Brian Brennan – Author
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When Mother Teresa came to small-town Canada

Brian Brennan - September 4, 2021 - One Comment
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Many called her a saint for her work among the poor. Today, Pope Francis made it official.

Recent Posts
    • One good blog deserves another
      Susan Toy is an author and indie publisher who continues to actively promote the work of her fellow authors long after their publishers have stopped marketing their books. She also promotes the work of self-published authors. In Canada, the trade publishers who do spend money on promoting their authors generally terminate the publicity campaigns after six months to focus on the next group of authors with new books to promote. That’s the point at which Susan often takes over. Susan Toy On her blog, Susan gave a welcome boost to my autobiography, Leaving Dublin, after it had been on the market for two years. She came back a year later to plug my newly-released eBook edition of Scoundrels and Scallywags. Then came a plug for the columns I wrote for the now-dormant online journalism magazine, Facts & Opinions, followed by a plug for the book, Brief Encounters, that emerged from those columns. Additionally, she blogged about my book Rogues and Rebels, and invited me to tell her readers about three of my books that were back in print and available for the first time as eBooks. Most recently, Susan profiled me and promoted my novel, The Love of One’s Country, in a new blog she calls Authors-Readers International. Susan has done all this out of the goodness of her literary heart. She asks only of her authors that we respond in kind by promoting her and her work. Many of us have been slow to respond. At one point, she told an interviewer, only about 10 percent of her featured authors had reciprocated. I was one of that delinquent 90 percent. But today, six years after she gave me my first plug, I’m pleased to finally return the favour. You can read about Susan’s career, and find links to her own published works, on her main blog called Books: Publishing, Reading, Writing. A second blog, Reading Recommendations, highlights her favourite authors and their books. The third of her four promotional blogs, Reading Recommendations Reviewed, offers third-party reviews of books featured on Reading Recommendations. All told, this makes Susan the equivalent of a one-woman version of Goodreads. As we say in Ireland, more power to her elbow!... Read more...
    • Updating my BOOKS section
      The web-savvy graphic designer Sydney Barnes, who did the covers for The Love of One’s Country and my new edition of Leaving Dublin, has revamped the BOOKS section of this site to create separate pages for my most significant titles. Let your mouse hover over the BOOKS drop-down menu at the top of this page and then click on a title to read about that book. You’ll find some new media links that I’ve inserted in five of these book pages, including the following: • On the Leaving Dublin page, you’ll find a link to an interview I did with Mary Lou Finlay of CBC Radio’s As It Happens when the Calgary Herald strike ended on 30 June 2000. I included a detailed account of that labour dispute in Leaving Dublin. You’ll also find links to my shaky debut as a radio news announcer in September 1970 and my more polished presentation as a newscaster in January 1972. That second broadcast takes us back to a time when Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau envisaged a $10 billion transportation corridor being built in the Mackenzie Valley for moving oil and gas by pipeline and moving people by road. It never happened, of course. The Berger Inquiry put paid to that. • On The Love of One’s Country page, you’ll find a link to a Spotify playlist of all the songs mentioned in this novel. • On the Building a Province page, you’ll find a link to an interview I did about this book with Judy Hamill of CBC Radio’s Daybreak Alberta. • On the Alberta Originals page, at the bottom of the page following the television interviews, you’ll find a link to a radio interview I did about this book, again with Judy Hamill of CBC. • On the Scoundrels and Scallywags page, you’ll find a link at the bottom of the page to an interview I did about this book with Lesley Primeau of Edmonton’s 630 CHED Radio. I had originally recorded these radio broadcasts on cassette tapes and have now digitized them – before they become brittle and give up the ghost, as old cassettes often tend to do – so you can listen to them here. Enjoy!... Read more...
