Home
Always Someone to Kill the Doves
Always Someone to Kill the Doves: A Life of Sheila Watson by F. T. Flahiff
Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award
Always Someone to Kill The Doves has been shortlisted for the prestigious 19th Annual Trillium Book Award in English language, Ontario's leading Award for literature. Set up in 1987 by the Ontario government to recognize excellence and foster increased awareness of the quality and diversity of Ontario writers and writing, past winners have included Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Timothy Findley, and Anne Michaels.
Always Someone to Kill the Doves is a rich and compelling account of Watson's life told by her close friend of over forty years, F. T. Flahiff. Crafted from archives, interviews, memories, and the bankers boxes Watson sent Flahiff shortly before her death, Flahiff chronicles Watson's fascinating life with flair, exploring her literary genius, her artistic temperament, her turbulent marriage, and the private anguish she suffered from. Best known for The Double Hook, a tiny but influential book which revolutionized Canadian literature, Watson demonstrates her literary prodigy further in the 70 pages Flahiff includes of her Paris journals, which give us a glimpse into the acute mind and imagination of one of Canada's literary icons.
"This is a moving and well-researched account of the ground that produced the remarkable figure we know as Sheila Watson, here not simply a figure but the complex and anguished intelligence whose fiction brought a startling modernism to Canadian literature. Fred Flahiff's method of tracing the whole from shards creates a vivid portrait of Sheila Watson set within the central dilemma of her life. Sheila herself speaks most vividly as the heart of this account in her remarkable diary entries written in Paris, 1955-56."
-Daphne Marlatt
"Sheila Watson's writing is immeasurably important to our culture, and a challenge to anyone who would try to place it in that context. This is a book we have needed on our shelves."
-George Bowering
From inside the book:
"There is marriage and there is a marriage contract-the contract is material and temporal. Marriage itself is an act of faith and consequently an act of perfect love-or inversely and perhaps more truly, an act of perfect love consequently an act of faith. Only a belief such as this would have made and did make the first years of our marriage possible.
"When a parent has a child, he knows that at a certain age the child should leave him, except under unusual circumstances. Even these circumstances are a violation in a sense-as the parent realizes, as mother for instance realized. . . .
"There is no analogy between the relationship of child and parent and the relationship of husband and wife.
"[Wilfred's young friend's] heart speaks to her now. This she will know whether she marries W or not. . . ."
Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award
Always Someone to Kill The Doves has been shortlisted for the prestigious 19th Annual Trillium Book Award in English language, Ontario's leading Award for literature. Set up in 1987 by the Ontario government to recognize excellence and foster increased awareness of the quality and diversity of Ontario writers and writing, past winners have included Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Timothy Findley, and Anne Michaels.
Always Someone to Kill the Doves is a rich and compelling account of Watson's life told by her close friend of over forty years, F. T. Flahiff. Crafted from archives, interviews, memories, and the bankers boxes Watson sent Flahiff shortly before her death, Flahiff chronicles Watson's fascinating life with flair, exploring her literary genius, her artistic temperament, her turbulent marriage, and the private anguish she suffered from. Best known for The Double Hook, a tiny but influential book which revolutionized Canadian literature, Watson demonstrates her literary prodigy further in the 70 pages Flahiff includes of her Paris journals, which give us a glimpse into the acute mind and imagination of one of Canada's literary icons.
"This is a moving and well-researched account of the ground that produced the remarkable figure we know as Sheila Watson, here not simply a figure but the complex and anguished intelligence whose fiction brought a startling modernism to Canadian literature. Fred Flahiff's method of tracing the whole from shards creates a vivid portrait of Sheila Watson set within the central dilemma of her life. Sheila herself speaks most vividly as the heart of this account in her remarkable diary entries written in Paris, 1955-56."
-Daphne Marlatt
"Sheila Watson's writing is immeasurably important to our culture, and a challenge to anyone who would try to place it in that context. This is a book we have needed on our shelves."
-George Bowering
From inside the book:
"There is marriage and there is a marriage contract-the contract is material and temporal. Marriage itself is an act of faith and consequently an act of perfect love-or inversely and perhaps more truly, an act of perfect love consequently an act of faith. Only a belief such as this would have made and did make the first years of our marriage possible.
"When a parent has a child, he knows that at a certain age the child should leave him, except under unusual circumstances. Even these circumstances are a violation in a sense-as the parent realizes, as mother for instance realized. . . .
"There is no analogy between the relationship of child and parent and the relationship of husband and wife.
"[Wilfred's young friend's] heart speaks to her now. This she will know whether she marries W or not. . . ."
Submitted on April 7, 2006 in By David.
