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Word is starting to spread about Kerry-Lee Powell's Inheritance, the searing poetic debut about PTSD and the redemptive power of song by the winner of the 2013 Boston Review Fiction Contest. When I wrote “The Lifeboat” I had been more or less bedridden for a couple of years with what later turned out to be a manageable illness. At the time I had no hope of recovering, and I’m convinced it was this despair that allowed me to imaginatively relive my father’s experiences. I understood, fully and with compassion, why he had taken his own life. I was half-asleep with the window open and a notepad beside me when the last line seemed to rise out of my bed sheets like a swelling chorus, drowning out the voices of the children playing in the park across the road. It was a serious moment, perhaps one of the most serious moments I’ve ever had.
My task was then to pare the poem down to its barest elements, try to attain, to borrow a phrase from Plath, ‘the illusion of a Greek necessity.’ I wanted to strip away as much extraneous detail as I could to show that the poem wasn’t only about my father’s tragedy but about how grief is handed down in memories and in song. The poem is a lifeboat, bearing its reader back into the past to relive my father’s terrible experience. It seemed essential to find the music in each line, to ensure that it came as close to embodying its own message as it possibly could. I think, too, that a formal poem engenders its own sense of inevitability. In this poem, I wanted the rhymes to be uncluttered, but at the same time to toll and echo like bells, to resonate the way my father’s traumatic memories and suicide continue to resonate in my life. One of the great things about art is that grief needn’t be banished or ‘cured’ or disavowed, but can instead be given its full due.
With its roots in the underworld and its high notes in the transcendent realm of the spiritual, the unearthliness of blues music endowed my own lack— of money, an identity, power—with pathos and a borrowed fervour. The lyrics and the music seemed contradictory and oddly complementary: a melancholy voice chronicling the solitudes and transience of human life with a subversive, life-affirming brilliance. I was falling in love with poetry, although I didn’t know it at the time.
DECEMBER 2, 2014
6:30 pm - Essex Branch, Essex County Library,25 Gosfield Town Line W., Essex
DECEMBER 3, 2014
7:00 pm - Leamington Arts Centre, 72 Talbot Street W., Leamington
DECEMBER 6, 2014
2:30 pm - LaSalle Branch, Essex County Library,5940 Malden Road, LaSalle
5:30 pm - Coles, 7672 Tecumseh Road E., Windsor
DECEMBER 9, 2014
6:30 pm - Kingsville Branch, Essex County Library,40 Main St. W., Kingsville
DECEMBER 11, 2014
6:30 pm - Amherstburg Branch, Essex County Library,232 Sandwich Street S., Amherstburg
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| Craig Pearson and Daniel Wells with a few book lovers! |
When you’re flipping through the pages you’re really getting a good historical overview of Windsor. It’s just a reminder that you’re rooted in the history of such a great community. It’s not just the buildings themselves: it’s the people and the energy of the community.
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| Marty Beneteau, editor of The Windsor Star. Courtesy of The Windsor Star. |
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The authors sign books for Marilyn Racovitis and her daughterHelena Ventrella. Courtesy of The Windsor Star. |
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| Special feature insert in The Windsor Star. |
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| Front page spread. |
This isn't the first excerpt published over the past month. "Anhinga," another of Kathleen's pieces, was placed in Storyville — a venue The New Yorker crowned the "digital pick of the week" for new fiction. Her story, along with others by William Vollmann, Donald Antrim, and Kseniya Melnik, were sent to subscribers of the Storyville app, and are currently available for purchase online. More on "Anhinga" can be found here.
Over at The Toronto Star last week, Emily Donaldson said some kind words about Kathleen Winter's newly released short story collection The Freedom in American Songs.
Demands are made of an African writer that are not made of a European or American writer. Insistence is made on proof of authenticity. Questions are asked about the degree to which it is ethnically genuine. No one questions whether José Saramago represents Portuguese culture. It's irrelevant to know whether James Joyce corresponds to the cultural standards of this or that European ethnic group. Why should African writers have to show such cultural passports? This happens because people persist in thinking of the production of these African writers as belonging to the domain of anthropology or ethnography. What they are producing isn't literature but a transgression of what is accepted as traditionally African.
The writer isn't just someone who writes. He’s someone who produces thought, someone capable of pollinating others with feeling and delight.
More than this, the writer challenges the basis of thought itself. He goes further than challenging the limits of political correctness. He subverts the very criteria that define what is correct, he questions the boundaries of reason.
