Photo from Kathleen Winter's Book launch courtesy of Gavin Will (of Boulder Publications) / stolen off Facebook

 There’s been well over decade’s worth of literary proof that Newfoundland is the literary capital of Canada. A fertile ground for fresh, new fiction. 

Case in Point: This photo was taken 10 nights ago at the legendary, “The Ship.” A pub no bigger than your living room.  

In this photo, left to right, a full spread of diverse, distinctive, literary firepower: 

Michael Crummey, Michael Winter, Kathleen Winter, Russell Wangersky, and Leslie Vryenhoek. 

 Skirting this photo’s range: 

Jessica Grant, Janet Russell, Libby Creelman are hidden behind that pole. 

George Murray had just left the building. 

A mini-pack of Burning Rockers, Lisa Moore, Claire Wilkshire, and Larry Mathews, are just off to the side. 

And the person taking the photo is pretty well stepping on the toes of  Chad Pelley and Samuel Thomas Martin, members of a recently formed writers group whose name, The Cold Stone, is a shamelessly pun-intended homage to the legendary Burning Rock fiction group. (The homage, of course, is a witty professional nod, not fanaticism?)

(And then some. Including at least a half-dozen emerging names you’ll know soon enough.)

So, all the publishers and agents are in Toronto, sure, but we all know where all the talent is. The joke is that “Take a picture in St. John’s and there’ll be a writer in the background.” Jacked it up. “Take a picture in St. John’s and there’ll be four or five writers in the background.”

From Danila Botha’s publisher, Tightrope Books: “A startling and original new voice that owes as much to Black Flag and Bikini Kill as it does to J.D. Salinger and Heather O’Neill.  Botha’s prose is compassionate, provocative, often funny, and always fearless.” Danila’s debut collection, Got No Secrets, hit the shelves this season. Check out her posts at The Afterword Here, or her last guest post on Salty Ink here. 

For today’s guest blog, I’m thrilled she chose to interview a Salty Ink favourite: Metcalf-Rooke winner, Amy Jones. her debut, What Boys Like, blew Salty Ink’s mind, remember?

“I think that most fiction is really just piecing together little bits of reality in different ways.”

 Amy Jones  (http://listophelia.blogspot.com/) is a fantastic writer. Her first book, a collection of stories called What Boys Like is the most exciting book I’ve read in ages- a diverse group of utterly convincing, uniquely voiced characters whose pain, restlessness and triumphs are entirely relatable, and whose voices are fresh and vital. Both the dialogue and internal monologues are spot on.

I had the chance to chat with her recently about her writing process, inspirations and what she loves about writing short stories.

 1)      You write from so many perspectives so well- from the perspective of a young kid living with her teenage mom in How To Survive Summer in the City (I loved that story, it cracked my heart open) In A good girl, from the perspective of a waiter, Alex, who is in love with a much younger woman, in Miriam Beachwalker, a teen trying to figure out who she is and what she wants from life, and a girl who realizes how unrequited her love is in All We Will Ever Be. Do you find it difficult to get into different character’s minds? It reads so seamlessly. What is the process like for you? How do you get the characters to seem so relatable, so real and so human?

Well, for one thing, I spend a lot of time people watching. I’m kind of obsessed with what’s going on in other people’s lives, and I’m always wondering “What’s that single mother at the grocery store thinking?” Or “What’s that guy with the super young girlfriend thinking?” My stories are all attempts to answer those questions.

2) How did the story “The Church of the Latter Peaches” come about? In it a bereaved widow tells the story of how she and her young fiancée met, and what their relationship with each other, and his family was like prior to the funeral. Was the chocolate fortune part inspired by the Caramilk secret? I’m wondering what your inspiration was. I found it wonderfully inventive.

I had this image of a pregnant widow sort of rolling around in my head for months, but the story really started to come together for me when I found Marty Peach. That story, more so than any other, went through a huge revision process — at one point I think it was 50 pages, at another point it was only 8 — and the whole Caramilk secret thing was just an experiment to throw in something kind of crazy in order to help me crack the thing open. But I ended up really liking it! So it stayed. I don’t know; it’s the most polarizing story in my collection, but I have a soft spot in my heart for it.

