Writing Home: A PEN Canada Anthology

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This sequel to Writing Away (1994), a travel anthology about faraway
places, is “a kind of travel book in which contributors take on their
home places.” In most cases, the editor notes, this means Canada.
“They could write anything at all about “home,” anything from an
account of a childhood place to a meditation on the meaning of home.”
Constance Rooke thinks of the source of such writing as “the energy of
desire.”

PEN is an international organization whose self-appointed task is to
remember writers in prison abroad, conscientious objectors deprived of
home and freedom because they spoke out on their beliefs. We assert the
right of “writing home, “ Rooke writes, “according to the dictates
not of dictators, but of one’s own heart and mind.”

Recurrent motifs in the anthology range from the spectre of Quebec
separation to writers’ cottage retreats. Vulnerability is a recurring
theme, as are celebrations of home and of the idea of home.

These lively pieces, contributed by 44 well-known Canadian writers,
including Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, John Ralston
Saul, Carol Shields, Jane Urquhart, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Rosemary Sullivan,
Janice Kulyk Keefer, and P.K. Page, are enjoyable reading. Sales of this
book go to support PEN’s work.