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!

Deluge

Today's poem-of-the-day I thought a fitting choice for those of you who may have spent 3.5 hours this weekend watching a) Yul Brynner be fabulous, and b) Charlton Heston grow a beard. The image you see to the side--mercifully not Mr. Heston--is a print by Segbingway called "Out of their Element," and was featured on the cover of Patricia Young's collection. (Segbingway, as I'm sure you all know by now, is the illustrator for our forthcoming Reasonable Ogre by Mike Barnes.) Enjoy!

Deluge

Patricia Young
from Here Come the Moonbathers, 2008

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose. – Genesis 6: 1-2

I walked a long way in an old pair of sandals
and when I looked up
I saw the fiery shape of a man
revolving in a field of blue space.

My knees locked, my tongue split like a flame.

In those days the world was immaculate
and devoid of memory.
It was difficult to think
without hearing
the language of birds.

His face emerged slowly,
feature by nascent feature.
And then his neck/chest/thighs –
all perfect, all splendidly formed.

He put on a body of flesh
as though putting on a suit of fine cloth.

Roses bloomed over the dip
of thorny hills and my eye cocked
toward Paradise.

*

Standing in the dark, braiding the horse’s mane,
I felt him lean into the blank
pools of my thoughts. He was
clean intelligence, incandescent.

Sex with an angel?
my sister said, pulling
water from the well, her voice
dipped in arsenic.

I no longer knew what I was –
woman or jackal, fish or flying thing.

*

Where had he come from?

I didn’t know, nor did I ask
if he’d been sent to me as some kind of
balm to the curse of being human.

A restlessness seized him.
He grew pale, spoke of the place he’d forsaken,
his words the same swollen sounds
scratched on the walls outside Eden.
And then the gibberish in his sleep –
the sky bursting open like a goat-skin bottle,
the ark’s wooden doors
slamming shut.

*

Those final days –
walking among the aloe trees,
leaves trembling like my senses.
The nightingale drunk on his beauty.
The giraffe weeping as he passed.
Bees clung to his skin. Everything
from the protozoan to our hybrid son
banging his breakfast bowl on the table
appeared resplendent and tragic.
I understood even the lowest embryo
manifests will, desire, a terrible cunning.

*

Death by drowning.

Should he have warned me, I whom he could not save?
Should he have whispered that last night of love –
When the rains finally come I will pass through your world like the voice of an animal.

Patricia Young Reading

Over at The New Quarterly's blog, The Literary Type, Rosalynn has posted a podcast of the reading from Patricia Young's recent tour. Worth a listen, on this second Friday of Poetry Month.

Photo, once again, by A. J. Somerset, of Combat Camera fame.

Patricia Young, after a reading.

Headed to London for a quick trip on Wednesday to share a curry with house-bound David Hickey and listen to Patricia Young read as part of the Poetry London Series. A. J. Somerset was in attendance, and took some photographs at the pub after the event, including this one. He has been promoted to Biblioasis's official photographer, just so long as he promises to keep me out of his viewfinder.

A wonderful reading, great conversation and company, passable beer.

For the (brief) story behind this photograph, please go here.

Here come the Moonbathers: Victoria Book Award Finalist

Patricia Young's 2008 collection of poetry Here Come the Moonbathers has been selected as a finalist for the Victoria Butler Book Award. It's the second time she's been short-listed for the award with a Biblioasis title, the first coming with her first collection of short fiction, Airstream.

The winner will be announced on October 14th at 7:30 pm at a gala event. The winner receives $5000.00.

The other finalists are:
Dede Crane, for the Cult of Quick Repair
Patrick Lane for Red Dog, Red Dog
David Leach for Fatal Tide
Ilana Stanger-Ross for Sima's Undergarments for Women.

Congratulations to Patricia for some much deserved recognition for what is a very fine book!

Patricia and Terence Young at the UBC Bookstore

Thanks to Zach Wells for posting a reading over at CLM of Biblioasis authors -- current and future -- Patricia and Terence Young. We've published a couple of excellent books by Patricia, her first collection of short fiction the Metcalf-Rooke Award winning Airstream, and her last collection of poetry, from which she reads here, Here Come the Moonbathers. We'll be publishing a new collection of short fiction from Terence, likely Spring '10.