Besides teaching me so much about writing, Alice Munro once taught me something about being a writer. It was 1986. She had just launched The Progress of Love and was doing a reading in a local library. I couldn’t afford to hand her one of the glossy new hardcovers to sign, so I took along my least-tattered Munro paperback – Lives of Girls and Women. She opened it tenderly, looked up and gave me a gracious smile before signing her name.I learned that night that the reader is to be honoured – even if she shows up with a second-hand copy of the wrong book.
Alphabet transforms from a novel of crime and punishment into a nuanced psychological profile of a killer, ultimately providing a gut-wrenching reminder of the atrocities contained within institutional walls and the lengths to which we are willing to go in order to protect our innermost selves. … Heartbreaking and emotional.We're thrilled to see such great coverage for Kathy. Alphabet is gaining momentum and quietly making waves in the states. It's definitely a book to keep your eye on.
One of the reasons for the popularity of Schoemperlen’s inventive work, which incorporates elements of collage, fragmentation, and other postmodern tropes, is that she seems to be having so much fun creating it. Her fiction also avoids turgid academic language in favour of playful re-imaginings of such mundane sources as romance advice columns, devotional texts, catalogues, and lifestyle questionnaires....Schoemperlen wants us to consider the randomness, absurdity, and militant certainties not only of another era’s texts and images but of our own, which will one day be judged as quaint as those of the Victorians. By the Book is a challenging read, but it never talks over or under the readers’ head, which should endear it to Schoemperlen’s fans and to adventurous readers unfamiliar with her work.
Writing is the way I pray. It’s through writing — the creative act — that I come into my own. I frequently have doubts about my relationship with my religion and my church. But writing? Never. ... As an actor, I was taught to observe, to listen and to empathise. As a director, I was taught to evaluate every detail of a scene from the standpoint of the audience. That balance of absorption and objectivity has been a big help to me as a writer.All Saints is a finalist for the 2014 for the Writer's Trust Award and one of the most critically acclaimed books of the year, proclaimed an instant Canadian classic by Macleans and others.
Sometime in 2007, fellow Biblioasis writer Mike Barnes sent me, in
manuscript, an essay he’d just written called “Two Rooms”, asking for my
response. From the first paragraph, I found it electrifying, astonishing,
and (remarkably) strangely beautiful despite its harrowing subject matter. It
described his hospitalization, in his early twenties, following a bizarre
self-mutilation, and what came after: misdiagnosis, two years of failed drug
trials, electroshock treatments, a staff meeting that nearly saw him
transferred to a long term care facility; then months of near-coma resulting
from a prescription dosage error. “Two Rooms” was the genesis of The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis (Biblioasis,
2008), a series of four interlocking personal essays that probe the impact of
mental illness on a life over a period of thirty years.
The reader is drawn to [Simon's] innate intelligence, his sense of humor, his delight in learning how to read and write to fill the time of his life sentence. Page sees the dichotomy of the dark and light side of her character as critical to the story. “I accept that both are true—the terrible side to these men, but the damaged, human facet also,” she says. This encompasses the question at the heart of this fine novel: Can a man, a murderer, insensitive to the violence around him, become functional, sympathetic, create and sustain relationships on a personal level? “Simon strikes me with sympathy and horror, sympathy and suspicion," says Page. "It is his 'bothness.'"It may be this complexity of character—not just with regard to Simon Austen, but with all the characters, both criminal and "correctional," that accompany him during his journey through the prison system—that made Alphabet such a celebrated novel in the U.K. and Canada in 2005, and make it one of the best American releases of 2014.
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Nancy Jo Cullen is the author of three collections of poetry and one collection of short stories. She lives between Kingston and Toronto and will be reading from 
Hosted by Piya Chattopadhyay. Sat, Oct 25th: 8:00-10:00 PM
A tribute to the life of friend, mentor, and Windsor literary icon Alistair MacLeod, with Caroline Adderson, Ryan Burchill, Steven Galloway, Nino Ricci, Antanas Sileika, Douglas Gibson, and, Daniel, Kenneth, Lewis, Marian, and Alexander MacLeod.
And last but not least, Charles Foran and Caroline Adderson will help close out the weekend as part of a special Books & Brunch event at the Art Gallery of Windsor on Sunday. Charles Foran's most recent novel is Planet Lolita, and he is the author of such books as Mordecai and a collection of essays from Biblioasis called Join the Revolution, Comrade. Caroline Adderson is the celebrated author of multiple books including Bad Imaginings and the Jasper John Dooley books for children. Her most recent book is Ellen in Pieces, published by Harper Collins. Biblioasis will be republishing her novel A History of Forgetting in 2015.