Archive for the ‘London’ 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)

Canadian Buzz at the London Book Fair 2013

Posted: April 23, 2013 in Debra Martens, Letter from, London
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Livres Canadiens

Canadian publishers at London Book Fair 2013

There were over 20 Canadian publishers at the London Book Fair this year, as well as some agents. I asked a few of them if it was worth their while, given the size and the not inexpensive venue at Earls Court Exhibition Centre. For Linda Cameron, Director, The University of Alberta Press, “The London Book Fair provides an important opportunity for me to meet with our UK distributor and publishers from other countries to discuss rights and territorial sales.” She also goes for “the latest innovations in the publishing industry.” Alana Wilcox, Editorial Director of Coach House Press, admits that her primary goal of selling rights keeps her busy in meetings with agents and publishers. Wilcox emphasizes the importance of repeat visits to the Book Fair:  “It’s always valuable to spend time with colleagues from around the world — you can’t always measure it in dollars, but it’s important to talk with fellow publishers, especially when our industry is changing so quickly. Selling rights requires a very long view — it takes years to build up a good network. That’s the most important thing about the fair — the chance to meet up with everyone.”

I didn’t meet up with anyone, but I did go to a panel discussion in the airy and not crowded Thames Room, called “Gloves Off! How Are Writers, Editors and Readers Feeling About Digital?” It promised to “explore the creative and collaborative relationships that need to happen to move publishing forward in terms of the creation of innovative content and engaged communities.” Commissioning editor Katharine Reeve tried to get the gloves off over whether editors or marketers should make the decisions in the digital future of books (editorial vision vs. technological predictors) but in the end spoke up for cooperation between the two departments. Reeve is also Head of the Department of Creative Writing and Publishing at Bath Spa University, and she had some startling statistics to cite: Last year there were 32 million books with ISBNs, a huge increase from less than a million because of self-publishing – and that does not include writers who did not bother getting an ISBN. Some best-seller lists now include self-published books. Self-publishing and print-on-demand services are changing the book market dramatically. Reeve said, “Print alone is not going to save the industry. That’s just one platform.”

How on earth can writers draw attention to their work in this avalanche of words?

Hint: haven’t you read something about Bath Spa University recently?

Kate Pullinger (Canadian writer abroad!) and Donna Hancox both talked about the importance of making the most of digital technology for creative work. Pullinger is publishing her next novel with a digital supplement. They talked about the importance of trans-media fiction, of combining your chapters with perhaps a blog by a character and short films of people your characters meet, for example. Non-traditional media should add dimension to your written/printed work.

I can tell you, after a year and a half of running CWA, that there are a lot of blogs out there. A deluge, a swamp, a morass of blogs. Getting yourself an online presence might not happen with just a blog. So I sat up and took note when Hancox started talking about digital collaboration. She urged the writers in the audience to submit to online journals, or to create e-sites with other writers. She used the phrase “boutique niche journals.” Hey, wait a minute. That’s Canadian Writers Abroad!

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Kate Pullinger

Posted: February 12, 2013 in Interviews, London
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She found London was a place she could sink deep into, sink everything, and yet not drown. -from The Last Time I Saw Jane

Professor Pullinger

Kate Pullinger (Bath Spa University)

Best known in Canada for winning the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2009 for The Mistress of Nothing, Kate Pullinger is also leading the way in digital fiction. In 2002 she worked with trAce Online Writing Centre. Her digital story, Inanimate Alice, won prizes in 2006 (four episodes of ten are available so far). The collaborative work combines her text with graphics, sound, and media games, and comes with material for teachers. In addition to her networked novel Flight Paths, she is working on the collaborative digital thriller Duel. Her novel in progress, Landing Gear, ties in with characters in Flight Paths. All very edgy.

Born in Cranbrook B.C., Pullinger left her Vancouver Island home for McGill University. Before finishing her degree, she travelled and then settled in London, where she lives with her family. She returned to university as a Reader in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, where she completed a PhD by published works in 2007. She is now Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media in the School of Humanities and Cultural Industries at Bath Spa University. Debra Martens spoke with Kate Pullinger via Skype on December 7, 2012.

