Mail to Magnolia - A Correspondence | Austin Macauley Publishers

Magnolia (aka Maggie Wu) is a young teenager from Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. Her life begins to overwhelm her as she grapples with the usual high school scenarios and particularly with the implications attached to being a wizard at the piano. Somehow, she discovers an old man, Chester Blantyre, and they become friends. After a while, they begin to correspond by email. Some of Chester’s mails to her form the material of this account. Anyone who enjoys a good read will find that the correspondence, as exemplified by Chester’s mails to Magnolia, involves a certain amount of do-it-yourself freedom. That is, certain questions remain to be answered by the reader, which depend on that reader’s imagination. For example, who was present at the interview when Magnolia was given advice about her crisis? And why are Chester’s mails presented in alphabetical order rather than chronologically? As you become involved, no doubt other questions will occur to you.

Arthur Ridgway was born in 1931 in Ilford, Essex, England. From an early age, he was fascinated by reading. He first went to school in Southampton. Later, he attended grammar school in Northamptonshire and then was drafted into the Royal Army Medical Corps for service as an X-ray technician in the Far East. Subsequently emigrating to Vancouver, Canada, he became a pioneer faculty member at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. While living within the magic circles of teaching students, he uncovered the pre-Google world of campus facilities to gain an advanced education.