Historical Curiosity

As I sit down to work on my overly long book proposal this morning, I’ve paused for a moment of procrastination. The coffee hasn’t kicked in yet.

This nostalgia post is courtesy of U of T’s Varsity newspaper, where I wrote reviews back in the first half of the 1990s. Advice from one of my professors back then: “It’s great that you’re writing so much. I recommend that you publish less and come to class more frequently.” I was dutiful, because Heather was persuasive, and so I ended up with a PhD instead of going to J-school.

But my preoccupations, it turns out, are consistent and enduring.

Just now, I was searching for a 1952 incident where the Varsity wags replaced “remedial English course” with something more naughty throughout a news piece. They were then shut down for a time by the outraged administration. I’ve heard tell of this before, but the documentation is tricky to locate. Expunged?

But I did find my own archive, so here’s a screenshot of my 1994 review of Gail Bowen’s A Colder Kind of Death. (I’m sparing you my opinion pieces on free love, campus censorship, and other issues that seemed terribly pressing, c. the early 1990s.)

But I also wrote for The Varsity about feminism, violence against women, Sara Paretsky, and Canadian theatre.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the paper’s editors–Naomi Klein, Tanya Talaga, Nicole Nolan (Sidhu), and many others–were a generation of feminist writers and thinkers who are shaping our cultural landscape, lo these many years later.

What a privilege to have been in their company, in the busy and down-at-heel offices in an old house on St. George Street.