Portraits Of Canadian Writers

Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Ray Robertson, Bronwen Wallace—these are just a few authors whose unforgettable words have made them icons of Canadian literary expression. In Portraits of Canadian Writers, Bruce Meyer presents his own personal experience of these and many more seminal Canadian authors, sharing their portraits alongside amusing anecdotes that reveal personality, creativity, and humour. Meyer’s snapshots, both visual and textual, reveal far more than just physical appearance. He captures tantalizing glimpses into the creative lives of writers, from contextual information of place and time to more intangible details that reveal persona, personality and sources of imaginative inspiration. Through these portraits, Meyer has amassed a visual archive of CanLit that illustrates and celebrates an unparalleled generation of Canadian authorship.

John Hartman paints thirty-two of Canada?s finest authors into their chosen landscape-- cities, mountains, towns, and beaches ranging from Tofino, British Columbia, to Elliston, Newfoundland. Each portrait is accompanied by a personal essay that describes how place influences the author?s life and work. The result is a unique and striking look at this country, overflowing with life.

`A portrait,' Sam has said, `is a passport to friendship', and many of his anecdotes concern his great company of friends, friends who tend to be writers, photographers, painters, musicians, architects, and actors. This volume contains the portraits of 50 of Sam's literary friends. Although these portraits are a record of people at a certain time and place, they are not merely an archive. These portraits are works of art in their own right. The background details are not merely descriptive. Sam is an artist and a considerable one. His pictures are carefully composed. He is, of course, concerned with capturing the `inner lines of force in the being of his subject' but he is equally concerned with the making of a picture, with composition, with shapes, with blackness and whiteness. In Sam's portraits, psychological and artistic concerns fuse. The images define both us and him and will live on to become a part of our national heritage. He has said of portraiture: `The sitter must be willing to be photographed. The photographer must be sensitive to the sitter. And a rapport between the two has to be established.' At the beginning of a photographic session, people are wary. Sam works at establishing the necessary rapport through conversation. He usually takes 24 or 36 exposures and his experience is that the better pictures start to arrive somewhere in the middle of the roll -- that is, when the sitter has moved from acquiescence to active participation in the session. Another way Sam helps the sitter relax is by using the natural light in the familiar surroundings of the subject's home; he sees the studio and the paraphernalia of tripods, flashes, and reflectors as inhibiting. Many of Sam's portraits, then, offer us the almost voyeuristic pleasure of observing domestic interiors for there are usually things in Sam's pictures -- ornaments, paintings, books, plants, pianos, sculpture, dogs, furniture. These furnishings and possessions further express and suggest the sitter's personality; Sam has actually called these photographs `environmental portraits'.

John Hartman paints thirty-two of Canada?s finest authors into their chosen landscape-- cities, mountains, towns, and beaches ranging from Tofino, British Columbia, to Elliston, Newfoundland. Each portrait is accompanied by a personal essay that describes how place influences the author?s life and work. The result is a unique and striking look at this country, overflowing with life.

This selection of writings by twenty-nine women, known and unknown, professional and amateur, presents a unique portrait of Canada through time and space, from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, from the Maritimes to British Columbia and the Far North. There is a range of voices from high-born wives of governors general, to an Icelandic immigrant and a fisherman's wife in Labrador. A Loyalist wife and mother describes the first hard weather in New Brunswick, a seasick nun tells of a dangerous voyage out from France, a famous children's writer writes home about the fun of canoeing, and a German general's wife describes habitant customs. All demonstrate how women's experiences not only shared, but helped shape this new country.

Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but reaching back to Bavaria in the late nineteenth century, The Stone Carvers weaves together the story of ordinary lives marked by obsession and transformed by art. At the centre of a large cast of characters is Klara Becker, the granddaughter of a master carver, a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by the First World War, and by the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman, afflicted since childhood with wanderlust. From Ontario, they are swept into a colossal venture in Europe years later, as Toronto sculptor Walter Allward’s ambitious plans begin to take shape for a war memorial at Vimy, France. Spanning three decades, and moving from a German-settled village in Ontario to Europe after the Great War, The Stone Carvers follows the paths of immigrants, labourers, and dreamers. Vivid, dark, redemptive, this is novel of great beauty and power.

Interpretations of Canada's emerging identity have been largely based on a relatively small corpus of literary writing and landscape paintings, overlooking the influence of the British and American travel writers who published hundreds of books and articles that did much to fix the image of Canada in the popular imagination. In Fashioning the Canadian Landscape, J.I. Little examines how Canada, much like the United States, came to be identified with its natural landscape. Little argues that in contrast to the American identification with the wilderness sublime, however, Canada’s image was strongly influenced by the picturesque convention favoured by British travel writers. This amply illustrated volume includes chapters ranging from Labrador to British Columbia, some of which focus on such notable British authors as Rupert Brooke and Rudyard Kipling, and others on talented American writers such as Charles Dudley Warner. Based not only on the views of the landscape but on the racist descriptions of the Indigenous peoples and the romanticization of the Canadian ‘folk’, Little argues that the national image that emerged was colonialist as well as colonial in nature.

This selection of writings by 29 women, known and unknown, professional and amateur, presents a unique portrait of Canada through time and space, from the 17th to the early 20th century, from the Maritimes to British Columbia and the Far North. There is a range of voices from high-born wives of governors general, to an Icelandic immigrant and a fisherman’s wife in Labrador. A Loyalist wife and mother describes the first hard weather in New Brunswick, a seasick nun tells of a dangerous voyage out from France, a famous children’s writer writes home about the fun of canoeing, and a German general’s wife describes habitant customs. All demonstrate how women’s experiences not only shared, but helped shape this new country.