Tidings — Winter 2021

U N I V ER SI T Y OF K I NG’ S COL L EGE A LU M N I M AGA ZI N E | W I N T ER 2021

TIDINGS Retired professor

SYLVIA D. HAMILTON honoured with namesake award

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

King’s moves classes online Three Bays restored: a photo essay Inaugural Undergraduate Fellowships in Public Humanities

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TH E 20 1 9 -2 0 STEWARD S H I P REPO RT * * * *

TIDINGS Winter 2021

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editor Elizabeth Grant elizabeth.grant@ukings.ca Design Co. & Co. www.coandco.ca Postal Address Tidings c/o Advancement Office University of King’s College 6350 Coburg Road Halifax, N.S., B3H 2A1 (902) 422-1271 King’s website www.ukings.ca Email naomi.boon@ukings.ca

3 Rising to the challenge: King’s moves courses online The shift to online classes came suddenly, delivering a “shock to the system.”

One year on, students and faculty discuss how they’ve made it work.

8 King’s honours recently retired journalism professor Sylvia D. Hamilton as namesake of five new annual awards for Black students Award for African Canadians, with a focus on African Nova Scotians, will help ensure Hamilton’s “legacy lives on” at King’s.

18 A Circular ending as Dr. Elizabeth Edwards closes the book on a distinguished teaching career As Dr. Elizabeth Edwards prepares to retire, her son, Dr. David Huebert, concludes his first year as a faculty fellow.

22 Undergraduate Fellowships in Public Humanities Nearly cancelled due to the pandemic, like so much this year the inaugural offering of the fellowships moved online—to a successful start.

38 Jessica J. Lee As a King’s student, Jessica Lee dreamed of writing “a fictionalized version” of her grandparents’ story. We spoke with Jessica to learn how pursuing that dream led her to write her award-winning memoir.

56 Lives Lived Canon Russell Elliott Rev’d Dr. Ingalls remembers the late Canon Russell Elliott, an alum who distinguished himself as a parish priest and a writer whose commitment to social activism was underpinned by a lifelong pursuit of knowledge, and love for friends and family.

Stories for this issue were written by students, staff, faculty and alumni of the University of King’s College.

Tidings is produced on behalf of the University of King’s College Alumni Association. The views expressed in Tidings are expressly those of the individual contributors or sources. We welcome and encourage your feedback on each issue.

Mailed under the Publication Mail Sales Agreement #40062749 Cover shot of Sylvia D. Hamilton

by Paul Adams, Adams Photography.

24 Three Bays restored: a photo essay 28 Stewardship Report 2019/20 36 FYP Texts 38 Alumni Profiles 46 Alumni Publish 50 AlumNotes

LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

WILLIAM LAHEY

Photo by Adams Photography

LAST YEAR, I WROTE this Tidings message just after King’s Feb. 5, 2020 remembrance of the 100th anniversary of the Windsor, N.S., fire that destroyed the old King’s campus. I expressed empathy for the administration of the day, thinking of how they endured a succession of difficult circumstances, including the Spanish flu. Little did I know that four weeks away another global pandemic waited.

This issue of Tidings will arrive shortly after the one-year anniversary of the day King’s and Dalhousie jointly made the decision to suspend in-person classes and to largely close our shared campus—to keep each other safe, to play our role in keeping Halifax safe, and to continue our mission as educators in difficult circumstances. The March 13, 2020 memo from President Deep Saini and I, urged everyone in our community to draw on our strength as we prepared “to come through this situation even stronger and more compassionate.”

In May, ‘the situation’ expanded beyond the pandemic. The killing of George Floyd in the United States shook the world, galvanizing the Black Lives Matter movement, giving spark and fresh urgency to the call for social justice. This, as the pandemic itself lay bare racial and gender inequalities. In this

context, the college reaffirmed our commitment to act to make King’s a more equitable, diverse and inclusive community.

A year into the pandemic, I am full of admiration for everyone around me as we work to keep pace with the ever-changing conditions and public health orders du jour.

In Nova Scotia, we have enjoyed some of the best conditions imaginable, but we have never forgotten our bonds to all those living through the pandemic in more difficult circumstances, or to those lost in Nova Scotia’s multiple tragedies of this sorrowful year.

We acknowledge all who have died this year, and their loved ones who bear a particular kind of grief in a time when we cannot come together.

The pages that follow attempt to chronicle how the King’s community deployed gumption and creativity throughout this year. The stories reflect the Herculean effort that imaginatively moved us online and, as I described a year ago, the way “our students have rallied with forbearance and good cheer, making us all feel better about the days ahead.”

It is not easy. We are masked. We are distanced. There is suffering in our inability to gather normally, to grieve, to celebrate, to teach, to study. The absence of the opportu-

nity to simply be together has been felt by each of us, here as in other places. Wherever we have weathered the pandemic, we are bound by a common experience that emphasizes our shared vulnerability, our care and concern for one another and our deep desire to be reunited.

Throughout this year, alumni and friends have shown their solidarity. I have been deeply moved by your thoughtfulness and generosity toward King’s students and our college. Your personal words of encouragement have helped sustain all who have received them.

As vaccinations begin to be available and we dare to dream of being routinely together again, I hope you’ll agree there is ample evidence, grand and small, of coming through this situation—stronger and more compassionate.

Sincerely,

William Lahey President and Vice-Chancellor

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LETTER FROM THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION PRESIDENT

PAUL THOMSON

GIVEN THE EVENTS and non-events of the last twelve months, I begin by addressing the newest members and soon-to-be members, the class of 2020, the class of 2021 and the class of 2024, who joined the King’s community this year. I want you to know that you will always hold a place of special respect and honour in the King’s Alumni Association. We appreciate, and will not forget, the collegial experiences you have sacrificed for the safety and well-being of everyone. We will endeavour to support, encourage and celebrate you now and into the future.

I would not dare suggest silver linings in a year marked by such hardship, loss and grief. Were it possible, all of us would wish this past year away. But optimism and hope always have a place within us, and this year held a revelation for the Alumni Association.

It all began when we joined the world in the rush to download Zoom. Suddenly, we had the highest attended Annual General Meeting in years—possibly ever. Our Executive Committee, which meets four times a year, experienced a closeness we had not known before as we are spread across the country. This spirit of togetherness was again present at President Lahey’s Holiday Happy Hour in December. We enjoyed his fireside update, a festive drink and played trivia together—from afar. ‘Zoom fatigue’ is a real thing and we are obviously eager to be in person again. However, even in September when we hope to be able to gather in the Wardroom and when Alumni Day celebrations and brunch in Prince Hall resume in May 2022, I suggest aspects of our pandemic habits are here to stay. My hope is that we are creating new traditions as the old ones experience a welcome return.

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For example, on pages 18-19 you will see that this year, through the wonder of Zoom, we are all invited to participate in a condensed version of the final FYP lecture, complete with tutorial groups. This is something to look forward to and an extraordinary opportunity to celebrate Dr. Edwards as she concludes her teaching career. She has influenced so many of us. (Be sure to sign up for your e-vite!)

In June 2020, the incomparable Kathy Miller retired from Alumni Relations and the Alumni Association welcomed her successor, Naomi Boon. Like the class of 2024, Naomi has joined King’s and embraced her new role from the safety of a desk in her home. Perhaps in kinship with students and younger alumni, she has brought new life to the ‘ask an alum’ program. It’s an informal network that allows alumni to share their expertise and experiences, as questions pop up in our professional and academic paths of choice. Naomi has also very recently established an opt-in ‘listserv’ for alumni wanting to receive suitable job postings, which also acts as a way for alumni employers to tap new talent. It’s our hope that over time these services gain momentum as you, our members, become aware that these options

are there to assist you.

We invite you to go to check out the Alumni & Friends section of ukings.ca. You’ll find many recent changes, and while you are there be sure to update your email address and send us your news.

In July, I will step into my role as past president, so I wish to thank you. It has been a delight to serve the association and you its members. It’s also been quite a ride! This year has brought us together in a unique way and shown us that there are many opportunities to foster our connections with King’s and with each other, now and long after these odd days are behind us.

Sincerely,

Paul Thomson, BA’90 President of the Alumni Association

President of King’s Alumni Association Paul Thomson, BA’90, speaks at the 2019 Alumni Day Brunch with emcee and King’s Assistant Professor of Journalism Pauline Dakin, MFA’15.

CAMPUS NEWS RISING TO THE CHALLENGE: KING’S MOVES COURSES ONLINE

by Philip Moscovitch THE EARLY 1970s WERE an era of dramatic change at King’s. The university’s divinity program moved to the Atlantic School of Theology and the Foundation Year Program (FYP) launched—promising an approach focused on in-depth learning and participation.

But those changes pale in comparison to the upheaval involved in moving all 2020-2021 academic programming online.

That, says Foundation Year Program Director Dr. Neil Robertson, represents “the biggest shock to the system that FYP has ever had.... A huge challenge.”

In determining how to make the transition to online learning, FYP—like other programs at King’s—was committed to maintaining the fundamental characteristics that make it unique.

“What can I do to make sure this is a welcoming space and not just another hour in front of your computer?”

Hilary Ilkay

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CAMPUS NEWS

Catherine Fullarton leads a tutorial online

“I personally did not realize how fundamentally helpful it is to just be surrounded by people that are working on something.”

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There are three key components to the Foundation Year Program: great texts, lectures, and intimate, small-group tutorials, where students and tutors hash out their thoughts on the readings.

“The most crucial decision we made was that we had to go with what's called a synchronous, rather than asynchronous, model for tutorials. In other words, people meeting at the same time, with Zoom tutorials as an integral part of the program,” Robertson says.

While students can watch pre-recorded lectures on their own time, they gather in tutorials to discuss the texts.

“There are issues about that in terms of people being in different time zones. And so we have, in a sense, had to ask some of our students to make some considerable adjustments in terms of when they're getting up or when they're going to bed to be able to participate in the program.” Robertson

says. “But I think that was the best and most important decision we made in terms of succeeding this year, because it's meant that our students have experienced the program with this crucial sense of it being a discussion together. And that part of the program has been preserved.”

In other words, whether online or in person, the spirit of FYP transcends its method of delivery.

That’s a perspective shared by both students and the FYP Fellows leading tutorials.

Faculty Fellow Dr. Hamza Karam Ally, who has been teaching from Ontario, says his approach is to ensure connecting over Zoom is “a shared experience, but also a very singular experience.... What can I do to make sure this is a welcoming space and not just another hour in front of your computer?”

Karam Ally has found his students particularly open to online learning, which

CAMPUS NEWS

has made the job easier. He says, “I was surprised from the outset by how quickly students adapted to this new world... I was so impressed and grateful for the way that they just took it on as ‘this is the way things are, and we’re going to make the best of it.’”

To maintain the intimacy of tutorials online, the university hired more fellows to lead the groups, and reduced the number of students in each group to 10, from 15.

The goal of tutorials, Robertson says, is not for students to find a “right” response to the texts, but to “explore for themselves and in conversation with their fellow students, what they think about the text and deepen their understanding and critiques or appreciation.”

The pandemic has added a new layer of informality to that intimacy.

“In a regular tutorial, you wouldn’t see students with blankets draped over them,” says Faculty Fellow Hilary Ilkay. “But I also

wouldn't have two kittens running over my head during a tutorial. It puts everyone on this weird level playing field, where none of us want to be doing this in our home, but here we are doing it. So, throw your duvet on if that makes you feel comfortable. That's fine.”

Students also appreciate some of the other efforts the university has made to keep them connected. Prince Scholarship recipient Sophia Wedderburn pointed to two in particular: Read Now and Write Now. Read Now involves tutors doing live readings of works that will be covered the next day. “I mean, one Read Now had an aria in it from an opera, which was really exciting,” she says.

Write Now is an opportunity for students to connect online and work on essays at the same time. “It gives you that feeling of being in a room or in a library full of people who are all going through the same thing as you are, she says. “I personally did not realize how fundamentally helpful it is to just be surrounded by people that are working on something. Being able to do that to some extent virtually has really enhanced my experience.”

FYP, of course, is not the only program to have had to make adjustments. In midMarch, faculty for the MFA in Creative Nonfiction had just finalized plans for the June residency—only to have to re-invent it on short notice for online delivery.

Kim Pittaway, the MFA’s executive director, says the in-person residencies are short and intense—with some days running from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. “That's part of the magic of it. There's all this stuff going on, you're all in it together, and it’s immersive,” she says.

“So we stood back from that and thought, what are the essential components? What's reasonable to expect from our mentors and faculty, and from our students as well? We didn't think people would want to be spending eight or 10 hours sitting in front of their computers.”

The MFA faculty went with a mix of synchronous small-group sessions, asynchronous lectures and events that could be seen live or later. Pittaway says she was surprised by the level of response to the optional sessions. “We thought if we get 30 percent of

students attending the optional stuff, we'd be happy. Instead, we got 90 or 95 percent of students attending most of the optional sessions live. And I was surprised by that.”

The News Reporting Workshop is another intensive program that had to make dramatic changes. In normal times, the workshop is focused on creating a real-life newsroom atmosphere, centred in a campus computer lab.

Although it’s challenging to re-create that atmosphere online, there have been unexpected advantages, says Terra Tailleur, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism. One of them is the wider range of stories being covered because students are spread out across different provinces.

“They're coming up with really compelling story ideas. And I'm really impressed with that, considering how challenging it is to report these days,” Tailleur says. Photography presents particular constraints, she adds. “Obviously, we can't have students breaking any of the physical distancing guidelines. So that hampers a few things. We have to get creative.”

To make news gathering easier, the university provided journalism students with kits—mailing them to those not living locally. The kits include a microphone and tripod with an adapter to attach it to a cellphone. Student Alecia Gallant calls the kits “awesome,” saying “they helped a lot.”

Asked mid-year what the main lesson of the transition to online learning has been, Robertson says, “I think there's a way in which we've risen above the situation, but there's another way in which there's no escaping the fact that the students are more isolated. I wouldn't want to misrepresent things as if there hasn't been loss. There have been moments of gain, in things like Read Now. And the ways people can connect online has allowed some people to take the Foundation Year Program who otherwise couldn't have been able to, because of their circumstances.”

He adds, “There’s no denying that not being on the same little postage stamp of the King's campus does affect both students and faculty. But in a way that just deepens our appreciation for the moments of connection.”

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CAMPUS NEWS

TALES FROM THE QUAD: PANDEMIC VERSION Life at King’s is different in 2020/21, but thanks to the energy, creativity and generosity of our community, the King’s spirit remains intact MOVE-IN DAY BECAME A WEEKEND—ONE STUDENT AT A TIME

PIPING HEARD ONCE MORE ON THE QUAD

Greeted by President Lahey and a few other students and staff, a smaller cohort of students, still taking their classes online, staggered their residence arrival times and abided by strict move-in protocols. Fourth-year student Megan Krempa maintained a move-in tradition at the entrance to the Quad.

KEEPING DISTANCE, KING’S STYLE We quickly learned how to wash our hands properly and regularly. We donned masks and followed directional arrows in the halls. And we were reminded what ‘six feet apart’ looks like with a little creative assistance in the Quad.

SWEET CHEERS AND STUDENT “BUBBLES” Students, faculty, staff and dogs alike enjoyed coming together on a brisk November day for President Lahey’s Hot Chocolate Social in the Quad.

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President Lahey decided that in a year when so many events and gatherings were cancelled, this tradition was ripe for return. In early October, King’s student and musician Cameron Barrett began playing his bagpipes. Piping has long been part of Cameron’s life, and life at King’s. At many special events, from formal meals to Encaenia, to a brief (by King’s standards) and memorable period that began in the 1970s when a piper played in the Quad each morning (referred to at the time as the “Tartan Alarm Clock”), pipers have been a part of King’s traditions. For President Lahey, the reintroduction of a piper has dual purposes: “The idea is to mark the end of every week and the beginning of every weekend, but also to provide our students with a little taste of one of the things that has been a constant at King’s over the years.” For Barrett, who had been accustomed to playing at formal meals as well as at the yearly Encaenia procession, “I’ve missed these events a lot, as I know everyone at King’s has. By reviving the tradition of piping in the Quad, we’re able to experience a little bit of what we are all missing,” he says.

CAMPUS NEWS

ILLUMINATIONS ON THE QUAD The Quad is normally quiet over the December holiday break, but 35 students remained on campus unable to go home.

In response, the King’s facilities team went above and beyond to make their holiday in residence extra special. Trees around the Quad were festooned with glowing lights to set the stage for a cosy and festive holiday on campus—and they are still up, perhaps to become a permanent feature.

PUZZLING OUT THE NEW YEAR THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION PACKS UP ‘BAGS OF LOVE’ To help with morale, the Alumni Association mobilized to create ‘bags of love’ for each of the students in residence over the December holidays. Even in residence, social gatherings are restricted in line with the provincial guidelines. Always eager to connect alumni with current students, each custom bag was filled with a selection of gifts, treats and activities, including books, puzzles, mugs, tea and even some goodies from local café, Tart & Soul, owned by alumna Safia Haq, BA(Hons)’10. Each bag also contained a booklet of letters written by King’s alumni from across the globe—sending well wishes, suggestions for COVID-safe activities in Halifax, and even their top Netflix and book recommendations for the season!

DIWALI LIGHTS UP RESIDENCE LIFE Thanks to the idea and organization provided by Jay Naidu, senior don Radical Bay, the students in residence transformed the Manning Room in November for the first-ever campus celebration of Diwali, “the festival of lights” celebrated around the world by Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists. The celebratory atmosphere was enhanced with sparklers and Indian sweets in the Quad.

Over the holiday break the dons brought a little extra holiday cheer to residence life with WinterFest, a schedule of movies, puzzles, and games nights—activities which also made a popular addition to residence life throughout the fall. Seen here, three students work on a puzzle depicting Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.

STUDENTS WELCOME 2021 The arrival of 2021 was celebrated with joy and sparklers by students who stayed in residence for the holidays. Bring on the New Year!

KING’S CO-OP BOOKSTORE SHOWS ITS KANT-DO ATTITUDE Pandemic or not, the show must go on for Canada's hardest-to-find bookstore, the King’s Co-op Bookstore. When COVID-19 arrived in Nova Scotia last spring, Paul MacKay, bookstore manager, quickly switched gears by closing the storefront, going online, and also offering free delivery by bicycle to customers located on the Halifax peninsula. He even garnered a little media attention for this unique delivery method!

DINING SERVICES PULL OUT THE STOPS TO KEEP UP TRADITION Dean of Students Katie Merwin and the Dining Services staff were pleased to see the well-loved tradition of formal meals in Prince Hall return in February as an "Informal Formal" with students donning their robes and coming together from residence to break bread in community. Dinner was held over three successive nights to allow for social distancing, and the students were joined

by President Lahey who opened the evening with some words about the history of Formal Meal, its role within King's history, and the importance of the event during the pandemic.

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KING’S HONOURS RECENTLY RETIRED JOURNALISM PROFESSOR

SYLVIA D. HAMILTON

AS NAMESAKE OF FIVE NEW ANNUAL AWARDS FOR BLACK STUDENTS Award is latest of many signposts being left

by Hamilton to guide and inspire current and future generations

by Allan MacDonald

THE UNIVERSITY IS PLEASED to establish the Sylvia D. Hamilton Award, named in honour of recently-retired King’s journalism professor Sylvia Hamilton. A noted writer, poet, filmmaker and visual artist, in addition to educator, Hamilton has devoted her career to the places, people and voices that make up the Nova Scotia Black experience, an experience Hamilton has traced back to her own ancestors coming to Nova Scotia in the years following the War of 1812.

