Don Nichol

B.A. English ’76, M.A. English ’78

PhD English (Edinburgh) ’84

In Don’s own words…

The education I received at Carleton continues to bolster me 40 years after I took my honours degree in English (BA 1976; MA 1978). First the obvious: I started out as a teaching assistant in Carleton’s grad programme which prepared me for sessional lectureships at Memorial, Concordia, Edinburgh, and the Open University. My first and only full-time job came in 1984, and here I am still teaching at Memorial more than 30 years later.

The prof who made the biggest impact on me was Mike Thompson. I still remember my first English class, wondering who this brilliant iconoclast was, wondering if I would make it to the second class. I did, and that was it for me: I was hooked. I ended up doing more courses with Mike, then my honours paper, then my MA thesis. It was on Anthony Burgess who seemed to come out with a new novel every time I finished a chapter. When I went off to Edinburgh, Mike’s letters were a great boost for me. I saw him in London when he ran one of his last marathons, hoped he would make it to St. John’s for a conference I organized in 1992. He sent a videotape of his paper, his voice gravelled by cancer, one of his last scholarly endeavours which was included in the proceedings.

Tom Henighan lured me into literary journalism via Penny Press which evolved into Ottawa Revue. I was doing everything from interviewing Martin Short to reviewing Monty Python’s Life of Brian. When I started my Ph.D. at Edinburgh in 1979, I found myself reviewing for The TLS, The Times Higher Education Supplement and other journals.

Carleton offered me a wide range of choices beyond English. Courses I did in Art History, Classics (with Terry Robinson), and Music (with Alan Gilmour) still exert their influence. I recently published an article on William Hogarth, plan to do another on Pope’s Homer, and am currently teaching a course in Songwriting. Notes (both mental and written) saved from film courses which I took with Chris Faulkner and George McKnight have come in handy for courses I have taught in cinema at Memorial.

My recently retired colleague, Larry Mathews, whom I first encountered at Carleton, started teaching at Memorial in 1984 along with me. I still bump into people who have connections with Carleton, some of whom are students who have gone “upalong” to continue their studies. The son of Ben Jones (who taught me Blake) works at Memorial. Peter Duchemin, son of Parker, has pursued magic in our department. Last fall, my wife and I stayed at Fishers’ Loft in Port Rexton, one of many remarkable places in Newfoundland and Labrador. It turned out that Mrs. Fisher was the daughter of George Johnston who taught me Old English and skated along the canal to campus like a wizened Tolkien. Last summer, I was delighted to re-encounter Don Beecher who was attending a conference organized by my Renaissance colleagues.

The first person thanked in the acknowledgments to Anniversary Essays on Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock (University of Toronto Press, 2016) is Ian Cameron who introduced me to the poem at Carleton in English 232. Mordecai Richler taught me a few things in the creative writing seminar he presided over at Carleton in the early 1970s. I later caught up with him at the 1990 Booker Prize banquet in London’s Guildhall when he was nominated for Solomon Gursky Was Here.

I still stay in touch with a number of my Carleton friends — Kevin Berland, Julia Drake and John Reardon, Hugh and Cynthia Gillis, Willadean Leo, Sue Rutherford, Will Straw…. One of the reasons why I am not terribly inclined towards online teaching is the relative facelessness of it, the lack of real-world contact, the chance to go to Roosters afterwards and have a great natter with excited class-mates. Four decades on, I continue to be thankful for my Carleton experience.