works were inspired thanks to my wife; when my vinyl collection finally arrived from the UK I wanted to put some of my favourite album covers on the wall. She would have nothing to do with it! So I had to think of a new way of celebrating the music and album artwork, without the student look.

CWA: Would you like to say something about your show in Venice, About Turn: Newfoundland in Venice, Will Gill & Peter Wilkins?

PW: It is a great honour that Will Gill and I are representing Newfoundland – the first time two NL-based artists have been officially invited to take part – at the Venice Biennale in a Collateral Event. It’s wonderful, very exciting to be there. We have a great gallery on the Grand Canal (Galleria Ca’ Rezzonico). The interest we’ve already received is much greater than we expected. Both of us have made work on a large scale.

Who are the twelve writers, you ask.Margaret Atwood, Roch Carrier, Austin Clarke, Douglas Coupland, Wayne Johnston, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Alistair MacLeod, Yann Martel, Anne Michaels, David Adams Richards, Jane Urquhart and M.G. Vassanji.

You can see 12 Writers’ Portraits at Canada House until May 31, 2013. Click here for the Venice Biennale.

Canada House (Peter Wilkins)

Canada House (Peter Wilkins)

Translating Montreal: Where Blueberries Are Not Myrtilles by Neil Smith

Posted: April 17, 2013 in Canada, France
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Reblogged from QWF Writes:

Last time I was in Paris, two men travelling on my train got into a fight when one dared address the other using tu.

“Vous m’avez tutoyé, monsieur! Vous m’avez tutoyé!”

A face was slapped. A beret was knocked askew.

Their hullaballoo over tu reminded me of the time I was at my Montreal gym and asked a fellow if he’d finished with the bench press.

Read more… 497 more words

This blog is by translator and writer Neil Smith. His discussion of differences between French in France and Quebec was posted originally on the Quebec Writers' Federation blog.
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The Shoemaker and the Rooster: Rhonda Douglas in Thailand

Posted: April 10, 2013 in Canada, Thailand
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Rhonda Douglas

Rhonda Douglas

Rhonda Douglas is a poet and writer based (most of the time) in Ottawa, Canada. She published Some Days I Think I Know Things: The Cassandra Poems in 2008 with Signature Editions. She is currently completing a new poetry manuscript, For, and writing a set of essays about the work she does in her “other life” as Global Projects Director for Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO).

Canadian Writers Abroad: Mini-Interview with Rhonda Douglas

1. Why did you leave your desk?

I travel for work quite frequently, usually overseas to Asia or Africa. To get some writing done, I will sometimes add on a few days to a trip. In this case, I had meetings in Chiang Rai (northern Thailand) and then went down to Bangkok for a few days to do some research for a non-fiction project.

2. When and where did you go?

I was in Chiang Rai, Thailand, in early February 2013, and then spent a few days in the neighbourhood of Rom Klao, which is about five kilometres from Bangkok International Suvarnabhumi Airport. It’s quite a mixed neighbourhood – new condos going up across from home renovation centres and Honda dealerships, a lovely park with a man-made lake in its centre, juxtaposed with some very poor areas home to people relocated from slums in downtown Bangkok by the municipality several years ago. I was there to visit a sub-contracted shoemaker who glues together shoes for a local factory.

3. What colour or odour did you notice or remember?

The woman I was staying with (Sayan) was completing an order for 700 pairs of sandals. Before they are sewn, the sandal uppers are secured to the sole using industrial-strength glue. I was warned about the pungent scent by my host but since the lower floor of their house was open to the outside, I thought it would be fine. Within seconds of her opening the glue-pot, my eyes were stinging and watering, and within ten minutes I had a throbbing headache. I could manage to keep working for about another thirty minutes before I had to leave to get some fresh air and take some Tylenol. Yet Sayan works with this day in and day out, and has done so for thirty years. I asked her why she doesn’t wear a mask but she said she’s used to it, though she did tease her husband about him being addicted to the glue, claiming that’s why he works such long days. (Lek will often work until 2 or 3 in the morning. He starts work just after 8 a.m.)

Shoemaker's workshop

Rhonda glues shoes

4. Did you meet anyone?

I met Sayan and her husband, Lek, who were my hosts in Rom Klao. I was also there with my colleagues from HomeNet Thailand – Poonsap and Da, who shared translation duties and accompanied me in Rom Klao overnight. We met several other home-based workers primarily involved in shoemaking.

