Author Blog

• Tripped out on the Prairies

  By Erika Dyck  |   0 Comments

  Posted on
  August 27th 2012
  at 11:24am

  Erika Dyck, the author of Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD on the Canadian Prairies, was profiled in the August/September issue of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada’ magazine University Affairs:

  “University of Saskatchewan history professor Erika Dyck says it was a future colleague who turned her on to LSD, so to speak.

  “It happened a decade ago when Dr. Dyck, then a doctoral candidate in the history of medicine at McMaster University, was asked to do some research by U of S historian Larry Stewart, one of her former professors. He was doing a project on the history of therapeutic experimentation with drugs in England, recalls Dr. Dyck, who holds the Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine at the U of S. ‘Because I was in Ontario, he asked me to look around and see what I could find out about experimentation in Canada.’”

  To read the rest of the article, click here.

  About the Book
  In the early 1950s, the leading centre of the world for LSD research was Weyburn, Saskatchewan, where two psychiatrists sought to revolutionize the treatment of mental illness and, in the process, gave rise to a new form of therapy: psychedelic psychiatry. Psychedelic Psychiatry is the tale of medical researchers working to understand LSD’s therapeutic properties just as escalating anxieties about drug abuse in modern society laid the groundwork for the end of experimentation at the edge of psycho-pharmacology. Historian Erika Dyck deftly recasts our understanding of LSD to show it as an experimental substance, a medical treatment, and a tool for exploring psychotic perspectives. She recounts the inside story of the early days of LSD research in small-town, prairie Canada, when Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer claimed incredible advances in treating alcoholism, understanding schizophrenia and other psychoses, and achieving empathy with their patients. In relating the drug’s short, strange trip, Dyck explains how societal concerns about countercultural trends led to the criminalization of LSD and other so-called psychedelic drugs. In this well-written and fascinating book, she confronts the ethical dilemmas of the time and challenges the prevailing wisdom behind drug regulation and addiction therapy.

  About the Author
  Erika Dyck is an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan.

• Emily Eaton and Growing Resistance

  By Emily Eaton  |   0 Comments

  Posted on
  August 21st 2012
  at 7:40am

  I grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And despite what you might have been lead to believe based on my upcoming book, Growing Resistance: Canadian Farmers and the Politics of Genetically Modified Wheat, I have no personal or familial ties to agriculture.

  I first became interested in agriculture while studying the sociology of agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan as part of my undergraduate degree in international studies. It seemed the perfect topic through which to study human-environment relationships, ‘non-rational’ economic actors (farmers), and questions of social justice.

  While conducting the research for this book I spent a lot of time with farmers. Having grown up in Saskatchewan gave me little credibility with the farmers that I interviewed. Instead, they perceived me as a naïve outsider, a ‘city girl’ that knew nothing about farming. Back home in Toronto where I was writing my PhD I was also an outsider in the large urban-focused geography department in downtown Toronto, Canada’s largest city. To my colleagues in Toronto, having grown up in Saskatchewan already meant I was an expert on all things agricultural.

  This summer I started a new research project on Saskatchewan’s oil economy. I’m feeling once again like a big outsider. The oil industry is overwhelmingly male and masculinist and not very amenable to this vegetarian academic on the left.

  Some colleagues say you should study what you know best; somehow I feel most comfortable studying what I know least. I find it a distinct advantage in the field. Interviewees seem to find outsiders less threatening, they are more willing to offer explanations, and they take time to substantiate their positions. The learning curve is steep, but it’s also very rewarding to be learning so many new things.

  About Growing Resistance
  In 2004 Canadian farmers led an international coalition to a major victory for the anti-GM movement by defeating the introduction of Monsanto’s genetically modified wheat. Canadian farmers’ strong opposition to GM wheat marked a stark contrast to previous producer acceptance of other genetically modified crops. By 2005, for example, GM canola accounted for 78% of all canola grown nationally. So why did farmers stand up for wheat?

  In Growing Resistance, Emily Eaton reveals the motivating factors behind farmer opposition to GM wheat. She illustrates wheat’s cultural, historical, and political significance on the Canadian prairies as well as its role in crop rotation, seed saving practices, and the economic livelihoods of prairie farmers.

  Through interviews with producers, industry organizations, and biochemical companies, Eaton demonstrates how the inclusion of producer interests was integral to the coalition’s success in voicing concerns about environmental implications, international market opposition to GMOs, and the lack of transparency and democracy in Canadian biotech policy and regulation.

  Growing Resistance is a fascinating study of successful coalition building, of the need to balance local and global concerns in activist movements, and of the powerful forces vying for control of food production.

• Favourite Foote Photos: David Carr

  By U of M Press  |   0 Comments

  Posted on
  January 24th 2012
  at 7:42am

  As a part of our search for the ‘lost’ photographs of L.B. Foote, U of M Press is asking artists and historians and photographers and politicians and art historians and journalists to tell us about their favourite Foote photo. We’re documenting this search on a blog called Lost Foote Photos.