    • Speaking engagement scam
      So here’s the oddly-worded e-mail I received this morning: From: Rev Canon Chris Ford <revcanonchrisford@gmail.com>Subject: Booking you for a speaking engagement!!! Message Body:Blessings to you from Brian, I am Canon Chris Ford, presiding Rev of the St Mary the Virgin Davyhulme,Urmston,United Kingdom. We are pleased to inform you that we would like to engage you for a speaking event here in Urmston, London at the Church conference coming up on the 17th, 18th & 19th of Jan 2020. The conference is tagged: ‘Big things: How to start small’.  Please we would like you to convey to us your availability for one of the dates as it can fit in your schedule.   Also, please we would as well appreciate if you get back in-touch with us in ample time so we can start corresponding the details.   Thank you and expecting to hear from you soon. Remain Blessed. -Rev Canon Chris Ford+447031809672https://www.stmarysdavyhulme.org/St Mary The Virgin13 Vicarage Rd, Urmston, Manchester M41 5TPUnited Kingdom. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.1 Peter 2:9 Too good to be true? I did some Googling. Yes, there is a church called St. Mary the Virgin in Urmston, but Urmston is in Manchester, not London, as stated in the body of the message. And yes, St. Mary’s vicar is Canon Chris Ford, but he doesn’t use a g-mail address. As for the alleged upcoming conference, it’s not listed in the church’s calendar for January. I did some more Googling, using as keywords the theme of the alleged conference: “Big Things: How to Start Small.” I received several hits, all with the word “scam” in the subject line. You can see some of them HERE and HERE and HERE. I was about to alert Canon Ford that his name and that of his church were being used for fraudulent purposes, but when I went back the St. Mary’s website I saw that the church now knows about it, and that a warning has been posted prominently on the church’s home page. This latest version of a long-running scam apparently just started today.... Read more...
    • Remembering John Murrell, 1945–2019
      The critics, including me, panned his first significant play, Waiting for the Parade, when it premiered at Alberta Theatre Projects in February 1977. Set in Calgary during the Second World War, Parade offered a series of interlinked vignettes about five women coping with civilian life on the home front. I described it in the Calgary Herald as nothing more than a “photo album of staged nostalgia.” The Albertan reviewer said much the same. And when the play moved to Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, the Star critic described it as “annoyingly domestic and vague.” So much for the early reviews of Parade. If John Murrell had allowed himself to be defeated by them – he was 31 when the play made its debut at ATP – chances are he would have quit the theatre and gone back to schoolteaching. But Murrell believed in the play. It was still a work in progress. He returned to his typewriter, revised the script, and eventually had the satisfaction of seeing a new edition of Parade mounted and toured across Canada by the National Arts Centre. The play was later filmed for television, produced in New York and London, and given the Chalmers Award for best Canadian play. It also garnered better reviews. I described the NAC production as “more edifying, more amusing and more fully realized” than the version I had seen at ATP in 1977. John Murrell I had been writing reviews at the Herald for less than two years when I panned the first production of Parade, and I know now that I wounded more than one emerging Canadian playwright – Sharon Pollock was another – with my hard-hitting early critiques. Following in the tradition of such theatrical nabobs of negativism as Nathan Cohen and John Simon, I was trying to impress readers with my wit, intelligence, and the fruits of my reading list on a given week. When I mentioned this to Murrell several years afterwards, his response was characteristically generous. “Perhaps we weren’t very good,” he said. “Remember, we were learning our craft too.” If Murrell was learning, he soon moved to the top of the class. His next play, Memoir, was a huge international success. A bittersweet two-hander about the last days of Sarah Bernhardt, it was translated into fifteen languages and performed in thirty countries including Ireland and England, where the role of the legendary French stage star was played by the distinguished Irish actress Siobhan McKenna. Memoir ran for more than three years in Paris in the 1980s and enjoyed a successful revival in Paris in 2003. After writing a couple of award-winning plays set in western Canada (Farther West and New World) and drawing on his knowledge of Italian and French to produce vivid new translations of such plays as Machiavelli’s Mandragola and Racine’s Bajazet, Murrell wrote and directed in 1988 what he said could be his last play. It was called October and dealt with the relationship between Eleonora Duse – Bernhardt’s great Italian-born rival – and Gabriele d’Annunzio, the chauvinistic poet and playwright who created starring roles for Duse in La città morta and Francesca da Rimini. Murrell felt October might be his last play because it was taking him longer and longer to revise and polish