Finding Mr. Wong - Softcover

Susan Crean was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario and is of Scots-Irish descent. She is a freelance writer and activist who has lived, besides Toronto and Paris, in Florence and New York City, and in Vancouver and Gabriola Island in British Columbia. Crean has worked as a current affairs producer for CBC-TV, an arts management consultant, a magazine editor (This Magazine), teacher, and broadcaster. Susan holds two degrees in art history and a diploma in museology from the École du Louvre in Paris, and since her return to Canada in 1970 has had academic appointments at six Canadian universities. She was the first Maclean-Hunter Chair in Creative Non-Fiction at UBC in 1990 and taught at the School of Journalism at Ryerson University from 2000 to 2006. Susan is a former chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada and a founding co-chair of the Creators’ Rights Alliance / Alliance pour les droits des créateurs (CRA/ ADC). She served on the Minister’s Advisory Committee on the Status of the Artist in British Columbia from 1993 to 1994 and on the board of Access Copyright from 1992 to 1995. She has represented creators on copyright issues for over thirty years, latterly at the international level through the CRA/ADC, attending meetings at the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva and Hong Kong. She has written and lectured extensively on the subject of intellectual property. Her articles and essays have appeared in magazines and newspapers across Canada, and she is the author of seven books, the first, Who’s Afraid of Canadian Culture, appearing in 1976. Her most recent book, The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr, was nominated for a Governor General’s award and won a BC Book Prize in 2001. She serves on the board of Native Earth Performing Arts and, in 2007, was awarded a Chalmers Fellowship. She is currently based in Toronto.

Acclaim for The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr "Crean very effectively mixes history, personal essays, and fiction into a potent cross-genre cocktail that, if it is any one thing, is mostly a travel memoir. It is, as the book’s subtitle states, a journey to find Emily Carr – Klee Wyck, the laughing one – and to come to terms with her legacy ... Elegantly written, thoughtful, and challenging, The Laughing One sheds new light on Carr’s career. More importantly, though, Crean takes the reader on a journey through a nation’s relationship not only with Carr and her work, but with the First Nations and the land itself. Essentially, Crean interrogates our fascination with the many Carrs posited by artists and historians, leaving the work to speak for itself. After this, the ways we listen to that work may never be the same."―Quill and Quire

“The memory portrait of a beloved servant is always a project fraught with dangers of sentimentality and mystification. Too often, the white author turns the tale of the racialized servants into hagiography or Hallmark sentiment, blurring entirely the brutal realities of race and class that undergird and hedge in such relationships.

Crean is exquisitely aware of these narrative dangers, and she is remarkably successful both in delineating them and avoiding them in this exemplary memoir.”
–Vancouver Sun