Now is the Winter: Thinking about Hockey

June 2009
214 pages | ISBN 978-1-894987-34-9

Editors Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison have put together a wide-ranging collection of essays that examine all aspects of Canada's beloved sport. From its mythical beginning on a frozen northern pond to its evolution into a sport for mass consumption, with many fascinating stops along the way, this collection celebrates hockey while acknowledging that there is more to it than a lone figure skating on an outdoor rink.

List of Contributors:

Michael P. Buma, Jamie Dopp, William M. Foster, Stephen Hardy, Richard Harrison, Anne Hartman, Kelly Hewson, Andrew Holman, Craig G. Hyatt, Mark R. Julien, Brian Kennedy, E. W. (Ed) Mason, Sam McKegney, David McNeil and John Soares,

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Periodizing Hockey History: One Approach
3. "Save Our Team, Save Our Game": Identity Politics in Two Canadian Hockey Novels
4. Frank Merriwell on Skates: Heroes, Villains, Canadians and Other Others in American Juvenile Sporting Fiction, 1890–1940
5. Stanley Cup/Superman
6. The Story of Hockey Photography in the Early 1950s
7. Boycotts, Brotherhood and More: International Hockey from Moscow to Colorado Springs via Squaw Valley (1957–1962)
8. The Aboriginal Art of Wake-Swimming: Or The Media Mythologization of Jonathan Cheechoo
9. "Here for a Little Pickup?": Notes on Women's Shinny Hockey in Toronto Public Parks
10. Media Framing of the Other: Ice Hockey in the New Zealand Media
11. "What Ever Happened to the Organ and the Portrait of Her Majesty?": NHL Spectating as Imaginary Carnival
12. "But What About My Feelings?": Examing Edmonton Oilers Fan Reaction to Chris Pronger's Trade Demand from a Gift-Giving Perspective
13. "You Said You Didn't Give a Fuck about Hockey": Popular Culture, the Fastest Game on Earth and the Imagined Canadian Nation

Reviews

Stick Pen (Laurie Ricou, Canadian Literature, 01/09/2013)
“Hewson’s critical alertness to complications of the normative national identity echo in much of the rest of the collection, which includes Anne Hartman on the trickster dimension of women’s shinny, Brian Kennedy on ‘scripting’ the NHL game according to Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, David McNeil’s affectionate speculations about hockey photos as text, Sam McKegney on sports writing and racialization of the Jonathan Cheechoo story, and E.W. Mason on storytelling techniques in New Zealand sports writing. The collection is supplemented by a rich bibliography and a helpful index.”

Hockey in the Canadian Imagination: Three Books on Hockey in Literature, Culture, and History (Laura K. Davis, Journal of Canadian Studies, 01/01/2012)
“Dopp and Harrison’s collection of essays, Now is the Winter, melds the personal with the academic, and it does so with skill and eloquence.”

Book Review (Angie Abdou, Arete, 3/25/2010)
"You don't have to love hockey to love Now is the Winter. The insights gleaned are not limited to this single game. The book is multidisciplinary in the truest sense, with the contributors representing over a dozen fields of study, including Canadian Literature, Kinesiology, History, Creative Writing, Social Anthropology, Sport Management, Business, Indigenous Literatures, and Communications. Some essays consider hockey and popular culture in general terms, and some are as specific as the analysis of the 2006 trade of former Edmonton Oiler Chris Pronger."

Sports Fan Holiday Gift List (T. Kent Morgan and Dutch Holland, The Prime Times, 12/10/2009)
“In Now is the Winter, editors Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison have pulled together a collection of essays that are sure to get the reader ‘thinking about hockey.’”

Excerpt

Read the table of contents, as well as Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison's introduction to Now is the Winter: Thinking about hockey.

About the Editors

Richard Harrison’s eight books include the Governor General’s Award–finalist Big Breath of a Wish, and Hero of the Play, the first book of poetry launched at the Hockey Hall of Fame. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, a position he took up after being the Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary in 1995. His work has been published, broadcast and displayed around the world, and his poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. In On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood, Richard reflects on his father’s death, the Alberta Flood and what poetry offers a life lived around it.

Jamie Dopp is an Associate Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Victoria. He has published a variety of articles on Canadian fiction, poetry, and culture, as well as one novel and two books of poems. In 2004, during a very rare cold spell in Victoria, he stayed up all night to build a backyard ice rink and managed to have three blissful days of outdoor hockey with his family.

Other Titles by Richard Harrison

25: Hockey Poems, New & Revised (2019)

On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood (2016)

Secret Identity Reader: Essays on Sex, Death and the Superhero (2010)

Worthy of his Fall (2005)

Hero of the Play: 10th Anniversary Edition (2004)

Big Breath of a Wish (1998)