CNQ shortlisted for National Magazine Awards

Congratulations are in order to Lynn Coady and Caroline Adderson, whose short stories published in Canadian Notes & Queries Magazine have been shortlisted for the National Magazine Awards.

Lynn Coady's "Dogs in Clothes," which appeared in CNQ 85 and Caroline Adderson's "Ellen-Celine, Celine-Ellen," which appeared in CNQ 86, both made the cut along with six other works of fiction published in Canadian magazines this year.

Further congratulations go to the numerous other Biblioasis authors who were shortlisted for various National Magazine awards, including Patricia Young in both the "One of a Kind" and Poetry categories, Lorna Jackson in the Fiction category, Russell Smith in the Personal Journalism category, and Robyn Sarah in the Poetry category.

The winners will be announced at the National Magazine Awards Gala June 7th at the Carlu in Toronto. For more information, head over to magazine-awards.com.

Good luck to all our finalists!

Alex Good's Headboard

Over at Good Reports, Alex Good has a short, though typically smart, review of Lorna Jackson's Cold-cocked: On Hockey.

Cold-Cocked is a bit of a grab-bag of a book: a fan's notes following the fortunes of the Vancouver Canucks (the author lives on Vancouver Island), an essay on sports, gender, and the media, a family history, and a menopause memoir. Though not consistently "on" hockey, hockey is the stable reference point around which everything else coheres as bodies and relationships fall apart. Sharply observed and honest to the point of being alienating at times, Jackson's book is a revealing personal odyssey as well as a valuable addition to the literature of our national game.

Lorna Jackson & Words on the Water

Just received word that Lorna Jackson will be appearing at the Campbell River Words on the Water Fest on Saturday, March 28th. Details can be found here.

Thin Air, Take Two: An Interview with Lorna Jackson

Over at the Thin Air blog, HOT AIR, there's a short and sweet interview with Lorna Jackson about Cold-cocked, Flirt, reading, writing and interviews in general. Another opportunity to plug one of the most enjoyably dark and off-the-wall collections we've had a chance to be part of at Biblioasis (Flirt: The Interviews), and a very fine writer. Flirt should still be available on any bookstore shelf worthy of the name in the country; Cold-cocked may not be quite as easy to find, but as hockey season starts again -- spent Thursday eve watching the Windsor Spitfires, ranked number one at the moment in the country, demolish the Sarnia Sting, with Emerson, and I expect there's a lot more OHL events in our future -- this is certainly worth digging up if you failed to last season.

The interview with Lorna can be found here:

/thinair2008.blogspot.com/2008/09/line-of-inquiry-lorna-jackson.html

Flirt: The Globe Review

A fabulous, smart, funny, moving, convincing, flirtatious review of Jackson's Flirt in the GLOBE this morn. Katia Grubisic: I owe you at least a shot of an (un)reasonable scotch the next time you're either in Emeryville, or I make it back to Montreal! (I know, I know: destined to be the latter.)

Katia-the interviewer-cum-reviewer: "I like the book more each time I read it." Which is what I was saying in yesterday's post. This is a book you read more than once. It keeps drawing me back to it (the last time being yesterday, hence the post), if only for the pleasure of dipping in for a few pages. It's as gratifying, as pleasurable, as a back-rub from Janet Jones Gretzky. Not that I've had one of those. Yet. But an impoverished publisher can dream, can't he?

So, please, go out and buy the damned book before Chapters/Indigo sends them all back.

FICTION

In which I flirt with Lorna

KATIA GRUBISIC

June 14, 2008

FLIRT

The Interviews

By Lorna Jackson

Biblioasis, 93 pages, $16.95

Print Edition - Section Front

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Lorna! Oh. Sorry.

- Mouthful of hair, sorry.

- I'm used to the two-cheek Montreal kiss. Leads to accidental making out when I try it with West-Coasters.

- The West Coast doesn't kiss. Flirting's transgression enough.

- Were you trying to be transgressive with this book, a literary incarnation of flirting?

- Not particularly. Just to show ... Just a coffee for me. This is a great old dive.

- Do you have The Macallan? 15? 21? Thanks.

- This was one of only three that got licences after Prohibition, the other two long gone. Vancouver's reinvented itself 14 times since we played here. "I lived in the city when it meant something, before it meant so little." I say that in the book.

- In Flirt, every short story is a mock-interview - with musicians, athletes, writers - cobbled together from real interviews, research, biographies, but each piece crescendos to reveal the interviewer. Like your first collection and your novel, the primacy of character is what drives the story. The tone is similarly edgy, too; you describe breastfeeding as being stabbed with a chainsaw.

- Alice Munro takes exception to the feasibility of that comparison.

- You've always done violence well, the latent violence of how hard it is to live a hard life well. You strike a risky balance between tenderness and honesty. Your writing revs. Mark Jarman summarized it as Hamlet meets Baywatch.

- Mark's a hoot.

- You wouldn't have wanted to flirt with him in this one? Or Hamlet, for that matter? David Hasselhoff?

- Nah. Flirting with Mark, we'd've ended up eloping to Vegas in robot suits or something. Hamlet's too wordy wordy wordy, and as for the Hass, I don't like men with bigger breasts than mine. Anyway, you're here with Lorna the character. Ask me about the interviews. Lorna the writer is home watching the game.

- Right, yes. The writer is not a tube of toothpaste, sayeth Atwood.

- But I toy with that autobiographical distance.

- Lorna-the-writer's last book was about hockey. In Flirt, we see you cruising around with Bobby Orr in his Cadillac, kayaking with your real-life pretend boyfriend Markus Naslund, getting a backrub from Janet Gretzky. What is it about hockey?

- You know, it's the facing opposition, often against the odds, and then someone at last does something. It's not unlike an interview, with a different set of players.

- Constructing the self by confronting the other. And the self is the story? I was concerned initially about the lack of linear plot in Flirt. I was worried too about keeping track of who's saying what. Like in some unattributed dialogue, when you find yourself counting backward to figure out the speaker. But the voices here are clear, just idiosyncratic enough. And the through line is Lorna-the-character's need to tell her stories, the way everybody has stories, plural.

- Yeah. To quote myself quoting Richard Ford, whose answers to the mock interview are lifted from a real interview I did with him.

- But your questions were different?

- The character I construct, her thoughts on writing, art, fatherhood, daughterhood, teenage love and rebellion, all that is elaborated against those real answers, yes.

- What was your favourite mock-terview? The Janet Gretzky is hilarious; she's so self-helpish, repressed. Has abolished the first-person singular pronoun. Says gosh.

- Totally wanted me.

- Totally. And Alice Munro - "Maybe it's flirting you smell, not manure." Your frustration with how she wrote Dance of the Happy Shades while her girls were napping ...

- ... while my daughter wailed, "Come get me, you slut," as soon as I sat down with a pad of paper.

