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.
A Note from Julie
We apologize for a mistake in the introduction. My previous book, Lines of Flight, follows the path of uranium mined in Northwest Territories (not Northern Ontario). The story of this uranium, the Sahtú Dene of Great Bear Lake and the atomic bomb can be found in the feature documentary Atomic Reaction, now on CBC doc channel and coming in January to CBC Gem.
Advance Praise
"Julie Salverson’s fascinating memoir, A Necessary Distance: Confessions of a Scriptwriter’s Daughter documents her study of travel kept by her father when he was compiling research for a film about world hunger in 1963. George Salverson wrote scripts for radio and television, and documentary films for the CBC, as well as being its first television drama editor. In turn, his mother Laura Salverson won the Governor General’s Award twice for her work writing about women, poverty and the immigrant experience. From these sources, Julie Salverson has inherited a rich legacy of story-telling, and in this memoir, she interrogates the historical, political and cultural moment that her father documented, as he struggled to reconcile his values and understanding of the world with the people and experiences he encountered. As Salverson probes his notes, she endeavours to filter out his privilege in an attempt to reach a deep understanding of who he really was and how he chose to move forward. Salverson manages to balance her own experience of family history with her father’s accounts in a way that celebrates his contributions while acknowledging the importance of thinking critically about the issues that define and challenge us. Highly recommended." – Lucy Black, author of A Quilting of Scars
"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
Interviews
A Necessary Distance: Thinking on the Page Across Generations with Julie Salverson (The Icelandic Roots Podcast, 21/04/2025)
Julie Salverson is interviewed on this great podcast talking about her recent book A Necessary Distance, where her famous Icelandic grandmother might make an appearance.
E437 with JULIE SALVERSON (Jamie Tennant, Get Lit, 03/04/2025)
Jamie Tennant talks to author Julie Salverson about her new book.
Julie Salverson Takes the Reader on a Fascinating Journey Through Her Father's Life in A Necessary Distance (Open Book, 09/12/2024)
"The book is about how we draw on everything we have, in order to move forward with, I’d say, a kind of radical sense of possibility."
A Necessary Distance: Confessions of a Scriptwriter's Daughter (Hollay Ghadery, New Books Network, 01/12/2024)
A fabulous interview between Hollay Ghadery, in her new position of host for the New Books Network, and Julie Salverson!
“I don’t want to reduce people to victims or villains”: An Interview with Julie Salverson (All Lit Up, 21/11/2024)
Julie talks about the experience of writing about her family history, what she does as a resilience trainer, and what she means by the importance of inheritance in this interview.
Articles
January 3, 2025, 5-6pm (Bruce Kauffman, finding a voice on cfrc 101.9fm, 03/01/2025)
If you couldn't make it to Julie Salverson's launch last fall, you can listen in here!
Books on My List (Julie Salverson, Wolsak and Wynn blog, 19/11/2024)
Julie Salverson rounds up a great list of strongly written books.
Most Anticipated: Our Fall 2024 Nonfiction Preview (49th Shelf, 01/08/2024)
Julie's book makes this great list.
Excerpt
Click here to read an excerpt from A Necessary Distance.
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).