The Curve of Time

”…a superlative text of travel writing and of the Pacific Northwest.” —The New Yorker

M. Wylie Blanchet (1891-1961) was born in Montreal and spent her childhood as an avid seeker of the natural world. Her adventurous and independent spirit led to extraordinary summers with her children exploring the coastal wilderness of British Columbia, and her recollections of the landscape have earned her memoir a place in Canadian literature as an enthralling West Coast must-read. Her children’s book, A Whale Named Henry, was published posthumously in 1983. Blanchet passed away at her home near Sidney, BC, at the age of seventy.

Edith Iglauer was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She married Philip Hamburger and raised two sons in New York. A frequent contributor to the New Yorker, she has written a great deal about Canada. Her first book, The New People (1966, reprinted and updated as Inuit Journey in 1979 and 2000) chronicled the growth of native cooperatives in the eastern Arctic. She profiled Pierre Trudeau in 1969 and internationally known architect Arthur Erickson in 1979. Denison’s Ice Road is about the building of a 325-mile winter road above the Arctic Circle. Divorced in 1966, she came to Vancouver in 1973. She married John Heywood Daly, a commercial salmon troller and moved to Garden Bay on the BC coast. Daly died in 1978. After writing Seven Stones: A Portrait of Arthur Erickson, Architect (1981) she began recording her memories of her late husband and his salmon troller the MoreKelp. The result was Fishing with John, a runaway bestseller and nominee for the 1989 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. Her second memoir, about her career in journalism, was The Strangers Next Door.