5. What was the best and worst part of your sojourn?

I enjoyed meeting Sayan very much. They have a lovely family and were very welcoming. The worst part would have to be the roosters kept outside in bamboo cages, which did not confine their loud crowing to dawn but instead seemed like they were screaming in my ear at regular intervals throughout the night as I tried to sleep. I have never hated an animal so much. Da took me to get fried chicken from a street vendor and I kept wishing we could just fry up that damn rooster and ensure the neighbourhood a good night’s sleep. Of course, everyone else is probably used to it.

caged rooster in Thailand

Rooster in a cage

6. Is there anything else you would like to tell us?

This visit was part of a non-fiction project highlighting the working lives of informal workers. If people are interested in reading more on that topic, they could visit www.wiego.org or www.inclusivecities.org for more information.

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A deluge of fat words

Posted: March 27, 2013 in Canada, China, Spain
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Spain 2013

White. White stones on the beach, white buildings, white stones in the paving of streets, white marble steps with flat red brick edging. Olive trees hiking up the hills, agriculture crammed onto the terraces. A ribbon of road squeezed between coast and hills. You’d think I’d write about the blue of the water beside our hotel near Nerja in Spain at the end of February. But I was struck by the white of things. Perhaps this had something to do with coming from the land of grey. When I lived in Kenya and India, I couldn’t understand why so many northern Europeans came for one week to such farflung places. After a year and a half under grey skies, I now understand the draw of the sun.

Over lunch one day, in either Málaga or Grenada, the hills and caves visible from the road got me to thinking about the Spanish Civil War and whether Norman Bethune had come this far south. Can it be that you don’t know who Norman Bethune is? He was a Canadian doctor who went to Spain in 1936 to join the International Brigade to fight the fascists, and who created the portable transfusion clinic. He also went to China, where he was welcomed for his innovative treatment of TB and for his hospital field work there too during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Much admired in China, he was brought to the attention of Canadians by the book The Scalpel, the Sword: the Story of Doctor Norman Bethune (1952), by Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon.Scalpel reissue

Given that several Canadian writers have been to Spain, this is not the place to write about my family vacation nor about a revolutionary doctor, even if he was Canadian – unless I can work in some literary connections. How many can I make?

One of the biographers, Ted Allan, wrote a novel about his time in Spain with the International Brigade, called This Time a Better Earth (1939). Never heard of it? Then perhaps you have heard of Love is a Long Shot (1984), which won the Stephen Leacock Award. Or his short story and screenplay, Lies My Father Told Me.

While The Scalpel, the Sword is inspiring, I was irritated by the present-tense scenes that read like a film script. My irritation is nothing compared to the criticism of others, from the Canadian Encyclopedia’s mention of lack of documentation to the Globe and Mail’s reviewer: “Though it moved many readers, the book was an unreliable hagiography stuffed with invented dialogue and lacking footnotes, an index or any other scholarly apparatus. More than half the book was set in China, where the two authors had not set foot. They drew liberally on a 1948 Chinese novel by Zhou Erfu, Doctor Norman Bethune, which they forgot to acknowledge.”  -Judy Stoffman, Globe and Mail, 19 May 2009.

The book Stoffman was reviewing was not The Scalpel, the Sword but a biography of Norman Bethune by Adrienne Clarkson, one of the Penguin Extraordinary Canadians series, titled, simply, Norman Bethune. The former Governor General has published, among her many works, the novel: A Lover More Condoling (1968), about a Canadian widow in France. There are now several works about Bethune’s life, including the 2011 Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune by Roderick and Sharon Stewart.

I wondered if the fighting in the Spanish Civil War had brought Bethune south.

English: Canadian Blood Transfusion Unit which...

English: Canadian Blood Transfusion Unit which operated during the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Norman Bethune is at the right. ca. 1936 – 1937 / Spain Italiano: Unità transfusionale canadese durante la Guerra civile spagnola. A destra il dott. Norman Bethune. ca. 1936 – 1938 / Spagna (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Postcards

Posted: February 26, 2013 in Austria, Canada, Debra Martens, Paris
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postcard of Leacock house

Stephen Leacock’s house in Orillia

You are on a trip somewhere. You spin the rack, buy some postcards, some stamps, go sit at a cafe and write a postcard to your lover, your parents, your child. Remember doing this, back when you knew their address because people didn’t move? Or when you actually filled in the addresses in the back of your agenda, when you carried an agenda? You sometimes thought your postcards were responsible for the survival of the post office. Now sending postcards should be easier; you should have the addresses on your portable device. But do you? And can you find post cards or post offices? Who writes postcards anymore? Are postcards now in the realm of nostalgia?

