A Necessary Distance: Confessions of a Scriptwriter’s Daughter
Julie Salverson
November 5, 2024
312 pages | ISBN 978-1-998408-08-5
George Salverson had written over a thousand radio plays for the CBC before he became the first television drama editor for the corporation. He wrote scripts for such beloved series as The Beachcombers and The Littlest Hobo, but he kept very little of his writing, being decidedly unsentimental about his work. So when his daughter Julie found a series of notebooks from a round-the-world trip he’d taken in 1963 to work on a documentary about world hunger, she knew she’d found something important. But the writer of these notebooks is not the father she thought she knew. From there Julie Salverson traces a fascinating web of personal and political history, of storytelling, of culture and it’s shaping and of a man caught in a time of great change.
Advance Praise
"This meticulously crafted, funny and provocatively moving book concerns a talented writer’s far-flung project in the historical context of early Canadian radio and television. To interrogate the past is a perilous undertaking, more fraught when the examination investigates and questions family history. In a remarkable cross-genre study, the intrepid character of the author’s father is revealed, as is Julie Salverson’s courage in her ongoing ethical search for truth and clarity." – Carolyn Smart, author of Careen and Hooked
"A Necessary Distance is a fascinating look at the way time and place affect perspective. I especially loved Salverson’s encounters with her father’s journals and her recreation of his global adventures while working on a CBC documentary on world hunger. It’s an absorbing, multilayered read and a wryly amusing excavation of family and cultural assumptions, past and present.” – Allan Stratton, author of The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish and The Way Back Home
"A Necessary Distance is a strange and beautiful book. It is a sustained and barely-ever-flinching piece of writing and investigation navigating the topographies of history, memory and experience in a daughter’s journey to understand her father through the written remains of his life’s work – his film and radio scripts, his travel journals. Like a tracker on a path gone cold over the decades, she follows the signs, piecing together her narrative from fragments and unheard stories. Salverson has the capacity to produce a sense of active wonder through her writing; to derive from intensely personal experience a reader’s awareness of wider contemporary significance, and perhaps foremost, to take a digression and show it to be integral. To read not just her father, but the man himself - with generosity and forgiveness, with love and not judgement." – Peter C. Van Wyck, author of The Highway of the Atom
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Excerpt
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About the Author
Julie Salverson is a nonfiction writer, playwright, editor, scholar and theatre animator. She is a fourth-generation Icelandic Canadian writer: her father George wrote early CBC radio and television drama and her grandmother Laura won two Governor General Awards (1937,1939). Julie's theatre, opera, books and essays embrace the relationship of imagination and foolish witness to risky stories and trauma. She works on atomic culture, community-engaged theatre and the place of the foolish witness in social, political and inter-personal generative relationships. Salverson offers resiliency and peer-support workshops to communities dealing with trauma and has many years of experience teaching and running workshops. Recent publications include the book When Words Sing: Seven Canadian Libretti (Playwrights Canada Press, 2021) and Lines of Flight: An Atomic Memoir (Wolsak & Wynn, 2016).
