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The Art of Fact:
An Introduction to Writing Non-Fiction
ONLINE COURSE!!! For those who have registered, the syllabus has gone up.
Instructor: Ken McGoogan / University of Toronto / School of Continuing Studies
Ten weeks starting Jan. 21, 2013
The hallmarks of Creative, Literary or Narrative Nonfiction are truth and personal presence. The genre includes subjective and objective streams, and encompasses memoir, autobiography, biography, history, adventure, travel, and true crime. The writer of nonfiction employs memory, imagination, analysis, and research, and adapts literary techniques from fiction, journalism, and the essay. This craft-oriented course aims to enhance your ability to tell true stories.Textbook: The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism, edited by Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda. (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-684-84630-6)
What a time we had in New York City!
I gave my keynote on Return to Rae Strait and surprised even Matthew Swan with some of my revelations.
I don't think he realized that, with Louie Kamookak, I visited Rae Strait in the High Arctic for the first time back in 1999. We erected a plaque to mark the spot where John Rae discovered the final link in the Northwest Passage.
Matthew, who runs Adventure Canada, goaded me into launching my talk by singing a couple of verses of Northwest Passage, the classic tune by Stan Rogers. He compounded his sin by hauling half a dozen rowdy types up front to join me for the chorus. This extravaganza was a first for the Explorers Club, one of the premier venues in New York, and I have paid good money to suppress the video tapes of that performance.
The Arctic Art of Sheena Fraser McGoogan proved a sensation. She brought three paintings, sold one, and left one to be auctioned at a looming Explorers Club event. We walked many streets, saw lots of art, spent a few bucks, and even hosted a soiree at our condo in the Upper East Side. We are plotting a return.
I gave my keynote on Return to Rae Strait and surprised even Matthew Swan with some of my revelations.
I don't think he realized that, with Louie Kamookak, I visited Rae Strait in the High Arctic for the first time back in 1999. We erected a plaque to mark the spot where John Rae discovered the final link in the Northwest Passage.
The Arctic Art of Sheena Fraser McGoogan proved a sensation. She brought three paintings, sold one, and left one to be auctioned at a looming Explorers Club event. We walked many streets, saw lots of art, spent a few bucks, and even hosted a soiree at our condo in the Upper East Side. We are plotting a return.
Lots of nice people live in New Jersey. We got to know quite a few of them while we stood in line for two hours outside the UPS office. There was the woman who, after she learned that we were Canadians, and also that we had a cab waiting, insisted that we should move to the front of the line. (Her position was not unanimously held.) And the other woman who, when she learned that UPS would not take cash or a credit card for the surprise “customs” duty, stepped up, appalled, to write a cheque for us (and was willing to accept our American $$$ cash in exchange). Also, I liked the folks who laughed at my jokes while we waited.
On the other hand, UPS maybe slipped a bit in my estimation. We got two packages to their office in Toronto by noon last Friday. Paid $240 up front for the sending, and understood that would cover the cost of delivery. The packages did not leave until the following Monday, but I am sure there is a good explanation for that. And they did arrive in New Jersey, and were brought to the correct address by late Friday (i.e. today).
Alas, UPS did not leave the packages there, because the youth who was home alone did not have the cash on hand to pay that surprise “whatever” duty. So they took the packages back to the UPS depot, which is closed all weekend, but where we could pick them up 830 to 930. Alas, sixty or seventy people got the same message. And there were two good-spirited but desperately over-worked people holding down the desk. So we got to know the New Jersey folks in line with us. Quite well. The New York cabbie was cool, too, especially when we promised a handsome tip.
My take-away? Yay, New Jersey! UPS, not so much.
On the other hand, UPS maybe slipped a bit in my estimation. We got two packages to their office in Toronto by noon last Friday. Paid $240 up front for the sending, and understood that would cover the cost of delivery. The packages did not leave until the following Monday, but I am sure there is a good explanation for that. And they did arrive in New Jersey, and were brought to the correct address by late Friday (i.e. today).
