Laura Cameron

The Weather and the Words: The Selected Letters of John Newlove, 1963-2003, gathers hundreds of never-before-seen letters from the poet John Newlove’s archives and sheds light on an author who was, to many Canadian writers, a literary master. Despite his stature during his lifetime, Newlove has been largely forgotten, and these letters remind readers of what an influential, compelling, and combative figure he was in Canadian literary history. Newlove lived and wrote during a time when Canadian writers were well-funded, widely read, and members of thriving literary communities. By the time he died in 2003, that culturally prosperous era had ended. Something else had changed, too: the practice of letter writing began to disappear as email replaced mailed correspondence. Telling the story of Newlove’s life, The Weather and the Words pays tribute not just to this one remarkable poet, but also to a remarkable era in Canadian history and the lost art of letter writing, the medium through which writers, politicians, and other public figures fought, collaborated, conferred, and philosophized about art and culture throughout the twentieth century. In Newlove’s correspondence readers will find a compelling story about the incredible difficulty of establishing a literary career and raising a family while struggling with poverty, addiction, and mental health issues. Through colourful letters Newlove exchanged with Canadian writers such as Margaret Atwood, Susan Musgrave, Michael Ondaatje, Al Purdy, and numerous others, The Weather and the Words gives readers a ground-level view of Newlove’s life and era. The book includes a foreword by Lorna Crozier, an introduction by editor J.A. Weingarten, and an afterword by Laura Cameron.

Freud may never have set foot in Cambridge - that hub for the twentieth century's most influential thinkers and scientists - but his intellectual impact there in the years between the two World Wars was immense. This is a story that has long languished untold, buried under different accounts of the dissemination of psychoanalysis. John Forrester and Laura Cameron present a fascinating and deeply textured history of the ways in which a set of Freudian ideas about the workings of the human mind, sexuality and the unconscious affected Cambridge men and women - from A. G. Tansley and W. H. R. Rivers to Bertrand Russell, Bernal, Strachey and Wittgenstein - shaping their thinking across a range of disciplines, from biology to anthropology, and from philosophy to psychology, education and literature. Freud in Cambridge will be welcomed as a major intervention by literary scholars, historians and all readers interested in twentieth-century intellectual and scientific life.

Freud may never have set foot in Cambridge - that hub for the twentieth century's most influential thinkers and scientists - but his intellectual impact there in the years between the two World Wars was immense. This is a story that has long languished untold, buried under different accounts of the dissemination of psychoanalysis. John Forrester and Laura Cameron present a fascinating and deeply textured history of the ways in which a set of Freudian ideas about the workings of the human mind, sexuality and the unconscious affected Cambridge men and women - from A. G. Tansley and W. H. R. Rivers to Bertrand Russell, Bernal, Strachey and Wittgenstein - shaping their thinking across a range of disciplines, from biology to anthropology, and from philosophy to psychology, education and literature. Freud in Cambridge will be welcomed as a major intervention by literary scholars, historians and all readers interested in twentieth-century intellectual and scientific life.

The "Opening" chapter reflects on the connection between historical and technological frontiers. "Listening for Pleasure" discusses oral histories as they relate to the negotiated and contested space of Sumas Lake. "Margins and Mosquitoes" recovers archival records from Victoria to Ottawa to explore flood-lake involvements federally, provincially, and locally. "Memory Device" moves into the archive of land and waterscapes, looking for connections between place and history, mindful of both Native oral tradition and written accounts of the lake. The concluding chapter, "One More Byte," written from the perspective of a mosquito, attempts to distance this project from the work of modernization while assessing the value of interactive history. An independent but complementary hypermedia essay "Disappearing a Lake" is located on this website (scroll up) at http://www.mqup.mcgill.ca/files/cameron_laura http://oldwww.mqup.mcgill.ca/files/cameron_laura/