by Randy Nikkel Schroeder
NEWEST PRESS
2026/$23.95/342 pp.

I’ve never read a book like Sinner’s Banquet. Randy Nikkel Schroeder has created a dark (and funny!) romp of a novel that fuses real and imagined Mennonite culture, noir tropes, Shakespearean-style insults and a deep goth sensibility.

The opening chapter drives you into the narrative at high speed with the surprise of Lethbridge, Alberta, being called “LA” and the energy of Schroeder’s similes such as “white as a peeled creamsicle.” The novel’s wild plot, which takes as many twisting turns as the protagonist’s turbocharged Cressida, involves the plight of Luke, a shunned Menno (due to adolescent sexual shenanigans in a church) now residing in Vancouver and working as a dealer, who gets on the wrong side of Serendipity Hamm, the “benzo queen,” after he tries to pull a scam. Fleeing back to his past with his doomed buddy Buddha to attend his uncle Ezra’s funeral, Luke just gets more wacko as he meets up with childhood accomplices, such as the deviously erotic Nora, and they plot revenge. I can’t give away the gory deliverance, but I must warn you, it’s intensely abject and not for the faint of gut.

The trio’s initial plan turns ever more complicated as it draws in a dastardly embalmer, a vicious gravedigger, an incipient deacon, Andy, who got the moniker Ratzy (for being a tattler), two dashing cops, a Hutterite and a nasty biker called Moby Dyck. The story recalls Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled tales, spiced with Trainspotting-style vice, with characters plucked from the mouth of The Big Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak (“I’ll dry your socks on your mother’s cross,” “I’ll make egg rolls with your foreskin.”) Benjamin Hertwig’s Juiceboxers and Susan Perly’s Death Valley also come to mind. But Sinner’s Banquet is unique, with uncommon scenes involving the history of Nazism, Dionysian cannibalism, a mysterious drug called Rumijch and the desecration of corpses. Grim, yes, but rollicking too.

The short chapters are full of clever allusions to everything from A Tale of Two Cities to Melville, insertions of Plautdietsch lingo (that “meidung” feeling), a plethora of jokes (at times repeating their “badabum” a bit too often, as when Luke inserts his “you’re a real poet” riposte with four different characters), and even some beautiful descriptions of the prairies (“the dark slopes of the Porcupine Hills and the windswept ridges of the Whaleback”). At the end of this unravelling world, Luke remains, both altered and unchanged by his brutal experiences, the entire narrative a kind of meditation on the Thomas Wolfe saying “You can’t go home again.” Sinner’s Banquet is a terrifically startling read, and putting it down, I wonder, “How am I gonna stir my butter now?”

Catherine Owen is the author of 17 books of poetry and prose.

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by C.J. Lavigne
NEWEST PRESS
2025/$23.95/176 pp.

The new speculative fiction imprint for NeWest Press, Barbour Books, comes out strongly with this remarkable novella from C.J. Lavigne, known to readers and awards committees for her excellent debut, In Veritas.

The Drowned Man’s Daughter is a fine book: rich, dark, intense, sneaky, secretly literary. On first reading I was simply lost in the strange and complex world of Naia and her cohort of generational slow-apocalypse survivors. As I read, I also wondered: does every generation of writers write the apocalypse that they have not earned but their forebears deserve

Lavigne’s narrator lives in a future world that desperately needs magic but cannot find it. Instead, magical thinking infects a tiny lost pocket of people who yearn for a way to make sense of their marginal existence. On an island, in an abandoned pre-breakdown ruin that may or may not have been a research station, a handful of survivors are locked into a strange ecosystem where sea people could be real or just a reflection from seals’ eyes in the depths. But there are definitely savage people on land who eat “moss-berries” (the reader extrapolates a world where moss has toxic berries) and give their babies to the island people to raise. Naia, however, was an infant from elsewhere, washed ashore on a disc of ancient plastic not long after a mysterious drowned man was found in the same spot, and her people are desperate for her to be a magical being who can influence the sea and the storms. Her narrative is a masterful tangle, as Naia wants to live up to the mythology even though she knows it’s not real. Still, over time, she is drawn into the mass desire for answers and salvation. Whether or not she finds those isn’t the point. The journey is not about the destination.

