As we prepare to send Terry Griggs' Nieve off to the printer, we remain undecided over which cover to go with. The original concept was the Black City image, a painting on canvas by Alexander Griggs-Burr, which details the first view the reader gets of the Black City as Nieve and her companion leave the hotel basement to journey underground.
The second cover was originally meant as one of the many internal illustrations, though we think it makes a very effective cover. It depicts Murdeth, one of the soulless bureaucrats who do the Impress's bidding, processing the human "material." Both still need a touch of tweaking, but we're not sure what to go with: might take both to the proofing stage at the printer to see what looks most effective.
Over at his blog Banjaxed, A. J. Somerset becomes just the latest fan of Ray Smith's Century. (He is also, incidentally, the only person yet to take me up on the offer to send Century to anyone, anywhere, for 20.00 incl. all taxes and shipping. In Andrew's case I drove it to Toronto and exchanged it for a sweaty twenty under a table at Hemingway's while the rest of the table was preoccupied. The offer still, of course, stands, though I may choose whatever means necessary, from Canada Post to pack-mule, to get it to you.)
For once, I'll cut to the chase and give you the last bit of his review. But you should really read the whole thing, here. Then buy the damn book. Skip the real Canada Reads for once, and, to paraphrase the lovely Kerry Clare, Read Independently.
From Banjaxed:
Henry James said that the only obligation of a novel was to be interesting. This one is fascinating.
And the writing. The writing is oh-so-artful, diction and syntax changing as we cast backwards in time; Smith does not allow himself to be trapped within the dictates of any particular style. This is a writer with a well-oiled gearbox, and he shifts gears smoothly without ever mistiming the clutch.
Also, it’s short. Writers of sweeping historical novels, take note: thine asses have been handed thee, upon a platter.
Nieve's parents' business has improved, but Nieve is worried. Her parents are professional sympathizers, and although Nieve appreciates the new clothes and treats, she is worried by the increasing need for her parents' services. The world is becoming darker. Strange plants are appearing, spiders and bats are becoming more plentiful, and people are more forgetful and fractious. As Nieve begins to discover the truth, she is drawn into a world of old myths and magic.
Although complete in itself, this debut in a trilogy sets up an interesting meta-narrative to be resolved in future volumes. As the story progresses, the tone gets progressively darker, ending on a hopeful but guarded note. The tone is more than amply supported by the illustratuions, which reference both Tim Burton and Edward Gorey. Part allegory, part Irish folk tale, the novel succeeds in dropping the reader into a world both familiar and slightly off kilter. Readers looking for good fantasy will enjoy the novel on its own, but readers with a passing familiarity with the darker denizens of Irish mythology will find much to enjoy.
Monday March 8th: Robyn Sarah reads at the University of New Brunswick in support of Pause for Breath.
Tuesday, March 9th: Robyn Sarah, Norm Sibum & Zach Wells read at Drawn & Quarterly, Montreal, 7 pm.
Wednesday, March 10th: Horacio Castellanos Moya reads at Harbourfront in Toronto, 7 pm; Zach Wells reads at the Pivot reading Series, Toronto; Marty Gervais talks about rumrunning at the Art Gallery of Windsor
Thursday, March 11th: Zach Wells appears at the Cooked & Eaten Reading Series in Peterborough
Friday, March 12th: Horacio Castellanos Moya reads at Western Ontario, 11 am; then reads at the University of Guelph at 2:30.
Hosted by Carmine Starnino. Mark it down and spread the word. The event serves as the Canadian launch for Norm Sibum's Smoke & Lilacs, the first reading since Zach Wells was shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize earlier this week (more on this later) for Track & Trace, and the first Montreal reading since Robyn Sarah's wonderful launch at the Word for Pause for Breath back in October.
Robyn Sarah, the veteran among this group of poets, has produced another fine example of lyric craftsmanship in her ninth collection, Pause For Breath. The pause Sarah meditates on is nothing less than the brief time of breathing between one's entry into the world and one's exit from it. Her poems demonstrate the mindfulness of one attending to the quality of each inspiration and exhalation onto the page.
Working on grants this week, CNQ's CC Grant, and Biblioais's OAC. Plus final reports, final copy-edits, covers, including the one above, for K. D. Miller's forthcoming Brown Dwarf, which should hit the printer early next week. Hosted Stephen Henighan last night for a Freedom to Read event, worked on promo for Page to Screen meetings next week, met with city officials about Rumrunners promotion. And, tonight, Adele Duck's opening at the Art Gallery of Windsor for a brief reprieve.
Jim Bartley reviews Amy Jones' What Boys Like in today's Globe:
There are prose styles that create a convincing world – the minimum expectation from a work of fiction – while offering the bonus pleasure of observing the author's prowess with language. We can gladly accept the show-off factor, provided it enhances the overall experience.
Then there is prose that operates more purely, a quietly expressive vehicle, while the expert word-wrangling remains veiled. The artistry hides itself. Amy Jones excels at the prose of invisible labour. In the best of this debut collection, her writing reads like understanding – as if there's no gap between the words and what they make you perceive. The top 10 of these 15 tales would make a book that is close to perfect.
