The Best of CAL 2017

Critics at Large Summer Meeting, August 4/17 (l.to r. Kevin Courrier, Danny McMurray, Steve Vineberg, Devin McKinney, Justin Cummings, Bob Douglas and Mark Clamen)

Back in January 2010, David Churchill, Shlomo Schwartzberg and I came up with the idea of Critics At Large. We envisioned a daily online arts journal that would provide for us the freedom to write – a freedom we were beginning to lose working in magazines and newspapers. Growing rapidly tired of plying our trade in a field where desperate careerism was taking the place of collegiality and editors were beginning to reward expedience, we wanted to remain more true to the pleasures of critical writing. We also wanted to discover what kind of reader we could cultivate and who they might turn out to be. Over the last eight years, many things changed in both our writing and in our audience. For one thing, Critics At Large became less a haven for frustrated writers and more an accomodating home for a diverse and hopeful group who saw the magazine as a possibility. We began attracting a motley crew from various backgrounds who helped change Critics at Large for the better. A number of men and women, young and old, experienced and not, came to shape our identity rather than take on the one we already had. Along that path, we also attracted veteran arts critics who wanted to continue to address the work that inspired them, but we also drew inexperienced writers trying to find the true value of having a voice to speak with. When I read individual pieces each day, I marvel at the sheer range of material and the keen passion each writer brings to their subject. As for our readers, not only have they been rapidly growing, but the diversity of opinion in the magazine has helped us reach out to a much wider audience.What became most important for me, as one of its co-founders, was watching Critics At Large grow beyond my own expectations into a continually morphing organism that embraces the freedom our writers bring to it. For those who believe that arts criticism isn't about having the right opinion, but instead is a means by which the writer and reader mutually discover their own personal relationship to the arts, I think we are succeeding in getting there. As a way to celebrate that goal, and, I suppose, to amply demonstrate it, here is a look back at some of my own favourite pieces from 2017. They aren't presented in any order of preference. Rather than commenting on the writer and their work, I've selected specific quotes that I think best reflects their value to me as critics. As I continue on as editor, writer, and reader, I can truly say that I'm proud to call them colleagues.

Kevin Courrier
Editor-in-Chief
Critics At Large

Podcast: Interview with Poet Dionne Brand (1984)

Dionne Brand, in 2016. (Photo: Andrea Karr)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1984, I sat down with Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist Dionne Brand.

Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Dionne Brand emigrated to Canada in 1970. In 1978, she published her first book of poetry,  Fore Day Morning: Poems. When we spoke in 1984, her fourth, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, has just been published by Williams-Wallace. Brand was Toronto's Poet Laureate from 2009-2012 and she was admitted to the Order of Canada earlier in 2017. Her most recent publication was the novel Love Enough, published in 2014.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Dionne Brand as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1984.

Podcast: Interview with Canadian Novelist David Adams Richards (1988)

 David Adams Richards in 2008. (Photo: Bruce Peters)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1988, I sat down with Canadian novelist, essayist, and screenwriter David Adams Richards.

At the time of our conversation, Richards's novel Nights Below Station Street has recently been awarded the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction. Nights Below Station Street was the first book in his Miramichi trilogy, which includes Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (1990) and For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (1993).

Born in Newcastle, New Brunswick, Richards has over the course of his career published 16 novels (the most recent being 2016's Principles to Live By) and works of non-fiction, including Lines on the Water: A Fisherman's Life on the Miramichi, which won the Governor General's Award for non-fiction in 1998. This past August, he was appointed to the Senate of Canada by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with David Adams Richards as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1988.

Podcast: Interview with Poet Alden Nowlan (1982)

Poet Alden Nowlan (1933-1983). (Photo Courtesy of Beaverbrook Collection of War Art)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1982, I sat down with Canadian poet, novelist, and playwright Alden Nowlan.

