How Hope Became an Activist - Out Now!

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  • George M. Johnson

    Author of Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling With Ghosts (Palgrave Macmillan, now in paperback) and Still Life With Nudes (ArtAge).
    Books
    About
    Scholar, Screenwriter,
    Playwright, Children's Writer.

About

George grew up in Waterdown, Ontario, where he has fond early memories of weekly trips to the library with his Dad, an English teacher, and where he later worked (and read) as a student. His Mom was a watercolor painter. After many years as an English Professor George became fascinated by the more visual (and collaborative) forms of writing: drama, screenwriting and picture books.

He has won a number of awards in all of these genres, including the 2007 Canadian National Playwriting Competition for his comic play Still Life With Nudes, published by ArtAge. His screenplay The Wonder was a Finalist in the British Independent Film Festival Competition and in the Script Doctor Contest of Contest Winners Competition in L.A. His screenplay Peace Pledge won the Wildsound Screenplay Competition, received Honorable Mention in the Euroscript Screenplay Competition and the New Renaissance Film Festival (London), and was an Official Finalist in the Cannes Screenplay Contest.

His first picture book How Hope Became An Activist was published in October, 2020. His picture book Sophia’s Secrets won the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Children’s Story competition. Another one, Marisa and the Mountains will be published by Simply Read Books in February, 2021. It was a Finalist in the San Francisco Writers Conference Writing Contest, as was his unconventional alphabet story, Aldo Renaldo and the Renegade Alphabet.

He believes in the power of literature to create empathy, and all of his work reflects his long-time advocacy of social justice.

For over 25 years he has been a Professor in the English and Modern Languages Department at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, where he teaches creative writing and Modern literature, as does his wife and sometime collaborator Nina. He can be reached at gjohnson@tru.ca.

He likes to tell Jellybean stories (just ask Sophia and Ben), make puns and sing.

Canoeing, camping, and cross-country skiing count among his outdoor passions. Living surrounded by mountains, with a wife from the prairies, inspired him to write Marisa and the Mountains.

  • How Hope Became an Activist

    What is an activist? Why do we need them? Join Hope as she discovers how to make positive change on issues that matter from clothes made in fair trade to refugee aid - and to have fun at the same time!

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  • Marisa and the Mountains

    Will be published by Simply Read Books in February, 2021.
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  • Dynamic Psychology in Modernist British Fiction

    Dynamic Psychology in Modernist British Fiction argues that literary critics have tended to distort the impact of pre-Freudian psychological discourses, including psychical research, on Modern British Fiction. Psychoanalysis has received undue attention over a more typical British eclecticism, embraced by now-forgotten figures including Frederic Myers and William McDougall
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  • Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling With Ghosts

    This book traces how iconic writers - including Arthur Conan Doyle, J.M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, Wilfred Owen, and Aldous Huxley - shaped their response to the loss of loved ones in the First World War through their embrace of mysticism.
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  • Excavating Modernity: Physical, Temporal and Psychological Strata in Literature, 1900-1930.

    This book scrutinizes physical, temporal and psychological strata across early twentieth-century literature, focusing on geological and archaeological tropes and conceptions of the stratified psyche.
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  • Still Life With Nudes

    Winner of the National Playwriting Award: A group of high-spirited seniors, the Ancient Acorns, stage a sit-in at a gallery that just happens to be a former water treatment plant. A fracas erupts!
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