Jean Alice Rowcliffe
"Whenever I work with parents now I tell them, switch off the phones, switch off the ‘what-you-have-to-do’, don’t look at Google, don’t look at what other parents are doing, dodge those sites that make you feel guilty. This diet of insecurity is being spoon fed to everybody and these parents have no confidence." |
ONE BREATH IN, ONE BREATH OUT The London Yodeller Interview with JEAN ALICE ROWCLIFFE As a wide-eyed, royalty-besotted teenager from London, Ontario, Jean Alice Rowcliffe charmed her way into a serving job in the dining rooms of Buckingham Palace. She then took the training to become the nanny for the children of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent (Chuck and Di lived just next door). Blessed with one child herself whom she mostly raised on her own, the one thing this abundantly qualified mother was not prepared for was to see James die of a rare form of cancer in 2009 at the age of 17. The London Yodeller sat down to tea with Jean Alice Rowcliffe in her central London home and here is some of what we talked about. Continue Reading . . . |
Janice Fiamengo
"Property and income qualifications prevented significant segments of the Canadian (and British) population of males from voting until 1918, when all such restrictions were lifted, following the bloody sacrifice of male life in World War One. One might say that it took massive male casualties and suffering to extend the franchise to all men and women; that women owe the right to vote partly to men’s self-sacrifice." |
CHALLENGING THE FEMINIST NARRATIVE The London Yodeller Interview with JANICE FIAMENGO As the commitment to freedom of speech on our university campuses grows ever more flaccid and proscribed, Janice Fiamengo, a soft-spoken Professor of English at the University of Ottawa has been appearing more and more fearless in her willingness to court controversy and outrage in her public pronouncements against second-wave feminism and the one-sided mischief that flawed ideology has inflicted on the world of academe and society at large. Continue Reading . . . |
“Anybody with ambition wants to get out of a town like Midland. If you said you wanted to be a writer, you were being presumptuous.” |
A HAPPY OUTLIER LOOKS BACK ON HIS CAREER AS A NOVELIST The London Yodeller Interview with RICHARD B. WRIGHT About two months after publishing my ‘summer reading feature’ on the novels of Richard B. Wright, Simon & Schuster published my favourite Canadian writer’s memoirs, A Life with Words. Though its cover is execrable (the publisher’s call not his; and in the interview below Wright has a few things to say about the current state of publishing) the book itself is a wonderfully funny and touching look back over his life and career. Continue Reading . . . MORE INTERVIEWS COMING SOON |