Meeting David McFadden at the Morrissey Tavern in 1993

When we would visit Toronto in the early 1990s we would visit with David McFadden. David is one of my favourite Canadian authors, a poet, novelist, and traveller.  From right: SM, CZ, DMc.

Tea with George and Jeanne Johnston, 16 February 1992

George Johnston in 1992

Photos taken in the living room of their Henderson Street home, Huntingdon, Quebec

Jeanne Johnston, Carolyn Zonailo, George Johnston

We always enjoyed tea with George and Jeanne Johnston, good friends from our years living in Huntingdon, Quebec. George and Jeanne were lovely people, generous, loving, welcoming... I have been blessed by knowing them.

Marya Fiamengo at The Cedars, spring 1993

Here's CZ and Marya on the Morrison Bridge.

CZ and Marya at the Elgin Cemetery.

Marya and CZ at the Cedars.

Marya on the Morrison Bridge.

SM, CZ, and Marya at The Cedars.

Wendell Berry on William Carlos Williams

Wendell Berrry's The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford (Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, 2011) is both Berry's homage to WCW and a discussion of poetry using Williams' work as the place of reference. This is an honest, serious, and articulate discussion of the work and meaning of one of the three or four major American poets of the last century.

Here is a quotation from Wendell Berry's book:

Without such rootedness in locality, considerately adapted to local conditions, we get what we now have got: a country half destroyed, toxic, eroded, and in every way abused; a deluded people tricked out in gauds without traditions of any kind to give them character; a politics of expediency dictated by the wealthy; a disintegrating economy founded upon fantasy, fraud, and ecological ruin. Williams saw all of this, grieved over it, and accused rightly... (p. 176)

Emily Carr on art and religion

"Emily Carr et ses amis" by Joe Fafard on Sherbrooke St. West
near St. Mathieu, 20 April 2013  

July 16th, 1933

Once I heard it stated and now I believe it to be true that there is no true art without religion. The artist himself may not think he is religious but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion. If something other than the material did not speak to him, and if he did not have faith in that something and also in himself, he would not try to express it. Every artist I meet these days seems to me to leak out something, some in one way, some in another, tip-toeing, stretching up, longing for something beyond what he sees or can reach.

Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands, the Journals of Emily Carr, Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, Toronto/Vancouver, 1966. P. 41.