No, they are not gone, but their use may be morphing into a less personal and more public function. At the beginning of this century, when I lived in Vienna, I picked up free postcards left in cafes, which advertised events, plays, readings, causes. A cool picture on one side, and information on the other. Hey, my Viennese friends, are those postcards still being dropped in cafes? While postcards are sold to collectors at flea markets, they are also being used for such things as education, charitable endeavours and design contests, such as Nottingham , art, and local history.

www.architekturtage.at

Invitation to Austrian architecture

About the same time that postcards made their way into cafes as advertisements, the short story took a spin in a mini. Grain magazine was the first, I think, to run a postcard story contest. (Grain‘s was 500 words or less; I remember deleting them one by one for “The End of Things.”). The Writer’s Union of Canada joined in with an even shorter version (250 words). These stories were published, but not on postcards, which might have brought the authors more readers. Now Geist is running a contest that actually requires a postcard image to go with the uber short story. Here is CWA’s advice: print up a bunch of postcards with a photo of the magazine cover on one side and story with web link on the other, and distribute them around bookstores –  oh right, hardly any left – ok, then, cafes and libraries, for free. Promote those story winners.

UK author Angela Carter sent enough postcards to her friend (and now literary executor) that the friend has published a book based on them with Bloomsbury. My favourite librarian blogger has put up postcards from the archives of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea: click here. Not surprisingly, postcards have also made their way into popular culture, in song, such as “Postcard from Paris” and film, for example, “Postcards from the Edge.” What examples can you think of?

The postcard has been around since the nineteenth century. It might be called the precursor to the tweet: short and inexpensive message to loved ones that others can read. Information on its history takes us to Paris and England and the United States, according to this  Wikipedia history. I would love to know how many postcards were sent over the years in Canada, from loggers and tree planters, from cottagers, soldiers on duty, nurses on holiday, students leaving home for the first time, relocated workers, lovers in long-distance relationships, from families doing their cross-Canada car trip. And from writers abroad.

A quick random check shows six postcards in the Dorothy Livesay papers at the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections from her trip to Bulgaria in 1977 for a writer’s conference. Would it be interesting to know how many postcards made it into the archives of other writers and whether there was a peak period of postcard posting?

These two postcards promote a cause — I couldn’t find any promoting literary causes, so these will have to do.

Niagara River

Maid of the Mist. A tourism postcard, but also a cause as the river Maid now competes with other boats for the Niagara Parks contract.

www.freesunday.at

Sonntag bleibt arbeitsfrei! (Aviva Taborsky) This was part of a campaign to not have Sunday shopping.

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Jane Austen and…

Posted: January 30, 2013 in Canada, International Events, London
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newly discovered portrait

a young Jane Austen

January 28, 2013, was the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. There was a readathon in Bath on the day, and by Jane Austen societies elsewhere in the world, with live streaming. Famous people read the book aloud, and in the media famous people talked about it. Such as Helen Fielding, the author of its modern day version, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Joanna Trollope, who is one of six authors writing modern versions of Austen’s novels for release in 2013.

as discovered by Byrne

Possibly Jane Austen (Paula Byrne in TLS)

So how does this relate to Canadian writers who go abroad? Challenge accepted. Ray Smith is the author of The Man Who Loved Jane Austen. Smith grew up in Mabou, Cape Breton, and has retired there after spending most of his working life in Montreal, teaching and writing. And yes, he went abroad. In an interview with John Metcalf on August 17, 2011, in Canadian Notes & Queries, he says he wanted to go from high school onward: “Real history was Europe, Plato to NATO, and the cultivated mind spent a lifetime fleshing out the time-line. Because of this and because Halifax is a naval and merchant marine port, I looked across the North Atlantic for intellectual riches. My back was to North America. From grade seven or so, I yearned for Europe. Because I had little talent for languages, that obviously meant Britain.”
He went to Toronto and worked at IBM to pay off debts and save for the trip. When he had enough money, he “booked passage for Michael [his poet friend Michael Kennedy] and myself on a freighter from Halifax to Avonmouth, the port of Bristol. About a month before departure, I met Lorna, a nurse; five days before I was to leave Toronto we decided to get married.”

