Author Extras
Killer shoes: Elizabeth Hay, winner of last year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, reflects on the award’s impact
Posted by Words At Large Admin on November 10 at 12:00 AM
This year has been a relaxing and an overwhelming one. It is more relaxing to win than to lose. More relaxing to have money, readers, praise. It has been a long time coming.
With my previous books, almost no one wrote to me. But winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Late Nights on Air (McClelland & Stewart) changed that. This time I am still receiving mail from appreciative readers and that’s a deep pleasure. More often than not, they are people with their own connections to the North. I love their stories. A few days ago I had a note from a teacher in Chicago who once taught in the Arctic. The reality of his uncontrollable third graders had pulled him awake at one a.m. and he said he considered sharing Ralph’s fate, but his canoe happened to be in Quebec.
These communications remind me of the intimate connections that radio excels at, when it excels.
An overwhelming year for some of the same reasons. More people seem to think I’m worth knowing. Fewer people confuse me with Elizabeth May. I have been barraged by requests to do readings, book clubs, talks. For six months after winning the Scotiabank Giller, I was afraid to check my e-mail. I understood, finally, why Sir Kenneth Clark, the late art critic, dreaded the mail. It would be so easy to be flattered into doing all manner of things I don’t want to do. Fortunately, saying no comes naturally to me. I was that sort of kid, that sort of mother. “Leave me alone, I’m reading.”
But how to say no gracefully? As with so much in life, you have to have the courage of your convictions. “I am delighted to be asked, but if I say yes I will lose my mind. I’m sorry. I must get back to my writing.”
This fall it’s quieter again. I’m able to work steadily — or waste time steadily — at my desk, where my floundering efforts humble me. The house is warmer because of the crackerjack new windows we had installed. I now own two cashmere sweaters and a pair of killer shoes that ooze sex from every pore, but mostly I’m in my dressing gown. Giller night is almost upon us once again. I will have a chance to embrace marvelous Jack Rabinovitch. “Dear, dear Jack,” I will say. “Look at the shoes you put on my feet.”
The 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize will be awarded on Tuesday, November 11.
Blogger Nikki Reimer reports from the opening of the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival
Posted by Words At Large Admin on October 24 at 12:00 AM
The 21st Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival got officially underway with Grand Openings, an event that featured seven writers of different styles and backgrounds. As one patron remarked, it made for a “very multicultural evening.”
The stories of the evening encompassed a truly diverse and international range of voice and experience that often addressed what it means to be "other" — to be alienated from one’s family or one’s birthplace, to be the immigrant struggling in an often hostile environment, or to be the victim on the receiving end of a bully’s taunts.
Rawi Hage read from Cockroach (House of Anansi), the only novel shortlisted for both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award for fiction. The unnamed immigrant narrator transported us to wintry Montreal. The excerpt was gritty and urban, raw and sexual, and pulled no punches on the immigrant experience. Maybe some immigrants want to better their lives, the narrator suggests, but “I want to better my death.”
Poet and short story writer Lorna Goodison, who read in a confident, lilting and lyrical voice (and charmingly referred to ubiquitous artistic director Hal Wake as “Prince Hal”), shared moving passages from her memoir From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (McClelland & Stewart), and not-so-moving recollections of the “cows horseshit flies mosquitoes” of Jamaica’s Harvey River that her uncle longed to escape.
Nadeem Aslam and Jonathan Raban invoked the post-9/11 global reality from very different perspectives. Aslam read from The Wasted Vigil (Bond Street Books), which poetically depicts war-ravaged Afghanistan. His description of an “impaled library” (one of the characters has nailed all of the house’s books to the ceiling) was so evocative I still can’t get the image out of my head.
Scott Griffin, the founder of the influential Griffin Poetry Prize, writes about his life-long love of poetry
Posted by Words At Large Admin on June 01 at 12:00 AM
This year’s Griffin Poetry Prize winners will be announced on June 4, with a Canadian and an international poet each receiving $50,000.
The other day I was asked why I like poetry, as if liking poetry was some strange aberration that required explanation. "Probably for the same reason that some people like music," I replied. The question though, spoke volumes about how far poetry had slipped from the mainstream of our cultural lives, which is somewhat bewildering to me.
Poetry is no longer really taught in the schools or heard in the coffee houses or homes. It’s rarely quoted by politicians, corporate presidents or heads of labour unions. Occasionally a poem (the Hallmark card variety) is pulled off the shelf and trotted out at a wedding or funeral to embroider a well meaning, but syrupy sentiment, but that's it. What a shame, what a travesty!
I grew up with poetry in the family. My father loved poetry and not only read it to us around the fire, but used it as punishment whenever we misbehaved. We were required to memorize a poem and recite it in front of family members and guests before dinner.
Although this had a salutary effect on my siblings, I found myself learning a lot of poetry. My father cleverly suggested that I search out my own poems to memorize, and they had to be longer than a few lines. I was determined to find poetry that would be unfamiliar to him (he being well read) and that got me interested in exploring poetry beyond our own library.
My behaviour did not improve and I was shipped off to boarding school. An inspirational, Victorian headmaster furthered my interest in poetry. I remember him entering the classroom, reading Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and then slamming the book shut with frightening authority. "Listen to this, listen!" he would exclaim, before reciting the whole poem off by heart. It was a romantic tour de force, designed to leave an impression on a young boy!
At university, I encountered a young professor, Arthur Motyer, who also loved poetry. He was able to convey the technical possibilities open to poetry that I had not fully understood. He showed me there was music within free verse that went beyond the confines of rhyming couplets or the metrical movement determined by various relations of long or short, accented or unaccented syllables. A whole new world opened up for me.
Through all of this, I learned the value of memorizing poetry, perhaps the only way to truly understand a poem, short of writing it. Different poems, favourite poems, remained with me, to be brought forward, when alone at night flying my plane or at sea, on watch, under a panoply of stars. They became friends, always there, on call.
