The Names of Things.

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright and librettist and author of the
children’s books Magic and What’s in a Name?

In high school he wrote A.J.M Smith poems into a notebook, found “the essence of poetry” in Homer, and stumbled on theatre. At university, he had a play produced, wrote the book and lyrics for an opera, published stories and poems, and got married. Today he is known as a prolific writer of poetry, novels, and plays, less well-known as an editor, teacher, actor, singer, translator of Chekhov, and fixer-up of houses. Much of his career has been tied up with Michael Macklem at Oberon Press and two years of it was spent as literary manager at CBC Television, where he claims John Hirsch changed his life. His many references to artistic colleagues and friends comprise a lively commentary on the arts in Canada over the last sixty years. Too bad we don’t have an index.

But this is a memoir. The thrust is personal. Helwig traces his life from the moving pages of his childhood in Niagara-on-the-Lake, where his father ran a furniture workshop and his irascible mother sang in choirs, through his many years in Kingston as he supported a family with teaching at Queen’s and at Collins Bay Penitentiary. From there, we follow his travels abroad, his on and off again marriage, his forays into theatre, his work on homes in Kingston, Wolfe Island, Montreal, and Prince Edward Island, as well as the unexpected joy he found in later years as he used his fine bass voice in choirs and in Barnardo Boy, for which he wrote the libretto. Through it all he gives us outlines of novels, scraps of poetry, and successes and rejections.

The many names of people may be daunting for those unfamiliar with the Canadian literary scene, yet they enhance the portrait of an artist using his skills and his wits to make a living. And here and there a short lyrical chapter or an intriguing comment draws us all in to remind us that this is at heart the story of a writer.