Showing 305 results

Geoffrey Ursell is an award-winning writer of drama for stage, radio, and television, as well as of fiction, poetry, and songs.

Ursell was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and grew up in Regina, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg. He received his B.A. (Hons) and M.A. from the University of Manitoba, and his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of London (England), where he studied with the acclaimed scholar Sir Frank Kermode. He once taught Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at the Universities of Manitoba and Regina, but he has been a full-time writer, composer, producer, publisher, and editor for over twenty-five years.

Geoffrey has written extensively for radio, including a five episode mystery-comedy series for CBC’s Morningside, as well as other mystery-comedy series for CBC Saskatchewan, and plays for Vanishing Point and Anthology. He has composed songs for stage and radio, and his songs were featured on a CBC television special, as well as being heard on Sunday Morning and As It Happens. He wrote the music and lyrics for the widely-produced Globe Theatre show, Superwheel (script by Rex Deverell), as well as for such plays as Black Powder: Estevan, 1931 (script by Rex Deverell), and Talking Back (script by Don Kerr). Ursell has also written or co-written several plays with songs for young audiences, including What Do You Wanna Bet?, The Willow Bunch Giant, and The Prairie Jungle Show.

Trap Lines, his first poetry collection, received a Commonwealth Poetry Prize Special Commendation. His second collection of poetry is The Look-Out Tower, and he also has a collection of short stories, Way Out West! His songs, poems, and stories have appeared in many Canadian periodicals and anthologies.

Ursell’s novel, Perdue, won the Books in Canada Best First Novel Award, and his stage plays have won three national playwriting awards. His first full-length play, The Running of the Deer, produced by the University of Alberta Drama Department and published by Playwrights Canada, won the Clifford E. Lee National Playwriting Award. Saskatoon Pie!, a musical comedy, published by Coteau Books, won Persephone Theatre’s National Playwriting Competition, and was later remounted twice and toured Saskatchewan with great success. It has since had many other productions.

Ursell has been Editor-in-Chief of Grain Magazine and is a founding member and publisher of Coteau Books.

Fred Wagner was born in Tyvan (near Francis), Saskatchewan in October, 1908 and raised on a farm, the eldest of four children. He attended Luther Academy in Melville and then Luther College in Regina. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Capital University in Columbus, Ohio and later a Master of Arts degree in English literature from the University of Minnesota.

In 1933, after a brief period of teaching in Minnesota, he began a thirty-two year teaching career at Luther College in Regina, where he taught high school and first year university English and directed numerous drama productions. In 1965, he joined the English Department at the University of Regina. He particularly loved teaching Chaucer but his interests and knowledge were broad, and his later scholarly efforts were dedicated to a group of English Quaker novelists of the mid to late 19th Century. During his time at the university he served on the Library Committee, both as a member and as chair.

Fred Wagner always took an active interest in theatre, studying theatre arts at the Banff School as a young man, mounting many high school drama productions some of which were entered in the Dominion Drama Festival competitions to fine reviews, and acting in amateur theatre productions locally.

After his retirement in 1976, he dedicated much of his time to researching the Victorian religious novelists. He had started this work during his years with the University of Regina English Department, beginning with publication of an annotated bibliography of one of those novelists, a Quaker -- J.H. Shorthouse, author of John Inglesant. His work culminated in the 1979 Twayne Publishers issue of his book on Shorthouse in its English authors series.

In his retirement, Fred continued some part-time teaching and served on a committee for the preservation of Saskatchewan House.

Throughout his life, Fred Wagner was a creative and accomplished amateur photographer. As well, in his youth, he was known to be a formidable pitcher in the men's baseball league around the farm communities south of Regina.

Fred Wagner was married to Jeanie MacNair Wagner, who also joined the faculty of the University of Regina's English Department.

Fred Wagner died on December 21, 1984 after a lengthy illness. He was 76 years old.