scripts to his satisfaction, and he was about to take on an administrative position as head of the Canada Council’s theatre section. But happily for theatregoers he did return to writing plays in the 1990s with Democracy and The Faraway Nearby, two award-winning dramas that also focussed on famous cultural figures from the past. Democracy told about a meeting between the poet Walt Whitman and the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson during the American Civil War. The Faraway Nearby was a poetic portrait of the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Also in the 1990s, Murrell began what became a long and fruitful association with Calgary’s One Yellow Rabbit both as a playwright and an actor. Additionally, starting in the early part of the 21st century, he demonstrated his versatility as a writer by crafting the librettos for three operas with Canadian composer John Estacio and one opera with music by the Calgary Opera’s current artistic director Bramwell Tovey. Writing for Murrell was the ultimate therapy and he couldn’t imagine ever living without it. “It’s the most natural process in the world for me,” he told me. “More natural than eating, drinking, sleeping, going to the bathroom or whatever. It can never stop. I will always continue to write, even it it’s only writing letters to people.” That’s why when he took a break from playwriting in the late 1980s to work at the Canada Council, his friends knew it would be just a matter of time before Murrell was back at his typewriter. “If he’s got things to write, he will write them, regardless of what circumstances he finds himself in,” said Tarragon director Urjo Kareda. “It’s his curse. He’s a writer and you can’t turn that off.” The circumstances he found himself in took a turn for the worse ten years ago when Murrell was diagnosed with leukemia. Yet he continued to write and perform and – according to an article by Jon Roe in today’s Calgary Herald – continued to approach life and his work with a dark sense of humour. “You never heard a word of complaint,” One Yellow Rabbit’s Blake Brooker told the Herald. “We joked darkly when he was around. He used humour to live life just as maybe you would or I would, if you could, if you had the strength and the ability.” John Murrell died on Monday at age 74. The flags of the National Arts Centre are flying today at half-mast.... Read more...
    • Becoming a first-time novelist – my progress so far
      I had already published fifteen nonfiction books of biography and social history, so I didn’t have anything else to prove in that regard. Before putting down my pen, however, I wanted to do one more book, this one derived from my own family history. I knew it would have to be fiction because I didn’t have the letters, diaries or other archival materials needed to properly tell the story of my chosen subject. She was a locally famous ancestor of mine, a farmer’s wife who made her mark as an Irish-language folk poet in rural West Cork during the first half of the nineteenth century. Her songs are still sung there to this day. I had included a short biographical profile of my ancestor in my nonfiction book Songs of an Irish Poet: The Mary O’Leary Story. But it focussed primarily on her poetic legacy and gave short shrift to Mary O’Leary’s personal story. She had been a famine survivor, what was it like for her to be living in West Cork during that lamentable period in Irish history? How did she feel when two of her sons told her they planned to emigrate to North America? What was it like to travel across the ocean on one of those famine ships? I couldn’t find the answers in my family history files so I did some research and drew from my imagination to tell the story. I worked on the novel for thirty years. I titled it The Love of One’s Country because it deals with the way immigrants can become conflicted when they trade one country for another. When I finally felt ready to share it with the world, I looked around for a literary agent to represent it. Here’s what happened next. I contacted eight of the top agents in Canada. I suggested to them that The Love of One’s Country should be published simultaneously in Ireland and Canada because the story unfolds in both countries. Four of the eight agents didn’t bother to reply. Two declined to represent it. One of those two read just a four-page sample of the 292-page manuscript and then rejected it, without explanation. The other said major fiction publishers nowadays are interested only in young diverse voices. I’m an old guy (now 76), white and straight. Not much I can do about any of that. The remaining two agents expressed some initial interest but then stopped answering my e-mails. After a year, with no offers from agents forthcoming, I looked around for a publisher to take it on. The major publishers were now out of reach because they don’t accept unagented submissions, so I contacted ten of the smaller presses. Seven were in Canada, two in Ireland, and one in London. Three of the seven Canadian publishers and one of the two Irish publishers failed to reply. Three of the remaining four Canadian publishers and the other Irish publisher rejected the manuscript. Paradoxically, two of these four rejectors said they actually liked the book but it wasn’t a “good