Creative Writing

I’ve been told that Canadians are excellent writers. If there ever was an overstatement this certainly is one of them. Yet Canada has produced some world renowned authors. Think Margaret Atwood (“The Handmaid’s Tale”), Nobel prize winning Alice Munroe (“Lives of Girls and Women), Lucy Maud Montgomery (“Anne of Green Gables”), Mordecai Richler (“Barney’s Version”), Yann Martel ()“Life of Pi”), Leonard Cohen, Northrop Frye (“Fearful Symmetry”) and Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”, “Tipping Point”) to name a few. ...

I wrote a little poem called The Canon during my university days. A Canon typically defines the acceptable, standard set of literature for a specific genre. English Literature in academia has an accepted list of stories, poems and plays which an English Lit student must read to understand Western culture and civilization. As required by my professors, I used my dog-eared Norton Anthology of English Literature to analyze Shakespeare, Milton, Woodsworth, Shelly, Faulkner, and a hundred other famous writers in the Anglo-Saxon world. ...