Ruth Anne Latta

THIS VISIBLE WORM   My “William/Willie challenge”  Some years ago I watched the movie, “Dangerous Minds,” centring on a dedicated high school teacher played by Michelle Pfeiffer. She initiated a “Dylan/Dylan challenge for her students. They were to find poems/lyrics by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and the American singer/songwriter Bob Dylan which had the same theme.  It turned out that each poet had written a work urging a bold, confrontational attitude to death. Bob Dylan wrote:  “...I will not carry myself down to die./When I go to my grave, my head will be high.”  Dylan Thomas wrote, “Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”   The idea of finding a connection between two poets from different eras and intrigued me, so I invented a similar challenge for myself, the “William/Willie” challenge. “William” is the English poet William Blake (1757-1827), whose books, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experien...

 The online magazine, Compulsive Reader, has published my review of Tom Lake :   https://compulsivereader.com/ 2024/03/12/a-review-of-tom- lake-by-ann-patchett/  Ottawa's Indigo store at Pinecrest has copies of my novel, A Striking Woman , in stock.

  A DISEASE (dedicated to the memory of  Dr. Deborah Gorham) “ At the time, people kept telling me, ‘If you put your little boy in day care,  he’ll catch a disease! ’” said the guest speaker to the women at the community center. In an adjoining room, for the duration of the half-hour talk,  a sitter supervised their children at play. “ But he was fine, stayed healthy and learned social skills that have served him well.” I was newly married, new to the city where my husband worked. Listening, I harboured a germ of hope. to become like this historian  with the glossy dark hair, confident air, and passion for her work. I was stunned by the social expectations that marriage had brought down on me. Everyone but my husband wanted me to find a job,  buy a house with a backyard and have babies - A.S.A.P.!  STAT! Any other path was pathological. Were wedded bliss and a vocation incompatible? Were my dreams a disease? Forty years later, the historian spoke to my...

 Ed Broadbent’s Legacy to Us I met Ed Broadbent once,  in 2003, at an all-candidates’ debate in my Ottawa  community. At Jack Layton’s urging, he had come out of retirement to run in Ottawa Centre. His performance was outstanding. Afterwards, I and other audience members went up to the front to congratulate him. Another party’s candidate, who had a TV presence, was younger and perhaps better looking than Ed, assumed that I and the others were coming to greet him, and looked crestfallen on realizing we weren’t. Meanwhile Ed looked surprised and pleased to have so many fans come up to shake his hand. On January 28th, 2024, watching his state funeral, I was moved by the inspirational eulogies about his strivings to bring about a social democratic Canada, I was pleased to hear the co-authors of his recent memoir, Seeking Social Democracy, pay tribute to him.   “Broadbent wanted to write something concerned with political ideas in the broadest sense” wrote on...

Une Femme Respectable: Recently, with the aid of English sub-titles, I watched Une Femme Respectable , a 2023 movie by Bernard Emond.   Set in Trois-Rivières during the Great Depression of the 1930s, this film is about a woman who hasn’t had the life she once hoped for, but tries to be a good person nevertheless. She is rewarded in a way she never expected to be. Rose Lemay is an attractive, modestly dressed, middle-aged woman who has inherited a pleasant but not elaborate home, and some money, from her late parents.  In her parlour there are wedding and family photos, and as well, a table-top sculpture of a woman who might represent Diana the Huntress.   The Parisian sculptor, Jean-Antoine Houdon, created a famous bronze statue of this goddess in 1790, and copies may have found their way into middle-class Quebecc parlours of the 1930s. As the novel opens, Rose  tells her hired-girl that she will served tea to her guests herself.   In her parlour...

From John Donne's sermon at St Paul's for the evening of Christmas Day, 1624.        God made sun and moon to distinguish seasons, and day, and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons. But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies. In paradise, the fruits were ripe the first minute, and in heaven it is always Autumn, his mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask panem quotidianum , our daily bread, and God never says you should have come yesterday, he never says you must again tomorrow, but today if you will hear his voice, today he will hear you.      If some king of the earth have so large an extent of dominion, in North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgment together:       He brought light out of darkness, not out...

The other day, someone asked me to name some of my favourite historical novels - other than the six I have written.  I reeled off some of the books listed below, then came home and thought of several more.   All  have educated me about significant events  of the past and narrative techniques.  These are my current favourites. Isabel Allende's  novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, has compelling characters who survive the Spanish Civil War and come to Chile, where they experience the 1973 right wing coup. Amy Bloom's, White Houses , set during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, shows First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena Hickock trying to sustain a relationship during this time of economic depression and world war. Barbara Kingsolver's, The Lacuna , centres on an American author who crosses paths with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky in Mexico in the 1930s, and then pays for it during the Red Scare. Kingsolver's award-winning D...