I ASK MYSELF: if writing were an Olympic sport, who would be its 2014 gold medalist? Alas, we may never know. Of course, we are free to speculate, and that can be good fun. Would it be Mark Helprin? J.K. Rowling? The (help me out here) Fifty Shades of Grey person? Malcolm Gladwell?
I WAS ASKED the other day who I imagined my ideal reader to be. “Well,” I answered – “I hadn’t really thought about that.” Not exactly a stellar reply, I know. Of course I had a half-formed, all-wispy-like inkling of my readers. Tween girls, not on the list. Marxist-Leninists? Not so much. The Nobel Literature Prize Review Board and the editors of Vanity Fair? Hell yes … one day. Well, now I’m curious – just who is my IDEAL reader?
[Note: This article appears in the Fall 2013 issue of the Nipissing Review Magazine.]
THE WET APRIL snow arrives with the AFN National Chief, Shawn A-in-chut Atleo, whose plane touched down in North Bay an hour ago. He sits in the restaurant, noting the wind over Delaney Bay and joking with his wife Nancy about the weather they’d left behind, in British Columbia. The pickerel arrives, and the conversation turns to a storm of another sort, occasioned a week earlier by a letter published in the Nanaimo Daily News.
FOR YEARS I’ve been restoring old fountain pens. As I’ve written elsewhere, I enjoy writing with this now anachronistic instrument — and in fact I’ve used a fountain pen for so long that they may not yet have fallen out of favour when I bought my first (a Sheaffer No-Nonsense) in the late 1970s.
ON SATURDAY, April 13, 2013, I chatted with Shelagh Rogers about the work of truth and reconciliation, books, and her years at the CBC. An excerpt of this discussion appears in The Roundtable episode 38. Here, for your enjoyment, is the entire interview.
EARLIER IN THE WEEK, journalist Nate Thayer posted an entry to his website titled “A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist — 2013.” Now, this is not any old journalist we’re talking about. Nate Thayer has written for dozens of highly regarded publications. He’s won meaningful and serious awards for his investigative journalism. The man interviewed Pol Pot.
TRUTH, LIKE WEATHER, arrives in degrees. Just as the weather is all around, so too dishonesty in writing. Indeed, the taking of the media’s temperatures is a primary moral responsibility of the modern reader. The question which confronts us is how do we read well in an age where dishonesty on many of the important topics may be taken for granted.
THERE’S NO USE in a writer denying the pleasures derived of notoriety, but it happened this week that I was “Freshly Pressed” and that I had feelings about it which weren’t entirely comforting. In case you don’t know, to be Freshly Pressed (or FPd, as I have discovered the WordPress folks put it) is to have a post chosen by the editors of WordPress for the landing page at wordpress.com. This arbitrary distinction — as I feel it to be — brings with it a huge momentary increase in traffic, comments, email and polite approbation. In short, here comes and goes your fifteen minutes of fame.
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE is not unique in having a fluid, ever-changing character. Best described as a Low German dialect imbricated by Latin and Greek, via eleventh century Frenchified Norseman, English has changed a good amount since Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the following lines, somewhere about the year 1390:
Now, sire, and eft, sire, so bifel the cas,
That on a day this hende Nicholas
Fil with this yonge wyf to rage and pleye,
Whil that her housbonde was at Oseneye,
As clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queynte;
And prively he caughte hire by the queynte,
And seyde, “Ywis, but if ich have my wille,
For deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille.”
I FIRST CAME across the writer Christopher Hitchens when he was a young Socialist contributing his “Minority Report” to the Nation. Very much yet in his soixante-huitard, Trotskyist phase, if not in possession any longer of his Socialist International card, he reminded me of my favourite writer, George Orwell.
RARE IS the day that I do not find a piece of bad writing in the New York Times, Washington Post, National Post, or Globe and Mail. This statement, I am confident, could be applied with justice to any newspaper of your choosing. The badness is delivered in many varieties, and in fairness I must observe that some errors are a product of working conditions, deadlines and the under-resourcing of bureaus and so on. Most bad writing however has as its root a more troubling fact: its creators do not know what words mean.
THERE IS an enormous store of narrative concerning the working habits of authors, much of it interesting and in my case consumed with amusement but skepticism also.
Years ago an upstart magazine based in a smallish Ontario city/biggish Ontario town asked me to write an article for the premiere issue. I wrote the article and got paid a small honorarium, but the magazine itself collapsed before even the first edition was printed. No one has ever read that article.
Continue reading The Protestant Work Ethic Versus This Bottle of Wine
There is a famous anecdote concerning two nineteenth-century British Prime Ministers and bitter rivals, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone. The former may be credited with first articulating “Progressive Conservatism” — by way of his 1844 novel Coningsby, or The New Generation — and the latter with both establishing and dominating the British Liberal Party, having ended his affiliation to the High Tories. According to the standard account, Gladstone asserted (doubtless with approval) “I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease.” Disraeli’s response was characteristically immediate, biting, and witty: “That all depends, sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.”
ALTHOUGH I KNEW at a young age that I should be a writer, little else would be sorted out until many years later, and then often by accident. When I was a child, say, ten to thirteen years old, I had only vague ideas about what a writer even was. I suppose I imagined a cold and dark room and a gaunt person at a desk, producing poems and novels, posting them to publishers who would promptly send back letters which read Thank-you, but no thank-you. In time I would have a more informed picture of a writer’s existence, having learned that publishers in fact do not send these letters, or any other, promptly.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 
