folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
Barry McKinnon was a good friend and confidant almost from the very start of my career as a newspaper journalist in Prince George. He provided great encouragement and advice soon after I arrived in March 1990 and began covering meetings of the College of New Caledonia (CNC) board of governors during weekend shifts at The Prince George Citizen.
Barry gave freely of his time in outlining the issues facing the college. Then he arranged for me an interview with the great Canadian poet Al Purdy, who gave readings at the college during the early summer of 1991.
Subsequently we had good conversations about the growing threats to disinterested, humanistic study of English. He was also concerned for the scholarly independence of instructors in the arts and for the freedom of expression of writers in the broader community. He warned about the damaging impacts of cutbacks and perceived a deliberate erosion of job security for writers who were dedicated to high standards and ideals in literary expression. He lent his moral support to people who believe in clarity and honesty in the use of the English language.
When I applied for a sessional appointment in the CNC English department in 1999, he was rooting for me and hoped I would get the job. I made it to the short list and was invited to the college for a committee interview. Although I was told I was high on the short list to be able to get an interview, ultimately it was a case of "Close, but no cigar." I didn't get the job and decided to continue working within local print journalism.
After a phase of downsizing around 2010, I moved from daily newspaper journalism into freelance writing. I wrote columns for some weeklies. By the early 2010s there began to be disputes over the allowable scope of subject matter for poets and other writers participating in public readings and reporters taking notes at them. I was asked to leave one literary reading and was made to feel uncomfortable at others. Barry came strongly to the defence of my freedom of expression as a journalist. He believed a journalist should be free to cover any literary or other arts event billed as open to the public and not have permission to attend and take notes on the event, as it was his job to do, suddenly be withdrawn after the reading was already under way. Barry believed an advertised public event should not be capriciously declared closed after it had already started because an unpopular media outlet or media representative was in attendance.
Barry was very kind and welcoming to his friends, colleagues and visiting scholars and writers. For example, he opened his home to friends and students who had experienced a serious loss in their families or who had lost a job. He was always ready to invite friends and out-of-town visitors to join him in going downtown for a beer or a meal to discuss the future of literary expression in the North. Often he would call some students and local writers together for dinner at the inner glass-enclosed private dining room at the Twisted Cork called The Library. University of California-Berkeley English professor Cecil Giscombe was one of the scholars invited to these dinners.
Barry McKinnon will be greatly missed. Too many of our good friends are leaving us. It is a very sad time.
May 30, 2024
Paul
Strickland is a Prince George writer who reviews literary events and writes
poetry and essays on cultural trends. He has an M.A. in English from UBC in
Vancouver (1974), as well as a B.A. in English (1971) and an M.A. in history
(1980) from the University of Nevada-Reno. He began writing political columns
for weeklies in 1977, and then worked nine years as a reporter for the
daily Medicine Hat News (March 1981-March 1990) and nineteen years
for The Prince George Citizen (March 1990-February 2009). From 2010
through 2012 he wrote columns and stories for The Confluence (CNC)
and Over the Edge (UNBC). He wrote bi-weekly political columns for The
Prince George Free Press from December 2012 until late April 2015,
when that paper closed. Since then he has written for newsletters about
local and regional politics, and continues writing reviews for the
online Chickenbus Tales (edited by Vivien Lougheed and John
Harris). He has self-published ten chapbooks of poetry, short stories and
essays.
