The following are the latest, most complete, descriptions of the topics and speakers in the Literary Puzzles & Mysteries series. This page will be updated throughout the year. For further information call 748-1733.

James Reaney is one of Canada's most wide-ranging and interesting writers. In a career spanning over fifty years he has won three Governor General's Awards for poetry (1949, 1958, 1962). His many plays include The Killdeer, Colours in the Dark, Wacousta!, and a three-play cycle entitled The Donnellys. He has also written numerous short stories (recently collected as The Box Social and Other Stories), children's plays and fiction, and numerous librettos. His influence upon younger writers like Margaret Atwood has often been noted. Professor Reaney has taught at the universities of Manitoba and Western Ontario. He is now retired and working on many new projects from his London, Ontario home. His son James attended Trent in the mid-1970s.

"Criminal Briefs" brings us two acclaimed Canadian detective writers. Eric Wright, creator of police detective Charlie Salter, and Howard Engel, creator of private detective Benny Cooperman, will talk about their own work and the field in general. Born in England, the award-winning Eric Wright has been the writer-in-residence at the Peterborough Public Library and taught English for years at Ryerson. Howard Engel, who left a stellar career at the CBC to take up detective fiction, has won the Harbourfront Festival Prize for Canadian literature and the Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction.

Frank Augustyn, former Principal Dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, Veronica Hollinger, of Trent University's Cultural Studies Program, and James Neufeld, of Trent University's English Department, share a common interest in the art of dance. Their presentation on the nature of the "text" in dance will explore the ways in which choreography is preserved and examine the limits to the accuracy of its transmission. When we read Sir Walter Scott, we can be certain that the words we read bear some relationship to the words he wrote. When we see The Sleeping Beauty, how sure can we be that the steps we see are the ones Marius Petipa originally choreographed?

For the past two hundred years there has been an ongoing debate about the authorship of the Shakespearean plays. Lack of conclusive evidence has raised the question as to whether William Shakspere of Stratford penned these insightful dramas and elaborate comedies. Could a man of his background and education have been capable of writing plays which contain a wealth of knowledge about history, court life, theology, law, metaphysics and world affairs of the day? Author Mark Finnan has written about the subject and like some earlier researchers makes the case that the plays were likely written by sir Francis Bacon, one of the most brilliant minds of the Elizabethan era. Finnan also presents his reasons why he believes there was a secret and successful collaboration between the two men. Trent English professor Zailig Pollock examines the case for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, an amateur poet and one of the most important literary patrons of the day. In addition to examining the specific arguments concerning Bacon and de Vere, the discussion will also raise the issue of why this mystery continues to exert such a fascination.

Mark Finnan's interest in writing and theatre goes back to his boyhood days in Dublin, Ireland where he was fortunate to be exposed to a wide variety of literature that ranged from Celtic legends to the plays of O'Casey, Shaw and Shakespeare. He studied acting at the Stanislavsky Studio in London, England and wrote and acted in a number of plays prior to emigrating to Canada in 1975, where he has worked as a news journalist and as the artistic manager of Cobourg's performing arts facility, Victoria Hall. Mr. Finnan has written a number of plays and adaptations which have been performed and broadcast in Ireland, Canada, and the United States. He is also the author of a trilogy about mysteries of early Canadian history: Oak Island Secrets , The First Nova Scotian , and The Sinclair Saga.

Zailig Pollock is a Professor of English Literature at Trent University where he has taught since 1976. His main areas of interest as a teacher are Renaissance literature, especially Shakespeare, and modern Canadian literature. His research over the past twenty years has focussed textual editing. He is Chair of the A.M. Klein Research and Publication Committee, which is bringing out the Collected Works of A.M. Klein , the largest such project devoted to an English Canadian writer. More recently has joined the Pratt Project as a General Editor. He is currently at work on the first hypertext edition of a Canadian poet, the Complete Poems of E.J. Pratt .

MICHAEL PETERMAN is currently Chair of English at Trent University, and has done most of his research and publishing in Canadian and American literature. He has co-edited three volumes of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill letters, edited the scholarly edition of Traill's The Backwoods of Canada, and has written a short biography of Moodie which is about to bepublished. Other authors he has written about include Robertson Davies, Timothy Findley, Margaret Laurence, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton and Sara Jeannette Duncan. His long-term project is a study of place in Ontario literature.

In his talk he will describe his experience over the past six years or so of tracking a literary jack-of-all-trades named James McCarroll (1814-1892) who was one of Canada's most promising and multi-talented writers until he ran afoul of the political powers in Toronto (read Canada) in the volatile years immediately preceding Confederation. The search has turned up many fascinating revelations that speak to the problems of being outspokenly Irish and being a writer in the testy and sometimes vicious world of pre-Confederation Canadian politics.

Dennis Duffy, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Toronto has published widely on Canadian literature. In 1994, he curated a photographic exhibit on the visual sources of Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. In tonight's illustrated lecture, he will discuss Ondaatje's use of photographs by Arthur S. Goss (1880-1940), Toronto's first official photographer, touching on such topics as the artistic weight of documentary photography, the political use of artistic imagery, and the role of the bygone imager in Ondaatje's postmodern re-imaging of Toronto.

Born in 1918 and still writing, Margaret Avison is regarded in some quarters as one of the greatest poets Canada has ever produced, and yet her work is not well known. This obscurity is itself a puzzle, but so in a way are the poems. Avison's poetry is part of a long tradition of riddle poems and a more recent understanding of poems as games, secret codes and mysteries. Gordon Johnston has been teaching at Trent and reading Avison with bewildered pleasure for 28 years.

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Maintained by Zailig Pollock; last updated: October 15, 2000