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.

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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

A review of Rooke's Hitting the Charts from the Danforth Review

Better late than never: a good review of Rooke from the Danforth.

And, if you've not seen him, he'll be reading on Friday in Toronto at Type Books, and Sunday in Ottawa as part of the International writer's fest. Go if you can: you won't be disappointed.


Hitting the Charts
by Leon Rooke
Biblioasis, 2006

Read the TDR interview with Leon Rooke

Reviewed by Michael Murphy

If Walter Benjamin is right, and the art of storytelling is dead, then Leon Rooke’s Hitting the Charts is surely an anomaly. While most books are meant to be read in private, this collection of short stories begs to be read aloud, in front of a live audience. From "The Deacon’s Tale" to "Biographical Notes," the theatrical quality of Rooke’s stories, combined with his merciless attention to form, presents the reader with a corrective to plot-driven, stale prose. For anyone who’s had the pleasure of hearing Rooke perform, the reading experience is only slightly less intense.

Hitting the Charts spans across almost three decades of Rooke’s career. Yet, the stories feel as fresh and inspiring as any current writing in Canadian fiction. Rooke’s sentences seem to come from the mouths of caffeinated children, unwilling to stop for breath, stretching across entire paragraphs and pages. The effect can leave a reader bewildered. But Rooke’s humorous manipulation of language never fails to invigorate, enchant, and, most importantly, entertain.

In "Sixteen-year-old Susan March Confesses to the Innocent Murder of all the Devious Strangers who would Drag Her Down" (one of many brilliantly-titled stories, second only to "Winter is Lovely, isn’t Summer Hell"), a sixteen-year-old narrator recounts a tale of frustrated, unrequited love with a fitting lack of periods and commas. "Mr Reeves," she imagines herself saying, "I know it’s crazy and absurd and out of the question even but I declare myself I yearn I ache I love you Mr Reeves for god’s sake don’t let me keep sitting here too fragile in this instance even to remove my eyes from your face O tell me what I should do how I might give myself help me Mr Reeves because this has never happened to me with those others I shall show you in our lake for I am my father’s virgin." Susan March’s verbose narrative seems to take place entirely within her teenage mind, one too frenetic for line breaks or verbal restrictions. "O! O! O! to catch my breath!" she cries, mimicking the breathlessness of her weary reader. As wearying as Susan March’s narrative might be, if the story were told any other way the young girl’s teenaged, scatterbrained urgency would be lost. Many of Rooke’s better stories demonstrate a similar reliance upon form, including the last one in the collection, "Biographical Notes." Told through brief biographical statements, "Biographical Notes" is about a controversial filmmaker and the different people he has met and influenced throughout his life. Here, as elsewhere, Rooke takes a good story and makes it better by telling it in a new and energizing way, with a definite focus on the telling.

Although I am calling Rooke’s works stories, John Metcalf insists in the foreword to Hitting the Charts that Rooke’s stories be thought of as performances. He writes that the "most fruitful way to approach Leon is to think of him as a jazz musician in full flight of improvisation … Sometimes the story takes off; sometimes, it peters out" (9). Indeed, there are few stories (or performances, improvisations) in this collection that peter out. The rare exceptions to this rule are the stories that seem to sacrifice content too readily for the sake of form. For example, "Hanging Out With the Magi" and "The Problem Shop" both begin strongly, but end without purpose. The former tells a confusing story about a family that lives with ghosts, and ends with the reception of a baby in a box, and a man in a tree. Although the reader wishes to make sense of these events, the conclusion fails to pull them together, and the story loses impact as a result. "The Problem Shop" suffers from a similar lack of cohesiveness. The ex-con protagonist seems to want a longer story than he gets, and when his problems are solved by heading out to sea on an ancient schooner, the reader cannot help but wonder if heading out to sea, into an open environment, is not simply Rooke’s way of telling us he couldn’t think up a better ending.