- You have a little crush on Alice Munro. That's probably the most seductive interview, you coyly reminding her of the end of Floating Bridge ...

- Great story; she dances so much so fast, without her "tights getting saggy."

- You seemed sweet on Benjamin Britten, too. By that last piece, the protagonist-cum-interviewer has told her whole story, in subtle bits that emerge organically, if somewhat megalomaniacally, through each conversation: the older sister who died young, the father who ineptly faked his own death, the string of musician boyfriends, the end of alcoholism. What's Britten like?

- Meticulously attentive, even posthumously, waiting for the world to amaze him, wondering what instrument he'll use to mimic the happy hens cavorting roosterless nearby. He held my hands, you know.

- Yeah, I liked that part. It was sincere; the interview rings true, sketches the subject exactly while touching on your own ars poetica.

- So it works, the character of the interviewer?

- Perfect. I like the book more each time I read it. She's a great character, flawed in all the right places, the kind of hard knocks all women would dare to rub up against, and sympathetic because it is hard, but you live it anyway. No self-pity ...

- Gawd no. Suck it up, snarls my Don Cherry-esque alter ego.

- You get the secondary characters, too -- you explain an absent God and do a full portrait of the dead sister in three sentences. A cutlery-coddling husband. Chelios. Thurber the spaniel.

- The story emerges from those details. Storytelling, like interviewing, is about the ability to lead your audience to a different perspective.

- You ask Britten whether "superficial effects are the will of the material, rather than the ego of the artist." Alluding to writing as well as to his Three Divertimenti?

- A writer has to listen to the writing, to the characters, in order to know the story and how to tell it.

- A good listener, in short. Like a musician, like ... You used to be a bassist, right? Good listeners. And bassists are hot.

- Are you flirting with me?

Katia Grubisic bats her eyelashes and drinks reasonable scotch in Montreal. Her first collection of poems, What If Red Ran Out, was published this spring.

Lorna Jackson Flirts with Richard Ford.

I haven't posted enough about this book yet. Available for about two months now, we only got around to launching last weekend in Victoria. There's only been scant coverage thus far -- a rather poor review of it in Q&Q, an article in a Victoria paper -- the Times-Colonist? -- which got many of its facts mixed up. A piece last week or this I have not seen yet in Monday magazine, Victoria's ALt-weekly. There's a Globe review upcoming, and I expect a few others to follow. Not the wide net cast by Lorna's Cold-cocked, but nor did we expect there to be. It's not a hockey book (though several of the pieces deal in some form with the sport), and it's a book which is awfully hard to define. A book which may fall between the cracks.

Which is a damn shame, as it is certainly the most idiosyncratic book of fiction Biblioasis has published, and perhaps the oddest title that will be published in Canada this year. Is it fiction? Okay, then, short fiction? A strangely arranged novel? A collection of linked riffs? Is it, as we've said in the cover bumpf, a long, comic essay on grief?

It's all of these things, and also brilliant. Comic. Beautifully conceived and written. Every time I look at the book I'm drawn into it, abandon myself to its pages for the pure pleasure of them. It has nothing to do with the interview subjects, Ian Tyson, Bobby Orr, Alice Munro, Janet Jones-Gretzky, Michael Ondaatje, Benjamin Britten. Richard Ford. It is entirely the book's finely crafted sensibility, its humour and sadness, its language and the joy Jackson takes in it. The intelligence and compassion and the absolutely bizarre shape this book takes. So give the damn thing a chance, will you?

As it ahppens, we've put Lorna's Richard Ford interview online on the CNQ website, so you can read it here:

www.notesandqueries.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=85&Itemid=48

Here's an excerpt, which starts with a question from the narrator:

—Do you have anxieties about writing in the first person from the narrative perspective of a guy who has sex with 18 women after his little boy dies, or a guy who thinks Canadians and their sport are boring? Are you afraid friends and family might confuse author and character?

—Absolutely not.

—Is that maturity, or did you never have those anxieties?

—I don’t give a shit.

—And did you never give a shit?

—If I did I made myself quit.

—One more question, Richard, then my time’s up. Who’s writing better short stories than you are?

Cold-cocked: the Blogger's Take & Flirt:The Interviews

After beating the traditional bushes to try and get some play, we sent review copies of Lorna Jackson's Cold-cocked: On Hockey to some of the leading hockey bloggers in the land. Over the last few weeks, several of these have posted reviews. They can be found by following the links below:

On Frozen Blog: http://www.onfrozenblog.com/2008/02/25/cold-cocked-is-a-hot-read/

Hockey Blog in Canada: http://hockey-blog-in-canada.blogspot.com/2008/02/tbc-cold-cocked-on-hockey.html

Scarlett Ice: scarlettice.blogspot.com/2008/02/scarlett-ice-library-cold-cocked-on.html

Untypical Girls: /untypicalgirls.wordpress.com/2008/02/16/book-review-cold-cocked-on-hockey/

Women's Sports Blog: ftlouie.typepad.com/womensports/2008/02/le-book-review.html

There were a couple of others I can't seem to locate right now, but i'll direct them to your attention later. More also quite likely to follow.

Lorna's next book, Flirt: The Interviews should come back from the printer within the next week. There's three hockey-related "interviews" in this collection -- Bobby Orr, Markus Naslund, and Janet Jones-Gretzky -- to go along with Ian Tyson, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, Michael Ondaatje and Benjamin Britten. "Interviews", in quotation marks, because they are, of course, fiction, or a pastiche of fiction, interview, news articles and biographies, and lord knows what else. It's the oddest book we'll be publishing this year, the hardest to define, and perhaps the most enjoyable. A collection of linked fictions in interview form conducted by a woman who would much rather tell her own story than listen to those of her famous subjects, by a woman who simply cannot stop talking about herself. Everything is about her, from Richard Ford's feelings about landscape and Bobby Orr's oft-injured knee, to Ian Tyson's lyrics, Alice Munro's motherhood, Markus Naslund's spirituality. Janet Gretzky's curves. Flirt might be a comic essay on adolescent grief. Or a comic essay on creativity. But perhaps its best to leave it as a collection of linked comic short fictions that mock real interviews and question the sort of information we often find in them.

As I said earlier, the pitching begins. And this is certainly one of our spring books that y'all should make sure you pick up. It's as much fun as you're likely to have between two covers. Which, alas, may say something about those of you who tune into this blog semi-regularly.

The Anti-Cherry: An Inimitable Look at our Sport

Roy MacGregor in this morn's Globe and Mail writes about Lorna Jackson's Cold-cocked: On Hockey. Not in the book sections, boys and girls, but on page A2 of our national paper. As if this book might actually be newsworthy.

