Tag: Margaret Atwood
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Louise Penny’s A World of Curiosities, Donna Decker’s Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You, and the Fictional Portrayal of the Montreal Massacre
This week, a fellow seeking to be the next Prime Minister of Canada had to apologize to Nathalie Provost. A survivor of the Montreal Massacre, she has been a vocal advocate for gun control and is running for the federal Liberal party. Great non-partisan news! However, Mark Carney referred to the site of the violence…
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Recent Research on Canadian Crime Fiction
I’m prepping spring/summer writing courses, and that had me looking up new and interesting sources about Canada-U.S. relations, in the hope that this will be an engaging topic for class members. Serendipitously, one of the first articles to turn up was about crime fiction–Robert M. Timko’s recent article on the first nine seasons of Murdoch…
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A Snow Day, a Sick Day, and Margaret Atwood’s “The Stone Mattress”
For my ENGL 262 students. See you after Reading Week! And apologies for the inconvenience. Margaret Atwood, Murder Mysteries, and “The Stone Mattress” My introduction to Margaret Atwood was Life Before Man, an austere and emotionally chilly novel from 1979, which made me fall in love with the Royal Ontario Museum before I’d ever set…
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Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, and Pat Lowther’s Life and Poetry
I’m working on an event to celebrate the brilliant poetry that Pat Lowther wrote before she was murdered when she was 40. This is a legacy that many others before me have contemplated, and it belongs most properly to her family members. Literary critics have limited emotional stakes in our work; we move on to…
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Reading Pat Lowther’s Poetry Against the Archive
I’ve spent much of the past several days reading and re-reading The Collected Works of Pat Lowther, edited by Christine Wiesenthal. Lowther died, in 1975, at age 40. Too often, her violent death has been considered with closer attention and care than her work. Part of this is the inevitable sensationalism, and voyeurism, linked to…
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 