As the years scooted by, I realized the value of poetry and decried its loss in the Western world of consumerism. Yes, it remained strong in South America and former European Eastern bloc countries, countries that had undergone years of repression, but here in Canada poetry had all but disappeared. Something had to be done.
Friends came to dinner, Michael Ondaatje and David Young, and we discussed the loss of poetry. We decided that same evening to establish the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.
Within nine months we had $2 million in a Trust, judges selected, the rules and regulations established and 230 books of poetry submitted. We were on our way. The readings that first year were held at Harbourfront in Toronto with an audience of 175 paying customers.
This year is the seventh year of the Griffin Prize. We have received 483 books of poetry from 35 different countries. Tickets for the readings to be held at Toronto’s MacMillan Theatre (which holds 850 people) are sold out. This is progress.
Yet, much remains to be done. Poetry is still far from the mainstream of our cultural lives where it properly belongs, but I for one, am optimistic.
This blog was originally posted on May 31, 2007, leading up to last year’s Griffin Poetry Prize announcement.
Ann Marie Fleming Interview
Posted by Words At Large Admin on December 16 at 10:08 AM
Ann Marie Fleming is an award-winning Canadian independent filmmaker, writer and artist, born in Okinawa, of Chinese and Australian descent. She is co-founder and former head of independent for the company Global Mechanic. Her book, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, is a graphic novel that explores her personal quest to unravel the truth about her great grandfather, a world famous, globe-hopping Chinese vaudeville magician and acrobat. In 2003, Ann Marie completed a documentary of the same name. The film has since won a multitude of awards, along with having appeared on television in both Canada and the U.S.A.
When did you first become interested in the story of your great-grandfather Long Tack Sam?
I've always been interested in the story of Long Tack Sam. After all, what kid wouldn't like a relative who was a magician...But I really didn't know that much about him. The little I did know has popped up from time to time in films that I made: waving an experimental film about my relationship with my maternal grandmother in 1987, and automatic writing a feature about my maternal grandfather's side of the family in 1996. But the search to find the story of Long Tack Sam started in 1997, when i some footage was uncovered of his home movies from the 30's, taken around the world.
Will Ferguson Interview
Posted by Words At Large Admin on December 13 at 09:17 AM
Will Ferguson's debut novel, HappinessTM, has been published in thirty-three countries and twenty-six languages around the world. It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and went on to win the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction. His travel memoir Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw was an immediate bestseller and won Ferguson his second Leacock Medal for Humour. His most recent book, Spanish Fly, is about a young man in the Depression era who falls in with a couple of con men. Ferguson lives in Calgary with his wife and their two young sons.
You're best known for your humorous observations but your latest novel, Spanish Fly, takes place in depression era America. How do you find humour in subjects that appear to be without humour?
Well, it is a novel about con men, and con games--especially the cons of the Twenties and Thirties, which were quite funny. They were often elaborate, with outlandish stories and a surprising twist at the end. Sort of like practical jokes, in a way, except of course the joke usually involved someone walking off with all your money. When I wrote Spanish Fly, I tried to let the humour come out of the cons themselves; I didn't try to impose it on the story.
Interviewing authors
Posted by Words At Large Admin on December 10 at 01:05 PM
Joel Yanofsky, a Montreal journalist and author who has interviewed many authors over the years, ponders why we want to get to know the person behind the book.
In his new novel, Exit Ghost, Philip Roth, cranky about the lot of the famous author, makes the following modest proposal: end all public discussion of literature. Including newspaper and magazine articles, radio, TV, and Internet chat. He even proposes a ban on those ladies-who-lunch book clubs. In an ideal world, writers wouldn’t have to stoop to doing interviews, to explaining themselves. “I’d leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own,” Roth writes.
Which is the problem with the ideal world: it’s no fun. What is literature, after all, if not an ongoing conversation? It starts intimate but spreads – like gossip raised to the level of art.
Anyway, do we really want to be talking less about books? Could we be? Compared, say, to Britney Spears? Or last night’s hockey game?
In fact, here’s my modest counterproposal: replace 24-hour sports-talk radio stations with 24-hour book-talk stations. Imagine Roth commenting on Doris Lessing’s recent Nobel Prize. “I was robbed,” he’d say. “Lessing isn’t fit to carry my thesaurus.”
Fortunately, most authors can be trusted to avoid trash-talk. A fact demonstrated in Random Illuminations, a new book made up of two decade’s worth of interviews between Eleanor Wachtel, the host of Writers & Company, and the late Carol Shields.
Carol Bruneau Interview
Posted by Words At Large Admin on December 05 at 12:24 PM
(photo: Bruce Erskine) Carol Bruneau is the author of two short story collections (After the Angel Mill and Depth Rapture) as well as the acclaimed novels Purple for Sky and Berth. Born in Halifax, Carol continues to live there with her husband and three sons, where she teaches at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. In 2001, Carol won the City of Dartmouth Fiction Prize and the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize for Purple for Sky. Her latest novel, Glass Voices (Cormorant Books), is about the life of a woman who survives the Halifax Explosion of December 6, 1917.
What inspired you to write Glass Voices?
Having grown up in Halifax, I'd always been obsessed with the Explosion--the rubble is still around if you know where to look. I grew up not far from where the Mont Blanc's anchor came to rest, near the part of the city known as The Grounds in my book, that was an odd mix of rural & urban until it was developed in the 1980s. Over the years, the accounts of Explosion survivors always gripped me--accounts in newspapers and, particularly, the ones in Janet Kitz's book Shattered City. It was an image in this book of an orphaned, blinded infant on a relief train that captured my heart most, the tragedy--and all the questions--that surrounded this image. Not that my book is an attempt to tell this anonymous child's story--but writing Glass Voices was a way of dealing with such unanswerable questions as WHY? such innocents must suffer the things they do.
