Stories about storytellers (Douglas Gibson 2011)

Alice Munro wrote a letter to the head of Macmillan of Canada in March 1986 when Douglas Gibson moved from Macmillan to set up Douglas Gibson Books at McClelland and Stewart (M&S). In the letter she wrote of her desire to be free of her contract with Macmillan so that she could be represented by […]

Elizabeth Day (2013) discusses storytelling: How reading aloud is back in fashion

I enjoyed reading a Jan. 6, 2013 article in The Guardian. The article (see link in previous sentence) by Elizabeth Day about her storytelling in an art gallery in central London begins with the following heading and text: “Storytelling: how reading aloud is back in fashion “At a weekly book club, Elizabeth Day has found […]

A Jane’s Walk in in the nature of a conversation. What is the nature of a conversation?

A Jane’s Walk can be presented as being in the nature of a conversation. A conversation differs from a lecture, as it more explicitly involves a two-way exchange of messages. A lecture does have elements of a conversation, in the event there is a Q & A session at the end of it. There’s also an underlying […]

Framing Regent Park: The National Film Board and the construction of “outcast spaces” in the inner city – 1953 & 1994

Jane Jacobs “helped us see that roads and buildings and streetscapes encapsulated information”

I like Alice Munro’s comparison between her way of reading a short story, and the experience a person has when visiting somebody’s house. We all know how a house works, she remarks in the anthology entitled The art of the short story (2206), and “how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and […]

Warfare in North America, 1500-1865: The normal grammar that defined the meaning of wartime violence sometimes didn’t work

A blurb at the Toronto Public website notes that Wayne E. Lee, in this book published in 2011 by Oxford University Press, has concluded that: “In the end, the repeated experience of wars with barbarians or brothers created an American culture of war that demanded absolute solutions: enemies were either to be incorporated or rejected. […]

We become what we think; we become the stories we tell ourselves

If you wear a white coat you believe blongs to a doctor, your ability to pay attention increases significantly, according to a study reported in The New York Times. If you wear the same coat believing it belongs to a painter, your ability to pay attention does not improve. The New York Times article that […]

The British empire was dismantled after the end of the Second World War

I was in elementary school in Montreal in 1955 when the ‘Richard Riot’ occurred in that city. The event, on March 17, 1955, was named after Maurice Richard, the star player for the Montreal Canadiens of the National Hockey League. In later years it was described as a key factor in Quebec’s Quiet Revolution of […]