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Articles by Darcy Ballantyne
Darcy Ballantyne: I spent last summer trying to find myself in the classified ads
A dimly-lit, overly air-conditioned room in a research library where the deliberate silence is interrupted only by the soft whir of dozens of microfilm readers doesn’t seem like a particularly enjoyable place to spend a hot summer, yet that’s where I found myself last year. I’d gone to Library and Archives Canada in downtown Ottawa on a needle-in-a-haystack mission to find a single document among thousands of similar ones that’s been on my mind for as long as I can remember.
With Love, Dad: On Finally Meeting My Father, the Novelist Austin Clarke Original
The first time I met Austin Clarke—in the mid-1980s at his house on McGill Street in Toronto—he gave me two things. Article continues after advertisement One was an old paper copy of the duplicate galleys for the last novel in the Toronto Trilogy, which bore an early version of the title—To Name the Bigger Light—shortened, of course, to The Bigger Light when it was published in 1975.
Is Dementia a Normal Part of Aging?
For the first time, there are more seniors alive today than children according to Statistics Canada’s latest population data. We are seeing an aging baby boomer cohort, as well as societal trends like longer life expectancies and lower fertility rates, and the combination of these factors has contributed to the rapid increase in the proportion of Canadians aged 65 years or older.
My Second Life as a Writer
A few years ago, when I was twenty-nine, I wrote something that splinted the fragile ankles of my writing career and pushed me into the world of professional writing. Ray Bradbury often retold the experience of completing “The Lake”: “When I finished the short story, I burst into tears. I realized that after ten years of writing, I’d finally written something beautiful.” I didn’t get dramatic or mystical-creative enough to cry when I finished writing my first good story.
The Unbearable Whiteness of CanLit
Two months ago, a group of scholars, activists, and artists converged in Toronto to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of Rinaldo Walcott’s seminal treatise on Black Canadian culture, Black Like Who? In his groundbreaking book, Walcott insists that “Writing blackness is difficult work,” particularly in Canada where “we are an absented presence under erasure.” The erasure Walcott describes occurs because black people in Canada are too rarely seen as truly Canadian.
The Unbearable Whiteness of CanLit
Author Austin Clarke, who passed away last year. Two months ago, a group of scholars, activists, and artists converged in Toronto to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of Rinaldo Walcott’s seminal treatise on Black Canadian culture, Black Like Who?
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