Marriage did not keep him at home: “I added Lorna to the booking. We took the train to Halifax, partied for a week, then boarded the ship, a Norwegian freighter with accommodation for six passengers. Lorna’s sister Lynda was making a living as a folk singer in London, and we stayed with her in her Hampstead bedsit. After a few weeks of pubbing and seeing the sights the three of us embarked on a tour – Edinburgh, St Andrews, Skye, Belfast, Dublin, and back to London.” He loved London, but the trouble was earning a living in the post-war hard times, so he and Lorna decided to move on.

“Everyone was enthusiastic about Ibiza in those days: you could live for a year on the cost of a week in London. Heating not needed, wine at tuppence a litre, fish and other seafood the same. Lorna and I decided to give it a try; Michael preferred to stay in London and returned to Halifax after a few months. I bought a typewriter (at a shop very close to 221b Baker Street) and a week or so later we arrived in Palma, Majorca. We were expecting a sleepy fishing town; the week we arrived Palma opened its one thousandth hotel and Kwame Nkrumah was there to judge the Miss World contest. We looked at our money. I was beginning to accept that I was simply too middle class to adopt the survival tactics of the English enthusiasts for the frugal life.” So they spent the last of their money on their BEA trip home to Toronto.

Smith may have not been comfortable staying, but he did go home with a manuscript: “I had already begun a novel during a brief stay in Villacarlos in Menorca. Lorna and I made a deal that she would nurse and I would write, planning to finish the novel in one year. Then we would see.” He saw his way to some fine novels, including Century, A Night at the Opera, and Lord Nelson Tavern. Elsewhere in the interview he talks about Austen’s novels: “In the surviving draft of the final two chapters of Persuasion, we can watch Jane Austen working through her scenes. In an almost telegraphic compression, she lays out the sequence of Anne Elliot’s thoughts; the precision is almost brutal…” Of Pride and Prejudice, he says, “…why must a novel progress as Pride and Prejudice does? Elizabeth Bennet’s struggles are forever young, the novel a living delight no matter how many times one reads it. But a form which doesn’t change is dead.” I hope the Austen zombie imitators heard that – a form [that would be the novel as Austen plots it] that doesn’t change is dead.

Although Smith confesses that he thinks The Man Who Loved Jane Austen to be his weakest novel, he explains its starting point, which is lovely and makes me want to read the book: “I had long had a picture in my head of Christmas shopping on St Catherine Street, of stopping at the corner by Ogilvy’s and seeing Mount Royal in snow, lit from beneath by the lights of downtown, somehow a magical vision, so I started there.” In the interview, he discusses his novel’s autobiographical elements from the fictional, and seems embarrassed about Frank’s Quebec nationalist in-laws. Then he returns to Austen: “The only stylistic aspects worth noting are that I stole Aunt Norris from Mansfield Park for Mrs Hatcher, and I relentlessly excised every blithe phrase, every hint of brio, keeping the prose flat and tight just as Frank must always keep himself in control.”

I am heavily relying on this CN&Q interview because it was the only one I could find. That life abroad did not agree with Ray Smith is, I think, an important aspect of the story of Canadian writers abroad. Later he went abroad again, travelling to Venice and Germany for research, to other cities on a book tour, on ski trips. Smith was named as one of ten underrated Canadian writers in the National Post’s “Flying Under the Radar.”

Is Ray Smith the only Austen tie in? No indeed. A descendent of Austen’s brother James lives in Canada. And she writes books. Not only is Joan Austen-Leigh the author of Invitation to the Party and Stephanie, among others, she has also written plays as Joan Mason Hurley, and co-founded the Jane Austen Society of North America. Very productive compared to her great aunt. Must be the Canadian diet and fresh air.