It's too long to type in, and the Globe has pulled its Globe Insider Pay-per-View trick, but for those of you who have access it can be found here:

www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/v5/content/subscribe?user_URL=http://www.theglobeandmail.com%2Fservlet%2Fstory%2FLAC.20071231.MACGREGOR31%2FTPStory%2F%3Fquery%3Dcold-cocked&ord=919614&brand=theglobeandmail&force_login=true


For those of you who don't, here a sampling of what Roy says of Lorna and her book:

AN INIMITABLE LOOK AT OUR SPORT

"The anti-Cherry is alive and well and living on the west Coast. She is a shepherd who names her sheep after hockey players ... And she knows her hockey. ... {Cold-cocked} may be the most unusual book ever written on the game ... a book that stretches from medieval literature ... to pop culture. "

Jackson, Hockey, & the holidays

I've been taking a bit of time off this past week, but thought I'd check in on a few things before heading off to the show this afternoon: No Country For Old Men, pairing perhaps my favourite directors in the Coen Bros. with one of my favourite novelists, Cormac McCarthy. All indications are it will be fabulous. One of the things I checked in on was Lorna Jackson's blog, Cold-cocked, where I discovered a few recent posts. I've pasted in the most recent below, though another excellent post can be found here:

//lornaj.blogspot.com/2007/12/captain-emos-wrister.html

Here's her post from yesterday. And, incidentally, Lorna will be nationwide on Sounds Like Canada with Shelagh Rogers January 9th.

The winter solstice brings back the light, sure, and not a moment too soon. It also brings lots of salt and butter and crabbiness and, phew, World Junior Hockey from far away lands.

Yesterday against the Czechs and this morning versus Slovakia—the wee nation that has already given us Hossas, two magic Marians, a pre-concussion Richard Zednik—the Canadians were snoozy and robotic. Great (fascistic) coaching is one thing, and “yay, we win again!” but must our junior tourny teams all play the same way and look like table hockey on big ice? Positionally sound, okay, but also predictable and machine-steady. Blame the salt and butter, but I nodded off—this was before 8 o’clock in BC, home of Kyle Turris—during the first two periods.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht teaches the aesthetics of sport at Stanford and is the author of the neat little book, In Praise of Athletic Beauty. He's an egghead, sure, but Gumbrecht talks about how the greatest pleasure in sport (or in art), why we watch and cheer, is when the unexpected happens. Seems kinda duh put that way, but I like how it explains that faster heartbeat and instant call to attention when a mistake happens on ice, or a spasm of uncontrolled creativity. This morning, Drew Doughty (great name for a Canadian, or in the case of westcoasters, Self-Doughty) decided to spinorama in the neutral zone when we all thought (cause we know the game's usual rhythms and patterns) he was going to retreat and regroup. He’s long practised that move and apparently had been told by coaches to tone down such hotdoggery for this tournament, to take fewer chances. Even before the move led to the Turris goal, it was thrilling to see the game stop in its tracks and to watch imagination and spark—things we value in all teenagers—squeeze the game off those tracks and send it bumping and grinding toward the net.

So far, things seem controlled and interesting and maybe we’ve moved beyond this as a nation (since the Super Series last year and the ’72 series before it) but: please. I don’t want to see the Canadians headshot the other team’s best forward so he can’t play, possibly ever again.

And speaking of spinoramas: anyone remotely interested in Canadian sports writing should be sad that John Burns has announced he will soon be leaving the Georgia Straight. Over the last ten years, Burnsie has always let me review the sports books I wanted to, has always given sports writing a place to be considered and criticized as legitimate cultural commentary and as literature. During the writing of Cold-cocked: On Hockey (and also my forthcoming book, Flirt: The Interviews), he listened, cared, encouraged and let me read and review many of the books that informed my take on hockey and how we feel, read and write the game. Let’s hope he’s not feeling too Self-Doughty and knows that extreme change (aka “the old spinorama”) is truly the only way to become better and more.

Cold-cocked Longlisted for the BC Award for Canadian Non-fiction

Wonderful news, folks! Lorna's swell book -- I believe I may have told you that it's a special tome -- Cold-cocked: On Hockey has been shortlisted for the BC Award for Canadian Non-fiction. It's one of the more lucrative prizes in the country, sitting pretty at $40,000.00. Buys a lot of hockey pucks, and could get a family of four swell season's tickets to all Vancouver Canucks games. So vote with your wallets, and pick up a copy: let's let the sales figures do the talking.

The shortlist will be announced in November. As I said, it's a stacked list. But c'mon: do you want to read about Hockey or Lord Beaverbrook? Hockey, or salmon-spawning?

Good luck to all (though, of course, especially to Lorna: cue Hockey Night in Canada theme!)

Announcement below:

BC Celebrates Canada's Best

Longlist Announced

The jury for Canada's largest literary non-fiction prize, the British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, has just released its longlist for 2008. Ten titles are on the longlist for the $40,000 prize, representing a wide range of subject and originating from publishers across the country.


Longlist for the Fourth annual British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction

Title: Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself
Author: Donald Harman Akenson
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

Title: The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory, and the Death of Wild Culture
Author: Tim Bowling
Publisher: Nightwood Editions

Title: At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914 to 1916
Author: Tim Cook
Publisher: Viking Canada

Title: The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son
Author: David Gilmour
Publisher: Thomas Allen Publishers

Title: From Harvey River
Author: Lorna Goodison
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Title: Cold-Cocked: On Hockey
Author: Lorna Jackson
Publisher: Biblioasis

Title: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Knopf Canada

Title: Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir
Author: Marina Nemat
Publisher: Viking Canada

Title: Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy
Author: Jacques Poitras
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions

Title: Portrait in Light and Shadow: The Life of Yousuf Karsh
Author: Maria Tippett
Publisher: House of Anansi Press


Jury Chair David Mitchell notes: "The quality and diversity of the titles on this longlist are testimony to the enduring strength of Canadian non-fiction. As a result, the work of our jury has been and continues to be extremely challenging."

From the longlist, the jury will select a shortlist, to be announced in November 2007. The award presentation will take place in late-January 2008 in Vancouver.

The jury for the 2008 British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction comprises:
David Mitchell (jury chair), a well-known political commentator and historian whose career has spanned both the public and private sectors. Mr. Mitchell is currently Vice-Principal, Advancement at Queen's University. His published work includes the notable biography, W.A.C. Bennett and the Rise of British Columbia.

Patrick Lane, one of Canada's finest poets. Mr. Lane's award-winning works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have been published around the world. In 2005, Mr. Lane won the British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for his memoir, There Is a Season.

Sandra Martin, a senior features writer for the Globe and Mail. Ms. Martin is a past winner of the Atkinson and Canadian Journalism Fellowships and gold and silver National Magazine Awards, as well as the author of the just-published book, The First Man: Daughters Write About Their Fathers.


Previous winners for the British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction include:
Noah Richler for This Is My Country, What's Yours? (2007)
Rebecca Godfrey for Under the Bridge (2006)
Patrick Lane for There Is a Season (2005)

Inside Hockey. com

Lorna Jackson is now writing a column for insidehockey.com,. the first of which is up. To check it out in the original (the site is worth a gander), go here.