3) I can see why. It’s experimental for sure, but a very touching and realistic seeming story. You make a lot of local references- to Halifax, Wolfville, other parts of Canada. Do you think setting is really important in short stories? Do you plan to set more in Halifax? I loved all the references, especially in How To Survive, it really hit a nerve with me. I’ve  met a lot of kids like that, and moms like Stacy.I don’t know if setting is important to all short stories, but it certainly is for mine. When I was writing What Boys Like, I was very conscious of the fact that I was writing about a city rarely fictionalized, and was careful to portray it as honestly as I could. That my Halifax friends say I got it mostly right means a lot to me! And yes, I’ve got way more Halifax up my sleeve. It’s what I know. I don’t know if I feel comfortable enough with any other city yet to settle into it with stories.

4) That makes sense. I don’t know if I’ve lived in Halifax for long enough yet to write about it. Are the stories mostly fictional, or are they based on people you’ve known? Have you ever been afraid to reveal parts of other people’s lives that were told to you in secret, or did they come purely from imagination? I ask this because to me they felt unbelievably vivid and real. Have you ever been afraid to expand on, or tell other people’s stories, and how did you resolve it?

I steal people’s stories all the time! But I totally consider everything I write about completely ficticious. If someone I know has had something interesting happen to them, it might find its way into a story but in a totally different way and to a totally different character. Or that little quirk that a friend of mine has, it might show up in an 80 year old man instead of a 30 year old woman. I think that most fiction is really just piecing together little bits of reality in different ways; even if you imagine something, it’s probably someone’s reality somewhere. Also, one thing I’ve learned is that people are going to see themselves in your stories no matter what, even if you consciously try to avoid it. Like, my mother thinks that every mother I ever write about is her. Eventually, I just had to stop writing about mothers.

5) That’s really funny- it happened with my mom too. It must be a mom thing.

I was reading that you love short stories, and that you want to write another book of stories next (which I am frankly thrilled about, and can’t wait to read) What do you say to people who say that short stories don’t sell? (I think it’s ridiculous myself. There’s a great Zoe Whittall poem where she says she’s told that, and so she decides to call her next book Go Ask Alice Munro).

I definitely love short stories above all else, and the reason I write is because I love to do it, so what sells isn’t the first thing on my mind (except maybe around the time rent is due!) I think short stories sometimes require more work from the reader, and definitely a more open mind, and that’s why I love them. I had a person tell me recently that they didn’t like short stories because she liked character development and dialogue, and in short stories there was no chance to develop either (actually, she said “well, sometimes you know what they’re saying to each other, but you don’t know why!”) But that’s really what I love about short stories: how much of it is in the subtext, how your own interpretation of it as a reader can be your own little beautiful secret. Also, I’m pretty much up for any challenge, so if someone says to me, “short stories don’t sell” it makes me want to say “oh, yeah?!”

6) Yeah, I love the subtext too. That’s a beautiful way to put it. Who are your main literary influences? Have you read anything fascinating or great that’s changed your life lately?I love Aimee Bender, Rick Moody, Lorrie Moore, Steve Almond, Miranda July, Lisa Moore… and about a hundred other short story writers. Rebecca Rosenblum, who won the Metcalf-Rooke award the year before me, continues to astonish me with her short stories. I’m reading The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz right now and it’s the first novel in a long time that is completely blowing my mind.

7) Your dialogue is so fresh, and sharp. Is it something you acquired through practice, or does it flow naturally for you? What is your writing and editing process like?

I really attribute my ability with dialogue to the years I spent as an actress, learning how other people talk, how the rhythm of their conversations flow, how they say so much in what’s not said. Also, like I said before, I eavesdrop a lot! That’s really where my stories start, with the dialogue — I hear the characters speaking in my head, and it’s not until I can clearly hear their voices that I can put anything down on paper. Once I start, I usually just vomit it all out onto the screen as fast as possible, and rarely do much rewriting, because I do so much of it in my head before I even start.

It has a pretty simple slogan: The Man Booker Prize promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year.

A fact about Lisa Moore: I am not sure if there is another writer who can touch her elegant, evocative sentence-level writing.

So it all lines up, right?

Today in London, the Booker Prize Foundation released its annual “The Booker Dozen” longlist. Newfoundland’s Lisa Moore is on it. Interestingly, the winner is chosen by an international judging panel chosen by the advisory committee of the Man Booker Prize: they meet  and chat a few times … in different parts of the world. Consideration is given to an author’s overall contribution to fiction “on the world stage. In seeking out literary excellence, the judges consider a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.”

