Your favourite Canadian writer’s favourite Canadian story prize got its start thanks to a Yankee making bank off Canadian history. James A. Michener donated the royalties from the Canadian edition of Journey, his 1988 novel about the Klondike gold rush, to support emerging writers in this country. The result was the $10,000 Journey…
Robert McGill
Robert McGill is a fiction writer and an English professor at the University of Toronto.
Articles by
Robert McGill
In my youth, I called myself a writer, but my first passion was distance running. I aspired to shocking feats of physical endurance, nurtured fantasies of heroism. (Probably I read too many comic books.) But at twenty-three, my dreams were burst by a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. Suddenly I needed insulin injections each time I…
Fascinating Boredom
Exploring the banality of affluence and the tedium of the raconteur January–February 2013
If some people spend their lives terrified of being bored, why are the distractions they seek out often tedious? This question is raised so provocatively by John Ralston Saul in Dark Diversions: A Traveller’s Tale that to call the book a study in boredom is not to condemn it but to identify its most interesting subject…