  David Carr, U of M Press’ director, contributed this piece about Foote’s photograph entitled Elks at the Promenade of Progress, September 1921:

  “It’s almost impossible to pick just one Foote photograph to write about. Foote had an enormous and diverse range and any single photo seems to ignore the many other themes and styles that weave through his fifty years of photo taking.

  

  Chose one of the great historical images (the North End slum photos for instance) and you seem to forget about the beautifully glossy portraits, such as the young Duke of Windsor standing, looking quite bored, next to a brilliantly polished black locomotive. Chose one of the portraits, and you‘re missing the powerful emotive images of ‘everyday’ family and private life.

  I’ve chosen a photo that doesn’t seem to have any of these characteristics. It’s a long, overhead shot of the Elks (Winnipeg Lodge No. 10) marching up Main Street as part of something called “The Promenade of Progress.” “Marching” is perhaps not the right way to describe a group of men dressed in white pants and beanies carrying striped umbrellas at the end of September, although its probably unfair to call it “sashaying” either. It is, nevertheless, one of those strikingly incongruous images that run through Foote’s work.

  It is this kind of photo, like the banquet in the sewer or the crew tasting the ice on the Red River, that always makes Foote seem like the artistic grandfather of Guy Maddin. What in the world could these men, dressed for some sort of odd Sunday outing, have to do with anyone’s idea of “progress?”

  But the date and place put this strange little parade into another context. The “Promenade” took place September 28, 1921. Just a little more than two years before, only a few hundred feet further north on Main Street, Winnipeg’s working class had tried its hand at a very different and much more serious movement towards progress. No one, of course, would have know this better than Foote himself, who had famously recorded those events of the 1919 General Strike in very nearly the same spot.

  Throughout the first part of the last century, this stretch of Main Street between the CNR Station and City Hall was the city’s ceremonial centre, certainly as chronicled by Foote himself. Every type of parade or procession went this route, and it may be adding too much symbolic weight to the crossing paths on Main Street of the strikers and the Elks. Nevertheless, its hard not to think that striped umbrellas and beanies in tight formation are exactly what Winnipeg’s city fathers thought was just what was needed to help erase memories of those nasty events two years before. And L.B. Foote was, as always, there to record it.”

• Favourite Foote Photos: Jim Blanchard

  By U of M Press  |   1 Comment

  Posted on
  January 17th 2012
  at 1:35pm

  As a part of it’s search for the ‘lost’ photographs of L.B. Foote, U of M Press is asking artists and historians and photographers and politicians and art historians and journalists to tell us about their favourite Foote photo. We’re documenting this search on a blog called Lost Foote Photos

  Jim Blanchard, the author of two U of M Press titles, contributed this piece about Foote’s photograph of The Telegram newsroom:

  “This is one of my favourite Foote photos. It catches a group of newspaper employees in what I suppose is the newsroom of The Telegram newspaper in their building which still sits at the corner of Albert and McDermot.

  

  The men are posing a little for Foote, maybe joking with him as someone from the rival daily. The big fellow on the left side of the table seems to be saying something that some of them think is funny. Some of the others are simply working. Their tools are paper pads and pencils, paste bottles and scissors, the latter on a chain so that everyone can share the same pair. There is phone in the left foreground but other than that there are no signs of modern equipment.

  Out of this room came, day after day, a fine newspaper with pages full of well-written, detailed reporting on what was going on in the city and out in the world. The quality of the writing was very high and if you browse through The Telegram – paper copies of The Telegram are still available at the Millennium Library – you’ll find very few errors in spelling or grammar.

  Many of the men in the picture may have been junior employees, like copy boys, who crowded in to get into the picture. But there are definitely a few ink-stained wretches here, men who look like they have been at it for quite a few years.

  It’s a lively, happy sort of picture that captures something of who these men really were and that’s why I like it.”

  Jim Blanchard is the Head of Reference Services at Elizabeth Dafoe Library at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of two award-winning UMP titles, Winnipeg 1912 (2005) and Winnipeg’s Great War: A City Comes of Age (2010). (Both titles included Foote photos.)

• David Drummond on Louis Riel

  By U of M Press  |   0 Comments

  Posted on
  December 19th 2011
  at 7:21am

  David Drummond, of Salamander Hill Design based in Elgin, PQ, is one of University of Manitoba Press’ freelance graphic designers. Most recently, he’s designed the covers for Mark Anderson and Carmen Robertson’s Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers.

  For spring 2012, David was responsible for the covers of Larry Krotz’s Piecing the Puzzle: The Genesis of AIDS Research in Africa and UMP’s reprint of Jennifer Reid’s Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State.

  

  David was kind enough to share a bit about his design process around the Louis Riel cover:

  “My goal with recent covers that I have been working on that deal with Canadian history is to up the ante and really make them look visually interesting. The covers I did recently for a two volume series on Darcy McGee are a case in point. We used high end production techniques to give them the aura of an ‘important book.’”

  “In the case of the Riel cover I wanted to avoid presenting archival photos in the usual fashion – duotones and sepiatones. I manipulated the archival image in Photoshop to give it an illustrative feel with lots of colour. This is not the typical way that figures from Canadian history are presented.”