After Congress: One Complete Voyage.

What's better than coming home after Congress and discovering a pile of happy reviews? The fact that my plants aren't dead is pretty good but this may be even better. First and foremost, we have Douglas Glover's Attack of the Copula Spiders, which after just shy of three chapters won the heart of Charles Wilkins at The Globe and Mail. Still a skeptic re: Spiders? Wilkins was too, & confessed to cracking it with a How to write a novel, yes yes, well well, grumble snuffle snort. But (& quoth my gran), there's no greater zealot than a convert: 

As I absorbed the book’s title piece, "Attack of the Copula Spiders," an eloquent little commentary on writing well in the age of Facebook, I felt a first pang of regret over my churlish resistance to a book that would ultimately reward me with its erudition and democratic spirit. Such was the pace of my conversion, that by the time I reached the penultimate chapter ... I had decided that every literate person in the country should be reading Glover’s essays and was fixing to present them to my eldest daughter.

It's possible that coming home to Copula Spiders is even better than coming home to that review. We'll have to ask the eldest Ms. Wilkins how she liked it. 


Next up we have a run on Alice Petersen, whose All the Voices Cry is splashed on blogs across the country this week. Yesterday Steven Beattie featured Alice's "Neptune's Necklace" as Day 30 of his 31 days of short stories, commenting on mood, place, and the subtle power of setting to shape subtext. (Sssssuper stuff.) For those of you who are curious. here's the section from Alice's interview to which he's referring:

2. “Neptune’s Necklace” is set by Aramoana Beach, Otago, where in 1990 thirteen people were shot dead by a lone gunman. The Aramoana massacre is now famous as New Zealand’s worst modern act of gun violence. Was the choice of this setting deliberate? What does it contribute to your story?

Aramoana Beach, Otago, NZ

Yes, this was a deliberate choice. I was twenty when that tragedy occurred and it really shook us all up. Before that, Aramoana had been known for its triumphant rejection of plans to build a smelter down there on the salt flats at the entrance to the Otago harbour. It’s a small settlement, but a strong one. It’s a place that makes you think. You are beside the sea and it’s all brisk and fresh and there are plenty of shells to pick up, but there’s this sadness in the air. I did not want to write about the massacre itself, so I made a parallel narrative, as my own act of memorial.

 "Neptune's Necklace" is a lovely story and well worth further attention. As Steven Beattie puts it:

It is coincidental that I read the interview with Petersen prior to reading her story. But how does a knowledge of Aramoana Beach’s history change the effect of the story, if at all? How would one react to the melancholy aspect of the tale if one thought it had no real world resonance? Does the knowledge of the 1990 massacre lend Hattie’s story additional gravitas? Does it tug at a reader differently? ... Petersen describes the setting of the massacre without ever mentioning the massacre. The story stands on its own. Armed with the background knowledge of what the story’s setting implies, how does that change a reader’s experience of it? Since it is impossible to erase the knowledge of what the setting implies, it is impossible for me to answer these questions. I would be interested to find out, however.

So would I. 


(As an aside, the first time I spoke with Alice on the phone about this book I swore she was saying, not "Neptune's Necklace," but "Nixon's Necklace," which I think would make a great followup piece. Alice? You game? Something at the Watergate hotel?)


Next we have The Winnipeg Review, who's to be commended for selecting a marvellous passage that really does showcase Alice's imagistic flare. Poor froggy! Here's their conclusion:

Petersen’s almost strange observations create a collection of realistic stories about loss, love, restlessness, and freedom— above all, it is a collection of decisions. Written in easily-managed chunks, All the Voices Cry could be read in spare moments, or, as the easy prose tempts you, all at once. The decision is up to you.

Last but not least we have the indefatigable Kerry Clare, who's given us a strong two cents on Alice at Pickle Me This. "The book is slim," she observes, "the stories are subtle and quiet, and their impact is not always immediate" - but "All the Voices Cry is a collection you might want to meditate on, its pages getting dog-earned and stained with coffee rings as the summer wears on."


