The Weekend in Review

G'day, folks, and happy Monday. We'll have more verse for you shortly--after a four-day hiatus we'll bring poetry month to an end with a bang--but in the meantime a few amuses-bouches, as dished up by critics from around the country. Reviews ad mari usque ad mare this weekend. Yes indeed.  

Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing, by Douglas Glover

"Douglas Glover, the award-winning Canadian writer of fiction, short stories and essays carries within him a huge sense of duty both to the craft of writing and to the language ... I stand before it in awe ... This is a book for all writers and for any creative writing class syllabus" - Telegraph-Journal

The Least Important Man, by Alex Boyd

"Consistently strong. Boyd's images and metaphors are deft." 

- Winnipeg Free Press

Suitable Precautions, by Laura Boudreau

"The stories in Suitable Precautions are peopled with characters who act in believably quirky and compellingly odd ways ... For Boudreau, it seems love is the most powerful precaution, and as such is the only one that comes with any sort of guarantee." 

- The Malahat Review

Something About the Animal, by Cathy Stonehouse

"Stonehouse's skill lies in her ability to render a topsy-turvy world without alienating her reader. Her writing is disarming and fearless ... The violence, pain, and vulnerability Stonehouse seems drawn to creatively make for intense reading, yet an ease with shifts in time, a mastery of suspense, and perfect, revealing last lines soften the blows." 

- The Malahat Review

"Not for the faint of heart" (Part 2)

Well it was in reference to a certain bell-lettrist from Kingston that I used the faint-of-heart phrase on Monday, but I suspect really what put it in mind was a recent review of Cathy Stonehouse's Something About the Animal. Not for the faint of heart indeed. The Literary Review of Canada is now offering a lengthy, thoughtful, & commendatory look at Cathy's work:

Whether examining the impact of generational cycles of violence, the psychic trauma of warfare or the coming of age in a Lawrencian working-class town, Stonehouse has written a collection of superbly crafted and keenly insightful stories.

The review's available in the print version only, I'm afraid, though a few other essays are available for download via the LRC website. It's a good issue, and worth hunting down. (Especially--she says, elbowing in a plug--since it also features work by Robyn Sarah. Way to go LRC!)

Happy Birthday to Us

Seven years ago today Biblioasis published its first book, Salvatore Ala's Straight Razor & Other Poems. So this past week we've been taking our birthday tour on the road. Tonight, it ends in Montreal, with a reading from the WOSS crew (Rebecca Rosenblum, Laura Boudreau & Cathy Stonehouse). Below please find a video from the start of the tour, which aired on Windsor Today.

Funny Ha-Ha

Cathy Stonehouse in the Post:

It’s hard to be funny about death. It’s even harder to be funny about child rape, especially when it has happened to yourself. But Edward St. Aubyn does it, in Never Mind, the first volume of his fictional trilogy about his alter ego, Patrick Melrose. Well, the rape scene isn’t exactly funny, but the context surrounding it is. Patrick is raped almost off-handedly by his aristocrat father who clearly does not anticipate any consequences. In St. Aubyn’s crisp prose, the horror of the situation morphs into a terrifying absurdity. And unlike one might expect, the effect is uplifting, enraging yet liberating, not least because it allows for the fact that Melrose, aka St. Aubyn, survived.

Recently I took a clowning course here in Vancouver with the extremely talented David McMurray Smith. One of the exercises we had to do involved lying on our backs and engaging in short sharp exhalations. What was the point of that? I wondered as all of a sudden my diaphragm broke out into spasms. Suddenly I was giggling. Pretty soon I was downright hysterical. And after a week or two of this the laughter opened up its opposite: tears. These were harder to allow, but the swing, as David called it, was starting to happen. For the first time in my life I truly understood how inseparable sadness and joy are, humour and horror. The body movements (knees coming up to chest, head thrown back) are almost identical. And the end result—that pleasant chemical “brain wash”—is also the same.

Writing about Terrible Things is a bit of a downer, and difficult to market unless you play up the voyeurism factor, the lurid realism that somehow numbs as it entertains. Yet “light” fiction can be depressing too, like a bad summer movie.

Read the rest here.