You can check out the reading here. A bit of background noise, so you'll need to turn up the volume, but well worth a listen.

Three Reviews...

In the Winter 2009 issue of Arc -- Volume 61 -- there are three reviews of Biblioasis Poetry titles. The first, of Robyn Sarah's Little Eurekas: A Decade's Thoughts on Poetry. T'is a feature review, and largely full of praise:

"I've never met Sarah, and was previously familiar only with her poems, but i've come to like her through these essays. Conversational in tone, her voice sounds like that of a friend. ... This easy-going style gives the book much of its clarity and approachability, two traits that poetry -- and poetry criticism -- could use more of.

Nest up: Shane Neilson on Patricia Young's Here Come the Moonbathers:

"She's the poet of compression, of no time and small space. ... Young at her best writes a noose around loss ... There is indeed a quiet, firm, almost questing brand of dignity in Young's brand of loss. It has made for an excellent collection ..."

Lastly, a review of Zach Wells's sonnet anthology Jailbreaks, which Alessandro Porco says "has scope ... As with any anthology, there are a few head-scratchers ... but also some jaw-droppingly good eye- (and ear-) openers."

Poetry to Warm the Wintry Soul

An article on the poetry of Patricia Young appeared in yesterday's Victoria Times-Colonist. If you go to the Times-Colonist website, there's a audio recording of her reading the poem printed here.

FRAGMENTS OF CHILDHOOD EFFORTS, HEARD BY MOM, STAY WITH HER

Patricia Young has been writing poems for as long as she can remember. Her early poems, fragments of which she can still recite, were about nature. Her mom was her first audience.

"She was nice enough to listen to them," says the 54-year-old Young, who was born and raised in Victoria. "When I look back, I don't think they were very good, but it gave me enough encouragement to continue."

oday she writes for a larger audience. So far she has published nine books of poetry and one of fiction. The quality of her work has also improved. The list of her achievements since 1987 include being nominated twice for the Governor General's Award for Poetry and winning the Pat Lowther Award, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award and others. Her first collection of fiction, Airstream, also won the Metcalf-Rooke Award.

She has been a writer in residence in several universities, the latest at the University of New Brunswick. It was during a hard winter in New Brunswick that she was inspired to write today's poem.

Young lives in Fairfield with her husband, Terence, who is also an award-winning poet. The couple met when Patricia was only 16; they have two grown children.

The husband-and-wife team occasionally spend time at their other home in Highlands, using it as a retreat for their writing.

"We help each other out," Young says. "It makes life easier when your spouse understands your work." -- Pedro Arrais, Times Colonist

- - -

The Times Colonist asked six Victoria-area poets to create poems for the winter season.

Today we present the fifth, Patricia Young's Cherry Tree in Winter.

The last will follow tomorrow on the front page of the Life section.

CHERRY TREE IN WINTER

By Patricia Young

Icicles hang from the eaves, the size of a man and twice as lethal.

Today I trudge through the snow-deep city in my landlord's parka.

Within its sheltering hood I hear nothing but rustling inside my head.

Here, winter goes on and on and I'm tired of my own thoughts.

Through snow-deep streets I trudge in my landlord's down parka.

On the other coast you get out the lopper, prune the cherry tree.

Here, winter goes on and on and I'm tired of my own thoughts.

On the phone you say, So much light. Now the leaves won't shadow the deck.

On the west coast, you get out the lopper and prune the cherry tree.

For years I've asked you to take it down -- too much foliage, too little fruit.

The light, you say on the phone. Now the leaves won't shadow the deck.

Tonight I love that its branches still hold our daughter's tree fort aloft.

For years I've asked you to take it down -- too much foliage, too little fruit.

And the trunk serves as a post for our son's Guatemalan hammock.

I love that its branches still hold a childhood tree fort aloft.

Beneath three quilts I dream I'm a tree riddled with blossoms and birds, a diamond-weave hammock swaying in a Guatemalan market.

Inside my sheltering head: the sound of rustling green. Husband,

you are the riddle beneath which I dream blossoms and birds, but

when I wake, icicles hang from the eaves, the size of a man and twice as lethal.

- - -

- To hear Patricia Young reading her poem, visit www.timescolonist.com

A Review of Patricia Young's Here Come the Moonbathers

from Fredericton's Daily Gleaner.

