Charles Foran

Revisiting early published work can be painful. Often the work is short fiction, a form that does not hide flaws very well. Prose is found to be uneven and characters and scenes lack development. Paragraphs suffer for the presence of one beat too many, or one beat too few. Then there are those summary sentences, epiphanic and diaphanous and…

In the spirit of the often personal and doubt-filled essays in this collection, a confession: I am no longer sure about this stuff either. Literary traditions, canons, the way of being in the world, via books, established over the past three centuries, the great 20th-century literary life, the challenging but rewarding career that many of us signed up…

My initial exposure to CanLit was not auspicious. It was 1975, and I was a grade nine student in a Jesuit high school in suburban Toronto. A charged young English teacher insisted we read a contemporary Canadian book together. Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood were all then recently…