George Fetherling

Douglas George Fetherling (born 1949) is a Canadian poet, novelist, and cultural commentator. One of the most prolific figures in Canadian letters, he has written or edited more than fifty books, including a dozen volumes of poetry, five book-length fictions, and a memoir. He lives in Vancouver. He has been the weekly literary columnist at five metropolitan newspapers and several national magazines. He has been writer-in-residence at Queen's University, the University of Toronto and the University of New Brunswick. He published under the name Douglas Fetherling until 1999, and thereafter under the name George Fetherling, switching to his middle name to honour his father George after recovering from life-saving surgery for the same medical condition that had killed his father.

He started in the Canadian literary industry in 1966 in Toronto, where he was the first employee of publisher House of Anansi.

A study of Fetherling's books George Fetherling and His Work, edited by Linda Rogers, features essays by W. H. New, George Elliott Clarke, Brian Busby and others.

Selected bibliography

Poetry My Experience in the War – 1970 Our Man in Utopia – 1971 Café Terminus – 1973 Eleven Early Poems – 1973 Achilles' Navel – 1974 Subroutines – 1981 Variorum: New Poems and Old, 1965-1985 – 1985 Moving Towards the Vertical Horizon – 1986 Rites of Alienation – 1988 The Dreams of Ancient Peoples – 1990 Selected Poems – 1994 Madagascar – 2000 Singer, An Elegy – 2004 The Sylvia Hotel Poems – 2010 Plans Deranged by Time – 2012

Fiction The File on Arthur Moss – 1994 Jericho – 2005 Tales of Two Cities – 2006 Walt Whitman's Secret - 2010

Non-fiction The Five Lives of Ben Hecht – 1977 Gold Diggers of 1929 – 1979 The Blue Notebook: Reports on Canadian Culture – 1985 The Crowded Darkness – 1988 The Gold Crusades: A Social History of the Gold Rushes, 1849-1929 – 1988 The Rise of the Canadian Newspaper – 1990 A Little Bit of Thunder – 1993 The Book of Assassins – 2001 River of Gold: The Fraser and Cariboo Gold Rushes – 2008

Biography The Gentle Anarchist: A Life of George Woodcock – 1998

Memoir Notes from a Journal – 1987 Travels By Night: A Memoir – 1994 Way Down Deep in the Belly of the Beast: A Memoir – 1996 The Writing Life: Journals 1975 - 2005 – 2013

Travel writing Year of the Horse: A Journey through Russia and China – 1991 The Other China: Journeys around Taiwan – 1995 Running Away to Sea: Round the World on a Tramp Freighter – 1998 Three Pagodas Pass: A Roundabout Journey to Burma – 2002 One Russia, Two Chinas – 2004 Indochina Now and Then – 2012

Anthologies edited A George Woodcock Reader – 1980 Carl Sandburg at the Movies: A Poet in the Silent Era 1920-1927 – 1985 (with Dale Fetherling) Documents in Canadian Art – 1987 Documents in Canadian Film – 1988 The Broadview Book of Canadian Anecdotes – 1988 Best Canadian Essays 1989 – 1989 Best Canadian Essays 1990 – 1990 The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs – 2001