Though her fans were delighted when she won the 2006 Metcalfe-Rooke Award for Canadian fiction, few knew why Patricia Young, twice shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry, moved unexpectedly to prose.

The former University of New Brunswick writer-in-residence answers that question in Here Come the Moonbathers, her first volume of poetry since 2000.

Assembled and revised this spring in a blue house overlooking Fredericton's St. John River, Young's new poems are provocative. They pinch. They prod. There's anger to which you'll say Whoa! until you've thought things through.

The dazzling lyric voice, pictorial quality, empathy, and terror of Young's Ruin and Beauty: New & Selected Poems (House of Anansi) is conspicuous, as is the poet's interest in the close connection between love and loss. What appears to have changed is the attitude toward experience that informs her writing.

Although Live Trap whimsically contrasts a boy's behaviour with that of rodents, its true subject is perception - tricks of the brain. Mice "[f]ar-seeing and fatalistic / but also capable of Houdini-like feats . . . light up the mind's nether regions, / always an afterimage, the thing that just was."

In Nocturnal, assonance, consonance, and kinetic lines help illuminate age and gender differences.

By day, "human cannonballs" (aligned with "phallic" cattails) hurl themselves from docks; girls (the moonbathers of the title) reject "noon's buttery spit." Precociously "wise to the moles threatening / to hatch tiny brown / spiders / on the downy / smalls of their backs," they slide into "gelatinous black water" after dark.

Desolate the Gooseberry records how it feels to lose a father ("Summer's elsewhere, a butterfly behind glass"); Mother Tongue highlights family life's astonishing gifts: "In each nest // a small miracle rubs against a great sorrow."

Before Sleep, A Conversation confronts fear head on:

She says, I was thirty-eight before I got it -

I mean, really got it - that I'd die too.

That sucking sound isn't the river, he says, it's the sound of us dying.

Though many have experimented boldly with poetic form, few have matched Young's proficiency: The haunting repetition of the pantoum suits The Day the Pigs Got Loose, Jack(s)knife and Miracle of Language perfectly.

In Praise of Poetry (or Why I Stopped Writing It) shows even strong writers what to aim for. Grievous Road, Melt (Patricia Young on climate change), Adoption, 1962, and Deluge will take your breath away.

- reviewed by DIANE REID

Patricia Young reading in Victoria B.C.

Join in an exciting literary evening with authors Patricia Young (Here Comes the Moonbathers) and Trevor Carolan who will read from and sign their new books, Friday, September 19 at 7:30 p.m. (doors open 7 p.m.) at Red Brick Cafe, 2423 Beacon Avenue. It will be an entertaining evening with music by Mark Bracken, guitarist. Enter the book draw to win a signed copy of writers’ books.

Admission $5. Sponsored by Community Arts Council of Saanich Peninsula. Pick up brochures at Sidney bookstores. For more information call 250-655-4447.

Review of Young's Moonbathers...

... in the Winnipeg Free Press. Are they one of the ONLY metropolitan newspapers which review Canadian poetry with any regularity any more? Certainly they seem to review it MORE than any other paper I know of. Kudos and thanks due to Walker Morley and everyone at the Winnipeg Free Press who are still willing to give that most un-commercial of collections -- the poetry book -- weekly attention.

Here's the part of the review dealing with Young's Moonbathers. As far as I know this is the first review of this collection thus far, which is a bit ridiculous, considering her previous two collections received G-G shortlist nods. But t'is the way of things these days.

Free verse impressive for its rhythmic control

By: Maurice Mierau

Updated: August 24 at 12:10 AM CDT

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Victoria writer Patricia Young's ninth book of poetry, Here Come the Moonbathers (Biblioasis, 80 pages, $18) is beautifully crafted, subtle and emotionally intense.

Young's free verse is impressive for its rhythmic control. Notice the double stress pattern here, the one long line, and then the return to pattern:

Why the bone clock?

Who the bone clock?

What to say about the bone clock

except it stopped when the world was still caterwauling

tooth and claw.

Young doesn't simply produce one kind of rhythmic variation. In Twenty Questions she deploys a casual five stress line: "Dad smells of mulched leaves, something sweetly organic./ Pulverized beach shells spill from his eye sockets."

She also has a rare gift for metaphorical thinking, where a metaphor is initially somewhat mysterious, and then comes into perfectly logical focus:

Your perfect life is not a poem after all.