On rereading The Drowned Man’s Daughter I was able to get the distance to look at how Lavigne makes, or doesn’t make, this post-breakdown future alive to the reader. During the online launch Lavigne said, “I explained everything, but then it was too long, so I cut every explanation but left the descriptions and actions”—which in itself is a master-class instruction for any speculative writer. The reader must be alert to the subtle interweaving of what Samuel R. Delany called “subjunctivity”: descriptions of a world not ours, but enough like ours to deceive us, or at least lull us into false assumptions that then are shattered by a single phrase or act. For example, my favourite moment, sublime in both art and craft, places a key piece of worldbuilding—on page 108! There, Naia says, of the community elder’s death, “She had been wise and hard and kind. She had once known a man who remembered birds.”

Candas Jane Dorsey is a multi-genre author and editor.

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by Carissa Halton
NEWEST PRESS
2025/$23.95/376 pp.

Revolution Songs is the debut novel of Carissa Halton, a communications consultant and keynote speaker on community development and government relations. Despite Revolution Songs being her first foray into fiction, she’s not an inexperienced writer. Halton previously published Little Yellow House (University of Alberta Press, 2018), a nonfiction account of moving to a rough, inner-city Edmonton neighbourhood. She has also published widely in magazines such as Today’s Parent and Azure and won a National Magazine Award for an article in Eighteen Bridges.

Halton brings direct language and talent as a researcher to her first attempt at fiction. Revolution Songs is a meticulously researched account of the turbulent years in the Crowsnest Pass from 1928 to 1932. Readers needn’t be put off by the two-page character list or the author’s note that sets out the book’s historical context. The novel is accessible and easy to follow despite its large cast. Halton delivers the story in short, catchy chapters, each with its own narrative arc, and readers will also learn the history by being immersed in the story. However, the endnote clarifying where Halton takes liberties and where she sticks to facts will be invaluable to history buffs. This transparency and rigorous research make Revolution Songs the perfect novel for anyone wanting an energetic, immersive tour of this region’s Depression-era history.

Halton is one of the few authors to hold a fictional mirror up to this specific region. In an old-fashioned, chronological storytelling style, she sketches the main events of the Pass with such acute attention that the place itself becomes a main character. She captures the smell of the mines, the shadow of Frank Slide, the dark days, the relentless wind, the omnipresent coal dust, the development of the local Communist party at the same time as the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, the growing support for women’s emancipation, and the constant grief and fear of families who made their living by mining coal. A character complains the smell alone would make her divorce her husband if he forced her to live in one of these miserable towns.

From the large cast, Annie Jalmer emerges as the novel’s heart. Readers focus on her as she navigates the Pass’s political conflicts, such as that between communist and fascist forces, or the rising unrest of workers. This labour unrest eventually results in a strike that provides the novel’s main plot. Though writing in largely utilitarian language, Halton creates believable, compelling characters who pull readers into the drama and lend insight, especially into the challenges of women navigating the hard mining-town life and the province’s fraught Depression-era politics. The story of the Canadian KKK gaining a foothold in Alberta is an important and timely reminder that not only can it happen here, but it has happened here—as a direct outcome of similar political polarization.

Halton’s deep research has afforded her no shortage of drama. She portrays a company that gives its employees just enough shifts that they’ll stay and labour conditions in which boys die because the “boss class” refuses to prioritize human life over their own financial interest. Despite this inhospitable working environment, desperate workers come from all over the world to this “miserable mountain pass.” Halton powerfully notes that there are many languages in the Pass, but all fail to describe the grief.

Revolution Songs might not be the book for readers who like experimental literary fiction and poetic language, but lovers of historical fiction will be hard-pressed to find a novel more packed full of drama than this one.

Angie Abdou is a professor of creative writing at Athabasca University. Her most recent book is This One Wild Life (ECW).

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by Lisa Martin
NEWEST PRESS
2025/$24.95/400 pp.

Nearly every paragraph of A Story Can Be Told About Pain, Lisa Martin’s debut novel, reads like a prose poem. Martin constructs her words so carefully that each sentence sings with beauty. An award-winning poet and essayist, Martin proves equally adept at the novel. Her prose has the rich evocativeness of the novels of Michael Ondaatje.