As Lorna has posted it on her own blog, however, I think I can get away with an old cut & paste below.

Lorna is also reading this Friday in Toronto, and should be on CBC's Q Thursday. More information to follow.

Desperate

from InsideHockey.com

It usually happens to me early October, Hockey Night in Canada on the little television upstairs, Maple Leafs home to Tampa Bay maybe. Colour man Don Cherry pitches his first mega-snit of the year, tells the kids at home that hockey players should be manly warriors and not visor-wearing Franco-sissies, and my teenaged daughter leaves the room because I’m shouting and shaking so much she can’t enjoy Vincent Lecavalier’s post-goal hug with Martin St. Louis. This year, though, my first rage came late, and Dandy Don didn’t start it.

Another network—the usually relevant TSN—recently commissioned a poll to track Sidney Crosby’s relative celebrity status in Canada. He’s likely the best hockey player in the world, they figured, but does that make him a cultural icon? Quiet the irritated voice in your head shrieking why why why would anyone waste the time of 1000 (500 men, 500 women) busy folks. On a list of Can-stars of all ilk—actors, musicians, celebs—Sid finished #6, between Avril Lavigne and Nelly Furtado and a couple behind Wayne Gretzky. (Even though they didn’t ask anybody in Quebec—huh?—Celine Dion was still #1.) On its own, the poll seems a silly and undignified way to treat athletes, but not enough to make me shout and shake.

But then: “In a game dominated by male fans,” says the report’s voice-over, and my mad-o-meter starts to rise, “it’s no surprise that men appreciate Crosby’s play with the Pittsburgh Penguins.” Men, ya see, know what it takes to finesse circus-assists from your knees while demon d-men hack your Nova Scotian face with sharp sticks, or to use your impossible quadriceps to power through a surly Slovakian centre’s desperation backcheck. Because men get it. They know stuff. They dominate the game with their amazing hockey sense.

And women? They who make up close to half of ticket buyers, depending on where you find your stat? “Crosby’s popularity is surprisingly high among women.” Cue the cute blonde on the street: “He’s young, he’s hot, he’s got tons of money…” she says. And cue the pretty gossip girl-slash-cultural critic from Entertainment Television: “You know what?” she sporty-spouts, “Youth and wealth are powerful aphrodisiacs.”

Back to HNIC. The Canadian public broadcaster is doing fine work to respect female fans and to acknowledge that women watch the game, understand it, are passionate about NHL hockey and its players, and get it from the inside, too: women play. Cassie Campbell—of the gold-medal-winning 2002 Olympic team—interviews players rinkside and gets them to seem personable; between periods, we get on-ice lessons with a veteran player/coach drilling pre-teen co-ed players. The goalie usually has her hair ponytailed. For a league desperate to woo new fans and re-stoke its old ones, this approach to broadcasting seems not only sensible, but strategic. There’s plenty of game for everybody.

Do women enjoy the next-door handsomeness of hockey players? Do men see in Crosby the boy they couldn’t be or the son they never had? Of course, and vice versa. Fans choose athletes not only for talent and competitive star-power, for their ability to bring home the Cup. They also align themselves with character. In Vancouver, veteran Trevor Linden sets the standard for civic duty and humanitarianism, and men admire him as a gentleman and a saint who raises his game for the playoffs. He’s also the one guy women from 14 to 90 would marry in a minute, providing he quarterbacks the 5-on-3 kill, wins every draw from Joe Sakic, and doesn’t stiffen those curls with too much gel. Drafted into the city at 18, Linden has grown up in front of fans for almost two decades and has shown skill, grit and heart on the ice. His hand-eye may be on the downslide, but his appeal is still complex and important.

One day, Crosby’s appeal will be, too. In the meantime, those who profit from the game and its #1 draw are a little too desperate to assign legendary status to a kid so young his whiskers droop.

The Hockey Season Begins

A new post from Lorna Jackson on the national pastime.

New Game, Same Old

An interview I did a few weeks ago with www.thetyee.ca reveals the startling revelation that I did not pick Markus Naslund in my hockey pool this year and tells why. But so guilty and disloyal did I feel after that interview, I joined another pool and chose Naslund while others scoffed. I’m glad I did.

Last night versus Calgary Flame Mikka Kiprusoff, he picked up the puck in his own end, powered Swedishly—teamless and bleak like an Ingmar Bergman character—down the wing and wristed a quick, off-balance and screened shot between goalie and post. Jim Hughson—congenial, articulate and smooth Hockey Night in Canada play-by-play dude—has said Naslund-of-old could shoot into a teacup, but this retro-Nazzie goal drew only excuses and justifications: Kiprusoff, as they say in the latest and lamest of hockey cliches, “would like to have that one back”; it was a softy, a fluke. Seriously?

In overtime, a handful of seconds to go, Hughson was already mid-chewout—he believed that had Naslund not left the point to dig for a scrambled draw he would have been in position to grab it and shoot—when Naslund found the puck anyhoo, muscled around a defender, passed improbably to Mattias Ohlund who shot hard and clean high-slottishly. Daniel Sedin, as always, tucked the wee rebound across the line.

Fave moment of the game: third period and amazing hulk, Calgary’s Dion Phaneuf, chases down the puck in his own end thinking icing call; Naslund goes after him on the boards, believing no-call. Phaneuf is about 6’3” and 210 pounds. Naslund is 5’11” and 195 and 12 years older than the gifted 22-year-old. The whistle to signal icing comes late, just as Naslund bumps him as he should. And we catch young Phaneuf outraged and shouting at Naslund like a cranky kid up past his bedtime, “That was fucking late!” as Vancouver’s captain does his familiar fed-up and testy removal of mouth guard, reasons tilty-headed with the ref, and stutters off to the penalty box for so-called roughing.

So the Canucks win the game with seconds to go. Daniel: goal and assist. Naslund: same. Ohlund, too. Alex Burrows was a wizard on the penalty kill, five-on-three a couple of times. And who gets picked for the 3 stars (remember: a couple of nights ago analyst Kelly Hrudey referred to Calgary as “we”)? First: a Flame. Second: a Flame.

In the earlier televised game—Montreal and Toronto—what last year was the Mastercard 3-star selection is now sponsored by Steelback beer, which host Ron MacLean suggested should make sidekick Don Cherry happy. Steelback, we recall, acquired naming rights to the new home of the Sault St. Marie Greyhounds, and so what used to be the Sault Memorial Gardens became the Steelback Centre, yet another hockey arena named to erase the ghosts of veterans in favour of the false god of commerce. (Here in Victoria, the new arena for the Salmon Kings was to be called Save-On Foods Arena until veterans and their families lobbied to restore the Memorial from the original Memorial Arena.) Later, the Steelback beer commercial comes on: gorgeous blonde shimmies her estimable cleavage up to the bar, asks for her beer in a can, and then a double-entendred flirt about size ensues with the bartender. The punchline: “size matters.” Beer, blondes, boobs and boytalk: if this is the new NHL, axe the shootout and sign me up for the old game. Saturday night shouldn’t be so confusing, or so adolescent.

