The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

Religion and morality: it has often been assumed that the two are closely linked, but with changes in social attitudes and the fragmentation and decline in religious belief, newly complicated questions have arisen. Current in Manitoba is disagreement about the government’s Bill 18, the Safe and Inclusive Schools Act, which is designed to reduce or prevent bullying.

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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

While travelling a few weeks ago I picked up a book by Margaret Drabble called The Pattern in the Carpet. I like Drabble’s books, but I hadn’t heard of this one, a desultory memoir which begins with her memories of working on jigsaw puzzles with a favourite aunt. As the memoir makes its wandering way through some of the mild entertainments of common life, she has occ

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Profile: Dianne Hicks Morrow

by Jane Ledwell

I believe anyone can write a poem,” says PEI’s new poet laureate, Dianne Hicks Morrow, emphatically. “I also believe a poem can be about anything… And that for me is the whole point.” She is getting over the initial shock of her appointment to the laureate’s role and is filled with enthusiastic hopes and plans for her three-year term promoting the literary arts, and p

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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

Just recently Gaspereau Press published a centennial edition of Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, printed in the something close to the style of the 1912 first edition. Since my marked-up copy of the book was long ago abandoned, I treated myself to the Gaspereau reproduction, and reread it by the fire over a couple of icy winter nights. A splendid b

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Launch of Prince Edward Island Legislative Documents Online

by Sean McQuaid

Over the course of decades upon decades of political action in this Island’s history, stretching back to centuries past, events and activities that occurred in our Legislature have been recorded for posterity in the Clerk’s Journals of the P.E.I. Legislative Assembly.

Handy things those Clerk’s Journals, each one summarizing t

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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

Anyone my age has lived through a lot of revolutionary changes. I am spelling out these words on the keyboard of a laptop. When I first started writing we put down words by hand or by hammering the keys of a large typewriter. For a copy we used a carbon paper between two white sheets.

Everything changes, sometimes very quickly. So far as I can make out from the available

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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

I learned a poem by heart this week. Memory Work they called it when I was in school. Of course much of education is a matter of remembering or learning to remember, but Memory Work was understood to mean learning a passage of poetry and being able to stand up and recite it. I’m not sure how much of it is done now, probably depends on the teacher.

There are still

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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

Recently I was given a 1931 copy of a magazine called The Dickensian: A Quarterly Magazine for Dickens Lovers. My copy presents—among reports from far flung branches of the Dickens Fellowship—essays on the use of alcohol in Dickens’ novels, on his fictional waiters, and on the sources of the songs quoted by Dick Swiveller in The Old Curiosity Shop.

You might call

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New publishing company aims for young adult market

by Ann Thurlow

Sometimes a great idea is a lot of hard work. And sometimes a great idea is a confluence of small things, an opening suddenly created, an opportunity seized. Not to say that the birth of Fierce Ink Press didn’t involve a lot of hard work. But the women behind Fierce Ink—Kimberly Walsh and Colleen McKie—definitely had their eyes open for a

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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

Not a large room, this gallery, but the four walls illustrate a lifetime of painting in oil, many of the pieces brilliant miniatures, small enough to fit in the lid of a paint box, here framed and displayed in a double row, every few feet a larger painting derived from an oil sketch hung between them.

I am standing in the J.W. Morrice room of the Ken Thomson collection

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