fit” for their lists. The fourth Canadian publisher expressed interest in doing the book at some point, but not this year and maybe not next. I wasn’t about to wait around – I’m an old guy, after all – so that left the London-based publisher as my final option. The London-based publisher, Austin Macauley, writing from a virtual office address in New York’s Trump Building, offered me what it called a “contributory” contract. This meant that if I paid Macauley $3,300 US, it would edit, design and print the book. Marketing and distribution would cost extra. I asked why Macauley couldn’t give me a traditional mainstream publishing contract, where the publisher would cover all the costs and give the author an advance against royalties. Macauley replied that because it “couldn’t ascertain the success” of my previous publications, I represented “somewhat of a risk” for it. Macauley clearly wasn’t interested in looking at my royalty statements, or at the newspaper clippings showing that my previous titles were Canadian bestsellers. I didn’t bother to respond to Macauley. Instead, I went with FeedARead.com, an independent publisher programmed with British Arts Council funding. It looked appealing to me because it paid royalties higher than the industry average and listed among its satisfied authors a former film critic for London’s Sunday Times who co-wrote the movie Fierce Creatures with John Cleese. FeedARead charged me nothing for setting up The Love of One’s Country for printing and distribution and – at minimal cost to me – made the book available for ordering from such major international booksellers as Waterstones, Barnes & Noble and Amazon. The novel entered the market this fall and has done very well so far. It earned several five-star reviews on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites, achieved generous print, radio and online media coverage, and hit the number one spot on the Calgary Herald’s local bestsellers list. In the midst of all this, I received another e-mail from Austin Macauley, again offering to publish the book for $3,300 US. But the book is already out there, I told Macauley, and doing better than expected. Did Macauley now want to waive its publication fee and give me the traditional publishing contract it offers to some of its authors? Oh no, said Macauley, “you are still a less established author and will require extensive marketing and promotions efforts to ensure you and your book are marketed to the right people.” To which I can only say this. If I were a more “established” author – unlike, say, the professional wrestler or the retired boxer Macauley listed as two of its marquee writers – why would I need a hybrid publisher like Macauley to market my book to the “right” people? By Macauley’s standards, I guess I should have made my career in the ring before deciding to become a novelist.... Read more...
    • The Love of One’s Country: A reader’s quiz
      After you’ve read my novel, here’s a little quiz you can try. No prizes, but I hope you have fun with it. With Google and Spotify, you can find most of the answers. I opted for these thematic choices with the hope of deepening and enriching the narrative. On pages 3/4, Jerry and Carol stop to watch a street artist sculpting a wolf-like creature he calls the Hound of Ulster. Who was the mythical Hound of Ulster and where do you find a reference to him elsewhere in this novel?On page 4, Jerry and Carol hear a busker singing “The Fields of Athenry.” What’s this song about? You can hear it on the Spotify playlist I’ve put together for the novel.On page 6, Jerry considers taking Carol to see a new production of John B. Keane’s Many Young Men of Twenty at the Gaiety. What’s the theme of this musical play? You can hear the title track on the Spotify playlist.What do the above two musical selections and the one at #6 below have in common, and why would I have picked them for this novel? (Easy questions, easy answers … like the clues in the daily Mini Crossword of The New York Times!)On page 18, in describing his love of draft Guinness, Jerry says, “A pint of plain is your only man.” Who originally coined this expression? (Clue: He makes a cameo appearance in the novel shortly afterwards.)On page 19, Tom and Jerry listen to Brendan O’Dowda singing a song about “cuttin’ the corn in Creeshla the day.” What’s the title of the song and what’s the song about? Again, please refer to the Spotify playlist.On page 25, Jerry talks about his ancestor singing her folk poems “in a language that the strangers do not know” and Tom observes that “the strangers came and tried to teach them their ways.” From what popular Irish song do these lines come?On page 44, Diarmuid quotes Cú Chulainn’s dying words, “I care not though I were to live but one day and one night, provided my fame and my deeds live after me.” Which Irish republican leader subsequently adopted those words as a motto he emblazoned on the walls of a school he founded? (Clue: That building, no longer a school, makes an early appearance in the novel.)On page 54, we learn that Diarmuid named his dog Setanta. Why would he have chosen that name?On page 152, Nell meets a woman from Sam’s Cross named Mary Collins. Her last name still has special meaning for people who live in that area. Why?... Read more...