It was an evening of mixed messages. I love the new instructional breaks. Former players get host MacLean on the ice to run drills with a bunch of hotshot kids and they learn a new skill. Smart, clear, fun: hockey. But then, later in the broadcast, MacLean and Colin Campbell (Senior VP and Director of Hockey Operations for the NHL) and retired winger Scott Mellanby, sit suited and handsome in their sleek leather club chairs, and they watch a pornographically large flat screen play and replay and play again and again—slower this time—young (and now ultra-suspended) Steve Downie’s headshot on veteran Dean McAmmond. We watch them watch. We have all seen this hit many times. And Mellanby’s expertise is welcome, but the three men look at the screen and so do we, and none of us is given the option to look away. Over and over, Downie leaves his feet, launches himself to attack another man’s head, and we are expected to watch.

Once—the night it happened—was enough. Why must we see it so often and so slow? Cherry tells the kids it was a dirty hit and wags his don’t-do-it finger at his implied audience. But any kid still awake and paying attention can see that if you do that kind of thing, the world makes it look big and important, watches and seems to enjoy watching.

We’re told that over the summer, the League sent teams instructional DVDs in order to qualify and quantify the criteria by which to judge a shot to the head not only illegal but punishable by suspension. Players were warned; it didn’t sink in for Downie. Instead of watching MacLean watch the hit last night, I’d like to hear those criteria and hear the pundits apply them to certain hits that have stained my imagination. Kyle MacLaren’s playoff clothesline of Richard Zednik a few years back. Should Chris Pronger’s elbow to the same concussed head of Dean McAmmond in last year’s playoff have gotten more than that measly one-game suspension? Would the outcomes of Steve Moore’s unpenalized hit to the head of the reaching and vulnerable Markus Naslund—the concussion, the bone chips vacuumed from his elbow, the missing wrist shot, Moore’s own broken neck—been different had the League made Moore sit for a few games?

Cold-cocked reviewed in the Georgia Straight

Book Reviews

Cold-Cocked: On Hockey

Book Reviews By Brian Lynch

Publish Date: October 4, 2007

Everything comes back to the gamein Lorna Jackson's Cold-Cocked.

Cold-Cocked burns with hockey's passions

By Lorna Jackson. Biblioasis, 206 pp, $19.95, softcover

Pro hockey is like any good story. It has its heroes, villains, and clowns, and plot twists that play out from game to game and season to season.

Vancouver Islander Lorna Jackson knows this. And she understands that, as with fiction, the more attention, commitment, and resourcefulness you bring to the tale being told, the richer it gets. Her new book, Cold-Cocked: On Hockey, is proof of that.

Cold-Cocked: On Hockey
by Lorna Jackson

Out of two Vancouver Canuck seasons–the 2002–03 and 2003–04 campaigns–Jackson creates a hockey-themed fugue that reaches into the most intimate details of her own life. Childhood memories of watching Hockey Night in Canada with her father in the late 1960s lead to a kind of elegy for his years as a young pilot in the Second World War. The injuries she witnesses in the game mesh with reflections on the limits of her own middle-aged frame. Her devotion to Canucks captain Markus Naslund makes her feel "old and pathetic…for having a crush on a golden young man who wasn't even born on the coast of Sweden when I graduated from high school in Vancouver". All of this is steeped in sardonic humour and backed up by a grasp of the game itself that is surprisingly nuanced, seeing how Jackson only returned to being a hockey fan at the age of 48, after decades away.

Cold-Cocked is not a book for all hockey devotees. Those who like Ron MacLean's fireside reminiscences may be freaked out by the fantasies Jackson regularly has about a heartfelt, sex-charged relationship with Todd Bertuzzi or Trevor Linden. If that's the case for you, then it's quite literally your problem, as the book is nothing if not one intricately personal perspective.

More generally, though, it must be said that Jackson could have done with fewer shows of contempt for some of the fans she runs into at games. Is there really anything wrong with discussing stats or a goalie's performance with your seatmates? Jackson often seems to think so, silently calling one guy who does this "Mr. Narcissist", a risky charge to level after so many passages describing Naslund as her "pretend boyfriend".

Still, such a shortcoming is bound to appear in a book this bravely revealing. You're left to wonder what further insights into life's farces and frustrations Jackson might have had if she'd watched all of the Canucks' 37-year history with the same intensity.

Lorna Jackson interviewed in the TYEE

Another article/interview in BC's TYEE came out this morn. Haven't seen it yet, but from what I hear we made the cover of this one. And if this interview doesn't sell you on Cold-cocked, then nothing will.

What I need desperately is to get Lorna on Hockey Night in Canada, maybe an After 40 Minutes segment. Face to Face with Don Cherry, watch him change more colours than one of his godawful ties. Or suits. More than anyone else, that man needs a day with Russell Smith, esq., someone who will finally, finally teach him how to dress. At 500.00/day, perhaps it might be worth all of us Thirsty readers chipping in a few bucks to purchase the man some fashion sense. Though it would do nothing, alas, for crap that comes out of his mouth.

'Cold-Cocked': The Hit of Hockey

Lorna Jackson on why we really watch the puck drop.

View full article and comments here http://thetyee.ca/Books/2007/10/05/Cold-Cocked/

By Geoff D'Auria

Published: October 5, 2007

TheTyee.ca

According to Lorna Jackson in her new book Cold-Cocked: On Hockey, we must read hockey like a good short story. We have to see the games as scenes, and the players as characters, actions as words -- a booming slapshot, an impossible deke, a body sacrificed against a blocked shot, a meaty fist upside an unsuspecting head.

And we have to put them all together and build our own meaning and come up with our own reasons about why this story is important (or not). This is our communal story, so we have to resist the version of the story imposed by a frenzied media or a corporatized NHL.

"Players don't make meaning," Jackson explains, "spectators do."

And this book is about that: about how to read the game and reclaim it from those who narrowly interpret it as a man's game, as a game of "warriors," as a single-minded quest for Lord Stanley's Cup (said with the tremulous, disembodied voice of Hockey Night in Canada).

"The NHL machine ignores people like me," Jackson writes, "women who abhor the easy cliché, the hypermasculine rhetoric. Okay, they build arenas that resemble shopping malls for us. Oh, and kudos, boys, for the ridiculous girlie replica jerseys with the figure-flattering cut and raglan sleeves so we can pretend to have boobs like Shania Twain. I don't want to be Markus Naslund and I don't want to shop."

Clearly, this is no textbook read on the sociology of sports and gender (although Jackson admits that exploring how women experience the game differently was a starting point).

