Salman Rushdie tells a story about a reading he was asked to do for a UK book festival early in his career. On the ticket with Rushdie was another young British writer, Angela Carter who, when taking the stage, looked out into a sparsely attended event and spontaneously invited the entire group of attendees to continue the event across the road at the Pub. That sense of Carter -- inventive, flexible but ever practical -- comes out in this reading, recorded in Toronto in 1986, and demonstrates her powerful voice, complex use of language, and her unique humour and creativity. Her early death at age 51 was a major loss for English-language writing. The audio recording used in this episode from Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter is published by Chatto & Windus, 1984. Copyright © The Estate of Angela Carter. Reproduced by permission of the Estate c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. Additionally, the audio is used with permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors.
Works by Angela Carter
The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children, Fireworks
Writers Talk: Angela Carter with Lisa Appignanesi (evideo)
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (ebook)
Other Related Books or Materials
Angela Carter: A Literary Life by Sarah Gamble
Nights at the Circus is Feminist... (link opens an article from The Guardian from Feb 2017)
Taking Flight with Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (link opens a piece from Tor.com from Apr 2017)
Angela Carter: a staggering command of language (link opens TPL Special Collections page of the Toronto Star Archives featuring a 1988 photo of Carter by John Mahler)
About the Host
Novelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.
Music is by Yuka
From the Archives
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations.
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA
Season 1, Episode: 21
Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus
(opening music segment)
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, produced by the Toronto Public Library. I’m Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, Angela Carter tells us about what it means to be a woman living in a world full of horrid, nasty, hairy things …
Angela Carter: The table cloth caught fire and all the little dears screamed blue murder as I ran down the length of the table with my hair and tulle skirt all inflamed, pursued by the furious pastry cook wielding his cake knife and vowing he'd make a bonne bouche of me.'
RANDY: In her opening remarks during this 1986 visit to Toronto, to read from her novel Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter offers special thanks to the Hilton Hotel and notes that its treatment is making her feel “very unhaggard.” It’s a telling word choice, insofar as it implies, with no apologies or self-consciousness, that her less pampered, regular state is, well, very haggard. Indeed, one of her many literary friends, the UK poet Andrew Motion, once described her as looking like she had been left outside during a hurricane. Whatever unconventionalities feature in Carter’s look and personal life — she went by herself to Japan as a newly married woman, met another man while there, and thereafter left her wedding ring in an airport lounge ashtray in Hong Kong — they are secondary to the confidently bizarre and outlandish features of her writing life. That writing life found early motivation in the reaction she had to a stifling upbringing, one in which her mother would turn off the television if a divorced actor appeared, and in seeking a life of the mind and body not made possible by being a young housewife taking some courses in English and Mediaeval Studies at Bristol University. She was very much interested, throughout her short and intense career, in revealing the world around us as stranger and more idiosyncratically alive than we might think, especially when it came to the sexual experiences of women. In service of this effort, she had a penchant for rewriting traditional fairy tales into dark and unsettling situations. You’ll sense as much, in a moment, in listening to this selection from her novel Nights at the Circus. But note that there’s more here than merely weirdness for its own sake. Carter’s special gift as a writer wasn’t just to radicalize traditional fairy tales. Rather, it was to reveal the strangeness of our world through the vision and tone and character and situations provided by fairy tale telling. When you hear about “horrid, nasty, hairy things,” you may be imagining something, or someone, out of a Maurice Sendak story. Instead, as you’ll see, it’s the kind of being that too many ordinary women have to confront unless, like the very big and very small characters in this section of Nights at the Circus, they find other ways to fly away.
___
Angela Carter: Hello, I, too, would like to add my thanks to the Hilton Hotel for the lavish hospitality. We are becoming very unhaggard. I want to read from a novel which, as chance would have it, has just been published. A novel called Nights at the Circus. It's a very long novel and I'm not... I'm going to read a very small part of it. It's about a very large woman. I mean, an amazingly large woman. A very large and impressive looking woman who has wings and biology dictates her destiny in no uncertain manner. There are very few things that a woman with wings can do, and in the latter part of the novel, she works in the circus, which is certainly one of the things she'd do. In the first part of the novel, she works in a brothel. She works in a series of brothels. It's set, by the way, at the turn of the century.