Ray Smith
Ray Smith

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Place and the Blues

Posted: January 16, 2013 in Canada, Debra Martens, East Africa, London
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from Radio Canada site

Robertson Davies

“My lifelong involvement with Mrs. Dempster began at 5:58 o’clock p.m. on the 27th of December, 1908, at which time I was ten year and seven months old.
I am able to date the occasion with complete certainty because that afternoon I had been sledding with my lifelong friend and enemy Percy Boyd Staunton, and we had quarrelled, because his fine new Christmas sled would not go as fast as my old one. Snow was never heavy in our part of the world, but this Christmas it had been plentiful enough almost to cover the tallest spears of dried grass in the fields; in such snow his sled with its tall runners and foolish steering apparatus was clumsy and apt to stick, whereas my low-slung affair would almost have slid on grass without snow.”
This is the opening of Fifth Business by Robertson Davies. In it he introduces the main characters, the conflict, and the time and place. The narrator and Percy are tobogganing in the village of Deptford, a village, the narrator explains ten pages later, on the river Thames in Western Ontario. He goes on for some pages about this imaginary village – its geography, religions, professionals and its families — but for me the essence of it lies in that snow on the spears of dried grass in the fields. I have lived next to similar fields, I have seen that snow, I have tobaggoned. Because of my experience, I inhale this passage as I would inhale the air of home.  book cover Fifth Business
However, as my professor of theatre, Anne Saddlemyer, said to me reproachfully when I was an undergrad, not all knowledge is empirical. I once tried to explain snow to a man in a country of England’s former empire. How do you get across to a reader a place that is unknown to them? Certainly the pages of exposition on Deptford will give the reader an idea of the place.
Let me take it from another angle. I read the novels of Joseph Roth before I ever went to Vienna. I remember struggling with his descriptions, sighing and saying I don’t like reading description. Because it was difficult for me to see the cobblestoned streets, the blocks of buildings hunched around the ring, the uniformed men. Can you imagine the particular shade of yellow paint of which he writes unless you’ve actually seen it? More importantly, does it matter? Or is the frisson of recognition (once yellow has been seen and read about) simply a bonus to the foreign reader? Which makes me wonder how you read the above passage if you’ve never seen snow.
Implicit in many of last year’s posts was the idea that it is important to know where a writer has lived in order to better understand the work. I did not really discuss this topic worthy of debate. Harry Mount, writing for The Daily Telegraph (7 Jan. 2013), thinks it is important. Writing about English Heritage’s blue plaques on residences occupied by famous people, he says, “But they are also more than just a collection of facts and dates, crucial as those things are. The knowledge of where someone once lived – particularly if it is at odds with their later fame and fortune – gives a peculiarly moving insight into their story.” He talks about the plaques in his neighbourhood, in Camden Town, north London, where the rich and famous now live, but which used to be “quintessential bedsitter-land,” and where George Orwell and Dylan Thomas once lived. Mount writes, “I’m a long-time fan of both writers. But I’d have known little of the enthrallingly dreary, everyday detail of their lives – or the bleak, mid-20th-century gloom of my corner of the world – but for those two little blue discs.”
Mount was one of many journalists writing about the blue plaques last week because English Heritage announced that due to funding cuts, it could no longer afford to put them up and is letting go its advisory panel. I love these blue ceramic plaques that punctuate buildings all over my neighbourhood, pausing me in my errands to contemplate a poet, an artist, a musician. There have been rumours of others wanting to take on the plaques, including the National Trust, but I have found no official confirmation. Why does this matter to Canadian Writers Abroad? Because Sara Jeannette Duncan has not yet got her blue plaque on the house in Paultons Square. All is not lost. English Heritage’s website assures us they are not cancelling or abandoning the scheme, they are just not taking new applications in order to catch up on their backlog while looking for a less expensive scheme for it to continue in future. Just as well, because Robertson Davies lived in England too.

Duncan's neighbour

Plaque at Paultons House, Paultons Square, Chelsea,
© English Heritage

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Solstice

Posted: December 20, 2012 in Canada
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I was thinking of wintry poems for this holiday post, and hit upon Robyn Sarah’s “Solstice.” So I emailed her to ask if I could post her poem, and she wrote back saying yes, and that one of her poems is in this week’s Times Literary Supplement (14 December, page 25): “Please Have a Seat.” Oh, yes, on the same page there’s also a review of a book by Sylvie Simmons about some Cohen guy. First the poem, then what you need to know about Robyn Sarah, who has not lived abroad.

              Solstice

A sly gift it is, that on the year’s
shortest day, the sun
stays longest in this house —

extends the wand of its slow
slant and distant squint
farthest into the long depths

of our wintry rooms — to touch with
tremulous light, interior places
it has not lit before.

