When Canada Dreamed

"A delightful tour de force of a most lost landscape beautifully recovered by a scholar and beautifully whimsical guru." -- John Fraser, CM, former editor of Saturday Night and correspondent for The Globe and Mail

As the ideals that inspired his generation pass away, a father re-creates his age for the benefit of his son in lovable portraits, brilliant conversations, hilarious satires, and explosive gossip. Are the values that led to Canadian firsts in health care, peacekeeping, architecture, a national literature, the liberal arts, and an aircraft industry still relevant to today's young? Beneath this mischievous appraisal lies a darker question about the meaning of these values to a person whose life is approaching its end.

Forty years ago and more, a "community of dreams" led to the emergence of a national literature, the establishment of Medicare, and the creation of a distinctively Canadian publishing industry. What might be accomplished if Canadians dared to dream again?

Memoirs include: A Canadian patriot keeps "Canada's National Publisher" afloat with a staff of eighty and no government assistance. A visionary educator creates an ideal university without an administration. A teenager receives an education in Newfoundland Screech on a deep-sea salvage tug at the hands of Farley Mowat. An aspiring prophet to the nation meets Leonard Cohen and Hubert Aquin, who lunches in public with a jar of cyanide on the table. A sisterhood of children's librarians use storytelling to save children from their parents and babysit a future author. A publisher sets the celebrity book in type while Marilyn Bell is halfway to becoming the first woman to swim across Lake Ontario. The renowned literary critic Northrop Frye appearing as an angel describes what it's like in heaven to a former student. A teenage boyfriend signs on as a seaman on an ocean freighter to be with his girlfriend on her baronial estate in Sweden. A determined novelist drops out of university and goes to the French Riviera and Oaxaca to write the first Ontario Gothic novel. Canada's greatest literary editor averts an author's suicide by using the editing of his manuscript as a form of psychotherapy.

Includes 48 photographs

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean Kane is the author of Wisdom of the Mythtellers and Raccoon: A Wondertale.