In A Good Girl, we meet Alex, 32. He’s a waiter and friends with Yousef, 45, his boss. They drink after hours, play music, talk about getting laid, take reckless jaunts out of Halifax Harbour on Yousef's boat. One night, Alex leaves his wallet in a bar, which leads to him spending a rum-soaked night with Leah, 18. Next day, on hearing the news, Yousef grabs Alex’s face between his hands and crows, “You're my fucking hero” – and we instantly see what anchors their friendship. How ordinary this scenario would be if the players were all nondescriptly thirtysomething. Jones loads her exposition with intrigue.
In the first four pages, these three already feel like people you’ve come to know and size up over a boozy weekend at a friend’s cottage. A large part of it is the dialogue. It’s as tight and precise as it can be without being telegraphic. While the characters are sniping and equivocating with their arch, as-if-I-care one-liners, we’re adding up the snippets that reveal inner selves and form the big picture. When Leah says, “I'm going to be a hair model,” it's the capstone on all we’ve been made to guess about her. When Alex says, “Too soon,” it distills the rivalrous camaraderie he shares with Yousef. When the tale ends with a one-word reply – Leah, at a costume party, saying, “Myself” – there’s a delicious moment of suspension before you feel the rush of meanings hit head and heart at the same time.
How to Survive Summer in the City presents a pubescent girl at the mercy of her alcoholic single mother. Again, dialogue leads the way, pulling us expertly into the sad dance of a mother's neglect, her child cast as ongoing babysitter.
One Last Thing melds the death of Kurt Cobain with a runaway teen and her sister’s refusal to chase after her one more time. Through the sister’s voice of desperation, Jones gives herself permission to stray onto the page. “I can't tell this story any more. Not like this.” She tests a more writerly tone: “We searched for you … a journey that was mapped out in the skin cells on the backs of our necks, steps ingrained in the muscular memory of our calves.” The authorial self-reference undermines the stark power of the tale, but the finale, putting us back into events, comes with a gratifying punch.
Miriam Beachwalker offers a seeking adolescent, sick of her carping mom and her own inertia. She will leave Halifax and reinvent herself. The farthest she gets is the beach, where she happens on a gay couple, sunning. Next day, Josh and Paul are back in the same spot. Miriam and Josh discover a rapport, and Miriam, being the needy party, over-invests in it. When the guys necessarily go missing, Miriam is left to write an involuntary love note in the sand, while her autistic little brother hurls himself along the shore with a kite. The piece wonderfully integrates plot, characters and imagery in a parable of inchoate longing.
A few tales feel hastily assembled, ramping up into unlikely dramas or coasting on quirk. Post Mortem inserts a car-crash decapitation in place of subtler violence; The Church of Latter-day Peaches overextends its tone of macabre whimsy.
Dead centre in the book is the quietly riveting, finally heart-battering Twelve Weeks. A young woman, possibly ill, returns to her father’s house after five years away. They don’t speak much. We gradually learn why. In the simplest sense (not to give an iota away), their problem is that they’ve both lived – and as we know, in life there are losses and regrets. Things change. Such easily known truths, but Amy Jones makes you know them like soft explosions at your core.
I: I was curious to read in your The New Quarterly interview that part of your education in short stories was learning to read them as well as to write them. What did that education entail?
AJ: I think it was just reading a lot of them. One of the first short story books I read was Barbara Gowdy’s We So Seldom Look on Love and I read it the way that a lot of people who don’t read short stories would, [thinking] “No! I wanted it to keep going. I wanted to find out what happens next.”
I had to retrain my brain to consume a short story. I think of short stories as more akin to poetry, or like art. A painting, instead of something that goes on and on. You know, I look at that painting on the wall and I take it in for what it is–
I: It was done by an elephant.
AJ: You’re kidding.
I: So maybe it’s not the best example.
AJ: No, but I see it for what it is, I get from it whatever emotion or story I think it’s telling. As opposed to sitting down and watching a movie, or reading a novel. But when I started reading short stories, I thought they would be like novels, but shorter…
So I read [the Gowdy book], and then I readThe Broken Record Techniqueby Lee Henderson. A friend of mine gave it to me when I first started writing short stories and she was like, “You should read this if you want to write short stories.” And I read it, and I really didn’t understand how to read it. And now, it’s one of my favourite short story collections. Same with the Barbara Gowdy one.
I had to learn to slow down, I think. When I read novels, and I’m still guilty of this, I have this really bad habit of jumping to dialogue and racing through descriptions and not really savouring every single word that comes along. But in short stories, every word is so weighted that you have to spend more time with it.
Over at his Vestige.org, August Bourre reviews Ray Smith's Century. It's brought me a great deal of happiness to see even a small group of readers discover this work over the last year, and my thanks to Kerry, once again, for giving me the chance to push it a bit more over at Pickle Me This (but .... Hair Hat!!!! Really???)
August has no doubts: Century is "one of the finest, most beautiful books I have ever read, regardless of the author's nationality. I don't feel the need to qualify this as a great "Canadian" book. It's just a spectacular fucking book. I will be shocked if I read anything better this year.
Amen to that. So go pick up a fucking copy, will ya?
If you need to read more to make up your mind, August's review can be read here.
And, to make it easier, I'll ship anyone who wants a copy for $20 flat, including shipping. Just email me at biblioasis@gmail.com, or send your crisp twenty to Biblioasis / PO Box 92 / Emeryville, Ont. / N0R 1C0.