—Robyn Sarah

4x5 Robyn Sarah_Photo credit D R Cowles (3)

Robyn Sarah; photo credit D.R. Cowles

“Solstice” was published in Questions About The Stars (1998; second printing May 2012), it has also been translated into French by Marie Frankland, in Sarah’s Le Tamis des Jours (Éditions du Noroît). Robyn Sarah was born in New York City to Canadian parents, and grew up in Montréal. A graduate of the Conservatoire de musique du Québec (clarinet) and of McGill University (Philosophy and English), she began publishing poems in Canadian periodicals in the early 1970s while pursuing graduate studies at McGill. In 1976, with her then husband Fred Louder, she co-founded a small press, Villeneuve Publications, and co-edited its poetry chapbook series, which included first titles by August Kleinzahler, A.F. Moritz, and others. The press folded in 1987. For twenty years she taught English at Champlain Regional College (St. Lambert, Quebec) while raising a son and a daughter. She lives in Montreal’s Mile End with her second husband, Boston-born photographer D. R. Cowles, with whom she has travelled to Israel and Morocco.

Robyn Sarah is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Digressions: Prose Poems, Collage Poems, and Sketches (2009), as well as two collections of short stories, A Nice Gazebo and Promise of Shelter, and a book of essays on poetry, Little Eurekas. Her work has been anthologized in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Since 2007 she has edited The Essential George Johnston, The Essential Don Coles, and The Essential Margaret Avison for The Porcupine’s Quill’s “Essential Poets” series. In 2010 she became poetry editor for Cormorant Books.

Finally, here is my Christmas gift to CWA’s readers and contributors, another poem by Robyn Sarah. “Before Snow” is in her collection The Touchstone: Poems New & Selected (Anansi).

Before Snow

What a light you take
from my sky — you clouds,
closing in, breathing a
cold down — though the
sun still flames a little
at your edges —turning to
silver now, and now
a pewter sheen. You came
as winter comes, expected
but unspecific, always a
small surprise, to know it’s
here now, this is it:

this is the long shadow, falling fast,
that love must rise to meet, if love’s to last.

—Robyn Sarah

Robyn Sarah’s works copyright © to the author.

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Leonard Cohen Gives Back

Posted: December 13, 2012 in Canada, International Events
Tags: , , ,
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Glenn Gould album photo

Glenn Gould, CBC photo

This is not breaking news, but I forgot to mention it last week. When Leonard Cohen was awarded the Glenn Gould prize, he gave the money back to the Canada Council for the Arts. Here is the text from the Canada Council website:

Toronto, May 14, 2012 – Leonard Cohen donated his $50,000 Glenn Gould Prize to the Canada Council for the Arts at a star-studded concert in his honour at Toronto’s Massey Hall.

“The truth is without the help and encouragement of the Canada Council I would never have written The Favourite Game or The Spice Box of Earth,” said Mr. Cohen. “I am profoundly grateful.” 

The Canada Council awarded Mr. Cohen an arts scholarship that helped launch his writing career in 1958, the first year of the Council’s operations. The scholarship was extended for three more years and supplemented with a small travel grant and poetry reading fee.

“We are deeply honoured and moved by Mr. Cohen’s donation back to the people of Canada,” said Joseph L. Rotman, Canada Council Chair. “Artists give back in many ways – through making art, through connecting people to each other, through giving voice to Canada abroad – and none more so than Leonard Cohen. How remarkable, then, that he has chosen to make this additional gift to Canada’s leading arts funder to ensure that others can benefit from the same support he received so early in his career.” 

Leonard Cohen is the ninth recipient of the Glenn Gould Prize, awarded by the Glenn Gould Foundation to celebrate brilliance, promote creativity and transform lives through the power of music and the arts. The Prize was originally administered by the Canada Council for the Arts until 2000. The Council also supported the Glenn Gould International Conference organized by the Foundation in 1992.

At the prize event, other singers sang his songs. Do they do anything like this at the Governor General‘s Literature awards evening? Have other writers read out their favourite passages from the prize-winner’s work? Cohen also gave a few remarks, some of which were about meeting Glenn Gould. Here is an excerpt from the 15 May Globe and Mail:

Cohen also opened up about his relationship with Gould during his brief time onstage.