AC: The piece I'm going to read has got... Is narrated by my heroine, but she does not appear in it. This is the story of a friend of hers who works in a very special kind of a brothel, which is a place for people who are troubled in their souls. And this girl, who's called the Wiltshire Wonder, is as teeny teeny tiny as my heroine, whose name is Fevvers, is enormous. This is... It starts off with my heroine talking, well.
AC: "The Wonder was a most accomplished dancer and could do high kicks that was just like opening up a pair of embroidery scissors. So I says to her, 'Wonder, why do you degrade yourself by working in this house when you could earn a good living on the boards?' 'Oh, Fevvers,' she replies, 'I'd rather show myself to one man at a time than to an entire theater full of the horrid, nasty, hairy things. And here, I'm well protected from the dark foul throng of the world in which I suffered so much. Amongst the monsters... For all women in this house are unusual. Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden. Who looks for a leaf in a forest?'
AC: "'Let me tell you that I was conceived in the following manner. My mother was a merry milkmaid who loved nothing better than a prank. There was, near our village, a hill, quite round and though overgrown with grass, it was well-nigh hollow since it was burrowed through and through with tunnels like runs of generations of mice. Though I have heard it said this hill was no work of nature but a gigantic tomb, a place that those who lived in Wiltshire before us, before the Normans, before the Saxons, before even the Romans came, laid out their dead. The common people of the village called it the fairy mound and steered clear of it at nights for they believed it was, if not a place accursed, then certainly one in which we human beings might suffer curious fates and transformations.'
AC: "'But my madcap mother, egged on by the squire's son, who was a rogue and bet her a silver sixpence she would not dare, once spent the whole of one midsummer night inside this earthen castle. She took with her a snack of bread and honey and a farthing dip and penetrated to the chamber at its heart, where there was a long stone, much like an altar but more likely, in all probability, to have been the coffin of some long dead king of Wessex. On this tomb, she sat to eat her supper. And by and by, the light went out so she was in the dark. Just as she began to regret her foolhardiness, she heard the softest footfall. 'Who's there?' 'Why, Meg. Who but the king of the fairies.' And this invisible stranger forthwith laid her down on the stone slab and pleasured her, or so she said, as mightily as any man before or since.'
AC: "'Indeed I went to fairyland that night,' she said. 'And the proof of it was nine months later, I made my infinitesimal appearance in the world. She cradled me in half a walnut shell, covered me with a rose petal, packed my layette in a hazelnut and carried me off to London town where she exhibited herself for a shilling a time as the fairy's nursemaid while I clung to her bosom like a burr. But all she got she spent on drink and men because she was a flighty piece. When I got too big to be passed off as a suckling, I said, 'Mother, this won't do. We must think of our security and our old age.' She laughed a good deal when she heard her daughter pipe up in that style for I was only seven years old and she herself not five-and-twenty. And it was a black day for me when I took it into my head to turn that giddy creature's mind to the future because at that, she sold me.'
AC: "'For 50 golden guineas, cash in hand, my own mother sold me to a French pastry cook with corkscrew moustaches who served me for a couple of seasons in a cake. Chef's hat perched on his head at a rakish angle, he'd bear the silver salver out of the kitchen and set it down in front of the birthday boy for this patisseur had this much sensibility, I was a treat for children only. The birthday child would blow out the candles and lift up the knife to cut its cake. But the pastry cook kept his own hand on the handle to guide the blade in case it cut me by accident and blemished his property. Then I'd pop up through the hole, wearing a spangled dress and dance around the table distributing streamers, favors and bonbons. But sometimes the greediest ones burst into tears and said it was a mean trick and cake was what they wanted, not a visit from the fairies.'