The central metaphor of the novel, highlighted in the book’s exquisite design, is the pine beetle plague, slowly eating trees from the inside. Toward the book’s end, a narrator draws readers’ attention to the attractive lines the pine beetle makes in wood. Should we admire the beautiful scripts beetles leave on dead trees, despite the destruction Standing on nearly 400 pages of proof, the book eventually answers: maybe yes. Maybe admiring beauty is the only way to keep going.

Though the novel has many complex characters and compelling plot lines, the main story revolves around Shiloh and her mother, Ruth. In the opening, the reader watches with Shiloh as her father plummets in a plane crash that ends his life and changes Shiloh’s and Ruth’s. Martin’s meditation on pain—how to be present with so much pain, how to move on from that pain—centres on these two characters but extends to all characters and perhaps her readers.

Martin’s characters live with various kinds of pain (even simply the pain of living a long life). The crash scene (with its aftermath) is central, articulating the ineffable grief and confusion of life-altering disaster and the impossibility of comprehending our reality changing in an instant. Martin brilliantly captures the devastating realization that we have little control over our own lives.

The stories Martin tells also address the question of how much weight to give such personal pain in a world of melting Arctic ice caps, warming waters of Bangladesh, ruined forests, and wildfires. One character beautifully decides that we must put the weight of the world down until we can bear the weight of our own pack. “I don’t want to be just another dead tree still standing.” Nobody can carry the whole weight all the time, and trying to do so will work to nobody’s advantage. Martin fills her book with profound bits of hard-won wisdom.

A Story Can Be Told About Pain is poetic and philosophical. Readers can approach it as a contemporary survival treatise. However, first it is a compelling novel—with riveting stories about Ruth and Shiloh and Raymond and Madeleine and Dave.

Lisa Martin proves that not only can a story be told about pain, but, in talented hands, pain (whether personal or global) can be transformed into beauty. She has a special talent.

Angie Abdou is the author of This One Wild Life (ECW).

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by Tom Radford
NEWEST PRESS
2024/$20.95/304 pp.

The most successful biographies are driven by a story, transforming a collection of historical facts into a compelling and coherent journey. The problem with Tom Radford’s biography of his grandparents, the journalists Peggy and Balmer Watt, is that it lacks a clear narrative thread. The consequence is that Peggy & Balmer: Two Journalists at the Edge of History lacks focus, feeling like a meandering patchwork of chronological sketches.

Such a result is surprising given the author’s achievements. Radford is an accomplished filmmaker, with over 50 films and documentaries to his credit. In 2020 he was appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada and has won several awards for his work. The Edmonton-based writer and director knows how to tell a story.

Knowing this about Radford makes reading Peggy & Balmer all the more frustrating. The potential for a great narrative is there: a young married couple, both journalists, arrive in Edmonton just as Alberta is declared a province. It’s a time of great hope and ambition along with difficult living conditions and political friction—culminating in the election of William Aberhart’s Social Credit government in 1935 and the media’s subsequent battle against the Press Act, for which the Edmonton Journal, where Balmer was then editor-in-chief, won a Pulitzer Prize. At the centre of this backdrop are two people who are in love despite being so different. Peggy is strong-willed, outgoing and skeptical of entrenched power structures, while Balmer is responsible, reserved and pragmatic.

Radford has attempted to focus this biography with a clearly stated theme, that the book is about “a love affair with the Alberta frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, a passion for place that consumed the lives of two extraordinary journalists.” His intention, however, is just not reflected in the execution. Much of the content of the book is derived from Radford’s own personal experiences and political opinions. In the first chapter, for instance, readers are thrown into the midst of the devastating wildfires that consumed much of northern Alberta in 2016 as Radford himself films the destruction from a helicopter. What follows is a withering criticism of resource extraction in the province. The author tries to justify including these passages by rooting them in the history of oil and gas development in the province. But such digressions are highly distracting from Peggy and Balmer’s journey.

Another persistent problem in the book is that, despite having access to personal diaries and newspaper clippings, Radford includes very few passages from these primary sources. He frequently tells the reader about Peggy’s internal thoughts and feelings, but rarely includes excerpts from her diaries to reflect these things in her own words. Likewise, Radford describes some of Balmer’s work as a journalist but includes few quotes from his many columns. These are missed opportunities to give Peggy and Balmer a voice.

