Category Archives: Dispatches from the Road

BOB DYLAN AND LEONARD COHEN

by Douglas Gibson

I was disappointed to read that Bob Dylan has decided not to go to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize for Literature. This is a huge loss — for him. Anyone who has been fortunate enough to attend the Nobel Prize ceremonies knows what a pinnacle they represent. Attendance is so cherished that to get into the hall (all gentlemen wearing the de rigueur white tie and tails) you must present not only your ticket, with the specific seat number noted, but also YOUR PASSPORT, to prove that you are the person to whom the valuable ticket was issued.

Jane and I still remember every dreamy detail of our 2013 day there as part of the Alice Munro party. We also remember the sense that we were part of what I can only describe as “the world at its best”.

Now, with his unfortunate decision, Bob Dylan will miss all of that.

I suspect that, even at death’s door, Leonard Cohen would not have made that mistake.

I knew Leonard, a little, because when I was the Publisher at M&S, we published his new poetry books. In the process, I worked cordially with Leonard’s charming agent, who was secretly stealing all of his money. Ironically, this crime had the beneficial effect of forcing Leonard to revive his career, making him earn new money by going on tour again, and writing and performing fine new songs.

I have two memories of Leonard that may be worth sharing. First, when he was at McGill, he studied English with Hugh MacLennan. They liked each other, and became friends. Hugh told me that once in private conversation Leonard was explaining the opportunities opened by the new, open sexual freedoms among young people like him. The older Presbyterian was scandalised , and protested: “But Leonard, you remind me of a girl I knew back in Nova Scotia. She was called “Anytime Annie”!”

Leonard did not mend his ways, to the relief of many ladies down through the years.

Once, when he visited our Toronto office in what was a busy day of interviews, for lunch we brought in to the Boardroom some unglamorous sandwiches from Druxy’s downstairs. Leonard was perfectly happy, expecting absolutely no special treatment. He chatted happily with me and Avie Bennett and Ellen Seligman, about subjects ranging from Hugh MacLennan to how to get money from a bank machine in sketchy areas in LA. In such a situation, he explained, using an on-street machine was asking for trouble, making yourself a target. So what you looked for was a bank machine inside a small grocery store. There you cased the joint, apparently immersed in reading the ingredients of, say, a bottle of Pepsi.

Then, when the coast was clear, you drifted across to the machine, still apparently deep into your Pepsi scrolls, quickly punched in your banking needs, grabbed and concealed the cash, then escaped to the front of the store with your Pepsi purchase. Muggers were not interested in a man bearing a bottle of Pepsi.

In the mourning that followed Leonard’s death, I was pleased by how seriously our newspapers took his loss. The CBC, too, devoted important hours to paying tribute to him and his work. I found myself deeply moved by the message that he had sent to Marianne, his long-time lover, when she was dying in Norway this summer. His loving message ended with the words…”see you down the road.”

On Remembrance Day came my moment of revelation. Unlike Bob Dylan, I would argue, Leonard Cohen knew what was really important. When someone came to him asking if he would recite “In Flanders Fields”, he said yes. Many major musical stars would have laughed off the idea of reciting this poem from grade school , about the First World War, for Heaven’s sake, as hopelessly “uncool”.

Leonard read the poem aloud. As the CBC ended its broadcast of Remembrance Day with Leonard reading that poem, the fact that it was happening  in the week of his death was almost too much to bear. But most powerful of all was how brilliantly he read it. No tricks, nothing fancy, just a serious, perfect reading, by a poet who knew what really mattered.

I’m sorry that Stockholm will not see him.

MOOSE JAW MEMORIES

by Douglas Gibson

We’ve been travelling around, at the expense of the blog, but amassing a number of stories. In Moose Jaw, at the Saskatchewan Writers Festival, we knew that we would have a fine time. This was a return engagement, after a three year lapse, and the old gang of friends was there, wallowing in the pool at The Spa, or strolling through central Crescent Park, where a beaver put on a special evening cruise for us.
We had breakfast with Harold Johnson and Joan, whom we met three years ago, as authors on the same stage in the Library. In August Harold is bringing out what sounds like a very controversial book about the impact of alcohol on our indigenous people. As a Cree with a law degree from Harvard who works as a Crown in La Ronge, Harold  knows about the daily damage of booze to our society. The book is called FIREWATER, and will come from Bruce Walsh’s University of Regina Press. It seems certain to be a powerful book. Watch for it.