In 2003, New Directions, a publishing company historically known for its stake in experimental literature, printed the first English translation of the late Roberto Bolanõ’s work—the slim volume “By Night in Chile”—during a time when contemporary Latin American authors were struggling to gain a foothold in the American market. Circulating among critics well-versed in the literary tradition of Isabel Allende and Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, the translation introduced readers to a then-unknown Latin America, one neither swathed in magic realism nor saturated with family saga, but instead, mired—violently, bitterly, and evocatively—in political repression. The novella would mark the bloody delivery of visceral realism into the American consciousness, which soon became infatuated with the macabre elements that rage so relentlessly through Bolanõ’s work and that of his contemporary and cohort, Salvadoran Horacio Castellanos Moya. This fascination, wrote Moya in a critical piece he penned for Argentine newspaper “La Nacion,” has evolved dangerously throughout the years: the portrayal of Bolanõ as a non-conformist, subversive heroin addict serves only to still a masturbatory urge to redefine Latin American literature and culture in an American English vernacular.
Moya’s own work, of which “Senselessness,” “The She-Devil in the Mirror,” and most recently, “Dance with Snakes” have been translated from Spanish, is evidence of the author’s acute comprehension of society’s penchant for forcing what is foreign into a controllable compartment. “Dance with Snakes,” originally published in 1996 and now translated by Lee Paula Springer, is a four-part frenzy, a detailed depiction of the chaotic hell one man and four murderous snakes engender. Superficially a fantastical page-turner, the novel is at its core an uncompromising interrogation of authority, a gruesome satire whose pivot turns on exposing the consequences that result from a manipulated identity.
Eduardo Sosa, the antihero of “Dance with Snakes,” is an unemployed and restless sociologist who becomes obsessed with a beat-up yellow Chevrolet that parks on the street across from his apartment. Sosa follows its owner—the wretched Jacinto Bustillo—for one day before he unceremoniously kills the man and discovers his secret: Bustillo owned a group of talking snakes, a tetramer of assassins Sosa takes to fondly calling his “ladies.” The snakes, who Sosa names Beti, Loli, Valentina, and Carmela, are the impetus for his transformation into Bustillo; terrified when he first realizes their presence, he quickly grasps: “If I could manage to keep myself under control... concentrate enough so they’d feel my vibrations and understand that I was the new Don Jacinto, I’d be saved.” They are also his accomplices, sustenance, and lovers as he goes on an impulsive rampage through the city, taking incidental revenge on those who wronged Bustillo and killing tens of other hapless individuals—who coincidentally are deeply involved in the politics of the city—along the way.
“Dance with Snakes” suggests the extent of Moya’s potential, but does not realize it fully. While “Senselessness,” published eight years later, was a horrific testimony of genocide, “Dance with Snakes” is an unsettling account of a narrator disillusioned with his own race. The novel gives a glimpse of the incredible emotional devastation that makes “Senselessness” such a disconcerting story of a man losing grip with his humanity, and it hints at Moya’s humor, with its fast-paced murder scheme that evokes the satirical comedy of Voltaire’s “Candide.” But more than a revelation of how developed Moya’s work would become, “Dance with Snakes” is a provocative take on what happens when a man on the fringes of society meets those entrenched in it.
For when the terror and destruction conclude, Sosa must reenter society—devastated and disoriented—alone once more. “I stumbled along, talking to myself, gesturing at the night, babbling. I called out to Loli. My love, my beautiful girl, come with me. I called out to Beti and Carmela, my princesses who had loved me so. Don’t leave me, my darlings, what will I do without you, where have you gone?” Yet despite the explosive display of power that sets Sosa fleeing from his snakes, Moya suggests that the man who has caused so much chaos will simply blend back into the world around him. Punished for being intractable, Sosa nevertheless manages to spite authority and replace a façade that fools those who tried to tame him. “Dance with Snakes” is a pointed critique of societal repression, whose value lies in its ability to infringe upon the prude sensitivities of human emotion and to make a renegade sympathetic, if not a hero.
—Staff writer Denise J. Xu can be reached at dxu@fas.harvard.edu.
It's been nearly two years since we published Ondjaki's first novel in English. I expect, at some point, we'll be working with him again. I have just found a short story by him, translated by Stephen Henighan, Biblioasis Translation Series editor and the translator of Comrades. To read Ondjaki's At the Crossroads please go here.
I don't know why I didn't see these the first time around, but if they are new to me perhaps they will be new to you as well.
Back in November, Maisonneuve did an interview with Zach Wells about the publication of Track & Trace.
Alessandro Porco: Can you talk a little about the new book’s title and central concerns?
Zach Wells: I think I first came up with the title after reading a passage in a story by Ivan KlÃma (tr. Ewald Osers) in his book My First Loves. That passage is now the epigraph of the book. But I might have had the title in mind already, then read the passage, not sure. The title is kind of a key. As with the title of Unsettled, it doesn’t refer to a specific phrase or poem, but is something that links the poems, that accounts for these particular pieces being in this particular book. The poems, which I wrote over a period of ten or eleven years—during which time I was moving all over the place, Halifax, PEI, Iqaluit, Montreal, Resolute Bay, Vancouver—are mostly concerned with place and displacement, roots and rootlessness, flux and fixity. I don’t tend to think of them in such terms—I’m generally more focused on how a given poem is working word to word, line to line, than in how it relates to other poems or thematic concerns—but when it came time to put them together, those seemed to be the main things all of these poems had in common. They’re more or less the same preoccupations as the poems in Unsettled, I guess, but differently focused.
AP: Why differently?
