If I Could Turn and Meet Myself

Alden Nowlan was born near Windsor, Nova Scotia, in January, 1933, to a girl not yet fifteen years old and her hard-drinking husband. At his death in 1983, he stood in the first rank of Canadian writers. With a grade four education, Nowlan turned himself into a journalist and, after Bread, Wine and Salt won the 1967 Governor General's Award, one of Canada's most prominent poets. He also became writer in residence at the University of New Brunswick, a speech writer for Richard Hatfield, a playwright, and a nationally respected fiction writer. Nowlan escaped the suffering of his early life, but he never escaped its grip on his emotions and imagination. He wrote his own life in twelve books of poetry, two novels, a story collection, and fifteen years of weekly newspaper columns, yet he hid some of the most significant facts from everyone. If I Could Turn and Meet Myself sorts reality from fiction to portray a more complex and richly humane Nowlan than any previous commentator, including Nowlan himself.