Barbed 'n arrestin Laura Boudreau

This arrived in my inbox this morning courtesy of Laura Boudreau ... and Gizoogle.

Suitable Precautions 

When a biatch uncovers a fortune up in tha attic, her ass begins a pilgrimage dat takes her ta tha knife-edge between blessin n' curse. Two fatherless lil pimps think Mista Muthafuckin Crisander is not a god damn thang mo' than a creepy next door neighbour until they nearly bust a cap up in his thugged-out lil' pot-bellied pig, n' learn tha secretz of his thugged-out lil' past fo' realz. A lil' ho yammers bout grade six, jackin blunts, n' her sister’s no-chicken diet while bein photographed by a internizzle pornographer.

Da storiez of Suitable Precautions is fresh n' hustlin. Da charactas within em exude a bitta beauty fo' realz. And while they lives may be derailed, refronted, celebrated, and questioned, what tha fuck holdz em together is what tha fuck also bindz tha stories up in dis collection: dat is, a sense fo' tha strange, tenuous fragilitizzle of human bonds. Suitable Precautions be a incisive n' movin debut, n' Laura Boudreau a voice ta be remembered.

A Wednesday Wrap-Up

Hello, Windsor. Hello, world. What's new? Well, for starters, BiblioPoet Alex Boyd has just returned from the marvellous UNB poetry weekend, which apparently was as fabulous as ever. Thanks to Ross Leckie & to UNB for hosting. Quoth Mr. Boyd, the readings at Memorial Hall—thanks in part to the lovely environs and stained glass—were a bit like Poetry Church. For those of you in Toronto who'd like a poesy experience of a different kind, you can check out Alex (and Sonia Di Placido, Josh Smith and Daniel Tysdal), at LiveWords tomorrow at the Black Swan. More deets here. 

And of course we can't forget our friends in the West, oh glorious West: C.P. Boyko is reading with Rae Spoon tomorrow at Pages on Kensington. Should be a good show. Rae will be playing some of their music and Craig will be opening with a little Psych work. And of the latter? We had a review come our way which will be running in Booklist on Oct. 16. "Readers will enjoy the author's versatility," they say, along with his "quirky (sometimes uproarious) sense of humor, sardonic view of the world, and fruitful imagination. He is also master of the ambiguous clue and unreliable narrator .... Libraries with any short-fiction readers should buy this book and keep an eye out for the next one."

Other reviews in brief: "Unruly Voices has insightful things to say about the corrupting influence of money on public discourse," said the National Post this weekend of Mark Kingwell's new essay collection (for which we'll be having a launch party at Type on November 1st): "The scourge of incivility might not be new, but it is more pervasive. And, as Kingwell warns, the cost to coherent debate is great." If you check out the Montreal Review of Books, you'll see Alice Petersen talking about books and Beckett. And (as a lead-in to Hallowe'en, perhaps?) the next issue of Prairie Fire begins their review of Laura Boudreau's Suitable Precautions with this: "There is nothing like good old gore to lift a short story out of the bland."
Indeed. Good gore. Love it. 

Anon!

Read Me Something You Love

Here's a nice thing for a Wednesday afternoon: a podcast of our own Laura Boudreau reading from our own Rebecca Rosenblum's The Big Dream, as recorded by Steve Wasserman, who is at present having a love affair with the short fiction of our great nation. O Canada! O podcast! O Laura! Take a listen. Thanks to Steve Wasserman for doing this--and good luck wrestling with the dulcet tones of OC.

(Also the anecdote about RR, the smiley stickies, and the savage red pen work is pretty d*mn funny.)

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

Rosenblum & "Social Short Fiction"; The Frank O'Connor Longlist

Well we're going to take a short (very short!) break from poesy to mention the three titles that were just longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Award. Congratulations to Laura Boudreau, Alice Petersen, and Rebecca Rosenblum!





The Big Dream has also been reviewed in the lastest issue of Prairie Fire, which you should definitely check out, not least for its four new poems by Sylvia Legris. (See? I told you the poesy-break wouldn't last long). Here's what reviewer Bob Armstrong had to say:

"We tend to think that the American Dream, or its Canadian cousin, is a subject for a novel, rather than a work of short fiction. Portraying our great big world, bringing to life success and failure, youth and age, wealth and poverty – that’s the job for the novel, and not just any novel: the “social novel.” Toronto writer Rebecca Rosenblum may make us re-examine that assumption with her short story collection The Big Dream. Call it, perhaps, the “social short story collection” ... The Big Dream is real life. For readers who want fiction that engages with the world we live in, Rosenblum’s work matters."