While some of Rooke’s less satisfactory pieces leave a little to be desired in the way of content, it helps to remember that these stories take on entirely new shapes and directions when read aloud. On the page, "Gypsy Art" is a condensed, hard-to-follow car accident of words, chronicling the misadventures of the wandering Fazzini. But if you’ve had the pleasure of hearing Rooke read the same story aloud, the story’s wandering becomes Fazzini’s wandering, and you begin to get a sense of what it means to "hit the road."

Benjamin may be right — storytelling may be a lost art form. But Rooke presents a pretty strong counter-argument. There’s a history to each word he pronounces, each sentence he constructs. At times, his stories are tender and engaging. At others, bawdy and irreverent. Mostly, though, Rooke just knows how to tell a good story well. With him, it’s the telling that matters.

Michael Murphy has contributed to filling Station, The Windsor Review, and All Rights Reserved. He teaches writing in London (the Canadian version) and is a compulsive used book shopper.

A Drive-by Reading: Kathleen Winter at Concordia

Kathleen Winter reads in Montreal next Monday: details on the poster above.

You can also catch her reading with Leon Rooke this Friday at Type Books on Queen Street in Toronto (7 pm start), and in Ottawa, with Leon and John Metcalf, as part of the Ottawa International Writers' Festival.

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?

Globe Review of Metcalf's Shut Up He Explained

The Globe & Mail reviewed John Metcalf's Shut Up He Explained in yesterday's book section. An excellent, thoughtful review, the kind which should actually sell books. Hallelujah! Only (gad)fly in the ointment is the title, which I've been assured was not of the author's choosing. Unfortunate, as it does not capture the true spirit of this book: celebration.

For those who have no interest in reading the whole review, here's the heart of it: "Shut Up He Explained ... is obligatory reading for anyone who cares about aesthetic vitality, the state of the nation's literature and the essential importance of very good sentences. ... John Metcalf will make you think very precisely about just what kind of literature you want in Canada, and about what kind of literature we in fact have."

Obligatory reading, folks. Needless to say, we could not agree more.

Metcalf: still Canlit's gadfly

ADRIAN MICHAEL KELLY

October 6, 2007

SHUT UP HE EXPLAINED

A Literary Memoir, Vol. II

By John Metcalf

Biblioasis, 398 pages, $36.95

Print Edition - Section Front

Enlarge Image

Martin Amis, who with his father Kingsley appears more than once in the engaging pages of John Metcalf's new memoir, Shut Up He Explained, has said that by the age of 70 a lot of writers ought to be kicked upstairs like a senile auntie or crusty grand-maman. The charm has long since faded, sadly, and she's only stinking up the place.

When an aging nabob of a nation's letters chooses to publish his memoirs, there can be similar cause for discomfiture. It's as though, having seen the reaper at the end of the tunnel, the old boy feels compelled to cull mouldering animosities, or the days of Oxbridge green and golden, before retiring to the attic with the Peak Freans and the sherry.

Double delight and relief, then, to see that as he approaches the age of 70, John Metcalf is still writing with the same élan that animates almost every line of his distinguished oeuvre. Despite occasional slackness and some syrupy nostalgia for mumsy-England, Shut Up He Explained (a companion volume to 2003's An Aesthetic Underground) is obligatory reading for anyone who cares about aesthetic vitality, the state of the nation's literature and the essential importance of very good sentences. It is also a moving record of time past and friends lost, a shimmering and often comic account of recent travels, and - Metcalf being Metcalf - a sometimes prickly if not intemperate j'accuse.

But therein lies part of the fun in reading Metcalf's non-fiction. Dismiss him if you will as the Pooh-Bah of Humbug, but no one in Canadian letters offends quite so well - or half as usefully - as he. Like Irving Layton before him, or Stephen Henighan now, John Metcalf will make you think very precisely about just what kind of literature you want in Canada, and about what kind of literature we in fact have. To read Metcalf on literary excellence, and on the techniques that make for it - as when, for instance, he spends an instructive chapter of Shut Up He Explained comparing the footling syntax and caricatures of Morley Callaghan to the precision and power of the early Ernest Hemingway - is to be powerfully reminded as to the centrality of style.