It's as much about her relationship with her daughter (a huge Ed Jovanovski fan) and her father (Béliveau) and her husband (tellingly, no preference reported), as it is about the game. And this is the point. It's a meditation on how Jackson finds her own meaning in the game, giving us all permission to do the same.

The Tyee spoke with Jackson recently to explore these ideas (and her mysterious relationship with Markus Naslund). We offer you this as your pre-game warm up for the first game of the season, tonight. Watch your groins.

On the allure of Olympic gold medal kisses and the 'new NHL man'

"What drew me in was watching those guys on the ice with their kids and kissing their wives and hugging their mothers, and just seeing them as a different sort of character than they had been in the '70s when I was [first] watching -- I mean, there were characters like Derek Sanderson that appealed to me as a teenager -- but I think I wanted a more complex character if I was going to watch that story and be involved in it now. And I got them."

On Italian bastard meets Nordic god

"I think they've got the right idea [in promoting this new NHL man]. I was drawn back in and I am more compelled by the characters, but then if they're going to keep me, they better pay up and give me a bit more [in terms of stories and complex characters].

"But also, it's so easy in Vancouver -- the narrative kind of took off on its own. Naslund and Bertuzzi, as characters, are interesting guys and with a really neat friendship -- the surly Italian bastard and the golden-haired Nordic god. So, it is really easy to be compelled."

On Bertuzzi and Naslund as Lenny and George from 'Of Mice and Men'

"I was reading Of Mice and Men again because I love the book, and the moment where Lenny squishes the mouse -- like, he's got this mouse in his hand and it's a caring, gentle moment and then... [deadpan voice] it's dead [chuckles]. And he doesn't get it; he doesn't know his own strength, and yet, George looks after him. It's a caretaking relationship. And it's also just a beautiful relationship between men based on aggression and loyalty and love. And one where ultimately a really hard decision has to be made about that relationship."

On Bertuzzi blame

"We're all changed by having to face what we got out of that situation, what we called for in that situation. Media, fans, all of us who've watched it on the screen a million times and got some sort of thrill out of it -- we were complicit. And if we looked at that and thought of it, you'd come back to the game a little bit differently. Not necessarily negatively, either.

"I didn't come back to the game horrified by outrageous violence. But I am less willing to accept a high hit to the head; I cannot stand to see that anymore. And I do distinguish between violence in hockey or fighting in hockey and what Bertuzzi did."

On how men think like women

"It's risky generalizing about anything, sports included, and especially men and women in sports. And I think when I started writing the book I thought that there was going to be a really clean division between [the supposedly male obsession with statistics and winning and "player as warrior" myth] and how women read the game. And then I did a fair bit of research reading around on fan response to sports in general, you know, lots of sociology of sport literature and stuff.

"Most of that indicated men don't really see sports as an obsession with statistics, and so on. They actually see it with imagination, as well. And they see it aesthetically, using phrases like 'pretty play' and 'beautiful goal.'

"But I still believe that the dominant sport journalism, broadcast or print journalism is obsessed with stats. And I think men are more likely, maybe, to be satisfied with that. And I don't think it's as interesting for women but I also don't think for a lot of men it's that interesting, either.

"I think women are looking for other things: they're looking identification with players, they want to have a Trevor Linden lead the team because they want to be like Trevor Linden and they want to marry Trevor Linden, you know? And maybe men are doing that [identifying with players] too, but they're less aware of it.

"I think you choose a player to emulate or one that is going to represent you because they represent some aspect of your values, or you want to get a hit off of their values.

On firing the Don Cherry narrator

"There's something in the gaps in a good short story. There's mystery. There's magic. You can [put it together for yourself]. And you'd better. You don't check your brain when you go through the turnstile. And you don't let Don Cherry do your thinking for you. There's no reason to."

On the athlete as warrior

"You can't get away from it in all sports, and hockey in particular. [Puts on hushed and earnest voice] 'Yea, that is right. Players are just like warriors. Whoa. Am I ever excited about this. And, oh, there's Don Cherry with his dead soldiers in Afghanistan on Coaches Corner. Yea, there is a connection! And I am being patriotic!'

"Well, I think it's a dangerous thing, a dangerous narrative to accept, especially on a Saturday night watching entertainment with our kids. And I don't think it's accurate. And it's a cliché. And all clichés and narratives need a good shake and I think that one does, as well.

"So part of me is offended by that 'warrior as hockey player' and vice-versa. And in part, that's [what let me] go back into looking [in her book] at my Dad and thinking about him 'cause he was a nice guy, you know? A nice, gentle man who was actually a soldier and a warrior and he was never the same afterward [World War II].

"I don't like hockey players to be idealized and I don't like warriors or war to be idealized. And when you put those two together, I think it's a thin reading of the game and of the players."

On whether she's in a hockey pool this year

"Yes."

On whether she recommends picking Naslund

"No."

On whether her answer to that was based on her telepathic and imaginary relationship to Naslund (as described in 'Cold-Cocked')

"[Laughs] I'll just check in with him.

"No, it's based on watching him skate a little bit in camp, and I watched last year very carefully and I have concerns about his body. I love him. I love his play. I think he's fabulous but I haven't chosen Naslund in my pool, [adds quickly] but I'm willing to trade for him if things improve.

On what story the Canucks are telling this year

"I don't think they've gotten started yet on that story. I mean, the story right now is 'How are we going to be more fit so that our groins don't hurt.' [Laughs] I read that they're starting to do yoga, which is probably a good step in that direction. What a hoot! Can you imagine Phil Esposito in Lululemon pants doing yoga? Or Derek Sanderson? I mean, good lord. But, I mean, they better figure it out, with all these groin injuries. [More laughter].

"They're so young. There's a rebuilding going on and there's a different identity being formed. So, I don't know if the story is started yet. I don't feel part of a story, let's put it that way. I mean, it's too easy to think that Bobby Lou [Roberto Luongo] is the main character here. I don't want him to be, for some reason. I don't want the goalie to be the main character who is the hero and the saviour because that's not an interesting story. If it's as simple as, 'if he stops it, we win,' it's not a [complex enough] story."

Cold-cocked: Launch Photos

A couple of photos from Lorna Jackson's launch of Cold-cocked: on Hockey at Bolen's Books in Victoria last Monday. There's another floating around, Lorna with Marty the Marmot, the Victoria Salmon Kings' mascot, which only proves we'll do next to anything to sell books. Though it seems to have added to the show: free hockey tickets and fan merchandise, hockey trivia, with Tim Lilburn walking away with some of the free tickets. A good time, as they say, was had by all.

Looks like Lorna will be on CBC's Q October 15th, which will be the first national exposure for this book. Hopefully much more to follow.

Woman on the Rink

A Vancouver Sun story, from Saturday, about Lorna Jackson's Cold-cocked.

Rumour has it she may be making an appearance on CBC's programme "Q" later this week, as part of a hockey panel. We'll keep you posted.