Nowlan was born in poverty in Stanley, Nova Scotia, where his father worked as an itinerant manual labourer. His mother abandoned the family when Alden was quite young and left him in the care of his paternal grandmother. Since the family was hard pressed to survive, education wasn't a priority. So Nowlan left school after the fourth grade, but when he discovered the library in the small adjacent town of Windsor, he would travel eighteen miles to stoke his interest in literature. Ultimately, Nowlan settled in Saint John, New Brunswick, where he married Claudine Orser, a typesetter, and became a poet. Having contracted throat cancer in 1966, which he recovered from, he went on to write many poems about mortality. In 1967, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his collection, Bread, Wine and Salt (Clarke-Irwin, 1967) was awarded the Governor General's Award for Poetry.

At the time of our conversation, Alden Nowlan's final book of original poetry, I Might Not Tell Everybody This, had just been published by Clarke Irwin. Nowlan passed away a year later, in 1983, at the age of 50 from severe emphysema.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Alden Nowlan as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1982.

Podcast: Interview with Elizabeth Waterston (1987)

Author Lucy Maud Montgomery, born on November 30, 1874.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1987, I sat down with Canadian editor, critic and biographer Elizabeth Hillman Waterston.

On this day in 1874, Lucy Maud Montgomery was born. Montgomery is best known as the author of Anne of Green Gables (1908) and a series of related novels and short stories, including Chronicles of Avonlea. Among Waterston's vast and varied writing are several books devoted to the life and work of L.M. Montgomery, including five volumes (and two complete collections) of Montgomery's journals, which she co-edited with Mary Henley Rubio. When Waterston and I spoke in 1987, The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. II. had just been published by Oxford University Press.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Elizabeth Waterston. as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

Remembrance Day Podcast, Part II: Interview with Robin Phillips (1983)

Brent Carver, Martha Henry, and William Hutt in The Wars (1983).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1983, I sat down with actor and stage and film director Robin Phillips.

At the time of our conversation, Phillips's film adaptation of Timothy Findley's 1977 novel The Wars had just been released. (My interview with Findley himself was shared here yesterday.) This was a few years before Phillips would make his triumphant return to the Stratford Festival in Ontario, directing Cymbeline and The School for Scandal on the mainstage, along with a double bill that same season of The Critic and Oedipus Rex. Robin Phillips passed away in 2015 at the age of seventy-three.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Robin Phillips as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1983.

Remembrance Day Podcast, Part I: Interview with Timothy Findley (1983)

Timothy Findley.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1983, I sat down with Canadian novelist Timothy Findley.

With Remembrance Day upon us, it is timely to revisit the conversation I had with Findley about his novel The Wars, set during the First World War. Originally published in 1977, The Wars follows Robert Ross, a nineteen-year-old Canadian who enlists in World War I after the death of his beloved older sister in an attempt to escape both his grief and the social norms of oppressive Victorian society. Adapted for the screen in 1983, the film was written by Findley himself and directed by Robin Phillips. (We will be be sharing my interview with Phillips here tomorrow in Part II of this special Remembrance Day post.)

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Timothy Findley as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1983.

Podcast: Interview with Poet Phyllis Webb (1982)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1982, I sat down with Canadian poet Phyllis Webb.

At the time of our conversation, Talonbooks had just released The Vision Tree: Selected Poems, which collected selections of her work from 1954-1982. The collection would go on to win the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry later that same year. Over her long career, Webb has also worked for CBC Radio where, in 1965, she created, with William A. Young, the long-running radio program Ideas. Her most recent book of original poetry was 1999's Four Swans in Fulford Harbour.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Phyllis Webb as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1982.

 

Podcast: Interview with Poet Al Purdy (1986)

Canadian Poet Al Purdy, 1918-2000. (Photo: John Reeves)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1986, I sat down with Canadian poet Al Purdy.