On Friday afternoon I gave my Across Canada By Story show in the Mae Wilson Theatre that I remembered with such affection. All went well, although this time there was no superb introduction by Bob Currie (whom I’d like to pack up in my bag, and take with me as my Travelling Introducer). Earlier, I had the pleasure of sharing a session with Bob reading his poetry this year.

I helped with one or two other events, once unofficially. I found Zarqa Nawaz, author of LAUGHING ALL THE WAY TO THE MOSQUE wandering aimlessly around the Library, when she was supposed to be the main lunch speaker. I led her there, and from the stage she told her interviewer, Angie Abdou, that this “nice man” had rescued her, and got her to the event on time. When the “nice man” was asked to identify himself, Angie laughingly suggested that following this particular nice man’s directions was usually good policy for any Canadian author.

On the final day of the Festival, events took a strange turn. I was on a five-author panel on humour, and the speaker before me was Zarqa. She was very keen to inform us all just how difficult it has been for her to find a market for her most recent piece of writing, a very thorough non-fiction study of labiaplasty. She spoke at some length about this, and the audience seemed to like it.

(There may be a link here with the romantic reticence in Saskatchewan that was satirised by singer Connie Kaldor in her Saturday concert at the Mae Wilson Theatre. She asked “Did you hear about the Prairie farmer who loved his wife so much that….. he almost told her?”)

Speaking for the first time, I followed Zarqa by thanking the organisers for inviting me to come to this superb festival. Then I noted, disapprovingly, that while inviting me to participate in the Humour panel, they had not even mentioned the word “labiaplasty”.

Not even once.

The ensuing discussion was amusing,and we all had a good time. Although Terry Fallis later suggested that I might have been wiser to avoid the issue of labiaplasty altogether. He said that I should have kept tight-lipped about it. I believe that was the term he used.

LOVE ALL – A TENNIS CONUNDRUM

by Douglas Gibson

Like so many Canadians, I cheered along as Milos Raonic fought back for famous victories against David Goffin of Belgium, and Roger Federer of Switzerland. This was a wonderful thing for Canada…a Canadian in the Men’s Final at Wimbledon. Surely this was something for all of us to get behind, cheering him on.

Except for this: his opponent in the Final was Andy Murray of Scotland.

I was born into a keen tennis-playing family in Scotland. I was good enough that I was on the local Men’s Team at 14, and my father and I never lost a set all season, as our fit young opponents vacillated between picking on the old guy, or targeting the little kid. So after I came to Canada in 1967, as my own minor tennis career  came to an end, I watched Andy Murray’s career take off, and supported him keenly – although watching him was never a truly relaxing experience.

He played a part in my own career as a writer. In 2008 he made it to the Final of the U.S. Open in Forest Hills, his first Grand Slam Final. I happened to be in Scotland, staying with my brother’s family near Stirling, just south of Dunblane, Andy Murray’s home town. Shazam! It was time for a piece of enterprise reporting. I contacted the Globe and Mail and asked if they would like a Special Correspondent’s Report on watching the New York Final in Andy Murray’s home town.

They liked the idea. I grabbed a quick sandwich, while my young nephew watched in disbelief (“You’re just going to go there and write about it for the newspaper?”), and drove to Dunblane. Quick questions on the street revealed that the tennis match would be shown at The Dunblane Community Centre. I found it, found the organizer, and shamelessly introduced myself with the words “I represent the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto”. In turn, she introduced me around in the crowd, to friends of the Murray family. I knew that all would be well when one old gentleman gave me the quote “Win or lose, to me Andy will always be just a wee laddie from Dunblane.” (Punching the air is not an appropriate response from a note-taking reporter).

Well, Andy didn’t win that day, but The Globe and Mail’s readers got a fine feature from an unexpected tennis correspondent. If you don’t believe it, you could look it up, from September 2008.

So Andy Murray and I go back a long way. Supporting Milos against him was going to be very hard. It was indeed, as my title suggests, a real tennis conundrum. How should a patriotic Canadian born in Scotland handle this culture clash?

In the end, I decided that since both Scottish and Canadian cultures are, let’s say “anti-triumphalist”, my most appropriate position was to support, and root for, the player who lost in the end.

So go, Milos!

THE NIGHT MANAGER SHUTS DOWN CANADA

by Douglas Gibson

Despite all of my travels to give my new Across Canada By Story show (more than 40 performances so far, only one of them involving a death-defying  fall off the stage) I have been able to see a spectacularly good TV series. It is “The Night Manager”, based on the 1993 novel by John Le Carre.