ZW: I’d say that, generally, Unsettled is a more civic book and T&T a more lyric book. I’d also say that T&T is a more refined book. Unsettled had over 80 poems in it, many of them quite rough and raw, some of which I’d disown now if I could. I held on to the manuscript of T&T for quite a while because I wanted to have a book in which I was quite confident that each poem justified its own existence. It only has 34 poems in it and I don’t think I’ll feel as negative about any of them in five years as I do about some of the poems in Unsettled. T&T also reflects my growing interest in metrics and stanzaic structures. There are some rhymed and metred poems in Unsettled, but those things are foregrounded more in T&T. Another difference is that Unsettled, being focused on the eastern Arctic, is more geographically unified than T&T, in which the poems take place on all three coasts, points in between and even in Orkney, Scotland.
Last month Jonathan Ball did an interview with Zach on his blog:
3. What is wrong with the publishing industry, and what are they getting right?
Lots of things are wrong with the publishing industry, but the thing that’s bugging me most these days is the union-type rules related to Canada Council block grant disbursements, whereby really enterprising, energetic and talented junior publishers receive smaller grants than sluggish, attenuated, mediocre relics–no matter what the jury recommends. These grants should be going to the houses making the most significant contributions–now–to publishing, not to those whose main claims to fame are their backlist and the fact of their survival. But then, survival’s what Canadian literature’s all about, ain’t it.
I think there are a lot of really dynamic small presses producing worthwhile books and in many cases making those books into beautiful objects. I think a few players on the small press scene have really raised the bar over the last decade, which has spurred some presses to up their game and has provided inspiration and a positive example to upstart publishers. Good design is so important, I think. What’s the point of making something few people are going to buy if you make it cheap and ugly? There are enough cheap and ugly things in the world. So kudos to presses like Gaspereau, Biblioasis, Coach House and the Porcupine’s Quill, to name a few, for giving words durable and stylish homes.
The image on the cover is of a mason jar labeled “Poems.”Inside the jar is a menacing photo of Black Hawk helicopters swooping low over a meadow and a small herd of sheep.The photo is repeated twice, as a full page at the front and back of the book. We’re in metaphoric country for sure, with plenty of low-flying politics and plenty of room for speculation.Are the helicopters about to massacre the oblivious sheep?Are we the sheep? Are we the Black Hawks swooping down?Is this an image of contemporary life – terror and violence mingled with hum-drum docility?
Norm Sibum’s The Pangborn Defence is a series of poems addressed to various people or entities with whom the speaker argues, reminisces, commiserates, muses, and otherwise engages in spirited discourse. This semi-epistolary form comes out of a long tradition made fresh in Sibum’s hands by his contemporary diction and topics, and by the undeniable energy, intelligence, and frankness of the poems. The book is a meditative rant, full of fire and play yanked up short by dead-seriousness.
CNQ 78 is at the printer. A special issue guest edited by David Hickey on the poetry of John Smith, it brings contributions from Hickey, Zach Wells, Ross Leckie and Smith himself, among others, alongside an excellent essay by David Mason, an interview with Norm Sibum, a short story by Terence Young and a piece on theatre in Canada by Jane Wells. Books reviewed include A. F. Moritz's The Sentinel, Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean, David Adams Richards' God Is, John Terpstra's Skin Boat, Adam Getty's Reconciliation, and much else besides.
This is also the last issue in the current format. Issue 79 will unveil a completely new look courtesy of Seth. There will be new features as well, and a wider range and focus. There will also be something special in each issue for subscribers not available on the newsstand: finely printed collectibles, including bookmarks, broadsides, chip and chapbooks, prints and other ephemera, produced by some of the best printers and publishers in the country, including GreenBoathouse Press, Gaspereau, Biblioasis and others. Stay tuned for further information.
Meniscus is a journey through the mind, poetry its means of travel.
From descriptions of a stormy, painful childhood and mental illness to reflections on love, New Brunswick-born physician and poet Shane Neilson delivers strong images and lines exploring much with quick, deft phrasing and choice diction.
Four groups of poems feature a strong narrative line throughout, abundant in intimate and revealing language. Neilson opens the collection with a poem called Recovery. He then uses the first grouping of poems, which focuses on the violence of a father against his family, as a starting point to access the evolution from mental to emotional states.
Following a narrative arc, we glimpse the frightening as well as the emotionally epiphanic. In The Beaten-Down Elegies we witness the terrible pain of violence where there should be love. Using metaphors drawn from the land and labour, with allusions to religion and drinking, much attention is paid to hands, to work, to the hard business of making a living. The speaker tells us, "I try to look like an accountant / at his ledger, but look instead on a fixed // post: totemic, obscure. In the end there is fear."
In the second section, Manic Statement, we see a dissolving self, an identity fragmented. An interior world at risk: "Your fortune is to collide, / collapse and wake up // to wreckage. Sanity / is the worst injury, tomorrow // the wound."
In the third grouping, Seized, there is physical fragmentation. Exploring seizures, physical and emotional, seems to be the business of this collection. Meniscus is never more visceral than in this section, with its "electrocuted songs" and its "sound like a thousand cannons." We follow the speaker's off-balance balcony fall from ambulance to hospital, from seizure and delirium to the aftermath of "the dream procedure."
And, finally, the fourth section, titled Love Life, knits the experience of pain into something foreign and shared, engaging the senses in another kind of upheaval. Poems that follow the various states of delusion, or fear, are juxtaposed against sensual poems of love, physical and emotional.