    • Defending the energy industry against its attackers
      The Kenney government has now loaded the barrels in the $30 million war room it established to defend the energy industry against attackers. Will it hit its intended targets? Calgary Herald columnist Chris Varcoe doesn’t seem to think so. He notes that the Stelmach government tried something similar in 2008 and that it didn’t last long – barely more than two years. “Nor was it particularly effective.” Varcoe writes that if it was hard in 2008 for the government to correct perceived media errors about the industry, “imagine how difficult it will be to do that in 2019, with the proliferation of social media and polarized audiences.” Varcoe is right. I also don’t think this new war room – now called the Canadian Energy Centre – is going to work. It won’t have the power to require the media to run whatever press releases, tweets or other propaganda devices it employs in response to negative publicity about the industry. So, it is doomed to soon become as irrelevant as the ill-fated “For the Record” website launched by the Stelmach government in 2008. Back in the day, in 1937, the first Social Credit government also tried something similar. It even went so far as to introduce legislation forcing newspapers to print government-supplied articles equal in length to those critical of the government. It didn’t work. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the proposed press legislation was beyond the province’s legal power to enact. Alberta’s newspapers received special Pulitzer Prize citations for their leadership in resisting the bill. The Kenney war room does have two functions that might be potentially useful, aside from its more immediate role of rapidly defending the industry against the shots fired by its critics. But these functions would only be of interest to scholars and researchers, not to the media. One is the data and research unit that will analyze information about the industry. The other is the energy literacy unit that will generate content for the stories the province wants to be told. The media likely wouldn’t use either of these government-sponsored units to obtain up-to-date information about the industry, because of possible bias. It already has plenty of neutral sources it can tap, including Statistics Canada’s new Canadian Energy Information Portal. As for the government’s rapid response unit, all it will do is add more decibels to the existing volume of noise about the industry. It would be more effective if it could find a way of cutting through that noise.... Read more...
    • Media coverage for The Love of One’s Country
      I published my novel independently, and that can sometimes deter a mainstream media organization from publicly acknowledging the existence of a book. But not the Calgary Herald, thank goodness. Nor has it been a deterrent for CBC Radio in Alberta. Today was a good day for letting readers and listeners know about The Love of One’s Country. Catherine Ford wrote in the Herald this morning that I must have been frustrated when I found it difficult to write the story of my own family after telling the stories of hundreds of other families in feature obituaries for the Herald during the 1990s. Catherine is absolutely right. I had no letters, diaries or other documents to guide my storytelling in this project, aside from transcriptions of poems composed in Gaelic by my grandmother’s great-grandmother, a survivor of the devastating Irish potato famines of the 1840s. Her poems gave me a sense of the things my ancestor cared about, particularly her desire for Ireland to separate from the United Kingdom. But they told me nothing about the woman herself. That I had to make up. On the radio, meanwhile, Daybreak Alberta host Russell Bowers gave me a generous amount of time – close to 15 minutes – to tell the listeners how I dealt with the challenge of writing about life in rural, famine-stricken Ireland a century before I was born. I also talked to Russell about the challenge of telling readers what it was like to travel across the ocean in a ship never meant for the transportation of human cargo. This is a journey, of course, that I never took myself. Catherine’s article and Russell’s radio interview have been important in getting the word out about The Love Of One’s Country. So, too, have the reviews appearing in blogs and newsletters, and on the Barnes & Noble website. No writer is ever content to write just for the closet. We all want our work to be read.... Read more...
