Letters from Rona / Working Life / Sort by date

I expected to remember Helen Thomas, the legendary White House correspondent who retired this week at 89 after holding presidents to account for close to half a century, as a model for my own old age---scrappy, tenacious and relentlessly committed to her craft. "I think I'll work all my life," she once said. "When you're having fun, why stop having fun?" Why, indeed. [more]

Assignment: delve into a $12 million sex discrimination case for Toronto Life magazine. Writer: young woman with no agenda or interest in gender disparity. Result: a feminist conversion and a story that says what older women with big jobs have been saying for years over a second glass of wine. However the case unfolds, that's news. [more]

No matter what field you're in or how accomplished you are, there will be times when you find yourself perplexed by a challenge you've never faced before. So you turn to a trustworthy pro with the contacts or the know-how to point you in the right direction. A person like my friend Leslie, a busy self-employed consultant who gets a buzz from sharing what she's learned. [more]

I do my best to steer clear of movies so new and hot, you can barely find a seat, but I made an exception for Up in the Air, starring George Clooney as a corporate hit man who flies all over the country firing people with cheerful sang-froid. Although I've never lost a job myself, I'll remember 2009 as the year I lost count of all the notes I sent to friends and colleagues who had just been booted out of theirs. [more]

In 1976, when we still believed in "having it all" and "glass ceiling" was a skylight with pretensions, I landed my first magazine job. Career gurus told me I should learn to act more like men. These days it's career-minded men who are being told to emulate women. So says Men's Health, the modern guy's mentor on every aspect of manhood from getting laid to getting ahead. [more]

William Safire, the formidably prolific author, columnist and self-described language maven who died this week in his eightieth year, was in the end a man of his word. Nearly five years ago he called his final-Op-Ed column for the New York Times "Never retire." When I first read that column one weekday morning in January, I had just begun what most people would call my retirement. But I scorned that word. [more]

Among the best perks of editing Chatelaine was being able to take my culinary dilemmas to a maven who knows home cooking the way Alain Ducasse knows haute cuisine---Food Editor Monda Rosenberg, since 1977 a trusted mentor, friend and kitchen confidante to millions of Canadian women (and no small number of men). [more]

If I am ever rushed on a gurney to Emerg, with a tube up my nose and a throng of doctors yelling orders in my wake, I want the first face I see to be Nurse Jackie's. Nothing stands between TV's stalwart nurse and her patient---not meddlesome relatives, not by-the-book hospital brass, not MDs determined to be heroes no matter what the cost. And certainly not her own limits. [more]

The obituary section lies open on my desk. A woman smiles up at me, lighting up the page as she used to light up rooms, podiums and bars in many countries. The words have the familiar laurel-wreath ring of all ceremonial tributes: "Alison Youngman died peacefully at home on March 8, concluding a short illness with the dignity, grace and good humour that had defined her life as a lawyer, volunteer and champion of women's leadership. [more]