Obituaries

RIP Gerard F. Farry

By Brian Fawcett | October 24, 2021

In mid-January of this year, 2021, Gerard Farry died in Vancouver at the age of 92. He wasn’t the sort of man who’d naturally be familiar to the readers of this website; he had been the director of urban planning for Greater Vancouver during the 1970s and 1980s, which was the heyday of urban master…

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Ken Belford RIP

By Brian Fawcett | April 3, 2020

Brian Fawcett’s obituary for poet Ken Belford, who died in February

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Graeme Gibson RIP

By Brian Fawcett | March 31, 2020

I didn’t know Graeme Gibson well, and for most of the time I was a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada, I didn’t like him very much. Gibson was one of the Union’s founders and in a way, remained, to the end of his life, its primary living role model (the Union’s other role…

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Billy Walsh, January 1944-July 2016 RIP

By Brian Fawcett | August 6, 2018

Brian Fawcett files his third obituary in the last little while. He’s more or less up to date with his personal version of the Grim Reaper’s activities. Or so he hopes.

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Wally Hourback, 1949-2017, RIP

By Brian Fawcett | August 6, 2018

 Late in the summer of 2017, Wally Hourback, a Canadian writer from North Bay, Ontario, and a man with whom I had a fifteen-year relationship that was entirely epistolary and editorial, died of heart failure. My relationship with Wally came about because of dooneyscafe.com, for which Hourback wrote occasional pieces, and which you know, if…

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Claus Spiekermann 1941-2015 RIP

By Brian Fawcett | August 1, 2018

    Claus Spiekermann and I tried to smuggle a car from Germany to Greece in the winter of 1963.  It didn’t go well, and we spent two weeks trapped by what people were calling the worst blizzard in 200 years. We got as far as Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia. The blizzard eventually…

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Brett Enemark, 1948-2017, RIP

By Brian Fawcett | October 12, 2017

Brian Fawcett posts an obituary for–and something of an apology to–an old friend who died a few months ago.

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RIP Henry Hoekema

By Brian Fawcett | October 12, 2017

A belated obituary for a man who deserved better than he got from life.

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John Asbhbery (1927-2017)

By Stan Persky | September 4, 2017

John Ashbbery.

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Larry Fagin and Prose Poems

By Stan Persky | May 28, 2017

Larry Fagin (1937-2017) thought that a lot of life was “off-the-cuff” and that “prose poems” were one way of conveying that insight.

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