Meniscus is a collection about the deep-down difficulties of life expressed in language that knows where it's going. These poems are rife with sound and shot through with images that stop and grab your attention. A physician's sense of diagnostic diction and a poet's sense of arresting image makes a forceful combination.
Heather Craig is a poet and writer based in Grand Bay-Westfield.
Poetry Quebec is currently spotlighting Robyn Sarah over at their website with an interview.
Poetry Quebec:Are you a native Quebecer? If not, where are you originally from? Why did you come to Quebec?
Robyn Sarah: I was born in NYC but that was because my father was doing graduate studies at Columbia at the time.I am Canadian by parentage (both parents Canadian) and have lived in Montreal since the age of four.My mother’s parents came to Montreal in the 1920s, escaping the devastation and economic distress of post-war Poland.
PQ:When and how did you encounter your 1st Quebec poem?
RS:Am I supposed to remember? I don’t usually ask poems to show me their passports when I encounter them.
PQ:When and how did you first become interested in poetry?
RS: I began reading and writing poetry as a young child, and was confirmed in both habits by my early teens.I have written an essay on this subject.It is called “I to my perils: How I Fell for Poetry”, and was first published in The New Quarterly (commissioned to kick off its “Falling in Love with Poetry” series.)The essay is reprinted in my book of essays, Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry.
PQ:What is your working definition of a poem?
RS:Still working on it.
PQ:Do you have a writing ritual? If so, provide details.
RS:Not really.It’s a nice idea.I wish I did.
PQ:What is your approach to writing of poems: inspiration driven, structural, social, thematic, other?
RS:For me, poems usually begin with a phrase I like the sound of.I call these “tinder words”.They come to me from nowhere—sometimes they occur as part of a letter I’m writing or a journal entry, or in conversation; sometimes they just come into my head and I jot them down.Poems germinate from them, sometimes within days, sometimes not until months or years later.I rarely know what a poem is going to be “about” when I start playing around with one of these phrases.I guess this means my poetry is ear-driven, though I am not a “sound poet.”
One of the highlights of our 2010 list -- Spring & Fall -- is K.D. Miller's first novel, Brown Dwarf. A moving, fraught psychological drama, a murder mystery, a painfully heart-rending settling of accounts, it is one of only a few manuscripts I've read in a sitting. I found it completely unputdownable. Jeet Heer has called her, in The Ottawa Citizen and elsewhere, Canada's best short story writer; Brown Dwarf will hopefully have him and others calling her simply one of Canada's best writers.
Here's a short description of the novel, and below that, Brown Dwarf 's first section.
When Brenda Bray, better known to the world as Rae Brand, the author of the popular "Elsinor Grey Mystery Series", returns home to Hamilton, she is set upon by vivid memories of the summer of 1962 when she struck up an intense relationship with a classmate, and together they sought to track and catch an escaped serial killer believed to be hiding out on the escarpment. Brenda and Jori search for this elusive murderer, their friendship twisting as the summer proceeds, becoming tautly fantastic and pre-adolescently sexual, eventually resulting in real tragedy. As the story of that summer unravels it becomes apparent that the headlines about Jori's disappearance only touch on the truth, and that Brenda must finally face up to that summer friendship and its results if she is going to discover any peace.
* * *
BRENDA
Brenda stares down at her saddle shoes. Navy and white, the navy parts like twin masks. When she wiggles her toes the white leather dimples like skin.
Jori is waiting for her. The way she always does. With her hands in her pockets and her head tilted back. Staring lazy-eyed out over the city. Just as if she doesn’t mind that Brenda’s holding them up. Again.
The white parts of Brenda’s saddle shoes were clean this morning. Now there are black scuff marks on them, and a smudge of dirt on one of her socks. She wishes she had thin, plain socks like Jori’s. Popcorn-stitch makes her ankles look thicker than they already are. But there’s more to popcorn-stitch, her mother says. They’re better value.
Jori is still waiting. She walked the ledge in seconds, just as if it was nice and flat and wide like the rest of the path. She didn’t inch along the way Brenda’s going to soon, holding her breath, grabbing at weeds that might pull out, clinging to corners of rock that might loosen and come away in her hand.
The first time Brenda made it across, Jori said, I’m proud of you, Brenda Bray. Brenda couldn’t look at her. Didn’t dare open her mouth in case she’d scream or cry. She had never hated anyone, not even Annie Bray, as much as she hated Jori Clement at that moment. And every time since then, she stands for long minutes thinking, I can’t I can’t I can’t. Then all at once it’s as if her feet think, Yes you can. And she hates Jori all over again.
Now the waist band of her skirt is starting to bind. She was going to wear slacks, but her mother made her change out of them because they’d gotten too tight for her to wear outside the house where all the world could see her. They looked indecent, Annie Bray said. (Sometimes Brenda lets herself think Annie Bray instead of my mother. She’s starting to do it more and more, especially when her mother says things like indecent.) All her other slacks were in the wash, so she had to put on a skirt. And that meant she had to put on her saddle shoes, because you can’t wear running shoes with a skirt. Just like you can’t go to church without a hat, or carry a white purse before the twenty-fourth of May.
She could tell Jori was surprised by the way she was dressed. Jori was in her usual Saturday outfit – blue jeans and a white T-shirt with a tan windbreaker over it and boys’ running shoes – the black and white kind with the red rubber circle at the ankle. (I get my clothes in the boys’ department. Daddy hates it, but Mummy tells him it’s just a phase.) Brenda kept expecting her to say something – What the hell are you doing in a skirt? Or, Jesus, Brenda Bray, we’re not going to a tea party. But she didn’t. She hasn’t said any of the other things Brenda keeps expecting her to say, either. How much do you weigh? What size do you take?