Alas, UPS did not leave the packages there, because the youth who was home alone did not have the cash on hand to pay that surprise “whatever” duty. So they took the packages back to the UPS depot, which is closed all weekend, but where we could pick them up 830 to 930. Alas, sixty or seventy people got the same message. And there were two good-spirited but desperately over-worked people holding down the desk. So we got to know the New Jersey folks in line with us. Quite well. The New York cabbie was cool, too, especially when we promised a handsome tip.
My take-away? Yay, New Jersey! UPS, not so much.
From Canada's History magazine
By Ken McGoogan
The “Anglos” made headlines again this
autumn.
The Quebec election made it inevitable: how
would the “Anglos” vote? Could the “Anglos” make a difference? As it turns out, the answer was a qualified yes: the separatist Parti Quebecois was held to a minority victory.
Meanwhile, I found myself
wondering how contemporary English-speaking Quebecers feel about being called
“Anglos.” Most of them have Irish or Scottish roots, and historically, the
Irish and the Scots have often been at loggerheads with the English.
Full disclosure:
I grew up north of Montreal in a French-speaking resort town. Every summer,
when the population exploded, I became one of “les Anglais” — an “Anglo.” This
troubled me. I was one-quarter French Canadian, for starters, and in winter,
when I wasn’t at school, I hung out with French-speakers. Also, I had no
English roots. How could I be an “Anglais?” It felt wrong.
But I knew
little history. I could not disentangle linguistic and ethnic confusions. Only
now do I begin to understand my discomfort, and to reflect that it might be
widespread. Consider Quebec’s demographics. In 2011, only 3.3 per cent of the
populace claimed English heritage, while 8.2 per cent — more than twice as many
people — claimed Irish (5.5) or Scottish (2.7).
Nationally, the
emphasis shifts, but the story remains the same: English origins, 21 per cent;
Scottish, 15 per cent; Irish, 14 per cent. Maybe we should speak not of English
Canada, but of Celtic Canada?
To lump together
Canadians of English, Scottish, and Irish heritage, and say they are “British” in
origin, is to forget that history transports emotional baggage. Many Canadians of Scottish heritage, for
example, retain collective memories of the Highland Clearances of the late 18th
and early 19th centuries. . . . As the Clearances were to Scotland, so the Great Famine was to Ireland -- a watershed event that launched a diaspora. . . .
[To read the rest, pick up Canada's History magazine, Dec. 2012-Jan. 2013.]
That is when the climactic event happens, Dec. 1: yours truly giving a talk called Return to Rae Strait.
It draws on my book Fatal Passage. I'll talk about explorer John Rae and visiting Rae Strait, where he built a cairn marking his discovery of the final link in the Northwest Passage. After my talk comes a screening of the docudrama Passage, which is based on my book.
OK, OK, lots else will be happening, too.
All the details can be found here:
http://www.explorers.org/index.php/events/detail/nyc_the_explorers_club_polar_film_festival
But notably:
Additional films and video clips will be shown throughout the building on Saturday and
Sunday. Original paintings by Sheena Fraser McGoogan and Inuit artwork from Look North
Gallery will be on display, and DVDs and books will be available for sale.
Other highlights include:
Friday, November 30, 2012:
5:30p – 6:30p Reception
6:30p Inuit Welcome – Opening Ceremony by Aaju Peter
6:45p John Houston introduction and screening of “Diet of Souls“
Saturday, December 1, 2012 – Celebrating Antarctica Day:
9:00a-10:00a Registration and Continental breakfast
10:05a Stefan Kindberg – Introduction to Antarctica
Events happen all day . . .