The new award is open to African Canadian students, with a focus on African Nova Scotians, at King’s and will be open to all degree streams with a preference for students in journalism and the King’s/ Dalhousie MFA in Creative Nonfiction. The five awards, which are renewable over the usual length of each degree program, are each valued at $2,020 per year, in honour of Hamilton’s retirement year of 2020.

CELEBRATION OF A STORIED CAREER In her biographical essay, “A Daughter’s Journey,” first published in 2004 in Canadian Woman Studies, Hamilton says of her work, “Of the signposts, I have erected a few.

Many more await creation.”

Those signposts, erected over four decades, are the films, essays, lectures, poetry and other writings that have served

Adams Photography Photo by

to elevate the multidimensional Hamilton to the status of cultural icon. In addition to holding three honorary degrees and having been named a Dalhousie Original as part of Dalhousie’s celebration of its bicentennial, Hamilton has been awarded Nova Scotia’s Portia White Prize, a Gemini Award, the CBC Television Pioneer Award, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal and, most recently, in 2019, the Governor General’s History Award for Popular Media: The Pierre Berton Award.

For King’s, however, the bestowment of this new award in honour of Hamilton is bittersweet. At the end of June 2020, Hamilton, whose courses in the Bachelor of Journalism program and the Bachelor of Journalism (Hons) program have been among consistently popular offerings in the journalism program, formally retired from her position as the Rogers Chair of Communications within the School of Journalism.

“Everyone knows Sylvia has been a beloved and exemplary professor, whose engagement in the classroom is renowned,” says King’s President and Vice-Chancellor William Lahey. “She has been an inspiration to all her students but in a special way to Black students and to other students from communities under-represented in both the study and practice of journalism. Naming this award in her honour is a gesture of

gratitude and thanks for all that Sylvia has accomplished. It is one of the many steps we must take to ensure her legacy lives on at our university and is one of continuing inspiration to our students.”

A LIFE OF TAKING ACTION AND FOMENTING CHANGE Having devoted her life and career to combatting one of humanity’s most horrible injustices, racial inequality, Hamilton says change will never come unless people take action. The importance of action crystalizes when she says members of white society who consider themselves forward thinking, in favour of equality, are part of the problem if they choose not to act. And to not act, she reminds us, is also a choice. Hamilton says a motivator to act is understanding you have a responsibility to do so.

“When you don’t act, when you don’t speak out, when you don’t do what you can within the realm in which you live and operate, racism will continue and it will be those most affected by it who will continue to take on the burden, to keep speaking out, and frankly, it’s tiring, it’s exhausting. A reason racism continues is because people in positions of power have done little.”

Hamilton then moves to the opposite end of the action spectrum and speaks of those who are doing a lot, beginning with Presi-

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dent Lahey and King’s Board Chair Doug Ruck, two individuals Hamilton says are “making decisions, within their spheres of power, to make lasting change.”

As part of his mission to diversify the student body at King’s, Lahey has hosted and attended meetings with various leaders from Nova Scotia’s Black communities to discuss, among other topics, the findings of the university’s scholarly inquiry into its historic connections to slavery.

“In nearly every meeting,” he says, “journalism was brought up as being an important field of study for Black students.”

Tim Currie, director of the School of Journalism, also speaks to the efforts of King’s, and to the contributions of Hamilton.

“We’re pleased to be supporting the Canadian Association of Black Journalists with their J-School Noire project, introducing young Black students to see journalism as a career option. But this is only a beginning. We have a lot of work to do and we’re delighted these awards in Sylvia’s honour will contribute to our shared view of a better future.”

KEEP MOVING FORWARD A professor at King’s since 2004, Hamilton was involved with the King’s Board of Governors prior to her arrival as a professor, where, in the 1980s, she played a role in the creation of policy around racial equity. Today, we need only look around us to know that change is being ushered in. Hamilton lauds King’s for continuing its push forward.

With her eye forever on the cause, Hamilton even cites the award named in her honour as “another important signal,” although she also lets it be known that she is deeply touched to be recognized in this way by her peers.

“This award is a remarkable honour, for me, for my family and for my community,” says Hamilton.

While she sees change, Hamilton is quick to add that change is something we must continuously press for because she has seen it slow and even stop.

“There are forces, and they are many,” she says, “that do not want to see change.

So my question is always, ‘What will we see six months from now, a year from now?’ What we’ve achieved so far is important, but this is not the time to dust off our hands and say it’s all done—because it’s not.”

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INAUGURAL WINNERS Sylvia D. Hamilton Award

Reese Zorogolé is in his second year of a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in the Environment, Sustainability and Society (ESS) program and plays for the King’s basketball team.

“I encouraged Reese to apply for this award because I believe in him as a person,” says Athletics Director Neil Hooper. “I can also spot a leader and Reese has those qualities and they will take him far in life.

I know what this award stands for and I’m

sure Sylvia will be proud to learn that Reese is a recipient.”

“At this stage, I’m still learning,” says Zorogolé. “It feels like I’m an activist in the making.”

While his degree program and playing for the Blue Devils take up most of his time now, Zorogolé has an eye on the future. He sees himself being, in some capacity yet to reveal itself, a community leader.

“I know how important issues like equality are and I feel I will play my part to make a difference. A lot of racism stems from the lack of awareness of African Canadian history, so we need to keep circulating that information. It’s so important yet sometimes it can still feel like an underground topic.”

Zorogolé speaks with first-hand knowledge when addressing issues of being part of a minority in Nova Scotia, such as structural discrimination, “like police checks, right here in Halifax,” or the treatment of Black and Indigenous people historically.

His demeanor tells you that he is serious about change: Zorogolé always speaks of solutions and how we need to keep working

toward them.

“I’m working in my own way on how I can empower my community, whether through basketball or working with young people or getting in touch with other young voices like my own. But it’s a challenge being a minority. There are things I’ve faced in my life that are not documented by anyone else beyond our own community. So it’s about identifying challenging situations, finding out what’s causing them, and working to change them.”

The two fields that interest Zorogolé professionally are also focused on positive change: psychology and sustainability. “If only everyone knew what we learn in sustainability class,” he says.

Meanwhile as Zorogolé charts his path, Hamilton’s work will be a fundamental reference and an inspiration, too. “Sylvia Hamilton is on my reading list, that’s for sure,” he says. “And I want to see her films.

I know she’s famous for her stories of the Black experience and our history in Nova Scotia. This makes me feel that much more honoured by this award.”

Darien Slawter, who is in his first year of a Bachelor of Science (BSc) and plays for the King’s men’s soccer team, had been encouraged to apply for the Sylvia D. Hamilton Award by Head Coach Jamie McGinnis, who speaks very highly of the rookie wingback.

“We’re lucky to have Darien in our program,” says McGinnis. “He is committed, talented and highly athletic. But above all of that, Darien is an excellent teammate with leadership potential.”

When Slawter received the email informing him he had won the award, he was at home doing schoolwork. Excited, his first call was to his mom, Adrienne Glasgow-Slawter. A long-time high school counsellor currently working at Nova Scotia Community College, his mother was just as thrilled. Glasgow-Slawter took a course from Hamilton in the mid-2000s, and that’s not all.

“I even appeared briefly in her documentary when I was an undergrad at Saint Mary’s in the early nineties,” says Glasgow-Slawter, referring to Hamilton’s

Gemini Award-winning 1992 film, Speak it!

From the Heart of Black Nova Scotia.

Today, Slawter is getting the most out of his King’s experience, even in the midst of the quarantine.

“While I’m doing my work remotely, I’ve really been liking the King’s environment when I’m there,” says Slawter. “And if the soccer team is any indication, that’s good because they’re all great people and they are people from all over. And of course, the award money is great, too. It helps a lot.”

While adept at soccer, Slawter also has a talent for chemistry—a key motivator in his choice to pursue a BSc at King’s. Also a prolific reader of sports journalism (many of his high school essays were sports themed) Slawter is considering writing-related courses as electives.

“It’s hard to say exactly as I’m still in my first year,” says Slawter, about future course selection. “I do enjoy writing, though; and along with chemistry I’m really enjoying my economics class, so I’m also feeling that could be an area I’d like to study more.”

When asked about issues championed

by Hamilton, his award’s namesake, Slawter is quick to point to his high school in Cole Harbour, N.S., Auburn Drive High School, for helping to shape his world view.

“I was very involved with Youth of Today at my high school,” says Slawter, referring to the group discussion program that was developed so students of African ancestry could gather with educators to learn about and celebrate African Nova Scotian culture and history. Now in its 24th year, the Youth of Today program has benefitted generations of students.

With this award now both Slawter and his mother hold a connection to Hamilton.

FUTURE SYLVIA D. HAMILTON AWARDS AND OTHER OPPORTUNITIES In future years, five Sylvia D. Hamilton Awards will be awarded annually. The award is open to African Canadian students, with a focus on African Nova Scotians, and will be open to students in all degree options at King’s with a preference for students in journalism and the King’s/Dalhousie MFA in Creative Nonfiction.

Interested students are encouraged to contact the Office of the Registrar,

registrar@ukings.ca, to inquire about the Sylvia D. Hamilton Award.

Additionally, King’s offers other scholarships open exclusively to African Canadian students, such as the Prince Scholarship and the Dr. Carrie Best Scholarship, which is open to African Canadians and Indigenous students in Canada. And there are other opportunities to read about at Ukings.ca—click on “Admissions,” then “Finances.”

TIDINGS | WINTER 2021 11

SCHOLARS ROUND-UP Meet a few of this year’s major scholarship recipients, who express excitement and gratitude

CARRIE AND RALPH WRIGHT MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP

DR. CARRIE BEST SCHOLARSHIP The Dr. Carrie Best Scholarship is for a Black Canadian or Indigenous student in Canada, and is worth $20,000 over four years.

“It felt very freeing to know that I was going into my next year with that with me,” says Jessica Casey of Paradise, Nfld., the 2020 Carrie Best Scholar. About the essay she wrote to secure the scholarship, Casey says “… I wanted to speak about how critical thinking can be used to overcome internalized oppression. Because that’s something that I’m really, personally interested in.”

Established in 2019 by Judith Kaye Wright, BA’64, in memory of her parents, the Carrie and Ralph Wright Memorial Scholarship is worth $39,000 over four years.

After being named the 2020 Carrie and Ralph Wright Memorial Scholar, Rachel Pinhey of Rothesay, N.B., sent an emotional thank you letter to King’s, promising “to honour the memory of Judith and her parents.” A prolific reader, Pinhey enjoys discussing books with her fellow students: “Sometimes these conversations can lead you down a rabbit hole of philosophical discussion and you come out on the other end a new, inspired person.”

JOHN AND JUDY BRAGG FAMILY FOUNDATION JOURNALISM SCHOLARSHIP The inaugural John and Judy Bragg Family Foundation Journalism Scholarship, worth $6,000, was awarded to Marianne Lassonde, BJ’20. Now enrolled in the Master of Journalism, Lassonde is studying from her home in Sherbrooke, Que. As part of her graduate studies, Lassonde is particularly interested in learning to interpret data and how a statistic can inspire a story.

Lassonde notes that the scholarship will help to alleviate financial stress, but also, “it’s a motivator—having someone root for you, in a way. Because the scholarship is kind of saying ‘Here you go, and I hope you succeed!’”

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PRINCE SCHOLARSHIP The Prince Scholarship is available to African Nova Scotian students entering the Foundation Year Program and pursuing a degree in arts, science, journalism (hons) or music. The award is valued at $24,000 over four years.

The 2020 Prince Scholar, Halifax-native Sophia Wedderburn, came to King’s with strong interests in history and literature.

Drawn to leadership from a young age, Wedderburn relates this to the influence of her

DEBRA DEANE LITTLE AND ROBERT LITTLE ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIPS FOR VARSITY ATHLETES Worth $5,000 per year and renewable for up to four years, the Debra Deane Little and Robert Little Academic Scholarships for Varsity Athletes were created in 2019 for students who demonstrate scholastic excellence coupled with athletic skill and dedication. In 2020, seven first-year students received this award. There are 31 Deane Little scholar-athletes at King’s this year.

Badminton player Aidan Badcock-Parks, a Bedford, N.S., native, describes the moment when he received the call offering him the scholarship saying “… it was nerve-wracking, it was amazing!” Now in the Foundation Year Program, Badcock-Parks appreciates how it has exposed him to great ideas through history. “The reading list is really awesome.… Would I go out of my way to pick Homer or Dante off the shelf? Probably not. But am I glad that I needed to read it? Definitely.”

Halifax-born rugby player Leigha Eisan knew she wanted to attend King’s when her high school guidance counsellor advised her that the Foundation Year Program could provide her with a solid historical foundation for her career goal of becoming a museum curator.

“It was just so, so exciting,” she remembers of the moment she was awarded a scholarship.

family—in particular her grandfather, Gus Wedderburn, who was a Halifax litigator and civil rights activist. When President William Lahey called to tell her she was being offered the Prince Scholarship, Wedderburn’s entire family came around and flooded the room with their enthusiasm before she was even off the phone: “That moment on the phone call with my family around me was just so overwhelming… I was filled with such gratitude and joy.”

DONALD R. SOBEY FAMILY SCHOLARSHIPS The Donald R. Sobey Family Scholarship, worth $50,000 over four years, has supported 19 King’s students since its establishment in 2014. Ella Winham expected to spend her first year studying remotely from her home in Vancouver, B.C. She didn’t expect to be awarded a Donald R. Sobey Family Scholarship. “I’m so grateful,” says Winham, who is now able to be in Halifax thanks to the scholarship. “I really get the sense … I’m being pushed to do my best.” For Dylan Taylor from Lethbridge, Alta., finding out he’d won the scholarship, “... was one of the best experiences of my life.” He says it means he doesn’t have to find part-time work during his studies.

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STUDYING THE ORIGINS OF MODERN MEDICINE IN THE MIDST OF A GLOBAL PANDEMIC

By Dick Miller

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IMOGEN QUINN WAS TAKING notes in her virtual Origins of Modern Medicine class one day in the fall when her professor, Dr. Gordon McOuat, director of the History of Science and Technology program (HOST), mentioned a 19th century doctor. The physician, Dr. William Beaumont, conducted some astonishing experiments on the digestive system of a living patient.

“It was a point mentioned very briefly in one of Dr. McOuat’s lectures,” Quinn says.

“In my mind I went—‘Wait. What?’”

So when it came time to decide on her final assignment—a choice between a standard essay or bringing to life a character or event from history in a creative way—Quinn focused on Dr. Beaumont and his patient, a voyageur named Alexis St. Martin. The man had a musket wound which Dr. Beaumont, more or less, patched up.

“There was a hole left under his left lung.

It gave Dr. Beaumont a window into the gastric system. He started to put food tied to a string into the hole and pulling it out an hour later to examine how much it had been digested. It’s kind of nasty.”

Nasty for sure, but also intriguing.

“It definitely made me research a lot. I read books and articles. I found Beaumont’s

book he published in 1832. That was amazing.”

Quinn used quotes from the correspondence between the two men along with creating fictionalized letters she imagined Alexis would have written to his mother: “How much does a man owe to another man who has saved his life? Does he owe him the remainder of his own?”

“I learned a lot about the evolution of ethics in medicine,” Quinn explains. “We wouldn’t do what Dr. Beaumont did now.”

“They are all just marvellous,” McOuat says of the assignments. “The students took them up with gusto!”

Other students created diaries, journals, a diorama, even an essay with illustrations— think graphic novel but shorter. That one was by Yuna Im. The topic was childbirth and midwifery in the early part of the 19th century.

“Childbirth became more medicalized and male physicians took over,” Im explains.

“They excluded the midwives. There was a lot of misogyny. It was a change that lasted for more than a century.”

McOuat notes that, not surprisingly given the pandemic, the bubonic plague was a popular topic this year. Abby Han-

Dr. Habibullah Kanth analyzing regional data against the hood of a Jeep in a rural area of Jammu, India, July of 1976. “As the state program officer responsible for the smallpox eradication program in Jammu and Kashmir, my grandfather had quite a few duties,” Faris says.

In Dr. Kanth’s words, “I had stayed at Dak Bungalow, Jammu for the night and was to tour Jammu province.

The driver had parked the vehicle in the compound and had gone to have breakfast when l took advantage of the opportunities and went through statistics to make a summary. Time was at a premium and this precious commodity could not be frittered away. The basic workers did the vaccinations and collected case data, inspectors supervised, surveillance officers monitored it and CMO’s (chief medical officers of each region) transmitted their data to me. This information was compiled and analyzed by me at the state level. I also went to every region to impart orientation and training courses to all categories of workers, ranging from deputy directors to basic health workers. This wasn’t all. Much more related work was done which was quite important.”

son chose it as her subject and created a website for her assignment. A visit provides a timeline, causes, symptoms and treatment of the plague along with some interesting approaches to protection: “Because physicians were expected to come in closer contact to the infected, a special garment was created to protect the physician from the disease. This costume is now one of the most recognized remnants of the outbreak … The coat is made from leather and waxed from top to bottom. The “beak” of the mask is filled with various herbs and flowers meant to purify the infected air before the physician breathed it in.”

Hanson says taking Origins of Modern Medicine this year, in these times, was ideal.

“Studying during the COVID-19 pandemic gave us a real connection to the history—to things like the plague or the cholera outbreaks in London during the 19th century.”

To smallpox, as well. That was the topic Faris Kapra chose. He created a diary of a fictitious physician working on the smallpox vaccination program in India in the 1960s and ’70s. Along with reading reports and articles about the program, Kapra started

with an invaluable source of first-hand information.

“I found out that my grandfather was involved in the smallpox eradication program in Jammu and Kashmir. I interviewed him. I realized there were a lot of parallels between the struggles people are facing now with the pandemic and those that were faced during this effort to eradicate smallpox.”

Now in its third year, Origins of Modern Medicine acts as a gateway course for the Certificate in Medical Humanities launched

by King’s and Dalhousie in 2020. Origins and the other courses leading to the certificate help students “think critically about medicine’s past and future roles in human life, about changing definitions of health and illness, and about the interactions that affect the patient experience.”

Im is just one course away from earning the certificate.

“It may give me an advantage when I apply to medical school,” she says. “But I really wanted to balance the science courses with the humanities. I am trying to expand my perspective. Taking these courses really helps me think more about how people engage with the medical system, how it affects them.”

Kapra is also on the certificate track. He

“Studying during the COVID-19 pandemic gave us a real connection to the history.” believes Origins and the other courses to come will give him new ways to think about medicine.

He says, “The systems that are in place in medicine and the ways of thinking that we take for granted haven’t always been that way. They have been evolving in a way we can learn from. I wonder what future generations will think about this insane time in 2020?”

TOP LEFT TO RIGHT:

Faris Kapra, Imogen Quinn, Illustration by Yuna Im

TIDINGS | WINTER 2021 15

REMOTE LOGIN Three students discuss studying journalism during the pandemic, and share what it’s like to study at King’s from outside the province

IN THE SUMMER AFTER GRADE 11, Josh Neufeldt and his mom visited King’s.

As a high school student in Toronto, Neufeldt knew he wanted to study journalism and King’s was one of the schools his university counsellor recommended.

