The Writing Life: Journals, 1975-2005 - Hardcover

Fetherling, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0773541144 ISBN 13: 9780773541146

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013

Synopsis

Selected from thousands of pages of the daily journals of George Fetherling - the inexhaustible novelist, poet, and cultural commentator - The Writing Life reveals an astute and candid observer of his contemporaries as well as himself. Hundreds of figures in the arts and public life crisscross the pages of Fetherling's journals, from Margaret Atwood and Marshall McLuhan, to Gwendolyn MacEwen and Conrad Black. The book begins in mid-1970s Toronto, a time of cultural ferment, and carries on to Vancouver and a new century. A captivating and intimate narrative, The Writing Life provides a compelling portrait of the last three decades of Canadian cultural life. From the book: Tuesday 4 February 1992 / Toronto Early this morning the latest in a series of strange phone calls from Edmund Carpenter in New York to discuss successive versions of his Canadian Notes & Queries piece on Marshall McLuhan. He falls to reminiscing and at one point says: "Marshall always reminded me of that passage in Boswell in which Boswell says that if you chanced to take shelter from a rain storm for a few minutes in Dr Johnson's company, you would come away convinced that you had just met the smartest man in the world. Marshall was like that too. Of course, if you spent an hour with Marshall, well, that was something quite different."

About this title

About the Author

George Fetherling's most recent books are the poetry collection Plans Deranged by Time and the novel Walt Whitman's Secret. He lives in Vancouver and Toronto. Brian Busby is an independent scholar, editor, and author, most recently, of A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Memoirist, Translator, and Pornographer.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0773541144
• ISBN 13: 9780773541146
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432