Salty Ink Spotlight: Laura Boudreau

Salty Ink's Canadian Affair this month is our own Laura Boudreau and her Suitable Precautions.  Chad raves about Precautions as "quite fantastic" and offers up the following:

Her deeply human and deftly crafted stories feature the right balance oddness and ordinariness to make them both original and universally appealing. Not to mention poignant and memorable. Her fine balance of humour and profound humanity — the kind that defines the best of ultra-modern Canadian short fiction — shines like stars here. I’m not alone in thinking so. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including The Journey Prize Stories 22, Grain, The New Quarterly, PRISM international, Canadian Notes & Queries, and Oberon’s trustworthy Best Canadian Stories series.

Her fresh writing and engaging stories show good range, and are unified by, to quote the backcover, “a sense for the strange, tenuous fragility of human bonds.” Laura Boudreau is among the next wave of Canadian writers to watch for. That’s a fact. The thing with all the good first books coming out lately is they’re pumping new blood into CanLit, and diversifying it. I would, comfortably, place this book into the hands of any reader curious of what I mean by the new wave of contemporary CanLit. Suitable Precautions, among other things, captures  what it is to be human in an unfair and unpredictable world.

He goes on to interview Laura about her collection, process, and the origins of several of the stories in the collection, including The Meteorite Hunter, which he's just published online in a web exclusive.  Here's Laura on the origins of the story:

“The Meteorite Hunter” was inspired by a magazine article about, well, a meteorite hunter. This man’s quest to collect space rocks struck me as both noble and fruitless, and I wanted to capture that dichotomy in my main character’s struggle to connect with his daughter. I found it difficult to focalize the narrative through David, a divorced man and estranged dad (that’s pretty far from my own experience, and subject position), but I must have done something right because the story seems to resonate with readers, particularly men. I think it’s healthy for writers to stretch their voices. If you find you’re writing endless incarnations of yourself, you’d probably be better off investing in a private diary. As one of my teachers used to say, nobody cares about what it feels like to be a potato.

If you would like to read the whole interview -- and you should -- please go here.  To read 'The Meteorite Hunter' please go here.

Corpse Pose: The Rover on Suitable Precautions

There's another rave review of Laura Boudreau's Suitable Precautions over at the Rover.  Mark Paterson offers this take on Boudreau's dark humour and style:

In his essay “The Monster Mash,” David Sedaris recalls, as a child, repeatedly exhuming the bodies of dead hamsters and guinea pigs. His motivation for grave-robbing? A genuine aesthetic interest in what his dead pets’ corpses looked like in various stages of decay. As gruesome that sounds, adolescent fascination with death is, as Sedaris points out, not all that uncommon. “At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project, the good kind that doesn’t involve homework.”

A similar unshackled attitude about death is at work in Laura Boudreau’s debut short story collection, Suitable Precautions. Most of Boudreau’s characters’ lives have been shaped by the deaths of others, the operative word here being “others.” Death, in Suitable Precautions, happens to a father we barely knew, the former owner of our house that we never met, the drowning victim we read about remotely in a newspaper account. In this way, Boudreau employs death as a deceptively simple foil; her characters come alive because they are not dead. And rather than use the abundance of death in her stories to create a dark or morose ambiance, she does the exact opposite. Like a child who inevitably finds a way to amuse herself at a funeral parlour, Boudreau’s writing is playful and oftentimes fearless.

For the rest of the review, please go here.  

Tread Carefully: Suitable Precautions

Over at the Toronto Review of Books Sydney Hyatt offers a rave for Laura Boudreau's Suitable Precautions:

Laura Boudreau’s debut book release, Suitable Precautions, is a masterfully curated collection of short stories. Her style is unpredictable yet always elegantly delivered. She seems to delight in walking the line between the playful and sinister.

For the full review, please go here.  

The Telegraph-Journal Raves About Suitable Precautions

from today's Telegraph-Journal:

This review was originally going to be a survey of some of this fall's debut Canadian short fiction
collections. But Laura Boudreau's Suitable Precautions was so superior it would have been a disservice
to her fine collection to have it share the spotlight.
I first read Boudreau, who was born and raised in
Toronto and lives in London, England, in the The
Journey Prize Stories 22. Her story, Dead Dad Game,
with its non sequitur twists left me wanting more. And
Suitable Precautions delivers.

Like her precocious, deviant tween girl Lauren in the
Poses, Boudreau is definitely someone who doesn't
know when to quit. She is best when at a ramble speed,
with words and thoughts spewing until the narrative
leads you someplace quite different from where you
began. And the wayBoudreau does it, these twists
don't feel like forced tricks - they come on like the slow
boil a frog feels sitting in the pot.

For the full review, please go here.