A long-time critic of the "deeply unhealthy connection between literature and nationalist politics," Metcalf has paradoxically become our greatest literary protector. No one - no one - has done more in this country to develop and promulgate a literature of which we can be proud. Against mainstream and commerce-driven preferences for "the mildly hysterical writings of Timothy Findley," the "creaking, fustian English" of M. G. Vassanji, or the "566 pages of Maritime Grand Guignol" that is Ann-Marie McDonald's Fall On Your Knees, Metcalf raises in Shut Up He Explained the bulwark of "the Century Club," or 40 books of short fiction published between 1900 and 2000 that represent, in his view, the best writing that Canada has produced.

Some of Metcalf's choices - Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant - will hardly surprise. More than a few - Annabel Lyon, Mary Brodsky or even masters Clark Blaise and Norman Levine - will be all but unknown to any but aficionados of the genre. After his list, therefore, Metcalf provides a critical discussion of each author's work. The result is a chapter of more than 100 pages. It could be used profitably by developing writers who aspire to more than, as Metcalf quotes Gallant, "pallid little 'I' stories," or it could be used, as well, in CanLit or criticism classrooms to provide for students an alternative to the Ideologiekritik and other gobbledygook they often get in place of aesthetic understanding.

But I suspect that many will find Metcalf's Hall of Heroes a bit of uphill work. Too often his critical apologia will consist of long quotations from book reviewers who merely echo Metcalf's views, or long quotations from the work of the writer in question at which Metcalf essentially points and says, "See?"

Metcalf is at his best in this singular book not when he is attacking or defending his contemporaries, but when he is rendering and remembering in a manner reminiscent of his fine short stories. When he visits Chekhov's White Dacha, for instance, or when he memorializes a sadly destitute and infirm Norman Levine, we see at work an enviable eye for small and transient (and therefore almost holy) detail.

A fan and ideal reader of Kingsley Amis, Metcalf says he wouldn't give "chopped liver" for the work of Martin, but Kingsley's brilliant son understands the marriage of Time and Talent, and Metcalf would do well to remember it. Savouring the talent on display in Shut Up He Explained left me hoping that, with his adorations and devotions so unequivocally in place, Metcalf will, as his own time draws a little closer, scabbard entirely his rattling sabre in favour of giving us a new collection of his diamond-precise and iridescent short fictions.

At work on a collection of new short stories, Adrian Michael Kelly is also guiding a group of university students in Oshawa through the aesthetic pleasures and pitfalls of Canadian literature.

Anything but Hank

The above image is by the phenomenal illustrator/artist Eric Orchard, who is illustrating Biblioasis' first children's book, Anything But Hank (authored, if you do not know, by the husband wife team of Zachariah Wells and Rachel Lebowitz). Set to be released in the Fall of 08, it will be a gorgeous book.

Eric has his own blog, where you can see other paintings he has done for Hank, in addition to numerous other illustrations. His blog can be found here: www.ericorchard.blogspot.com/.

Another illustration can be found here: www.ericorchard.blogspot.com/2007/09/owls-preparing-for-battle.html.

To see the actual illustrations, with their depth, colour, texture, is amazing. I had them for 24 hours before passing them along to Carleton Wilson, who will be typesetting Hank. We should have an initial mock up soon.

Eric is also slated to illustrate David Hickey's first children's book, to be published in 2009.

Profile of Kathleen Winter in the St. John's Telegram

Just in case you were beginning to think that it was all Cold-cocked, all the time...

E-mail error brings good fortune
Metcalf Rooke Award helps gain Winter new readers

JUSTIN BRAKE
Special to The Telegram

Local author Kathleen Winter is revelling in the events surrounding the national release of her latest book, all of which were never supposed to happen.

The St. John’s-based writer, and Telegram columnist, was recently named recipient of the 2007 Metcalf Rooke Award, which recognizes the work of new and up-and-coming Canadian writers.