Which is fine except your blood is full of magnets.

You'd like to smuggle yourself out of the abandoned city

but you're stuck to the fridge... .

Here Come the Moonbathers

Poet Laureate John Steffler has published Patricia Young's poem Melt, from her upcoming Spring Biblioasis collection Here Come the Moonbathers -- her first poetry collection in over 8 years -- as the poem of the week of the Poet Laureate website. The website can be found here:

www.parl.gc.ca/Information/about/people/poet/index.asp?lang=e&param=4&id=1&id3=1

And here is Patricia's poem:

MELT

by Patricia Young

“We can’t even describe what we’re seeing.”
Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar conference.

One morning they appear in nameless droves.
Fabulous creatures flicking their silver fins and ancient jewels.

A long lost mythology? Weird migration?
They lurched onto the tundra like bawling infants,

announced themselves with the subtlety of a brass band.
Wave upon wave, antlers vibrating, tails ablaze.

Who? we asked. Who are you?
One day they weren’t there and the next

they were traveling toward us
with the speed of a birchwood forest.

We gathered to mourn those passing
swiftly into memory, the polar bear and arctic seal.

Time cracked.
The century was thinner than ice.

We had 1200 words for reindeer but not one
for hornet, robin, elk, salmon, barn owl.

Try to understand: we had never seen a barn.
Never stepped into such a cavernous space.

*

We have never stepped into a cavernous space.
Try to understand: we have never seen a barn.

Hornet, robin, elk, salmon, barn owl.
We have 1200 words for reindeer but not one

for a century thinner than ice.
Time cracks.

Swiftly into memory: the polar bear and arctic seal.
We gather to mourn those passing

with the speed of a birchwood forest,
the new ones travelling toward us.

One day they aren’t here and the next
we ask, Who? Who are you?

Wave upon wave, antlers vibrating, tails ablaze.
They announce themselves with the subtlety of a brass band,

lurch onto the tundra like bawling infants.
A long lost mythology? Weird migration?

Fabulous creatures flicking their silver fins and ancient jewels
appear one morning in nameless droves.

More Victoria Butler shortlist coverage...

An article published yesterday in the Victoria Times-Colonist.

Husband and wife vie for city book prize

Katherine Dedyna

Times Colonist

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

An exciting literary evening will climax Oct. 17 at the Union Club when one of five local writers wins the $5,000 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.

"If people want tickets, they should get them quickly," says Victoria Book Prize Society president Bess Jillings, noting only 200 of the $10 tickets remain available.

The event features readings by the five finalists, refreshments and a chance to mingle with the authors and have books autographed by finalists.

The 2007 finalists include a husband and wife as well as last year's winner. They are:

- Bill Gaston, author of Gargoyles, a book of edgy short stories nominated last year as best English-language fiction for the Governor General's Award. According to publisher House of Anansi, gargoyles are "physical manifestations of the disfigurements and contortions to which we human beings subject ourselves."

- PK Page, one of Canada's most acclaimed poets, for Hand Luggage, her poetic account of her years spent travelling as the wife of a diplomat. It's a book of "penetrating observations and probing questions arising from richly varied cultural experience frankly and lovingly examined," says a review by Stan Dragland on the website of publisher Porcupine Quill.

- Patricia Young, known previously for her poetry, for Airstream, 14 short stories published by Biblioasis that, according to the publisher, "explore the small victories and lurching disappointments" of everyday life in unsentimental style. To wit: "a house fire sets in motion the end of a marriage as a couple re-examine the meaning of truth and commitment."

- Terence Young (Patricia's husband), a St. Michaels University School teacher, for his book of poetry, Moving Day. Publisher Signature Editions notes that "some poems touch on the dreamy qualities of memory, its tendency to slip into the magical, and still others turn a quirky eye onto child-rearing, education, home repair." Young is a previous winner for his novel, After Goodlake's.

- Mark Zuehlke, last year's winner for Holding Juno -- his view of the Normandy invasion -- this year goes back to the War of 1812 with For Honour's Sake, a non-fiction account published by Knopf Canada. "This is a really readable history of that war," says Jillings.

Zuehlke explores who really won through "never-before-seen archival material" and covers not only the horrors of war but the unsatisfactory negotiations in Ghent that ended it but have resonated for nearly two centuries, says the publisher's website.

