The thrill of the chase

Posted on July 31, 2012 by doradueck

Anne Konrad’s parents were among those Mennonite refugees who managed to leave the Soviet Union in 1929, but most of her uncles and aunts were not. Over the past twenty years, Konrad, a writer living in Toronto, has been searching for and documenting the fates of relatives who stayed behind. She combed through old letters and documents, tramped around areas where her parents had lived, visited members of the extended family in various parts of the (eventually former) Soviet Union, and most dramatically, gained access to the police files of the trials and executions of her uncles. Continue reading →

Miscellanea: July

Posted on July 25, 2012 by doradueck

What I really appreciate about a blog is the opportunity to play — by which I mean, change things around if one likes, experiment, be of this mind for a while, or that look, and when it seems necessary, refresh it.

So, a year after beginning an author blog in an attempt to separate out my identity as an author from my other ramblings, I’ve decided to bring myself into just one web place again — here. If you’re interested, I offer an explanation in my last post there, but the short version is, it began to feel too complicated to be divided. (I don’t know what one does with abandoned sites, however; do I let the content there grow old and faded in the passing online weather, or do I remove it from public view?) Continue reading →

How do you flex your writing muscles?

Posted on July 17, 2012 by doradueck

Great news that writer Mavis Gallant’s private journals will be edited and published, though not so great that we may have to wait until 2014 to read them! A teaser set of excerpts from 1952 appears in the July 9 issue of The New Yorker, where Gallant also published more than 100 stories over her lifetime. I’ve not yet seen the issue (the copy someone bought at my request from a bookstore across town yesterday turned out to be the July 2 issue!), but teaser bits from that teaser set have appeared here and there on Facebook statuses and in blog posts (such as this lovely one by Janice Gray over at Richard Gilbert’s blog Narrative), all enough to make it clear how full of personality, wonderful writing, and compelling detail the published journals will be. A 1959 treasure quoted by editor Steven Barclay is an example. Continue reading →