Q: When did you leave Canada and why?
Pullinger: I left in 1982 when I was 20. I left not so much because I wanted to leave Canada but because I wanted to come and live in London. I had been to London twice prior to coming to live here, but only for a week at a time. My idea about coming to live in London was tied up with my adolescent idea about where you needed to be in order to be a proper writer. That was also tied up with my interest in music, British music in particular. And also the cultural scene that I knew that I would find in London.
Q: British music 1982? That was punk?
Pullinger: I was too young for punk. Punk came to British Columbia about two years after it ended here. Just the general English pop scene really, punk, David Bowie, Joy Division, those kinds of bands that seemed really extraordinary to me at the time.
Q: That’s very brave of you to come just like that. You didn’t come straight from B.C., did you?
Pullinger: I went to McGill University when I was 17, which seems extremely young now, and I dropped out after a year and a half. Then I went to live in the Yukon for a year. My eldest sister was living in the Yukon, so I went to the Yukon and worked in a mine. My brother-in-law worked in a mine outside Whitehorse. I got a job crushing rocks. I made a ton of money; even by today’s standards it was extremely well paid. So I did that and then I travelled in Europe and North Africa for six months before coming to live in London.
Q: Were you already writing when you left?
Pullinger: Yes, it had always had been a … I guess I had started writing seriously … well when you’re a teenager these things all seem so serious … from the age of 12 or 13. It was what I knew I wanted to do. University sort of deviated from that and that’s partly why I left McGill. I had this clear idea of what I wanted to do. It’s not a thing I’ve ever regretted and of course bizarrely I’ve ended up working in academia, despite being a drop out.
Q: You earned it, I think. How did you come to be working in academia?
Pullinger: I’ve always done bits and pieces of teaching, writing. Just gradually through a series of opportunities, really, over the last decade. I’m now professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University. I’ve been there since the middle of September.
Q: Do you like teaching in Bath?
Pullinger: I’m really enjoying it. Really lovely. The physical environment at the university is absolutely beautiful. The two campuses I work on are fantastically beautiful, both of them. It’s very friendly, very open, an interesting set of colleagues and working environment so I’m really pleased.
Q: To go back to when you arrived in London – how did you earn a living? (more…)

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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Respirer et écrire

Posted: October 4, 2012 in Debra Martens, India, London
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construction next door

I have been thinking about Sara Jeanette Duncan lately. I should be thinking about her work, but I’ve been thinking about her. OK, when I cough (a lingering cold), I think about her. Because here’s the thing. I have it easy compared to her life in London. If I sometimes find it tough to keep up with the dog on the walk to Kensington Gardens, how did Duncan find it, walking from Paulton’s Square? For a while she lived quite close to Kensington Gardens, but in her last years in London she lived closer to the river. How did she get from the square down there to the park up here? Did she bother or did she rather sit in her little square? What I love about Kensington Gardens is the wind, the feeling that you are breathing fresh air despite the traffic bordering the park top and bottom.

Here’s a picture of what’s been going on next door and why I was seeking fresher air. Was Duncan able to seek this freshening feeling, did she take a bus, did she walk, was she able to walk that far with her tuberculosis or mystery respiratory ailment imported from India? I suppose I should buy a biography of her life, but I rather enjoy walking around London wondering if she coughed here or panted there. Is that weird? The walk from the King’s Road to Kensington Gardens would be about 45 minutes today, on clean sidewalks beside automobile traffic. Transport for London confirms it is a 41 minute walk.

In Duncan’s day, she would have walked through air thick with smoke from people’s coal fires, on dirty streets  in damp leather shoes with frayed laces. Who knows how long it took to walk that distance? Walking beside other people with TB, coughing. Then again, if you could read while walking, as in this photo from a decade earlier….

walking 1906

On Kensington Church Street 1906, (not SJD), from Dave Walker’s blog

I haven’t found a quick statistic on how many Londoners had TB back then, but I did find this:

In 1911 the National Insurance Act encouraged a state-led campaign against tuberculosis, allowing sufferers who had insurance to be treated in sanatoria. … The Metropolitan Asylums Board was finally empowered to care for uninsured tuberculosis patients in 1913 under the Public Health (Prevention and Treatment of Diseases) Act. … The London Open Air Sanatorium was opened in 1901 by the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis. When the Metropolitan Asylums Board bought the institution in 1919, they renamed it Pinewood Sanatorium, providing 160 beds for adult patients. The hospital was situated in 82 acres of pine forest near Wokingham in Berkshire. Pine trees were believed to be beneficial for sufferers of tuberculosis and three exercise tracks were marked out through the woods. –City of London Archivist Katharine Short, “Pinewood Sanatorium”

According to Katharine Short, Canadian soldiers were treated at Pinewood during the Second World War. The hospital was closed in 1966, when it was used for, among other things, television studios. (Not, apparently, Pinewood Studios, which has been operating from Heatherden Hall in Buckinghamshire since 1934).