AC: "'Possibly due to the circumstances of my conception, I had always suffered from claustrophobia. I found I could scarcely bear the close confinement of those hollowed cakes. I grew to dread the moment of my incarceration under the icing and I would beg and plead with my master to let me free, but he would threaten me with the oven and say, if I did not do as he bid me, then next time, he would not serve me in a cake, but bake me in a vol-au-vent. Came the day at last my phobia got the better of me. I clambered in my coffin, suffered the lid to close on me, endured the jolting cab ride to the customer's address, was cursorily unloaded on the salver in the kitchen, and then came the trip to the table. Half fainting, sweating, choking for lack of air in that round space, no bigger than a hat box, sickened by the stench of baked eggs and butter, sticky with sugar and raisins I could tolerate no more, with the strength of the possessed, I thrust my bear shoulders up through the crust and so emerged before my time, crusted with frosting, blinking crumbs from my eyes. My eruption scattered candles and crystallized violets everywhere.'
AC: "'The table cloth caught fire and all the little dears screamed blue murder as I ran down the length of the table with my hair and tulle skirt all inflamed, pursued by the furious pastry cook wielding his cake knife and vowing he'd make a bonne bouche of me.'
AC: "'But one child kept her wits about her in this melee, sat gravely at the bottom of the table until I reached her plate, when she dropped her napkin over me and put out the flames. Then, she picked me up and stowed me away in her pocket and said to the pastry cook, 'Go away, you horrid man. How dare you torture a human creature so.' As it turned out, this little girl was the eldest daughter of the house. She carried me off to the nursery and her nanny put soothing ointment on my burns and dressed me up in a silk frock that the young lady's own doll sacrificed for me, although I was perfectly able to dress myself. But I was to find that rich women, as well as dolls, cannot put on their own clothes unaided. Later that night, when dinner was over, I was introduced to papa and mama as they sat over their coffee, of which they gave me some, since it was served in cups of a size that just suited me. Papa seemed to me a mountain whose summit was concealed by the smoke from his cigar, but what a good, kind mountain it was. And after I had told my story as best I could, the mountain puffed a purple cloud, smiled at mama and spoke. 'Well, my little woman, it seems we have no course but to adopt you.' And mama said, 'I am ashamed. I never thought that horrid trick with the cake might cause suffering to a living creature.'
AC: "'They did not treat me like a pet or a toy either, but as truly one of their own. I soon formed a profound attachment to the girl who'd been my saviour, and she for me, so that we became inseparable, and when my legs could not keep up with hers, she would carry in the crook of her arm. We called each other sister. She was just eight-years-old to my nine. My ship had come to rest in a happy harbour. Time passed. We girls began to dream of putting up our hair and letting down our skirts and all the delicious mysteries of growing up that lay ahead. Although, as for me. I knew I'd never grow up in any worldly sense, which made me sometimes sad.'
AC: "'One Christmas came the question of the pantomime. Some sixth sense perhaps forewarned me that danger lay ahead. I told mama that I'd put childish things away and preferred to stay at home that night and read a good book. But my sister was lagging a little behind me in the business of maturing, longed to see the bright lights and pretty tinsel, and told me that if I was not one of the family party then the treat would all be spoiled. I submitted to her tender bullying. As it turned out, the pantomime was Snow White. I turned first fire then ice in our box as the scenes unfolded before me, for dearly as I loved my family, there was always that unalterable difference between us, not so much the clumsiness of their limbs, their lumpish movement suppressed me. Nor even the thunder of their voices, as never in all my life had I gone to bed without a headache. No, I had known all these things from birth and grown accustomed to the monstrous ugliness of mankind.'
AC: "'Indeed, my life in that kind house could almost have made me forgive some, at least, of the beasts for their beastliness. But when I watched my natural kin on that stage, even as they frisked and capered and put on the show of comic dwarves, I had a kind of vision of a world in miniature, a small, perfect, heavenly place, such as you might see reflected in the eye of a wise bird. And it seemed to me that that place was my home and these little men were its inhabitants who would love me, not as a little woman, but as a woman. And then, perhaps, it was. Perhaps the blood of my mother did flow in these however scaled down veins. Perhaps I could not be content with mere contentment. Perhaps I always was a wicked girl and now my wickedness, at last, manifested itself in action.'