Initially, Winter sent a manuscript of her most recent work “boYs”, a collection of fiction short stories, to John Metcalf, who she thought held the post of senior editor of the Porcupine’s Quill, an Ontario-based press.

“I actually sent it to the wrong publisher because he was always with the Porcupine’s Quill,” Winter explains from her home in Holyrood. “Unbeknownst to me he had left that and gone to Biblioasis.”

Nonetheless the manuscript finally reached Metcalf, who read it, contacted Winter and prompted her to enter it in Biblioasis’ competition.

“He called me right away and let me know that it had come at a time when he was accepting submissions with Leon Rooke for this award,” says Winter, who agreed to let it be a part of the competition.

The stories in her book, Winter explains, are “about how people relate to each other.

“There are a lot of men in the stories and most of the stories are seen through the eyes of women.”

Five of the stories were pulled from the vault, she says. “I wrote those when I was in my twenties.”

The remaining stories are a collection of her works from the past few years.

When she found out she had won, Winter was ecstatic that she would have the opportunity to expand her readership to a bigger audience.

With the award came a publishing contract with Biblioasis, who pressed 1,500 copies of “boYs” and provided her with a regional tour to promote the book.

She has already made stops at the Winnipeg International Writer’s Festival, the Eden Mills Writer’s Festival and in October, will be traveling to Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, where she will officially be awarded the Metcalf Rooke Award.

She even plans to take her tour to her birthplace, a small town in Northeast England called Bill Quay.

Though she and her family moved to Newfoundland when she was only eight years old, one of Winter’s priorities is to share her writing with the places she has called home, such as England, but also Corner Brook, where she grew up, and St. John’s.

Now 47, she is finally realizing her “number one goal in life … to have readers.”

As is often the case with new publications, Winter realizes critics have the potential to determine a book’s success, but it doesn’t seem to worry her.

“It doesn’t make me nervous,” she says. “I’ve been seriously working on this material so I really believe in it. I can’t see how any review could really crush me at this point. I’m just too old for that,” she laughs.

The book’s official launch will take place in the Port Room of the Downtown Courtyard Marriott on Oct. 27 at 7 p.m.

On Oct. 7 she will also chat with readers and sign copies at Chapters on Kenmount Rd. from 2-4 p.m.

Winter is also planning to travel the island to share her book with others. Anyone interested in having her do a reading for any community group, school, library or book store café, can email her at hyacinth@nf.sympatico.ca.

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.

Leon Rooke & Kathleen Winter read October 12th at TYPE Books in Toronto

Leon Rooke and Kathleen Winter take over TYPE books, located at 883 Queen St. W., at 7 pm, October 12th. This will be more than a reading: it'll be a performance. Leon's one of the best performers I've ever seen, and easily one of the best writers and storytellers in the country. If you've not seen him before, you're in for a treat. I saw Kathleen read for the first time when we launched boYs last month at Eden Mills, and she's extremely capable herself. Mark it on your calendar, and spread the word: as far as readings go, this one's as good as it gets.

Review of The Goldfish Dancer in the Women's Post

A good review of Patricia Robertson's The Goldfish Dancer in the Women's Post. His only small quibble was the inclusion of the novella 'Girl With Cello', oddly enough, my favourite piece in the collection. My only quibble was he refers to Patricia as being Saskatchewan-based. This is not the first time this season Patricia has been confused with that other Robertson. One of them will have to change their name. (There's precedent for this: at the turn of the last century, there was a very popular novelist in Britian by the name of Winston Churchill, and a young up and coming politician by the same name. They decided that there was too much confusion, and that one of them would have to begin to use their middle name to simplify matters. If I remember correctly, they flipped a coin. We could do a similar thing here."

In any case, the review...

Wearing fine gold scales

The Goldfish Dancer
By Patricia Robertson
Biblioasis
192 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by
Russell Wangersky

Some mornings, you wake up and remember a place you love, and wonder all at once why you haven’t been back recently. With short story collections back on the Canadian radar, collections like The Goldfish Dancer make you realize they never should have left.