Brenda’s feet still won’t move. Maybe there’s a safety rule against walking a ledge in saddle shoes. What if she fell and broke her neck? Or worse, what if she fell and didn’t die, but got hurt so badly that her mother had to push her around in a wheelchair? If you’d done what I told you. If you’d stayed away from that Jori or whatever she calls herself. Day after day, for the rest of their lives.
It’s not really very steep here. If she did fall, she’d probably just scrape her knees and elbows. But she might rip her skirt, too, her perfectly good skirt that still has lots of wear in it and that cost good money. Annie Bray would demand to know how she did it, and would keep on at her until it all came out. Who she was with. What she was doing. Where. The where would be the worst part. No. Maybe the what. Except the who would be pretty bad too. There is absolutely nothing good about what they are doing right now. Not a single thing. And Jori is still waiting.
That waist band is almost cutting her in half. Brenda hopes it hasn’t rolled itself into a rope, because then the label might show at the back and Jori might see For the Pleasingly Plump Child stitched in pink thread.
“I’m sorry I’m taking so long,” she calls. It’s what she always says when they get stuck at the ledge.
Jori shrugs. “Take as long as you want.” That’s what she always answers. As if the two of them had just stopped for a minute to look at the view.
The city doesn’t look quite real to Brenda today. The bright October sun makes the shadows sharp. The streets could have been drawn with a ruler, they run in such straight lines down to the bay, and the tiny houses look perfect from this high up. No missing shingles or broken bricks or sagging porches. The trees look like somebody painted them green then shook drops of orange and yellow over them. Even the smoke from the steel plants is like something in a painting, shooting straight up into the pure blue sky. Brenda imagines the tiny people who live down there leading perfect little lives with no Pleasingly Plump labels and no Hurricane Annies and no ledges to cross and no Jori Clements waiting for them.
Jori is still waiting, with that cool smile of hers smoothing her mouth. Why doesn’t she just leave me here? Brenda thinks. What does she want with me, anyway? Wouldn’t she be better off without me?
She looks up into the sky. This would be the perfect time for her father to come rattling down out of the clouds in his bus. He would lift his Hamilton Street Railway cap to her and say, Hop aboard, Miss Bray! Then together they would drive up, up and away, for ever and ever amen.
She’s had that daydream for as long as she can remember. But ever since she’s known Jori, she’s been asking herself stupid questions, almost as if she wants to spoil it. How would your father recognize you, since he only ever saw you as a baby? Would he be disappointed at the way you turned out? Would you still be Pleasingly Plump in heaven? Twelve is too old for daydreams. She can just hear Annie Bray – A big girl like you.
Her feet still won’t take the first step onto the ledge. “I’m coming,” she calls. “Soon.”
In November 2009, Oromocto native Shane Neilson received the Mimi Divinsky Award for History and Narrative in Family Medicine at the 2009 Family Medical Forum in Calgary. The award, which is accompanied by a $1,000 cash prize, recognizes the narrative account of experiences in family medicine.
A second honour came Neilson's way with the publication of Meniscus which sees Neilson move away from chapbooks to his first full-length trade book of verse.
Meniscus, according to The Canadian Oxford Dictionary means (1) the curved upper surface of a liquid in a tube; (2) a lens that is convex on one side and concave on the other; and (3) a thin fibrous cartilage between the surfaces of some joints.
All three meanings could be applicable.
The first section of Meniscus features the poems in Neilson's first chapbook, The Beaten-Down Elegies (2004). These are memory poems of growing up and witnessing how life is lived through the eyes of youth.
The second section, Manic Statement, contains various utterances relating to the medical profession. Bipolar, for example, is a brief, but very poignant expression of this affliction in which "all roads/ are mad."
Life on 8 Lane is another deeply moving poem that relates existence in a psychiatric ward along side that of "the city in perpetual drizzle" as "the sun still rises and sets." There is no cure is a poem that has reflective metaphors on the parallels between farmers and doctors noting especially how "the doctors shake their heads like farmers do/ when the season's bad."
The section titled Seized records all sorts of messages from the doctor's viewpoint on such topics as open head injuries, seizures en route, the ambulance, the MRI, and the OR.
The last section, Love Life is complete with paradoxes on numerous aspects of life and its precious significance.
On Realizing his Toddler Will Become a Woman and Before Irony express well the theme of the section, which has considerable emphasis for Neilson's daughter.
Neilson, who grew up in Oromocto, attended Oromocto High School, and the University of New Brunswick before studying medicine at Dalhousie University, now lives in Guelph, Ont., where he is a family physician. Although the practice of medicine and the literary arts are not always compatible, Neilson clearly demonstrates how it is possible to be successful at both.
Meniscus has an excellent balance in which the medical practitioner spans the vital features of life and death with precision, understanding, care, and realism.
Copy-editing today our sole poetry manuscript for Spring: David Starkey's A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel. Thought it might be a good day to share a poem:
Promises, Promises
The question, emailed from someone I don’t know, nevertheless looms large: Dream to be a hero in her bed? Of course, I do—this is my wife we’re talking about. How could I fail
to be interested in the elaborate and ungrammatical come-ons: Enlarge you’re banana length! Don’t loose your passion to bad potence! Get ready to the wildest nights
of your life with the original blue-pill! Yes, she tells me there’s more to marriage than physical love—taking out the trash, for instance, vacuuming and laundry
and picking up after our St. Bernard— but surely my satisfactory discharge of those domestic duties must pale beside a gratifying boosted performance like Mr. Sex Machine!
