“Have you been in trouble with the American government before? Where are your papers, the Canadian official shouted,” in novelist and humanities Professor Susan Swan’s short story “Sleeper” printed Sept. 11 in The Globe and Mail. The story is about a young student singled out by customs officers on a train crossing the Canadian-American border. Swan’s Web site opens this week: http://www.susanswanonline.com. Her new novel, What Casanova Told Me, will be published next year.
Free speech trampled
In a letter printed Sept. 11 in the National Post, York education student Aliza Libman registered her disgust over the protest that cancelled Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at Concordia on Monday. “Activism is only a laudable pursuit of freedom of expression when it doesn’t strip others of their right to hear lectures from visiting dignitaries and allows those dignitaries their right to freedom of speech,” she wrote.
Where were you?
York University student Leanne Parnass remembered where she was last Sept. 11 on the anniversary a year later in The Toronto Star: “I was home from school that day sick with the flu. … I watched CNN, and they kept showing the picture of the planes crashing. And that was how I spent my day. I didn’t move. Sick, watching something you couldn’t believe was happening.”
Not a pretty study
CP Wire ran a story Sept. 11 about a study that will look at the impact of violence on African-Canadians’ health and quality of life. The $1.25-million study is a joint project of York, Dalhousie and Calgary universities.