5:30p – 6:30p Dinner break / Reception in library
6:30p Ken McGoogan – "Return to Rae Strait" and screening of John Walker’s
docudrama based on Fatal Passage . . . followed by Q&A
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012 – Arctic Films
10:30a Stefan Kindberg – Introduction to the Arctic
1:30p Feature film/documentary “Chasing Ice”
2:00p Aaju Peter – Introduction and screening of film/documentary “Tunniit: Retracing the Lines
of Inuit Tattoos,” followed by Q&A
3:45p Alan Nichols, Explorers Club President – Thank you address
In the Globe and Mail of Nov. 17, our hero reviews the new biography of Roald Amundsen, called The Last Viking. Author: Stephen Bown. Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre . . .
By Ken McGooogan
In 1905, when he was preparing to sail out of Gjoa Haven in Canada’s High Arctic, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen buried a few artifacts beneath a cairn. Those artifacts, among them a photo of a scientist who had taught him how to locate the moving North Magnetic Pole, are now held at a museum in Yellowknife. And visitors to the Inuit settlement of Gjoa Haven, so named by Amundsen in honour of his ship, the Gjoa, can see the remains of the observatory sites from which Amundsen took magnetic readings.
The explorer spent two winters based in that harbour on King William Island while becoming the first explorer to navigate the Northwest Passage across the top of North America. He belongs crucially to the history of Canada’s Arctic exploration, and yet, as Stephen R. Bown remarks in The Last Viking, most books treat Amundsen almost exclusively in the 1911 context of the “race to the South Pole.”
That so-called race, which found Amundsen becoming the first to reach the Earth’s southernmost point, while British explorer Robert Falcon Scott died trying, makes for an admittedly gripping story. And Bown does it justice here. But he also demonstrates that, as a polar explorer, Amundsen achieved more in the north than he did in the south. He not only led the way through the Northwest Passage, but traversed the Northeast Passage along the Russian coast, and flew an airship over the North Pole.
Bown surmises that Amundsen is not better known in the English-speaking world because much written material was available until recently only in Norwegian. In The Last Viking, he fills in many empty spaces. Who knew, for example, that Amundsen enjoyed lingering love affairs with three married women? He was about to marry one of them, recently divorced, when in 1928, at the age of 55, he flew north to help rescue an Italian explorer, and was never seen again.
Amundsen emerges from these pages as an obsessive, lonely figure: idiosyncratic, principled, misunderstood. Bown admits that he could be arrogant and impatient, but usually turns up mitigating circumstances and makes a good case that the explorer deserved better treatment than he received.
The author shows that Amundsen succeeded in reaching the South Pole because of what he learned in the north. As a boy, he became enthralled with his fellow Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, who made the first crossing of the Greenland icecap and then traversed the Arctic by exploiting the drift of the pack ice. From his native Norway, Amundsen also took up skiing, honing his abilities as a youth by undertaking ambitious (and dangerous) cross-country expeditions.
From the Inuit, with whom he shared many adventures while based at Gjoa Haven, Amundsen learned above all how to travel across ice using dogs and dogsleds. This expertise he brought to his South Pole expedition. Comparisons may be odious, but really: Scott could barely ski, brought ponies to the Antarctic instead of dogs (!), and was driven to man-hauling sledges, known to be killing work.
Bown notes that, thanks to some trick of the British psyche, Scott became a romantic figurehead, the embodiment of heroic but doomed struggle, “the man who snatched victory from the jaws of death.” Half a century before, the same magic convinced the world that John Franklin and his men, tragically lost in an impassible region of the Northwest Passage, had somehow “forged the last link with their lives.” Amundsen proved otherwise.
Bown never does explain how the Norwegian learned what route to follow through the labyrinthian passage, though the explorer himself credited John Rae with pointing the way: “He discovered Rae Strait, which separates King William Land from the mainland. In all probability through this strait is the only navigable route for the voyage. … This is the only passage which is free from destructive pack ice.”
Throughout, Bown writes from the lofty, distancing heights of the fair-minded historian, eschewing creative non-fiction. As a result, The Last Viking does not transcend its genre. Yet the work is sharp-eyed, thorough and convincing, and constitutes a significant addition to the Arctic canon.
