Serviceable bio of woman who started New Play Society, one of the first companies to perform Canadian plays. No in depth psychology here, just a precis of the main events in her life. A mostly forgotten pioneer except that the Toronto theatre awards are named after her. 2 years ago

In 1982, Linda Spalding was living in Hawaii and was on a jury for the murder trial of a woman named Maryann Acker. One day she was late, and was removed from the jury. Maryann Acker, of whose guilt she was not convinced, was convicted on all counts. Spalding never forgave herself for not being the possible dissenting voice on the jury. Twenty years later, in the course of reflecting on her life, she wonders what happened to Maryann (who is still in prison) and contacts her. The book is an account of their relationship, of Spalding’s examination of both of their lives. It is beautifully written in an unadorned style, but Spalding has a way of ending chapters with razor-sharp, poetic insights. Similar in many ways to Sharon Butala’s book The Girl from Saskatoon, but I liked this better. Because her subject is still alive, Spalding is able to delve deeper into her life and the book is richer for that, and also for the risks she takes in looking honestly at herself. 3 years ago

Really enjoyed this. If you’re Canadian, you know who Farley Mowat is. Writer of books about nature, the north, and funny books about pet animals he had as a child (The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, Owls in the Family). This is an utterly charming, sweet, beautifully written account of his childhood, his eccentric father and his growing affinity with natural world. Really loved it. He writes in a clear, engaging style and the kid he writes about is ingenuous, eccentric, and loveable. Recommended. 3 years ago

In 1962, a young nurse named Alexandra Wiwcharuk was murdered in Saskatoon. Her killer has never been found. Saskatchewan writer Sharon Butala was a high school classmate of hers. 40 years later, she is still haunted by the story and this is her look back at Alexandra, the world the two of them grew up in, her attempts to investigate the crime herself, and a meditation on time and destiny. Butala is a wonderful writer and she evokes, mostly through writing about her personal experience growing up, the world in which the crime took place. The murder mystery is fascinating too, as are the walls of silence Butala encounters in her attempts to get information from the police and others. But I’m not sure there’s enough material for a book here: sometimes it feels like a bit of a stretch. I was born in Saskatoon so the book has a special resonance for me, and I was living there, although only two years old, when the murder took place. It’s a story that needs to be told but Butala’s book, due to the limits about what she can actually know about Alexandra, who remains largely a cipher, is mostly about herself. That’s an interesting story too, but it’s not the one the book purports to be about. 3 years ago

Mervyn ‘Butch’ Blake (1907-2003) was a much-loved actor, born in India in the last days of the British Raj, who began his career in England and subsequently spent 42 seasons at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, retiring at the age of 90. Butch’s early career was spent with British theatrical luminaries such as Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Vivien Leigh, and Peggy Ashcroft, among many others. He loved the theatre and cricket, being the driving force behind the festival’s cricket team for years. He was a link with a rich theatrical tradition (he told me he met the actor-manager Johnston Forbes-Robertson (1853-1937) as a young man, I believe he said on a railway platform). He was a lovely man, warm, kind and generous. I worked with him a few times. This isn’t so much a biography as a tribute, and it is delightful on that level. 4 years ago

I thought I was going to hate this based on a cursory flip-through, lots of repetitive swearing and violence and nihilism. But I really liked it. It’s much more crafted than it looks like at first glance. 1978, as its title should indicate, is set during the punk era, in Toronto, its characters are teenagers and early twenty-somethings and its narrator is a young man named Boy. He shares an apartment with Soo, an angry, violent lesbian and her partner, a self-cutter named Jacky who isn’t even sure she’s a lesbian, and Kid, who, after slashing his arms and being hospitalized, turns out to be a scared kid named Preston. The four of them want to form a punk band called Cerebral Paisley but none of them can play instruments and they can never get it together to rehearse. They live on beer and drugs, their apartment is a broken down mess, they have one outfit each which is often covered with vomit from their last debauch. They don’t have jobs or, if they do, they lose them over the course of the story. The apartment is taken over by a scary drug dealer named Keath and his junkie-slave Mr. Shit. There is lots of violence in the book and despair and hopelessness and self-destruction. But there is a heart at the core of the book in the narrator, Boy, who is lost but searching for and sometimes exemplifying kindness and grace. The only false note in the book for me was at the very end when Jacky holds a gun on Boy while telling him of her vision of the two of them getting away and moving in together. She loves him, she tells him. And Boy responds, ‘That’s a pretty little picture’, repeatedly. It seemed like a piece of B movie dialogue, and out of character for Boy, who is one of the more passive fictional narrators I’ve encountered. It felt like Jones needed a catalyst for the book’s violent conclusion and decided that this would do. In fairness, Jones had not necessarily intended the book for publication. It was published four years after his suicide in 1994 by his estate. But it’s sad because it shows what a promising writer he was. Daniel Jones first became notorious in the Toronto literary community more for his drug- and booze-fueled outrageous behaviour than for his writing. But he dried out and moved on. 1978 is a look back in sorrow and anger. In flat unemotional uninflected prose, sort of like Hemingway on drugs, Jones takes us on a tour through hell and makes us care. This is an accomplishment. 4 years ago

This is a sobering, thought-provoking book. Farr discovered the body of her partner Toronto writer Daniel Jones (1959-1994) after he committed suicide. The book is about the way she dealt with Jones’ death, and is a broader look at our attitudes to suicide and how we find (and often don’t find) constructive ways to help those suffering depression and contemplating suicide, and the survivors, those left behind after someone kills themself. Farr is a good writer and this is written in clear, affecting prose. The only thing that gave me pause was the feeling that, in certain places, she was settling old scores, particularly in dealing with the reactions of others to Jones’ death. She is an honest and compelling witness, though, and this book is definitely worth reading. I have Daniel Jones’ novel 1978, which I will read after this. Also Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, the collection of poems he wrote about his former wife Sylvia Plath. Farr discusses it in her book, praising it and defending Hughes from those who view him as complicit in Plath’s death. One of Farr’s goals in writing the book, to bring the topic of suicide out of the shadows of taboo where it mostly resides, is extremely laudable. 4 years ago