These seven pieces have a clear ability to transport the reader from Harlem to Lancashire to Spain. I read Grave of the Heroes in a dilapidated lodge on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula, the room clean despite the hint of cold mildew, and I was instantly transported to the familiar smells of Spain in April. I lived in Barcelona for a year, traveling regularly to the small towns that surround the city. Saskatchewan writer Patricia Robertson captures the sense of those towns dexterously: “On a crumbling stone bridge into the village a herd of cows bunched, flicking ears at the car. The driver, shouting, leaned out his window, palm flat on the horn. Claudia got out and walked.” Robertson conveys the eerie, almost-threatening feel of fiestas that include masked characters, the solemn black garb of the older village women.

Badlands takes you to Western Canada in 1949; After Annabel to a fading London, England, and then back to Vancouver. These are sudden, magic trips, almost note-perfect, the kind of stories that are long enough to give a sense of the people inside, while leaving you almost wistful, wanting to know even more about where they will go once the stories end.

This is not a traditional collection of linked short stories. The characters are too geographically broad, too spread apart in time, place, and nature. But there is one crucial connection: Characters in these stories live. They feel and fear, and they make you do the same. They also move, from place to place to place. No one stands still here – these are real people in motion.

If I have one quibble with the book, it’s the inclusion of the historical novella Girl with a Cello. Its main character is a housemaid working in a variety of households and, simultaneously, working through her search for belonging. It is equally able to transport the reader, but it jars with the others in the collection.

Strangely, the first story, The Goldfish Dancer, occurs in the same timeframe (prior to the First World War) but doesn’t give the same feeling of being separate from the other stories. Perhaps, that’s because the main character’s growth in The Goldfish Dancer depends less on place and historical information, and more on the distinct voice of the character herself.

If this collection had been broken apart and expanded into two books, there’d be plenty of reasons to buy both. It is small, bright-eyed, and luminous – a wonderful goldfish all its own.

Russell Wangersky is an author and columnist from St. John’s, Newfoundland. His memoir on a career as a volunteer firefighter, Burning Down the House, will be released in the spring of 2008.

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.

Shut Up in the Ottawa Citizen

An article published Monday in the Ottawa Citizen about the release of John Metcalf's Shut Up He Explained. Beyond the gadfly comment -- John's a bit tired of that one, folks (I am not, he said recently, a tiny stinging thing...) better than expected. And a little more charitable than Nathan Whitlock's take on the tome in the present Quill & Quire. (Though thankfully that review means we've finally broken through the Q&Q defence: t' is the first time they've reviewed one of our titles. Would that they waited one!)

A gadfly revitalized

A new book and a new job give critic and writer John Metcalf new energy -- and new outlets for his caustic views

Charles Enman

The Ottawa Citizen

Monday, September 24, 2007

CREDIT: Bruno Schlumberger, The Ottawa Citizen Ottawa writer and literary critic John Metcalf felt a few years ago that he was running out of energy after decades of tilting at windmills in Canada's literary establishment. But now, at 69, he is re-energized after meeting Dan Wells, the owner of a small Windsor press for which he has become fiction editor.

John Metcalf -- fine short story writer, mentor to a generation of upcoming Canadian writers, and gadfly to the Canadian literary establishment -- is back with a new book and a set of opinions as pointed, uncompromising and heartfelt as ever.

Metcalf will be reading from his latest book, Shut Up He Explained, at the Manx Pub on Saturday. That will be the book's launch, part of the Plan 99 Reading Series that has been running for seven years.

For years, Metcalf was senior editor at the Porcupine's Quill, perhaps the country's premier small press. Now 69, and newly installed as fiction editor at Biblioasis, a small press based in Windsor, he says he's caught new breath at an age at which he was starting to feel he should fade into the background.