AC: "'It was easy for me to give my family the slip in the crush at the end of the show, easy to find the stage door and trot past its guardian as he took in a bouquet for Snow White. I soon found the door on which some cruel comic hand had pasted seven tiny stars. I knocked. Inside there sat the handsomest young man on a sofa, just the right size for both of us, and he was busy mending a tiny pair of trousers, with what, to your eyes Fevvers, would have seen an invisible needle and a length of invisible thread. "What pint-sized planet did you spring from?" He cried out when he saw me.' Then, the Wonder covered her face with her hands and wept bitterly. 'I shall spare you the sorry details of my fall, Fevvers,' she said when she recovered herself. 'Suffice to say, I traveled with them seven long months, passed from one to the other for they were brothers and believed in share and share alike. I fear they did not treat me kindly, for although they were little, they were men. How they abandoned me, penniless in Berlin, and how I came under the terrible protection of Madam Schreck are circumstances I relate to myself each night when I close my eyes.'
AC: "'Over and over, I rehearse an eternity of fearful memories, until the time comes to get up again and see for myself how those who come to slake their fantastic lust upon my small person are more degraded yet than I could ever be.'" That's the Wiltshire Wonder. I see that I've got time to actually introduce you to my heroine. Here she is. Working in a music hall, working at the Alhambra Theatre, London, in the last days of the year 1899. "On the stage of the Alhambra when the curtain went up, there she was, prone in a feathery heap behind tinsel bars while the band in the pit sawed and brayed away at "Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage." How kitsch, how apt the melody. It pointed out the element of the meretricious in the spectacle. It reminded you the girl was rumoured to have started her career in freak shows. While the band played on, slowly, slowly she got to her knees, then to her feet, still muffled up in her voluminous cape of feathers, a crusted helmet of red and purple plumes on her head.
AC: "A breath of stale night air rippled the pile on the red, plush banquets of the Alhambra, stroked the cheeks of the plaster cherubs that upheld the monumental swags above the stage. From aloft, they lowered her trapezes. She seized hold of the bars of the cage in a firm grip, and to the accompaniment of a drum roll, parted them. The golden cage whisked up into the flies, tangling for a moment with the trapeze. She flung off her mantle and cast it aside. There she was. In her pink fleshings, her breastbone stuck out like the prow of a ship. The corset cantilevered her bosom, while paring down her waist to almost nothing. Her hair was hidden away under the dyed plumes that added a good 18 inches to her already immense height. On her back, she bore an airy-burden of furled plumage as gaudy as that of a Brazilian cockatoo. On her red mouth, there was an artificial smile. 'Look at me.' With a grand, proud, ironic grace, she exhibited herself before the eyes of the audience, as if she were a marvelous present too good to be played with. 'Look. Not touch.' She was twice as large as life and as succinctly finite as any object that is intended to be seen, not handled. 'Look. Hands off. Look at me.'
AC: "She rose up on tiptoe and slowly twirled round, giving the spectators a comprehensive view of her back. Seeing is believing. Then she spread out her superb heavy arms in a backwards gesture of benediction, and as she did so, her wings spread too, a polychromatic unfolding fully six feet across, spread of an eagle, a condor, an albatross fed to excess on the same diet that makes flamingos pink. 'Ooh.' The gasps of the beholders sent a wind of wonder rippling through the theater. But Walser, who's a journalist, who's watching the spectacle, but Walser reasoned with himself thus, 'Now, the wings of the birds are nothing more than the forelegs, or as we should say, the arms. And the skeleton of the wing does indeed show elbows, wrists and fingers, all complete. So if this lovely lady is indeed, as her publicity alleges, a bird woman, then she, by all the laws of evolution and human reason, ought to possess no arms at all, for it's her arms that ought to be her wings. Put it another way. Would you believe a lady with four arms, all perfect like a Hindu goddess, hinged on either side of her shoulders? Because that is the real nature of the physiological anomaly in which Miss Fevvers is asking us to suspend disbelief. Wings without arms is one impossible thing, but wings with arms is the impossible made doubly unlikely; the impossible squared.'
