George Fetherling Explained

Douglas George Fetherling (born 1949) is a Canadian poet, novelist, and cultural commentator.^[1] One of the most prolific figures in Canadian letters, he has written or edited more than fifty books, including a dozen volumes of poetry, five book-length fictions, and a memoir. He lives in Vancouver. He has been the weekly literary columnist at five metropolitan newspapers and several national magazines. He has been writer-in-residence at Queen's University, the University of Toronto and the University of New Brunswick. He published under the name Douglas Fetherling until 1999, and thereafter under the name George Fetherling, switching to his middle name to honour his father George after recovering from life-saving surgery for the same medical condition that had killed his father.^[2]

He started in the Canadian literary industry in 1966 in Toronto, where he was the first employee of publisher House of Anansi.

A study of Fetherling's books George Fetherling and His Work, edited by Linda Rogers, features essays by W. H. New, George Elliott Clarke, Brian Busby and others.

Selected bibliography

Poetry

• My Experience in the War – 1970
• Our Man in Utopia – 1971
• Café Terminus – 1973
• Eleven Early Poems – 1973
• Achilles' Navel – 1974
• Subroutines – 1981
• Variorum: New Poems and Old, 1965-1985 – 1985
• Moving Towards the Vertical Horizon – 1986
• Rites of Alienation – 1988
• The Dreams of Ancient Peoples – 1990
• Selected Poems – 1994
• Madagascar – 2000
• Singer, An Elegy – 2004
• The Sylvia Hotel Poems – 2010
• Plans Deranged by Time – 2012

Fiction

• The File on Arthur Moss – 1994
• Jericho – 2005
• Tales of Two Cities – 2006
• Walt Whitman's Secret - 2010

Non-fiction

• The Five Lives of Ben Hecht – 1977
• Gold Diggers of 1929 – 1979
• The Blue Notebook: Reports on Canadian Culture – 1985
• The Crowded Darkness – 1988
• The Gold Crusades: A Social History of the Gold Rushes, 1849-1929 – 1988
• The Rise of the Canadian Newspaper – 1990
• A Little Bit of Thunder – 1993
• The Book of Assassins – 2001
• River of Gold: The Fraser and Cariboo Gold Rushes – 2008

Biography

• The Gentle Anarchist: A Life of George Woodcock – 1998

Memoir

• Notes from a Journal – 1987
• Travels By Night: A Memoir – 1994
• Way Down Deep in the Belly of the Beast: A Memoir – 1996
• The Writing Life: Journals 1975 - 2005 – 2013

Travel writing

• Year of the Horse: A Journey through Russia and China – 1991
• The Other China: Journeys around Taiwan – 1995
• Running Away to Sea: Round the World on a Tramp Freighter – 1998
• Three Pagodas Pass: A Roundabout Journey to Burma – 2002
• One Russia, Two Chinas – 2004
• Indochina Now and Then – 2012

Anthologies edited

• A George Woodcock Reader – 1980
• Carl Sandburg at the Movies: A Poet in the Silent Era 1920-1927 – 1985 (with Dale Fetherling)
• Documents in Canadian Art – 1987
• Documents in Canadian Film – 1988
• The Broadview Book of Canadian Anecdotes – 1988
• Best Canadian Essays 1989 – 1989
• Best Canadian Essays 1990 – 1990
• The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs – 2001

External links

• Web site: Doug Fetherling fonds - Search Research Collections. McMaster University Library. William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections. 17 July 2019.

Notes and References

1. Virginia Gillese and Karen Grandy, "Douglas Fetherling". The Canadian Encyclopedia, January 21, 2008.
2. Bill Cameron, "Douglas Fetherling becomes a George: After three decades, 50 books, writer risks commercial suicide". National Post, April 7, 2001.