Creative Women Doing Sixty

"I don't read and write music, I just feel it, and it all comes at once. " – Rita MacNeil   On Monday, April 22, residents of Cape Breton will gather at St. Mary’s Church in Big Pond, Nova Scotia, to celebrate the life of one of the greatest voices of Canadian country and folk music: Rita MacNeil. She passed away on April 16, 2013, due to complications in surgery;...

Creative Women Doing Sixty

Even as she was learning to co-ordinate fine motor skills using her tiny fingers at three years old, Jeanne Lamon knew she was meant to play the violin. It was as if her soul was reflected in the music produced by the instrument. She began studying the violin at the age of seven in her hometown of Queens, New York. She made it a lifelong career choice...

Creative Women Doing Sixty

It is nothing particularly groundbreaking or controversial to announce that, at eighty-one years old, Alice Munro is still one of the most brilliant writers in Canada. Unlike Margaret Atwood, probably the peer who invites the most comparison, Alice Munro does not experiment freely with form.   Apart from one novel, published in 1971, Munro deals solely in short stories, mostly about women and mostly set in rural areas. There...

Creative Women Doing Sixty

  In 1994, when Gloria Steinem turned sixty, she published a collection of essays entitled Moving Beyond Words. Ms. Steinem is, of course, the founder of Ms. magazine, a founder of New York magazine, an author, and a public lecturer. When she spoke at Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto sometime that year, I was in the audience.   At one point in her lecture, she...