A Little Help from our Friends In the fall of 1979, as the new school year was about to begin, I found myself in exile, shunted to a crowded, windowless office space in a remote corner of our tiny college, Champlain St. Lawrence CEGEP in Quebec City. As a young, part-time English instructor, I didn’t..
Awakenings, The Panther, and Anne’s conditional liberation from the confines of brain cancer In his poem “The Panther,” Rilke paints a heartrending portrait of an animal so confined that its vision dulls into endless bars and its will stalls into a ritual of pacing. The poem is a gateway to the experience of the..
Spring 1969: Pierre Berton visits London, Ontario, and high school authorities go ballistic For Maria Van der Velden By 1969, even in conservative, homogenous London, Ontario, seismic changes were rumbling through the corridors of power. In those halcyon days, I attended Oakridge High School where the 1960s zeitgeist had begun infiltrating, albeit on little cat..
A story from my book titled My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny /Le temps passé avec vous fut bref mais tordant Part One: Bully for you, Georgetown Ontario, 1959-1964 When I was about seven years old and attending Chapel Street Public School in Georgetown, Ontario, I routinely began to throw my..
Valentines Day Audiobook Book Launch: Attach your antlers and have a listen La description française suit la description anglaise. I’m excited to announce that the English version of my audiobook is available on Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books, meaning listeners can purchase it outright, use an Audible credit, or get a discount if they own..
Willy Loman : I don’t want a change! I want Swiss cheese! Why am I always being contradicted? – Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman For Daniel MacDonald, the finest Willy Loman ever For his birthday, June 27, 2024 Getting old is no piece of cake Getting old is no piece of cake; The feast..
Atteindre le sommet de la liste globale des pires ventes mondiales Reaching the pinnacle of the international worst seller list English to follow : Mon livre – la version anglaise ainsi que la version française – a franchi une nouvelle étape : Il a battu de nouveaux records en atteignant le sommet de la liste..
The Trial of Duddy Kravitz This is Academy Award week and one the films in line for best picture is a brilliant courtroom drama titled Anatomy of a Fall ((Anatomie d’une chute). My family has always loved courtroom dramas. So I created trials with and for my students. Here is a piece about Duddy..
How my mother became a pedant…an excerpt from My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/ And a grammar song by the great musician https://soundcloud.com/andy-mcclelland Stream The Grammar Song by Andy McClelland | Listen online for free on SoundCloud My mother, Angelina Reiser, was born in 1918 of parents who had..
I had to bring my 10-month-old baby son to Short Story class at CEGEP Champlain St. Lawrence junior college in Quebec City in January 1982 A Classroom Visitor: January 1982 One’s life is an urn Smashed into shards Made up of memories Sparked, determined, and falsified by Songs, stories, and photographs. Photos create shards…