September 5, 2010: Sockeye Salmon Migrating by the Millions - The 4th Line Theatre - Michael's Interview with Anna Quindlen
Today's guest host was Karin Wells.
Migrating by the Millions - Sockeye Salmon are flooding into the Fraser River by the millions this season. In hour one of our show, we had a discussion about the mysteries of fish forecasting.
Read more here
Listen to Hour One:
Hour Two: 4th Line Theatre - The 4th Line Theatre in rural Ontario is the little theatre that thought it could. And it did. Their plays are written by some of the best Canadian playwrights, and most nights it is a 'Standing Room Only' venue.
Read more here
Listen to Hour Two:
Elsewhere on the Show: We also brought back an interview Michael did with journalist/novelist Anna Quindlen. After a brilliant career as a columnist with both the New York Times and Newsweek, Several years ago Anna Quindlen began an equally brilliant career as a novelist. Her latest book, Every Last One, continues her exploration of that most interesting of topics-everyday life.
Music
Song: Die Forelle
Artist: Claire Desert and Anne Gastinel
Album: Classique & Zen
Migrating by the Millions
Each day, it seems the estimates of the Sockeye Salmon returning to the Fraser River this season just keep on going up. Twenty million. Thirty million. Now they are saying there will be thirty-four million Sockeye on the Fraser River this year. The biggest run in almost a hundred years. And its not just the Fraser. Sockeye runs all over the west coast are running at two or three hundred per cent higher than predicted.
If you go down to the docks, you'll find they are practically giving it away for four dollars a pound. Fish canneries don't have the capacity to handle that many fish. Up and down the coast, they are working overtime, and they still can't keep up.
This is, of course , a very different picture from what we saw last year.
Last year, we were all doing stories about how maybe we were on the verge of catching the Very Last Fish. Stories about how we have over-exploited the natural bounty of the sea for a hundred years, and now it was payback time.
Dean Bavington is a professor of Environmental History at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario.
Dr. Pauly is a professor at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia, and the principal investigator of its "Sea Around Us Project. " That is a project devoted to studying the impacts of fisheries on the world's marine ecosystems.
Music
Song: Salmon Run
Artist: As the Crow Flies
Album: Miles to Go
Anna Quindlen's Word Work
It has been a little over a year since Anna Quindlen wrote her last regular column for Newsweek Magazine.
In that column she explained that it was a time for "fresh perspective and new ideas". After nine years as the bi-weekly back-page columnist she was stepping aside to make room for younger writers. But really, she's chosen to do full-time what she's always wanted to do - make things up.
It's not the first time she's left journalism. In 1995 she quit The New York Times, where she'd won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, to concentrate on writing her novels full-time.
Her career - her "word work" as she calls it - spans almost 40 years, and her work has appeared in some of America's most influential newspapers and magazines. Then, as now, journalism's loss has been fiction's gain.
Ms. Quindlen has written 14 books, including four best-selling novels: Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue and Blessings.
Her latest novel is called, Every Last One. It's the story of an average family - two parents, three teenagers, a dog - living an average, almost unremarkable life. Until something awful happens and the family is blindsided by an event no one could have predicted.
Anna Quindlen spoke to Michael Enright in May.
Music
Song: Salmon Run
Artist: Mad Pudding
Album: Rattle on the Stovepipe
If You Build it, They Will Come
We spent the final hour of The Sunday Edition in the summer in rural Ontario - in a farmyard behind a big white farmhouse, down a hill off a gravel road near Millbrook Ontario. That's about an hour and a half east of Toronto .
The farm belongs to Robert Winslow - this is where he grew up. Robert Winslow loves this unpretentious part of Ontario and the stories it offers up. So when he inherited the farm 20 years ago he turned it into a place to tell those stories. He created 4th Line Theatre.
The audience sits in what was the hay barn; the animal barn became dressing rooms, the stage is the grass between the buildings - the stage is really the entire farm - the pond, the fields - one of this summers plays opened with two men driving a horse and cart across those fields. There are no lights - performances start at 6:00 and everyone arrives around 4:00 for a picnic before the show.
Every play has been written for 4th Line and every play springs from what the locals might think of as just things that happened around here - what others might call history.
It never should have worked but 4th Line Theatre just finished its 19th season. This year they averaged 90% attendance. Playwrights bid to write for 4th Line - to created something universal from what happened just down the road.
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