Marian Botsford Fraser

The act of turning dark memories into words is difficult, especially when not working in one’s mother tongue. The writing in itself — finding the right phrase in a foreign language, then building a narrative — requires enormous strength of purpose. And to put a deeply personal story of persecution, flight, and loss of identity on the…

In Landscapes of Silence, two narrative streams flow over the Arctic topography that Hugh Brody returns to again and again. The first is a story he has avoided telling all his life, about his upbringing in a Jewish household in Sheffield, England. The second is the story of Qallunaat’s impact on Inuit. Putting these narratives into conversation — making connections between them — was something Brody long…

About thirty pages into her memoir, All Things Consoled, Elizabeth Hay is recalling a fight with her mother; it’s a recognizably wide-ranging fight (on and off over several hours) at a classic battleground (the family cottage), somehow embracing (but not directly or exclusively) rotting peaches, wasted chicken juices, teasing versus taunting, greasy…

On a wintry weekend in 1991, I attended a meeting of Janeites at the Château Laurier Hotel in Ottawa. Janeites are Jane Austen enthusiasts; this was the annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America, when several hundred devotees of Austen assemble in a different city every year. They listen to readings, admire displays of quilts and…

It is a rare book that can alter forever the reader’s understanding of a single word, an ordinary word that until now has had one meaning only. The word is “caress.” A soft, musical word, with loving connotations; how can it possibly be used without irony to describe acts of torture? But henceforth for this reader it is yoked to images of flayed skin and clamshell…

The number of seniors in Ontario will increase by 30 percent in ten years. This information was phlegmatically attached to recent news reports of allegations of abuse at a long-term care facility in Peterborough, Ontario. Camille Parent’s 85-year-old mother, Hellen MacDonald, suffers from dementia and resides at St. Joseph’s at Fleming, a non-profit seniors’ residence affiliated with Fleming College. When Parent found her covered in scratches and bruises earlier this year (having previously suffered broken bones after an attack by another…

“Immigration work has to be carried on in the same manner as the sale of any commodity; just as soon as you stop advertising … the movement is going to stop.” Or so declared Canada’s bullish minister of the interior Clifford Sifton in 1899. According to Daniel Francis, in his most recent book, Selling Canada: Three Propaganda Campaigns That Shaped the …

Call it what you will—material, inspiration, fodder, oxygen—writers do not write books without it. They wait for it patiently, like a trout fisherman or a birdwatcher or a rock climber trapped by inclement weather. They imbibe extravagantly or enter a convent or (in countless movies, including the recent Limitless) just stare at a blank page or…

Since the beginning of parliamentary time in Canada (1867), only 216 women have been elected to the House of Commons; 3,867 men have warmed those same seats. We are currently in the 40th sitting of Parliament, with only 68 of 308 seats occupied by women. Appalling, infuriating, don’t you agree? Parliamentary time for Canadian women only began in…

Patrick Lane stopped living in the Okanagan Valley around 1958, when he was about 20, but he has never left. The brutality of his childhood (alcoholic parents, abuse, petty criminality, poverty and the casual savagery of that time) shaped his adult years. He became an eloquent, acclaimed (and apparently charming) poet who saw violence and cruelty everywhere he…