The Porcupine's Quill
Celebrating forty years on the Main Street
of Erin Village, Wellington County
BOOKS IN PRINT
This Is Our Writing by T. F. Rigelhof
Punctuate his title as you like but T.F. Rigelhof considers This is Our Writing a declaration, an enquiry and an exclamation. As a writer of half a dozen, a reviewer of dozens upon dozens, and as a reader of a multitude more books, Terry Rigelhof knows much about writing in Canada.
In these eleven essays, he asks what is best in what has been written by Canadians in the twentieth century. He examines selected works of some writers whose accomplishments need serious revaluation. What are the real achievements of Robertson Davies, Carole Corbeil, Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, Hugh Hood, Leonard Cohen and George Grant? Rigelhof comes up with a list that will surprise some and dismay others.
This is a book for readers who have always known in their heart of hearts that Robertson Davies was an egregious windbag and that underneath the inspired silliness of their carefully contrived and managed public images, Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen have produced three of the most intelligent novels we have. In a sequence of interlocking personal essays, Rigelhof explores living a writerly life in Canada at the end of the twentieth century. The text is fortified by a dozen photographs, all but one previously unpublished, by Gabor Szilasi, one of Canada’s greatest active documentary photographers.
Table of contents
This Is Our Writing
Why Read What They Write?
Dull and Very Stiff
In the Wings
She’ll Always Have Paris
There’s a Purple Dinosaur in My Doghouse
Tales Catching Tales
The Fiction of Leonard Cohen
George Grant at McMaster
Of the Streets Where I Live
Choosing the Best
List of Photographs
Review quote
‘Over the last decade, The Porcupine’s Quill has developed a minor specialty in publishing cantankerous books that challenge the complacency of Canadian literary commentary. ...Now comes T.F. Rigelhof’s This Is Our Writing, which asks the bracing and necessary question: What is truly good in Canadian fiction and what is merely trendy and popular?’
—Jeet Heer, The National Post
Review quote
‘In This Is Our Writing, critic and novelist T.F. Rigelhof offers a rigorous appraisal of Canadian fiction, handing out half a dozen bouquets and a few walloping brickbats to those works he has found compelling enough to win his admiration or overrated enough to draw his ire. Rigelhof’s criticism will be familiar to regular readers of the Globe & Mail, and This Is Our Writing finds him at his most personal, blending his heartfelt opinions with a kind of meandering autobiography that is rare, but not unwelcome, in the straitlaced field of literary criticism.’
—amazon.ca
Review quote
‘[T.F. Rigelhof is] the choice man for reading our society’s erratic spiritual pulse.’
—The Montreal Gazette
T. F. Rigelhof is a contributing reviewer to the Books section at The Globe and Mail and was recently used as the intellectual pin-up for the new book section at the National Post.
His essay on religion in Canada at the end of the millennium, A Blue Boy in a Black Dress: A Memoir, won the QSPELL/Royal Bank of Canada Award for Non-Fiction in 1996 and was also nominated for the Governor General’s Award. His critically acclaimed short stories of contemporary life in Montreal have been anthologized and adapted for television and are collected in Je t’aime, Cowboy.
His first novel, The Education of J.J. Pass, has been ranked as one of the best coming-of-age novels written by a Canadian. His satirical second novel, Badass on a Softail, was a finalist for the Mordecai Richler’s Prix Parizeau II. Recently retired from teaching at Dawson College, Rigelhof now lives in Westmount, Quebec.
For more information please visit the Author’s website »
The Porcupine's Quill would like to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. The financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) is also gratefully acknowledged.
