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Imagined Truths
Myths from a Draft-Dodging Poet
Memory is not only selective, it’s an amazing liar, con artist and spin doctor. History is what we choose to remember about the past in order to justify the present.
Richard Lemm grew up in cool 1960s Seattle, raised by alcoholic grandparents with a mad, absent mother and a mythic father who might or might not have died before he was born. To avoid the draft, he left “the greatest country in the world” and moved to Canada just as the Age of Aquarius was dawning. Now, having constructed a new and equally imagined identity, he uses his poet’s sensibility to examine the myths, familial and cultural, that shaped his youth—the unsettled frontier, the noble warrior, the little woman, the golden age of the 1950s and the inexhaustible natural resources of the Pacific Northwest.
This wry, poignant and insightful memoir looks at growing up in a family and country you didn’t chose and coming of age in the country and with the people you did.
Contributors
Richard Lemm
Richard Lemm has taught creative writing and literature at the University of Prince Edward Island since 1988. He is the author of six poetry collections, a short fiction collection, and a biography of Milton Acorn, Canada’s People’s Poet. A past-president of The League of Canadian Poets and past co-chair of Access Copyright, he has served on juries for The Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the CBC Radio Literary Competition, and the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.