Dining out with the Writers' Trust
Posted by Words At Large Admin on November 26 at 11:48 AM
Each year, The Writers’ Trust of Canada organizes gourmet dinner parties with Canadian authors. Donations are used for authors’ awards and scholarships, and also to help writers in financial crisis. Toronto’s Great Literary Dinner took place mid-November, and Three Day Road author Joseph Boyden was one of the hosts at the black-tie gala.
Monkey suit? Check. Hair pomade? Check. A couple drinks for courage? Check. All systems go. To the gala, then. To the Four Seasons ballroom. I’ve been asked to co-host the Writer’s Trust fundraiser this year. And why did I agree to this? Certainly not because I’ll be good at it. It’s for a good cause, that’s why. A great cause. The best cause. My speaker’s notes? Oh shit!
The Writer’s Trust was founded by Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje–among other luminaries–in the 1970s. Its mission was and remains to help struggling writers in Canada survive the countless hardships we face. And those countless hardships pretty much revolve around money, or lack of it. I was asked by Don Oravec, current Don of the Trust, to do this.
So I stand at the podium with my petite and lovely co-talking head Amanda Lang, host of BNN’s SqueezePlay. I am blinded and confused, thinking to myself, does my generation have the balls, the wherewithal, the generosity of heart to create something even close to this? The question still niggles.
D.R. MacDonald Interview
Posted by Words At Large Admin on November 20 at 09:27 AM
D.R. MacDonald was born in Cape Breton and grew up mostly in the United States. MacDonald has received two Pushcart Prizes, an Ingram Merrill Award and an O. Henry Award for his short fiction. His first novel, Cape Breton Road, became a national bestseller in 2000. His latest work, Lauchlin of the Bad Heart (HarperCollins Canada), was longlisted for the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The book is about a former boxer who becomes entangled in a sinister plot of revenge. D. R. MacDonald teaches at Stanford University in California and spends the summers in Nova Scotia.
What inspired you to write Lauchlin of the Bad Heart?
It began as a short story, urged into my imagination by a murder that occurred in the community where I live in the summer. But I soon realized there was too much in it for a story to deal with, that I wanted to examine more than that single event and a witness’s role in it. Lauchlin’s character began to develop, and of course that of Tena and Clement and the others, and I saw a much larger and deeper story emerging, the kind that demands space and length.
David Chariandy on his novel Soucouyant
Posted by Words At Large Admin on November 19 at 11:56 AM
(photo: Gwen Lowry) The Vancouver writer’s debut novel, which is in the running for a Governor General’s Award, explores memory and generation gaps in a family balancing between a Caribbean past and a Canadian present. Words at Large asked David Chariandy to write about the sources of Soucouyant.
I’ve noticed that every time I try to explain what my novel addresses, or how it came about, I end up spinning a whole new narrative. Sometimes I’m more or less satisfied by my explanatory gestures. Other times, I’m not so satisfied, or else I worry that I’ve begun to pursue thoughts and moods that are altogether separate from my first novel.
I’m probably not alone in wondering if writers are ever really in the best position to comment on their own works. Sartre once suggested that an artist knows she’s finished a project when, one day, she looks at the result of her labours and remarks, in amazement, "I’m the one who did that?" If Sartre is right, then I’m pretty sure I’ve finished Soucouyant, even though I value the opportunity to reacquaint myself with this now rather strange creature.
Soucouyant is essentially about a relationship between a mother with early-onset dementia and a son who is conflicted about his responsibilities both to her physical needs and to her dying memories. It was challenging for me to represent dementia itself, a condition that both awed and terrified me, a condition that so many people have witnessed and endured in ways that are nothing less than heroic.
Continue reading "David Chariandy on his novel Soucouyant" »
Ken Follett Interview
Posted by Words At Large Admin on November 12 at 11:58 PM
(photo: The Fundacion Catedral Santa Maria) Well known as a writer of international best sellers, Ken Follett was born in Wales and began his career as a newspaper reporter in Wales and in London. His first bestselling novel, The Eye of the Needle, won the Edgar Award and was adapted as a film. He followed this success with four more thrillers: Triple, The Key to Rebecca, The Man from St. Petersburg, and Lie Down with Lions. He surprised readers when he came out with an epic historical fiction novel in 1989, The PIllars of the Earth. It was on the NYTimes besteller list for 18 weeks. Now he's come out with a sequel to that successful book, World Without End, published by Dutton. Follett is also president of the Dyslexia Institute, a council member of the National Literacy Trust, and an amateur musician who plays bass guitar in a band called Damn Right I Got the Blues. He and his wife live in a rectory in Stevenage, 30 miles north of London, with two Labrador retrievers called Custard and Bess.
You were very established as a thriller writer when you published The Pillars of the Earth. What inspired you to take up historical fiction?
Pillars was inspired by the Gothic cathedrals of Europe. Every time I stood in one of these remarkable buildings, I would wonder: Why is it here? My book is the answer to that question.
Snapshots of the First World War: fiive key moments in Canadian history
Posted by Words At Large Admin on November 10 at 11:55 PM
By Nathan Greenfield, author of Baptism of Fire
It’s impossible to sum up the experiences of all Canadians in the First World War with these five key battles—but these crucial moments are clear examples of the extreme hardship of life in the trenches.
The Second Battle of Ypres: April 1915
At 5 PM on April 22, the Germans unleashed the first gas attack in history, tearing a hole almost five miles wide in the French lines, immediately to the Canadians’ left. Canadian counter-attacks at midnight and the following dawn stymied the German advance. At 4 AM on April 24, the Canadians withstood another gas attack. The weight of German shelling and infantry attacks later forced them to withdraw to more defensible positions closer to Ypres. In one hundred hours of battle, the Canadians suffered more than five thousand casualties.