It's worth noting that a few reviewers, including Kerry and Kirsty Hourd over in Winnipeg, have commented on how pleasant it is to read a series of what can only be called short short stories. 5 pages, 7 pages, and so forth. Therefore to conclude I thought I'd leave you with some of Alice's own words on the subject:

My ideal reader is sitting in the car waiting to pick up the kids. He has a small coffee at hand and ten minutes to spare and he’s already read his favourite page of the car manual. There’s nothing else in the glove compartment except All the Voices Cry and some gum. Or maybe she has ten minutes tucked up in bed before she knows she is going to zonk out, so she looks in my book to find a story that will take ten minutes to read. These are the folks who value the compact quality of the short story. Just ten minutes, time for one story, one brief excursion to somewhere else. One complete voyage. 

We hope you've enjoyed your trip.


Oh yes. In case you're one of the 2 people who haven't seen me splashing it all over facebook, Anakana Schofield is this month's cover girl at Quill and Quire. Take a look. Picture's there at the bottom left. You know, where you see that sultry stare.

A Stone Motherfucker of a Book

When we move into a second printing for Light Lifting, we know what we're going to put on the front cover. Forget Robert Wiersma's Pure Literary Transcendence. I prefer his unedited enthusiasm over at Beattie's Shakespherian Rag. "It really is a stone motherfucker of a book. It blew me away."

Over at That Shakespherian Rag Steven offers his own take on Light Lifting:

Sometimes a debut collection appears that’s so assured, so confident, so poised that it’s hard to believe it’s the author’s first time out of the gate. This was true of Rebecca Rosenblum’s 2008 debut, Once, and it also applies to Alexander MacLeod’s newly Giller-longlisted collection Light Lifting. (Like Rosenblum’s book, Light Lifting is published by Biblioasis, a press which seems to have some kind of alchemical formula for discovering talent in the short fiction arena.)
Not that MacLeod’s book appeared fully formed as if out of Zeus’s head. The author published his first story when he was 21 years old. He’s now on the cusp of 40, so the seven stories in his collection have clearly been percolating for quite some time. Such patience and dedication is apparent on every page of MacLeod’s staggering debut, which collects a group of tough-minded urban tales about people at defining moments in their lives – moments that often involve a recourse to violence or harm.
Each story is a small stylistic marvel. “Adult Beginner I” features a potent, vertiginous scene – one of the most visceral in recent memory – of a swimmer attempting a daredevil dive off a hotel roof into the Detroit River. “Wonder About Parents” employs staccato, declarative sentences to trace the trajectory of a relationship through the prism of a head lice infestation at an elementary school. The title story, about the macho dynamics of a bricklaying crew, opens with a scalding description of a sunburn: “You could see it right through his shirt. Like grease coming through waxed paper. Wet and thick like that, sticking to him. Purple.”

Full review here.

And MacLeod bunkmate A.J. Somerset has this to offer over at his Banjaxed.

Alexander MacLeod’s debut collection of short fiction, drawn from 15 years of writing for literary magazines in Canada, tempts you to indulge in the kind of superlatives that might be counterproductive in the age of hype; just how brilliant can it really be? Well, pretty damn brilliant, actually. Among the seven longish stories that make up this collection, there is not a single misstep. This book is that good.
These stories lead in one direction, dart down a side alley, and then return to themselves, without any bad welds or weak seams to give away their construction. “Number Three” erects the Chrysler minivan as a mythic object, while exploring the consequences of a devastating accident; “Adult Beginner I” finds teenaged lifeguards diving into the Detroit River from the roof of the Holiday Inn, as a swimmer goes out of her depth; and “Wonder About Parents” encapsulates, in staccato prose, the strange intimacies of parenthood. “Good Boys,” an apparently simple story about four brothers and the kid across the street, manages to be both funny and moving while avoiding any form of predictability.
Read it. Oh, yes. Read it.

That, pretty much, is his full review. So just visit AJ's blog by chicking over the right. And pick up his Combat Camera as well. It also is a Stone Mutherfucker.

I just like saying that.