A woman’s disappearance sends shock waves through her university town because of its parallels to the murder years before of a much-mythologized poet in an act of domestic violence.
It’s the intriguing premise for So Much Love, by Rebecca Rosenblum (MA 2007), a novel that – with a huge cast of characters and interweaving stories – took its author many years to write. Rosenblum started it in 2000, but the structure wasn’t working. “I had to wait until I was a good enough writer to write it,” she explains.
To that end, Rosenblum completed U of T’s creative writing master’s program, working with mentor Leon Rooke on her award-winning short story collection, Once. Her followup, The Big Dream, is a collection of linked stories that showed her how a book’s parts could work as a whole.
So Much Love was born from undergraduate discussions about poet Gwendolyn MacEwen – specifically, from Rosenblum’s discomfort with conflations of MacEwen’s work and the circumstances of her early death, which highlighted how a victim’s voice gets lost in tragedy. The novel also engages with ideas about university education. “Everyone learns something different from the same text,” Rosenblum says, “and I wanted to show that.”
Recent Posts
New Paths to Recovery
Every year, thousands of Canadians seek help for addiction. Which treatments work best?
Can Electric Vehicles Save the Planet?
Eliminating gas-powered cars and trucks may help avert a climate catastrophe. But they are only part of the solution
The Theatre of Tomorrow
A U of T lab is working with actors, writers and directors on how they could harness AI and other emerging technologies to generate new ideas and – just maybe – reinvent theatre