“One of my mom’s friends was having a wedding in Halifax that summer, and so we said, ‘Perfect! Let’s schedule a stop by the campus,’” Neufeldt recalls. “I liked it so much that I ended up deciding to come to study at King’s.”

Fast-forward to 2021 and Neufeldt is in his third year of a Bachelor of Journalism (Hons) degree, but he’s not studying in Halifax. In the topsy turvy world of COVID-19,

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Neufeldt is one of a number of students who is studying at King’s from outside Nova Scotia this year.

When the pandemic ended in-person classes in March of 2020, his first concern wasn’t about how online classes would work.

He had bigger things on his mind.

“I will be honest with you, my biggest concern at the time was figuring out what I was going to do with my life,” he says. “I was living in King’s residence at the time … and so I didn’t know where I was going to live, whether I was going to go back home, whether I was going to stay in the city… The classes became an afterthought.”

Ultimately, Neufeldt returned to Toron-

to. Recalling his routine from before the pandemic with his life now, he laughs at the differences.

“It’s kind of funny, because growing up my mom always joked ‘Now don’t spend too much time on the screen’ ... But now here I am, and I have to do it!”

Now that he has worked out some of the most pressing questions that the pandemic created—like where to live—Neufeldt is in a better position to reflect on his classes.

He says that although the abrupt move to online learning in the spring of 2020 came with some bumps, he’s impressed with how things have come together, especially the amount of work being assigned.

“The adjustment to online learning, I’ll be honest, it was a little difficult at first. It felt for the first bit that teachers just wanted the world from us …

“By this point it feels like they have a realistic idea of what students can afford to put in for time, and instead of lots of really big term assignments we see a lot of little, smaller-scale stuff on a regular basis that keeps everyone engaged.”

Raeesa Alibhai began the fall 2020 semester enrolled as a first-year commerce student at Dalhousie while taking a journalism elective at King’s—all from her parents’ home in Toronto. Mere days into her first semester she had a realization—though she doesn’t consider herself a voracious reader, she was truly enjoying her journalism textbook.

“I think in that moment I realized that—if I’m going to be sitting here behind my computer screen—I need to be doing something I want to do.”

Alibhai transferred to King’s, and she’s now in the Foundation Year Program as a Bachelor of Journalism (Hons) student.

Unlike the horror stories she’s heard from her older sister, a medical student, about run-ins with cold and unresponsive university professors, her experience with the faculty at King’s has been transformative.

“You always hear ‘university profs are not approachable, don’t expect to get emails back!’ and my experience has been the complete opposite…. In both the Foundation Year Program and in Journalism.

“Our journalism instructor, Lezlie Lowe, she’s the best—she has been so approachable throughout the entire year, and I can’t even describe how big of a difference that has made.”

Still, there’s no denying that it’s hard to settle into a new community from far away.

Having been very involved in the extracurricular life of her high school, she has yet to experience that at King’s.

“I think that really hit me because throughout high school I was super involved…. Not only being home, but being in an online learning environment—that was really difficult to face, because I was used to having another community that I was a part of.”

Despite the challenges Alibhai remains optimistic. Asked what it’s like to study journalism during the pandemic, she says, “It’s bittersweet, but learning about such a relevant subject in such a crazy time is honestly kind of an advantage, because it sets you up for whatever could be coming next. And this pandemic has really proven that anything can come your way!”

For Jonah Kurylowich, a first-year Bachelor of Arts student at Dalhousie who enrolled in the Foundations of Journalism course at King’s, remote learning has allowed him, for the time being, to remain in the small town of Peace River, Alta., where he is a volunteer firefighter.

Interviewed in the late fall of 2020, he said that “studying remotely fits oddly well” into his life in Peace River.

Though Kurylowich isn’t planning on a career as a journalist, he decided to take some journalism courses to understand a field that he says plays “a pivotal part in our lives.”

Asked how he imagined online learning would work, he replies, “I actually wasn’t too sure how it would work out. It was kind of just uncharted territory.” Three months into his courses, he pointed to the ability to pause, rewind and replay lectures as a real benefit of recorded lectures. “Thinking about it now, why didn’t we just record classes?” he says. “It just makes sense.”

For all of these students, the biggest challenge so far has been time management.

“Not being forced to go into a class at a certain time ends up lending itself to putting lectures off,” says Kurylowich. “But I have found the thing that really helped with that was making sure that I have time to do everything: sitting down on Monday and saying ‘Okay, here’s what my week looks like … here’s what I need to get done and here’s the videos that I need to watch for this week,’” he says.

“I think that one of the really important skills that all of us have learned this year is making a schedule for yourself, because that’s something you can do whether classes are online or in person,” says Alibhai.

Neufeldt also began planning his weeks to mitigate some of the stress he felt early on. But for him it was another realization that has made the biggest difference.

“I think that the biggest realization I had that made my life easier and helped me cope with the amount of stress I was feeling was realizing that our teachers, our professors, they’re humans too. They feel a sense of empathy and they know just as well as us that online learning is really hard, right?”

Neufeldt’s insight echoes Alibhai’s experience.

“Especially doing online school from home—I don’t know a lot of people at King’s … so just knowing that if I had any questions I could approach Lezlie [Lowe] was the best feeling…. She played a really, really big part in making this year good for me.”

Sometimes it helps just to know you’re part of a community and that you’re experiencing the same things, together. Even if that community is spread very far apart.

TOP LEFT TO RIGHT:

Joshua Neufeldt plays E-sports for Dalhousie in 2019, photo by Looney Bros. Photography; Raeesa Alibhai; Jonah Kurylowich LEFT: Broadband internet service coverage in Canada, 2014, courtesy the CRTC

TIDINGS | WINTER 2021 17

A CIRCULAR ENDING AS DR. ELIZABETH EDWARDS CLOSES THE BOOK ON A DISTINGUISHED TEACHING CAREER Dr. Elizabeth Edwards and a few of her colleagues reflect on her coming retirement while her son, Dr. David Huebert, enjoys his first year as a FYP tutor

by Jane Doucet

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AS PROFESSOR Dr. Elizabeth Edwards envisioned wrapping up her 30-year teaching career in the spring of 2021, she couldn’t have foreseen two things. First, that the Foundation Year Program (FYP) would be done virtually due to a global pandemic.

Second—and more appealing—was that her son, Dr. David Huebert, would be joining her in his inaugural year as a FYP tutor. In fact, it’s the first time in FYP’s history that a parent-offspring pair have taught simultaneously.

Spending three decades diving into FYP’s vast and challenging reading list may have helped Edwards adapt to the online classroom setting. “Within these texts that take place over thousands of years, there’s a sense of the whole world opening up,” she says.

“You see the long development of problems and, ultimately, their solutions.”

Although Edwards misses the spontaneity of in-person interactions, she feels that King’s has organized online learning well, with faculty members doing their

“I love my students. The quality of students we get is a high watermark—they’re extremely bright and motivated.”

best to try to keep the spirit of King’s alive virtually. “It has been a very strange year,” she says. “The fun of collaborative teaching, with colleagues and collegiality, is the rule at King’s. I love my students, too. The quality of students we get is a high watermark—they’re extremely bright and motivated.”

Edwards moved to Halifax from Calgary to earn her BA and MA degrees at Dalhousie. When she was ready to look for work, she turned to Dal, where her husband, Dr. Ronald Huebert, was teaching in the Department of English. She was hired as a FYP tutor in 1990.

“I had no defined career path. I wanted a job, I had young children and I was very happy to have an academic position,” she says. “Those early years were mind-blowing.

I had read some of the texts before, and yet I was flabbergasted. I wasn’t prepared for the connections between the texts. I was learning along with the students.”

A PhD from Cambridge University came in 1997, and Edwards became a full King’s professor in 2009. She is also a founding faculty member and the first director of King’s Contemporary Studies Program and was vice-president of the college from 2001 to 2006. “I have fond memories of so many things,” she says of her career, “but just about everything to do with Angus Johnston and the amazing lectures he gave.”

Dr. Angus Johnston, who died in 2017, was a FYP director and vice-president of King’s who closed his teaching career in 2009 with a lecture on Bob Dylan. Edwards can’t choose her own favourite lecture. “I like all of my Contemporary Studies courses,” she says, which range from such diverse topics as pain and death to home and homelessness to David Bowie.

Dr. Neil Robertson first met Edwards when they were pursuing their doctorate degrees at Cambridge. Now FYP’s director, he was hired to teach at King’s in 1989, the year before Edwards joined the faculty. “She

On Wednesday, April 7, Dr. Elizabeth Edwards will deliver the final FYP lecture of the 2020-2021 academic year, titled “On Levity,” and her last official lecture before retirement.

Dr. Edwards will deliver a mini reprise of this lecture, complete with tutorial breakouts, exclusively for alumni in a special online event on April 21, at 8 p.m. AT. Alumni are invited to register to attend the event via the event page on ukings.ca, or by emailing naomi.boon@ukings.ca.

was a star at Cambridge, and much admired for her scholarly prowess,” he says. In fact, in 2001 her doctoral thesis would be published as the book The Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge, Sussex).

Edwards was equally suited to the multiple roles she held at King’s.

“She’s so smart and doesn’t put up with nonsense from anyone,” says Robertson.

“She wants her students to think for themselves—independence of mind is completely fundamental to her. She brought all of that to her work as an administrator and created a sense of trust with her colleagues.”

Her legacy at King’s will be felt in myriad ways, says Robertson. “She has had a huge impact on the Contemporary Studies Program. And as one of the first female professors at King’s, she brought a demand for equity and for creating a space where innovation can take place.”

Another colleague who will miss Edwards is Dr. Dorota Glowacka, director of the Contemporary Studies Program. In 1995, Edwards called Glowacka, who was working in Toronto, to ask if she’d like to apply to teach at King’s.

“In my interview, she was so welcoming and supportive that I strongly felt she would have my back,” she says. “Now I can’t imagine King’s without her.”

In those early years, Glowacka quickly came to respect Edwards’ sharp mind. “She’s brilliant and intellectually strong, a real powerhouse,” she says. “She’s also very student-oriented. She has been very proud of her students’ accomplishments, both while they were at King’s and after they have left.”

After her last day of work in June, Edwards, who is a medievalist by training, will turn her attention to ongoing scholarly projects. In the meantime, is she giving any advice to her son on how to navigate his role as a FYP tutor?

“I could take advice from him, he has lots

of teaching experience,” she says. “I did tell him to be ready for the tsunami—the intense reading load is like a wave that breaks over you. You begin rethinking everything you thought you knew.”

“My mom has always been reticent with advice when it comes to King’s, to not influence me or control my journey,” says Huebert. “She has taught me about teaching by modelling what a good teacher is.”

“I loved the program and admired my tutors,” says Huebert who is no stranger to FYP. In 2008, he earned a BA from King’s with combined honours in Contemporary Studies and English.

Like his mother was when she started teaching, he’s married with two young children—and at just 35, he has already amassed an impressive portfolio of writing accolades, including the CBC Short Story Prize, The Walrus Poetry Prize and the Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award.

After completing his PhD at Western University in 2018, Huebert taught literature, philosophy and creative writing at Western and Dalhousie. He calls teaching at King’s a “back-burner fantasy,” something he wasn’t single-minded about pursuing but that he imagined while doing graduate work.

The move to virtual classrooms hasn’t posed many problems for Huebert. “I’m proud of how the whole community is doing,” he says. “People would prefer the traditional approach, but we’re lucky to have the technology. I use the chat function a lot to ask students questions, and everyone participates. It’s important to look at the advantages. At King’s, we ask students to look beyond the initial assumption of what something is supposed to be.”

As for Edwards, her parting advice to King’s is simply this: “Continue doing what you’re doing with FYP, think about what you want the future of the program to be and fight for it.”

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THEY WERE LOVED Responding to a year marked by loss for many people worldwide, King’s journalism students have been helping Canadian families share stories of their loved ones

by Georgia Atkin

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IN FALL 2020, STUDENTS in the sixweek News Workshop contributed to the special project “They Were Loved,” an ongoing nationwide initiative headed by MacLean’s magazine to publish an obituary for every Canadian who has died of COVID-19.

When MacLean’s approached King’s and other journalism schools for assistance in June 2020, Assistant Professor Terra Tailleur decided to incorporate it into her teaching for the fall term. Tailleur’s News Workshop, intended for graduate students and fourth-year honours students, guides participants in developing a professional portfolio while learning the skills necessary for working in an online newsroom. She considered “They Were Loved” a worthwhile project and practical long-distance assignment, but she also saw an excellent learning opportunity.

“In the News Workshop, we talk to many officials: we’ll talk to politicians, we’ll talk to spokespeople, we’ll talk to a lot of people who get paid to talk to us,” says Tailleur.

“And it’s really important that [the students]

also talk to people who don’t necessarily talk to reporters all the time. Getting that experience is super key—that range of reporting and interviewing experience.”

As part of a wider collection of story assignments, each of Tailleur’s 15 students was tasked with writing one 250-word obituary for “They Were Loved,” choosing a subject to write about from a list of names supplied

by MacLean’s. Students had to interview a relative or close friend of the subject and also supply a photo.

While MacLean’s provided plenty of support for students, including clear instructions for what they wanted, Tailleur decided she needed some extra help to make this assignment work, and she knew exactly who to ask: Martha Troian.

Martha Troian, MJ’13, is an award-winning independent journalist from Lac Seul First Nation and Wabauskang First Nation in northwestern Ontario, specializing in investigative journalism. She is noted for, among other projects, her series of CBC profiles on missing and murdered Indigenous

“...It’s really important that [the students] ... talk to people who don’t necessarily talk to reporters all the time. Getting that experience is super key—that range of reporting and interviewing experience.” women. Tailleur had originally met Troian as a fellow graduate student at King’s, and the pair had kept in touch.

“I knew Martha would be good for this, because she’s a very kind person, but she also has a tremendous amount of experience interviewing people who have suffered loss,” says Tailleur.

Working one-on-one with Tailleur’s students, Troian helped them locate interviewees for the obituaries, offered guidance on how to approach each person, and assisted with the final editing process.

“I feel like my instincts were bang-on to bring her in, and I’m really glad that I did,” says Tailleur. “Having Martha was a gift.”

Of the 14 Canadian journalism schools participating in this project, King’s is the only Atlantic Canadian school. Tailleur’s students wrote primarily about Nova Scotian victims of COVID-19, but some profiled people from other parts of Canada.

Talia Meade, a fourth-year student in the Bachelor of Journalism (Hons) program, wrote her assigned obituary about Hedwig

Antonia Krzus, a 91-year-old woman in British Columbia who died of COVID-19 in August 2020.

For Meade, the hardest part was tracking down a relative to speak to—but she also learned how to speak with family members of someone recently deceased, becoming more aware of her own tone and phrasing during the interviews.

“Definitely a little more gentle than how you would conduct a normal interview,” she says, reflecting on the experience. “All of these passings were really recent from COVID… a lot of times the family was still in shock or in a bit of grief.”

Despite the challenges of the assignment, she is satisfied with her finished piece.

“I thought I wouldn’t be able to capture who they were from an interview—just one interview—but I got some good stuff from the family members, and I feel like I captured a lot about who my subject was, just from the anecdotes that they were giving.”

Over the course of the workshop, Tailleur saw her students grow in confidence as they

completed the assignment.

“I think some of them were fairly surprised that they could pull off this assignment,” she says.

In one memorable discussion, a student told Tailleur about an interview that had lasted two and a half hours. The student had found the phone call “amazing,” appreciating the in-depth experience of establishing a connection with the interviewee and learning all about the obituary subject’s life.

The finished stories that Tailleur has read reflect that experience: “They’re very powerful.”

The students completed their final edits to the obituaries in December and have sent them to MacLean’s. All the pieces will be published on MacLean’s website, with some potentially selected for additional print publication by the magazine.

LEFT: Terra Tailleur RIGHT: Hedwig Krzus

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UNDERGRADUATE FELLOWSHIPS IN PUBLIC HUMANITIES Six King’s students thrive in newly-created work experiences

by Josh Hoffman

THE UNIVERSITY of King’s College’s new work-integrated learning program, the Undergraduate Fellowships in Public Humanities, provided exciting professional experiences to a group of talented students, despite beginning in the middle of a pandemic.

The program launched last summer to offer King’s students short-term jobs at a variety of organizations and businesses. King’s Vice-President Dr. Peter O’Brien oversaw the program’s inception and described the fellowships as a way for “students to make the link between their studies and their future career possibilities.” In 2020 six students were awarded fellowships and learned—like the rest of us—how to work virtually in the COVID-19 era.

That the program took place is worth celebrating in its own right, given the uncertainty that characterized the past year.

“When the pandemic hit, we initially had to cancel the program,” said O’Brien.

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“Then as organizations made the transition to remote working conditions, we realized that we could still make this work.… This work-from-home variation on the program had the unintended benefit that students were able to be placed with organizations regardless of their geographical location— we had one student in Winnipeg working at an organization in Halifax, and another living in Halifax working for an organization in Calgary.”

Sophie Lawall was an Ocean Gallery Facilitator for the Discovery Centre in Halifax. “It was an amazing experience,” said Lawall, a third-year Early Modern Studies and English student. Lawall’s primary tasks included writing and interviewing for a new exhibit by Ruth Munro and researching literature on climate change research in Nova Scotia to create educational content for Ryan Jameson, manager of science education at the centre.

These were subjects Lawall knew nothing about. “I’m from the Prairies,” she joked. “I didn’t learn much ocean science.” Her job was to take information and rewrite it in a way that could be understood by elementary school students. She found she could determine what information was most crucial to include in less than 100 words of text by, “using the critical thinking and reading skills I’ve learned at King’s to understand that kind of information.”

Third-year History of Science and Technology student James Ersil, who is also studying acting at Dalhousie, was thrilled to hold an artistic internship with Outside the March, a Toronto-based theatre company.

“It was a dream come true,” Ersil said.

They initially thought the position involved paperwork. It did, but they got to join in on the fun as well. Ersil participated in a weeklong phone call theatre experience called Ministry of Monday Mysteries that helped

LEFT TO RIGHT:

Hannah van den Bosch, James Ersil, Sophie Lawall BELOW: Decklan Rolle

actors work during the pandemic and provided entertainment for people stuck at home.

When Ersil was invited to participate in a reading of a new script with the other actors they were elated. “I was so grateful,” they said.

Watching the actors and witnessing the do-it-yourself nature of the theatre company reassured Ersil.

“It opened my eyes to the possibilities in that career,” they said. “Success isn’t one thing. Success just isn’t starring in a play.

Success is working really hard on a show and everyone enjoying it.”

For Hannah van den Bosch, a fifth-year English (Hons) and Contemporary Studies student, the fellowship gave her experience working in a field aligned with her interests.

Van den Bosch worked in marketing and communications for Halmyre, a firm of marketing strategy consultants in Toronto. As a member of the social media marketing team, Van den Bosch created content for the firm’s various social platforms.

“The team was very kind and accommodating,” she said. “They offered mentorship and guidance through immersion in day-today activities, as well as opportunities for me to learn and practice new written communication and editorial skills.”

Throughout the internship, Van den Bosch improved her professional writing skills, while contributing to a number of Halmyre’s campaign proposals, briefs, white papers and guides.

“I feel very lucky to have had this professional experience,” she said. “Not only do I feel prepared for future professional employment opportunities, but I have gained a number of new skills that are applicable to

my studies and everyday life.”

