Anne Marie Macdonald

Photo from Random House New Faces of Fiction

When Fall on Your Knees was published in 1996, Toronto actor and playwright Anne-Marie Macdonald became an instant sensation. Though the plot of this debut novel is horrifying at times, the tale is told with such evident truthfulness that the reader has no choice but to willingly suspend disbelief and follow the story from Syria to Cape Breton to New York and back.

Fall on Your Knees was selected for Canada Reads in 2010. In 1997, it was short-listed for the Giller, the Trillium Prize, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Orange Prize (UK) and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The book won the CAA Harlequin Literary Award, the Dartmouth Book Award and the Commonwealth Prize for First Fiction.

Her second book, The Way the Crow Flies, also received high praise. In this story, a child protagonist is threatened by both local misdeeds and global politics. This was also nominated for the Giller Prize, and is reviewed here in the Guardian.

Macdonald appeared at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts in Sechelt a few years back to read. When asked where she got her ideas, this poised young woman said they simply came to her. The darkness of her stories, she assured the audience, had nothing to do with her childhood, which was normal and pleasant.

Anne Marie Macdonald's play, Good Night Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet (Vintage 1998) won the Governor General's Award for Drama and the Chalmers Award for Outstanding Play. The play Belle Moral, was produced in 2008 at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-theLake. Macdonald has also written opera librettos.

David Suzuki

Photo from David Suzuki Foundation

My original idea for this series was to stick to fiction writers. But I feel it would be absolutely wrong to leave out one of Canada's most famous native sons.

Born in 1936 in Vancouver, David Suzuki is a third generation Canadian who was just six years old when Canada declared war on Japan during WWII. With many others of Japanese ethnic origin, his father was detained and dispossessed. The family later settled in London, Ontario.

Suzuki got his BA from Amherst College in 1958 and earned his PhD in Zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961. Later he went to Berkeley to further his education. In the late sixties, he was a geneticist teaching at UBC, where I studied The Philosophy of Science with him.

Scientist, activist and broadcaster, as well as a prolific author, Suzuki has been called by CBC "Canada's foremost environmental conscience." A couple of days ago, he weighed in on the D-word -- disposable, in his blog on the David Suzuki Foundation site. "Solutions are in our nature," says the sub-head.

His most recent book, The Legacy: An Elder's Vision for our Sustainable Future (D & M 2010) begins with a Foreword by Margaret Atwood, herself a conservationist.

Barry Broadfoot

Book cover photo from Armstrong Stamps

Instead of describing his characters, Barry Broadfoot used dialogue to reveal them directly. But his work was non-fiction and his characters were real people. His metier was like oral story telling, except that the stories he collected were written down.

Arguably his most famous work is Ten Lost Years: Stories of Canadians who Survived the Depression (1973). This collection of individual stories of struggle and hope showed the Hungry Thirties directly through the eyes of those who experienced that era directly.

By the time Broadfoot died at age 77 in Nanaimo in 2004, this book had sold 200,000 copies in multiple editions. The play based on it ran for months in Toronto and elsewhere, and then toured Europe and made a hit at the Edinburgh Festival. CBC adapted it for television.

Another well-known work is Six War Years, 1939-1945: Memories of Canadians at Home and Abroad (1976). Broadfoot produced other books in the same genre: The Pioneer Years, The Veterans' Years, Next Year Country, and The Immigrant Years. In 1977 he published Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame, a book about the internment of Japanese Canadians in World War II. This was before Joy Kogawa's Obasan, which came out in 1981.

Born and raised in Winnipeg, Barry Broadfoot attended the University of Manitoba and began his career as a journalist at the Winnipeg Tribune. He worked for nearly two decades at The Vancouver Sun.

One day he quit his job and went on the road, collecting stories. He produced seventeen books in all, and was published by Douglas Gibson, who published many famous authors and has recently published a book himself. For his opus, he was awarded The Order of Canada, as well as a B.C. Lifetime Achievement Award and an Honorary degree from the University of Manitoba.

He died February 1, 2004 and was remembered in The Star by Judy Stoffman on March 1.

Stuart McLean's philosophy also involves patience and faith

Photo: My Reading Tree

Today I picked up a book my daughter gave me last year. I was still waiting for a suitable time to savour it when I realized that another Christmas was almost upon us. The Vinyl Cafe Diaries (Penguin 2010) was still sitting by my bed, and I picked it up with pleasant anticipation.

Unlike the others in The Vinyl Cafe series, this book is not filled with funny stories about Morley and Dave, their kids, Sam and Stephanie, and their pets, Arthur the dog (who eats ice cream) and Galway the cat (who knows how to flush the toilet). Say "Dave Cooks the Turkey" almost anywhere in Canada and you'll be greeted by hoots of laughter.

Instead, the reader gets a glimpse of a more serious, contemplative side of this much-loved broadcaster, storyteller and writer. Still, as soon as I opened it, I was in Stuart McLean land, that magically pleasant, funny, happy place his fans love so much.

Born in Montreal, Stuart McLean moved to Toronto to work on CBC radio, where he created the fictitious family of Vinyl Cafe fame. For many years, McLean has travelled across this wide country, knitting it together by telling his tales -- hilarious with an undertone of optimism that flirts with naivete. After many years of good intentions, last year we finally made it to his concert at the Centre for the Arts.

This year's concert tour brought him last night to Hamilton. Tomorrow he plays the McPherson in Victoria. The first week of December, he works his way across the prairies, hitting Calgary, Banff, Edmonton, Regina, and Saskatoon before going back to Toronto. Then back out west to Vancouver and Seattle, and east once more to Montreal and Ontario destinations before Christmas. His concerts also feature wonderful musicians.