Woman on the rink

Lorna Jackson left a country music career and discovered writing. Now she's writing about something else she had left behind -- her love of hockey

Joe Wiebe

Special to the Sun

Saturday, September 29, 2007

The stereotypical image makes men the only serious students of the game. Women who follow hockey are more interested in the players' looks than their stats and avert their eyes when a scrap erupts on the ice, while men cheer for blood.

Following this logic, it is presumed that men are the truer hockey fans and women just spectators.

Lorna Jackson will tell you that's nonsense, although it's true that when women dare to enter a debate about hockey, they get "shut down and shut up, ignored or derided, dismissed."

The Vancouver-born author who now makes her home in Metchosin, half an hour west of Victoria, is no mere hockey spectator. For proof, read her book, Cold-Cocked: On Hockey (Biblioasis, 206 pages, $19.95). It's an incisive and provocative study of our national sport through female eyes.

Its main focus is on the team Jackson admires most, the Vancouver Canucks. On the second page, she establishes her stance as both a fan and a writer:

Vancouver is a hockey town though easterners don't see it that way and never have. We fill the seats at the Garage night after night, and still a player or owner or Toronto broadcaster crowns Toronto the country's hockey mecca and claims the game for themselves. We are told that hockey fans grew up playing on frozen ponds, that hockey as Canadian identity stems from the bitter cold winters, the ice and snow, the flatness of landscape and the vast horizon of winter.

F--- that noise. [...] You want ice? Thirteen thousand years ago, it was 1500 metres deep where downtown Vancouver stands, but the ice age ended. We moved on.

Over breakfast in a Main Street café, Jackson is not quite as strident or forceful as this quote might imply, but it's clear she knows her stuff. She teaches fiction in the University of Victoria's writing program and has written a novel (A Game to Play on the Tracks) and a collection of short stories (Dressing for Hope).

She hasn't been a life-long hockey fan. She loved watching it with her father as a teenager in Vancouver but was turned off by the increase in violence that arrived in the mid-1970s with the Philadelphia Flyers, better known as the Broad Street Bullies.

She left hockey behind as a young adult, turning instead to music. She became a country singer, touring all over B.C.

It was a self-destructive lifestyle, she admits now, so after about eight years she stopped drinking, gave up the music scene and went back to school. Initially, she thought she'd get a law degree, but she "ended up in the writing department and never left."

During the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002, she found herself drawn back to the game, led by the heroics of our national team, which finally won gold after 50 years of disappointment.

The Canucks also got her attention that winter as they became competitive again under the leadership of players like Markus Naslund, Todd Bertuzzi, and Ed Jovanovski. Around that time, she decided to write this book.

"I started taking notes then and talking to people around me, especially women," she explains. "It seemed to me that my experience of coming back to the game and getting worked up about it wasn't just me -- it seemed to be a cultural shift."

Part of her excitement came from a fictional interview with Bobby Orr she had written as part of a book of short fiction, called Flirt: the Interviews, which will be published next year.

She also found herself sharing a love of the game with her teenage daughter, Lily, and this made her think about watching hockey with her late father. Her exploration of his life is one of several very compelling threads in the book.

"I wanted it to be a writerly book," she says, "and I wanted to play with sportswriting, as well. The cliché is that men don't read and women don't read about sports, but that's not true at all. I wanted to build a book that used sportswriting and pushed it a little harder and was inclusive of those categories."

Jackson has definitely succeeded: Cold-Cocked is not only a hockey book; it is also a memoir of a particularly tumultuous, emotional time.

Her exploration of her father's life brought long-suppressed emotions to the surface, and she also forced herself to endure painful physiotherapy for an old knee injury -- all while she was going through menopause.

Over the course of the 2002-03 and 2003-04 hockey seasons, Jackson followed the Canucks closely, attending games -- often with Lily, but sometimes accompanied by female friends with different levels of appreciation for the game. She also sought out the opinions of other writers and poets, especially women, and even interviewed some of the Canucks, including Brad May, Johan Hedberg and Trevor Linden.

Maybe writers don't make the best sports fans or, at least, not the most supportive ones. Jackson says she watches the game more for a story than just to cheer the Canucks on. She admits to liking a tie better than an easy victory because it forms a more exciting story.

Thus, for her the 2003-04 season was too predictable. "It was too boring. They were winning, over and over again. They probably would have won that year, and I wasn't that interested in that.

"But the story got better when that trajectory got upset."

The upset she is referring to is, of course, the incident that gave the book its title: Todd Bertuzzi's attack on Steve Moore. It left the Colorado Avalanche player with a career-ending injury, resulted in a major suspension for Bertuzzi and seemed to scuttle the Canucks' will to compete.

"I was as appalled and depressed as anyone else was," she says of the incident, "but I was also gleeful. My book just got better."

Similarly, she admits that when her husband, Tom, announced he was leaving her, "I recognized it as a better ending than what I had. That's what writers do. I would be lying if I denied it."

Obviously, Cold-Cocked is much more than a book about hockey. That's what makes it easy to recommend to readers male and female and to people who wouldn't normally consider reading a hockey book written by a woman.

Still, we're talking about hockey, so I have to ask her if she hopes her Canucks will win it all, one of these years.

"They don't have to win the Cup. I would be over the moon, but that's not why I'm watching hockey right now," she claims.

"I want to see how they come together as a team, I want to see what some of the young guys do, I want to see what will probably be the best defensive core in the year. I want to see the magic they can do, and I want to see if Naslund has anything left."

Sounds like a true fan to me.

Cold-cocked on Hockey/ Shut Up He Explained Launches this week

Just a quick note to let you know that Biblioasis will be launching two titles this week. On Monday, September 24th Lorna Jackson will be launching Cold-cocked: On Hockey, a book Dave Bidini has blurbed as among the best hockey books of the era, at Bolens Books in Victoria BC at 7 pm. Marty the Marmot, of the Vancouver Salmon Kings will be in attendance will freebies, including tickets. If you can make it, please attend, and pass along word to any and all who might find it of interest.

Biblioasis will also be launching John Metcalf's memoir Shut Up He Explained in Ottawa on Saturday, September 29th, at 7 pm, at the Manx Pub on Elgin street. No free hockey tickets at this one, alas, but the Manx is perhaps the best scotch bar in the nation's capital, and it's certain to be a memorable event. I'll be making the trek to Ottawa, so please, if you are in the area, stop by. And again, pass along to any and all who might be interested.

Cold-cocked: the media blitz begins

Cold-cocked: On Hockey, Lorna Jackson's most recent book, and a tome Dave Bidini has blurbed as "one of the best hockey books of our era" is officially out. The Victoria Times Colonist kicks off what for us here at Biblioasis is a veritable shock of media attention with an article; I understand that the Vancouver Sun did something small as well. This week will see Lorna on CTV's Breakfast television in Vancouver, interviewed by the Vancouver Sun, on BC's most popular radio show -- the Bill Good show on CKNW -- on CBC's BC Almanac, CFUN's Jenn and Joe Show and on CBC Victoria's On the Island. The book gets officially launched at Bolen's books in Victoria on Monday, September 24th. Then next week there's an appearance on CFAX Radio's Talk it Over, and later an interview on Studio 4. We expect much more once the ball gets rolling.

