VIRTUAL GROUP LAUNCH: McGill Department of English Faculty

Robert Lecker, author of Who Was Doris Hedges? The Search for Canada's First Literary Agent, and Eli MacLaren, author of Little Resilience: The Ryerson Poetry Chap-Books, will launch their respective books at this McGill Department of English group launch.

Robert Lecker is Greenshields Professor of English at McGill University. Eli MacLaren is associate professor of English at McGill University.

ABOUT THE BOOKS

In Who Was Doris Hedges? Robert Lecker provides a detailed account of her remarkable career. Hedges published several novels, short stories, and books of poetry, moved in Montreal literary circles, did a stint as a radio broadcaster, and provided reports to the Wartime Information Board during the Second World War, possibly as an American spy. She lived a privileged life in the Golden Square Mile district of downtown Montreal with her husband, Geoffrey Hedges, a member of the Benson and Hedges tobacco empire. The more one uncovers about Hedges's life, the more one discovers a courageous figure who was exploring many of the conflicted issues of her day: the rise of juvenile delinquency, the suppression of female sexuality, the place of women in business and finance, and the difficulties confronting the publishing industry in the years leading up to and following the war.

In Little Resilience Eli MacLaren analyzes the formation of the series in the wake of the First World War, at a time when small presses had proliferated across the United States. Pierce's emulation of them produced a series that contributed to the historic shift in the meaning of the term "chapbook" from an antique of folk culture to a brief collection of original poetry. By retreating to the smallest of forms, Pierce managed to work against the dominant industry pattern of the day - agency publishing, or the distribution of foreign editions. Original case studies of canonical and forgotten writers push through the period's defining polarity (modernism versus romanticism) to create complex portraits of the author during the Depression, the Second World War, and the 1950s. The stories of five Ryerson poets - Nathaniel A. Benson, Anne Marriott, M. Eugenie Perry, Dorothy Livesay, and Al Purdy - reveal poetry in Canada to have been a widespread vocation and a poor one, as fragile as it was irrepressible.