At the time of our conversation, McClelland & Stewart had just released The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, which collected Purdy's best work from the previous 25 years. A published poet since 1944, Purdy published 39 books of poetry in his lifetime and is one of Canada's most celebrated poets. His numerous prizes and honours include the Order of Canada in 1982, the Order of Ontario in 1987, and the Governor General's Award for Poetry for the 1986 volume. Al Purdy passed away in 2000 at the age of 81.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Al Purdy as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1986.

 

Loyalty, Mastery, Mystery: Nicholas Jennings’s Lightfoot

Gordon Lightfoot in 1976.

I was eager to read Nicholas Jennings’s Lightfoot (Viking; 328 pp.), the first biography of the Canadian singer-songwriter, for what are probably typical reasons. I’ve loved Gordon Lightfoot’s music, much of it, for most of my life; and we tend to want to know more about people who impress us, especially if a certain mystery attaches to them and to the sources of their achievement. Lightfoot has never been self-revealing in obvious ways, in either his lyrics or (to the degree that one has even registered them) his public statements. His best music transfixes partly because it comes across as effortless, contented, and fully formed, with no show of raw nerves or violent ambivalence à la Dylan or Lennon. Placid yet strong, it maintains just the right emotional distance. Surely Lightfoot’s unique gift is driven by at least a few tangible, knowable secrets; surely having a sense of the man will only deepen the music. But having read the Jennings book, I question whether Gordon Lightfoot’s art – his in particular – can benefit in any way from a biographical context. I wonder if even a better book than this would likewise cut against what makes his music alluring. And I suspect that there’s a reason we’ve been able to love that music so well for so long while knowing so little about the man who made it.  

Podcast: Interview with Writer B. W. Powe (1987)

Marshall McLuhan in 1973.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1987, I sat down with Canadian writer and scholar B. W. Powe.

At the time of our conversation Powe's landmark book, The Solitary Outlaw (Lester & Orpen Dennys), had just been published. He was a student of Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto, and the book explores the role of the intellectual in a post-literate age by profiling Pierre Trudeau, Wyndham Lewis, Glenn Gould, Elias Canetti, and McLuhan. Since 1987, Powe has published books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and philosophy. His latest publication, in 2016, is The Tigers of Perception, a multi-media lyric essay. Powe is currently a professor of English at Toronto's York University, where he has taught since 1984.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with B. W. Powe as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

Soul Survivors: Interview with Clement Virgo (1995)

Sharon Lewis as the DJ in Rude.

As part of our Canada150 series, where we celebrate the country's birthday, we have been featuring periodic articles and interviews focusing on Canada's artistic accomplishments. Although filmmaker Clement Virgo is originally from Jamaica, he came to this country when he was 11 and would in time become one of our prominent directors. Beginning his adult years as a window-display artist in the fashion industry in the late eighties, he soon became a resident at the Canadian Film Centre's Summer Lab in both 1991 and 1992. While there he produced three short films: A Small Dick Fleshy Ass Thang (1991), Split Second Pullout Technique (1992), and Save My Lost Nigga' Soul (1993), which won the prize for Best Short Film at the Toronto International Film Festival that year. While at the Centre,Virgo also developed a script which in 1995 became the basis for his first feature, Rude.

Rude is a triptych about three characters seeking redemption and survival over an Easter weekend in an expressionistic version of an inner-city neighbourhood. General (Maurice Dean Wint) is a painter and former drug dealer just released from prison who has to fight the transgressions of his past, while his brother, Reece (Clark Johnson), gives in to the temptation of becoming a criminal. Maxine (Rachael Crawford) is a window dresser struggling with depression since she ended a pregnancy and lost her lover, Jordan (Richard Chevolleau), a boxer who has his own inner struggles, which culminate in an act of gay-bashing. This whole triad is tied together by the excoriations of Rude (Sharon Lewis), the DJ of a local pirate radio station. While Rude had its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, later that same year it won the Best Canadian Feature Film in Perspective Canada at TIFF, and was nominated for eight Genie Awards, including Best Picture, at the 1996 event. At TIFF 2017, Rude was selected to be screened in the Cinémathèque section.

