Sad to hear that Canadian writer David Helwig died
this past Tuesday, after a brief stay in palliative care. It was good to know,
at least, that he was able to see and appreciate Ingrid Ruthig’s work editing David Helwig: Essays on His Works, a
book that managed to appear mere weeks before his death. My own small
contribution to such, solicited by the editor, was the “12 or 20 questions” interview I did with him, way back in December, 2009.
I moved through a number of Helwig works during my
twenties, and he was even good enough to read for me at one point, somewhere in
the early 1990s, when I was running poetry events as benefits for the Ottawa
Food Bank. The collections of essays he edited, The Human Elements (two
volumes), were important books for my young self. And he was always both kind
and attentive those few times we did interact. During a trip to London with
Stephen Brockwell back in 2006, I actually brought his then-new memoir with me to read [see my review of such here], and sat afternoons in a park by Westminster Abbey, moving slowly
through his adventures in Kingston, in both writing and theatre circles.
Condolences to his friends and family.
Further biographical information can be found on him here, with a more extensive bibliography at his own website.
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