The five finalists were winnowed from about 50 entries. Local authors, who did not make the cut include Silken Laumann (Child's Play; Random House); Terry Glavin (Waiting for the Macaws; Penguin) and Katy Hutchinson (Walking After Midnight; Raincoast).

The jury will be revealed on the evening of the awards; MC will be John Gould, a past Giller Prize nominee and University of Victoria writing instructor.

The Victoria Butler Book Prize is funded by the city of Victoria, with administrative and some event costs covered by philianthropist Brian Butler of Butler Brothers Supplies. Other contributing sponsors include the Union Club, the Greater Victoria Public Library and the Magnolia Hotel.

Tickets are available at Munro's, Bolen Books, Ivy's or by calling 592-1464.

© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2007

Victoria Butler Prize News Release

For those who don't know, Patricia Young's Airstream made the short-list. It's a stacked one: Gaston, Page, Zuehlke, and Patricia's husband Terence. Anyone in the area might want to consider attending: from what I understand it's a pretty swell event.

Tickets on Sale for Victoria Butler Book Prize Awards

Date: Tuesday, October 9, 2007 For Immediate Release

VICTORIA, BC — Tickets are now on sale for the 4^th Annual City of Victoria Butler Book Prize gala awards presentation to be held at the Union Club of British Columbia on Wednesday, October 17, 2007. The City’s $5,000 prize is awarded annually to a Greater Victoria author for the best book published in the preceding year in the categories of poetry, non-fiction, children’s books, fiction and biography.

The 2007 finalists include:

Bill Gaston Gargoyles (fiction), published by House of Anansi

PK Page Hand Luggage (poetry), published by Porcupine’s Quill

Patricia Young Airstream (fiction), published by Biblioasis

Terence Young Moving Day (poetry), published by Signature Editions

Mark Zuehlke For Honour’s Sake (non-fiction), published by Knopf Canada

The winner will be selected by three jurors, comprised of professionals from the writing, library, and book- selling community.

Open to the public, the event will feature readings by the five finalists and will provide guests with the opportunity to meet the writers and have their books signed. This year’s Master of Ceremonies is John Gould, an award-winning author, a teacher of creative fiction at the University of Victoria, and a past Giller Prize nominee.

Tickets are $10 and can be purchased in advance at Bolen Books at Hillside Mall, Ivy’s Book Shop on Oak Bay Avenue and Munro’s Books on Government Street, or by calling 592-1464. Tickets will also be available for purchase at the door. Refreshments will be served and there will be a no-host bar.

What: 4^th Annual City of Victoria Butler Book Prize Awards

When: Wednesday, October 17, 2007, Event starts at 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 7 p.m.

Where: Union Club of British Columbia, 805 Gordon Street

Founded in 2004, the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize is a partnership between the City of Victoria and Brian Butler of Butler Brothers Supplies and is sponsored by the Greater Victoria Public Library, the Magnolia Hotel and Spa and the Union Club of British Columbia. The Victoria Book Prize Society establishes the policy and criteria for the prize, appoints the jury and administers the competition.

- 30 -

For More Information:

Gail Price Douglas, Community Development Planner Bess Jillings, President

Parks, Recreation and Community Development Department Victoria Book Prize Society

(250) 361-0358 (250) 592-1464

Airstream Review in Canadian Literature

A good review of Airstream in Canadian Literature. If you haven't picked up a copy at your local bookstore, or at the very least borrowed it from a library or friend, perhaps this and the Victoria Butler nomination will help you make the right decision.

Unfortunately, this review is also coupled with a poor review of Clark Blaise's latest, published by the Porcupine's Quill. Though we have no stake in this one -- beyond the fact that we first published one of the stories, The Sociology of Love, in the Biblioasis chapbook series -- Blaise is one of the most important Canadian writers of the last 40 years, and one of a handful -- along with Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and Norman Levine -- of the best short story writers in the country. This collects some of his best, along with a few new stories. In fact, the whole PQL Blaise project is a necessary purchase for any and all interested in short fiction, in Canada or elsewhere.

My own personal CanLit journey began with Blaise's Tribal Justice and North American education, his first two books, and still among the best collections of short fiction ever published in Canada. Understanding how one thing leads to another, I'm not at all sure that Biblioasis would exist today if I'd not read those collections.