The program is again accepting applications from students and employers through April 5. O’Brien said there are plans to coordinate this program with other initiatives in development. Remarking on the fact that each of the 2020 fellowships relied on communications skills in some form, O’Brien said the program reinforces the value of a humanities education: “Our students have built up strong capacities to access information, think critically about it, and communicate in ways that can capture people's attention. Those are invaluable skills and we want to support students as they figure out what piece of the world might be able to benefit from their King's education. That, for me, is the chief benefit. … I hope that through this program and other initiatives that we are beginning to plan that students start to think about how their background in the humanities could play a role in the rest of their lives.”

“I feel very lucky to have had this professional experience.”

Funding support for King’s Undergraduate Fellowships in Public Humanities is generously provided through a gift from BMO Financial Group.

Decklan Rolle, a second-year journalism student, did his fellowship with the communications team for the School of Health Science at Dalhousie University.

Rolle wrote for the university’s website and other platforms. He says his journalism education at King’s so far helped him excel in this position. “Being a part of the Dalhousie Health communications team was one of the best opportunities I could ever have,” he said.

Stephen Wentzell, a fourth-year journalism student, interned as an investigative writer and editorial assistant with Alberta Views magazine. Wentzell’s job involved researching and writing a 3,000-word investigative article on housing. “It was a valuable experience as a journalist to have the magical combination of time and funding to do a deep-dive into an issue like housing,” he said.

Liam Clarke-Cooper, a third-year arts student worked with St. George’s Youth Net to explore and navigate YouthNet’s extensive and largely untouched archive material. His work culminated in the production of a short documentary series about various aspects of YouthNet’s history, vision and scope of current programming. “The humanities education I’m getting at King’s helped me to do rigorous, often historical, research, tell an engaging story, and draw out interesting responses through communication with documentary subjects,” he said.

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THREE RESIDENCES RESTORED A PHOTO ESSAY In March 2020, King’s made the bold decision to go ahead with the restoration of Chapel, Middle and Radical Bay, in the midst of a lockdown.... The restoration of three of our beautiful bays in the pandemic is symbolic of all we have accomplished in the last six months and of our confidence in our future, in and beyond the pandemic.

— William Lahey, President and Vice-Chancellor, excerpt from a community message, Sept. 30, 2020

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“Each of these bays is now ‘modern’, with a spiffy shared common room* and new furniture and twenty-first century bathrooms, plumbing and heating.

The artistry and attention to detail is exemplified in baseboards that have been cut to align with the sloping the floors developed over the past 90 years, and as you run your hand over the now-pristine walls, you can feel the sways of the 1920s plaster. The century of living and learning in community that has happened in these bays is still embodied in them.”

— President Lahey, excerpt from a community message, Sept. 30, 2020 * The new feature most requested by students—a common room with kitchen facilities, where students will be able to spend time together informally, sharing meals, chatting, relaxing and comparing ideas.

Despite care and regular maintenance, years of constant use have taken their toll. The demands of 21st century life can no longer be accommodated by 1920s construction.

Despite being well-designed, well-built and maintained as best as possible over the years, the Bays’ almost one-hundred years of continual use shows.... ... With a restoration that will preserve the original architectural vision and beauty of these buildings, alumni coming back to campus will still feel as if they are coming home. We can restore the Bays to their original splendour while moving forward with necessary modernizations that will improve student comfort and quality of life.

— Excerpt from https://thebays.ca/

Chancellor Debra Deane Little and her spouse, Robert Little, gave us the confidence to take on this large-scale restoration project at the outset of a pandemic in the summer of 2020.... ... A charitable gift in the amount of $2 million from the King’s Chancellor’s family foundation, Alpha Aquilae Foundation, led the way to a comprehensive restoration of three of King’s five historic student residences, known as “bays.” The iconic stone buildings were designed by Halifax architect Andrew Cobb and have been home to generations of King’s students since 1929. ... The Alpha Aquilae Foundation gift— one of the largest in the history of King’s— became a cornerstone of the project’s funding.

— Deane Little gift announcement, ukings.ca /news photo: Ryan Stradeski

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Kevin Kavanaugh Photography

In February 2020, Debra Deane Little was appointed as King’s 15th Chancellor, an appointment that signals a committed relationship with King’s, a relationship that Debra, a champion of the classic Liberal Arts education, looks forward to.

“The kind of undergraduate education King’s provides only enhances other areas of your career and life. It enables you to take communications and critical thinking to the next level, which is so important today. I know from my own talks with faculty and staff, that it’s a special place.

I was touched to learn that not just the faculty get to know the students, but so do the administrative staff. King’s is that rare university community that truly nurtures the student. These days, that’s unique. We look forward to helping King’s continue to flourish on the national and international stage.”

— Deane Little gift announcement, ukings.ca /news

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“This is an occasion where we’re happy to publicly announce our gift,” says Debra ... “Should our helping to publicize this effort succeed in alerting others that this project is in need of a last surge of support—that’s one more way we can help.”

We are so close! ... To help Chapel, Middle and Radical Bays cross the finish line go to https://ukings.ca/ alumni/giving/ways-to-give/ the-bays/ We look forward to the event we’ll have to celebrate this restoration—when celebrations are possible!

Built after a great fire raised their predecessors in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in the middle of one pandemic, restored amid another pandemic, these King’s residences are ready to welcome the next century of King’s students.... Friends of King’s like Debra Deane Little and Robert Little are leading the way to ensure this happens.

Thanks to many, and especially our Director of Facilities, Ian Wagschal, the project came in on time and under budget at a total cost of $4.5 million. Good fiscal management meant the university was able to contribute almost $1.3 million, and the project has enjoyed the support of other donors, too.

— President Lahey, excerpt from a message to the community, Sept. 30, 2020

“We are again enormously grateful to Debra and Robert for sharing our vision of King’s and for seeing the crucial significance of the bays to our collegial model of living and learning in community,” says William Lahey, President and Vice-Chancellor. “Their gift gave us the encouragement needed to tackle this massive restoration during the lockdown phase of the pandemic, on an unprecedented time-line and under extraordinary conditions. We are pleased to say—we did it!”

In September, students finishing their self-isolation in Alex Hall crossed the Quad to join students arriving from within the Atlantic Bubble to be the first of a new century of students to call these newly restored buildings home.

— Deane Little gift announcement, ukings.ca /news

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STEWARDSHIP REPORT 2019/20 28

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STEWARDSHIP REPORT April 1, 2019 – March 31, 2020 FOR SOME TIME, I have been musing aloud about the approaching anniversary in 2029 of the opening of our Halifax campus. I see King’s in a unique parallel with its history (the pandemic has reinforced this reflection) where, for the decade prior to 1929, our predecessors were busy fundraising, relocating to Halifax, designing and building a new campus, creating our association with Dalhousie, and forging relationships with new neighbours. Given the changes unfolding around Photo by Adams Photography us and throughout higher education, I see us on a similar trajectory as we ready King’s to thrive in its ‘Next Century’ in Halifax.

As is always the case, this Stewardship Report covers the previous fiscal year— in this case, April 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020. It was a milestone financial year for King’s, thanks to the thirty-seven percent permanent increase in government funding secured in 2018 and new levels of support from individuals like you. Support for and interest in the financial well-being and an optimistic future for King’s set a new high.

The fiscal year we are in now, which ends in a few days, has been equally encouraging, albeit in a different way. In a year that posed unique financial challenges for all, the support shown to King’s in a time of great student need was heartening and at times breathtaking. The emergency funding our government distributed among all universities both cushioned the financial impact of the pandemic but also validated the college’s decision to spend what had to be spent to ensure our response to the pandemic was proportionate to the challenges it posed.

And with this momentum, I am sharing the news that the Stewardship Report will be lifted from Tidings in the future. This will allow you more pages for stories about the King’s community and each other, and it will mean a stand-alone publication to celebrate you, our donors, and the difference you make, each fall.

To the alumni, parents, faculty, staff, board members, friends and students whose names appear on the following pages, thank you for recognizing all that is good and worthy of support at King’s. We look forward to your continued support for our educational mission, and to working together to set King’s on course to meet the needs of our current and future students.

TOTAL FUNDS RAISED Bequests

$579,373

Annual Giving

$294,724

Gifts

$726,651

TOTAL $1,600,748 New Pledges

$2,370,000

YOUR GIFTS DIRECTED Unrestricted

$129,049

ibraries & Academic L Programs $162,998

William Lahey President and Vice-Chancellor

Athletics

$30,371

Chapel

$26,626

Chapel Choir

$94,928

tudent Assistance S (Scholarships & Awards) $974,255 Student Experience

$42,750

Campus Renewal

$136,841

Other

$2,930

TOTAL $1,600,748 Endowment $625,521

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DONOR ROLL

DONOR ROLL Every effort has been made to list names accurately. If your name has been omitted, or displayed incorrectly, please accept our apologies, and notify King’s Advancement Office, 6350 Coburg Road, Halifax, N.S. B3H 2A1 or call (902) 422-1271 ext. 128 or email Paula.Johnson@ukings.ca.

The “blue crown” symbol marks all those donors who have contributed consecutively for the last five financial years and the “gold crown” symbol marks all those donors who have contributed consecutively for the last 10 financial years. They are awarded a “King’s Crown.”

CHANCELLOR'S CIRCLE ($10,000 and over) anonymous (3) The Alpha Aquilae Foundation BMO Financial Group The John and Judy Bragg Family Foundation ∂ Estate of Dolda Lorraine Clarke* ∂ Global News Donald Harrison Larry Holman ∂ Isles Foundation Incorporated Peter Jelley ∂ Estate of F.C. Manning* ∂ Wesley M Nicol Foundation Anja Pearre UKC Alumni Association ∂ Wilson Fuel Company Limited ∂ Estate of Judith Kaye Wright* ∂ GOVERNOR'S CIRCLE ($5,000 to $9,999) anonymous (2) Adriane Abbott ∂ Acadia Broadcasting Limited ∂ Patricia Chalmers ∂ Compass Group Canada George & Tia Cooper ∂ Edmonds Landscape and Construction Services Ltd. Tom Eisenhauer ∂ Estate of Donald & Shirley Hambrick* Harrison McCain Foundation ∂ Susan Hunter ∂ Mary Janigan & Tom Kierans ∂ William Lahey & Kathryn Lassaline Elisa Nuyten & David Dime* Beverly (Zannotti) Postl ∂ Donald Stevenson ∂

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INGLIS CIRCLE ($2,000 to $4,999) anonymous (2) Mary Abbott & Kevin Gormely Judy Abraham David & Robin Archibald ∂ William Barker & Elizabeth Church ∂ Katrina Beach ∂ Black Family Foundation Peter & Patricia Bryson Richard Buggeln ∂ Gordon Cameron ∂ Hope Clement Coca-Cola Refreshments Canada ∂ Thomas Curran ∂ Christopher Elson ∂ Elizabeth & Fred Fountain ∂ Foyston, Gordon & Payne Inc. Kevin & Carolyn Gibson ∂ Dale Godsoe ∂ Laurie Hay William & Anne Hepburn ∂ Keith Johnson Laurelle LeVert ∂ Rowland Marshall ∂ Anita McBride Gillian McCain ∂ Michael & Kelly Meighen ∂ Estate of Robert Des Brisay Morris* Daniel O’Halloran Penguin Random House Canada Neil & Patricia Robertson ∂ Sarah E. Stevenson ∂ R. Howard Webster Foundation PRESIDENT'S CIRCLE ($1,000 to $1,999) anonymous (2)

Willa Black Paul Charlebois ∂ Sarah Clift Rosalie Courage Richard & Marilyn (McNutt) Cregan ∂ Robert Dawson ∂ Daniel de Munnik & Tasya Tymczyszyn ∂ Arthur Frank & Catherine Foote ∂ Marion Fry ∂ John & Brenda Hartley ∂ Kara Holm ∂ The Hornbeck Family ∂ Ronald Huebert ∂ Ranall & Sherry Ingalls Kim Kierans ∂ David Lewis Roland & Marian (Huggard) Lines Stephen Lownie John MacKay Mark MacKenzie Kenzie MacKinnon ∂ Jaqueline Matheson Ann McCain Evans Elizabeth Miles ∂ Peter O’Brien Sandra Oxner Ann Pituley ∂ RBC Foundation David Rose Ronald Stevenson ∂ University of King’s College Day Students’ Society Benjamin von Bredow Suzanne Wheeler Romeo ∂ Hugh Wright ∂ BENEFACTOR'S CIRCLE ($100 to $999) anonymous (25) Janet & Kenneth Adams ∂ Eric Aldous ∂ James Allard Bob Allison ∂ Mark Andrews Rachel Ariss & Gary Genosko Mary Ellen & Lowell Aronoff Marcia & Stephen Aronson ∂ Lorraine Atherton Sarah Atkinson Margot Aucoin ∂ David Baker

Jane Baldwin ∂ Paul Baldwin ∂ Jennifer Balfour ∂ Mary Barker & Ron Gilkie ∂ Roberta Barker ∂ Keith Barrett ∂ Jennifer Bell David Ben-Arie Matthew Bernstein & Risa Prenick Gilbert Berringer ∂ Michael Bird Myra Bloom ∂ Victor Bomers Sjoerd Borst Michelle Boutilier Stephen Bowman & Elizabeth Koester ∂ Shirley Bradshaw Daniel Brandes & Dawn Tracey Brandes ∂ Hanna Brandt Rhea (Skerrett) & Patrick Bright Lauren Brodie ∂ Randall Brooks Rebecca (Moore) Brown ∂ Richard Brown Brian Brownlee ∂ Sandra Bryant Mordy Bubis & Nina Stipich ∂ Colin Burn ∂ Steven Burns & Janet Ross ∂ Melissa & Jeff Burroughs Barbara Butler Nicola Butler Katrina Byrne ∂ David Cadogan George Caines ∂ Sheila Cameron Christine Campbell Nancy Campbell ∂ Judy & Mark Caplan John Carr ∂ Donald & Jean (Kryszek) Chard Carolyn (Tanner) Chenhall ∂ Fred Christie ∂ Joan Christie Ian Chunn & Susan Reaney Ginny (Lewis) Clark Burdette Coates ∂ Charlotte (Graven) Cochran Wayne Cochrane Peter Coffin Borden Conrad Peter Conrod ∂

DONOR ROLL Thomas Coonan ∂ Gail & Richard Cooper ∂ Armand Couture Susan Coyne Mary Craig Hugh Crosthwait Tim Currie & Christina Harnett Brian & Lindsay Cuthbertson ∂ Ronald Cutler ∂ Audrey Danaher & Richard Heystee ∂ Ken Dauphinee Gwendolyn Davies ∂ Susan Davies ∂ Wendy Davis ∂ Joan Dawson ∂ Ann (Creighton) Day Paul Cassel & Diane de Camps Meschino James Deignan Kenneth Dekker ∂ Alison DeLory Michelle Deruchie Kenneth & Marged Dewar Fraser Dewis & Marilyn (Lingley) Dewis J. Mark & Rachel (Swetnam) DeWolf ∂ Sarah Dingle & Carl Lem Diocesan Synod of Fredericton ∂ Susan Dodd ∂ Jane Dover Stephanie Duchon ∂ Lynda Earle James Eaton Elizabeth Edwards ∂ C. Russell Elliott* ∂ Nancy Elliott & Richard Dyke Greg Elmer Howard Epstein Richard Evans Monica Farrell ∂ Jim Feir Wilson Fitt & Thelma Costello ∂ Mark Fleming & Rachel Renton David Fletcher Phillip Fleury ∂ Ian Folkins ∂ Susan Folkins Brenda & Robert Franklin ∂ J. Roderick Fraser Linda & Gregor Fraser Andrea Frolic Peter Giddens Dorota Glowacka ∂ Dr. John F. Godfrey Amy Goldlist

Victoria Goldring ∂ Nestor Gomez John Gorrill ∂ Graduating Class of 2019 Andrew Graham ∂ Nicholas Graham Nita H. Graham David Gray Howard Green & Lynne Heller Roselle Green ∂ Anne Gregory Mary Grise & Christopher Mogan Joanna Grossman ∂ Gregory Guy ∂ Brenton Haliburton Pamela Halstead Catherine & David Hamilton ∂ Geraldine Hamm ∂ John & Genesta Hamm Elizabeth Hanton ∂ Gaye Harden George Harding Andy & Anne (Dorey) Hare Carla & Steve Harle ∂ Kathleen Harper Peter Harris Susan Harris ∂ Nicholas Hatt Suzanne Hawkes C. William Hayward ∂ David Hazen Douglas Hazen ∂ Mark & Shirley (Wall) Hazen ∂ Pearl Hazen Alan Hebb ∂ David Herbert ∂ Angela Hill John Hobday ∂ Neil Hooper ∂ Dennis & Doris House Bruce Howe James Howison Michaela Huard Ian & Catherine Hugill Dennis Hurlburt Robert Hyslop ∂ Erin Iles ∂ David Israelson & Susan Elliott Simon Jackson Alan Levine & Iris Jacobson ∂ Parisa Jahangiri Ian Johnson ∂ Paula Johnson ∂ David & Ena Gwen Jones Ben Kates Janet Kawchuk ∂ Doreen Kays ∂

Mary (Lewis) Kennedy ∂ Glen & Glenda (Cummings) Kent ∂ Ross Kerr Stephen Kimber ∂ W. J. Tory & Margaret (von Maltzahn) Kirby Stephen Knowles ∂ Frances (Kuret) Krusekopf Andrew & Patricia Laing ∂ Langley LeBlanc Medical Service Inc. Yannick Larose Kelly Laurence Jennifer Laurette ∂ Caleb Lawrence ∂ Dennice & Stephen Leahey James LeBlanc Thomas & Barbara (Aikman) LeBrun Thomas Ledwell ∂ John & Nancy Leefe ∂ T.C. Leung ∂ Catherine Lipa ∂ Ruth Loomer ∂ Bill & Stella Lord ∂ Iain R.M. Luke ∂ Andy Lynch Gregory Lypny David MacDonald ∂ Ronald A. MacDonald Jane MacDonald-Spiteri Kevin MacDonell ∂ Sara Macfarlane Ken & Mary MacInnis ∂ David Mackay ∂ John MacKenzie ∂ Norman MacKenzie ∂ Lina (McLean) MacKinnon Anne MacLaren John MacLean ∂ Stephen & Julianne (Doucet) MacLean ∂ Russell MacLellan Rod & Robin MacLennan Michael & Cynthia (Edwards) MacMillan ∂ Marli MacNeil ∂ Adrienne Malloy ∂ Bob Mann ∂ James Mann ∂ Heather May ∂ Allen McAvoy ∂ Alexandra McCann Kathryn & Leo McCluskey Frances (Smith) McConnell Eve (Lorway) McDermott Paul & Lucy McDonald ∂

