At the Toronto Arts and Letters Club

I gave a talk today on Jackson's Wars at the Toronto Arts and Letters Club. A great audience, and an incredible historic space. It's where A.Y. Jackson came for lunch, in the room in which I was speaking, with several fellow future members of the Group of Seven in May 1913.

Kind words from Lorne Huston on “Jackson’s Wars”

Montreal cultural historian Lorne Huston has some nice things to say about Jackson's Wars in the Spring 2023 issue of MCLL News, the newsletter of the McGill School of Continuing Studies. He writes in part: "Hunter has done his homework. He keeps an open but critical mind as he combs through a vast archive of...

Just published: Repairing the World

I'm delighted to say that Repairing the World: Sheila Kussner and the Power of Empathy, has just been published. This was a work commissioned by a Montreal-based committee, but they gave me free rein to portray the life, character, and achievements of a truly remarkable person I knew nothing about. Famous in Montreal, Sheila Kussner...

“Jackson’s Wars” a finalist for the Dafoe Prize

Lovely news this morning from my publisher, McGill-Queen's University Press: Jackson's Wars is one of five finalists for the 2023 Dafoe Book Prize. The finalists have been chosen from books in 44 different fields. "The John W. Dafoe Book Prize memorializes John Wesley Dafoe, one of the most significant Canadian editors of the 20th century....

A thumbs-up from Charles Hill

Charles Hill, curator emeritus of Canadian art at the National Gallery, has graciously sent along an endorsement of my latest book Jackson's Wars: "This is a superbly researched book on a period in the life of A.Y. Jackson that is too often lightly treated, yet was crucial to the development of his social and artistic...

The Cry of the Loon

An edited version of this article appeared in the Winter 2005/06 issue of ON Nature. The first of several ironies in our relationship with the common loon is the way we’ve turned a vocalization born of stress—the multiple-note tremolo with an octave jump near the end—into an audio signature of northern tranquility. Loons make this...