Continue reading "Snapshots of the First World War: fiive key moments in Canadian history" »
Pauline Gedge Interview
Posted by Words At Large Admin on November 05 at 12:28 PM
Pauline Gedge is the award-winning and bestselling author of eleven novels, eight of which are inspired by Egyptian history. Her first book, Child of the Morning, won the Alberta Search-for-a-New Novelist Competition. The Eagle and the Raven received the Jean Boujassy award from the Société des Gens des Lettres in France and The Twelfth Transforming won the Writers Guild of Alberta Best Novel of the Year Award. Her books have sold more than 250,000 copies in Canada alone; worldwide, they have sold more than six million copies and have been translated into eighteen languages. The Twice Born is her newest book and is published by Penguin Canada. She lives in Alberta.
You’re best known for your descriptive historical fiction, primarily set in Ancient Egypt. What draws you to this time period?
I'm drawn to Ancient Egypt primarily, I think, because of an excellent history teacher who began our study by bringing to class a wonderful book full of colour photos of the treasures found in King Tut's tomb. She set it upright on her desk and simply turned the pages over slowly, one by one. I was transfixed at once by the huge, kohled eyes of the women and goddesses, the magnificent jewellery, the sheer opulence of everything I saw. I was eleven years old, a uniformed schoolgirl at a conservative Oxford school. A new dimension was added to my already fertile imagination.
An examination of the reign of Hatshepsut followed the Tut photos, probably because my school was for girls' only and my teacher wanted to make sure that she had piqued our attention by using a female heroine. She then turned to an overall view of the Old Kingdom, but I had fallen in love with Hatshepsut, make-up, and jewellery. A lifetime later Hatshepsut became the subject of my first published novel. I've never lost my interest in make-up, or a purely sensuous and greedy eye for barbaric adornment! Of course other influences were at play in my early life--a father whose bookshelves were full of stories written by the explorers of Africa, a solitary nature drawn to the simplicity of desert landscapes--but that first glimpse of Ancient Egypt's splendour is as fresh and striking today, in my memory, as it was fifty years ago.
Peter Robinson Interview
Posted by Words At Large Admin on October 29 at 08:35 AM
Peter Robinson is the recipient of numerous awards for his Inspector Banks novels, including the prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for the French translation of In a Dry Season, the Edgar Award for the short story "Missing in Action," Denmark's Palle Rosenkrantz Award, and several Arthur Ellis Awards for Best Novel. In 2002, he was awarded the Dagger in the Library by the British Crime Writers' Association. Friend of the Devil (McClelland & Stewart) is the latest book in the Inspector Banks series. Robinson was born in Yorkshire, England, and immigrated to Canada after graduating from the University of Leeds. He now lives in Toronto.
How did you come up with the Alan Banks character?
I think he's a combination of my idea of an interesting cop character and some of the detectives I was reading about at the time I first started writing crime fiction, especially Philip Marlowe and Maigret. I didn't really know much about British crime fiction then, apart perhaps from Agatha Christie and P.D. James, so my main early influences in the field were American and European-Ross Macdonald, Ed McBain, Nicholas Freeling, Van der Wetering, Sjowall and Wahloo.
Beating the odds
Posted by Words At Large Admin on October 28 at 01:26 PM
Toronto author Alissa York is sharing the Scotiabank Giller shortlist with some of the top names in Canadian fiction, including two-time Giller winner M.G. Vassanji and one-time recipient Michael Ondaatje. Writing her novel, Effigy, also took her into unexpected terrain.
“How did you feel when you found out?”
I get this question a lot lately, ever since my novel, Effigy (Random House Canada) appeared on the shortlist for this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize. The short answer is, not surprisingly, Thrilled! But there’s a little more to it than that.
The truth is, I’m amazed to have written a book like this in the first place. I’ve been writing fiction since my early twenties, and if anyone had told me then that I would one day set a novel in mid nineteenth-century Utah, I would’ve drawn upon my Australian roots and answered, Not bloody likely.
Birth of a book
Posted by Words At Large Admin on October 23 at 12:06 PM
Toronto author Gil Adamson has been writing and publishing poetry and short fiction for years, but now she’s in the literary limelight. Her first novel, The Outlander, was published last summer and has been raking in accolades and international sales. We asked the Toronto author to write about her experiences, from getting her novel published to taking it on the road. Here’s her first installment.
The other day, I wandered into Indigo. I was in one of those nauseated, mall-head states you get into, rudderless and carrying purchases I didn’t need. And I can’t pass a bookstore without going in. Anyway, I got three steps into the store and stopped.
There, on a table by the door, with a recommendation, was my book The Outlander (House of Anansi, 2007). Of course, I figured the book would be in there somewhere, spine out, up by the A’s. But on a table? What the..!? I pretended to browse for a few minutes, but I was too excited to think. I thoroughly enjoyed the moment, and then I skittered out of there with my cheeks aflame. I wonder if “established” writers feel that way too? Maybe once in a while?
Michael Hirst Interview
Posted by Words At Large Admin on October 22 at 03:10 PM
Michael Hirst is a English screenwriter who wrote the 1998 award-winning movie Elizabeth, starring Cate Blanchett, and its current sequel, Elizabeth, The Golden Age. Hirst also wrote and produced the 2007 TV drama series The Tudors. The critically acclaimed series brings to life Henry VIII's tumultuous early years and follows the intrigues, dramas and desires of this sexy young king from 1520 to 1530. The Tudors airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on CBC. Episodes are available for streaming online, after they have aired on CBC Television on the official site.
Update: The 10 episodes of Season Two will be broadcast in the fall schedule starting late September. More info will be announced at the season launch on May 26th.
Why did you choose to write about a young Henry VIII rather than the more familiar story of his later life?
The answer is almost implied by the question! We all know the Holbein portrait of the overweight, puffy-faced, piggy-eyed Henry VIII, his legs planted arrogantly astride…but who knows that, as a younger man, he was called “the handsomest prince in Christendom”? We know–or think we know–the butcher and the monster he became, chopping off the heads of saints and wives alike…but have we met the sensitive younger man, once bound for a career in the church, the humanist, scholar and progressive thinker, determined to be a just ruler? And what are the connections between these two disparate images?