What minor miscalculation wouldn’t she forgive—the compliment paid too late, socks left in the living room, the cable bill overdue again—if only I could lead her
into a world of boundless enjoyments, where my splinter will be bigger and more solid, where excellent hardness is easy and I can stay real man even being drunk.
No, no Biblioasis book made anyone's best of the decade, or not that I've come across. No Biblioasis author even made a best of the decade list, which is, in my view, a travesty. Michael Carbert over at the online magazine Encore Lit does attempt to remedy this. He chooses Terry Griggs's Rogue's Wedding and Russell Smith's Muriella Pent as being among the most egregiously overlooked books of the decade. And I would have to absolutely agree with him. Both of these books remain among my all-time favourite novels, and rank as among the best Canadian novels, in my opinion, ever published. They are two of the few books I'll probably re-read in the not-too-distant future.
Some other picks, judged by a scan of my bookshelves, that rank as among my favourite books published this past decade. I don't know if any of them made a Best of the Decade list. All of them quite easily could have:
Annabel Lyon's Oxygen Clark Blaise's Selected Stories (Four Volumes, published by the Porcupine's Quill) Ray Robertson's Gently Down the Stream Caroline Adderson's Pleased to Meet You Mark Anthony Jarman's 19 Knives Lisa Moore's Open Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies Alistair MacLeod's Island Leonard Michael's Collected Stories Horacio Castellanos Moya's Senselessness. Alice Munro's Hateship Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (or almost anything else by her)
Certainly, this list overlooks many, including books we've published here, books I've borrowed, books in one of the dozens of boxes still in a storage locker, books I've taken from the library, books I've loaned out and lost. Not to mention non-fiction and poetry. And it is heavily slanted to short fiction: counting Rogue's Wedding and Muriella Pent, 9 of 13 titles are short fiction collections. But it will suffice in a pinch.
Carbert, though, is right: Griggs and Smith: if you haven't read them, do yourself the favour.
Though it may seem a bit early to be posting on Fall 2010 books -- I've yet to begin work on all our Spring titles yet -- t'is the way of things around here. Though not always the most organized chap, I'm often forced to juggle mutliple seasons at one time. Today, as a for instance: I met with a current author to discuss a future book, then with another to discuss a spring title, then came home and finished a couple of proposals for non-fiction titles for Fall 10 and Fall 11, read some of a ms which, at best, will see Biblioasis publication in Spring '12, then worked on some Fall 09 title promo. Now, after I finish this post: I pick up the kids. All in a half-day's work. (The rest comes when they go to bed.)
Above, though, is what I hope will be the cover photo for A. J. Somerset's Metcalf-Rooke Award winning Combat Camera. It captures so much about the book: the war photography, the violence, the beauty of his writing on photography and art, his hero's rather ... combative and thoughtful nature. A nature Andrew himself shares, or so I gather from his blog Banjaxed. It's been one of my favourites for the last couple of months, and I check in quite regularly. I suggest you do so as well. Check out his blog here, and one of my favourite posts from back in November here. And, when Combat Camera comes out in a scant 8 1/2 month's time, do yourself a favour and pick it up as well: you will not be disappointed.
Biblioasis will be distributing Norm Sibum's Smoke and Lilacs in Canada this Spring. Published in the UK by Carcanet, it may very well be Norm's best collection. Originally set for publication in Canada by Fitzhenry and Whiteside, it was a casualty when they cut their poetry program early last year, and has not seen Canadian distribution as a result. We're quite chuffed to have it. Should you like to order a copy, please put in an order with your local bookseller or contact us directly. We'll get you off a copy as soon as we receive them.
From Sibum's Smoke and Lilacs, the opening poem, 'From Propertius with Love':
Oh the days are inconstant, rich in betrayal, my language expert In all-night kisses and your bad temper. What shall I make now Of your lip, the sudden thundershower Squalling across the gardens of Lucullus? Sap that I am, optimist, I write you verse declaring my love After I catch you at it, a swindler plying your buttocks. 'Looking for something?' you hiss. I am. Order in the cosmos. A little trust. I want, oh I don't know, the bliss to which I'm accustomed. And I'm always in the market for a state With a benign and friendly face.
I have been accused on occasion of being a touch ... dour on this blog. And in life, for that matter. A shame, that, as I must be, at the heart of things, an optimist. Why else, of course, would one continue as a small press publisher? The wages suck (wages? what wages?), as do the hours. Most of what you do is merely taken for granted. Very little of it is considered good enough. The media largely ignore you. They certainly don't give your books the attention they are due. The distributors can't get your books into stores quickly enough when they are selling, but manage to process returns and their attendant fees in record time. Authors ....
But, Wait! This is, after all, the Good News Edition of Thirsty. And despite the truth of what is above, we've plenty of reasons to be both quite happy and thankful. I thought I might take a moment and list a few of them. In no particular order...
1. Clark Blaise has been made an Officer of the Order of Canada, a much-deserved honour.
2. Sticking with Clark for a moment, he looks set to hand in a new collection of short stories, for publication either in the Fall of 2010 or Spring 2011, in the coming months.