The Man Booker Prize is hands down one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, and its cash prize weighs in at £50 000. It also sells books by the barrel, as much or more than most other literary awards. Look what it did for its 2009 winner, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. That book was pretty well falling out of the sky last year, wasn’t it?

Darryl Whetter’s A Sharp Tooth in the Fur  

For every pack of young writers out there striving to be the next Lisa Moore or Michael Winter, there ought to be another hoping to be as fresh and crisp as Darryl Whetter. Though critically acclaimed (this book was a Globe and Mail Book of the Year), Whetter remains undersung, in that each and every Canadian who hasn’t read a story like “Profanity Issues,” has missed out on the kind of literary entertainment only a finely crafted short story can offer up.

Joey Comeau’s Overqualified 

People use the term “very original” too freely. They waste it as a descriptor. Example: Joey Comeau has written a collection of linked short stories, all of which are in the form of cover letters to places like Irving Oil and HBO. THAT’S original. And Goddamn funny. If you haven’t read Joey Comeau’s Overqualified, it is a lesson in innovation, a laugh-out-loud stab North America, an occasionally unexpected heartbreaker. It is a book for everyone with an iota of life in them.

A friend said, “I am heading out of town for a while. Suggest a book; give me my literary summer fling. Make it something funny but profound and unforgettable.”

A literary summer fling, she said, and I thought of this book, because The Darren Effect is the best-looking book I’ve ever laid eyes on, and, a truly unforgettable read. I don’t remember every book I read in 2008, but  this one’s never left me. So I suggested Libby Creelman’s The Darren Effect. Described by Lisa Moore as “Pepper-hot and Coolly comic,” it fit her request for the perfect literary summer fling.

The Globe and Mail said it best: “ The novel marries the tragic and comic to wonderful effect in developing the complexity of ordinary lives.”

With its scenes of women stalking a man stalking birds in the woods, and a weird teenager who crawls on all fours, I would have to re-read the novel, twice, to do it justice, but I think its publisher does as good a job as possible in pitching the book:

“An affair. A marriage. Accidental encounters. A secret spying mission masquerading as research for a short story on desire. This is the rich ground from which The Darren Effect springs, carrying us through the complexities, tragedies, and unanticipated triumphs of love and loss. The Darren Effect is a miraculous novel, in which the characters coalesce and crisscross in awkward, surprising, and hilarious ways. Damaged by grief and circumstance, Heather, Isabella, Darren, and Benny offer each other heartbreak, love, and redemption at a time when all previous points of reference have vanished. Creelman’s writing snaps with wit. Spinning a cunning plot, she upends reader’s expectations in a devastatingly funny novel that entertains with ticklish tenderness and keen perception.”

Lost Gospels (Brick Books, 2010)
Poetry
by Lorri Neilsen Glenn

A truly moving collection of poetry that dwells in profoundly personal yet and universal subject matter. A book a blaze so you feel it. Outspoken and insightful, there is a way she conducts her language so you hear all the right nuances. So the sharp lines sink in. Deeply.

She is exorcising moments of sorrow in many of these poems, and in the rest she is asking the questions we all do. Yet what she is ringing out of these questions is the beauty of life, hammering home a paradox: The things that make a person forlorn are the very things we live and breathe for while they’re here.

Her diction is elegant, exact, and evocative. If every collection of poetry has a poem that never leaves you, that’s what makes Lost Gospels stand out: the abundance of poems that spoke to me, rattled me, so I wouldn’t forget this collection the minute I start reading another one. I think we’re all in this book: We’ve seen many of the scenes Lorri pontificates upon, but she captures it and serves it up in a way only a poet laureate like her can.

In other poems, reflections from a place of sorrow and deep introspection, surprisingly, reflect the hidden beauty of everyday life. When a poet cracks themself open like this, they open their poetry up to a broader and more compelled audience. This book is a valley and I fell right in. Universal and opened-ended observations said, asked, or thought about with such crystalline phrasing that at times a reader might just understand the world a little more. The seeming ease with which she wraps words around the core of what’s being said is what stood out to me. Genuinely moving subject matter, language, and clenching one-liners, tied up into a neat package of poetic radiance.

Some highlights, in my opinion: “Legs,” “Winter Kill,” “Wild,” and “Hemlock Ravine.”

 Lorri Neilsen Glenn was Halifax’s poet laureate from 2005-2009. Click here to read an interview with Lorri at Speaking of Poems’ website. Also, catch her at the 2010 Shelburne Writers’ Festival, where she is conducting a workshop in addition to reading.