So the question is: was Mrs Everard Cotes insured? But wait — she was cured of her TB in Simla, India. Here she is in her mild plaint at being forced to sit all day in her Simla garden:

“And Tiglath-Pileser has come, and has quoted certain documents, and has used gentle propulsive force, and behold, because I am a person whose contumacy cannot endure, the door is shut and I am on the outside, disconsolate. … I am only banished to the garden. … My eye, which is a captious organ, is to find its entertainment all day long in bushes – and grass. All day long. … From morning until night I am to sit for several months and breathe, with the grass and the bushes, the beautiful pure fresh air. … In vain I have represented that microbes will agree with them no better than with me; it seems the common or house microbe is one of the things that I particularly must not have.” –The Crow’s Nest

Ah, but that garden cure would surely mean that some years later she would be drawn to Kensington Gardens?

The title of this post is the subtitle of a book I still haven’t got around to reading. It is supposed to be about writers with tuberculosis or asthma and how disease affects writing: Le souffle coupé : respirer et écrire by François-Bernard Michel (1984). Here is a nice little summary.

Today’s challenge: name another writer (Canadian or non) afflicted by breathing problems?

book cover

from Univ. Rochester “Beauty for Commerce”


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The Future Margaret Laurence Wanted

Posted: June 26, 2012 in Brazil, Debra Martens, International Events, London
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Planet Earth, NASA

Are you disappointed by the results of Rio+20, the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development? Here are some uplifting words from a wise woman who once lived in Knightsbridge, not far from here. This is from her memoir Dance on the Earth. Margaret Laurence is talking about the end of the Second World War.

“A new and better and more just social order had to emerge. We would make sure that it did. The world could and would be a better place. Poverty could be eliminated. People could be free in a free and peaceful world. We were not mouthing clichés. These things mattered…. Forty years on, I could weep for how naïve we were in so many ways. Yet the death of hope is the death of the will and perhaps of the spirit. I continue to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that it is not too late to save our only home, the planet earth, and that it is not too late, even at this very late date, to learn to live on and with the earth, in harmony with all creatures. Part of that belief is social belief, part of it is religious faith. Even after all the failures – the wars, the pollution, the radioactive waste, the real possibility of nuclear reactors melting down, the slaughter of whales and dolphins – even after all these atrocities, I believe that we cannot and must not give up.

I never look back at my younger self and smile wryly, thinking how curiously simple-minded we were. We were naïve and idealistic, but we were on the right track. We cared, and we must continue to care. Each generation must believe it can change the world for the better, whatever the odds are against us.”

I should mention here that Laurence got through only a first draft of her memoir before she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and that her revisions were dictated and the book finished with her daughter’s help. The memoir was given to me by a friend in Nairobi with whom I have lost touch. Losing touch happens to we wanderers, despite our best intentions.

cover for reprinted The Prophet’s Camel Bell

Like Sara Jeannette Duncan, Margaret Laurence lived with her husband abroad, and then settled for a time in London while he worked elsewhere. I will write more about this when I’ve done my research. It is only fitting, given that the conference was in Brazil, that I close with an excerpt of a poem by P.K. Page, who lived in Brazil with her diplomat husband, and wrote about it in her memoir, Brazilian Journal (another of my books left in storage…).

 Planet Earth

It has to be spread out, the skin of this planet,

has to be ironed, the sea in its whiteness;

and the hands keep on moving,

smoothing the holy surfaces.

     ‘In Praise of Ironing’, PABLO NERUDA

It has to be loved the way a laundress loves her linens,

the way she moves her hands caressing the fine muslins

knowing their warp and woof,

like a lover coaxing, or a mother praising.

It has to be loved as if it were embroidered

with flowers and birds and two joined hearts upon it.

It has to be stretched and stroked.

It has to be celebrated.