3. Cynthia Flood's daughter Margaret recently gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Lachlan. Congrats!
4. Alexander MacLeod's first collection of short fiction, Heavy Lifting, is set for a Fall 2010 release. i've been waiting on this one for years. I'm quite excited.
5. K. D. Miller's novel Brown Dwarf, set for Spring 2010, is even better the second time through. Put it down as one of this season's must-reads.
6. We've hired some new help here at the Bibliomanse, Melissa Young, who so far seems to be exactly what we need to help get everything organized.
7. I've just read a page and a half of what will hopefully become a new Chellis Beith novel.
8. Marty Gervais's The Rumrunners: A Prohibition Scrapbook, continues to sell, meaning we should soon be able to pay off most of our creditors. Yes, that (likely) means you.
9. Checked in on the Peripatetic yesterday aft, sitting forlornly in her cradle. But there's only three months until we get her back in the water.
10. The launch date for Terry Griggs's Nieve is only three months away as well. April will be a very good month.
11. I've signed the contract for Rebecca Rosenblum's next collection of stories, The Big Dream. I'm thankful she decided to stick with us.
12. A book I found in a thrift shop should go for between $5000-7000 at auction later this year. A few more similar finds and it will be easier to remain optimistic.
13. Ray Smith's Century has found one more fan, and has the chance to be discovered by a few more. Thanks Kerry.
Over at Pickle Me This, Kerry Clare has reviewed the first of her Canada Reads Independently choices, Ray Smith's Century.
Its sombre cover coupled with my misunderstanding that Ray Smith had eschewed story for higher principles would have kept me from Century: A Novel, were it not for Dan Wells' recommendation. I thought this was a book that wasn't for me, not only in a "not my cup of tea" sense, but that it was meant for a more erudite kind of reader for whom the act of reading is not meant to be a pleasure cruise ("Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song... Wallalaleialala").
So it is my surprise to find I love this book, that it contains everything I look for as a reader, including that most unfashionable self-contained universe. That Smith may have eschewed traditional narrative structure, but he has done so only to compress a 500+ page novel into his first 98 pages, to represent the disintegration and disorder present in the universe the book contains, to have Century be what it's meant to represent. And that his writing possesses a sympathy for and understanding of women that I found surprising, and striking, and even (dare I suppose in a book such as this?) somewhat heartening.
Heinrich Himmler didn't shock me. Perhaps I'm just being defiant in my reactions, but Jane Seymour, the young woman in 197o's Montreal who receives his ghostly visitations in her bed, the nightmares in which he touches her naked body (but oh, I was struck by the details-- "the buttons on the cuffs of his sleeve caught on the sheet when he reached under to touch...")-- there is context for her, precedent. Of course, her friends suppose that she has undergone a trauma, perhaps she has been raped, which has led to the visions, which leads to her suicide. And that may be so, but the whole thing is the extreme end, I think, of how ordinary girls become obsessed with Nazism, which manifests in more usual terms with an Anne Frank fascination and YA books about the Holocaust. As a kind of dangerous experiment in empathy, though of course the Holocaust is so sanitized in such literature, but there is a thin line there, and I just think that Jane Seymour has crossed it for one reason, or for many.
For the rest of what Kerry writes on Century, please go here.
What else can I add? Not much. Kerry fears towards the end that "it occurs to me that this response to Century has done it no favours. That its biggest problem is that no one is ever going to to say, "Hey, read this" with a snappy one-sentence reason why. That it raises questions without answers, and begins an engagement that is unceasing, and it's more like someone handing you pieces of a puzzle than recommending you a book. Except you get to rearrange the pieces over and over again, which is infinitely more interesting, but frustrating too." But I think she's mistaken. Her analysis of Century is so open and generous and engaging that she has me putting the book once again on the bedside table for another read. Hopefully she'll have convinced a few of you out there to pick it up as well.
Has anyone else read Century? Any thoughts you would care to share?
Steven Beattie has offered his own take on Century in the comments section on Kerry's blog that I'll take the liberty of quoting in its entirety:
Century is such a strange, unconventional book that I find it intensely difficult even to come up with a critical language appropriate to discuss it. And yet, its very strangeness, its very iconoclasm and idiosyncrasy, is what makes reading it such a potent experience.
Even its generic classification is open to discussion (as you point out, Kerry). Is it a novel? I'd argue yes. John Metcalf, on the other hand, considers it a collection of short stories, and certainly a case could be made. The closest Charles Foran comes in his introduction is to call the book a "tonal labyrinth," but even he admits that it's finally "unclassifiable."
What I love about the book is its morality, its honesty, and its embrace of language as a means of rescuing us from darkness. It's a deeply troublesome novel, but it's well worth the effort an engagement with it requires.
In the end, I'm convinced that a single reading is insufficient to come to a full appreciation of Smith's achievement in the book. I look forward to returning to the text and will be interested to measure my second encounter with it against my first.
But, hang on: this isn't my recommendation; it's Wells's. What am I doing defending it? Go read Moody Food, then we'll talk again.
That's right! I almost forgot. We get to do this again. Stay tuned for Kerry on Ray Robertson's Moody Food.
As we prepare to send Terry Griggs' Nieve off to the printer, we remain undecided over which cover to go with. The original concept was the Black City image, a painting on canvas by Alexander Griggs-Burr, which details the first view the reader gets of the Black City as Nieve and her companion leave the hotel basement to journey underground.