Radford also misses several opportunities to explore Peggy and Balmer’s role as journalists during a tumultuous period in Alberta history. For example, in a pair of chapters devoted to the First World War, Radford never examines the role of Balmer’s newspaper, the Edmonton Journal, during the war, so we never learn whether the paper supported or opposed Canada’s role in the conflict or remained neutral. Not a single passage from Balmer’s columns during this period is included in the book. Nor is there an examination of Peggy’s or Balmer’s experiences as journalists reporting on the war. Indeed, Peggy and Balmer are often absent or at best passive witnesses as history unfolds around them.

The book is not without notable strengths. Radford provides a good summary of Alberta’s history, a primer for anyone with limited knowledge of the early 20th century. And the epilogue relives an excursion the young Radford experienced with his grandparents that is both insightful and moving. But these merits are eclipsed by the book’s omissions and poor focus.

Andrew Torry is a playwright and curriculum designer with the City of Calgary.

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by Ruth DyckFehderau
Newest press
2023/$23.95/352 pp.

It’s hard to imagine being four years old, going suddenly deaf and then being left by your father at the Elora Home for the Feeble-Minded—in 1963. From there, Verity Blessure is soon moved to the Holdstock Facility in Alberta. Author Ruth DyckFehderau relieves readers of having to imagine all this, by laying bare what Verity and others at the facility must endure.

Verity’s father, Esau, on the advice of the town’s doctor, gives Verity away while her mother, Jude, is in the hospital. The novel shows a series of terrible choices by people trying to do the right thing. Or perhaps it’s just a series of terrible choices by people who should know better. Verity, somewhat reborn as Athena, later tries to discover her own story, on the advice of her therapist, who says the task may help her regain some of her shredded memory. Through newspaper articles, medical documents, letters, interviews and anything she can access, Athena constructs a profoundly moving, heartbreaking account of how individuals and a society fail their most vulnerable.

Athena struggles with the motivations of those who have such a devastating effect on her. She pieces together her father’s life and reveals the suffering Esau endured as a young man who wanted to study geology, but poverty and family responsibilities prevented his dream. She considers the role played by Harriet, the head nurse at Holdstock, especially in conjunction with Dr. Mol Vestidge, whose first move with Verity is to plunge a filled syringe into her leg, knocking her out for days. Harriet and Mol manage to keep the facility running despite a series of funding cuts that result in an inhumane environment—but an efficient one, thinks Harriet. The novel shows the changing attitudes to mental healthcare (though it’s evident we still have a long way to go, given the number of people who lack homes and care).

DyckFehderau has written a remarkable novel that bursts with cruelty—and kindness. Mental and physical health, sexuality, homosexuality, poverty, friendship, religion, art, even the love of and for a dog are topics layered upon Athena’s search for herself. And the novel has moments of joy that help relieve the pain. For example, Athena’s friend Mr. Saarsgard (who owns an XXX film store) often takes Athena for rides on his motorcycle. He gets goggles for Vincent the dog so he can ride too. Athena notes, “This morning [Vincent] brought me not his leash but his goggles. I believe he wanted to go for another spin. I understand entirely.” As the author/compiler of the book, Athena is gifted in capturing the voices of the various characters and imagining how they may have felt. And of course behind Athena is DyckFehderau, whose novel I (Athena) is rich and complex and deserves a huge amount of attention.

Candace Fertile teaches English at Camosun College.

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Read more from the archive “Mental Health Place and Home” March 2024.

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by Ellen Anderson Penno
NEWEST PRESS
2024/$24.95/248 pp.

How does one carry on after losing a lover to the mountains In what ways does grief leave its imprint on that young love, when the relationship is newly fragile and uncertain Ellen Anderson Penno’s memoir Counting Bones touches on these difficult questions, following in the vein of Maria Coffey’s classic Fragile Edge and Jan Redford’s more recent End of the Rope.

Decades after the Mount Baker avalanche that claimed Ian Kraabel’s life, sensational reports about the emergence of his climbing partner’s backpack from the toe of Coleman Glacier vault Penno back into a grief she thought she’d sealed away. “So many times my thoughts had travelled to retrace the events of the avalanche… that my mind flew through every detail to the inevitable finish, like water flowing down the creek behind my childhood home.” Her response to this news is to tell her own story, plundering old diaries and letters to provide a vivid picture of life with Ian and the months and years following his untimely death.