From her publisher: “A startling and original new voice that owes as much to Black Flag and Bikini Kill as it does to J.D. Salinger and Heather O’Neill.  Botha’s prose is compassionate, provocative, often funny, and always fearless.”
Danila’s debut collection, Got No Secrets, hit the shelves this season. Check out her posts at The Afterword Here.  She will be guest blogging on Salty Ink this week: her favourite Canadian books, and then her favourite Atlantic Canadian books.

My Favourite Canadian Writers

 I’ve been studying education at Mount St Vincent University in Halifax, and one of the most brilliant kids I taught  in grade eight this year told me why he enjoyed reading the Dave Pelzer memoir A Child Called It.  “It makes me feel like my life really isn’t that bad, he said, no matter what I’m going through. It gives me perspective, and at the same time, it makes me feel less alone”.

I realized how important that is — for everyone to find literature that speaks directly to them, that gives them a different understanding of their own life experiences and even a little compassion for themselves. A lot of the things we go through aren’t as difficult as we think they are at the time.

 Heather O’Neill and Zoe Whittall are writers who exemplify this most for me. They write with a grittiness and a dauntlessness that is so heartening to me.

Heather O’Neill is the author of my favourite short story of all time, called I know Angelo, from the Zoe Whittall edited collection Geeks, Misfits and other Outlaws.  In it, a character called Chloe is pregnant, and trying to kick her heroin addiction. Her boyfriend Angelo, who is the father of her child, and whom she clearly adores, is still addicted and using. O’Neill is unbelievable at a turning a phrase, and finding incredible beauty and even humour in sadness. The story opens with the line: “My mother only ever sent me one postcard. It was of Nietzche and it has this joke: I think about you all the time, but the penicillin helps.”  It’s the kind of line that makes you crack a smile, no matter what kind of day you’re having. She’s an absolute master at writing lines that are both stunningly graceful and heart wrenching. Her character walks around reading a Chekhov book, which she says “gives her the feeling those lucky pennies on the sidewalk are her eyelids”. She follows that up with the statement that reading the book “makes her feel that she and Angelo are just around the corner from being classy people.” The love struck Chloe describes Angelo’s hair in the morning as “feeling like a cat’s paw that’s stepped in the milk bowl”. She remembers that in the moment that she conceived, “His nipples were like pansies. His lips hung like toilet paper floating in the sink. His breath was like if you could buy morning in a can at a supermarket.” She says he makes her feel like “a perfect curl of hair, like all her words are pastries lined up in the window of the bakery.” This talent for making the harrowing enchanting stands in sharp contrast to her tragic subjects- a boyfriend who is raped by his dealer, who shoots up in front of his pregnant girlfriend, who according to the story became pregnant when they were paid to have sex in front of an older man who was: ‘shuddling on the chair to get a better look, a framed photo of Claudia Schiffer over his head.”

I remember being astounded at how fearless it was the first time I read it. I remember how it made me question my own work, and want to push myself much further. I remember being so impressed by her sensitivity to detail, at her emotional accuracy and her precise imagery.

Her novel Lullabies for Little Criminals, the story of a twelve year old prostitute named Baby, is equally arresting, harrowing and beautiful.

In the same book that her story I Know Angelo appears, there is a story by Whittall called Seven Stops Nine that ends with the fantastic line: “I am having the world’s slowest nervous breakdown.”

Whittall is similarly skilled at writing characters whose lives are dark and complex, at evoking compassion and even empathy as they navigate through emotional crises. Both of her novels, Bottle Rocket Hearts and Holding Still for As Long As Possible, she cuts immediately to the bone, and to the heart. Bottle Rocket Hearts ends with the dissolution of a relationship, “the bottle rocket diffused”.

Eve, a young woman who has spent the duration of the novel in love with a woman named Della, realizes that Della has never been honest with her. She notes that “her heart now beats strongly and purposefully, no longer a panic driven metronome.”

Her poetry is equally stunning. In the Emily Valentine Poems, in the poem On Discovering she writes:

“Having .23 cents in my chequing /and .47 cents in my savings/ and a two day coke hangover

Is no reason to feel as bad about myself/ as I do right now.”

It hangs on the wall near my desk where I do my writing. It never fails to make me feel better when I’m having a bad day.