Long before that book appeared I was telling anyone who would listen that John Le Carre was not “just” a spy novelist, but the best novelist in Britain. I’m happy to note that this heretical opinion is now gaining acceptance. Ample proof is provided by the recent book, John Le Carre: The Biography , by Adam Sisman, who is, of course, “an Honourary Fellow of  (aha!) the University of St. Andrews”. His account of the life of David Cornwell, the man behind the nom de plume, is full of admiring quotes from major sources. For example, Philip Roth called A Perfect Spy “The best English novel since the war. ”Ian McEwan in 2013 called Le Carre “perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain.” I agree.

Certainly, in my mind, Le Carre/Cornwell was behind the best TV series of all time, the 1979 BBC adaptation of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Watching the superb plot unfold on the screen drove me back to the book, and I had a strange extra-dimensional experience as the same events were subtly revealed in two art forms.

With that background, I was excited to learn about the new TV series, “The Night Manager”. I have not been disappointed, and await the final episode with keen interest. One curiosity is that the villain of the piece – “the worst man in the world” – is a shameless arms dealer named Charles Onslow Roper, played by Hugh Laurie. Yes, Hugh “Bertie Wooster” Laurie, the pop-eyed idiot kept afloat by Jeeves, and later the star of the American TV series, “House”. For a Scot, there’s a special pleasure in seeing Hugh Laurie (and we all remember the old Scottish song “Annie Laurie”) become the world’s idea of a drawling English villain, when his features are almost a caricature of The Scottish Face.

For Canadians, there’s a special curiosity in the TV version of “The Night Manager”. In the book (and, again, I was drawn back to the book) when our hero,  Jonathan  Pine , has left Cairo, then Switzerland, then Cornwall, and is creating a new identity,  he ends up for some months in Quebec. In the mining town of Esperance he ends up working at le Chateau Babette, hired by mighty Madame Latulipe, who unfortunately gives him a room near her daughter Yvonne, whose fiancé, Thomas, is off studying First Nations in the North.

Madame is convinced that Pine/alias Beauregard is French.“Or perhaps Belgian. She was not an expert, she took her holidays in Florida. All she knew was, when he spoke French she could understand him, but when she spoke back at him, he looked as insecure as all Frenchmen looked when they heard what Madame Latulipe was convinced was the true, the uncorrupted version of their tongue.”

There are about 30 pages set in Canada, while Pine seduces his way to a new passport. But they don’t appear in the TV series. Making a film or a TV series out of a novel always involves great deal of reduction, and, in truth, the Canadian episode is not central to the book. Le Carre (who is involved in this screenplay) has written ruefully about how much cutting is required to prepare a novel for the screen, saying that you have to watch your oxen being turned into a bouillion cube. I’m sure that in the original quote, it was an Oxo cube.

DOES HIS OWN STUNTS

by Douglas Gibson

After my London fall from grace, I asked my blog-readers (blogistas?) for ideas about how best to turn this mishap to my commercial advantage.

So far, the best suggestion has come from the High Commission’s own Scott Proudfoot. He suggests that I should boast that, unlike many Hollywood A-listers, “Gibson does his own stunts.”

Debra Martens came up with a witty headline about “falling for the love of books.” She tells me that she’s working on the contrast between me swan-diving to the floor, while in Trafalgar Square outside Horatio Nelson turns his back in statuesque disgust.

 

HOW TO SEE THE SHOW

I’ll be giving performances of ACROSS CANADA BY STORY in May.

IN TORONTO, at THE BEACHES LIBRARY, on Queen Street, on Thursday May 12 at 7.00

IN STRATFORD, at The CITY HALL AUDITORIUM, as part of Springworks, on Saturday May 14 at noon.  AND on Tuesday May 17 at 8pm.

IN TORONTO, at THE RICHVIEW LIBRARY, 1806  Islington, on Thursday May 26  at 6.00.

IN ELORA, at THE ELORA FESTIVAL, a 20-minute version in The Aboyne Hall, from 1-to 4.00

At all of these events, books will be sold, and signed!

 

MORE TO COME, IN SUMMER AND BEYOND

KING OF THE ROAD

by Douglas Gibson

When I fell off the stage in Canada House, I did so in the Mackenzie King Room. Another example of how links with this former Prime Minister keep cropping up in my life.

