Alison Garwood Jones

Penelope Fitzgerald on Builders & Takers

Originally published in November 2023 in Blog

Occasionally, a novelist comes along who distracts me from my love of biographies. Enter Penelope Fitzgerald, the English novelist and author of The Bookshop. I’ve decided this drawing is her protagonist, Florence Green. Florence’s honest attempts to open a jewell of a bookshop in her seaside English town were destroyed by the coordinated efforts of […]

Read more

Viking girl

Originally published in October 2017 in Blog, Toronto Illustrators

Cartoon by Alison Garwood-Jones Doing anything well takes discipline. This is Hildegard. She’s a Viking warrior with a stringent daily routine involving running, journaling/goal setting, and practicing her fencing. Not much gets in her way, especially men. But, at some point, she’ll hit a wall. The need for balance — not exactly defined in the […]

Read more

Mrs. H.T. Miller

Originally published in December 2016 in Blog

Mrs. H.T. Miller, widow: iron-gray clipped hair (lightly waved). No makeup. Smokes occasionally. Eats peppermints. Keeps them in the right pocket of her full-length beaver coat. #CapoteCharacters, 1945.

Read more

Enid, Bruce & Pierre

Originally published in October 2015 in Blog

“Hey, what’s up with Fergie?” asked Jacob Meier, one of the boys in Enid Ferguson’s Grade 9 Canadian history class. Someone had to explain her absence. It was a Wednesday morning at Rideau Academy and Enid had called in sick one day after dragging herself to school in lumpy drawstring track pants and shock-absorbing runners. Jacob, […]

Read more

Out of the woods

Originally published in April 2015 in Blog

ildegard walked the forest in a squeaking body of armor. Her chest plate was bronze and had dings from all the arrows that had tried to pierce her heart, but never made it. Her waist was tiny and bound by a wide leather belt fringed with hard studs designed to keep hands off. Her long […]

Read more

Fiction

Originally published in October 2013 in Blog

Read it here.

Read more

Fiction and human nature

Originally published in January 2010 in Blog

There’s a reason why Shakespeare feels completely fresh the further we move away from his time, and why the spine is cracked on almost every page of a book by Alice Munro and Philip Roth, at least in my collection. I don’t see that sort of wear and tear on the covers of my Erich […]

Read more
error: Content is protected !!