- Danila Botha

The Hour of Bad Decisions by Russell Wangersky

The consistent sentence-level craftsmanship in this collection is a rarity. A solid display of literary talent. A sentence-after-sentence assurance this man earned that Giller nod. Engrossing stories and compelling subject matter. Raw human emotion swimming through dynamic diction.

 Michael Crummey’s Flesh and Blood

Overshadowed by Crummey’s highly acclaimed novels, Flesh and Blood is a work of linguistic mastery in every way: the style, structure, and barebones writing in these stories are as assured as the hawk that never misses in sinking in those talons. This is the work of a literary genius. I mean it as no slight to Michael’s great novels – but this is his best book.

Mark Anthony Jarman’s My White Planet

People hail Jarman as the country’s most original short fiction writer in the country. But original doesn’t cut it; original implies he is the first of our generation, but he is beyond this generation of writers. He is the first of the next to come. He is post-original. It is like he is ten years in the future, writing from a place where language and story has evolved to, and none of us are quite there yet. Inevitably, a reader will sometimes get lost trying to find him (find a story inaccessible), but when you do find him and keep up, you know you’ve just experienced something no other writer in this country is offering.

A Nova Scotian favourite,  Lesley Crewe, is set to release her fifth novel with Nimbus Publishing this fall.

The struggle to capture the essence of a novel and be visually appealing to a reader can be a tough challenge that a good publisher takes seriously.

For Crewe’s Her Mother’s Daughter, they’ve gone through 5 covers, all nice in their own way, having found this book cover a particular challenge.

Click here to hop on over to their great blog and read all about the evolution of this cover, the rationale behind desgining and then ditching each cover, and the reason why number 5 was the lucky number … and all you have to do to win a FREE ADVANCE COPY is join Crewe’s Facebook fanpage leave a comment on which cover you like the most!

AND/OR! Respond on Nimbus’s blog by July 22nd to win a copy of one of Lesley’s other books! You get to choose between, Relative Happiness, Shoot Me, Ava Comes Home or Hit & Mrs. (Speaking of book covers, Hit & Mrs. was shortlisted for Salty Ink’s Judge a Book by Its Cover contest last year, based on public voting!)

2010 Re-release Reader’s Guide Edition of Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven

- A GG finalist and Winner of the Atlantic Bookseller’s Chocie Award; a winner of the Dartmouth Book Award and a finalist for the Thomas Head Raddall Award.

- Special features include an afterword by Marina Endicott, a great interview with Lynn Coady, and more.

A work of rare vivacity. Strange Heaven is bursting with dark humour and its well-placed opposite. This re-release of Lynn Coady’s critically acclaimed debut novel is proof positive she is a genuine, assured, compelling voice, and has been from the start. It has been said, written, taught, and seldom denied that to capture a reader requires making them buy and care for your characters, and Coady is particularly gifted in this regard. If characters could get any more real or fun to read about, then Lynn Coady would make all the real-life  people you know seem dull and unconvincing. This book is funny, sad, compassionate, ridiculous, believable, authentic, brash, mature, gripping, immature: and a dozen other adjectives to assure you it is worth a read. If you missed Coady’s lively debut the first time, don’t make the same mistake twice.

Click here to read more about this book at Goose Lane’s website.

 Many people have done the “suggested playlist,” thing, but as far as I know, Salty Ink’s Chad Pelley was the first to get permission from 15 musicians for a mutually benefical CD Soundtrack. Want a copy? email chad@saltyink.com with the header “Soundtrack” to enter the draw.

This CD went out with certain review copies, and I fired it off to some university radio stations, etc. There are explanations below for why each song made the cut.

I intentionally dropped names in the book so I could make a soundtrack. Won’t do it again, as it is a little obtrusive, and, as one critic said, after calling me a music snob, ” … might, in ten years time, date the novel.”

Click Here to read all about Away from Everywhere and watch a trailer

01.) The Weakerthans – Left & Leaving

- In an old draft / deleted scene, Owen used lyrics from this song for the epigraph of his short story collection Four Letter Words

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02.) Joel Plaskett – Heartless, Heartless, Heartless

- Another scene cut out of the novel: When I first wrote the scene where Hannah and Owen come to St. John’s, they went to a Joel Plaskett show at the Ship, and were spotted being a little too friendly by an old friend of Alex’s.

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03.) Pilot to Bombardier (Bryan Power) – Lifetime Behind

- This song captures some elements of the book well. It’s brooding and reflective in an atypically warm, disarming way. Like a few parts of the book.