In ACROSS CANADA BY STORY I tell about how, long before my own days at Macmillan, the sober bachelor’s visit to the Macmillan of Canada’s building on Toronto’s Bond Street went terribly wrong. The Prime Minister expressed the wish to pay his respects to the nearby house that had belonged to his grandfather, William Lyon Mackenzie. His appalled assistants, and their Macmillan hosts, were aware that the house had fallen on hard times, and was now a brothel.

As the portly Prime Minister stood reverently on the sidewalk outside, one of the ladies inside spotted him, and mistook his quiet reverence for bourgeois hesitation. Throwing up the window, she vigorously invited him to step inside, giving some very explicit promises of the pleasures that awaited him there. The Prime Ministerial party departed at high speed.

Later that old house was restored, and became the fine museum that it is today. That was where we at Macmillan mischievously launched the 1976 book, A VERY DOUBLE LIFE by C.P.Stacey. This astonishing history drew on the recently published secret diaries kept by Mackenzie King. These diaries revealed, beyond question, that this man, who held the post of Canada’s Prime Minister longer than anyone else, was deeply crazy. In the restrained words of The Canadian Encyclopedia (1988): “Recent revelations show that this apparently proper and colourless man was a spiritualist, in frequent contact with his mother and other dead relatives and friends.” To speak plainly, this Prime Minister, in charge of Canada throughout the Second World War, was a crazy man, who consulted his dead mother before making vital national decisions that would cost lives.

Yet this very eccentric side remained a closely held secret. Most Canadians were astonished when the Diaries, and Stacey’s book full of damning excerpts, revealed the truth.

But surely, for this secret to be held so successfully, he must have kept his beliefs totally secret in Ottawa? Right?

Wrong.

We switch to Gananoque, where, thanks to Debra Davis, on 29 April, I went to visit The Literary Festival, now in its second year. (I recommend it, without question).And, as usual, in telling stories, I received some. A woman in the audience later introduced herself as a member of the Norman Rogers family, and told me that Norman had been one of Mackenzie King’s closest advisers, and a member of his War Cabinet. In fact, in 1939, this former Professor turned Kingston MP became the Minister of National Defence. The next year, he died in a plane crash.

Naturally, his funeral was a major national event, and Prime Minister King was there, with the Cabinet. To console the grieving Rogers family, King sought them out, to assure them that Norman was just fine, and very happy in Heaven. He, the Prime Minister, had recently chatted with him, and was pleased to report that everything was fine with good old Norman.

The family was amazed to hear the Prime Minister talking openly in this way, but they kept the story secret, like all the stories of King and his mother’s portrait, and his respect for the opinions of his dead dog, little Pat. But the story lived on.

I’ll think of this story every time I go near the Kingston Airport, The Norman Rogers Airport, one of the few instances of an airport named after a man killed in a plane crash.

DISASTER IN LONDON’S WEST END

by Douglas Gibson

Since I started performing on-stage versions of my books, I’ve been to many surprising places. With STORIES ABOUT STORYTELLERS I went from coast (Queen Charlotte City, Haida Gwaii) to coast (Woody Point, Newfoundland) to coast (Ungava Bay, on an Adventure Canada cruise ship, in July 2015). Over 100 Canadian performances, so far!

Outside Canada, I took the show to Mexico, and to China, with performances in Beijing and Shanghai.

Now, with the new show based on the fall 2015 book. ACROSS CANADA BY STORY: A Coast-to-Coast Literary Adventure, I’ve started to roam around Canada. So far, I’ve given about 20 shows, in every province west of New Brunswick. Many, many more to come. Watch this space….or invite me to your theatre, library, bookstore, or club!

But in April I opened up new territory, by giving the show in Scotland and in England. The Scottish show was in St. Andrews, my alma mater. I was there to celebrate my 50th anniversary of graduation. I gave the show in the Byre Theatre, to a small but appreciative audience that seemed interested to learn about our major Canadian authors.

A side note: the Byre Theatre played a role in my life, perhaps preparing me for the performing life. In 1964, I and five friends under Alan Strachan took over The Byre for a week, to put on an original satirical review, a little like “Beyond The Fringe”. A high point occurred in the middle of the show when I stepped out beyond the closed stage curtains. In an annoyingly mincing voice I posed as a theatre authority, saying:  “Trends in humour are ever-changing. Satire has come and gone. Now many experts in the field are predicting that the new popular trend could well be….Slapstick!” Whereupon a bare arm flew out between the stage curtains and smashed a large custard pie into my face.

