The Dad Dialogues

By (author): George Bowering, Charles Demers

Charles Demers is a thirtysomething comedian and the author of three books; George Bowering is eighty, Canada’s first poet laureate, and the author of more than eighty books. Charlie and George are also the best of friends. And the fathers of daughters.

In this unique book of correspondence, these two men from different generations write to each other about the burdens, anxieties, and singular joys of parenthood. The letters begin as Charlie and his wife discover they will become parents; he expresses his hopes and fears of impending fatherhood, compounded by his OCD and his own father’s illness, while George recalls his experiences raising a daughter in the 1970s and his anxieties about bringing a child into a troubled world.

Together, their thoughtful, funny, candid missives reveal what fathers know (or don’t know) about raising daughters, as well as themselves and each other. Their combined observations make for a passionate, funny, and moving portrait of fatherhood in all its imperfect, beautiful glory.

AUTHOR

George Bowering

George Bowering was born and brought up in the Okanagan Valley of Pinboy. He published his first book of poems when he was 28. Since then, he has published 100 or so books and chapbooks, won Governor General’s Awards for his poetry and fiction, was the first Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada, and has received both the Order of British Columbia and the Order of Canada. He now lives a few steps from where he lived as an undergraduate in Vancouver, British Columbia.

AUTHOR

Charles Demers

Charles Demers is a comedian, writer, and playwright, and the author of the novels Property Values (Arsenal Pulp Press) and The Prescription Errors (Insomniac Press), and the non-fiction books The Horrors (Douglas & McIntyre), Vancouver Special (Arsenal Pulp Press, now out of print), and (with George Bowering) The Dad Dialogues (Arsenal Pulp Press). He’s a regular on CBC’s The Debaters and is the voice of Walter the Slug on the Emmy-winning Netflix cartoon Beat Bugs. He is also the editor of Robin’s Egg Books, a humour imprint of Arsenal Pulp Press. A longtime political activist, he lives in East Vancouver with his wife and daughter.

Reviews

An engagingly written look at fatherhood. Despite an almost fifty year age difference, Charles and George align on most aspects of what it’s like to be a father, how marriage gets affected, and what babies are really like.
–The Ormsby Review
Confident and amusing, poignant and thoughtful … Strong undercurrents–of dread, anxiety, and fear–contribute the sense that funny episodes aside, parenting isn’t for the faint of heart.
–Macleans
A thoughtful, amusing book which should spark a lot of conversations about fathering, daughters, housework and diapers. –Vancouver Sun