The new book, he says, is "something strange, something that goes in three or four directions -- part memoir, part history, part criticism, and part an attempt to engage people with good prose and show them how to read it."

Canadians, he's been saying for decades, have never really learned to read well. They've been seduced by the belief that Canadian writing takes its virtue from being Canadian, and not from any intrinsic merit in the quality of the prose.

"We've had almost a total confusion between literature and nationalism. Large claims have been made for books simply because they are written by Canadians -- and I have irritated many people by insisting that this is an appalling basis for judgment."

He spends a good deal of time demonstrating, persuasively, that Morley Callaghan, "the father of the Canadian short story," as he's often called, is, in fact, a second-rate writer. And he's scandalized that M. G. Vassanji has twice won the Giller Prize and is again on this year's short list for The Assassin's Song.

"It's peculiar that this country's most prestigious prize has been given twice to a man who really is barely capable of writing a sentence in English," Metcalf says. "And this isn't a matter open to dispute -- all you really have to do is read a paragraph, and it's awful."

People sense more negativity in his work than is really there, Metcalf says. He's never disputed that there are many fine Canadian writers -- Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Leon Rooke, Clark Blaise and Norman Levine, among others. And he sees many up and coming writers -- "at least 30" -- who are doing work respectable according to any international standard.

Sitting in a sunlit room in his art-filled Centretown home, Metcalf, all reputation for ferocity aside, is a picture of owlish amiability, listening closely to questions and often laughing as his mind makes connections as names are mentioned and old controversies revisited. His English origins -- he came to Canada in 1962 -- are evident in his accent and unusual precision of speech.

He smiles when a line in his book about his mood of four years ago is read to him: "It was a cumulative exhaustion," he writes, "the exhaustion of years. I was feeling deeply weary of swimming against the tide, deeply weary of living embattled."

"That's not the feeling I have today," he says, as he talks about Dan Wells, the owner of Biblioasis, for which Metcalf plans to serve for several years as fiction editor.

"I was going to withdraw, but then I met Dan and was quite revitalized by his enthusiasm, his youth, and his energy. I think we can make Biblioasis the best literary publisher in the country, just as I believe I'd done with Porcupine's Quill."

Metcalf says he's always told the Canadian literary establishment "not to circle their wagons, but to straighten them out and look outward." And Biblioasis, he's happy to say, is already looking at the wider world.

"We will have lots of Canadians on our list, but we've already moved to publish some Americans, and in fact we're just moving to publish a writer from Angola, in a translation from Portuguese. We don't plan to be inward-looking at all."

There will be lots of space for young Canadian writers, many of whom he quotes in brief passages in the new book.

"I want to celebrate a whole generation of new young Canadian writers," he says. "And when I quote pieces of their prose, I want readers to treat it as a buffet, where you sample something, find you like it, and perhaps get the book that it was taken from.

"If I can be instrumental in getting even a handful of people to read those books, then that is reward enough."

Among the writers are Mike Barnes, Mary Borsky, Ann Copeland, Keath Fraser, Lisa Moore, Diane Schoemperlen and Russell Smith. (There are also such old hands as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Hugh Hood, Margaret Laurence, Alistair MacLeod and Norman Levine.)

In the book, he writes of feeling several years ago that, by 70, he would no longer be on top of the game, "perhaps too hidebound" to hear the voices of emerging young writers.

Now only one year away from that milestone, he finds that fear has vanished.

"I think I'm hearing the new voices loud and clear," he says. "And I'm perfectly confident that Dan Wells and I are going to produce a very interesting list."

As part of the Plan 99 Reading Series, John Metcalf will be reading at the Manx Pub, 370 Elgin St., on Saturday, Sept. 29 at 5 p.m. Seating is not guaranteed.

The Late Report...

