LONDON, ONTARIO – While I’ve long been aware of tensions that can trouble relations between artists of various kinds and more conventional denizens of the workaday world – such soul-wilting energies as resentment, projection, envy and contempt – I’m happy to report that these were not issues in my home of origin.

LONDON, ONTARIO – I recently gave our reading group a holiday from our usual theological fare and assigned one of my all-time favourite novels, How Green Was My Valley (1939) by Richard Llewellyn (1906 – 83). This was at least my third immersion in this coming-of-age tale which is told from the perspective of the youngest son in a large family at the turn of the last century as their way of life in a Welsh coal-mining village is steadily degraded by economic exploitation and environmental plunder. Though written in English, the narrative is conveyed in a beguiling prose that seems to have been somehow steeped in the characteristic lilt of the Welsh vernacular; ie: “We sat in the sun, on a turf as soft as my mother’s tablecloth and greener, with the wind kept away by the rock, and angry because of it.”