Graham McGillivray ∂ McInnes Cooper Celeste McKay Alan McLeod David Mercer Kaitlin Merwin Beverley Millar ∂ Gary Miller ∂ Kathy & Dick Miller ∂ Joyce (Blandford) Millman Catherine (Rhymes) Misener ∂ Janet Mitchell ∂ Adrian Molder Penny Frances Moody-Corbett Stuart Moore Jane Adams Ritcey & Wilfred Moore Andrew Morrison & Jennifer Morawiecki ∂ David Morris ∂ Brendan Morrison ∂ Joan Morrison ∂ Stephen Murray ∂ Diane Murray Barker ∂ David & Margaret (Harris) Myles Peter Nathanson ∂ Ardis Nelson Jan Nicholls & Paul Sobanski ∂ Kenneth Nickel Kenneth Nickerson Anne O’Neil ∂ Fran Ornstein ∂ Robyn Osgood & Christopher Ashwood Marco Oved Doug & Marlene Oxner Owen & Elizabeth (MacDonald) Parkhouse Kevin Pask Kelly Patterson & Peter Buckley Glenn Payette Anne & Pays Payson Charlotte (MacLean) Peach ∂ LeRoy Peach ∂ Gary Pekeles & Jane McDonald ∂ Sandra Penney Robert Petite ∂ Cynthia (Smith) Pilichos ∂ Simone Pink & Doug Mitchell ∂ Rob Platts & Rachel Syme ∂ Joseph Poon Elizabeth Murray & Gary Powell ∂ Helen Powell ∂ Morton Prager ∂ Margo Pullen Sly ∂

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DONOR ROLL James Purchase Christina Quelch ∂ Irene Randall ∂ F. Alan Reesor ∂ Adele Reinhartz & Barry Walfish Peter Rekai Susan (McCulloch) Richardson Michelle Rippon Patrick Rivest ∂ Amy Rizner David Roach & Alex Schofield Henry & Phoebe Roper ∂ Bala Jaison & Marc Rosen Stephen Ross & Mary O’Riordan Elizabeth Ryan ∂ Helen Anne Ryding Barbara Saipe Stanley & Anne Salsman Mike Sampson Bonnie Sands Barbara Scott Aden Seaton & Howard Krongold Shelley Shea ∂ William Sherren Brian Sherwell Bill Sigsworth & Catherine Richard Carrie & Peter Simon ∂ Lynda Singer ∂ Katharine Sircom ∂ William Skinner Pierre Alvarez & Jessie Sloan Barbara Smith ∂ Ben Smith ∂ Jane Smith Roslyn Smith Gary & Kadre Sneddon Stephen Snobelen ∂ Peter & Elizabeth (Bayne) Sodero ∂ Andrew Sowerby ∂ Lori Stahlbrand Detlev Steffen Catherine Stein Thomas Stinson ∂ Kevin & Janice Stockall ∂ Carmon & Sharon Stone John Stone Kate Sutherland & Evan Renaerts David Swick ∂ Lisa Taggart ∂ Elaine Taylor R. Brian & Sheila Taylor ∂ Kelley Teahen D. Lionel Teed ∂ Jerome Teitel ∂

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Lhadon Tethong Geraldine Thomas ∂ Chelsea Thorne ∂ Robyn Tingley ∂ Keith Townley Nicholas Townley ∂ Fred Vallance-Jones ∂ Pauline Verstraten Elizabeth Vibert Thomas Vincent ∂ Nancy (Clark) Violi ∂ Anne von Maltzahn Isabel Wainwright ∂ Mordecai Walfish ∂ Richard Walsh ∂ Karolyn Waterson & Carl Boyd ∂ William Wells ∂ Zachary Wells Christopher J. White ∂ Jana Wieder* Tara Wigglesworth-Hines ∂ Tom Wiley Peter & Irene Wilkinson Gavin Will William Williams ∂ Hugh Williamson Jan Winton ∂ The Rev. Dr. Kenneth J. Wissler ∂ Margaret Withrow James Wood ∂ Kathryn Wood Anne Woods Peter & Maida Woodwark ∂ CUPOLA CLUB (up to $99) anonymous (4) Sarah Abman John Adams Carolyn & William Appelbe Kenneth Askew ∂ Kathleen Bain Richard Bartram ∂ Leigh Bateman Joshua Bates ∂ T. Frederick Baxter Nancy Blake Timothy Borlase Rae Brown Lawrence & Jane (Reagh) Bruce-Robertson Terra (Duncan) Bruhm Ronald Buckley ∂ Rachael Cadman Margaret Campbell John Chance Clare Christie ∂

Lyssa Clack ∂ John Cook ∂ Brian Cormier Robert Craig ∂ Mary Jane Craik John Creelman ∂ Rosalind Curran Veronica Curran Dalhousie-King’s Reading Club Christine Davies Douglas Davis ∂ Carol (Coles) Dicks ∂ Donna DiCostanzo Jackie Digout Sally (Bergasse) Driscoll Michael Dunn Corinne Earle Gordon Earle ∂ Alyssa & Matthew Feir Victoria Foley Alexander & Stacey (MacDonald) Forbes ∂ Isabelle Gallant Edward Gesner ∂ Alfred Spurr Gilman Terrance Graham Barb Granek Gutstein Emanuella Grinberg Bernard Hart Keith Hatfield ∂ Lillie Haworth Pamela Hazel David Henry H. Douglas Hergett ∂ Jessica Herschman Michael Hoare ∂ Barbara Hodkin David Hugill James Hunter ∂ Laura Hussey-Bondt Kieran Innocenzi ∂ Randall & Rachael (Earle) Jewers Sarah Jones Gladys (Nickerson) Keddy ∂ Mary Beth Knight Simon Kow ∂ Diane Kuipers ∂ Adrian Lee ∂ Anne Loosen Richard Sean Lorway ∂ Christina Macdonald ∂ Alyssa MacKenzie Rory & Genny (Whelan) MacLellan ∂ Ronald Marks Marjory Helen Masson M. Garth Maxwell ∂

Barbara (Neish) McArthur ∂ Duncan McCue Warren McDougald Gillian McGillivray Natalie McLeod & Nikolas Capobianco Elizabeth McNeil ∂ William Mercer Carol Miller Elizabeth Montgomery ∂ G. Warren Murley Helen Oldershaw Andrew O’Neill ∂ Christine O’Neill-Yates Kathryn & Richard Ortner Stewart Payne Diane Pickard & Russell Bamford ∂ Brian Pitcairn Ian Porter Mark & Carolyn Power ∂ Nancy (White) Power Jonathan Powers Lars Renborg Nicola Rendell Nancy (Brimicombe) Ring Martha Roberts Tudor (Caldwell) Robins Sheila (Fenton) Robinson Gillian (Bidwell) Rose ∂ Jonathan & Emily (Hunter) Rowe Myra (Crowe) Scott David Sheppard Paul Simpson Maya Smith Sean Smith Heather (Christian) Stevenson ∂ Liz Tarshish Dylan Tate-Howarth ∂ Edward Thompson ∂ Kelly Toughill ∂ Randy & Deborah Townsend ∂ Valerie Vuillemot Angela Walker ∂ Terrance Wasson John Weeren ∂ Amichai Wise ∂ Peter Young *deceased

LEGACY Estate of Dolda Lorraine Clarke Estate of Donald & Shirley Hambrick Estate of F.C. Manning

DONOR ROLL Estate of Robert Des Brisay Morris Estate of Judith Kaye Wright

DONOR ROLL

BY DECADE 1937 C. Russell Elliott* ∂

IN MEMORY OF Malcolm Bradshaw Carol Campbell Catherine Campbell Ken Chung Jamie Cochran Janet Cochran Jane Curran Rev. J.E. DeWolf Sarah Dube George Earles Prof. John F. Graham Harold Graven Peggy Heller James How Angus Johnston Sheila Jones Janet Kitz Daina Kulnys George D. D. Lewis George Martell Antigone (Tiggy) Nichols Daniel O’Brien Dr. Harry D. Smith & Joy H. Smith Leslie (Cutler) Walsh

IN HONOUR OF Aidan Aronoff Rachael Bethune Jackson Byrne & Rebecca Best George Cooper Marion Fry Dorota Glowacka Dale Godsoe Jennifer Gray Roselle Green Kim Kierans Bill Lahey Walker Nickel Brenna Sobanski Jordan Spears Colin Starnes Michal Stein Amy Teitel Gary Thorne Hugh Wright

SPONSORSHIPS Wilson Fuel Company Limited

1944 anonymous (1) 1947 Edward Thompson ∂ 1948 William Sherren Brian Sherwell

1957 Estate of Dolda Lorraine Clarke* ∂ John MacKenzie ∂ Ben Smith ∂ Isabel Wainwright ∂ 1958 George Caines ∂ Fred Christie ∂ John Hamm Bernard Hart C. William Hayward ∂

1950 J. Roderick Fraser

1959 Norman MacKenzie ∂ G. Warren Murley LeRoy Peach ∂

1951 anonymous (1) Hope Clement Kenneth Nickerson Gillian (Bidwell) Rose ∂

1961 Roland Lines David Myles Sandra Oxner Richard Walsh ∂

1952 Frances (Smith) McConnell William Skinner

1962 Marilyn (Lingley) Dewis Geraldine Hamm ∂ Caleb Lawrence ∂ Thomas LeBrun Russell MacLellan Donald Stevenson ∂ Nancy (Clark) Violi ∂

1953 Carol (Coles) Dicks ∂ Corinne Earle Marion Fry ∂ Ruth Loomer ∂ Barbara (Neish) McArthur ∂ Joan Morrison ∂ 1954 Keith Barrett ∂ John Gorrill ∂ Pearl Hazen Alan Hebb ∂ David MacDonald ∂ Estate of Robert Des Brisay Morris* 1955 John Cook ∂ 1956 anonymous (1) Gilbert Berringer ∂ Mary Jane Craik Ann (Creighton) Day Ann Pituley ∂

1963 T. Frederick Baxter Charlotte (Graven) Cochran Gwendolyn Davies ∂ Fraser Dewis Gordon Earle ∂ Linda Fraser Edward Gesner ∂ Doreen Kays ∂ Stephen Knowles ∂ Barbara (Aikman) LeBrun Marian (Huggard) Lines David Morris ∂ James Purchase Elizabeth (Bayne) Sodero ∂ D. Lionel Teed ∂ 1964 anonymous (1) Nicola Butler Donald Chard Burdette Coates ∂ Lillie Haworth

H. Douglas Hergett ∂ T.C. Leung ∂ David Lewis Helen Oldershaw Anja Pearre Barbara Smith ∂ William Wells ∂ Estate of Judith Kaye Wright* ∂ 1965 Roselle Green ∂ Michael Hoare ∂ Nancy Leefe ∂ Margaret (Harris) Myles Michelle Rippon Carmon Stone John Stone Thomas Vincent ∂ William Williams ∂ 1966 Margaret (Burstall) Brown ∂ Ronald Buckley ∂ Carolyn (Tanner) Chenhall ∂ Glen Kent ∂ John Leefe ∂ James Mann ∂ M. Garth Maxwell ∂ 1967 Mary Barker ∂ Clare Christie ∂ John Creelman ∂ Hugh Crosthwait Douglas Hazen ∂ Bruce Howe Glenda (Cummings) Kent ∂ Carol Miller Charlotte (MacLean) Peach ∂ Sheila (Fenton) Robinson 1968 anonymous (1) Jean (Kryszek) Chard Ginny (Lewis) Clark Peter Coffin Armand Couture J. Mark DeWolf ∂ Ena Gwen Jones Brenton Haliburton Peter Harris Keith Hatfield ∂ David Jones Ronald A. MacDonald Cynthia (Smith) Pilichos ∂ Beverly (Zannotti) Postl ∂ Susan (McCulloch) Richardson

TIDINGS | WINTER 2021 33

DONOR ROLL 1969 Wayne Cochrane Borden Conrad Marilyn (McNutt) Cregan ∂ Richard Cregan ∂ Sally (Bergasse) Driscoll Larry Holman ∂ Robert Hyslop ∂ Lina (McLean) MacKinnon Ronald Marks Eve (Lorway) McDermott David Mercer Janet Mitchell ∂ Robert Petite ∂ Helen Powell ∂ Elizabeth Ryan ∂ Lynda Singer ∂

1976 Peter Bryson Rosalie Courage Mary (Lewis) Kennedy ∂ W. J. Tory Kirby Adrienne Malloy ∂ Myra (Crowe) Scott

1970 anonymous (2) Andy Hare Anne (Dorey) Hare David Mackay ∂ Nancy (Brimicombe) Ring Heather (Christian) Stevenson ∂ Hugh Williamson

1979 Andrew Graham ∂

1971 Sara Macfarlane Ken MacInnis ∂ John MacKay Penny Frances Moody-Corbett Irene Randall ∂ Sheila Taylor ∂ The Rev. Dr. Kenneth J. Wissler ∂

1972 John Carr ∂ Joan Christie Rachel (Swetnam) DeWolf ∂ George Harding Ian Johnson ∂ Gladys (Nickerson) Keddy ∂ 1973 Timothy Borlase Phillip Fleury ∂ Brian Pitcairn R. Brian Taylor ∂ 1974 Wilson Fitt ∂ Susan Harris ∂ 1975 Peter Young

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1977 Patrick Bright Wendy Davis ∂ Michaela Huard Margaret (von Maltzahn) Kirby 1978 Robert Craig ∂ Patrick Rivest ∂

1980 anonymous (1) Michael Bird Rhea (Skerrett) Bright Patricia Chalmers ∂ David Hazen Richard Sean Lorway ∂ Stephen Lownie Marjory Helen Masson Barbara Scott Shelley Shea ∂ 1981 anonymous (2) Thomas Curran ∂ Elizabeth Hanton ∂ Catherine (Rhymes) Misener ∂ 1982 Robert Dawson ∂ Susan Folkins Stacey (MacDonald) Forbes ∂ Rachael (Earle) Jewers Kim Kierans ∂ Marli MacNeil ∂ 1983 anonymous (1) Kathleen Bain Jane (Reagh) Bruce-Robertson Christine Davies Tom Eisenhauer ∂ Alexander Forbes ∂ Terrance Graham Glenn Payette

1984 David Baker Leigh Bateman Richard Dyke Anne Gregory Randall Jewers Kelly Laurence Kevin Stockall ∂ 1985 Lawrence Bruce-Robertson James Eaton Mark Hazen ∂ Shirley (Wall) Hazen ∂ Iain R.M. Luke ∂ Mark MacKenzie Alan McLeod Stephen Murray ∂ Neil Robertson ∂ Kelley Teahen John Weeren ∂ 1986 anonymous (1) Sheila Cameron Brian Cormier Nancy Elliott Christopher Elson ∂ Ian Folkins ∂ Simon Jackson Andrew Laing ∂ James LeBlanc Jane MacDonald-Spiteri Joyce (Blandford) Millman Peter Nathanson ∂ Angela Walker ∂ 1987 anonymous (3) Mark Andrews Christine Campbell Susan Dodd ∂ Victoria Goldring ∂ Gregory Guy ∂ Julianne (Doucet) MacLean ∂ Stephen MacLean ∂ Gillian McCain ∂ Stuart Moore Katharine Sircom ∂ Elaine Taylor James Wood ∂ 1988 Jennifer Balfour ∂ Michael Dunn Pamela Halstead Terrance Wasson

1989 Laurelle LeVert ∂ Christopher Mogan Owen Parkhouse Gavin Will 1990 Daniel Brandes ∂ Nicholas Graham Suzanne Hawkes Peter O’Brien Elizabeth (MacDonald) Parkhouse Sean Smith 1991 Jennifer Bell Rebecca (Moore) Brown ∂ Paul Charlebois ∂ Lyssa Clack ∂ Keith Johnson Kevin MacDonell ∂ Kathryn Wood 1992 Mary Abbott Tim Currie Kenneth Dekker ∂ Kevin Gibson ∂ Kevin Gormely Mary Grise Duncan McCue Sandra Penney 1993 anonymous (2) Christine O’Neill-Yates Amy Rizner Suzanne Wheeler Romeo ∂ 1994 Mark Fleming Peter Giddens Peter Jelley ∂ Frances (Kuret) Krusekopf Cynthia (Edwards) MacMillan ∂ Michael MacMillan ∂ Gillian McGillivray Jennifer Morawiecki ∂ Rachel Renton Sarah E. Stevenson ∂ Lisa Taggart ∂ Christopher J. White ∂ 1995 Carolyn Gibson ∂ Donald Harrison Ross Kerr

DONOR ROLL Andrew Morrison ∂ Christina Quelch ∂ 1996 Eric Aldous ∂ Roberta Barker ∂ Christina Harnett Tudor (Caldwell) Robins 1997 Lynda Earle Angela Hill Mary Beth Knight Robyn Tingley ∂ 1998 anonymous (1) David Ben-Arie Sjoerd Borst Andrew O’Neill ∂ Emily (Hunter) Rowe Aden Seaton Lhadon Tethong 1999 Rae Brown Gordon Cameron ∂ Jonathan Rowe Zachary Wells 2000 Sarah Dingle Carl Lem Amichai Wise ∂ 2001 anonymous (1) Lauren Brodie ∂ Howard Krongold Jennifer Laurette ∂ Thomas Ledwell ∂ Catherine Lipa ∂ Bob Mann ∂ Mike Sampson Paul Simpson Valerie Vuillemot 2002 Joshua Bates ∂ Daniel de Munnik ∂ Allen McAvoy ∂ 2003 anonymous (1) Amy Goldlist Nicholas Hatt Laura Hussey-Bondt John MacLean ∂

Nancy (White) Power Andrew Sowerby ∂ 2004 Emanuella Grinberg David Herbert ∂ Jessica Herschman David Hugill Ben Kates 2005 Dawn Tracey Brandes ∂ Colin Burn ∂ Victoria Foley Joanna Grossman ∂ David Henry Marco Oved Chelsea Thorne ∂ Nicholas Townley ∂ Tasya Tymczyszyn ∂ 2006 Sarah Abman Jane Baldwin ∂ Terra (Duncan) Bruhm Brendan Morrison ∂ 2007 Myra Bloom ∂ Yannick Larose Anne Loosen

Graham McGillivray ∂ Maya Smith Mordecai Walfish ∂ 2008 Michelle Deruchie Isabelle Gallant Adrian Molder

2013 anonymous (1) Rachael Cadman Stephanie Duchon ∂ Kieran Innocenzi ∂ Warren McDougald Elizabeth McNeil ∂

2009 Victor Bomers Alyssa Feir Sarah Jones Christina Macdonald ∂ Alyssa MacKenzie David Sheppard

2014 anonymous (1) Dylan Tate-Howarth ∂

2010 John Adams Genny (Whelan) MacLellan ∂ Rory MacLellan ∂

2016 Rosalind Curran

2011 Matthew (Baker) Feir Adrian Lee ∂ Kaitlin Merwin Lars Renborg 2012 Richard Bartram ∂ Veronica Curran Elizabeth Montgomery ∂

2015 anonymous (1) James Hunter ∂

2017 Kathleen Harper Benjamin von Bredow 2018 Martha Roberts 2019 anonymous (1)

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FYP TEXTS

1922: “PUZZLED, BORED, IRRITATED, & DISILLUSIONED”

by Dr. Thomas Curran

DO YOU KNOW MARK TWAIN’S definition of a classic? “A book which everyone wants to have read—but nobody wants to read.”

I am absolutely obsessed with a weekly (English) Guardian column entitled: “Books that made me” which has been running since September 2017—so, of course, all the past columns are online. I have become so obsessed (actually: addicted) with this regular Guardian feature that—even during the lock-downs—I had to try to limit myself to the one new column each week, and, only if I had dealt with the most pressing of my duties, could I allow myself to peek at a past exemplar—but, then strictly, only one additional column a week.