The narrative joyfully conveys the affect arising from a shared language—philosophical discussions about Plato’s soul mates, “hypotenusing” as the act of taking the most direct walking route, and a letter from Ian (pronounced “Yawn”) signed “crushedly yours.” Of their intense few months living together, Penno writes, “Our carefree tangle of bodies would have me sleepily confused as I awoke, my hand resting on his stomach, thinking it was my own body.”

Too soon after Ian’s death, Penno, with little time to exhale, is flung into the rigours of medical training. “I was a med school student by day, fighting off grief at the end of every day. She was giving me a solid daily beating, and what I did not know yet is that I should not have been fighting her so hard.” Throughout the book, the mantra “step, rest, step, rest, repeat, repeat, repeat” bleats its mountain climbing mantra: the only way to make it through anything big is to break it down into manageable pieces.

Chapters are artfully stitched together with topics from Gray’s Anatomy such as The Heart (breaking, bleeding, beating) and The Sympathetic Nerve (put on your own oxygen mask before helping others). The result is a piercing and original read that enfolds the reader with touches of humour and pathos.

The author has stated that her book is meant to carry hope: that one can carry on after traumatic loss—step, rest, repeat, repeat—and moreover that grace is possible. In her first book, Penno shows that revisiting memories of a lost love can be more intimately rewarding than one might ever imagine.

Elaine Morin is co-editor of two literary anthologies.

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by Jaspreet Singh
NEWEST PRESS
2022/$20.95/104 pp.

Jaspreet Singh’s How to Hold a Pebble is published under NeWest Press’s “Crow Said” poetry series in honour of Robert Kroetsch, which emphasizes “places and people outside the literary mainstream” and features poets who “will continue Kroetsch’s literary tradition of innovation, interrogation and generosity of spirit.” Singh and his poetry collection are an ideal representative of the spirit of this series.

Singh’s first poem, “Six Months Ago,” ends with the image of a raven performing two “little love pantoums/ meant to linger/ within me// They linger”, a perfect opening to a collection of poems that also linger in the mind, to the point of haunting, as love poems to the earth. As with this one, many of the poems are deceptive in their smallness, their understatement, but, like a pebble, hold deep complexities. The poem “The Zoo,” for instance, sees a taxi driver admonish the speaker for taking his parents to the zoo, noting that “North America and/ Europe used to display/ non-white/ people in zoos” and suggesting instead to “Show respected parents the Athabasca/ Glacier before it melts”, again reminding the reader of imminent ecological collapse.

The collection is remarkable for the variety of forms Singh deftly employs—from free-verse lyric poetry, reminiscent perhaps of Ondaatje’s early lyricism, to masterful ghazals and the formal experimentation of, for instance, “Cyclone,” in which lines whirl across the page division and words swirl to mimic the cyclical chaos of a storm:

“apart Things         Things Falling         were”

The same words whip past and return, repeating in a different disorder, as objects might in a cyclone—form here not just reflecting but becoming content.

Of particular note is “Whyte Avenue,” an ekphrastic poem that takes a freshly painted mural on Whyte Avenue as the focal point of an extended meditation on art, community, belonging and desire in the Anthropocene. The poem gently invites us to look at a woman looking at a mural of a whale as others on the street “join her/ in the looking”. The speaker watches them watching and feels “I have entered the mimetic/ desire of the first woman”. But the speaker also feels he is “outside/ the frame”. Whether he’s entered the frame of desire or remains outside is an uncertainty that arises because “times have/ changed. Mural making/ and watching have changed”. These changes are simultaneously personal and global: “The sea is rising” in part because Whyte Avenue “will keep making/ heat”; this poem, like so many in the collection, hangs under the shadow of the climate crisis.

Innovative and searching, this rich collection will linger, will haunt, may gently sink beneath your wisdom like a pebble.

Jay Gamble teaches in the English department at the U of L.

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by Margaret Macpherson
NEWEST PRESS
2022/$24.95/296 pp.

Novelist Margaret Macpherson wrote Tracking the Caribou Queen: Memoir of a Settler Girlhood to understand “the insidious ways systemic racism shaped my youth in Yellowknife” during the 1960s and 1970s. Macpherson draws from first-hand experiences to “reveal how my thinking about Indigeneity in those days was warped by stereotype, prejudice and white privilege.” If settlers can name their participation in past injustices, she writes, “only then can we make way for a right and equitable future as true Treaty People.”

Macpherson’s personal history begins with her family moving to Yellowknife, where her father worked as a school principal and later as a federal bureaucrat. The memoir’s structure tracks a series of incidents from her early childhood to late adolescence. From the jokes she hears about a woman living in a hotel, to uncomfortable play dates with a scooped neighbourhood girl, to a pair of cringe-inducing sleepovers, her anecdotes reveal the sometimes subtle but always toxic sting of interpersonal racism.

Other moments explore the complicated relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. In a scene near the end of high school, Macpherson goes on one last date with a young Dene man from the Akaitcho First Nation. Their dialogue brims with adolescent longing and confusion. They camp beneath the stars and then go their separate ways, with no dramatic conclusion or goodbye. The author renders moments like these with a natural authenticity, casting aside stereotypes.

Macpherson is less effective at scrutinizing systemic racism. Though she hints at broader patterns of institutional practices, she never examines them or their impacts in detail. Consider when she was 13 and wrote a story for a class assignment. Her submission appropriated Indigenous history and used several racist typecasts. Macpherson takes personal responsibility for writing the story. But she was 13, still young and impressionable. No doubt several forces influenced her thoughts and actions, but these go unexamined. Where did she learn the stereotypes she used Who or what taught her that appropriation was okay

These and other social factors are a discernible gap throughout the memoir. Macpherson never tells what her school curriculum taught her about Indigenous peoples. We learn almost nothing about the hostel next to her school that housed Indigenous youth. She divulges little about her father’s job managing Indigenous education in the North. Her stated purpose at the outset is to understand how systemic racism shaped her youth, but these institutional details are largely absent. As important as personal accountability is, Macpherson takes on more than her fair share while letting the surrounding racist structures off the hook.

Andrew Torry is a curriculum designer for the City of Calgary.

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by Mark Lisac
NeWest Press
2020/$19.95/320 pp.

In Mark Lisac’s engaging new mystery, his second novel after a long career as a political journalist, Edmonton lawyer George Rabani reopens a client’s sale of his personal photo collection to the Alberta government. Rabani and client Jack Ostroski wrestle with the government over old photos that raise moral dilemmas. Some could embarrass the party in power. One could identify the National Guard soldier who killed a student at a 1972 Wisconsin demonstration.

Ostroski was a third-generation Kodak employee in Rochester, NY, before making his way to Hollywood. That career—with a possible starlet romance—was interrupted by the Korean War. Returning rootless, he lost another near-love at a Buffalo TV station. Now he fixes and sells old cameras in Edmonton.

The characters live as if in a movie, holding the values—and temptations—of black and white times. As Rabani walks, his window reflections “flickered past like frames of old movie film.” A closed cinema’s poster case is like a tombstone marking the end of the culture that began with vaudeville.

Ostroski is Old School. He prefers his Underwood typewriter, where “nothing turns into something…. Not like an arrangement of electrons in a computer.” Worse, digitizing images is “a destructive perversion… like an atomic bomb,” that renders the timeless photo ephemeral. The new demon cell phone photos “make everything forgettable” by detaching us from our experience. For him, the decay in the image medium reflects our loss of meaning, of the past, of our moral bearings, both individually and in the political and social order.

Alberta is portrayed as young, indeed averse to any past: “Here history is something to be wiped out, as if one is ashamed of it.” One romance ends when the woman must move to Chicago to find work in her field, “historical preservation.” The province’s sleek new high-rises connote “the land of… endless new optimisms.”

The novel is carefully structured: a comic surprise in the opening hostage scene sets up a later threat, then a fatal conclusion. But on these Edmonton mean streets people aren’t murdered. If the genre recalls Walter Neff of Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1946), the novel’s inspiration is Walter Benjamin, who distinguished history from remembrance: “History tells you what happened in the past…. Remembered events are infinite because they are only the keys to everything that happened before and after them.” The past lives and controls the present even as our images of it decay. With his eye for detail and the courage to inflect his genre conventions, Lisac proves a dab hand at conveying weighty themes lightly. Like those movies.

Maurice Yacowar is a professor emeritus at the U of C.

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