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04.) The Album Leaf – Always for You

- This would come on as the credits rolled up. It just thematically encapsulates much of the novel, particulalrly the closing revelation.

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05.) Damien Jurado – Sheets

- See page 58, where Hannah mentions he is Owen’s favourite musician and they lay on her couch listening to and discussing him. (And lyrically, this song really suits the book.)

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06.) Blair Harvey ft. Joel Hynes – Dozen Beer

- See page 176. ” … get a drink downtown. Get out of the house. Blair Harvey and Mark Bragg were playing at The Ship.”

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07.) Brian Borcherdt – Motel

- See page 276. Emily was listening to Brian the night Andrew stumbled into her studio and …

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08.) Mark Kozelek – Up to My Neck

- See page 284, when the power goes out. “We could go out in my truck and chat. Maybe take a few CDs out with us and flick the dome light on. I’ve got some Mark Kozelek, I think you’ll like him. And The Great Lake Swimmers.”

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09.) Mark Bragg – Amanada Lies

- See page 176. ” … get a drink downtown. Get out of the house. Blair Harvey and Mark Bragg were playing at The Ship.”

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10.) Eric Bachmann – Lonesome Warrior

- See page 282. What Owen and Emily are listening to when the power goes out.

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11.) Hayden – Home by Saturday

See page 256, where Hannah talks about her crush on Hayden / the night Alex took her to a Hayden concert.

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12.) Great Lake Swimmers – Changing Colours

- See page 284, when the power goes out. “We could go out in my truck and chat. Maybe take a few CDs out with us and flick the dome light on. I’ve got some Mark Kozelek, I think you’ll like him. And The Great Lake Swimmers.”

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13.) Damien Jurado – Everything Trying

- See page 58, where Hannah mentions he is Owen’s favourite musician and they lay on her couch listening to and discussing him. (And lyrically, this song really suits the book.)

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14.) Wintersleep – Listen (listen listen)

- Not mentioned in the novel, but lyrically, and mood-wise, it was the perfect song to use in my trailer for the novel. But, then, didn’t.

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15.) Songs: Ohia – Being in Love

- See page 120. The Jason Molina lyrics Owen quotes are from this song. Songs:Ohia are also mentioned by Hannah on page 20.

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16.) The Frames – True

- Mentioned in a rough draft, this song just really captures a few different elements of this novel.

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17.) Hayden – Between Us to Hold

- See page 256, Alex takes Hannah to a Hayden concert. 

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Disclaimer: This is an unofficial soundtrack. These songs / this CD will never be sold or made available for download by the author (who sees this as a mutually promotional marketing tool) and to my knowledge, permissions for this have been granted. If any musician or label representative would like the author to deactivate the audio sample of their work, email chad@saltyink.com.

Jon Tattrie first caught my — and Canada’s — attention with his Christmas at the Airport project. A month later, I was impressed after sharing a venue with him in Halifax, as he read from his 2009 debut novel, Black Snow, a novel that Halifax Public Libraries declared a book of the decade (alongside titles like Lullabies for Little Criminals). It also spent time as #2 on the Chronicle Herald’s bestseller list, and took silver in The Coast’s annual “best of Halifax” poll for a local writer/book.

Tattrie is back, already, with a 2010 release: The Hermit of Africville: The Life of Eddie Carvery.

Who is Eddie Carvery? Eddie Carvery was born in Africville, Nova Scotia, an African-Nova Scotian seaside village  bulldozed in the 1960s under the guise of “urban renewal.” Its people were relocated by the city of Halifax, except for Eddie, who returned to Africville in 1970 and pitched a tent in protest, aiming to and to reclaim his people’s land and history. “Forty years, three families, seven heart attacks and numerous attempts on his life later, he remains living on the land where he was born. He’s been shot at, had his residence set on fire and been run off his land countless times. His struggles with his demons of addiction and violence have cost him his families and his entire adult life.”

Salty Ink: This is a pretty amazing story. Tell us about Eddie Carvery and your inspiration to write this story.

Jon Tattrie: 

I was covering the Africville summer reunion as a reporter in 2009. The city had just renamed a service road ‘Africville Road’ and I was in search of a quote who could tell me how great the recognition was 40-odd years after the destruction of the black Nova Scotian community. Instead, I got Eddie Carvery. He spoke passionately about Africville, about his protest and about racism for 45 minutes, at which time my digital recorder’s battery ran out. Eddie concluded by saying, ‘But your readers don’t want to hear about that.”