The questions that are put to contemporary and living authors in this Guardian feature is which book they are most “ashamed not to have read”—sometimes this also appears in the form of: “The book I couldn’t finish?” From my informal poll of over half the published columns, I have ascertained that James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is by far and away that work of literature that Guardian authors have either never managed to begin or then to finish. Moby-Dick is a distinct second (“leave that whale alone”), but

* 36

Melville is not mentioned nearly as often by the penitent sinners. If there were ever a use for Mark Twain’s dictum, it must be here.

In the same vein, W.H. Auden apparently gave a lecture on Cervantes’ Don Quixote in which he informed his audience that he had never actually managed to finish this great (and massive) early novel, and he doubted if there might be anyone in the audience who had finished it either.

The Guardian authors tend to be a bit more respectful of Ulysses than of Moby-Dick (1851). The general tone for Herman Melville is this: the authors hope that Captain Ahab finally completes his encounter with the whale, because along the way the readers have become entirely wearied by the Captain’s tedious obsession.

This January (2021) there was a slight flurry of James Joyce celebration because the eminent author died in January 80 years ago (January 13, 1941). James Joyce festivities are bound to ramp up soonish, since in 2022, we shall be commemorating 100 years since the publication of two of the most famous/notorious/admired/over-hyped statements—take your pick—of “Modernism” in the English language, viz. James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s epic poem

A marvellous FYP initiative for this Zoom/COVID academic year has been the nightly performance of “Read Now!” in which the subject of the next morning’s lecture is introduced by a reading aloud from the assigned text. On Sunday evening, March 7th, two of the chief architects of “Read Now!” (FYP’s Susan Dodd and Neil Robertson) were engaged in a Zoom recitation of the entirety of Eliot’s epic The Waste Land—a very moving and special treat for all involved.

TIDINGS | WINTER 2021

The Waste Land—both first printed in 1922.

There is something quite instructive in the way these two poems were received by another colossus of English-language Modernism, Virginia Woolf—whom we are now reading in the Foundation Year Program, with the same regularity as Eliot’s (mostly admired) masterpiece. This academic year (2020-21) Woolf ’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) is the required reading. There is critical opinion that features of Woolf ’s 1925 novel (first mentioned in Woolf ’s diary in August 1922) contain evidence of the putative influence of Eliot’s earlier completed monumental poem.

The Woolfs (Virginia and Leonard) were profoundly charmed by Eliot: they published Eliot’s poetry (1919), found an apartment for him, and they were engaged in setting up a patronage fund to support Eliot’s poetic ambitions. But most remarkably, Virginia Woolf took a direct hand in preparing the publication of The Waste Land—since the initial typesetting had been so incompetent. The early exposure to the then still unpublished The Waste Land was positive: Virginia Woolf recorded that Eliot read his poem to them: “He sang it & chanted it [&] rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity.”

Presumably Virginia Woolf has also summarized the reaction of many of us in our first encounters with the poem: “What connects it together, I’m not so sure…”

That was in June of 1922; in that October, she defended Eliot in a letter: “I have only the sound of it in my ears, when he read it aloud; and have not yet tackled the sense.

But I like the sound.”*

How many scores of FYP students might Virginia Woolf be addressing with these accounts of her initial responses to Eliot’s poetic collage?

And for many (secret) Guardian authors might Virginia Woolf be speaking concerning the novel Ulysses—when, in a letter she reported to the famous Lytton Strachey: “Never did I read such tosh.” Her diary (August 16th, 1922)—not really meant for “social media” consumption—documents Woolf ’s being “puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples”—a tone not altogether divorced from aspects of Ulysses itself. So, at least in that way, novelist and critic can be firmly united.

This negative judgment

by Woolf (of an “underbred book”) is rendered despite the fact that “Tom, great Tom, thinks this [Ulysses] on a par with War & Peace!” It is with unbearable sadness that one learns this truly stellar friendship was, in its turn, also to suffer a massive falling out in early 1928. In February, Woolf herself would be equally “puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned” by the formerly so highly esteemed companion. Apparently on February 6, after Thomas Stearns Eliot announced that he had become an Anglo-Catholic, the erstwhile “Tom, great Tom”—became now “poor dear Tom Eliot who may be called dead to us all from this day forward.” King’s Chapel goers, beware!

REMEMBERING KING’S

By John MacKay BA’71 MEMORIES COME IN TORRENTS now, often flooding in with a potency and richness I didn’t know were possible when I was young. It’s one of the curious states of being that aging brings.

After many years away, I’m once again in Halifax, where my daily walks take me across the King’s Quad, quiet now in these unusual times. Often, for a minute or two, I stop and take in the beauty of this college I have always loved.

In the wash of memory, it was just moments ago that I bolted out the doors of Radical Bay late for class, that I sat aimlessly with fellow students on the A&A building stairs and that I lived, here at King’s, that sense of vibrant expectation that belongs exclusively to those years of our lives.

Places, like people, have power and energy and in many ways, King’s formed me; it was here, directing plays in the King’s Theatre, that I discovered the talent that would become my first career. It was here that I made heartful friendships, some of which are with me still. I fell in love here, broke my heart here, experienced here the parts of myself that would become my cherished gifts and my life-long struggles.

Of course, there’s a point to what I’m writing and excuse me if I’ve been a touch slow getting to it. I want to evoke in you, today, a reminder of what King’s continues to evoke in all of us who have been here. I want King’s to

survive, I want King’s to prosper. I want the King’s experience to be here, waiting for the many, many more of us yet to come.

To that end, I’m leaving King’s a gift in my will. It won’t build a building or bankroll a new academic program, believe me, but it’s something, and doing so has great meaning for me. What I leave in my will is part of my legacy, a mark of who and what have really mattered to me in my life.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve given to King’s occasionally over the years. Or maybe you’ve never been in a position to give, though King’s has always been in your heart. Well, here it is, your last chance, so to speak, to support this college you love. You can set it up now and you can personalize it; you can leave a gift that lets the college use the money where they most need it at the time, you can earmark it for scholarships or you can work out something that has personal meaning for you. The gift I’m leaving, for example, will go towards the academic program that, at the time, is cutting edge and full of promise for the university, the program that may help shape King’s future.

Whether you remember your years here as the flat-out happiest of your life, or, as I do, the years that brought you to life in unexpected ways, we all have ownership of the University of King’s College and, to one extent or another, we’re indebted. Remember King’s and all it means to you in your will.

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ALUMNI PROFILE

JESSICA J. LEE The award-winning nonfiction writer joins us for a Q&A

JESSICA J. LEE, BA(Hons)’08, is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author and environmental historian. Her memoir Two Trees Make a Forest was awarded the 2020 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the top prize for nonfiction writing in Canada. The memoir was also awarded a spot on the shortlist for CBC Canada Reads 2021. We spoke with Jessica J. Lee about her creative journey so far.

Jessica, congratulations! Two Trees Make a Forest is a memoir told through exploring your ancestral homeland of Taiwan. What made you want to tell this story?

It’s a book that in some ways I’ve been wanting to write forever. Even back when I was at King’s, I was trying to write a novel which was a fictionalized version of my grandparents’ story. I could never really find my feet with it, so I just had this story in the back of my mind.

After I had written my first book, Turning, I felt a little pressure to move onto my next book; but it was also at a point where I had been living in Berlin for a few years and

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I was feeling quite at home—but also quite sad. My German had gotten much better than my Mandarin ever was, my grandmother died, and I was feeling very disconnected to my mum’s side of the family and from the Taiwanese aspect of our heritage.

It really crystallised for me in that period of time, so I decided to devote that energy into the book. The core narrative spans a three-month period that I spent in Taiwan, hiking and trying to chase down my grandparents’ story and trying to find a ‘muscle memory’ in the landscape.

Your first book, Turning, is also based on a personal narrative and connection to nature—your account of swimming in 52 different lakes in one year. How did the inspiration for Turning come about?

I did my PhD fieldwork with winter swimmers in England and I got really hooked on it. When I moved to Berlin, I discovered that the city was surrounded by thousands of lakes—there are 3000 in the region. Swimming became a practice that gave me a way to connect and get to know the place, and

to relate it intellectually to what I had been trained in—in doing so much landscape history and environmental philosophy. For me, being able to get out into the landscape and write about it and have the experience of connecting very physically really gave me some structure.

I was still trying to finish my PhD at the time, so I was doing two or three days of writing the book and then two or three days on my dissertation, and that was the deciding year—either applying for postdocs and looking at tenure track or going all in to writing books.

Can you articulate what it was that tipped you to favour 'all in'?

I think I ended up committing to writing in a fairly organic way. I started by leaving enough time to really devote myself to promoting my first book—which ruled out taking on a full-time job for a while—and then, as time rolled on, I realised I had enough work and momentum to stay with it.

I loved the day-to-day of being accountable to myself, sometimes travelling, sometimes

What did life as a new King’s graduate look like for you?

researching, sometimes writing, sometimes giving talks. It seemed like the best way to draw on my academic training outside of the university context.

You’re based in London now. Was that always part of the plan?

It’s been a huge year of transition. After COVID hit I realized how much of my profession up until now has been predicated on me being able to travel easily: as most of the publishing I do is in the U.K., I realized that was untenable. So, we decided to move back to London—that was not a planned thing!

We moved, very unexpectedly, and I started a new job at Cambridge University, so I’m back in academia now, which is not at all what I expected! It’s great, though, and it’s the right kind of balance for me. I’m working on a project funded by the Wellcome Trust, where my job is to communicate the history of science research in different ways, through radio programs and engaging the public….

It’s cool to find my way back into academia with the training that I have previ-

ously, but as a writer. That fits really nicely for me. It was a stressful year, moving in the middle of a pandemic, but everything has really come together in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. To be honest, I couldn’t have planned it, because it was all a bit like dominos, one thing after another, working out.

Could you have ever imagined as an undergraduate at King’s that you would be where you are now?

I went directly into my master’s after I graduated. That autumn, I moved to the U.K. and started my masters in humanities and cultural studies. After that one-year program—even by the end of my undergraduate—I think I already knew I wanted to go into academia. So by the time I finished my master’s I made myself promise—just to be sure that academia was what I wanted to do—to take time off. I got a job working at an educational non-profit in London, working on primary school literacy.

After a while, I knew I really wanted to do a PhD in North America. I was lucky in the sense that my PhD was funded; I don’t want to diminish the financial aspect of making that work. I decided outright that I didn’t want to have to make the decision to do a Monday-to-Friday job at the expense of being able to write or being able to travel for my writing or research, or to do all of these other little things I wanted to do. I always worked part-time jobs on the side to make sure the bills were paid, until I got to the point where I am now, where I have enough work across my desk to keep me busy for a couple of years in advance at this point! It takes time and sacrifice in terms of financial stability. But it does work out!

What’s next for you, Jessica?

No! Where I am now, I can’t even articulate it. It was my inarticulable dream when I was at King’s. But in a way, I would never have told anyone that because it seemed too unrealistic, too impossible—even impractical. I thought it was a really rigid process—I had to get my masters and do my PhD and I couldn’t make a mistake.

There are so many other paths to take. I often come back to thinking about my time at King’s, because I just approach it with multiple ideas in mind all the time. I try not to be so rigid about how I approach things. If someone had told me back then what would happen, I might not have believed them!

The good thing with the job at Cambridge is that it’s a five-year contract. It’s two days a week, which pays the bills and allows time to create. I’m doing that, which I’m really excited about and I am, theoretically, working on another book: I have actually booked off the entire winter and spring in hopes that I will be able to start a new book, staying in the nature writing and environmental history genre.

We can’t wait to see what comes next!

Find out more about Jessica’s work at jessicajleewrites.com.

TIDINGS | WINTER 2021 39

ALUMNI PROFILE

ROBERT MUGGAH ‘This is coming’: How Robert Muggah’s work anticipated the COVID-19 pandemic

IT WAS A GREY, OMINOUS DAY in New York City. Robert Muggah, BA(Hons)’97, was driving his wife and young daughter over the George Washington Bridge, headed for the Canadian border. It was February 2020.

Muggah and his family had moved to New York on a sabbatical from Rio de Janeiro, where he co-founded the Igarapé Institute, a ‘think-and-do tank’ that works primarily on citizen, digital and climate security across the Americas and Africa.

Just a few months into the sabbatical in late 2019, Muggah and his team, after hearing the first few reports of a new virus that had originated in China, started investigating.

“It was alarming what we were finding in local [Chinese] news—even before headlines hit the mainstream news,” Muggah explains.

“We ran some models and quickly established that the coronavirus was going to be

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really bad. We started to call everyone we knew, foreign ministries, intelligence, and others around the world, to tell them that ‘this is coming.’”

As Muggah continued his work with New York University (NYU) and the United Nations by day, he stayed up late into the night at his computer poring over the numbers.

He points out that armed conflict and criminal violence, on which he is a global expert, behave similarly to disease.

“Because violence is contagious, like many infectious diseases, they can move in similar ways throughout a population.” Over the years he has worked with organizations such as the World Health Organization to predict global pandemics and map vaccination supply chains. But COVID-19 was different.

“I’d been writing about this for years— the threat of pandemics to cities and their most vulnerable populations,” Muggah explains. He recalls contacting everyone he knew around the world with pre-existing health conditions to warn them of the magnitude of the emerging pandemic. “After I crunched the numbers for New York, my wife and I rented a car, packed up the apartment and left. Within a month, New York was the infection epicentre of the world for COVID-19.”

“To me it was clear, despite the uncertainties at the time, that this was the direction the virus was going in,” Muggah says.

However, many people were skeptical that the virus could be as bad as he was predicting, including many of his co-workers.

“It was an interesting moment. I’ve spent years thinking about early warning and am always surprised about how reluctant we are to understand existential threats even when they are staring us in the face.” The lack

of action was frustrating for Muggah. “It’s reminded me about how we need to think harder about how to get messages out to the public,” he adds.

On crossing into Canada, Muggah was relieved to be home after more than 25 years living abroad. He also felt an incredible sense of foreboding about what was to come.

Settling in Ottawa, he has continued to work on COVID-19 and how it will shape the future of our planet.

“My work is focusing on the ways COVID-19 and other mega-threats are accelerating changes in our societies, including the future of cities. I’m also trying to take to action.”

This involves designing digital tools and platforms to help large cities like Amsterdam, Bristol, Chicago, Los Angeles and Ottawa recover and increase their resilience—both online and off.

Back in Canada, he’s closer to his technology company, SecDev, which works on another global challenge—digitisation.

“Specifically, on speeding-up inclusive digital transformation, with governments, business and non-profits.” Muggah explains. The SecDev team are also working in the context of COVID-19—they set up a voluntary cyber security defense force in Canada to provide free and subsidised services to public health institutions.

Muggah continues to communicate with global audiences about how we can make tangible progress on issues related to climate change. His new book, Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the Next 100 Years, is co-authored with Ian Goldin, Oxford University professor of Globalization and Development and the founding director of the Oxford Martin School, a world-leading group of experts from across Oxford tackling the most

pressing challenges facing humanity.

“The book is essentially a repository of everything I know in one place,” Muggah says. “The idea is to use powerful maps to help give signposts for dealing with future mega-threats. The big message is that we’re facing a host of systemic risks which are layered and cumulative … We all need to mobilise a much more determined and collective effort to address them. International cooperation is really the key to our survival; we need better globalization, not less.”

Muggah is now working on a landmark report with the UN Secretary General, a “post COVID-19 plan for strengthening multilateral action and international cooperation on global public goods.” And there’s a new environmental eco-thriller about crime in the Amazon, which he and his co-author Misha Glenny are developing for Netflix.

And homeschooling his daughter. He smiles, “Like everybody else, I’m juggling home and work with pretty limited success!”

With no shortage of projects and global problems to work on, Muggah still credits the Foundation Year Program (FYP) at King’s for building his intellectual and ethical foundation for debate and critical reflection, which has informed much of his work.

“What I loved most about FYP was this idea of spending a year reading, maybe 70 or more books. You would then have to defend your ideas orally—and on paper—on a routine basis. It opened up a whole approach to critical inquiry that has become less common in the North American education system,” Muggah says. “We are in the midst of a truly monumental period of change, geopolitically, environmentally, technologically. We need to be steeped in our history to make wiser decisions for future generations.”

“We are in the midst of a truly monumental period of change, geopolitically, environmentally, technologically. We need to be steeped in our history to make wiser decisions for future generations.”

“I remain stubbornly optimistic, in spite of what we’re all going through,” Muggah concludes. Despite the challenges of COVID-19, we’ve seen some extraordinary collaboration and innovation—especially in the sciences.” Furthermore, he adds, “the virus has stimulated a deeper reflection about the health of our societies and forced a reckoning with the status quo. The Black Lives Matter protests are a reminder that

people everywhere are reckoning with the past.

“We have an opportunity to take action, to trigger change, and that’s pretty remarkable. The decisions we take in this decade will shape the trajectory of this planet for the coming thousand years—and that’s an extraordinary thing to think about. We’re alive to be witness—to participate—in this history-making moment.”

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ALUMNI PROFILE

HARRY CRITCHLEY Bachelor of Arts (Hons), 2015 Law Student, Schulich School of Law

“If you have the ability to do something you have a responsibility to do it.”

“ONCE YOU START TO HAVE meaningful connections with people in jail, it is really hard to turn away from them. These are people who have been systematically failed by society.”

Harry Critchley made those “meaningful connections” through the likes of Aristotle and Sophocles.

This is how it went. After his first two years at King’s Critchley spent the next year studying at the University of Oxford. He came back to King’s to finish up his degree, but he says his enthusiasm for the liberal arts had waned. At least it had until a friend suggested he volunteer with the Halifax Humanities Society. It is a program that offers university-level, non-credit courses for people on low incomes.

“That turned things around for me in a big way. People who were isolated by illness or by poverty were able to read these texts and come together and have really powerful conversations.”

That led Critchley to opening “the black box” of the corrections system.

“In my last year at King’s I got really involved in working in the provincial jails. We took the Halifax Humanities program and taught it in the Burnside jail in Dartmouth as the Burnside Education Program.”

Critchley says they would meet in a tiny windowless room around a table. It was like a book club. He remembers one day they were reading the play Philoctetes by Sophocles in which the hero, abandoned on an island, feels alone, without a friend in the world.

“So, we had one guy who said ‘This is exactly how I feel. I feel alone all the time, I

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feel incredibly isolated.’ And then everyone else in the class chimed in and said ‘Yeah, that’s how I feel too.’ It was such a beautiful moment of vulnerability. We’re in a place of hyper-masculinity and they are talking about feeling lonely, missing their kids.”

The Burnside Education Program, at the request of the inmates, morphed. Critchley and the others running the program started offering basic literacy classes and high school math.

As Critchley says, “Once you learn about the corrections system it’s like—if you have the ability to do something you have a responsibility to do it.”

Critchley took a couple of years off school to continue with the program. He also worked at Dalhousie University helping profs in the Faculty of Arts set their students up with work experience in the community.

He then helped set up the Limitless program for the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC). Critchley was uniquely qualified.

Limitless brings NSCC courses to people in jail.

While working on Limitless, Critchley earned his Master’s degree from Queen’s University. He is now a student in Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law. He has his sights set on working for Legal Aid in rural Nova Scotia.

“That’s what the humanities are all about.

When you read Plato and Aristotle and all the others, you learn to appreciate different ways of seeing the world. That’s what I learned at King’s and that is what I take to all the work I do. You've got to meet people where they are with their own unique set of experiences and their own view of the world.”

“That’s what the humanities are all about. When you read Plato and Aristotle and all the others, you learn to appreciate different ways of seeing the world.”