Clement Virgo's follow-up feature, The Planet of Junior Brown (1997), would earn him an Emmy nomination, while the controversial, Lie With Me (2005), stirred strong reaction for its explicit sexual content at the 2005 edition of TIFF. Along with directing the popular award-winning boxing drama Poor Boy's Game in 2007, Virgo co-wrote and directed the six-part miniseries adaptation of  Lawrence Hill's best-selling novel, The Book of Negroes, for CBC Television, which went on to further acclaim when it was screened in the United States.

When I first spoke to Virgo, a few days before the TIFF premiere of Rude in 1995, we touched on a number of subjects including Bryan Singer's clever caper drama, The Usual Suspects (which he had seen at Cannes that year), the place of spirituality in black films, and how he felt his pictures differed from the heated dramas on screen at the time (Boyz in the Hood, Menace to Society) about contemporary black culture.

Podcast: Interview with Author Morley Torgov (1982)

Author Morley Torgov.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1982, I sat down with Canadian author Morley Torgov.

At the time of our conversation Torgov's novel The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick had just been published. The next year, he was awarded Stephen Leacock Award for Humour for the novel. A well-received film adaptation was released in 1988. His most recent novel is The Mastersinger from Minsk (2012), the second book in his Inspector Hermann Preiss mystery series. In 2015, Morley Torgov received the Order of Canada.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Morley Torgov as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1982.

Podcast: Elspeth Cameron on Hugh MacLennan (1981)

Author  Hugh MacLennan in 1984.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1981, I sat down with Canadian biographer and poet Elspeth Cameron, whose biography of author Hugh MacLennan had just been published.

Cameron would go on to make a career of writing about Canadian literary figures, and Hugh MacLennan: A Writer's Life was her first book. (The biography was nominated for a Governor General's Award that same year.) She followed it up with, among others, biographies of Irving Layton (1985), Robertson Davies (1991), and Earle Birney (1994). In 1997, her memoir No Previous Experience: A Memoir of Love and Change won a W. O. Mitchell Literary Prize.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Elspeth Cameron as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1981.

Living Spaces: The Family Camera at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum

The Dewan family visiting Niagara Fall, August 1980. (Photo courtesy of Deepali Dewan)

There is a fascinating photography exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) this summer with a partner site at the Art Gallery of Mississauga (AGM). The Family Camera is based on the premise that family snapshots play a key role in defining, celebrating and memorializing the idea of family, even if some of those photographs are missing. Many of them record the migration process to Canada of a wide variety of families, and the photographs have been taken not only in Canada but in countries from which the families have migrated. This is an exhibition that is rich in storytelling and history, large and small.

Changing the Narrative in Canadian History: Three Recent Canadian Studies

The Scream by Kent Monkman. (2017, Acrylic on Canvas)

If you are a Canadian, you will undoubtedly know that Aboriginals have not joined in the joyful acknowledgement of Canada’s sesquicentennial. Several native men and women have articulated that this occasion that celebrates Confederation, itself a product of a colonial mentality, is shameful because the framers regarded Aboriginals with contempt. One commentator argued that the Canadian historical narrative had to change. On the evidence of two of the books under review – Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests (University of Toronto Press, 2017) by Peter H. Russell and The Promise of Canada: 150 Years – People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country (Simon & Schuster Canada, 2016) by Charlotte Gray – the narrative about the relationship between the British and later Canadian governments and the Aboriginal peoples is changing. Russell (full disclosure: I personally know this distinguished political scientist) fully understands Aboriginal disenchantment with the 1867 Constitution Act – it offered them nothing – and based on the evidence in The Promise I suspect that Gray would also appreciate their refusal to participate in this event. Although Tim Cook’s Vimy: The Battle and the Legend (Allen Lane, 2017) does not address the Aboriginal issue, he does challenge a dominant narrative about Canadian identity that has emerged since the celebration of the country’s centennial in 1967.

