Now is the Winter: Thinking about Hockey

• 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.’”

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.