Epiphany vs. Exploitation

Patricia Young (Author)

Airstream.

Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Clark Blaise (Author)

World Body: Selected Stories: 4. Porcupine's Quill

Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Reviewed by Jennifer Fraser

Airstream follows in the tradition of the Joycean epiphany, whereas World Body exploits both world and body. Patricia Young’s Airstream evokes through poetic language nuances of emotion leading to a decision; with each story one is startled by what Joyce would term the “revelation of the whatness of a thing.” Young has the command of language and the depth necessary to discover, as Joyce would put it, “the radiant soul” of “the commonest object” or person. Reminding the reader of the diverse characters of Dubliners, in Airstream, the narrators vary, and the voices in which they think and talk vary; thus, although not packed full of international reference, the fictions of Airstream are far more foreign than those of World Body. Dubliners explores paralysis; Airstream examines betrayal.

A child is abandoned by her mother: “Hanging upside down from her knees, she rolls her eyes back and the woodchip playground becomes a sky. She flutters her eyelids and chants the new unlisted number, hoping her mother can hear her wherever she is.” A 20-year-old falls in love and stops caring what people think: “every cell in my body was a small closed monastic room that had thrown its door open.” A widow explains: “Doctor Whitely suggested I write these letters. He said I needed to find a way to hold onto the love while letting go. I have no intention of letting go, but I agreed to write letters in exchange for sleeping pills.” A boy hides the toy gun he’s been given by his father: “Mick loves the gun and hates it, which is sort of how he feels toward his mother because of the divorce.” A foster-parent protects her child: “A metal plate slides down over my eyes and a horrible stink hits me like a blow to the head and something long and supple slips off a shore and into the water, and then my hands are around Butchy’s neck.” A hitchhiking teenager discovers: “The afternoon sun is a column of light pouring through the arched window at the end of the hallway, and she thinks she could tell this boy that she wishes she’d chanted at her father’s bedside, she wishes she’d chanted and sung and prayed day and night, she wishes she’d pressed her mouth to his ear and begged him not to give up, to please please hold on.” A young girl yells in defiance: “All the other girls wear leggings” and her Scottish immigrant mother answers back: “I don’t care if the Pope of Rome wears leggings.” A teenager faces her boyfriend: “Trudy accepted all of it. She looked into his eyes, the pupils like tiny imploding black holes, and she saw the truth clearly: She was as wired to Dill as he was to heroin.”

These quotes cannot capture the epiphanies which begin with the first word of the story and build with each phrase, sentence, paragraph. As suggested by her title, Young draws the surrounding oxygen in order to create each story’s combustion. The words of the stories are like air particles joining to form a high-altitude wind that blows apart characters’ beliefs and hopes. It is this wind that an agoraphobic woman blows when her husband announces he’s leaving her and the kids: “She might have been someone with somewhere to go, a woman who, having just applied nail polish, was blowing it dry.” The terrified becomes the brave.

When you finish a Patricia Young story, your bones hurt. You ache. And it’s because of the knowledge you now carry.

In contrast, the stories in World Body read like resumes, case studies or obituaries. Everyone is a stranger to everyone, even parents and children. Dr. Lander is trying to reach his son who has become an extremist Buddhist monk in Japan, but he’s attracted to his son’s girlfriend: “We were standing in a Tokyo subway, I was staring into cleavage and a warm zombie had just propositioned me.” Dr. Lander next visits a colleague who has left his wife and children to marry one of the breathtakingly beautiful women who are a dime a dozen in Blaise’s stories. Alas, Lander fails to secure her attentions for the night, so he takes next best: “And so that way they spent the night, his stiffened cock up the bitch’s cunt, her jaw clamped firmly on his wrist.” One realizes in World Bawdy that if gorgeous young women aren’t available, one always can consider their pets. Another narrator, Picard, breaks his own code of conduct in Jakarta and has sex with a 15-year-old prostitute three times, but unfortunately for him, her arm gets blown off in an uprising.

