Another cup of coffee

Many interesting publications find their way to the “in” tray on my desk, and occasionally I even have a chance to read some of them.  One of the arrivals last week was a little booklet of poetry and prose entitled The Coffee Shop Resumé, the second issue produced this year by a group of intrepid first-year students in one of our ArtsOne clusters, “Writers and Writing in Canada”, taught by Collett Tracey – and I hope that the Chief Editor, Jeremy Davis, won’t mind if I mention his name and offer my congratulations both to him and to his team.  I was impressed, with both the quality of the production and the writing which it contained.  Well done!  Writing is not easy; indeed it can be exceptionally hard work.  Just ask any doctoral student who has completed all their research and is then faced with the daunting task of turning those notes into a dissertation.  And creative writing may be the most difficult of all, although there are certainly many who aspire to be writers … and one of the most common questions I receive at the Ontario Universities Fair in Toronto each September is whether Carleton has a Creative Writing program.  (Incidentally, the answer is “We do!”  It is available as a concentration in the B.A. in English.)

There was a time when I had some aspirations in that direction myself, and in my undergraduate years I also wrote poetry.  But academic writing soon displaced all other forms … and I can indeed remember the pride I felt when my first scholarly article appeared in print.  It still feels very good when a new book or journal arrives with my name on or in it, and I know I am not alone in that feeling.  I can see it in the faces of those colleagues who appear at my office door with a copy of their latest publication in hand, and I rejoice for them and with them.  In recent years I have once again turned my hand to a bit of non-academic writing, in the form of these weekly blogs.  Admittedly, some of these are better than others, with much depending on how much time is available, usually on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning.  And I do love it when someone stops me in the tunnels to say how much they enjoyed the latest offering.

In his editorial opening the second issue, Mr. Davis gets it absolutely right when he says that “Writing is alive”; but we part company when he goes on to lament that our literature courses often teach “dead writing” that is “dry, and dusty, and best left alone”.  The human species has produced a lot of exceptional writing over the years, in many genres, both fiction and non-fiction, and I have thoroughly relished exploring it.  Authors from the past have both taught me much and provided great pleasure.  My favourite literature courses in both English and French were those that surveyed a broad range of writing, and I still take delight in the work of many poets, from Joachim Du Bellay to Guillaume Apollinaire, from Robert Browning and T.S. Eliot to John Lennon and Paul McCartney … and faithful readers of these weekly musings will know that I often find meaning in their lines.  The authors may or may not be still with us, but their words are very much “alive”, still resonating after all these years.  Indeed, therein lies the greatest gift that writing bestows on us: a measure of immortality.