Opposite Contraries

Emily Carr was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1871, and died there in 1945. She studied art in San Francisco, London and Paris. Except for a period of fifteen years when she was discouraged by the reception to her work, she was a committed painter. After 1927, when she was encouraged by the praise of the Group of Seven, interest in her paintings grew and she gained recognition as one of Canada's most gifted artists. Now, nearly sixty years after her death, her reputation continues to grow.

Susan Crean is a well-known writer and cultural critic, most recently of the Emily Carr biography, The Lauging One. She is a frequent contributor to magazines such as Geist, This Magazine, and The Capilano Review and is a former columnist for Canadian Art. Crean was appointed the first Maclean-Hunter chair in Creative Non-Fiction at the University of British Columbia in 1988, and spent more than a decade on the Coast. She currently teaches a course in magazine writing at Ryerson's School of Journalism in Toronto and is working on her next book, a collection of essays on globalization and postmodernism called The End of Art. She is a former chair of the Writers' Union of Canada and is the co-chair of its Copyright/Electronic Rights Committee, and a member of its Social Justice Task Force. She has recently joined the board of Native Earth Performing Arts and divides her time between Toronto and Gabriola Island, B.C.