AC: In his red-plush press box, watching her through his opera glasses, he thought of dances he had seen in Bangkok, presented with their plumed gilded mirrored surfaces infinitely more persuasive illusion of the airy creation than this over-literal winged bar-maid before him. He thought of the Indian rope trick, the child shinning up the rope in the Kolkata market, and then vanishing clean away. Only his forlorn cry floated down from the cloudless sky. How the white-robed crowd roared when the magician's basket started to rock and sway on the ground until a child jumped out, all smiles. Mass hysteria and the delusion of crowds, a little primitive technology and a big dose of the will to believe. In Kathmandu, he saw the fakir on a bed of nails, all complete, soar up until he was level with the painted demons on the eaves of the wooden houses. 'What', said the old man, heavily bribed, 'would be the point of the illusion if it looked like an illusion? For,' opined the old charlatan with po-faced solemnity, 'is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.'
AC: "Now the pit band ground to a halt and rustled its scores. After a moment's disharmony comparable to the clearing of a throat, it began to saw away as best it could, at what else, the "Ride of the Valkyries". She gathered herself together, rose up on tiptoe, and gave a mighty shrug in order to raise her shoulders. Then she brought down her elbows so that the tips of the pin feathers of each wing met in the air above her headdress. At the first crescendo she jumped. Yes, jumped. Jumped up to catch the dangling trapeze. Jumped up some 30 feet in a single heavy bound. Her wings throbbed, pulsed and whirred, buzzed and at last began to beat steadily on the air they disturbed so much that the pages of Walser's journalist's notebook ruffled over, and he temporarily lost his place, had to scramble to find it again. Almost displaced his composure, but managed to grab tight hold of his skepticism just as it was about to blow over the edge of the press box.
AC: "What made her remarkable as an aerialist was the speed, or rather the lack of it, with which she performed even the climatic triple somersault. When the hack aerialist, the every day wingless variety, performs the triple somersault, he or she travels through the air at a cool 60 miles an hour. Fevvers, however, contrived a contemplative and leisurely 25, so that the packed theater could enjoy the spectacle as in slow motion of every tense muscle straining in her Rubenesque form. The music went much faster than she did. She dawdled. Indeed, she didn't defy the laws of projectiles because a projectile cannot mooch along its trajectory.
[laughter]
AC: "If it slackens its speed in mid-air, down it falls. But Fevvers apparently pottered along the invisible gangway between her trapezes with the portly dignity of a Trafalgar square pigeon flapping from one proffered handful of corn to another. And then she turned head over heels three times. Lazily enough to show off the crack in her bum. 'But surely,' pondered Walser, 'a real bird would have too much sense to think of performing a triple somersault in the first place.' Yet apart from this disconcerting pact with gravity, which surely she made in the same way the Napoleon Faccia had made his, Walser observed that the girl went no further than any other trapeze artist.
AC: "She neither attempted nor achieved anything a wingless biped could not have performed, although she did it in a different way. And as the Valkyries at last approached Valhalla, he was astonished to discover that it was the limitation of her act in themselves that made him briefly contemplate the unimaginable, that is the absolute suspension of disbelief. For, in order to earn a living might not a genuine bird woman, in the implausible event that such a thing existed, have to pretend she was an artificial one? He smiled to himself at the paradox. In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax in order to gain credit in the world. 'But,' and Walser smiled to himself again as he remembered his flutter of conviction that seeing was believing, 'What about her belly button? Hadn't she just this minute told me she was hatched from an egg, not gestated in utero? The oviparous species are not by definition nourished by the placenta, therefore they feel no need of the umbilical cord, and therefore don't bear the scar of its loss. Why isn't the whole of London asking, Does Fevvers have a belly button?' It was impossible to make out whether or not she had a naval during her act. Walser could recall of her belly only a pink featureless mass of stockinette tights. Whatever her wings were, her nakedness was certainly a stage illusion.