Ohhhh Canada: Critics At Large Celebrates Canada 150

Celebrating birthdays is complicated enough when you're discussing people, let alone when you start talking about a nation. For a few months, the idea of doing a special series of pieces reflecting the complicated and controversial history of our Confederation was kicked around. But these days there is no one person who is a driving force at Critics at Large to bring consensus and focus to these kinds of ambitious plans. So the notion languished passively and died on the vine. We ended up doing an ad hoc number of random pieces that became part of an informal Canada 150 series. Since my turn to write was coming up today, I had to ask myself if I wanted to do something – anything – about why Canada mattered. But I had too many ideas and none that jumped out as inspired. So while recently culling together some of my own Critics at Large writing for a summer project I've been working on, I began reading a number of other critics who said things in the heat of reviewing that touched on some fascinating aspects of what it meant for them being Canadian. In a matter of moments, I began lifting selections from those reviews dating back to our beginnings in 2010. In those works, Canada was a leitmotif that I had the urge to embroider into a motley quilt of cultural discourse. Not all our writers are included here, as some over the years had little to say about Canada, while others make repeat appearances because some idea of Canada predominated in their work in a way that looms larger than it might have when the piece was once a review. As I was the one to do the writing today, I throw down the first gauntlet with a selection from a book review I did back in 2010.

-- Kevin Courrier, July 1/17.    

Podcast: Interview with Director Denys Arcand (1986)

Rémy Girard in Denys Arcand's Le déclin de l'empire américain (1986).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1983, one of those people was French-Canadian film director Denys Arcand.

At the time of our conversation, his film Le déclin de l'empire Américain (The Decline of the American Empire) had just been released. The movie would go on to win nine Genie Awards (including Best Motion Picture) and become the first Canadian film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Arcand also wrote and filmed two sequels, 2003's Les invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) and 2007's L'age des ténèbres (Days of Darkness). Both movies would also be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, with Les Invasions winning – and becoming the first Canadian film ever so honoured. 

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Denys Arcand as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1986.

Two Poets, Two Voices: Gianna Patriarca and Alden Hadwen

It is not known if Gianna Patriarca and Alden Hadwen know each other. But these two women have more in common than having coincidentally published books in 2016. Both are poets with ties to Toronto, and both are mothers who are roughly the same age – somewhere north of 50. But it is their work that draws them together here for comparison. Each projects a nuanced feminine sensibility regarding poetic writing that serves as a form of self-revelation. Words chisel deep into memory and emotion, exposing hidden meaning. Both write honestly and straightforwardly about personal experience, yielding highly individualized portraits of everyday womanhood which yet have something of the universal about them. Their language is raw and sensual and the subject is quotidian life – buying postcards, sipping coffee, watching the flowers grow. The ordinary made extraordinary through an alchemy of potent words. Love, loss, desire, regret, the quest for identity and a sense of belonging are concerns they share in common, regardless of their divergent backgrounds and decisively different points of view. Where Hadwen describes trilliums "piercing the moist forest floor," Patriarca writes of extinguished candles and plastic flowers garlanding the Virgin in churches visited by widows at dawn. One celebrates the potent energies of nature while the other rages against the emotional chill of the city. There's a reason for that.

Podcast: Interview with Guy Vanderhaeghe (1982)

Author Guy Vanderhaeghe, with Canadian Governor General David Johnston, receiving his third Governor General’s Literary Award, in 2015. (Photo: Sgt Ronald Duchesne)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1982, one of those guests with Canadian short story writer (and soon-to-be celebrated novelist) Guy Vanderhaeghe.

When I sat down with Vanderhaeghe in 1982, he had just published his first book, a collection of short stories entitled Man Descending. That volume would go on to win the Governor General's Award for Fiction, making him one of the few first-time authors to achieve this. He won this award again in 1996 for his novel The Englishman's Boy. In 2015, his most recent published work, Daddy Lenin and Other Stories, was similarly honoured.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Guy Vanderhaeghe as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1982.