(long read) When US President Donald Trump is not demanding that Canada become “the 51st state” he muses about redrawing a border, a border that is defined by treaties dating back to 1783. In mid-March Trump, in a media scrum outside the White House, talked about redrawing the border. In Trump’s derailed train of […]
(long read) There was at time, not long ago, at least in the six thousand years of human settlement on the Greek island of Santorini, that I and my roommate were the only two people sitting on a stone bench in the town of Fira watching the sun set over the Aegean Sea. I can’t […]
A dark and stormy night 1813 edition (I don’t usually full post excerpts from my work in progress, I often put far too much into first drafts and then have to drastically cut. This episode of “a dark and stormy night” I discovered is too good to pass up. I am working on stories about […]
Topsham on the River Exe, in Devon, is the seaport for the larger city of Exeter. In the past week, I have had the chance to explore one of the towns where my roots are, the Pennells, on one main branch of my father’s side of the family. There were villages in the area of […]
Masthead for Field in March 1908 In May, 1908, 114 years ago, two presumably rich, presumably British, hunters came to Kitamaat Village, hired two Haisla guides named “Frank” and “David” and went bear hunting in the Kitlope, Giltoyees and up the Kemano River. One of the two hunters, named John H. Wrigley, would later write […]
Version 2.0 Updated October 2023 Long read (Contains spoilers for It’s a Sin and may trigger some AIDS survivor readers. Names in quotation marks are pseudonyms. Many of the names from the 80s aren’t mentioned because I don’t remember. Other names are real, taken from my occasional diary or letters I wrote) This is an […]
Fifty years ago, in 1970, two books, one written and edited in the United States, the second in Canada, both gathered prominent writers to predict what the year 2020 would be like. As one might expect, no one got it entirely right. There were hints of things to come. Now it’s 2020. The world is […]
Earlier this summer I saw a prepublication notice for Sarah Kovner’s book Prisoners of the Empire Inside Japanese POW Camps, where the Harvard University Press promotion called the book “A pathbreaking account of World War II POW camps, challenging the longstanding belief that the Japanese Empire systematically mistreated Allied prisoners.” I eagerly pre-ordered the book. […]