From a distance, Carol Shields and Mavis Gallant might be seen as two leaves on the same branch of Canadian literature. There are several life parallels, including American childhoods: Shields was born in 1935 in Illinois, and Gallant, though born in Montreal in 1922, spent years shuttling between Quebec, Connecticut, and New York. Both settled early in Canada (Gallant at…
J.R. Patterson
J. R. Patterson was born on a farm in Manitoba. His writing appears widely, including in The Atlantic and National Geographic.
Articles by
J.R. Patterson
In 1913, a thirty-five-year-old engineer from Nova Scotia, Sidney Clarke Ells, travelled to Alberta’s Athabasca River valley as part of an exploratory team sent to report to the federal government on the springs of bitumen that had been seen seeping freely from the ground. It would have been a journey of some mystery and adventure, and Ells seemed particularly suited for the…
Canadians of a certain age may remember when schools released cookbooks. Recipes were drawn from the student body, teachers, and parents, with the collected results then sold to raise funds. My elementary school in Gladstone, Manitoba, released a few during my time there, and I still have one, Gladstone Elementary School Recipe Book…
Michelle Bedard published Canada in Bed: An Irreverent Study of Canadian Sexual Attitudes in 1969. Its cover was a little risqué: a drawing of a couple in bed, under a Maple Leaf quilt, the man engrossed in some financial booklet while the woman, red-nippled and blond, expresses frustration. The book, which set out to examine satirically the “perilous shortage of love in Canada,” is really a bundle of sour notes on what Bedard considered a country of emasculated…
Many of us accept that we are living in a new era, one in which nothing is inconsequential. All our actions, it seems, are imbued with profound significance: the generation of pollution, the repression of this group or that, the exploitation of tradition, and the spread of disease. The global consciousness released by the internet and smartphones has rendered innocence…
On my family farm is an outbuilding we call “the school.” About twenty-five feet wide and twice as long, it’s used for storage: gardening equipment and the farm truck, a rotation of tractors and other machinery. When I was very young, it held, for several calving seasons, a maternity pen into which cows would be brought to give birth in the relative…
Nothing is ever changed at a single stroke, I know that full well, although a person sometimes wishes it could be otherwise.— Margaret Laurence
Believing that real life happens elsewhere is one of those particularly Canadian traits — both in our people and in our fiction. The talented among us really only “make it” when they get to the…
Michael Ignatieff is one of Canada’s chief intellectual exports. As a modern-day man of letters, he is a truly transatlantic thinker who gets too little credit at home for his various outputs, which comprise a bookshelf of some sixteen works of non-fiction, three novels, and two screenplays. The albatross of his political career, his urbanity, and his many postings abroad — from director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John …
The assumption with elegy is that the composite of remembrances and anecdotes comes together to form a single, unmistakable portrait of the deceased. Yet any attempt at a faithful rendering of the comedian Norm Macdonald, who died in September, aged sixty-one, leaves little more than a jumbled sketch. The man was publicly unknowable. Fiercely anti-confessionary, his jokes were constructed so that they yielded a splintered image of his private…
A squalling baby held aloft, its umbilical cord falling into a moose-skin boat beached on a riverside. Sinew nets bursting with fish. Dogs hauling laden sleds through the deep taiga forest. The fatty underside of a hide scraped with a flint rock. A cadre of kin working together to erect a camp along the Mackenzie River. These interweaving…