Like Elizabeth I–who I also wrote about–Henry is an iconic figure in English history, but I’ve always been less interested in serving the icon than in discovering how and why it was created: in the human being behind the historical mask.
Goran Simic Interview
Posted by Words At Large Admin on October 16 at 03:32 PM
(photo: Luna Simic) Goran Simic was born in Bosnia and has published many volumes of poetry, drama and short fiction. His work has been translated into nine languages and been published and performed in several European countries. One of the most prominent writers of the former Yugoslavia, Simic and his family were trapped in the siege of Sarajevo. In 1995 they were able to settle in Canada as a result of a PEN Freedom to Write Award and he became a resident at the University of Toronto's Massey College as part of their writer-in-exile program. PEN's Writers in Exile Committee supported Simic's integration into the Canadian writing world, and he and poet Fraser Sutherland collaborated on a short-run collection of poetry called Peace and War, as well as a theatrical piece. In 2003, Brick Books published Simic's first full collection of poems in Canada, Immigrant Blues , translated by Amela Simic. He continues to write and give readings.
Gail Anderson-Dargatz Interview
Posted by Words At Large Admin on October 14 at 02:50 PM
(photo: Mitch Krupp) Turtle Valley (Knopf Canada) is the fifth book to come from talented Canadian author Gail Anderson-Dargatz, whose novels have been published in several languages worldwide. Her first novel The Cure For Death By Lightning met with acclaim and garnered her the UK’s Betty Trask Award and a nomination for Canada’s Giller Prize. A Recipe For Bees soon followed with nominations for the Giller and the IMPAC Dublin Award. A Rhinestone Button was a national bestseller in Canada and her first book, The Miss Hereford Stories, was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.
Top 10 Literary Heroes, by Bruce Meyer
Posted by Words At Large Admin on October 11 at 09:10 AM
English literature academic and broadcaster Bruce Meyer gives new insights into the heroes who inspire us in his new book Heroes: The Champions of Our Literary Imagination (HarperCollins Canada). Meyer is best known to CBC Radio listeners for his frequent contributions on book-related subjects. In his latest work, he gives readers a new perspective on their favourite literary heroes, ranging from Superman to Dante.
Heroes come in all shapes and sizes, from the Common man to the Divine entity. There are dark heroes and there are saints. They populate not only the labyrinths of our imagination, but also the pages of the works of literature that help to shape the way we think and dream. My new book, Heroes: The Champions of Our Literary Imaginations (HarperCollinsCanada), explores not only the various types of heroes we meet in literature but how they function and what they tell us about ourselves.
Here are the top ten heroes from some key works of the Western literary imagination. I hope this list will spark some thoughts about who you consider to be heroes and what constitutes that honorable title.
Entertaining strangers
Posted by Words At Large Admin on October 04 at 09:01 AM
When Wendy Morton started reading her poems to strangers, it was the start of something big. Random Acts of Poetry, taking place from October 1 through 7, is a national, week-long celebration of books and literacy. Here’s how it all began...
When is it that we stop being read to? Was that sweet time of childhood gone forever? I suppose I was thinking about this when I first began reading poems to passengers on WestJet flights in 2002. I had made a deal: I would read to travelers and write them poems, in exchange for free flights.
I was now a corporate-sponsored poet, something unheard of in the literary world. And something happened each time I read a poem to the person I had written it for: a kind of delight passed between us.
In 2003, I flew to Halifax to tour with my second book of poetry, Undercover. I drove around, and when I saw someone waiting in line or at a gas station, I would park, leap out of the car, read poems to strangers and give them books. If I was walking down the street and someone smiled at me, I’d ask if they’d like a poem and a book. I called it random acts of poetry.
Bernice Morgan Interview
Posted by Words At Large Admin on October 03 at 11:20 AM
Bernice Morgan was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in 1935. She is the author of the Canadian bestsellers Random Passage and Waiting for Time, which won the CAA Award for Fiction. Both novels were adapted into a four-part television miniseries, which aired in Canada and Ireland in 2002. Her new book, Cloud of Bone (Knopf Canada), is an engrossing story of the last surviving Beothuk, a World War II deserter and a recently widowed English woman at the end of the twentieth century.
(Photo: Greg Morgan) Cloud of Bone is three different stories, stretched out over more than 100 years, but then linked in the end. Why did you decide to link these seemingly unrelated storylines?
Many of the stories in Topography of Love are set in the place of my childhood–St. John’s during the Second World War. After that book was published I knew that I wanted to write more about that time and was circling around the possibility of a novel about a Newfoundland seaman during the Battle of the North Atlantic. Then, one day, when I was gazing out of my office window in downtown St. John’s, I saw that a small monument, that had marked both the location of Shanawdithit’s grave and of St. Mary’s Church, had vanished–that, in fact, the entire hill was being blasted away. Not only had we caused the extinction of her people, we also seemed bent on eradicating every sign that they had ever existed. Right then, in that moment, I saw how my story about the sailor and Shanawdithit’s story could be combined. It took years, of course, to work out the details of their stories.
St. Urbain's hairdo
Posted by Words At Large Admin on September 17 at 10:29 AM
Montreal author Joel Yanofsky ponders St. Urbain’s Horseman as Richler’s novel comes to a screen near you.
Joel Yanofsky is waiting with bated breath to see the adaptation of St. Urbain’s Horseman on CBC TV this week. The Montreal author of Mordecai & Me has loved this ambitious and exuberant Richler novel for many years, and wonders how it will play out in a mini-series.
This is what I’ll be waiting to see when the two-part TV adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman airs on the CBC this week: do they get the shiva scene right?
St. Urbain’s Horseman is a funny, sprawling, ambitious Canadian novel – for my money, the most ambitious. I remember the critic John Metcalf telling me that when Richler, who’d been living in England, came back to Canada in the early 1970s, with Horseman already acclaimed, every Canlit wannabe and poseur was put on notice. It was like a monster-size frog had just landed in a very small pond, Metcalf said.
