Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives

In this electrifying episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, travel back to October 1992 to hear Martha Gellhorn — novelist, journalist, and witness to nearly every major conflict of the twentieth century — read from the newly revised conclusion to her landmark book The Face of War, first published in 1959 and updated across five editions as Gellhorn found herself, again and again, unable to look away.

At 84, in what would prove to be one of her final public appearances, Gellhorn arrives at the Harbourfront stage not to reminisce but to provoke. She takes phrases we have heard so often they have lost their edges — we love our boys, better dead than red, we won the Cold War — and holds them up to the light until the rot shows through. What emerges is something rare: a moral reckoning delivered with the authority of someone who was actually there, on the ground, in Spain, in Finland, in China, across Europe, in Vietnam, in Central America, watching ordinary people absorb the violence that leaders and slogans set in motion from a safe distance.

Listen as she traces the evolution of The Face of War through five decades and five editions — each expansion driven not by ambition but by outrage she could not suppress. She describes going to Vietnam in 1966 because the reporting she was reading bore no resemblance to what she knew war actually looked like for the people living inside it. She recounts her time in El Salvador and Nicaragua, where she came to believe that American foreign policy had decided, simply, that the poor were dangerous. And she reflects on the lesson she believes governments drew from Vietnam: that the real threat to a war effort is not the enemy, but a free press.

The reading itself — Gellhorn's newly written conclusion for the 1992 edition — crackles with the same controlled fury. She takes on the arms trade with particular ferocity, arguing that governments which prosecute the drug trade while freely selling weapons to anyone who can pay are guilty of a hypocrisy that dwarfs anything crack or heroin has ever produced. She calls out the Cold War as a forty-year waste that bankrupted both superpowers while the world's poorest people paid in blood. She offers a rare note of genuine admiration for Mikhail Gorbachev — the one world leader in her experience who chose to step back from catastrophe rather than toward it. And she closes, as she always did, not with hope exactly, but with the refusal to pretend that silence is acceptable.

This recording has a great deal to say to us now. The wars Gellhorn names have changed; the logic she describes has not. Embedded journalism, managed media access, government-approved narratives of conflict — the tools she identified in 1992 have only grown more sophisticated. The gap between military spending and spending on citizens has only widened. The arms trade she called more destructive than the drug trade continues to dwarf it. And the civilians who pay the price — nameless, numerous, dying in conflicts they did not choose — remain, as she put it, out of sight.

What Gellhorn offers, in the end, is not a political programme but something more demanding: the insistence that if you believe something is evil, silence is itself a sin. She called her own contribution a squeak. It still carries.

Recommended Reading & Viewing

By Martha Gellhorn

Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn's Letters of Love & War, 1930-1949

The Face of War (print & ebook available)

The Weather in Africa Three Novellas

The View from the Ground

Travels with Myself and Another (print & ebook available)

About Martha Gellhorn

Love and Ruin by Paul McClain

Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life by Caroline Moorehead

Film & Video

The Troubles We've Seen (available via Kanopy)

The audio recording of Martha Gellhorn was recorded on stage at Harbourfront in Toronto in October 1992 and is used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Learn more about Canada's largest book festival, and its many year-round events and programs, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.

Content Warning: This episode contains references to suicide. Listener discretion is advised. Please take care of yourself and seek support if needed.
In this moving episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, travel back to October 1994 to hear Linda Gray Sexton speak candidly about the complex legacy of being Anne Sexton's daughter. Her intimate presentation at Harbourfront, allows the author to reflect on the tangled relationship between a brilliant, troubled poet and the daughter who became her literary executor at age 21—the same year Anne took her own life.
Listen as she shares the unforgettable moment of discovering a letter her mother wrote to "the 40-year-old Linda," a message across time that served as both farewell and benediction. She explores the honest, painful inversions of their relationship—including the unsettling ritual of "playing nine," where adult and child traded places in ways no child should experience. Yet she also retrieves moments of pure maternal love, like a rainy Thanksgiving afternoon when they lay together watching pheasants in the yard, a memory Anne would immortalize in her poem "The Fortress."
This recording captures Linda at a pivotal moment: twenty years after her mother's death, having moved from anger through empathy to forgiveness, ready at last to speak back to the voice that never stopped addressing her. Her journey illuminates the weight of literary executorship, the complications of loving someone who was both mentor and burden, and the hard-won understanding that came only after she herself became a mother and weathered her own depression.
As Anne Sexton wrote in the poem that gives this episode its title: "I walk, I walk. / I hold matches at street signs / for it is dark, / as dark as the leathery dead / and I have lost my green eyes / my way, my way." Anne Sexton spent her life searching for 45 Mercy Street—that metaphorical home where past and present reconcile, where confrontation joins hands with forgiveness. She never found it. But perhaps, in writing this memoir, her daughter finally did.
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SHOW NOTES
The audio recording of Linda Gray Sexton was recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in October 1994 and is used with the permission of Linda Gray Sexton and the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Learn more about Canada's largest book festival, and its many year-round events and programs, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca. 
Click here to check out Seasons One and Two of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to more than 30 previous episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Carlos Fuentes, Jamaica Kincaid and many more.
Recommended Reading & Viewing
Books by Anne Sexton
Live or Die (1966) - Pulitzer Prize winner
Transformations (1971)
45 Mercy Street (1976, posthumous)
Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (1977) [ebook]
Books by Linda Gray Sexton
Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton (1994)
Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide (2011)
Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair with Thirty-Eight Dalmations (2014)
Books About Anne Sexton
With Robert Lowell & his circle : Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and others (2012)
Three-martini afternoons at the Ritz : the rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton (2021)
About the Host of Writers Off the Page
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.
Music is by Yuka
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.