He recalled meeting the Toronto native for the first time around 1960. A twenty-something Cohen was interviewing Gould for a magazine and nervously ventured to the pianist’s apartment to meet.

 “This was before the days of tape recorders,” said Cohen, who recalled that the interview – intended to last a few minutes – stretched for hours.

 “I was so engrossed by what he was saying, I stopped taking notes. Those words were burned into my soul.”

 Until Cohen returned to his Montreal home to write, that is.

 “I couldn’t remember a word that he said,” added Cohen, who became the ninth recipient of the Glenn Gould Prize and followed in the footsteps of Montreal jazz great Oscar Peterson and Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu Gould and Cohen would meet again years later, at Columbia Records’ New York headquarters.

 “He was recording something sublime, I was recording something otherwise,” quipped Cohen, noting that he was, at the time, endeavouring to master the hip new slang.

 “I said (to Gould), ‘Hey man, what’s shaking?’ He said: ‘I didn’t know you were from Memphis, Tennessee.’”

 While Cohen avoided overt sentimentality in his words, an array of speakers from different disciplines happily offered testimony to Cohen’s brilliance.

 Actor Alan Rickman compared Cohen to the 16th century English poet Thomas Wyatt. Celebrated author Michael Ondaatje discussed the ways in which Cohen’s 1963 book, The Favourite Game, helped him transition to life in Montreal as an immigrant to Canada. And Clarkson, whose friendship with the singer dates back nearly 45 years, said his two novels “made (her) life worthwhile.”

 But perhaps most touching was the brief tribute offered by Cohen’s son, Adam, who performed Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye before closing the show with a rousing singalong take on his father’s 1967 hit, So Long, Marianne.

Doesn’t that sound like fun? They know how to throw an awards party. I can see it now. At the Margaret Atwood Novel Prize and the Alice Munro Short Story Prize evening, D.W. Wilson and Sarah Selecky are going to get up there and talk about their meeting with the famous author, and then their literary friends — their up and coming writer pals — are going to read from their works. And then the kids, who are young adults loving literature, are going to get up and say sentimental things…. I can see it now.

You still have a chance to catch Cohen on tour. Check out Cohen’s website. Tickets go on sale tomorrow for his concert at The 02 in London on 21 June 2013.

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When one is gone and far — Leonard Cohen

Posted: December 4, 2012 in Canada, Greece
Tags: , , , ,
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So Long Marianne

Leonard Cohen in 1960, with Marianne Ihlen on Hydra in Greece. -James Burke, NYTimes

Audrey Thomas isn’t the only Canadian writer to have spent time in Greece. I almost called today’s post “resurrection man” because he resurrected his career, but I didn’t because something else I’m working on  makes it quite clear that resurrection man is not a flattering thing to call someone. As anyone who reads the papers already knows, Leonard Cohen came out of retirement because his savings had disappeared. Once he started writing songs and touring again, he found that he was enjoying himself. Ok, so maybe his voice is not what it was, but there is something pleasurable about having these late gifts from someone who had absented himself from our lives.

The title of this post is the last line of a poem that appears at the front of Cohen’s 1963 novel, dedicated to his mother [are my notes right?]: The Favourite Game.

There is a lot of information to be had about Cohen the songster, so I thought I’d look at The Favourite Game, which is about a young man from Montreal who spends time in New York City and at a children’s camp in Quebec. Here is a quotation from Breavman’s time in New York:

“He was relieved that it wasn’t his city and he didn’t have to record its ugly magnificence.  He walked on whatever streets he wanted and he didn’t have to put their names in stories. New York had already been sung. And by great voices. This freed him to stare and taste at will.”

There it is, one of the reasons writers leave home — to be freed.

There is also much information available about his early life, and someone has compiled and added to it already. That’s right, the book you’ve bought someone for Christmas: I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons.

In Montreal, Cohen studied at McGill, where he started writing poetry and also wrote fiction. Then he made his way to London, and in 1960, went from London to Hydra, a Greek island that was already home to writers and artists. I think we might be visiting Leonard Cohen again in these pages.

What other Canadian writers spent time in Greece?

Français : Le chanteur canadien Leonard Cohen ...

Français : Le chanteur canadien Leonard Cohen à Trouville-sur-Mer (Normandie, France) le 26 janvier 1988. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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