Marilyn Jones | Emily Carr Chronicler

The Book of Small: The Stories That Made Emily Carr Famous

Published: 7 September, 2025
Written by Marilyn Jones

The Book of Small is a collection of thirty-six word sketches in which Emily Carr–four decades later–relates anecdotes about her life as a young girl in the frontier town of Victoria. She notes: “There were a great many things that I only half understood, such as saloons and the Royal Family and the Chain Gang.” The young Emily, who gave herself the nickname “Small,” was an intense, observant and sensitive yet rebellious child,…

read more

Before the Totems: Emily & Alice in Alaska 1907

Published: 5 September, 2025
Written by Marilyn Jones

In the summer of 1907, Emily Carr and her sister Alice set out on an adventurous three week holiday to Alaska—a journey that would have a major impact on Emily’s life and art. The pair left from Seattle on August 18th, 1907, on the cruise ship ‘S.S. Princess Royal’ This would be Carr’s first direct encounter with the Indigenous villages of the Northwest Coast, and it played a formative role in the development…

read more

Emily Carr & the Fruits of Her Pottery Years

Published: 3 September, 2025
Written by Marilyn Jones

When one thinks of Emily Carr, images of towering British Columbia forests, brooding skies, and bold totem poles rendered in expressive brushwork come to mind. But nestled between her early frustrations as a painter and her later recognition as a major Canadian modernist lies a lesser-known, yet deeply telling chapter in her creative life: her pottery work from 1925 to 1932. This short-lived career in ceramics, born of financial desperation and simmering artistic…

read more