Jo-Ann Wallace

When I was growing up in Montreal, way back in the early 1960s, the annual visit of the Shrine Circus was a very big deal. Beginning in 1939, the Karnak Temple chapter brought the circus to the old Forum every May as a fundraiser for the Shriners’ Hospital for Crippled Children (as it was then…

I think of them as the Melmac years. That makes them sound like a lifetime — my lifetime — ago. In fact, only about twenty years have passed, and the whole thing began innocently enough with the purchase of an already ancient class C motorhome. It might be kinder to describe the vehicle as “retro”— its upholstery,…

Elizabeth Hay’s Snow Road Station opens fifteen years ago with Lulu Blake, a sixty-two-year-old actor, leaving an unnamed theatre (though clearly it’s the National Arts Centre in Ottawa) and brooding on her performance as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. “She had muffed her lines,” we’re told. The irony is not lost on Lulu that the specific line she couldn’t remember —“O woe is me”— is a sentiment with which her character…

My eighty-nine-year-old mother is undertaking her own version of Swedish death cleaning, even though she’s been an inveterate thrower‑out of things as long as I can remember. There’s really not that much to get rid of. But she’s at it again, rummaging through drawers and fretting over the items that have accumulated in her not very crowded condo storage locker in southern…