Jack Pollock was a Toronto art dealer best known for his discovery of First Nations painter Norval Morrisseau. Dear M is a selection from letters he wrote, while living in Provence, to a psychiatrist he had seen briefly in Toronto before leaving for France. In them, Pollock discusses his life in Provence, his painting, his former life as an art dealer, his sexual history, among other things. Ostensibly, Pollock writes to M as a patient, someone attempting to sort out what he calls his ‘fucked-up’ life. But one has the sense that Pollock really isn’t interested in changing. He lives a true bohemian life, never having any money, never knowing where his next meal is coming from, living on credit, dodging bills, etc. He views himself as a generous man, which he is, but he also relies on others to get him out of scrapes over and over again. He is a former cocaine addict and most certainly a sex addict, based on his descripton of that area of his life. I was fascinated by his stories of the art world in Toronto when he started and of an area known as Toronto’s Greenwich Village, the area on Elizabeth Street from the bus station north through what is all Toronto General Hospital now. And the stories he tells about Morrisseau are priceless, the complete chaos of his life. I had no idea either that Morrisseau was bisexual or gay, Pollock is the first person I’ve read who deals with this. Flamboyant, articulate, and frustrating. 4 years ago

I liked it. Not as much as the two I’ve read already, but I liked it. 4 years ago

Jim Nason is an interesting writer and I was carried along by the story but I’m not sure if this is really a novel. The story of a health caregiver, mostly working with AIDS patients, this book concentrates much more on the patients themselves than on any real revelation of the character of the protagonist, Tony. We learn things about him, that he has a drinking problem, that he really wants to work in the theatre (although, this, almost at the end of the book). But I never felt that we were really inside his head. Nason is also a poet and I enjoyed this short book. But there’s a reticence I don’t totally understand. 4 years ago

I loved this. I like Cordelia Strube’s writing a lot. Very funny but also very black and bleak. Reese is separated from his wife and children, working at a telemarketing firm, which he hates, being driven insane by the environmental disasters he sees his fellow humans wreaking on the world, by man’s inhumanity to man. He’s also looking for the perfect mattress for his depressing basement apartment, his parents are ill and driving each other crazy, and he’s prone to angry rants that he can’t seem to control. I found Reese completely compelling and his descent into his private hell completely convincing. And there’s an upbeat ending which I didn’t see coming at all, some welcome redemption. Highly recommended. 4 years ago

Wonderful. About a girl growing up in a Mennonite community. The voice is fantastic. 4 years ago

For the flagellants in the crowd. 4 years ago

A find, from a very small press. Life in Toronto’s Yorkville from 1965-1969, the beginnings of the counterculture. 4 years ago

I am recalling a couple authors I like,

Farley Mowat & Robertson Davies

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-17832566.html

I at first confused Robertson Davies with Owen Davies but then did my checking. (I am impulsive some times the way I post. But if I don’t feel 100% right, I go to other sources, often online, & check)

Owen Davies is Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire and the author of A People Bewitched (1999).

I was also intrigued to hear from a friend, she thought Jack London was Canadian. I said I didn’t think so, and voila he is born in San Francisco, grew up there, and travelled the world as a merchant marine, and so on…

http://london.sonoma.edu/jackbio.html

Malcolm Lowry, now HE is Canadian, from B. C. methinks. Wrote Under the Volcano. 5 years ago

Wonderful. 5 years ago

Not very well written but a fascinating glimpse into the mind of Hindley-Smith, who started Therafields, ‘a maverick therapy group … It was a uniquely ‘60s experiment in communal living and self-help, where analysts worked, and often lived, with their clients in properties along Dupont Street [in Toronto] and through the Annex.’
(http://www.geraldinesherman.com/BothSidesNow.html)
Toronto Star book critic Philip Marchand, who was part of Therafields (as was Canadian poet bp nichol), described Hindley-Smith in an article in Toronto Life (Sept. 2002): ’... By 1964 – though it isn’t clear whether she had any hard credentials – she had an extensive therapeutic practice at U[niversity] of T[oronto]. The priests and nuns visiting her home on Madison, with its macrame wall hangings, were enchanted. They had finally encountered someone who listened to them, who understood them, who wanted to help them. Were they deluded? Hardly. Lea was a canny judge of human beings. And when she spoke, people listened. Her voice – a vibrant soprano, unwavering and sympathetic – was the kind that instantly alerted the nervous system of the auditor. It was not a voice made for small talk. Whatever she said, she believed absolutely. She knew how wretched her clients felt, and she was determined to salvage their lives.’
(http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-26650368_ITM) Secret Places is what seems to be thinly disguised autobiography. It describes the protagonist Susan Ormond’s marriage to Fred Jarvis and the course of their married life. Susan is resourceful and Fred is feckless. Susan eventually sets up a house in London with extra rooms which she rents to students, the participants in her first experiments with therapeutic relationships. What intrigues me about Hindley-Smith is how unabashed she is about endowing her heroine with greater awareness and sensitivity than anyone else in the story: ‘Susan did not reveal to the group what she had seen on this and many other occasions of a similar nature. She knew that they were not ready for deeper revelations …’ We are not told what those revelations are, but we are left in no doubt that Susan is in possession of a higher wisdom. I have another book by her that is from a second trilogy. The books were published by Therafields in beautifully designed editions. Found this one in a bargain bin for $1. Fascinating. 5 years ago