Here’s a quick followup to the advance on Thursday’s talk about Cultural Journalism: (Re)Viewing & (Re)Visioning . . . it was a treat!
JBNBlog enjoyed meeting some fine new people, loved the venue (D1060) & found there are still folks willing to laugh when I recount the following exchange with a New York rock writer who wanted to know about London music beyond Lombardo & we somehow got into a Garth Hudson-Garth Richardson mixup: Garth Hudson, which band is he in?, the Band, which band is that, the Band . . . I don’t know. Third Base.
More seriously, it was humbling (yes, humbling) to realize how the series started with Canadian poet Margaret Avison (a great friend of my parents) c. 1972 and has seen Alice Munro, Richler pere et fils, my parents, Farley Mowat, Elizabeth Hay, Lawrence Hill & more follow her lead. Fanshawe also has a fantastic gallery of photographs taken of many of the visiting writers.
All of the above makes it clear the Letters & Arts series is a perhaps overlooked corner of the Canadian pantheon. Thanks to Fanshawe Prof. Ingrid Hutchinson for the invitation & for being a fine host & thanks, also, to drummer & drum scholar Bernie Koenig for the introduction & sharing some drum history thoughts during my talk.
The talks are free & the public is welcome. The series is supported by the City of London’s CAIP grants administered by the London Arts Council which means speakers get paid. (I appreciate that).
Next up in the 2011-2012 Letters & Arts series is ace novelist Terry Griggs, an old London friend now based in Stratford. Terry fits in with the Avison-Mowat-Hay-Richler gallery a lot better than JBNBlog.
Here’s a vow to do more to alert Londoners to this jewel of CanLit in our midst . . . Fanshawe’s Letters & Arts is the unacknowledged ruler of the London cultural world.