    • Make us better, said the immigration officer
      Should Canada exclude certain immigrants? “Absolutely,” declared a Mount Royal University sessional instructor in a controversial opinion piece deleted from the Vancouver Sun’s website after being widely condemned on social media. “If you do let people into your country,” wrote Mark Hecht in his now discredited op-ed, “then make sure they hold similar values.” The op-ed, which remained in the Sun’s print edition while an apologetic editor-in-chief excised the offending piece from the paper’s website, said Canada should abandon cultural and ethnic diversity, tolerance and inclusion, and start accepting a new norm for immigration policy: compatibility, cohesion and social trust. The article even went so far as to say that a “sprinkle of Protestantism” would put the country back on the right track. Hecht defended his piece as an attempt to break new ground in terms of what he could say in a mainstream newspaper. But nobody, aside from a handful of commenters on his blog, stepped forward to publicly support him. “An inexcusable failure of journalism,” said one critic. “Jingoistic, xenophobic,” said another. “White supremacist screed” with “neo-Nazi talking points,” said a third. Hecht rejected the suggestion his views were racist because “I’m talking about culture, not skin colour.” But to no avail. Even his employer refused to publicly side with him: “The ideas expressed do not represent the position of Mount Royal University.” This all happened on a weekend when the daughter of Romanian immigrants who came to Canada in the mid-1990s did our country proud by becoming the first Canadian-born tennis player to win a Grand Slam singles title. I can envisage the immigration officer saying the same thing to Bianca Andreescu’s parents that one of his predecessors said to me on Remembrance Day 1966: “Welcome to Canada. Make us better.”... Read more...
    • Why did I write my novel, The Love of One’s Country?
      Because I felt I had told only part of the story when I published Songs of an Irish Poet: The Mary O’Leary Story, a nonfiction biography of my ancestor, a renowned Irish folk poet of the 19th century. Yes, I had written about the financial difficulties my ancestor faced during the years leading up to the potato famines of the 1840s, when the cattle and dairy farming business she ran with husband James went into a steady decline.  But no, I hadn’t written much about the devastating impact of the famines themselves, aside from a few paragraphs about evictions by greedy landlords.  I had written nothing about the workhouses, those Dickensian institutions built to house the most destitute of the rural inhabitants. And I hadn’t written anything about the inadequate famine relief efforts, or the fake incentives the landlords offered their “surplus” tenants to get them off their lands and onto coffin ships bound for North America.  One reason for this omission was that the main source of information for my biography – a priest who interviewed Mary O’Leary’s grandchildren and published an Irish-language book of her songs in 1931 – had offered only sketchy details of her life in his book. His main goal, it seems, was to preserve her poems. They had never been written down during her lifetime, but passed orally from generation to generation, and had only survived as artefacts of an ancient Irish literary tradition because the priest and two fellow folklore collectors asked the grandchildren to sing them for transcription purposes.  After publishing my Mary O’Leary biography, which was little more than an expanded version of the priest’s book but now translated into English and rewritten extensively with added historical context, I felt the need revisit her story and fill in the gaps. My ancestor, after all, was a famine survivor. She had avoided the workhouse and didn’t die of starvation. She lived to be 75, which back then would have been considered a ripe old age. And she left a legacy of songs still performed today at major traditional music festivals throughout Ireland.  How did the survivors get through those dreadful times when successive years of blights destroyed their potato crops? How did they deal with the abuses they suffered aboard ship, aside from the unsanitary conditions and the rampant cases of typhus and dysentery? These are what I wanted to write about, and fiction gave me the best vehicle for telling that story after I had completed the necessary research. I also wanted to give the narrative a contemporary dimension by blending the famine history with the story of a more recent immigrant, like myself, who found Canada to be as welcoming in the 1960s as it continues to be today for immigrants seeking refuge. My autobiography, Leaving Dublin: Writing My Way from Ireland to Canada, became the point of departure for that part of the fictional story in my novel.  I’m thrilled now to share my novel with the world. I gave it the title The Love of One’s Country because it deals with the way immigrants can become conflicted when they trade one country for another. For further details and purchase information, consult my books page.... Read more...

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© 2019 Brian Brennan