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Trivias Humorous - Joan Walker - Pardon My Parka

(if you are researching Joan and can help us with more information, please email me at canushumorous@gmail.com)


- Joan Walker wrote three (3) published books during her career.  They were in three different formats.  Pardon My Parka  was a light-hearted, first-person account of personal experiences.
- The other books were Repent at Leisure (Ryerson Press, 1957), a novel which won an award for fiction, and Marriage of a Harlequin (Toronto: McCleland & Stewart, 1962), which was a biography of sorts of the late 18th, early 191th century British playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan.  This latter book is described by booksellers as “a biographical novel.”

- Joan Walker is often cited in relation to these books as Joan Suter Walker.  Suter (or Sutter) was presumed to be her maiden name.

- In 2004 in a communication to the Canadian War Brides organization, a researcher from the northern Quebec town of Destor sought more information about Joan Walker, providing the following as background (citing "Contemporary authors. First revision -- Detroit, Gale Research Co.[c1967-1979] -- ISSN: 0190-3616" as the source.”  (accessed Jan. 19, 2013)

- According to this source, Walker was “Born in London, England ; went to Canada, 1946, now Canadian citizen; daughter of Jean Etienne and Madeleine (Siebs) Sutter ; married James Rankin Walker, September 20, 1946. Education: Attended schools in Brighton, England, and London, England; École des Beaux Arts, Geneva, Switzerland, student for two years. Politics: Conservative. Religion: Anglican. 

- Career : Harrods Advertising Agency, London, England, fashion artist, two years; Amalgamated Press Ltd., London , England, sub-editor, three years; Newnes-Pearson, London, England, assistant editor, three years; Sunday Pictorial, London, England, feature writer during World War II; free-lance writer in Canada, 1946- . Member: Canadian Women's Press Club, Canadian Authors' Association.”
- This information is consistent with what Joan Walker shared about her life in Pardon my Parka and with remarks she made in a newspaper interview in January 1970 ("Optimism Helps Writers," January 21, 1970, Ottawa Citizen) which she gave by telephone from her then home just outside of Oshawa, Ontario.

- Walker did not consider herself to be a literary writer nor a humor writer although she did admit to always keeping on the “light side of things.”  

- Her later writing took the form of newspaper articles and regular columns in the Globe and Mail newspaper.  Although she wrote book reviews for the paper, often on new humour works, she was not much interested in her own books. 
- In fact, she did not even keep one copy of Pardon My Parka for own and stopped writing books after the publication of Marriage of a Harlequin in 1962.

- Walker considered Stephen Leacock “a genius” and, in her later career, longed for a return to his kind of humor in Canadian literature.