There is a memorial scholarship in his name at Luther College (High School) to recognize the achievements of a student who excels in both English and drama.

Jeanie Wagner (nee Shaw) was born in Kingussie, Scotland in March, 1922. She moved to Regina at the age of two. She returned to Scotland with her mother and sister for one year when she was eight, and enjoyed many visits there in later years, including years of sabbatical studies spent in England and Scotland.

Jeanie attended Scott Collegiate in Regina, Luther College (for first year university studies) and the University of Saskatchewan where she attained a Bachelor of Arts degree and a teaching diploma in 1942. She taught high school English in Grenfell and at Central Collegiate prior to her marriage in 1947 to Fred Wagner. After that time, she did some part time teaching and music coaching at Luther College prior to raising her family.

As a young adult, Jeanie was an accomplished singer. In 1951 she completed an ARCT diploma (Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Toronto) in vocal performance and pedagogy, for which she received the highest mark in Western Canada that year.

Jeanie completed a Master of Arts degree in 1966. She joined the English Department, initially on a part-time basis, and taught there for over 25 years. Her research interests were varied, beginning with D.H. Lawrence on whose work she did her Masters Thesis and subsequently several published articles. Other research interests included American writers, Mark Twain and William Faulkner in particular, and Canadian poet A.M. Klein. In her last years of teaching, and springing from her own heritage, Jeanie dedicated much effort to exploring the works of, and building a collection of novels and poetry by early and mid-20th Century Scottish writers, as well as associated literary analysis and criticism. The period came to be known as the Scottish Renaissance.

Jeanie Wagner took a keen interest in her natural surroundings, and in their preservation. She edited numerous articles for the Blue Jay magazine and similar publications in Saskatchewan and Canada, particularly in her retirement. As an analytical reader and editor, she also assisted friends with their own literary efforts. Most notable among these were Saros Cowasjee's short story collection Strange Meeting and other stories and R.B. Fleming's 2010 biography of Peter Gzowski.

Jeanie Wagner died on July 5, 2016 at the age of 94.

Kathleen Wall was born in Michigan and took both her Bachelor’s and her Master’s degrees in English Literature at the University of Michigan. She moved to Winnipeg in 1973 with her first husband, Dan Geminder, who was a trumpet player with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Told that “there were no jobs for English PhDs,” in 1976, she nevertheless pursued this degree at the University of Manitoba, working with Evelyn Hinz on a study of the Callisto myth that ranged from Renaissance sources to Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, tracing the way in which changes in women’s circumstances were accompanied by changes in the ways authors used the myth and its variants. Her thesis, defended in 1984, was latter accepted by McGill-Queen’s University Press and published as The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood: Initiation and Rape in Literature in 1988. During her Ph.D. studies she began writing poetry more deliberately and published her second book, Without Benefit of Words with Turnstone Press in 1991.

In the meantime, she had secured (despite the Graduate Chair’s advice) a full-time job at Winnipeg Education Centre in 1982, an off-campus program of the Faculties of Social Work and Education that was designed to educate and train inner city teachers and social workers. WEC’s students were both dedicated and underprepared; as well, the program was, like many marginalized endeavours, under-funded. She ended each day feeling that something had been left undone, some student left unhelped. As well, she was the only English professor for the program, which left her feeling isolated. When she and her first husband separated, she began looking for jobs elsewhere, coming to the University of Regina in 1990, where she found a supportive environment she could not have predicted. The English Department at the University of Regina values the creative as well as the academic work of its faculty. In 2001, Wall won the University’s Alumni Award for Teaching; she gives significant credit to those dedicated and underprepared students at WEC for teaching her how to teach.

