“

Sullivan has penned hundreds of essays, memoirs, and travel pieces. This collection brings together the best of these.

Marty GervaisEditor of Black Moss Press
“

Sullivan is celebrated as a literary biographer… her biographical skill is… displayed in pieces on Atwood… Laurence…and her own ancestors…. I find these essays and those on painters, romantic obsession, the nasty politics at a human rights conference, and travel experiences in Czechoslovakia, France, Chile, Cuba, and Mexico…give a strong impression of her personality as she strikes out for territory without undue concern about scoring intellectual points. The essays show her as a woman of life, not just ideas, and as such admit the reader to intimacies of various subjects.

Keith GarebainThe Globe and Mail
Selected Essays Memory Making

Black Moss Press, 2001.

Contents

  • Memory-Making and the Stamina of the Poet
  • Only Insight Gets Us Through: Confessions of a Literary Biographer
  • Meeting in Mexico
  • Alias Margaret: The Radcliffe Years
  • The Centric and Eccentric Debate
  • Wet with Another Life: “Meditations of an Old Woman”
  • Romantic Obsession
  • Prague 1979
  • An Interview with Margaret Laurence
  • Purdy’s Dark Cowboy
  • The Ideal Civil Servant
  • Keeping the Lid on Democracy
  • Christopher Columbus, The Embroideress, and the Man Who Was Buried Standing Up
  • Confessions of an Anthologist
  • The Trail That Led to Me