Website of Author Keith Maillard

ON THE DEATH OF DORIS LESSING

August 20, 2024November 18, 2013 by Keith

“Literature is analysis after the event.” Doris Lessing from The Golden Notebook.

To say that Doris Lessing had a huge impact on me is a monumental understatement.

I first read Lessing in 1970.

For two years I had been pouring all of my energy into the American antiwar movement, but now the New Left was exploding into fiery fragments — bombs going off on campuses, the Weatherman faction of SDS at the height of its insanity, paranoia, bone-grinding fear, bleak nihilism. During those two years of activism I had not read fiction. I remembered the writers I used to love, felt a nostalgia for a lost time when an innocent sweetness had been possible, but in 1970 it was not possible to admire John Updike for his elegant prose. Then I read The Golden Notebook and suddenly there was Lessing in all of her fury and intensity — WAKE UP, this is serious, this is BLOODY serious, this MEANS SOMETHING.

Keith Maillard is the author of fifteen novels, one book of poetry, and two memoirs. He has won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Literary Prize and the Governor General's Literary Awards. The Clarinet Polka was awarded the Creative Arts Prize by the Polish American Historical Association. Dementia Americana won the Gerald Lampert Award in 1995 for the Best First Book of Poetry Published in Canada.

Keith was born and raised in Wheeling, West Virginia, the inspiration for the fictional town of Raysburg which serves as the setting for many of his novels. He has been a musician, a contributor for CBC Radio, a freelance photographer, and a journalist. He teaches in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

Keith occasionally posts to X (formerly known as Twitter), to Facebook, and to Tumblr where he feels much more at home. He always posts under his own name.