In this captivating episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, step back in time to 1990 Toronto and immerse yourself in the lyrical world of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. The recording captures Heaney in an intimate reading at the Harbourfront Reading Series, where his distinctive Irish voice brings to life some of his most beloved poems, including "Digging," "Follower," and "The Railway Children."
Heaney's verse resonates with the earthy cadence of his native countryside, conjuring vivid tableaux of his heritage—his father's calloused hands excavating potatoes from resistant soil, his aunt's practiced movements transforming flour into sustenance, and his boyhood self gazing skyward, convinced that rain-slicked telegraph wires conducted not just electricity but human connection itself. With characteristic warmth and humour, Heaney considers his creative process, discussing how his Irish upbringing and English literary education influenced his distinctive poetic voice. This rare archival recording reveals not just Heaney's masterful command of language, but also his generosity of spirit and deep humanity. Whether you're a longtime admirer of Heaney's work or discovering his poetry for the first time, this episode offers a remarkable opportunity to hear one of the 20th century's greatest poets bringing his words to life in his own voice.
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This audio recording of Seamus Heaney, recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1990, is used with the kind permission of Faber & Faber and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, as well as the Toronto International Festival of Authors.Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.  
Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.

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SHOW NOTES
Works by Seamus Heaney
Death of a Naturalist (print edition)
New Selected Poems (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone (print edition) (ebook)
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose (print edition)
Station Island (print edition) 
Other works about Heaney and other materials
On Seamus Heaney by R.F. Foster (print edition)
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (print edition)
The Poet & the Piper: Music by Seamus Heaney and Liam O'Flynn (music file via Hoopla) 
Seamus Heaney's Poetry of Remembrance (documentary via Kanopy)
About the Host of Writers Off the Page
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.
Music is by Yuka
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.

This conversation between Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes and Bob Rae, recorded in 2000, offers a time capsule of North American relations at a pivotal moment. The interview captures Fuentes just after Mexico's historic election that ended the PRI party's 71-year rule—a seismic political shift that he explains with characteristic depth and nuance. While Fuentes delves into Mexican politics with a detail that might seem excessive to casual listeners, his purpose is profound: he's illustrating how Mexico's complex political evolution deserves the same serious consideration given to more dominant nations.
What's particularly striking, viewed from today, is Fuentes' perspective on North American identity and free trade. Speaking when NAFTA was relatively new, he offers insights that feel remarkably prescient as we witness the pendulum swing from the market-linked regional identities of the 1990s toward the more protectionist national boundaries of today. As a cosmopolitan intellectual fluent in Spanish, English, and French, Fuentes represents a vision of North America that transcends borders while acknowledging deep cultural differences—"the differences are huge," he admits.
Despite his global perspective, Fuentes finds his deepest meaning in the personal: "Grandmothers are the best novelists," he tells Rae, suggesting that family storytelling contains more authentic truth than official histories. This tension between grand political narratives and intimate personal stories runs throughout their conversation, as Fuentes discusses his disciplined writing routine, his diplomat father's influence, and the powerful female protagonist of his then-new novel, The Years with Laura Diaz.
Throughout this exchange, we witness Fuentes' remarkable ability to weave together cultural creation and political engagement, offering a unified vision of human experience that remains relevant despite—or perhaps because of—the dramatic changes in our world since 2000.
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The audio recording of Carlos Fuentes in conversation with Bob Rae was recorded on stage in Toronto in October of 2000 and is used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.   
Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.

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SHOW NOTES
Works by Carlos Fuentes
The Old Gringo (ebook) (print edition)
The Years with Laura Diaz (print edition) (ebook)
Vlad: a Novel (audiobook) (ebook)
The Death of Artemio Cruz (print book)
Terra Nostra (print book)
Where the Air is Clear (print book)
Aura (print book)
Other Related Books or Materials
A World of Ideas. Writers. 2010 documentary by Bill Moyers about key Latin American writers including Fuentes.
About the Host of Writers Off the Page
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.
Music is by Yuka
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.

In October of 2000, Ursula K. Le Guin sat down with CBC's Marilyn Powell to discuss her novel, The Telling. Listening to their conversation now feels like opening a time capsule – one that paradoxically contains prescient observations about how we both preserve and erase our past. Le Guin speaks of editing with razor blades, of physically cutting away words from paper – a practice that feels almost mythological in our age of ephemeral keystrokes and vanishing digital drafts. Yet within this seemingly dated discussion emerges a timeless truth: that our past exists only through the artifacts and stories we choose to keep. As she weaves between discussing myth-making and the tactile nature of writing, Le Guin reveals how community-held stories become the framework through which we understand our history. These aren't just tales, she suggests, but rather the very architecture of human memory, the scaffolding that holds our collective past in place. There's something haunting about hearing the author, now herself part of our literary past, contemplating how we maintain connections to what came before. Yet in her voice, we hear not anxiety but wonder at how each generation finds new ways to tell its stories, to make sense of where it's been.
Perhaps that's the most enduring message from this conversation across time: that while the tools we use to record and share our stories may change, the essential human need to weave meaning from memory remains constant, evolving and adapting like a living thing.
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The audio recording of Ursula Le Guin in conversation with Marilyn Powell was recorded on stage at in Toronto in October of 2000 and is used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.  
Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.

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Works by Ursula K. Le Guin:
The Telling (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Lathe of Heaven (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Left Hand of Darkness (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Word for World is Forest (ebook)
Other works about Le Guin and other materials mentioned:
Ursula Le Guin: the Last Interview and Other Conversations (print edition)
Ursula K. Le Guin and the Ambiguous Utopia (emovie)
Earthsea, 2005 (DVD)
TPL Blog piece from 2018 on Le Guin and her legacy (link here)
About the Host of Writers Off the Page
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.
Music is by Yuka
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.