Plot wasn’t Richler’s strength and Horseman jumps all over the place – from ghettoized Montreal in the 1950s to London in the swinging 1960s. The anti-hero, Jake Hersh, is pushing 40, enduring a trumped-up trial – accused of various acts of perversion – and clinging desperately to his self-worth and his marriage. He’s a lost-generation-guy; he needs something solid to believe in. Horseman works because it takes Jake’s existential mid-life crisis seriously and also finds it hilarious. Most surprising of all for Richler, the novel is deeply moving.
All movie
Posted by Words At Large Guest on August 31 at 12:58 PM
All Hat is a fast-paced novel - pure country noir with fast horses, dodgy land developers, a deadline to save a family farm, and an ex-con looking to settle a score. It's a book that had "movie" written all over it. Author Brad Smith muses on the stories behind the feature film All Hat, which will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this month.
This would have blown Al Gore’s argument all to bits.
I was at home on a Monday morning last September, recovering from Sunday's 12-hour golf game, when the phone rang. On the line from L.A. was the actor Keith Carradine. He'd just signed on to play Pete Culpepper in the film adaptation of my novel, All Hat, and wanted to talk about the character.
During the course of the conversation I mentioned that I was suffering from the marathon golf game of the previous day. (In the interest of full disclosure, I feel obliged to mention that the 12 hours consisted of five on the golf course, seven in the clubhouse. Draw your own conclusions.) When Keith said he hadn't played in a while, I told him to bring his clubs to the film shoot, scheduled for October. He asked if the weather in Ontario was suitable for golf in autumn and I told him that our fall days were beautiful.
And with that, I jinxed the whole damn thing.
Sparks in my (third) eye
Posted by Words At Large Guest on August 27 at 12:05 PM
Shauna Singh Baldwin’s award-winning novels and stories have explored the lives of Indian and Pakistani characters in their homelands and adopted countries. So she was surprised when her latest writing took her to many unexpected places. Here she explores the genesis of the ten tales in her collection, We Are Not In Pakistan, forthcoming in early September.
Before I knew I was writing a collection of stories called We Are Not in Pakistan, I wrote a tale about Naina, an Indo-Canadian Hindu woman whose name means third eye. Naina has been pregnant for fourteen years. Once the story was finished, I realized “Naina” was advising me to open myself to the sparks that give life to hybrid things, that grow from associations and shape themselves for re-vision, then birth.
Story sparks can arrive from strange places. On my forty-something birthday, someone mentioned that if I’d ever wanted children, I might have had a son or daughter who’d be about twenty-three by now. And I thought: But what if I weren’t me? What if I am Dr. Karanbir Singh, professor of economics? Who receives an email from someone who says she’s my twenty-three year old daughter Uma from a green card marriage. What if she wants to come visit me in – let’s make it Santa Barbara? How will Karanbir bridge “The Distance Between Us”?
Ripple effects
Posted by Words At Large Guest on August 20 at 12:35 PM
Marina Nemat’s memoir Prisoner of Tehran was published in Canada last spring, and has already been translated into many languages. Only 16 years old when she was arrested in the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, Marina Nemat spent two years in the notorious Evin prison. Here she describes the far-reaching consequences of publishing her story.
(photo: Frank Cunha) I believed that once I put my memories on paper, the past would go away. But it didn’t. Instead, it became larger than life, magnified through every single word. I promised myself that the pain would disappear once I shared my story with the world. But it didn’t. So I charged ahead, fueled by a desperate need to find closure, to make sense of all that had happened, of torture, death, rape, betrayal, forgiveness–and my survival.
With my book being published in 20 countries, I had to travel around the world to promote it. City after city. Two continents. Tens of interviews. And every interview left me emotionally exhausted. Like a seed in fertile soil, the past had sprung back to life from the shards of my broken silence.
At every book-signing event, there were always a few Iranians who asked me to sign the book in Farsi. Sometimes they had been political prisoners themselves, and sometimes they had a loved one who had been in prison in Iran.
There were hugs and tears, and I was always on the look out for a familiar face, hoping to find my prison friends in the crowd, but this never happened. After one event, a beautiful, young Iranian girl broke into tears telling me that her mother had been a prisoner in Evin, but that she never talked about it. I knew this silence too well.
Northern lights
Posted by Words At Large Guest on July 17 at 08:08 AM
Toronto poet and broadcaster Barbara Carey puzzles out her attraction to Scandinavian mystery novels.
I'm not usually a fan of murder mysteries, though I have a nodding acquaintance with the classics of the genre, everything from police procedurals to psychological suspense and forensic grisly-fests to hardboiled detective stories.
But there’s one major, geographical exception: I’m hooked on Scandinavian mystery novels, what I think of as the "Northern Lights" of the genre.
I’m not the only one to feel the appeal of these often severe stories: the Scandinavian “crime wave” has invaded bookshelves around the world since Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s detective Martin Beck was translated into English thirty years ago.
I’m sure there are many clues to the explosive appeal of crime fiction from these lands of the midnight sun. Some speculate about the transformation of formerly peaceful countries, with low crime rates and “cradle to grave” welfare systems, once the Soviet Union crumbled and liberal immigration laws led to greatly changed demographics. But I’ll leave the definitive unraveling of that mystery to others, and investigate the writers I enjoy.
I haven’t read everything (yet), so I can’t say for sure that there’s a distinctively Nordic style. But I can certainly identify what I like about a few of my favourite Scandinavian authors: Henning Mankell, the Swedish writer who’s probably the best known (and most translated) of the bunch; Karin Fossum, a Norwegian novelist; and my latest enthusiasm, the Icelandic author Arnaldur Indriðason.