ALUMNI PROFILE

LYNDSIE BOURGON Bachelor of Journalism (Hons), 2008 Writer, Oral Historian

“I felt like I had reached a new level that I never thought I would.”

LYNDSIE BOURGON HAS HER writing sights set on poachers. Tree poachers.

“Poaching wood around the world is incredibly lucrative,” Bourgon says, then adds, “but people don’t always pay much attention to it because trees don’t have the same kind of charisma that, say, an elephant might have.”

Bourgon is writing a book about tree poaching, primarily in the American Pacific Northwest but also in Peru, where the illegal trade in Amazonian timber is flourishing.

She understands the environmental damage such logging causes, but more than that she is fascinated by the human stories behind the practice, what she calls the entanglement of culture and identity with the environment.

“I was doing interviews in areas of Peru where timber poaching had taken place. I did interviews about what it was like in the ‘70s and how policy changed. But also about the broader relationship people had with the trees themselves. It was about how they related to the land and the forest. There was a shift from steward to guardian.”

Bourgon says gathering the oral history of the region provides us with a deeper understanding of poaching.

“Oral history gives us the nuance. It gives us empathy. It’s not just about one person who poaches a tree, there is so much more.

There are many levels as to why it happens.”

That way of thinking, Bourgon says, began at King’s.

“I found the Foundation Year Program (FYP) incredibly challenging. But it taught me to see current events at a much deeper level by seeking out different perspectives.

Putting that together with the technical skills I learned in journalism such as writing and interviewing has made me so much better at what I am doing.”

But her path to researching and writing about poaching was not straightforward. After graduating from King’s, Bourgon worked as a freelance writer and a magazine editor, living for a time in Scotland, Toronto, Haida Gwaii and back home in Alberta. It was an important time of personal discovery she says.

“I figured out what I wanted to do. I wrote more about the environment and culture. And I wanted to go back to school.”

She did. Bourgon enrolled in a Master’s program in Environmental History at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

While there she began writing a book about the illegal lumber trade. Getting to South

America for research, though, was a difficult proposition.

“So, I applied for the early career grant from the National Geographic Society,” she says. “I was starting work on my book and I knew that I didn’t have the network and resources in Peru I needed.”

In 2018, Bourgon was granted the title “National Geographic Explorer.” It meant financial and logistics support that launched her career as an author. Her book is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2021.

“It was a boost for my intuition—that what I was thinking about and working on was something important,” she says. “This is something that stays with you. They support you long after your project is done. I felt like I had reached a new level that I never thought I would.”

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ALUMNI PROFILE

KATHERINE CONNOLLY Bachelor of Arts (Hons), 2012 Software Engineer at Neo Financial

“It is really exciting to be writing code that will ultimately create a fully functional bank.”

KATHERINE CONNOLLY ADMITS that going from a liberal arts education at King’s to writing code for a brand-new digital bank is, well, an unusual path.

“And it’s even weirder when you see what happens in between the two,” she laughs.

Indeed, it is.

Connolly’s first stop after graduating happened with a walk across the Quad. She worked in King’s Registrar’s Office helping with recruitment and student advising for a couple of years. That led to a gig as a residence don before she decided to try another university. Connolly graduated from King’s Environment, Sustainability and Society (ESS) program and enrolled in the University of Calgary’s Master’s program in Public Policy.

“Being so passionate about environmental issues I thought it would be valuable to study it in Alberta at the centre of the debate.”

With a second degree under her belt, Connolly headed off to the Czech Republic where she spent a year working at a hostel.

It was a bit of a detour, but Connolly got back on the path when she came back to Canada. She applied, she figures, for 150 jobs, finally landing a position as Special Assistant to Ontario’s then-Premier Kathleen Wynne.

“She is the hardest worker I have ever met. Working beside her was life changing,” says Connolly.

Connolly’s job was to, among other tasks, manage the Premier’s schedule.

“I started thinking how much easier the job would be if I could write a computer program to help with the scheduling and

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organization. So, I started teaching myself how to code.”

Now Connolly will be the first to tell you that at that point in her life she was anything but a techie.

“I was an arts student through and through. But the skills I got from the Foundation Year Program (FYP)—the independence, knowing how to learn, and the self-determination—I could apply them to something totally different.”

When the Wynne government lost the next election, Connolly lost her job. But that interest in computer coding stayed with her.

“I signed up for a 10-week learn-to-code boot camp with Lighthouse Labs. That was the hardest thing I have ever done. I initially dropped out but then I figured out how to do it, just like I had learned how to write my papers at King’s.”

Connolly then applied to work for Lighthouse Labs. She says, “Having taken the boot camp and my experience from working

at the Registrar’s Office at King’s advising and recruiting made me an ideal candidate.”

She got the job, but within months job offers from other companies started to pour in. She ultimately chose to work for a startup called Neo Financial, a brand new digital alternative to banking in Canada.

“They brought me on as one of their first developers. We are building everything from scratch so it is really exciting to be writing code that will ultimately create a fully functional bank.”

Connolly knows that her career path has been anything but conventional and is certain that it will continue down the same “weird” path that started at King’s.

“Tech touches every part of our lives now, which is what I love most about this industry. I am still passionate about public service and the environment and I know there is a future where I can combine those passions with tech in a new and interesting way.”

ALUMNI PROFILE

CHAD LUCAS Bachelor of Journalism (Hons), 2001 Diversity and Equity Advisor, Government of Nova Scotia

“Be able to think in bigger terms about your life.”

JOURNALIST, AUTHOR AND communications advisor Chad Lucas uses storytelling to bring people together.

For someone with dreams of being a reporter, Chad Lucas’ working life began exactly where a graduate would want to end up. Lucas’s four-year journalism degree and combined English honours led him straight into a sportswriter job with the Chronicle Herald, where he covered basketball and interacted with fans through “one of the first blogs the Chronicle Herald ever had.”

Lucas achieved his aspiration of becoming a reporter, but eight years in he was already thinking “Ok, what’s next?”

What was next was a variety of interesting projects with the provincial Office of African Nova Scotian Affairs. Lucas’s work in the civil service has continued through historic moments, such as the public apology issued by Premier Stephen McNeil to former residents of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children. Remembering the October 2014 apology, Lucas recalls that “to be able to witness that and have a tiny role in pulling that day together—it was a really moving experience.”

Approaching 20 years out from graduation, Lucas is a father of four, an occasional lecturer, and a full-time advisor with Communications Nova Scotia. Reflecting on his dynamic and varied life, Lucas says, “sometimes the thing you think that you want is just the first step.”

He notes how studying the liberal arts prepared him to build the life and work that he wanted.

“More than ever, I think we’re in an era where people seldom lock onto one career

path and follow it through from beginning to end. I know I certainly haven’t. I think the liberal arts gives you the broad flexibility to be able to think in bigger terms about your life, your career, and where you’re headed.

There may not be one path; there may be some zigs and some zags—the liberal arts can help prepare you for that.”

In fact, Lucas has recently taken a new direction. His debut middle-grades fiction book, Thanks a Lot, Universe, is a coming-of-age story between two boys, set for publication in May 2021. In a way, this was a natural move for Lucas, who has already published several of his short stories. “Fiction has always been a love of mine,” he says.

“I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller.”

“Fiction has always been a love of mine.

I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller.”

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ALUMNI PUBLISH King’s is pleased to share announcements of books alumni have published that we learned about this year. You will also find announcements of previously published books that have been nominated for awards in ALUMNOTES.

Gail (MacDonald) Crawford, BA’55, DipJ’55, has written three books, A Fine Line Studio Crafts in Ontario from 1930 to the Present (Dundurn Press), Studio Ceramics in Canada (Goose Lane) and Hearts of Oak: A Gaelic Legacy, published in 2015 (Boularderie Island Press).

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Together with Lynn J. Salmon, author John M. MacFarlane, BSc’70, has chronicled the journey of Captain John Voss, a Canadian sailor who in 1901 circumnavigated the globe in a dugout red cedar canoe called the Tilikum. For Around the World in a Dugout Canoe: The Untold Story of Captain John Voss and the Tilikum, the North American

Society for Oceanic History has awarded them the John Lyman Book Award.

Though some personal accounts exist from Voss and original mate N.K. Luxton, this book draws on research from libraries, archives, museums and primary sources around the world to provide a full and fair account of the remarkable voyage.

Alan McHughen’s, 1972, latest book, DNA Demystified, brings the reader up to speed on what we know, what we don’t and where genetic technologies are taking us. From laying the basic groundwork and a brief history of DNA and genetics, to newsworthy topics like DNA fingerprinting, using DNA in forensic analyses and identifying cold-case criminals, DNA Demystified offers an informal yet authoritative guide to the genetic marvel of DNA. Martine Jacquot, BJ’84, author of over 30 books, has a new trilogy of historical fiction novels that is being published in Europe and Africa: Les Terres Douces is set in the ’40s to the ’50s; Les Glycines is set in the ’50s to the ’60s; and Les Colombes is set in the ’70s. The publisher, Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III, salutes the essential role of women throughout history as painted in Jacquot’s writing.

Alan Doerksen, BJ’88, has published the novel The Lost Princess of Loulan—a historical fiction story about a young woman

in the ancient western Chinese kingdom of Loulan who is tragically lost at a young age and grows up not knowing her true identity as the heir to the throne.

Jane Doucet, BJ(Hons)’93, is pleased to announce that Vagrant Press, the fiction imprint of Nimbus Publishing, will publish her second novel, Fishnets & Fantasies—a funny, heartwarming story about a married couple in their late 50s who open a sex shop in Lunenburg, N.S.—in July of 2021.

Fishnets & Fantasies is currently available for online preorders at Indigo/Chapters and Amazon. Jane’s first novel, The Pregnant Pause, was shortlisted for a 2018 Whistler Independent Book Award. She is working on her third novel, which will combine characters and locations from her first two books.

Lindsay Cameron Wilson, BA’95, BJ’99, and Justine Barnhart have created a new cookbook, FOOD + REFLECTION. The book is an intimate collection of 20 recipes photographed through Lindsay’s kitchen window during isolation. They will be donating a portion of the sales to The North Grove, a Dartmouth, N.S., non-profit organization and community hub that offers services and space for people to learn and connect through family support, food and friendship.

Robert Muggah, BA(Hons)’97, and Ian Goldin have published Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the Next 100 Years. The book, published by Penguin Random House, is being released in 10 languages and in countries across the world. Terra Incognita highlights the power of maps to improve awareness and inspire action to solve global challenges. It shows how maps are not just informative but can inspire optimism.

In constant need of renewal, maps reveal progress while signalling how a combination of political leadership, smart incentives and regulatory pressure can improve the human condition. At a time when we feel inundated with data, maps help cut through the noise and offer deeper insight into our transforming world.

Chad Lucas, BJ(Hons)’01, has written Thanks A Lot, Universe. Brian has always been anxious, but things get worse when he and his brother are placed in foster care.

Ezra notices Brian pulling away and wants to help, but he worries his friends might figure out he has a crush on Brian. But when Brian and his brother run away, Ezra takes the leap and reaches out. Both boys must decide if they're willing to risk sharing parts of themselves they'd rather hide. If they can be brave, they might find the best in themselves—and each other. Thanks A Lot, Universe will be available from May 2021 from Amulet Books.

Natelle Fitzgerald, BJ’02, released her first novel Viaticum, through Now or Never Publishing. Viaticum is a psychological thriller about Annika, whose decision to sell her life insurance policy for cash unexpectedly binds her to Matt, a desperate investor in need of a big payout. It is a drama about two people fighting to maintain their dignity in a world that objectifies them.

In 2015, Eva Holland, BA(Hons)’05, was forced to confront her greatest fear when her mother had a stroke and suddenly passed away. After the shock and grief subsided, Holland began to examine the extent to which her many fears had limited her and wondered whether or not it was possible to move past them. Fear is a universal human experience and Nerve, published by Penguin Random House, answers these questions in a refreshingly accessible way, offering readers an often personal, sometimes funny and always rigorously researched journey through the science of facing our fears.

Nerve was one of four Canadian titles named to Time’s, “100 Must-Read Books of 2020” list, and was listed on the Smithsonian Magazine’s “Ten Best Science Books of 2020.”

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Emily Sharpe, BA(Hons)’05, has published a book entitled, Mosaic Fictions: Writing Identity in the Spanish Civil War. It is the first book-length critical analysis of Canadian Spanish Civil War literature.

The book focuses on the extensive contributions of Jewish Canadian authors as they articulate the stakes of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) in the language of nascent North American multiculturalism. The book demonstrates how marginalized North American supporters of the Spanish Republic crafted narratives of inclusive citizenship amidst a national crisis not entirely their own.

Natural Killer is a harrowing personal account of Harriet Alida Lye’s, BA(Hons)’09, battle with cancer at age 15. Her rare form of leukemia, the eponymous ‘Natural Killer,’ has a grim prognosis. Yet she survived and at age 30 became pregnant—something she was told her extensive chemotherapy would make near impossible. Drawing from personal and family accounts from her time at the hospital as well as contemporary reflections, this is an intimate portrait of illness and learning to trust in your body again.

David Huebert, BA(Hons)’08, has published a new book of poetry, Humanimus.

Humanimus presents a world of soiled nature, of compromised ecology, of toxic transcendence. Raising environmental precarity to the level of mythos, this book implicates readers in what Dominic Pettman calls the “humanimalchine,” where modern cyborg bodies are rewired and remixed with mechanical membranes and animal prostheses. Revelling in corporeal excess and industrial abjection, Humanimus fans the ash of the human experiment to see what strange beauty might wilt and whimper there.

Wolfville, N.S.-based writer Deborah Hemming, BA(Hons)’11, has written her first novel. Throw Down Your Shadows is a dark coming-of-age tale that follows a 16-year-old girl whose life and friendships are upended by the arrival of a magnetic new companion.

Jen Powley, BJ’01, MFA’15, has made her first foray into fiction with Sounds Like a Halifax Adventure, which became available on June 15. It’s a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book for adults about two sounds—Pia, the sound of a door chime, and Edgar, the

sound of a refrigerator hum—who go on an adventure to some of Halifax’s landmarks, with multiple possible endings. The book features 16 original illustrations by Bee Stanton.

Powley’s first book Just Jen received the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award at the Atlantic Book Awards.

Janice McDonald’s, MFA’16, book, Fearless: Girls with Dreams, Women with Vision, was published in March and appeared on the Toronto Star’s national bestseller list just a week later.

In this collection of inspiring true stories, McDonald—entrepreneur, speaker, and host of the Fearless Women podcast—brings together more than 100 extraordinary, unafraid women and asks them to look back at the moments in their youth that set them on the path to leadership. From high-profile entrepreneurs to philanthropists, athletes, artists, and states-people, the lives featured in this book represent the many journeys women can take to find their passion, create change and make a monumental impact on the world around them.

No More Nice Girls: Gender, Power, and Why It’s Time to Stop Playing by the Rules, the new book, published by House of Anansi Press, from Lauren McKeon, MFA’16, asks an important question: why do we expect women and other marginalized genders to try to win an unfair game rather than change the rules? A follow-up to her incisive 2017 book, The F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, McKeon examines the institutional discrimination that curbs women’s personal, political and economic power, and posits that lone success stories of women who break through shouldn’t be a measure of success.

Christian Smith’s, MFA’17, MFA-project book, The Scientist and the Psychic: A Son’s Exploration of his Mother’s Gift, is a captivating, one-of-a-kind memoir about a scientist’s life with his famous psychic mother and his revealing exploration of the paranormal realm.

Today, Smith is a molecular biologist at a hospital in Toronto, and his mother, Geraldine, is retired and in poor health.

They are closer than they’ve ever been, and now he shares the story of her undeniable perceptual abilities and pioneering work as a psychic—and endeavours to make scientific sense of it.

Karen Stiller, MFA’18, had her book project published by Tyndale House Publishers (Chicago) in May 2020 as The Minister’s Wife: a memoir of faith, doubt, friendship, forgiveness and more. The spiritual memoir-in-essays explores themes of faith and belonging.

Jenni (Evyenia) Sisovitis, MFA’19, has published a collection of poetry and prose, What I Remember About Dying. Through the collection, she navigates love in all forms. The loss, the longing and the suffering. She also explores mental health and the ways in which it can dictate another person’s life. With multiple voices diversified in age, this collection introduces the reader to a speaker who is learning what love is all over again.

Iguana Books published Marilyn Carr’s, MFA’20, book, Nowhere Like This Place: Tales From a Nuclear Childhood, in the fall of 2020. Nowhere Like This Place tells the story of growing up in the quirky, isolated, company town of Deep River, Ont., in the 1960s and ’70s.

Jennifer Bain, MFA’20, is pleased to announce that her first travel book, 111 Places in Calgary That You Must Not Miss, has been published by Emons Verlag in Germany. It’s part of a global series of insider guides. These are not your typical travel guides. The chapters revolve around quirky things like abandoned places, cemeteries, haunted places, historical crimes, public art, artifacts and interesting washrooms. Each chapter gets a two-page spread with a fullpage colour photo and a 300-word, Atlas Obscura-style story.

Jon Tattrie, MFA’20, has published Peace

by Chocolate. The book tells the extraordinary story of the Hadhad family—Isam, his wife Shahnaz, and their sons and daughters—and the founding of the chocolatier, Peace by Chocolate. From the devastation of the Syrian Civil War, through their life as refugees in Lebanon, to their arrival in a small town in Atlantic Canada, Peace by Chocolate is the story of one family. It is also the story of the people of Antigonish, N.S., and so many towns across Canada, who welcomed strangers and helped them face the challenges of settling in an unfamiliar land.

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ALUMNOTES Read more details on these alumni achievements in the Alumni & Friends section of King’s website: www.ukings.ca/alumni

70s Ray Oake, ’74. Upon retiring from teaching physical education in Sydney, N.S., Ray continues his exercising. Between running in marathons around North America and kayaking at Big Pond, he skates weekly. In Ray’s submission he notes that the question is, “Did Ray pay Marie for the skates?”

For Arthur George Theuerkauf, BA’73, LLB, Q.C., law has been central to his career, first as an RCMP officer and then later becoming a crown prosecutor in Dartmouth.

Art is an excellent and long-time golfer; he knows the rules, just make sure you don’t cross the line when playing with him!

80s On October 31, 2020, Christine Davies, BJ(Hons)’83, retired from CBC Newfoundland after almost 34.5 years with the corporation. During her career, she worked at every CBC station in the province as a reporter for radio and TV, studio director, producer, music librarian, and radio archivist. She continues to reside in St. John’s.

Sue Farrell Holler, BJ(Hons)’84, recently won an Alberta Literary Award—the R. Ross Annett Award—and the US-based High Plains Book Award, for her novel Cold White Sun, based on the true story of a child

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refugee who was smuggled into Canada. The book was also a finalist for a 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award. The result of months of intense interviews and detailed research, Holler considers writing this story one of the top experiences of her life.

After a 32-year career with the Nova Scotia Public Service in a variety of departments and roles, Shirley (Wall) Hazen, BA(Hons)’85, retired as a Director at the Department of Business on October 31, 2019. Shirley is enjoying creative endeavours and an active volunteer life. After

90s Militia Man is a documentary directed by Lisa Clifford, BJ(Hons)’92, a journalist formerly of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, who has covered the International Criminal Court for more than a decade. Despite spending millions of euros, the International Criminal Court has shed little light on the war crimes of Congolese militia man Germain Katanga, or properly compensated his victims. Militia Man is the story of a flawed war crimes trial and the families shattered by the politics of international justice.

two years of a peaceful retirement, Mark Hazen, BSc(Hons)’85, is coping with the disruption. In mid-2019, Mark launched his woodturning business Rotational Matters.

