sewn paper
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Non-Fiction / Essays
October 2000
208 pages
ISBN 0-88984-218-3
$18.95
This is Our Writing
T.F. RigelhofPunctuate 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The text is fortified by a dozen photographs, all but one previously unpublished,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.
`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?' `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.' `[T.F. Rigelhof is] the choice man for reading our society's erratic
spiritual pulse.'
- Jeet Heer, the National Post
- amazon.ca
- The Montreal Gazette
Photo by Gabor Szilasi
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. He currently lives and teaches in Montreal.