It’s been a MARMvellous week indeed, with several in our cosy group already posting about their reading: Bill has reached farthest back into MA’s chronology with Lady Oracle; Rebecca has read The Penelopiad; Kaggsy both Dearly and “Cut & Thirst”; and Bron joined in with “Death by Clamshell”. Beyond
“It’s November; it’s almost bedtime”—in autumn 1919, when older Iris remembers reading her ABCs as a child, and determines that she’s never been the kind of person who could drive off a bridge. Neither she nor her mother was that sort, but her father could have and, it seems
“I was big on grit,” she says in an interview* where she describes finding old pages of writing from her childhood and teenagehood. She wrote a novel about an ant, still unfinished. And there were musings on the Hungarian Revolution and despair. “I had an eye for lawn-litter and
In a 1990 interview* MA talks about writing The Edible Woman in a chaotic Vancouver apartment: papers strewn everywhere, piles only she could decipher, and very little furniture (including a card table loaned by Jane Rule). Not how you’d imagine writers working (chair, desk), she says. It was a
Bigamy, fraud, prison: the life of Frederick P. Grove reads like a novel. His 1925 novel Settlers of the Marsh both does, and doesn’t, hint at the unconventional choices he made in his own life. In one sense, it feels like a quintessential early Canadian novel. It even begins