O this great beloved world and all the creatures in it.

It has to be spread out, the skin of this planet.

…

Follow the link for the complete poem, or better, buy her book, Planet Earth: Poems Selected and New.

Is there a Canadian writing in Brazil, or about Brazil, or about P.K. Page, who would like to contribute to this post?

P.K. Page, CBC

Love Literary London

Posted: June 19, 2012 in Letter from, London, United Kingdom
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There are many things to love about London, but my favourite is its celebration of literature. Besides theatre, Sherlock and Doctor Who. Dead authors appear on blue plaques on walls of buildings they occupied (with other famous people, artists, architects, illustrators). You probably already know about the Guardian Books section, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. Have heard of the second-hand bookstores on Charing Cross Road. Maybe you have planned a visit to such independents as Foyles and the Folio Society bookshop. Here is a good example of the literary life in London. Last night I went to the Royal Society of Literature’s discussion with Michael Ondaatje. Yes, there’s a Royal Society of Literature; it was founded by King George IV in 1820, to “reward literary merit and excite literary talent.” I am a paying member — but not a Fellow.

Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje, CBC

Michael Ondaatje was made a Fellow last year, and as a result, yester evening he was asked to sign the roll book, which dates back to 1820, using either Dickens’s quill or Byron’s pen. (He took the pen.) How cool is that? Or is it silly? They’ve had those writing implements since they started. The person who was supposed to engage Ondaatje in discussion couldn’t come, so Colin Thubron, President of RSL and renowned travel writer, asked another person to step in: Fiammetta Rocco, Editor of Books and Arts at The Economist, and master of six languages. Not that he lacked choice; he could have asked any number of approximately 500 literati (Fellows) from the Society to fill in, such as the Director, Maggie Fergusson, the literary editor for Intelligent Life, or the biographer Victoria Glendinning (a Vice-President) historical novelist Hilary Mantel (a Vice-President). The Fellows represent all genres of writing: fiction, poetry, travel writing, biography, scriptwriting, history, playwrights and literary critics. Literary critics? Ok, the AGM is coming up; what if the critic who skewered the novel in a recent review ends up beside the novelist? Some RSL articles can be read online.

What about Ondaatje? Best known for The English Patient, best loved for In the Skin of a Lion and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, he returned to Sri Lanka, the place of his birth, with Running in the Family and Anil’s Ghost. He has written and edited yet more: you can find out about his work on his agent’s website or buy his books from Random House. The evening’s discussion turned into more of an interview in which he answered questions he’s answered before, and then he read from The Cat’s Table.  Listen here. During the audience questions, a woman mentioned that he has beautiful feet, but he wouldn’t take off his shoes and socks. Here is a PEN conversation between him and Colum McCann in 2008.

Now to bring this post back to the Olympics. The Cultural Olympiad offers 12,000 events and performances across the United Kingdom, in parallel with the Olympics. For example, Southbank Centre’s Poetry Parnassus brings together poets and spoken-word artists from competing Olympic nations to read and give workshops. This is part of the Southbank Centre’s Festival of the World.  Even better, Poetry Parnassus will have a souvenir. Poets submit in their native tongue for the World Record Anthology. The Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference will also have a book to offer as a souvenir, which will gather highlights of a global discussion broadcast online in August into a book about writing today. It will be published after the final conference session in the autumn of 2013.

Did you know there is a storyline for the opening ceremony of the Olympics? It is based on The Tempest. Frank Cottrell Boyce, screenwriter and children’s books author, wrote the storyline and is working with Danny Boyle on the ceremony. Frank Boyce has recently been appointed Professor of Reading at Liverpool Hope University. Yes, reading. He was also involved in the Reader Organisation.

Speaking of readers, Canadian Writers Abroad has readers in Afghanistan, Alaska, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. That’s just on the days that I noticed. One of those readers is also a writer (Malaysia, Netherlands) — Alison has offered to write something for CWA. Which is great, because there’s so much going on this summer that I’m going to Canada. So if any of you readers are also writers, and would like to write a “Letter From” or a book review or something, please drop me a line at canadianwritersabroad(at)gmail(dot)com.

What TV show is filmed in Cardiff?

