Carrie Buchanan:
CLASS OF 1970
John Rennie High SchoolClass of 1970
Pointe claire, QC
Carleton University - JournalismClass of 2006
Ottawa, ON
Carleton University - JournalismClass of 1988
Ottawa, ON
Bryn Mawr College - Arts & ScienceClass of 1974
Bryn mawr, PA
Cedar Park Public SchoolClass of 1967
Pointe claire, QC
Carrie's Story
Okay, I'll do this. After high school I went to a U.S. women's college called Bryn Mawr, They gave me a great scholarship, so I could go, and had a great academic reputation. What I learned was well beyond the books and the papers,though. It built my confidence in my own ideas, how to support them with research, and how to ask questions. It also taught me that women can do a lot of things people once thought they couldn't. On my return, I worked for a year or so in a laboratory (I was a science geek, after all) and reconnected with George Buchanan. We got married in 1975 and are still married, with two now-adult children, Dave, born in 1978, and Sarah, born in 1981.
Early in our married life, I got the writing bug. So I began taking journalism courses at Concordia, at night, and soon quit the job to work for the News & Chronicle, then the North Shore News. George was really supportive of all this, and sometimes it asked a lot of him, for example, when we had to move from our cool downtown apartment BACK to the West Island! That was a hardship.
When Dave came along (the baby) George, who was in computer science, got a job at twice the salary in Ottawa, so we moved. His family were there, which was nice, and gave us some local support. I worked briefly for the Ottawa Journal, then it folded. I could not get another journalism job, and I felt like my right arm had been cut off. I decided to go back to school, with my mother's support as well as George's. They looked after the kids and cooked and did all sorts of supportive things when needed. I was very fortunate. But it was a part-time thing and I took till 1988 to finish. I got a job at the Ottawa Citizen, which I adored until 1995 when Conrad Black bought the paper. It was a nightmare after that, but I stayed, supporting the family for a few years while George went back to school to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. In 2000, when George was supposedly almost finished, I took a buyout from the Citizen and started my own doctoral program in Communications. I had started teaching journalism at Carleton and loved it. I taught there for seven years and was well liked by students and other faculty, but in 2006 we had to move to Cleveland. George was ordained that year, and his first job (the only ministry one so far, and a great job for him) is in Cleveland, Ohio. I have spent the past thre...Expand for more
e years finishing my dissertation, and it was done last fall, but I was ordered to do some rather extensive revisions. So I am finishing it all over again -- and that is a tough, tough process. I hope to defend in August, if I get it completed by June 30. It is about the changing "sense of place" in Canadian newspapers (the Toronto Star and Ottawa Citizen) from 1894 to 2005. That is, how is the local place represented in these papers and how did that representation change over time?
The latest news, in the spring of 2009 I landed an excellent, full-time, tenure-track job here in Cleveland. I'll be an Instructor and when I complete the PhD, an Assistant Professor, in the Tim Russert Department of Communication and Theatre Arts at John Carroll University, a respected Jesuit liberal arts college here in the eastern suburb of University Heights, just a few miles from our home. I am ecstatic, and the new office is a great space for finishing my dissertation revisions!
So that's the story of my career. Our children are doing amazing things: Dave is now a grad student himself, at Brown University, in Cognitive Science. He is married to a wonderful young woman, Sarah Mitchell-Weed, who is in law school at Northeastern in Boston. They live in Providence, RI. And daughter Sarah is in Vancouver, doing radio, writing and, in the summer, running a Girls Rock Camp (no apostrophe -- because girls rock, man!), where she teaches drumming, guitar and songwriting, I think (those are her skills, though she also plays banjo and mandolin some) and generally how great it is for girls to "rock out!" Her radio podcasts are at Life After Radio on the internet (they don't allow links here, I gather), and you will see her sometimes in The Tyee, a web-based newspaper from Vancouver.
Also central to my life is music. I sing in the church choir, and have done this for many years. I sing with friends, too, as some of you may recall my doing in high school. I am close to my sister, Elaine, particularly since our mother died in 1995. And George and I still adore one another.
I also love gardening, and am now learning about doing so with native plants. My religion is also really important to me, and one of the principles UUs believe in is the interrelatedness of all life. So I've been interested in environmental issues for many years. And done a lot of organic gardening.
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