Home Office
I’ve always dreamed of having a beautiful, vintage home office, mid-century up to, even, the ’70s. I have a grey, ’60s-era Steelcase desk, but you can hardly see it for all the stuff. Also two green, ’60s-era full-extension four-drawer filing cabinets. But my my modern stand-up desk breaks the spell, as do the floor-to-ceiling Billy […]
Mastering Nonfiction
I’m among the faculty of the University of King’s College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction. The program, which is focused on book publishing, has recently put together a PDF booklet with four of the many short essays on creative nonfiction techniques (like mine on reconstructions) and information (like getting books published) that faculty members have written. […]
A Plum Job
I devoured food writer Ruth Reichl’s memoir, Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir, fitting it in around everything else I was doing over Christmas and New Year’s. My late mother loved both Gourmet and its baby sister publication, Bon Appetit, so I’d been reading them for many years and always admired the fine writing […]
Volume Control
Why do so many people experience hearing loss? It’s not just a matter of growing older By David Hayes, The National Post, December 14, 2019 About a dozen years ago, I saw an ear, nose and throat specialist at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto. After taking a battery of hearing tests, I laid on a […]
Working Class Martyr
On December 8, 1980, I was working on a deadline for one article or another on my Underwood typewriter when my phone rang. It was my friend, singer Marian Tobin, calling from the El Mocambo where she and her two singing partners who made up The Honolulu Heartbreakers were performing that night with Professor Piano […]
Gerda Taro’s Pioneering War Photography
She was, like so many talented women, overlooked, known mainly for being legendary war photographer Robert Capa’s lover and muse. But Gerda Taro was herself a war photographer, celebrated today as the first woman to cover the front lines of a war. With her small Leica camera she ignored the bang-bang and focused on humanizing […]
Yaggy’s 19th Century Publishing Empire
Levi Walter Yaggy was an inventor, writer, and publisher in Chicago. His 1886 Yaggy Anatomical Study of Human Anatomy (used in medical schools and by physicians) was considered a landmark of its era, especially for its use of pop-ups. The folio contained large charts, or “manikens,” of the human anatomy, including the skeleton, muscles, nervous system, arteries […]
When Typewriter Repair Shops Ruled
So glad that Gramercy Typewriter is still around. I visited the shop, on West 17th Street in Chelsea, a few years ago and it provides a lovely nostalgic feeling for those of us who, long ago, wrote on typewriters, not computers. According to Paul Schweitzer, owner of Gramercy Typewriter, which his father founded in 1932, there’s […]
Where War Reportage meets Creative Nonfiction
Link to essay in National Post They Will Have to Die: Verini’s reporting straddles the polarities of war with evolution of technology ‘I would find out later that the strike request exchanges were taking place on a WhatsApp channel. Armies, air forces, an infinity of munitions, all orchestrated via a free chat application’ By David Hayes, […]
READY TO WRITE THAT BOOK?
READY TO WRITE THAT BOOK? Come to the “Meet-and-Greet” for the University of King’s College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction Monday, November 11; 6 p.m. Penguin Random House 320 Front St West, #1400, Toronto, ON You’ll hear all about the program from our Executive Director, Kim Pittaway, and you can chat with faculty members as well as […]