Blackout.

And the bare-armed Stage Manager then led me, blinded and gasping, back to my dressing room, where towels awaited me. As I finished mopping my face, more than thirty seconds later, they were still laughing. Give the audience what they want… And seeing me getting a creamy pie smashed into my face certainly seemed to hit a new theatrical record for total audience delight, every night of the week. It was good training for a Publisher.

There were no custard pies in evidence when I gave the show on April 19 in Canada House, in Trafalgar Square. The High Commission people treated me very well, and Scott Proudfoot introduced me graciously to the 70 people assembled in the grand MacKenzie King room. The stage, about two feet high, was bare, to allow me to roam around, retreating where necessary to the screen at the back, to point out details of Anthony Jenkins’ caricatures, or of the maps as we moved across the country. It was all very fine, and Nelson was standing unconcerned on his column outside the window when BANG, I fell off the stage.

It wasn’t just a little trip off the back. It was a full swan-dive, so that I landed on my shoulder and head, legs in the air. The screen went blank, people screamed, and Jane and Scott stormed across the stage to pick me up, and dust me off, and restore the shattered slide-changer that had suffered in the fall.

Miraculously, I was not hurt, and was able to carry on, and even to enjoy the excellent dinner that the High Commission staged in my honour in the MacDonald room. But since Trafalgar Square is definitely in London’s West End, a theatrical Mecca, I hope that someone can come up with a selling line about this incident that I can use to promote my show.

Any ideas?

For an objective account of my fall please read the blog of Debra Martens, spouse of Scott Proudfoot.

https://canadianwritersabroad.com/2016/04/27/falling-for-love-of-books/

FROM BLOOMSBURY TO THE YUKON

by Douglas Gibson

Roger Fry was a senior member of the Bloomsbury Group, a respected art critic who mingled with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and the gang. He championed  modern artists such as Cezanne and Matisse,  and was such a prominent figure in Britain that his son, Julian, saw that he was likely to spend his life in his father’s shadow, as “Roger Fry’s son”.

So Julian came to Canada, and became a hard-riding rancher in B.C.’s Cariboo, where art critics were not an important part of life.

There he raised his son, Alan Fry.   Born in Lac La Hache in 1931, young Alan was a real Cariboo boy, raised around horses and cattle, and skilled with a rope and an axe. In 1962, he revealed an extra dimension when he published his book about growing up, Ranch On the Cariboo.

He came into my life when in 1969 he brought me an extraordinary manuscript, a novel based on his experience as an Indian agent working in rural B.C. for the Dept. of Indian Affairs. For a civil servant to produce such a hard-hitting book about how bad things were on a “fictional” reserve was amazingly brave. When How A People Die was published in 1970 it was a sensation. “The New York Times” ran a review by the Native American novelist N. Scott Momaday that said :“This small book is one of the most sensitive and incisive statements on the subject of human alienation that I have seen…”

Reviews in Canada were equally admiring, but the harsh portrait of a dysfunctional reserve, written by a civil servant, led to an angry chorus of voices wanting him fired. Alan went to his local band, and left his fate in their hands. After a meeting they reported that they wanted him to stay, and told the rest of the world that Alan was their guy, and everyone else should back off. A respected native leader visited the reserve in question, and wearily reported to Alan that things were, in reality, even worse than in the book.

Alan kept on writing, from his base on Quadra Island, near Campbell River, where I visited him twice. In 1971 he brought out Come A Long Journey, about a canoe trip down the Yukon river with the narrator and his Native friend Dave. The Revenge Of Annie Charlie (1973) dealt with Native conflicts with the RCMP in a humorous way. In 1974 he reverted to his old Cariboo ranching background with The Burden of Adrian Knowle .

Then he got tired of the bureaucracy in Indian Affairs, and quit. What should he do now? Well, he had loved the time he had spent in the Yukon, and decided to move there. But how? How could he get a grubstake when his only asset was his house on Quadra, surrounded by Douglas Fir trees? His Lac La Hache skills provided the answer.

With his axe he felled enough trees to make a two-storey log cabin, built the old way, with interlocking timbers and not a single nail. I visited the house, which was a thing of beauty. And now Alan had two houses to sell, to keep him going in the Yukon.

Just north of Whitehorse, beside Lake Laberge, he erected a tepee, and lived in it year-round, even during the months when he was surviving under 40 below ( where Celsius and Fahrenheit meet) temperatures in a tent. I was back in my warm office in Toronto, fascinated by all this, and in due course a book came out of it, a non-fiction guide called Survival In The Wilderness. Read it…..it may save your life one day.

