Saturday’s Globe and Mail October 24, 2008

We had just come out of the trophy room in Stompin’ Tom Connors’s basement, a rather stark chamber lined with framed photos, gold records and other memorabilia from a career that spans five decades. Connors was telling me about the games he plays with his band on the road: checkers, chess, Scrabble, croquet .… (Keep reading…)

Canadian Dimension Magazine, September/October 2007

In a fascinating memoir, the American award-winning and once blacklisted film writer, Walter Bernstein, warns about the dangers of looking back by reminding us of what happened to Lot’s wife: she turned into a pillar of salt. So, if perchance that happens to me, all I can ask is that you throw a little of that salt over your left shoulder. (Keep reading…)

March/April 2005 Issue

an excerpt from my memoirs, a work in slow progress

I was 19 years old in September, 1967, when my new husband and I got into his funky old Volvo fastback, the one that looked like a late-forties Ford, hooked it up to a U-Haul trailer, drove from Toronto to Chicago and set up housekeeping. We rented a modest apartment, an English basement as they called it, in Hyde Park, the University of Chicago neighbourhood on the city’s South Side. Though our street and a few others where students lived were down at heel, generally speaking Hyde Park was a place of gracious homes, commodious apartment buildings, green lawns and the graceful, gothic buildings of the campus itself. Bruce was on a graduate scholarship, and he’d chosen the University of Chicago over Harvard and Columbia. He was 24, and well travelled. He knew New York and the American northeast well. He wanted to get a sense of the American heartland before he settled down to life and a career in Toronto. Besides, this was the land of Studs Terkel. (Keep reading…)

January/February 2005 Issue of Canadian Dimension