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        1959 NO AWARD MADE 
                                    
            With this Blog, I am claiming the 1959 Leacock Medal - post- humorously...
        
                    
         1960 Just add Water and Stir by Pierre Berton
            March 29, 2013

Like that of many Canadians, my last memory of Pierre Berton was his appearance on the CBC’s Rick Mercer Report in 2004. Berton, 84 at the time, was to pass away later that year. He took part in the comedian’s TV program ostensibly to demonstrate how to roll a perfect marijuana joint ...

             
          1961 Mice in the Beer by Norman Ward
             April 5, 2013
              “The Gentle Art of Satire” is not an expression you hear or read too often. Yet this is how Norman Ward’s writing skill was described by the publisher of his book Mice in the Beer ....

          
           

              1962 Jake and the Kid by W.O. Mitchell
                April 5, 2013
               My copy of W.O. Mitchell’s Jake and the Kid is a later edition, paperback version of the book. The cover art features a Norman Rockwell-style painting of the darkened interior of a barn framing an open door that looks out into bright daylight ... 

           1963 Three Cheers for Me by Donald Jack    
              April 19, 2013

             By the time Donald Jack wrote his war story, the 1963 Leacock Medal winner Three Cheers for Me, the pain of World War II was being displaced by the upbeat early 1960s, and Jack, who served in the RAF as a teenager near the end of that war, had moved to Canada ....


            1964 Homebrew and Patches by Harry J. Boyle
            May 3, 2013

               My mother grew up in a family that was far from wealthy and ha little in the way of luxuries. Her most memorable childhood Christmas was the one when she saw and tasted an orange....




           1965 War Stories by Gregory Clark
              May 10, 2013

              The title of Gregory Clark's 1965 Leacock Medal winning book War Stories is not misleading. Its pages recount Clark's experiences in the grip of bloody, plodding conflict on the frontlines in the two world wars. But collectively, these stories also describe another, separate battle ...





       1966 Nursery rhymes to be read - by George Bain
          May 17, 2013
          I wish I had known about George Bain’s 1966 Leacock Medal Winning book Nursery rhymes to be read aloud by young parents with old children when my kids were little ...




               1967 Needhams' Inferno by Richard J. Needham
                   May 24, 2013

                   In full flight, Richard J. Needham seemed relentless.
He could serve up one joke, one bit of nonsense, one sardonic shot after another after another after another for pages and pages ...



Miriam Toews in Peterborough (May 21 - 2015)

and How Humour can make us Sad

After Day One of the Contesting Canada’s Future conference at Trent University (May 21-23, 2015), I felt like a break from all the talking, listening, and thinking, but couldn’t resist one more session.  That evening, at Peterborough’s Market Hall theatre,  Miriam Toews  gave a reading and a bit of her time to fans.

Toews has written many books, and any one of them could have supported an evening’s conversation.  But her latest, All My Puny Sorrows, naturally served as the touchstone for introductions and most questions on this occasion.  In the form of a novel, the book tells the true story (the way only fiction can do sometimes) of her close, tense, always loving relationship with her sister, the complexity of mental illness, and then suicide.  An earlier Toews work dealt with her father’s depression and, again, suicide.

Reviewers call the new one “desperately sad,” “unbearably sad” and just “sad.”

With this, you might not expect those reviews to also talk about humour and the funny
side of the story.   But they almost always do, and perhaps surprisingly to those who only know of the general subject matter of her works, Miriam Toews, a humour-writing award winner as well as winner of big literature prizes, likes to laugh, make jokes, and smile.

In fact, she did a lot of that on this night in Peterborough when she was forced, for the first time in her life, to use glasses at a reading.  She joked around, a few times pushing them up and down on her head like a Star Wars storm trooper flicking his visor.

During the talk and then later in less formal interactions, Toews sought assurances that what she called her “jokes” were really funny.  By this she meant, the humorous parts of Puny Sorrows.  At first, I took this as a sign that she really would like more recognition as a humour writer.

And this inspired the humour writing student in me.

But as she spoke about this feature of her book, it became clear that her motive in writing humour is the same as any other exercise of her writing skills.   She just wanted to do justice to the story and, in this case, to her sister’s memory.   She wanted readers to feel her sister’s humour and fun side, which was intertwined with that desperately sad, long walk toward suicide.  The humour amplifies the sadness.

Think about it.  The people you miss the most are often those who made you laugh and can still make you smile when recalled by a humorous passage in sad book or when just talking, listening, and thinking.
DBD
May 2015