The O'Neill Effect (Part III)
Posted by Words At Large Guest on June 22 at 09:54 AM
When Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals won Canada Reads this spring, the debut novel shot to the top of bestseller lists. It's all part of the “Canada Reads Effect,” a term Quill & Quire coined to describe the huge impact of CBC Radio's title fight. This week, the Montreal author muses on reading, writing and the trunks of strangers’ cars.
All I ever wanted to do was to be a writer. Well, for a while, I did entertain the idea of being a back-up dancer. My father would never sign me up for dance lessons though. He had a horror of dance teachers, and all other people who ran extracurricular activities for that matter. I suppose it all turned out for the best though. Where would I be now if I'd followed my dream of being a back-up dancer: washed up, living in a bungalow outside LA, divorced from a Backstreet Boy.
Being a writer justifies a lot of the weird stuff you did before you started writing. All idiotic and dangerous behavior becomes wonderful subject matter. My mother never cared if I was alive or dead when I was a kid and, as a result, I was always overly familiar and trusting of strangers. Sort of like a feral kitten looking for a scrap of food. I would stop whenever anyone called me. If someone wearing a red band uniform and mirrored sunglasses asked me if I wanted to go in the alley and take a look at what he had in the trunk of his car, the answer was always yes. Although I risked being murdered, it all turned out for the best, because now the contents of that trunk have become poems.
Check out Heather O’Neill’s photo feature, “Postcards for Little Criminals,” and Canada Reads.
The O'Neill Effect (Part II)
Posted by Words At Large Guest on June 20 at 08:18 AM
When Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals won Canada Reads this spring, the debut novel shot to the top of bestseller lists. It's all part of the “Canada Reads Effect,” a term Quill & Quire coined to describe the huge impact of CBC Radio's title fight. This week, the Montreal author muses on reading, writing and the trunks of strangers’ cars.
Ever since I was quite young, I always planned to be an alcoholic and go completely mad if I ever became a best-selling novelist. I determined that I would only have shallow friends who secretly despised me and would write tell-all memoirs about my bad habits. I thought that I would have to have at least five husbands and wear a fur coat even in the summer. Obviously, having a best seller was one of these ridiculous scenarios, like imagining what you would do if you won the lottery. Perhaps the major change in my life is that I am no longer beset with the terrible anxiety of being an unpublished novelist. The idea that you are going to end up penniless and have nothing to show for all the years you've spent on your writing is really enough to make you consider chopping off an ear. And now that that weight has been lifted, all there is to do is start on the next novel.
You get so used to the characters from your novel, that you think of them as friends who you could never really live without or replace. But starting a new novel is like when a little kid moves and changes elementary school. Suddenly there is a new cast of characters and a completely different world for him to participate in, and, try as he may, he can't really keep in touch with anyone from the old school. Anyhow, for me, there's nothing as delightful as writing a first draft. The new characters want to say ridiculous things, get dressed to the nines, take their pants off in the kitchen, betray one another, get rich or die trying, drink too much, read spy novels, fraternize with the people who will ruin them, carry one another to heaven, lose their way, express the truth with lies and do whatever else my characters are apt to do. You will meet them soon enough.
Check out Heather O’Neill’s photo feature, “Postcards for Little Criminals,” and Canada Reads.
The O'Neill Effect (Part I)
Posted by Words At Large Guest on June 18 at 03:17 PM
When Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals won Canada Reads this spring, the debut novel shot to the top of bestseller lists. It's all part of the “Canada Reads Effect,” a term Quill & Quire coined to describe the huge impact of CBC Radio's title fight. This week, the Montreal author muses on reading, writing and the trunks of strangers’ cars.
I was in New York the other day and someone at a party announced, "Do you know that everyone in Canada is forced to read Heather's novel." This was met with amazement and exclamations about what a great country Canada was, despotic in the best possible way. I tried to interject that it was only suggested that the entire country read it by a CBC Radio show. She dismissed this with a wave of her hand, preferring her own version of the story. Nonetheless, although no fines or pressure tactics have been implemented, a surprising number of people have indeed read my book.
Enough people anyway that strangers have come up to me in the oddest places to tell me that they liked Lullabies for Little Criminals. In the museum, in the drug store, in bookstores, at the airport. None of these people seem to have anything common either. They range from angelic looking blue-haired sixteen-year-old boys to sophisticated-looking middle-aged women.
When I was in elementary school, on Valentine's Day, we would bring empty Kleenex boxes to school and put them on the edge of our desks. Then we would sit back and wait for other kids to put their Valentines inside our box over the course of the day. It could be a little nerve wracking. When you write a book, you find yourself in the same predicament, where you might end up with no cards or notes whatsoever in your box. Each time someone comes up to me and says that they like my book, it's like getting a handwritten Valentine in that box that says, "Be Mine." It means the world to me.
Check out Heather O’Neill’s photo feature, “Postcards for Little Criminals,” and Canada Reads.
Book Expo-Sure
Posted by Words At Large Guest on June 13 at 09:36 AM
Robert J. Wiersema is an author who works at Victoria’s Bolen Books, which won Bookseller of the Year at BookExpo this week. Here’s his insider look at the buzz and beverages served up at the country’s biggest book bash.
There comes a moment, every BookExpo Canada, when the inherent and aggressive surreality of the situation tips over into full-on cognitive dissonance. In other words, you start to think, "I must be imagining things, because there is no way this can actually be happening."
In the better years of BookExpo Canada, there are many of those moments.
I should backtrack, though.
An outsider would probably be hard-pressed to think of a more staid gathering than BookExpo Canada. It's the annual gathering of the Canadian publishing tribes, a weekend every June that brings to Toronto the country’s booksellers, publishers, editors, writers, publicists (ah, publicists...), agents, media, government types and sales reps for two days of meetings and seminars, and another two days of a trade show to promote the upcoming fall season.
Sounds dull, right?
Wrong. Oh, so wrong.
When the Canada Council popped the first champagne cork at 11 o'clock this past Sunday morning, it was the first official drink of BEC 2007 (the gathering ran from June 8-11 this year, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre). It came, however, slightly past the half-way point of the weekend.