The Theory Group organized by Ray Mise and attended by Ken Probert, Bernie Selinger, Aydon Charleton, and Jeanne Shami, among others, introduced her more formally to narratology, which she had been exploring rather directionlessly on her own. Thus her early essays after the Callisto book explored the dimensions of the unreliable narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day as well as other works (from As for Me and My House to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) that helped provide a framework for the way the reader makes sense of the narrative in the face of the narrator’s unreliability. This was followed by an essay on two short stories by Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood and their use of the mise en abyme for exploring the challenges to women’s lives in the seventies. Still working in the vein of feminist criticism, Wall began teaching very popular classes in Jane Austen and less popular class in Virginia Woolf. She initially used her knowledge of narratology to puzzle out Woolf’s use of form in A Room of One’s Own (Journal of Narrative Theory 1999) and Jacob’s Room (Texas Studies in Literature and Language). The latter essay would soon appear in the Norton Edition of Jacob’s Room. Sought out for her skills as a teacher of composition by McGraw-Hill Ryerson, she significantly revised Barbara Fine Clouse’s Patterns for a Purpose and added Canadian readings in 2010. Her work on Woolf led her to explore aesthetics and theories of beauty. She published one of the first critical essays, “Ethics, Knowledge, and the Need for Beauty” on two popular novels, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty in the University of Toronto Quarterly in 2008.

In the meantime, Wall continued to write poetry, winning a John V. Hicks Major Manuscript Award for the manuscript that would become Time’s Body (Hagios Press) in 2005. Her second novel Blue Duets, was published by Brindle & Glass in 2010; both the poems and the novel were shortlisted for a Saskatchewan Book Award. (Her first novel, entitled Still Lives, remains appropriately in a box, now in the archives, to be resurrected when she discovers what its heroine wants). Wall has attended workshops and colloquia with Lisa Moore and Robert Kroetsch (2007), Don McKay (2013), and Ken Babstock (2015). After 24 years in the English Department, Wall retired in 2014 to write. At this time (August 2015), she is at work on a book of ekphrastic poems currently being edited by Don McKay; on a study of Virginia Woolf’s aesthetics that grew out of the earlier articles, entitled Virginia Woolf’s Poetics of Engagement; and on a third novel, Soul Weather. Lengthy essays on minimalism and craftsmanship wait in the wings. She keeps a popular blog entitled “Blue Duets.”

Pamela Wallin was born in Moose Jaw and raised in Wadena, Saskatchewan. She attended the University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus (predecessor of the University of Regina) where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and political science. Beginning her career as a social worker, Wallin changed course after co-hosting a noon-hour open-line show on CBC Radio. From 1975 to 1978 she held numerous positions with CBC Radio in Regina, Toronto, and Ottawa. Then in 1978 she joined the Toronto Star working in their Ottawa bureau.

Wallin's long association with CTV began in 1981 when she joined the network to co-host its morning show, Canada AM, with Norm Perry. She reported from Buenos Aires in 1982 covering the Falklands War and the subsequent collapse of the Argentine government. In 1984, on the eve of the visit to Canada of the Chinese premier, Wallin and Perry hosted Canada AM from Beijing. Then in 1985 Wallin was appointed Ottawa bureau chief. She was the first woman in Canadian television history appointed to head a bureau. As bureau chief, she also produced and hosted Question Period and regularly anchored CTVs weekend National News program.

Wallin left CTV in 1992 and, for the next three years, co-anchored CBCs Prime Time News with Peter Mansbridge. In 1995 she established her own production company, based in Toronto, which produced such shows as Pamela Wallin Live and Pamela Wallin's Talk TV. In 2000 she hosted the Canadian version of the hit game show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Wallin was Consul General of Canada in New York from 2002 to 2006. She was appointed to the Senate of Canada in 2008 and serves on the Senate's prestigious Foreign Affairs & International Trade Committee and is Deputy Chair of the Defence & National Security Committee. Wallin is also Chancellor of the University of Guelph. She serves on several corporate boards and continues her work as the Senior Advisor on Canada-US relations at the Americas Society and the Council of the Americas in New York.

Pamela Wallin is an Officer of the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honour. She also served, at the request of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, on the special Independent Panel on Canada's Future Role in Afghanistan.