Olympic rings at Cardiff City Hall, http://www.london2012.com

T.C. Haliburton and the Olympics

Posted: June 13, 2012 in Canada, Debra Martens, London
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The London Chapter of the Haliburton Society is joining the Olympics, in the same way that the Cultural Olympiad is running in parallel with the London 2012 Olympic Games. It’s hosting “From Canada’s East Coast to London’s East End – in time for the Olympics!” Four participants are confirmed for this verbal Olympic event at the Leytonstone Library Hall in London from August 1-3, 2012. (No one is paid but authors are able to promote and sell their books at the event.) The library hall holds eighty people and the Society will offer wine and beercover of The Clockmaker.

Two alumnae of University of King’s College in Halifax started the London Chapter of the Haliburton Society in 2006: writer John Stiles and and Chris MacNeil, who is involved with Network Canada. Stiles explains where the notion to start a London branch came from: “The seed of the idea was born when I saw an article in The Times mentioning that Nonsuch Classics were republishing, The Clockmaker or the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, as well as its follow-up: The Attaché or Sam Slick in England. [“Dickens’ rival judged fit for return” by Dalya Alberge, The Times: 06 February 2006.] This republication seemed like an event worth celebrating, particularly as the Times article indicated that Haliburton was a rival in popularity to Dickens.”

Established in Windsor in 1884 in honour of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, the Haliburton Club’s mission was to promote the knowledge not only of the works of Haliburton but also of Canadian literature. Proud of being the oldest literary society on a campus in North America, today’s Haliburton Society is a literary club at the University of King’s College that meets to read and discuss texts. The Society also organizes an annual essay contest.

There is another connection between Haliburton and the (winter) Olympics: some claim that Haliburton’s “hurling on ice” is proof that hockey’s origins lie in Nova Scotia.

Here’s an excerpt of The Clockmaker: “Politics makes a man as crooked as a pack does a pedlar; not that they are so awful heavy, neither, but it TEACHES A MAN TO STOOP IN THE LONG RUN.  … It beats cock fightin, I tell you, to hear the Blue Noses, when they get together, talk politics. They have got three or four evil spirits, like the Irish Banshees, that they say cause all the mischief in the Province—the Council, the Banks, the House of Assembly and the Lawyers. If a man places a higher valiation on himself than his neighbors do, and wants to be a magistrate before he is fit to carry the ink horn for one, and finds himself safely delivered of a mistake, he says it is all owing to the Council. The members are cunnin critters, too; they know this feelin, and when they come home from Assembly, and people ax ‘em “where are all them are fine things you promised us?” why, they say, we’d a had ‘em all for you, but for that etarnal Council, they nullified all we did. The country will come to no good till them chaps show their respect for it, by covering their bottoms with homespun. If a man is so tarnation lazy he wont work, and in course has no money, why he says its all owin to the banks, they wont discount, there’s no money, they’ve ruined the Province. If there beant a road made up to every citizen’s door, away back to the woods (who as like as not has squatted there) why he says the House of Assembly have voted all the money to pay great men’s salaries, and there’s nothin left for poor settlers, and cross roads. Well, the lawyers come in for their share of cake and ale, too; if they don’t catch it, its a pity.”

Thomas Chandler Haliburton, NYPL

Stiles is especially appreciative of Sam Slick’s expressions: “As a native writer from the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, I have always been interested in witty and funny sayings and have tried to incorporate Nova Scotian expressions, such as “tighter-than-a-mouse’s-hole stretched-over-a-barrel,” into my works.” He is the author of the poetry collection Scouts are Cancelled and the novel The Insolent Boy, among others. Sam Slick’s sayings are still popular today. Have a look at this list.

Haliburton is also a good example with which to continue the discussion on dialect. Fred Cogswell is the author of the Haliburton entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online: “Haliburton’s use of language added American to Lowland Scots on the list of English variants which a writer could use with a fair chance of winning appreciation and acclaim. In this regard, he paved the way for that great democratic prose epic of America, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Furthermore, his gregarious and sociable nature enabled him to study at first hand the many individual and unusual types which were fostered by the isolation and social freedom of a frontier. At the same time, his knowledge, derived from both reading and experience, of traditional propriety and genteel British behaviour gave him a frame of reference within which to place these excesses. … It is ironic that Haliburton, the arch-tory, should have become the “father of American humour” in the most democratic sense. The success and popularity of Sam Slick established at the same time the vogue of the folk hero…”

Please contact John Stiles if you would like to sponsor or read at this event.