By the time the cork-popping finished echoing through the cavernous convention centre, there was a healthy crowd assembled, many of them on-hand for hair of the dog (the Saturday night of BEC weekend is notorious for its parties: I think that at one point, I was actually attending three of them simultaneously).
It's not just the proliferation of drink that makes BEC so surreal (though it helps). The event itself is completely over the top.
While there was nothing this year to rival the year that publisher Jack Stoddart brought an elephant to the show to promote his company (which went under soon after–-make of that timing what you will), BEC is itself an altered mental state. Trade show by way of Fellini.
Make no mistake, much work is done at BEC. Fall books are appropriately launched and feted. Occasions are marked (Random House Canada closed the show with a reception honouring Karen Connelly's recent Orange Prize win–-by then I had long lost track of how much champagne I had drunk). Catalogs and bumph are distributed. Advanced reading copies are snagged. Books are signed by grateful writers (yours truly included). Heated business discussions pop up in every corner of the hall.
But it's not the work that makes a BEC (I was going to say something like "I don't go to BEC to work,” but thought better of it when I realized that my wife and employers might chance across this entry): it's the sheer spectacle. And, more, it's those moments you can feel your brain starting to melt under the pressure that keep me coming
back.
There were plenty of those moments this year. The true-to-scale model of the world's tallest man that I swear kept looking at me. The full-size set of The Simpsons' couch, complete with Bart and company for your photo-taking pleasure. They kept looking at me too (clearly too little sleep and too much alcohol bring out my inherent paranoia). The arrival of Jean Chretien to celebrate his upcoming memoir was too many levels of surreal to even parse.
Then there was the moment I was talking with Doug Gibson, editor of his own imprint at McClelland and Stewart and one of the great figures of Canadian publishing, wondering how hard it would be to commandeer the yellow chicken mascot suit (though we agreed Clifford the Big Red Dog would do in a pinch) to run amok, wreaking havoc on the show.
Sadly, that isn't the really surreal part. The really surreal part was the ensuing conversation on Scottish history, clans and tartans between Doug and the kilt-wearing author of the Walter the Farting Dog books. Doug Gibson. Walter the Farting Dog. The mind reeled and rebelled.
Thankfully, it was back in check for the moment that Bolen Books was awarded the Libris Award from the Canadian Booksellers Association for Bookseller of the Year. That's the best kind of surreal: being awarded such a prize from a jury of your peers, receiving the acclaim and support of an entire industry for the work you do every day.
Surreal, but heart-warming. And much appreciated.
It feels oddly like a dream now, though.
Robert J. Wiersema’s debut novel Before I Wake was published by Random House Canada in 2006.
Why poetry?
Posted by Words At Large Guest on May 31 at 03:05 PM
This year’s Griffin Prize winners were announced June 6. Here, Scott Griffin, the founder of the influential prize writes of his life-long love of poetry.
The other day I was asked why I like poetry, as if liking poetry was some strange aberration that required explanation. "Probably for the same reason that some people like music," I replied. The question though, spoke volumes about how far poetry had slipped from the mainstream of our cultural lives, which is somewhat bewildering to me.
Poetry is no longer really taught in the schools or heard in the coffee houses or homes. It's rarely quoted by politicians, corporate presidents or heads of labour unions. Occasionally a poem (the Hallmark card variety) is pulled off the shelf and trotted out at a wedding or funeral to embroider a well meaning, but syrupy sentiment, but that's it. What a shame, what a travesty!
I grew up with poetry in the family. My father loved poetry and not only read it to us around the fire, but used it as punishment whenever we misbehaved. We were required to memorize a poem and recite it in front of family members and guests before dinner.
Although this had a salutary effect on my siblings, I found myself learning a lot of poetry. My father cleverly suggested that I search out my own poems to memorize, and they had to be longer than a few lines. I was determined to find poetry that would be unfamiliar to him (he being well read) and that got me interested in exploring poetry beyond our own library.
My behaviour did not improve and I was shipped off to boarding school. An inspirational, Victorian headmaster furthered my interest in poetry. I remember him entering the classroom, reading Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and then slamming the book shut with frightening authority. "Listen to this, listen!" he would exclaim, before
reciting the whole poem off by heart. It was a romantic tour de force, designed to leave an impression on a young boy!
At university, I encountered a young professor, Arthur Motyer, who also loved poetry. He was able to convey the technical possibilities open to poetry that I had not fully understood. He showed me there was music within free verse that went beyond the confines of rhyming couplets or the metrical movement determined by various relations of long or short, accented or unaccented syllables. A whole new world opened up for me.
Through all of this, I learned the value of memorizing poetry, perhaps the only way to truly understand a poem, short of writing it. Different poems, favourite poems, remained with me, to be brought forward, when alone at night flying my plane or at sea, on watch, under a panoply of stars. They became friends, always there, on call.
As the years scooted by, I realized the value of poetry and decried its loss in the Western world of consumerism. Yes, it remained strong in South America and former European Eastern bloc countries, countries that had undergone years of repression, but here in Canada poetry had all but disappeared. Something had to be done.
Friends came to dinner, Michael Ondaatje and David Young, and we discussed the loss of poetry. We decided that same evening to establish the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.
Within nine months we had $2 million in a Trust, judges selected, the rules and regulations established and 230 books of poetry submitted. We were on our way. The readings that first year were held at Harbourfront in Toronto with an audience of 175 paying customers.
This year is the seventh year of the Griffin Prize. We have received 483 books of poetry from 35 different countries. Tickets for the readings to be held at Toronto’s MacMillan Theatre (which holds 850 people) are sold out. This is progress.
Yet, much remains to be done. Poetry is still far from the mainstream of our cultural lives where it properly belongs, but I for one, am optimistic.
Scott Griffin is a Canadian businessman and philanthropist. He is also chairman and director of House of Anansi Press. His memoir My Heart is Africa came out in 2006.
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