The tone and diction of World Body are often clinical and academic until an occasional twist at the story’s end. The narrators are so similar and the stories so formulaic in the pattern of sexual yearning and fulfillment or failed conquest that perhaps the collection should be thought of more as a repetitive novel. Sometimes the stories read as possibly brilliant academic essays on memory, but without the references or documentation, they seem a hodge-podge of ideas that tend to collapse when a woman “fresh from her shower” or a blushing “ex-student,” now elderly prof’s wife, enters the room.

Sometimes Blaise’s stories reach the rhythm of a meditation and resonate with striking insights as in “Kristallnacht”: “No guns, the violence is more intimate; chains swung in an arc then down on a skull.” Another powerful line is thought by a man who hears the story of a humiliated female stranger when they sit side by side on an airplane: “Leap, Saint Patty. I present myself to you like a tethered bull in a pasture. Rip my stupid throat out.” Unfortunately, these potent ideas do not receive exploration; they surface in the story only to sink again. These stories recall a tabloid where tawdry sex occurs in different cities that function as backdrop to the same shallow human gestures.

Airstream on Victoria Butler Shortlist

Patrica Young's collection of short fiction, Airstream, published last Spring, has been shortlisted for the Victoria Butler Book Prize. It's nice to see that this collection made the cut against a very stacked list, when it's been so regularly overlooked up to this point. The inaugural Metcalf-Rooke Award winner, it's one of the books I've been most proud to have been a part of here at Biblioasis, and that is really saying something.

The winner will be announced October 17th. The remaining short-listed authors and books are:

Bill Gaston. Gargoyles. (short fiction) Anansi
P.K. Page. Hand Luggage. (poetry Porcupine's Quill
Terence Young. Moving Day. Signature Editions
Mark Zuehlke. For Honour's Sake (Canadian Military History) Knopf.

A strong, varied list. Wonderful to see Terence, Patricia's husband, also on the list for his collection. He'll forgive me if I keep rooting for Patricia.

Airstream can be purchased directly from the Biblioasis website, on Abebooks, or here, at amazon.ca.

An additional note: I learned today that Patricia has had another story accepted for publication in the Best Canadian Short Fiction Anthology published by Oberon Press. Congratulations are also in order for that accomplishment.

Best Canadian Stories

I've just learned today that the first story in Kathleen Winter's short fiction collection boYs, 'You can keep one thing', has been selected for inclusion in an upcoming volume of Best Canadian Stories. Congratulations. The lead story in this fall's collection, it's a tale of culture shock, of a family that moves from England to Newfoundland, told in the voice of the young and naively perceptive heroine Maggie Carter.

This is not the first Biblioasis author to make the Best Canadian cut. Leon Rooke's novella Balduchi's Who's Who -- which was the first Biblioasis short fiction chapbook, and in my opinion the best thing he's ever written -- was selected by Douglas Glover for the current (2006) anthology. Patricia Young's story 'Hapless Girl' -- as yet unpublished, but hopefully destined for her second Biblioasis short fiction collection -- will appear in this year's anthology.

Speaking of Patricia Young, she has been selected as the 2007-2008 writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick. Another of her stories, 'Pool Man,' will be appearing in the next issue of the Fiddlehead.

Relit Awards

Two Biblioasis titles have made the Relit Longlist: Leon Rooke's Hitting the Charts: Selected Stories, in the story category, and David Helwig's Saltsea in the Novel. Disappointed not to see Patricia Young, Mike Barnes, and David Hickey there, as there's no doubt that each is better than many that have made the cut, but t' is the way of these things.

Speaking of those three, we'll be doing a new book by all of them in the next year or so: Patricia Youngs' first poetry collection in nearly a decade, a brilliant and very moving memoir on art, memory and madness called The Lily Pond by Mike Barnes, and David Hickey's wonderful first children's book.

Last year, both of our titles by Goran Simic made the Relit longlist, and his From Sarajevo, With Sorrow made the shortlist for poetry (losing out to Leon Rooke's first poetry collection, Hot Poppies.) For those of you who have not read From Sarajevo, With Sorrow, you should order yourself a copy. It's powerful stuff.

And while I'm speaking of '08 (& beyond), we have another Simic collection in the works, a selection of his best pre-war poems, which will be made available (with a few exceptions) for the first time in english. In Canada (& elsewhere in the english speaking world), Goran is known solely as a poet of war and immigration. But he had a varied and successful career as a writer and poet before the war, and we are hoping to broaden the understanding, appreciation and audience of Simic with this new book.