Haliburton’s residence, NYPL

Jubilee and Dialect

Posted: June 5, 2012 in Canada, Debra Martens, London
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In my last post I tried to start a discussion on the use of dialect and idiom in fiction. I expected people to exclaim Faulkner! and James Joyce! in the comments – those masters of voice. Although the teachers in the Masterclass that I attended cautioned us against excessive use of dialect, recommending a few exemplary phrases and then dropping them once into the story, it is not now unusual for writers to use voice, whether through dialect, idiom or rhythm, to establish character.

Canada's canoe in flotilla

Canada’s canoe in flotilla on Thames; we stood at back of crowd to left of balconies and didn’t see this. By http://lifeasthewife.co.uk/2012/06/04/photo-blog-diamond-jubilee-flotilla/

As I write, celebrations for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee are ongoing. On Sunday we went to the river to watch the crowds watching the flotilla and then went home and shivered in front of the TV to watch the rest. Which got me wondering how big the crowds were in 1897.

What can the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee have in common with dialect? Ah, well, it depends which queen and which jubilee. Have a look at this use of dialect, which I doubt would get published today. Here is the first verse of “The Habitant’s Jubilee Ode”:

I read on de paper mos’ ev’ry day, all about Jubilee

An’ grande procession movin’ along, an’ passin’ across de sea,

Dat’s chil’ren of Queen Victoriaw comin’ from far away

For tole Madame w’at dey t’ink of her, an’ wishin’ her bonne santé.

The habitant’s explanation covers the Plains of Abraham and likens the Queen to an adopted mother who is nice. The habitant goes on to say that with the new regime not much has changed: “w’y it’s jus’ lak’ it be before./Spikin’ Français lak’ we alway do, an’ de English dey mak no fuss…” You can read the whole poem here. The author, William Henry Drummond (1854-1907) was a doctor in Montreal. According to The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, his “distinctive dialect verse” was Canada’s most popular poetry at the turn of the century.”

This poem appeared in his first collection, published in 1897. In Drummond’s preface to his collection, he professes to have written this dialect not “with any thought of ridicule” but with love, having lived “side by side with the French Canadian people.” In 1884, Mark Twain also felt the need to preface his use of dialect in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, concluding “I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.”

The Companion points out that not everyone saw the love, such as La Patrie in 1901, which called “cet idiôme bâtard” a travesty. Montreal poet Louis Dudek praised Drummond’s break with tradition, arguing that his use of dialect “made it possible to free language for the expression of real life and human character” (as quoted in the Companion, from his Selected Essays and Criticism 1978).

William Henry Drummond

Surely, though, the highest praise is to be imitated, as Drummond was by Alexander M. Rose, who also wrote a Jubilee poem, which pretends to be by Jean Baptiste Trudeau and begins: “W’en Queen Victoria calls her peup’s/ For mak’ some Jubilee,/ She sen’ for men from all de worl’ –/ And from her colonie.” I found this on one of my favourite online resources, University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry Online. I found other jubilee poems on www.canadianpoetry.ca, such as “Victoria,” written by William W. Campbell for the 1897 Diamond Jubilee.

Just as I was wondering what Campbell and Sara Jeanette Duncan thought of Drummond’s work, I came across the plodding rhyme of James McIntyre’s “Queen’s Jubilee Ode, 1887,” and flipped the question around. What did Drummond make of such Victorian poetry as McIntyre’s, as in the last stanza of the Ode: “Britain’s empire is extending,/ Truth and justice ever blending,/ May strife and discord ever cease,/ And jubilee inaugurate peace.” But hold, how can we fault McIntyre, who wrote “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing over 7,000 Pounds”?  Was Drummond reacting to, or writing in opposition to, McIntyre’s dull verse?

Today we would likely agree that Drummond’s use of dialect was perhaps too much of a good t’ing. The fact remains that in 1887 and 1897, several poets in Canada were inspired by the Queen’s Jubilee to write a tribute in verse. Here in England, the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, released a commemorative volume of poems, Jubilee Lines, which selects 60 poets for 60 years. Thus I await the Canadian poems for the 2012 Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Who knows if there will ever be another?

Canada’s canoe in flotilla of 1000 boats, Ottawa Citizen

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