On the gentle teaching of painful truths

[bibliogramma]

This is the year I discovered Thomas King. King is a First Nations author and a professor of English and Theatre at Quelph University in Canada. He has been writing since the 1990s and has produced a number of novels and several collections of short stories, and in 2003 he was the first Native Canadian to deliver the Massey Lectures, which were published under the title The Truth about Stories, which I read earlier this year.

King has said that "Tragedy is my topic. Comedy is my strategy.” He writes about the Aboriginal experience in white North America, which certainly has many of the elements of tragedy, and at the same time, his work in the short stories I have read – from the volume A Short History of Indians in Canada - is so wisely and wittily funny even as it eviscerates the assumptions, attitudes, perceptions and actions of white North Americans toward First Nations and Aboriginal peoples that this white reader can only thank King for such a happy course of instruction, correction and illumination.

Reading the stories of King the author, and then reading the lectures of King the teacher on what story is and means and does in Aboriginal tradition, has been most rewarding, and I look forward to reading more works by this person who is so kind as to use his talent to make me laugh and think and learn.


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