Then a woman came on the scene, and the tepee life became less attractive than life in a house in Whitehorse….

I visited that house in January, to catch up with my old friend Alan. We’ve stayed in touch over the years, always with great pleasure. My pride in working with Alan over all this time was revived a few years ago when my friend Howie White, of Harbour, realising that How A People Die was still – tragically – relevant today, reissued a new edition of the great classic.

At 84, Alan is now not as young as he once was, and is fighting a number of health challenges. But as you can see from the attached photo, he and his editor and friend for so many years are damned glad to see one another. And I’m glad to pay tribute to an important Canadian author.

Alan Fry

 

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

by Douglas Gibson

One of the joys of touring around, giving one of my shows, is that I get to meet and mingle with people who love books……..sometimes even my books!

Sometimes the conversations are very surprising, coming straight out of history. For instance, a couple of weeks ago I was at Leaside Library, and I was talking about Grey Owl, and the success of his shows that the Noble Red Man gave on-stage in Europe and North America. A man in the front row burst out, “I SAW HIM! In Sudbury, eighty years ago! I was a kid, and I was taken to see the famous Grey Owl. It was amazing”

Amazing, indeed, since Grey Owl died in 1938. But when I spoke to him later, Doug Gardner told me he was about 8 years old, around 1936, when he went to St. Anne’s Hall in Sudbury, the big local auditorium for major events. He remembers being astounded, and very impressed, by the man in buckskins on stage.

More recently, at the Shaw-College Library, I was talking about my Windsor visit to grab the manuscript from Alistair MacLeod when a fan in the front row couldn’t contain herself. “A HOME INVASION!” she shouted out, excitedly.

I was in Whitby this week and met a woman when I signed her book. She was more restrained at my event, but later wrote in an email that she knew all about Michael Ondaatje’s romantic adventures at Bishop’s. “My sister-in-law told me the campus fairly hummed with the scandal!”

FUTURE SHOWS YOU MIGHT WANT TO SEE

Toronto: Wednesday, March 30, 2016   Writers’ Trust Lunch…….Women’s Art Association, 23 Prince Arthur 1.30—3:00pm

Nanaimo: Thursday April 7, 2016 U.V.I. Gustafson Lecture, 7:00pm

Quebec City:  Sunday, April 10, 2016 Festival, Morrin Centre, Brunch

Scotland:  St. Andrews, Sunday, April 1, 2016, ACROSS CANADA BY STORY. The Byre Theatre, 7:00 pm

England:  London, Tuesday April 19, 2016. Canada House, Trafalgar Square, ACROSS CANADA BY STORY 6:00pm Show, 7:00 pm Reception. Please tell all your friends to register with the Canadian High Commission!

Many more shows to come, in Toronto, and beyond.

News from Near and Far

by JK
I’ve been neglecting my blog recently, because I’ve been in China. While I was there I gave the show in Beijing, where the organizer of The Bookworm Literary Festival, Peter Goff, described me afterwards in these kind words:

“Doug Gibson’s show brings you into the hearts and minds of Canada’s literary giants, wonderful writers he has edited and published and drank with and danced with over the years. Throughout his career Doug had a gift for identifying great storytellers. It clearly helped that he’s one himself.”

Later I flew to Shanghai, where I gave the show in the Canadian Consulate. It was gratifying, and fun, although only a very small proportion of China’s 1.3 billion population were able to attend.

But in a whirlwind tour, I was able to speak twice to groups assembled in our Embassy by the very able Ambassador, Guy St. Jacques, and gave a series of lectures at universities and libraries in Suzhou and Hangzhou (don’t worry, if you don’t know them, they only have 12 million people in each city). One day our consular people picked me up at my hotel at 7 a.m., and got me back at 11 p.m. Standing on guard for thee, spreading the word about our fine authors.

An amazing experience.

NOW, AN EVENT FOR ALL ALICE MUNRO FANS AROUND TORONTO:

On Thursday, April 16, through Sunday, April 19, at The Isabel Bader Theatre, Charles Street, Toronto, the San Francisco group Word for Word will be producing a remarkable read-and-acted version of two Alice Munro Stories, at 8 p.m.
On Thursday through Saturday, I’ll be involved in leading post-show discussions from the stage.

If you love Alice Munro, please come along. It should be a remarkable evening.