He invites you to check out some of his creations on his Rotational Matters social media.

In December 2019, Luanne Walton, BA’86, was promoted to the position of Senior General Counsel in the Constitutional, Administrative and International Law Section at the Department of Justice Canada. She specializes in the Canadian division of powers.

ALUMNOTES John Burchall, BJ’93, began a Doctor of Ministry program in Public Theology in the fall of 2020 at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, St. Paul, Minn. In 2009, John graduated from the Howard University School of Divinity, Washington, DC, and he is also a 2010 graduate of Georgetown University Hospital Chaplaincy Residency. In July 2013, John was ordained in the American Baptist tradition.

John has worked for the Montgomery Hospice of Rockville, Md., and Ecumen Hospice of the Twin Cities respectively.

Currently, he is a Certified Peer Support Specialist under the Minnesota Department of Health and working in Suicide Prevention and Mental Health.

He is also President of the Toastmasters Club 75, Minneapolis, Minn., and a Community Board Member of Blaisdell YMCA. John and Janessa Hope Kohls of Baldwin, Wis., were married on February 20, 2020 at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minn., where he is an associate minister.

Ida Gallant-McLean, daughter of Alex McLean, BA(Hons)’96, and Claire Gallant, was born in November 2019 and has been enjoying the attention of two housebound parents and a doting older brother and sister. Alex is co-artistic director of Halifax’s Zuppa Theatre, currently working from home after a number of cancelled festival appearances elsewhere in Canada.

Claire runs Halifax’s Bite-Sized Kitchen, a company devoted to teaching children hands-on skills in the kitchen, also dormant during the COVID-19 pandemic. The upside has been lots of family time in the garden, as well as occasional latenight conversations about the philosophy of mind. Ida thoroughly approves of it all.

QUEENSBOUND, an audio project founded

by KC Trommer, ’93, in 2018, has launched a dynamic new website. QUEENSBOUND seeks to connect writers across the New York City borough and showcase and develop a literature of Queens. On queensbound. com, you can navigate the Queens subway and hear all 33 poems from 2018 and 2020, including from past Queens Poets Laureate Paolo Javier and Maria Lisella (you can find Trommer’s poem on 46th Street).

Lhadon Tethong, BA’98, is co-founder and director of the Tibet Action Institute and was awarded the National Endowment for Democracy’s 2019 Democracy Awards.

Lhadon leads a team of technologists and human rights advocates in developing and advancing open-source communication technologies, nonviolent strategies, and innovative training programs for Tibetans and other groups facing heavy repression.

She currently serves as co-chair of the International Tibet Network, the global coalition of Tibet-related non-governmental organizations.

Kathryn Burton, BA’98, was named chief of staff to Boston, Mass., Mayor Martin J. Walsh. She officially stepped into the role on March 9, 2020. Prior to working as chief of staff to Mayor Walsh, Burton was director of operations for New Boston Ventures and previously worked as chief of staff for thenstate treasurer Steven Grossman.

In January 2021, Amelia Hadfield, BA(Hons)’96, took up the position of Dean International at the University of Surrey, in addition to retaining her posts as Head of Politics and director of the Centre for Britain and Europe.

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ALUMNOTES Marco Chown Oved, BA(Hons)’05, received the Environmental and Climate Change Award from the Canadian Association of Journalists for his feature Life and Death Under the Dome, which looked at the deadly 2018 heat wave in Montréal and what can be done to prepare for more frequent and hotter urban heat waves in the future.

Terra Spencer, ’99, has been working as a solo performer and songwriter since 2018. She released her first album in 2019, touring the Maritimes, Ontario, the U.K. and Europe. Her second record, Chasing Rabbits, was recorded in Halifax and released in November 2020. It is a bundle of winter songs, reaching back to Terra’s experience leaving home for university until the present day, about her life as a musician and mother alongside fellow King’s alumnus, Andrew Kasprzak, ’97. Their daughter, Sarah, who plays the French horn on Terra’s album, is currently in the Foundation Year Program (FYP)!

Sam Worthington, BJ(Hons)’05, and Yolana Wassersug, BA(Hons)’08, were married on December 28, 2019, at the Prince George Hotel in Halifax. Sam teaches at Dalhousie and Yolana works in the Registrar’s Office at King’s. Their wedding party included dear King’s alumni friends, Jesse Hiltz, BA(Hons)’08, and Michelle Arbus, BA(Hons)’09.

2000s Megan Wennberg, BJ’04, has directed a documentary titled The Killing of Phillip Boudreau. The film tells the complicated story of a death that tore apart the Nova Scotian community of Isle Madame, a postcard-perfect collection of Acadian fishing villages off the coast of Cape Breton Island.

Sam Mednick, BJ(Hons)’05, a King’s journalism grad who was kicked out of South Sudan by its government in October 2019, and praised in a subsequent New York Times editorial, has had her first TEDx Talk posted online. In her TEDx Talk, Mednick talks about what it’s like to report from such a place, and the value of paying attention to this kind of “forgotten” conflict. Mednick is a freelance journalist and the Burkina Faso correspondent for the Associated Press. She’s worked and lived all over the world including Africa, Asia, South America, Europe and the Middle East covering conflict, post-conflict and development stories.

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Vanessa Green, BJ(Hons)’07, launched her own content marketing consultancy, Greenlight Content, in September 2020.

Written and directed by Ariel Nasr, BA(Hons)’05, The Forbidden Reel was shown at the Atlantic International Film Festival. The film is a chronicle of the efforts Afghan filmmakers took to preserve their national cinema against civil unrest.

Emma Yardley, BJ’07, won silver in the Destination Travel (Newspaper) category at the 28th Annual North American Travel Journalists Association Awards for excellence in travel journalism for her article, “How to See Iceland by Boat,” published by the Globe and Mail, and a bronze in the Cruises (Print Publication) category for “Beyond the Fjords,” published by VIE Magazine.

ALUMNOTES Lee Nelson, BA’08, has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Bodies from Below: Decomposition, Death Certificates, and the Politics of ‘Natural’ Death,” before his committee in the Science & Technology Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His dissertation focuses on human decomposition research within the forensic sciences, specifically forensic entomology, and how the category ‘Natural Death’ within death certificates affects forensic research and naturalizes environmental injustices.

Jessica J. Lee, BA(Hons)’08, was awarded the 2020 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction for her memoir Two Trees Make a Forest.

Laurel Collins, BA’09, was elected the Member of Parliament representing Victoria, B.C., in October 2019. Prior to her election in the House of Commons, Collins was an instructor at the University of Victoria and a city councillor.

Laura MacKenzie, BJ(Hons)’10, and Vincenzo Ravina, BJ(Hons)’10, were married on August 3, 2019, in Cape Breton, N.S. They met at King’s in 2008 thanks to journalism faculty Fred Vallance-Jones putting them together as editing partners in Reporting Techniques. Laura now works as an English language instructor at ISANS. Vincenzo appeared on season 7 of Penn & Teller: Fool Us, presenting an original magic routine called Mind-Reading Glasses. The episode aired on August 3, 2020. Good things happen on August 3rd!

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ALUMNOTES Christina Macdonald, BA(Hons)’09, became a partner of Kimball Law in January 2020. Christina joined the firm as an articled clerk in 2017 and became an associate lawyer after being called to the Nova Scotia bar in 2018. She and Ian Sinclair, ’06, who first met in FYP 2004-05, now live in Wolfville, N.S.

John Packman, BJ(Hons)’09, built a corporate portrait and video business.

He has pivoted into broadcasting livestreamed talks, interviews and festivals since COVID-19 began. He recently completed video work for the Toronto International Festival of Authors and Material Sampling: A Making + Thinking Symposium.

Moira Dann, MFA’16, has a book deal with Touchwood Editions for a book entitled, Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Objects. It’s a “wonderful, nerdy history connected to items found in what used to be the home of B.C.’s biggest family of interesting settler stinkers, the Dunsmuirs.” The book is scheduled for publication in spring 2021.

Taylor Saracuse, BA(Hons)’16, is in a Yellowknife-based band called PIT!. They are an R&B/soul group and their first EP Modern Mating Calls was released on May 7, 2020, funded by the N.W.T. Arts Council.

You can listen to PIT!’s EP on Bandcamp.

Lorax B. Horne, BJ(Hons)’16, was named a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. Lorax is a journalist whose work has appeared in the Guardian, Newsweek, CBC, Maisonneuve, the Globe and Mail, and Elle Canada. They were recently named Editor in Chief for Distributed Denial of Secrets, a publishing collective aimed at enabling the free transmission of data in the public interest. Horne is currently developing Hacks and Hackers, a memoir-driven book about the intersection of technology and people.

Lachlan MacLeod, BA’10, and Cassie Guinan, BA’13, are delighted to announce the birth of their daughter, Ivy Louise Guinan MacLeod, on September 24, 2019, in Halifax, N.S.

2010s Evany Rosen, BA(Hons)’10, is the co-creator of the hilarious TV series New Eden, a true-crime mockumentary about an all-female cult in 1970s B.C., which quickly implodes due to the incompetence of its narcissistic and lunatic leaders. Not only did Rosen co-write the series, but she also stars as one of the lunatic leaders.

Justis Danto-Clancy, BA(Hons)’11, and his partner Justin Blanco, won the Sopinka Cup, the National Trial Advocacy Competition,

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in March 2020. To place first, Danto-Clancy and Blanco had to first win the Arnup Cup, the Annual Trial Advocacy Competition for Ontario law schools, and then beat seven other top-tier teams at the National Trial Advocacy Competition, all of whom won their respective regions.

Danto-Clancy is now in his third year of a law degree at the Bora Laskin Faculty of Law at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., where he was the 2019-20 president of the Law Students’ Society.

Abagail Bumpus, BA(Hons)’18, graduated with distinction from the University of Leeds with an MA in Curating Science. The program was housed in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.

Abagail’s dissertation was titled “Our Emotional Connection to Living Collections: Understanding How We Collect Plants at the

ALUMNOTES Intersection of Our Biological and Digital Environments.” It explored plant collection practices within Facebook groups, discussing both traditional botanical practices and memes! She hopes to explore the topic further, perhaps in a doctoral program.

2020s Jennifer Bain, MFA’20, won gold in the 2020 Travel Media Association of Canada Awards in the Sports, Recreation and Adventure (Online Publication) category for “How to catch a baseball game in Cuba? Be relentless,” published by the Daily Beast and bronze in the Destination Travel category for her article “The Trouble with Teen Angst,” published by the Globe and Mail.

Margaret Lynch, MFA’20, is the winner of the 2020 Penguin Random House Best Nonfiction Book Proposal Prize. She won for her proposal for Transformed: When My DNA Changed, So Did I, her memoir of her journey to “become a better person” after a rare leukemia invaded her body when she was just 30.

The Lonest of Wolves, an award-winning documentary short directed by Ellery Platts, BJ(Hons)’20, and Travis Devonport, BJ(Hons)’20, premiered at the Atlantic International Film Festival as part of the NextGen Shorts Program.

Feleshia Chandler, BJ(Hons)’20, and Lucy Harnish, BJ(Hons)’20, directed a documentary short, The Mad Scientist of Hubbards, at the Atlantic International Film Festival, about local designer Allan Carver, whose large-scale constructions blend art and technology.

Danica Sommerfeldt, MFA’20, has launched an online bookstore and monthly book subscription service, Coastal Bookstore. Based in Port Moody, B.C., she hopes to open a brick-and-mortar store there in the very near future. For now, Coastal Bookstore offers a small collection of books, all of which have been personally researched and selected by Danica to ensure they offer good quality reads and represent diverse voices.

Whilst launching a business in the midst of a global pandemic has been challenging, Danica has adapted and persisted in this adventure, and looks forward to opening the physical bookstore very soon.

IN MEMORIAM Marion (Ware) Boyer, (BA’63), May 16, 2020

Christos Kritikos, (DCL’02), January 31, 2021

Barbara (Jefferson) Brougham, (BA’51), June 19, 2019

Harvey Lewis, (1941), October 13, 2020

Andrew Burns, (1956), June 10, 2019

Peter MacDonald, (1954), October 6, 2020

Bernice Camachao, (Friend of the College), March 31, 2020

Brian MacGillivray, (1990), August 26, 2020

Silver Donald Cameron, (DCL’04), June 1, 2020

Gerald Nelson, (1946), February 17, 2021

Catherine Campbell, (BA(Hons)’87), September 1, 2019

Valerie O’Brien, (Friend of the College), November 7, 2020

Jennifer Casey, (BJ’11), May 17, 2020 Donald Clancy, (1952), September 11, 2019 Borden Conrad, (BA’69), January 29, 2021 Rosalie Courage, (BA’76), (Board of Governors 2018-21), February 28, 2021 Armand Couture, (1968), November 4, 2020 Edward Doering, (BA’58), May 20, 2019 C. Russell Elliott, (BA’37, BDiv’52, DD’79), October 2, 2020 Brian Fisher, (BA’81, BSc(Hons)’85), January 1, 2021 Ilze Folkins, (Friend of the College), February 18, 2021 Lloyd Gesner, (BA’51), July 17, 2020 Jack Hatcher, (BA’69), November 25, 2020 Frances (Glass) Horner, (BA’41), March 24, 2019 James How, (DipJ’58), November 19, 2019 Nancy King, (BJ(Hons)’95), October 2, 2020

David Petrasek, (Friend of the College), May 12, 2020 Joseph Phillips, (Friend of the College), May 4, 2020 Charles Poulain, (Friend of the College), February 9, 2020 Margaret (Latimer) Power, (BA’73), April 8, 2020 Peter Power, (BSc’53), February 3, 2021 Margaret Saunders, (1953), September 6, 2019 Lynn Sherren, (BJ(Hons)’80), March 11, 2020 Margaret Smith, (1990), January 4, 2020 Harold Stevens, (1958), November 30, 2020 Patricia (Jones) Timbrell, (1946), May 29, 2019 Douglas Troop, (1946), November 6, 2020 John Wainwright, (1962), October 3, 2019 Jana Wieder, (Friend of the College), October 9, 2020 David K. Wilson, (1948, DCL’13), June 29, 2020 Cherie (Tolson) Winters, (1964), March 22, 2020

TIDINGS | WINTER 2021 55

LIVES LIVED

CANON ELLIOTT

by Rev. Dr. Ranall Ingalls, King’s College Chaplain

‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways, or sought to change it. The point, however, is to love it.’ —Fr. Gary Thorne (with apologies to Karl Marx), final FYP lecture 2018

A DISTINGUISHED KING’S graduate finished his course this past autumn on October 2, ‘full of years.’ The Rev’d Canon Clark Russell Elliott (BA ’37, Div ’52, DD ’79), was 103. Over his long life he distinguished himself in many ways: as a faithful parish priest; as a social activist and community builder; as a friend, example and mentor.

Readers who knew him will be able to add to this list. But it is perhaps as one who embodied the education that King’s seeks to give that he distinguished himself above all. In him knowing and loving met, and were not separated.

At a time when most of Nova Scotia was populated by subsistence farmers, fishers, and foresters, he was born in the rural farming village of New Ross (July 10, 1917), into a large family, the sixth of nine children.

Before he was 10 he went to live with his grandparents, answering a plea from his grandfather for help on the farm. Thus he grew up intimately acquainted with poverty, physical labour, and people who depended upon one another and cared for one another.

Attending Christ Church in New Ross he also grew up familiar with prayer, worship,

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TIDINGS | WINTER 2021

the poetry of The Book of Common Prayer, the beauty of the carpenter gothic buildings typical of Maritime Anglicanism, and the rhythm of fasts, feasts and seasons of prayer closely related to agricultural rhythms. The hymns chosen for his funeral speak eloquently of this world, where grew the roots of the great love for people that characterized his whole life. Shaped by love, he loved in turn.

His best-known book, The Briefcase Boys, recounts how as a deacon (1940) and then as a priest (1941) a passionate commitment to social activism and community development as a founding member of the Anglican Fellowship for Social Action (AFSA) sometimes led to misunderstanding. This was long before such activism became respectable in the 1960s. Friendship sustained him: the friendship of the Rev’d Dr. Samuel Prince, professor at King’s and a well-known sociologist; the friendship of a group of young clergy—the ‘briefcase boys’ of the title of his book; the friendship of members of AFSA in Nova Scotia and abroad. The same passionate commitment informed his pastoral care for the people of five Nova Scotia parishes:

Pugwash, Bridgetown, Lantz, Fairview, and Liverpool. He served St. John’s Church in Fairview twice.

Canon Elliott was well acquainted with grief, for all the cheerful enthusiasm for which he was known and loved. With his first wife, Dorothy, he outlived their oldest son, Michael, who died not long after graduating from King’s. (A scholarship for a returning student in memory of Michael continues at King’s to this day.) Fr. Elliott also outlived Dorothy, and later their younger daughter Martha, as well as his second wife, Carol, whom he married several years after Dorothy’s death. With his marriage to Carol, he gained three step-children who became very close to him both before and after her death.

A cleric who worked with Canon Elliott for two summers recently wrote of him, I remember many things, but above all his unremitting kindness. It was that, I think, rather than social theory, that underlay his commitment to justice… He bore much sadness in his life but I think it only made him kinder.

Love for people and care for communi-

ties continued as Canon Elliott ‘retired’ to Wolfville. He did not believe in retirement.

Instead, he devoted himself to the town and its people, making a connection with the local L’Arche community, volunteering with the local Interfaith Council, concerning himself with issues of housing, undertaking pastoral visiting, and joining a small group of Baptists, Anglicans and Roman Catholics to explore Ignatian spirituality.

As age curtailed his activity, Canon Elliott continued to be nourished by contemplative roots planted in childhood and nourished at King’s. In a meditation written for friends and family the Christmas following his 100th birthday he wrote, “Only God Himself knows fully the saving power of waiting in love.” Those who have lived the vita activa as he did often find waiting and the end of life particularly difficult. He shows a remarkable poise.

Both nature and human nature seem to possess an inner rhythm of working and waiting, starting and stopping, speeding and stillness. Each year has its winter, each week its Sabbath, each day its night.

Trees bloom and shed foliage to wait for

Spring. A seed waits in dark soil until the sun draws it up out of the soil. Every human needs to wait full nine months before separating from mother to fend for itself.

Near the beginning of the same reflection he quotes the elderly Pope John XXIII, “My bags are packed, I am ready to go.” In what follows he makes abundantly clear that these words do not arise from self-pity or a lack of appreciation for the gift of life or the goodness of temporal things. He was waiting for union with the same divine Love from which his pastoral care and social activism came. This gave meaning to his waiting, and sustained him in hope till he passed out of our sight. “God waits.… Some day He will be All-in-All again—and I will be home, where I belong.”

“I remember many things, but above all his unremitting kindness. It was that, I think, rather than social theory, that underlay his commitment to justice.”

LEFT: Canon Russell Elliott, photo by Josh Hoffman RIGHT: The Elliott brothers. From left:

Chester, Howard, Russell, Lewis, Albert and Robert Elliott. Taken outside the family home in New Ross, N.S., near the end of World War II.

TIDINGS | WINTER 2021 57

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