AC: "After she'd pulled off the triple somersault, the band performed the coup de grace on Wagner and stopped. Fevvers hung by one hand, waving and blowing kisses with the other, those famous wings of hers now drawn up behind her. Then she jumped right down to the ground. Just dropped. Just plummeted down, hitting the stage squarely on her enormous feet, with an all too human thump, only partially muffled by the roar and applause and cheers. Bouquets pelt the stage. Since there is no second hand market for flowers," she's tremendously avaricious. "Since there is no second hand market for flowers, she takes no notice of them. Her face, thickly coated with rouge and powder so that you can see how beautiful she is from the back row of the gallery, is wreathed in triumphant smiles. Her white teeth are big and carnivorous, as those of Red Riding Hood's grandmother. She kisses her free hand to all. She folds up her quivering wings with a number of shivers and moves and grimaces, as if she were putting away a naughty book. Some chorus boy or other trips on and hands her into her feathered cloak that is as frail and vivid as those the natives of Florida used to make.
AC: "Fevvers curtseys to the conductor with gigantic aplomb and goes on kissing her hand to the tumultuous applause, as the curtain falls and the band strikes up, God Save the Queen. God save the mother of the obese and the bearded princeling who has taken his place in the Royal Box twice nightly since Fevvers' first night at the Alhambra, stroking his beard and meditating upon the erotic possibilities of her ability to hover.
[laughter]
AC: "And the problematic of his paunch, vis-a-vis the missionary position." Thank you.
[applause]
Speaker 2: Thank you very much, Angela Carter. For those of you who were looking for Gerard Reve from the Netherlands, you share our disappointment in the telegram that we received from him late last week telling us, as was the case with Hugo Claus, that he is quite ill, and so we've sent a telegram off to both gentlemen. I understand Hugo Claus is still in the hospital undergoing tests, and we've sent telegrams of best wishes and better health to both men. A reminder that the World's Biggest Bookstore, which is also one of the major sponsors of the festival this year, has an excellent display of books by all of the authors participating in the festival, and it's located up here in the upper lobby. And we'll see you back here for the second and final set in about 25 minutes.
[background conversation]
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RANDY: Angela Carter was born into a middle-class household in a London suburb, in 1940. She was lovingly, if too intensely parented, and elected not to go to Oxford after learning her parents intended to move nearby. Instead, she married a folk music-loving chemist in her early twenties and took some courses at Bristol University. Restless and unhappy, she took a trip by herself to Japan, where she met a young man who also had literary interests. They had an affair that led to the breakup of her marriage; thereafter, she began writing, publishing her first novel, Shadow Dance, in 1966. Many more would follow, including The Magic Toyshop and The Bloody Chamber, and she became well-known for her provocative representations of sex and violence and fairy tales and eventually had a son with a younger man; she met him when he came to help her with a plumbing problem in her kitchen. A close friend to many other writers, including Salman Rushdie, whom she secretly hosted along with his bodyguards for good dinners and television during his time of hiding because of the fatwa on his life, Angela Carter died at the age of 51, in 1992, shortly after being diagnosed with lung cancer.
The audio recording used in this episode from Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter is published by Chatto & Windus, 1984. Copyright held by The Estate of Angela Carter. Reproduced by permission of the author’s Estate and Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., Additionally, the audio is used with permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. As always, thanks to TIFA, the Toronto International Festival of Authors, for allowing us access to their archives. Find out more at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
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Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is a year-long podcast series that celebrates 40 years of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. It's produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou and Michelle De Marco, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and research support from Marcella van Run.
For more about Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. For all of Toronto Public Library's podcasts series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA.