I apologize for my silence over the last several weeks. I was in Europe, visiting family in London and getting reacquainted with Paris, for a month. Then I got sick. Then I got bogged down in preparing to move house in August, which requires much downsizing. I have had no time for writing.
Sorting through masses of papers, most of them destined for shredding, I came across this cover letter and entry for a writing competition at the University of Alberta in 2000. The letter seems to me to be more pertinent, not to say poignant, than ever in view of the seemingly unstoppable bureaucratization of universities.
The prize in the competition, open to U of A faculty, was “$10,000 to be spent on traveling for purposes other than academic research.” I didn’t win the competition, but its sponsor, Mrs. Cécile Mactaggart, liked my entry well enough to kindly fund my two-month trip to New Zealand in the fall of 2000 for purposes set out in the letter.
The text was subsequently incorporated in my book Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject, an exercise in autoethnography published by Paradigm Press in 2004, which is now part of the Routledge list.