In an essay called "Salt of the Earth," McLean meditates on salt. Now used by the ton on winter roads, he tells us, salt has been revered since ancient times as a ritual substance that can still remind us that "we are here for each each other for there is salt between us." (87)

In this book of essays, McLean writes about weather and seasonal chores, about neighbours and neighbourhoods, about what holds communities together, about pets and mementoes and clothes we hang onto long after we stop wearing them. In other words, the themes are the same ones he uses in his stories.

One essay that strikes a poignant note is his meditation on newspapers. If newspapers like the Montreal Gazette, founded in 1785, should go down, he says, the big loss would be the shared experience they have given us. "I love newspapers," says McLean and in this he is certain to touch a nerve with many readers who feel the same, for as McLean says, "our newspapers are more than the sum of their parts." (40)

I'll close on the essay about a tropical plant McLean bought on the advice of a real estate agent. After first resisting the idea, he saw a potted palm and succumbed to a whim. Lo and behold, the house sold.

I snuggled down more comfortably in my chair when I read that McLean kept his palm alive after he moved. His comment on this small victory so well expresses my own view of life: "the important lessons...[are] patience and faith." (14)

Chistoper Buckley's adverbs of memoir

Image: Christopher Buckley with his parents from New York Times

Today's post is not on CanLit. Though I'm currently working on a novel, I keep getting nudged by the memoir that has been quietly simmering away on the back burner. I've been reading some memoirs by other people, to see how they handle them.

Losing Mum and Pup is a  memoir by Christoper Buckley, who lost his mother and father the same year. Not your average parents, mind. They were conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr. and his socialite wife Pat Turner Buckley. William F. chummed with famous American conservatives, hosted the TV show Firing Line and wrote gargantuan amounts of material: columns, articles, books of fiction and non-fiction.

His only son "Christo" definitely inherited the writing gene. The memoir is a frank, warm and at times hilarious portrayal of his parents. His mother was raised in Vancouver and attended Crofton House, a private girls' school in West Point Grey. She later applied to Vassar, her son reports, because she wasn't great at Math, and there it wasn't an entrance requirement. In Poughkeepsie, Pat roomed with William F. Buckley's sister, who introduced them.

Besides the frankness and humour of this book, I love Buckley's fearless use of adverbs. Recently there have been attempts to quell the use of these modifiers. Some say dropping adverbs is de rigeur in modern American writing, calling them too Victorian.

Sure, Anne Perry uses adverbs, but she's British and her novels are Victorian. Now that I have a contemporary American example, I feel vindicated. On page 134, Buckley's use of adverbs is liberatingly liberal; in fact, I discovered no fewer than six, all of them muscular. The rest of the book is far from devoid of them.

I respectfully take off my hat to Christoper Buckley, and as a fellow-orphan, I sympathize. I know the feeling of being at the front of the mortality line. It comes to us all, unless the order goes terribly wrong in that universal human queue.

Nicely done, Christo. Glad you supported Obama, too.

Sky Lee

Photo D&M Publications

My introduction to the work of Sky Lee was the short story, "Broken Teeth," published in Vancouver Short Stories (UBC Press 1985). This brief tale opens with a Canadian-born adult daughter visiting her mother, who still lives according to the ways of the old country. Their apparently cold relationship revolves around duty and guilt.

When Ma tells her daughter about an accident that happened back in China when she was a small child, the atmosphere shifts subtly. Feeling a new compassion, the daughter does what she can to provide some belated consolation to the traumatized eight-year-old her mother still carries within.

Sky Lee went on to publish a novel, The Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990). This tale portrays the alienation suffered by generations of a family living in a society that often ignored and rejected them, as well as unveiling the feudal social structures they've brought with them from the old land. This novel won the City of Vancouver Book Award and was nominated for the Governor General's Award.

In 1994, Lee published a collection of short stories called Bellydancer. She has been labelled a feminist writer, and her stories deal with themes of identity and community in the face of racism and homophobia. In the late sixties, she was a founding member of the Asian Canadian Writers workshop. Fellow-members include Vancouver author Joy Kogawa and playwright Roy Miki.

Sky Lee is also a poet, and an illustrator who collaborated with Paul Yee on a children's book.

Jane Urquhart

Photo courtesy of One Book, One Community

In her novels, Jane Urquhart evokes the dynamic presence of certain unique historic moments, and enriches her narratives by weaving in a cameos of real people.

My favourite is the The Stone Carvers (McClelland and Stewart 2001), a novel that reveals the longstanding multicultural history of Canada. Urquhart brings the reader face to face with the little-known sculptor Walter-Allward, who designed and oversaw the carving of the vast marble monument at Vimy to Canadian casualties of the Great War.

The novel is full of subtle ironies. Allward imports marble from Italy and hires only Italians to work on his monument; when WWII comes, however, the monument will stand in a battlefield again and the Italians will be on the enemy side. Tilman repeatedly runs away, but must still come home to himself. Of German descent, Klara falls in love with the young Irishman Eamon, who love with airplanes and leaves her to join the air force and learn to fly.

The Stone Carvers was nominated for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Literary Awards, and the Man Booker Prize.

In Away (McClelland and Stewart 1993), Urquhart creates a dramatic scene behind the Parliament Buildings, when a fictitious girl enthralled by love changes Canadian history by causing the assassination she is trying to prevent. The great statesman Thomas D'Arcy McGee, whose statue may be seen today on Parliament Hill really was assassinated. This novel was co-winner of the Trillium Award as well as being nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Other works by Urquhart have also received literary recognition. Her first novel, The Whirlpool (1990), which features the poet Robert Browning at Niagara Falls, was awarded Le prix du meilleur livre etranger (Best foreign book prize, France).

The Underpainter (1997) won the Governor General's Award for fiction, and A Map of Glass (2006) was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.