Homage to a Magic Medium

Years ago, in an earlier life, I spent a couple of days driving the late Peter Gzowski from point to point in eastern Ontario on a publicity tour for The New Morningside Papers. “It’s so weird,” I told him, “hearing your voice from here”—I waved my hand beside my right ear—“rather than there”—and I gestured toward the car radio.

“What would you like me to do?” he replied. "Stick my head under the dashboard?"

What I had wanted to convey was how important that voice had become to me; how Gzowski’s daily conversations with anglophone Canada provided sustenance for the journey as I rattled from town to town in a company car, flogging books for the same publisher that has just published Elizabeth Hay’s third novel, Late Nights on Air. Radio talk makes people and ideas and possibilities seem within plausible reach, the way a highway map makes long distances look easy. Radio is a comforting medium for travellers, and people in...