Margaret Laurence

I'll just read some of them.

They recommended Their Personal Favorite, which is A Bird in the House by Margaret Lawrence, which I've never read.

They also recommended North End Love Songs or River Woman by Katerina Vermette.

I've read North End Love Songs, which is wonderful.

In fact, there were two writers when I was in my teens and early 20s who were kind of mentors and had a huge impact on me.

One of them was the Canadian novelist Margaret Lawrence.

Before we had Margaret Atwood in Canada, we had Margaret Lawrence, and she wrote a number of classic pieces of work that are real standards of Canadian literature.

But then the other was there was a writer named Ross MacDonald who wrote a series of detective novels about a character named Lou Archer.

And I discovered those books when I was 15, and I became obsessed with them.

And what I tend to do also is that people who have walk-on parts, my theater training coming back, people who are just mentioned in passing or they are in the first chapter or something will often have a starring role in a later book.

And that's something that I think Margaret Lawrence did in her Manawaka books.

She focused on a different set of characters in each of her books in the same area, but they get mentioned in the other books where they're not taking center stage roles.

Now you've got three published and you've got the fourth one done, working on the fifth.

The idea of memory, historical memory is rare.

That's why I chose a lot of, well, there are women writers, there's Margaret Lawrence and there's others who wrote about the prairies, growing up in the prairie or farm life, but there aren't enough of those books.

Because I suppose because the cities are such magnets, and that's where the education is, where the money is, where the employment opportunities are.

The people leave, and they go, and they become Torontonians or Winnipeggers.

I never found a Augie Bartsch.

No.

But you have to take literature, the literature that you find, not what you wish had happened, but what's there? What do we find there? What you find is either homegrown people writing about Sinclair Robs, writing about the prairies, Margaret Lawrence writing about the prairies, or the urban people The urban novel, urban fiction, whether it's in French or in English about Toronto.

And you have to take it as it is.

Signed, Kenneth Miller, his real name, bracket, Ross and Bone.

And so, and he was one of two great mentors I had at that time in my life, and the other was Margaret Lawrence, who had been a writer in residence at Trent, and I went to see her.

And we came, you know, formed a friendship, which became even deeper once I met my future wife, Neitha, who everybody likes more

than me.