Gwendolyn MacEwen

Writer

• Born: September 1, 1941
• Birthplace: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Died: November 30, 1987

Biography

Gwendolyn MacEwen, the second daughter of Alick and Elsi (Mitchell) McEwen, was born on September 1, 1941, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Most of her early education was in public schools in Toronto and Winnipeg. She became fascinated with fantasy at an early age by reading superhero comics and science fiction, and she began writing fantasy and science fiction in high school partly, it is thought, as an escape from a troubled home life shaped by her mother’s mental illness and her father’s alcoholism. Her formal education ended when she left Western Technical-Commercial School at age eighteen to begin writing full time. By then, she had changed her surname from McEwen to MacEwen.

MacEwen published her first poem at age seventeen and continued writing poetry all her life. He first books, Selah (1961) and The Drunken Clock: Poems (1961), were filled with verse that mixed science, myth, and fable. Her poems reflect concerns that would infuse much of her poetry for the next two decades, notably her belief in the innately mystical nature of humanity and its conflict with the cold realities of modern life. She would find the imagery of science fiction a suitable vehicle for addressing these concerns. MacEwen married the poet Milton Acorn in 1962, but the marriage lasted only several months, after which she began living with magician and performer Bob Mallory.

Another collection, The Rising Fire, followed in 1963, and its metaphysical explorations of the nature of reality and the physical universe further established MacEwen’s reputation as a poet who believed that artists have a responsibility to mediate between the physical and spiritual worlds. This attitude shaped the theme of MacEwen’s first novel, Julian the Magician (1963), in which a young man’s talent at stage magic is just a gloss on his true mystical nature. In 1966, after her relationship with Mallory had ended, she moved briefly to Cairo, Egypt, having received a grant to write a historical novel about the Egyptian pharoah Akhenaton, which would eventually be published in 1971 as King of Egypt, King of Dreams.

Throughout the 1960’s, MacEwen continued to write poetry and plays, several of which were dramatized on Canadian Broadcasting Corporationradio. These plays featured some of her strongest renderings of science-fiction elements, including The Lady and the Robot, about a woman frustrated in her desire to seduce an artificial intelligence, and The World of Neshiah, about a planet whose race can remember events of the future, rather than the past. Fantasy and science-fiction themes also shaped the poems in her collections A Breakfast for Barbarians: Poems (1966), and The Shadow-Maker (1969), for which she won the Governor General’s Award.

In 1971, MacEwen married Greek folksinger Nikos Tsingos, whom she had met in 1969. Her poetry collection Noman appeared the following year, as did The Armies of the Moon, another collection of poetry steeped in fantastic themes and imagery for which she won the A. J. M. Smith Poetry Award. In 1973, she and Tsingos opened a Greek café, the Trojan Horse, in Toronto, hoping that it would provide them with a more stable income. The café failed, contributing to their marital problems, and they separated in 1976. The poems in MacEwen’s collection The Fire-Eaters capture her emotional turmoil during this period. She and Tsingos divorced in 1983. MacEwen wrote prolifically during the next decade, producing several new volumes of poems, a translation of Euripides The Trojan Women (1979), a book of Arabian folk tales for children, The Honey Drum (1983), and the story collection Noman’s Land (1985). She traveled briefly in Europe in the early 1980’s and upon her return to Canada served as writer in residence at the University of Toronto in 1984 and University of Western Ontario in 1986. Her poetry collection Afterworlds appeared shortly before her death on November 30, 1987, due to complications from alcoholism.