Several weeks late, here are some photographs form this years Eden Mills. A rainy affair, it was a less than average crowd -- usually measured in the thousands, it would be a surprise if there were more than a few hundred. Still, the rain held off for most of the day, and it proved a lovely



time. Book sales were brisk, considering, and it was good to see some familiar faces, including a couple of regular Thirsty readers. I met Kathleen Winter for the first time and we launched her new collection, boYs. She read beautifully, from a History of Zero, one of the stories in the book, and despite the small audience of 100 sold out the festival bookstore and then some.




Leon was in fine form, reading from a powerful new story. Goran Simic was supposed to be there as well, as part of a PEN panel, but got waylaid in Sarajevo, passport-less. Caroline Adderson was also there in support of her latest collection -- Pleased to Meet You, one of the best books of 2006 -- and it was delightful to spend some time with her again. She's just published her first children's book, Very Serious Children, which I picked up and am currently reading to my boys. It's a tale about two boys who grow up with their circus family, and are desperate to escape their rollmops and pink popcorn for lives as accountants and broccoli. Very funny, and a hit with the kids.

I met Steven Price for the first time, pictured at the Biblioasis booth with Chris Banks; also met Paul Glennon, pictured above with Leon, Stephen Henighan and myself. The bottom picture shows Kathleen with Neil Smith of Bang Crunch fame.

Kathleen brought with her E. M. Forster bookmarks, crocheted page markers she made and we gave away with each sold copy. I have a few signed copies left, with a Winter original bookmark loosely inserted should anyone be interested. They are quite lovely.

Kathleen is currently in Winnipeg, reading at the Thin Air festival with her brother. If you're in the area, check out her reading. And give her book a chance: in awarding her the 2nd Metcalf-Rooke award, John and Leon welcomed "a new and distinctive voice in Canadian writing." Her voice is certainly distinctive; I'd also add fresh and varied. There's more than one voice between these covers, though all are worth reading and savouring.

We're two for two with this Metcalf-Rooke Award thing. Can't wait to see what the current batch brings in.

Banff...etc.

Away this past week on LPG -- that's Literary Press Group -- business. I've never been to Alberta before, let alone the Rockies. The thin air made me feel even more out of shape than I actually am. I brought a lot of work -- copy-editing, mostly, spring's titles -- but couldn't stomach the thought of getting to it. A lot of time, alas, was spent indoors in meetings -- over 20 hours over 2 days -- but I got out each day for a short hike. Spent dinner and several evenings with Steven Heighton, who was leading a fiction writing workshop, and the rest of my fellow publishers/board members. Sampled prairie beer each evening. On my last night I was able to hook up with Jack Illingworth, former PQL intern and current ACP point guard.

Friday morning saw the first of what I expect will be several rounds of the Biblioasis-ECW squash tourney. I feel it my duty to report, sadly, that team Biblioasis fared not at all well. Round two will take place December 6th to 8th for any of those in the Toronto area who would like to see me get a bit of revenge.

Back in my onion field for a few days before heading up to Ottawa for Metcalf's launch of Shut Up He Explained. The book came in while I was away. It's our most ambitious production yet: 400 pages, plus 32 pages of b&w photographs, hardcover with dust jacket. The cover photo by Thirsty reader Brenda Schmidt looks swell. I'll be sending her a few copies next week -- but thought I'd wait and get John to inscribe one to her while I'm up in Ottawa. The rest of you, they've already left the warehouse, and should be in bookstores across the country by next week. Rush out will you and pick up a copy. We've a hefty printing bill to pay and could desperately use your money.


One last thing: while I was away a fabulous, short little novel by Alexander Scala hit my inbox. I read it, and accepted it immediately. I Arrive in Burgos is an brilliantly perverse tale of the Spanish Inquisition, and something I'm incredibly happy to land for Biblioasis. I've not yet read his only other published novel, Dr. Swathmore, published by the Porcupine's Quill, but Steven Heighton told me that it is equally brilliant. I've got a copy in an as yet unpacked box, and intend to find it immediately. It might be worth looking up a copy yourself.

Correction: Shut Up Launch at 5 pm, Saturday September 29th at the Manx Pub, at 370 Elgin in Ottawa

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.

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.

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."