THE
GALLEY
The Media Club of
Ottawa
"Penning the Future"
February, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
Guest speaker: Hon. Flora MacDonald, P.C., C.C.
Member of Parliament for Kingston and the Islands from 1972 - 1988. A
leader in peace, health and world issues, she will speak about her work
with girls in Afghanistan.
Where: Library and Archives
Canada, Room
156.
Time: 6 p.m.
Cost: $20, Media Club members $15
includes light meal.
Coffee only $7.00
RSVP: June Coxon 613 521-4855
***
|
Janice
Fiamengo
Discusses Kit Coleman
 Although Kit Coleman
was a private person behind the facade of her newspaper columns,
Professor
Fiamengo told us the story of her life she had pieced together for her
book. It
was a life that Kit herself proclaimed to be
unorthodox.
Born
in Ireland, she
migrated to Canada where she worked for the he Toronto Mail as
a
columnist until 1911. It was while working for that newspaper that she
became,
in 1898, the first accredited female Canadian war correspondent.
Fiamengo
noted that
women’s pages were introduced as regular features of Canadian
newspapers in the
1800s. Although Kit Coleman, who knew French, Italian, Spanish and
Latin, wrote
for such pages, her column didn’t stick to the usual
women’s pages topics. She
preferred to write about world events, sprinkling her columns, called
“Kit’s
Kingdom”, with quotations from many sources. Consequently she
had many male
readers as well as women. And she received letters from readers, whom
she
called her ‘paper friends’, from numerous places
around the world as well as
across Canada. Her writing included advice to readers who wrote to her.
To
illustrate why readers found her daily columns so fascinating for three
decades, Fiamengo’s handout included some of Kit’s
responses to her readers
that ran in her columns.
Other
books about
Kit Coleman include Barbara Freidman’s Kit’s
Kingdom, and Ted Ferguson’s book
called Queen of Hearts.
“Kit
Coleman, who
died in 1915, created a persona,” said Fiamengo, who left us
with the question,
‘is the person we meet in her columns really her?’
http://www.english.uottawa.ca/faculty/fiamengo.html
|
|