Of Badgers and Bookstores

Cathy Stonehouse, author of the just-released short-story collection Something About the Animal, is hosting The National Post's Afterword this week. In Of Badgers and Bookstores she wonders what will happen in a world where we don't have independent bookstores as cultural centres, as places where we can get our literary bearings:


I don’t go to church or frequent many bars but I do go to bookstores. I love the fact that they are so anonymous: the perfect place to fondle the raw edges of new paperbacks or discreetly sniff stuck-together pages for that new ink smell. I go there for the sensory overload, the sense of company, to trawl the shelves for serendipitous findings or just to remind myself that books are still there. I prefer not to talk, although I like the companionship of other customers, each on their own erotic quest, seeking companionship, a quiet, yearning restlessness in the air.

The crazy crowded logic of Jimbocho, Tokyo’s bookselling quarter, that tiny store in the Japanese town of Kushiro with its half shelf of English language books, the subterranean alternative bookshops of 1970s Manchester, the antiquarian delights of Charing Cross Road. Whenever I travel I seek out bookstores as entry points. I also visit them for moments of peace.

A good bookstore is a matchmaking enterprise. Rifling through musty volumes in Vancouver’s Macleod’s Books one day several years ago I chanced upon an old green leather-bound volume entitled The Life Story of a Badger, by J. C. Tregarthen. Inside the front cover was a bookplate stating it belonged to a Mr. and Mrs. Brooke. Pasted into the back was a yellowing newspaper clipping on “Men and Badgers,” alongside penciled-in notes about the Brooke family motto. Slid into the pages were several newspaper articles and postcards depicting badgers.

I am a badger-phile. These tenacious, occasionally ferocious black and white creatures that shy away from humans fascinate me, not least because they are native to where I grew up. So I seized on the book with great delight. Its melodramatic tale of a badger named Brock, who escapes being hunted and trapped, is a piece of writing few would perhaps appreciate, yet clearly the Brookes were inspired by this fable of their namesake. I will treasure it also.

A good bookstore is not just a place where books are sold but one where connections are forged between past and future. It’s also a place where literary community is formed. When I arrived in Vancouver twenty years ago I knew nothing about West Coast Canadian literature. I also did not have many friends. But browsing the shelves of R2B2 Books in Kitsilano I overheard fascinating literary conversations. Dawdling in the aisles of Octopus Books on Commercial Drive I learned about local readings, got to know local writers. In People’s Co-op I browsed the rotating chapbook stand. In Duthie’s I surveyed the vast range of Canadian fiction titles, and in Ariel, the Women’s Bookstore and Women in Print I learnt about SKY Lee, Dionne Brand and Ethel Wilson.

Would I be able to do any of this online?

To read the rest of her post please go here. And please check back at The Afterword over the following days for more from Cathy.

Something About the Animal

Cathy Stonehouse's debut fiction collection Something About the Animal arrived from the printer on Monday, and copies will be finding their way to book stores and reviewers across the country over this week and next. It is in the top handful of fiction debuts we've published at the press: real life horror stories imbued with tremendous humour and understanding. One of four short story collections we're publishing this year -- alongside collections by Clark Blaise, Laura Boudreau and Rebecca Rosenblum -- you can test-drive both the title story (Something About the Animal) and read a brief two-page Afterword about it in the just-released new issue of The New Quarterly (Certainly the best literary mag in the land).

i've also just been made aware of the first review of Animal, in the current (May) issue of Quill & Quire. Chelsea Murray writes, in part:

Cathy Stonehouse’s debut collection contains one heartbreaking situation after another: sexual abuse, mental illness, loneliness, and death pervade the book. However, Stonehouse’s spare prose reveals the hidden layers of her vulnerable characters with great precision, making it difficult to turn away.
...
Despite the sombre material, Stonehouse can be darkly funny. ... Gaynor, the confused kid mourning her mother’s death in “A Special Sound,” repeatedly recites the incorrect words to what she calls the “necklace prayer”: “Hey old Mary, full of grace, the law deals with thee. Blessed art thou, a monk’s woman, and, blessed tart, the Fruit-of-thy-Loom, Jesus.”