The Victoria Times -Colonist article:

Hockey inspired author to make life changes

Sharie Epp

Times Colonist

Saturday, September 15, 2007

CREDIT: Ray Smith, Times Colonist Author Lorna Jackson's estrangement from hockey ended after watching Team Canada win the gold medal at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City.

Happy times for Lorna Jackson were evenings spent with her dad in the '60s and '70s, watching Hockey Night in Canada. With a teenage crush on Boston Bruins bad-boy Derek Sanderson, she followed hockey with a passion.

But life took some sad and confusing turns, and Jackson abandoned the sport for 30 years, before Team Canada and the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics changed everything. The result: A book entitled Cold-Cocked on Hockey.

The book, which will be launched on Sept. 24 at Bolen Books, is written from a woman's perspective, but is not a puff piece. Jackson enforces that slant by using the "f" word in the prologue.

"I wanted the voice to be authentic. I wanted it to be the way I communicate. I wanted it to be pretty gritty," said Jackson, an author and creative writing teacher at the University of Victoria. "I didn't want it to be a girlie book."

"It's not just men who use those words."

Growing up in Vancouver, Jackson's childhood was as normal as anyone's, until she was 12. Then her sister became ill, eventually dying of cancer. Her dad, a Second World War pilot and prisoner of war, faked suicide and disappeared for a time, a result of post traumatic stress syndrome, and Jackson cracked her knee in a fall, an injury that threatened to cripple her later in life.

As a young woman, Jackson drank hard, married and divorced, and travelled in a band, before finding her niche. Now 51, she's been teaching for a dozen years, and lives with her dogs, sheep, and 16-year-old daughter Lily on a Metchosin acreage, where she talked about her relationship with hockey.

"I love the game," Jackson said, but her love is the angles and perspectives missing in the Don Cherry Rock'em Sock'em version. She thinks the NHL does a "lousy" job of promoting the game to women, despite the fact approximately 40 per cent of ticket buyers are female. "I think women get left out of the conversation."

"I wrote about how hockey can inspire us, including women, in a lot of different ways."

Years ago Jackson, who is fine with a good clean fight, was turned off by the violence and aggression in the sport. But in 2002, she became mesmerized by the skill and thrill of the Olympic tournament -- by Markus Naslund and Todd Bertuzzi and by the way players carried their kids after winning the gold medal.

"I thought, 'That's not Phil Esposito going out to strip joints after the game,'" Jackson said. "I just loved watching hockey again, and it came out of nowhere."

Along with hockey, came a desire to get fit, and strengthen her knee. Jackson worked out at Juan de Fuca Recreation Centre, and immersed herself in hockey. She watched closely as the Canucks endured first the lockout, then the Bertuzzi incident and its circus-like aftermath, followed by the new regime.

"It was interesting to watch [coach Alain Vigneault] change the systems on the team, trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and he did."

Like every other Canucks fan, Jackson is anxious for the season to begin. She expects the Canucks to ice the best defence in the league, and is looking forward to seeing the magic of "beautiful players" Daniel and Henrik Sedin. Whether or not the Canucks make the Stanley Cup is immaterial, as far as she is concerned.

"I'm not a Stanley Cup watcher. The ending is not the most important part," Jackson said. "I like the journey."

Cold-cocked: On Hockey

Lorna Jackson's Cold-cocked: On Hockey is in the house. Or, more truthfully, it's in my driveway, dropped off by a truck with a 60 foot box, bringing back 60,000 pounds of some sort of boxed food stuff to Toronto. Another case of overkill. Once again, my sons' little red wagon saved a good deal of work. I need to get myself another cart -- I just don't know how much more that wagon's plastic wheels can take.

The book looks swell in an attractive, minimalist David Drummond cover. Dave Bidini (of Rheostatics and Tropic of Hockey fame) quotes on the cover: "A real triumph and a book hockey fans deserve. Cold-cocked deserves a place in the pantheon. Absolutely one of the best hockey books of our era." (Yes, it's a blurb, and a front cover one to boot, but you can trust it, because we read it first, loved it, and say the same thing.) More importantly, it's in no way your standard hockey tome: it's fresh, witty and word drunk, cuts the game no slack, wrestles its beauty down.

It should be in stores within a couple of weeks. I'll keep you posted regarding launches, readings, and anything else Cold-cocked.

Hockey in July Lorna Jackson style

It may seem much too early to think about hockey, but some of us -- two of us, actually -- have to. Lorna Jackson's Cold-cocked: on Hockey is at the printer and due back within a couple of weeks. It will officially hit bookstore shelves the first week of September. Readying herself, she's started a blog for the book, which can be found here: http://lornaj.blogspot.com/.

We'll be stealing the odd post and putting them up on Thirsty, but if you're into hockey, and you feel like a test drive of the wit, wordplay, swagger and street smarts Jackson brings to her interpretation of the game, you could do much worse than to check in on Cold-cocked: the blog on a fairly regular basis.

Without further ado, the first entry.

St. Trev in the Dolomites

Maybe training camp. Maybe pre-season. I was going to wait to start writing, but then shots of Trevor Linden snugged into spandex in Europe surfaced—shell-shocked, jubilant, shirtless by a cold river in Italy, dehydrated and schnitzelling in Germany.

When I finished writing Cold-cocked: On Hockey, I wondered if I’d ever be that hell-bent drawn to the game again. Would players still inspire, thrill, disgust, delight and bore me? I guess so, starting now.

Linden’s lately been the topic of fan snits and on-air sport-gripes. Canuck fans are choked with management for not re-signing St. Trev the minute he scraped off his (grey) playoff beard. Fan favourite. Heart and soul. Great playoff stats (for a team that couldn’t cut-and-paste a goal post-season). “Beg him to stay! Pay him double!”

Last week’s 2007 JEANTEX Bike Transalp was 725K through the German and Austrian Alps and Italian Dolomites in 8 stages. Vertical gain: 20,836M. The winners took 27 hours; Linden and his partner went 40 and finished a stunning 48th in the Masters category. His partner’s blog describes Linden’s harrowing cartoon careen—hey! no brakes!—down a perpendicular hill and it’s clear to me the team would be nuts to sign the naughty daredevil before he passes his next physical.

Also clear: Linden is not a guy who’ll be lost without hockey. Let’s see: relax—tanned, handsome, beery—in an icy river in Predazzo after an epic 12-hour bike ride, or get 20 minutes of penalty-kill ice time 5-on-3 playing against this year’s Edmonton Oilers for 8 hours?