Ken McGoogan has written four books on Arctic exploration. Dec. 1, his talk at the Explorers’ Club in NYC will be Return to Rae Strait.
By Ken McGooogan
In 1905, when he was preparing to sail out of Gjoa Haven in Canada’s High Arctic, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen buried a few artifacts beneath a cairn. Those artifacts, among them a photo of a scientist who had taught him how to locate the moving North Magnetic Pole, are now held at a museum in Yellowknife. And visitors to the Inuit settlement of Gjoa Haven, so named by Amundsen in honour of his ship, the Gjoa, can see the remains of the observatory sites from which Amundsen took magnetic readings.
The explorer spent two winters based in that harbour on King William Island while becoming the first explorer to navigate the Northwest Passage across the top of North America. He belongs crucially to the history of Canada’s Arctic exploration, and yet, as Stephen R. Bown remarks in The Last Viking, most books treat Amundsen almost exclusively in the 1911 context of the “race to the South Pole.”
That so-called race, which found Amundsen becoming the first to reach the Earth’s southernmost point, while British explorer Robert Falcon Scott died trying, makes for an admittedly gripping story. And Bown does it justice here. But he also demonstrates that, as a polar explorer, Amundsen achieved more in the north than he did in the south. He not only led the way through the Northwest Passage, but traversed the Northeast Passage along the Russian coast, and flew an airship over the North Pole.
Bown surmises that Amundsen is not better known in the English-speaking world because much written material was available until recently only in Norwegian. In The Last Viking, he fills in many empty spaces. Who knew, for example, that Amundsen enjoyed lingering love affairs with three married women? He was about to marry one of them, recently divorced, when in 1928, at the age of 55, he flew north to help rescue an Italian explorer, and was never seen again.
Amundsen emerges from these pages as an obsessive, lonely figure: idiosyncratic, principled, misunderstood. Bown admits that he could be arrogant and impatient, but usually turns up mitigating circumstances and makes a good case that the explorer deserved better treatment than he received.
The author shows that Amundsen succeeded in reaching the South Pole because of what he learned in the north. As a boy, he became enthralled with his fellow Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, who made the first crossing of the Greenland icecap and then traversed the Arctic by exploiting the drift of the pack ice. From his native Norway, Amundsen also took up skiing, honing his abilities as a youth by undertaking ambitious (and dangerous) cross-country expeditions.
From the Inuit, with whom he shared many adventures while based at Gjoa Haven, Amundsen learned above all how to travel across ice using dogs and dogsleds. This expertise he brought to his South Pole expedition. Comparisons may be odious, but really: Scott could barely ski, brought ponies to the Antarctic instead of dogs (!), and was driven to man-hauling sledges, known to be killing work.
Bown notes that, thanks to some trick of the British psyche, Scott became a romantic figurehead, the embodiment of heroic but doomed struggle, “the man who snatched victory from the jaws of death.” Half a century before, the same magic convinced the world that John Franklin and his men, tragically lost in an impassible region of the Northwest Passage, had somehow “forged the last link with their lives.” Amundsen proved otherwise.
Bown never does explain how the Norwegian learned what route to follow through the labyrinthian passage, though the explorer himself credited John Rae with pointing the way: “He discovered Rae Strait, which separates King William Land from the mainland. In all probability through this strait is the only navigable route for the voyage. … This is the only passage which is free from destructive pack ice.”
Throughout, Bown writes from the lofty, distancing heights of the fair-minded historian, eschewing creative non-fiction. As a result, The Last Viking does not transcend its genre. Yet the work is sharp-eyed, thorough and convincing, and constitutes a significant addition to the Arctic canon.
Ken McGoogan has written four books on Arctic exploration. Dec. 1, his talk at the Explorers’ Club in NYC will be Return to Rae Strait.
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