I disagreed. I went home, filed my story (with an abridged version of Eddie’s complaint) and could barely sleep that night. Eddie’s been camped out in the abandoned fields of Africville for 40 years and he started moving into my brain that night. In later months, I had dreams where I could see Eddie sitting in his trailer sitting in my brain.

I came back two days later and proposed collaborating on a book about his life. He agreed on the spot and that started an extraordinary partnership. I had been looking for a story like this all of my adult life and he was ready to talk. I started going to his camp three or four days a week, interviewing him for an hour or two at a time, over four months. I wrote the interviews up every day and the deeper we got into his story, the more astonished I was.

Eddie’s a man like no other I’ve ever met – he’s straight out of the Old Testament and lives a life most of us can’t imagine. Listening to him grow quiet as he re-lived his dark days as a drug addict and violent man took me into my own city’s hidden darkness. Hearing how Africville saved him thrilled me and gave me hope for Halifax.  

Africville has become a home of sorts for me. I still visit Eddie most weeks to hear his latest adventures, to ask his opinion on things and to just enjoy his company. When I’m frustrated with work or entering a patch of bad life weather, I go see him. Sitting in plastic chairs, gazing out at the Bedford Basin, talking to whomever stops by – it puts things into perspective. Eddie has walked in the darkest valleys and visited sun-drenched mountain tops. Few people survive such extremes or emerge with such understanding.

As a writer, The Hermit of Africville is a dream project. Eddie’s a gifted story teller with a sensitive mind for natural parables and so for the most part, turning his stories into words was a matter of listening closely. Because of the high-profile battle he and his brother (and co-protester) Victor had with Halifax in the run up to the 1995 G7 meeting here, he is a well-known figure, yet almost nothing is known about him. The same is largely true of the Africville he grew up in.

Eddie’s conviction at the protest, and his inner courage in exposing his soul at the same time he exposes the soul of the city, makes this book magic. I hope it will give people a better understanding of what we all lost when we lost Africville. The love Eddie has for his home has sustained him through 40 winters, 40 summers, 40 springs and 40 falls. He’s slept on frozen fields, risked his life and lost his families, but he’s never lost Africville.

I hope my book can offer even some of that love to others.

Jon will be launching The Hermit of Africville at 2 p.m. on July 24th, at the Africville Summer Reunion in Halifax. The launch will include a reading, words from Carvery, and a performance by jazz singer/judge Linda Carvery.

 ……   

On Larry and his latest novel

Larry Mathews is credited as the founding member of the Burning Rock Fiction Collective. A writer’s group that includes names like Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, and Jessica Grant. Credited perhaps because in his inaugural year of teaching creative writing at Memorial University, him, Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, and some others, didn’t want to stop meeting and swapping writing once the class had finished, and from there began Canada’s most legendary writer’s group.

Mathews is, as described by Mark Anthony Jarman, “A Searing and silver-tongued wit.” His latest novel came out a few months ago, The Artificial Newfoundlander, and Salty Ink made it May’s Book of the Month. Read that article here. It’s a gut-busting, fast-paced, pleasure-to-read story, in which an amusingly introspective and disgruntled professor is surrounded by absurd characters as far-fetched as life itself, as his role as  a father, lover, and academic is put to the test.

On his pleasure-to-read The Sandblasting Hall of Fame.

The Artificial Newfoundlander left me needing a little more Larry Mathews. For years now, I’ve been wanting to read his debut collection of shorts, The Sandblasting Hall of Fame, but we all know how that goes: 20 new books hit the shelves each month, burying the old ones deeper down in the to-read pile. Bookstores are frustratingly quick to send anything a year or two old out the door, so you have to order online, etc.

Don’t be lazy like me about this book. GO. Get it.

Few books have the abundance out laugh-out-loud moments, the sheer, glistening wit of it. The sheer “joy of reading.” Oh, and from a writer’s viewpoint: the clever narrative construction and the lack of throwaway sentences: his style is punchy and gripping: a great combo when you throw his wit in the mix. Mathews plain has fun with language here, in the way Jessica Grant does in her heralded (exquisite!) writing. If people are going to be consistently comparing Burning Rockers Michael Winter and Lisa Moore’s attention to detail, they ought also to be comparing Grant and Mathews’ clever wordsmithery and pleasure-to-readedness.

What he does with his endearing misfit characters acts as a way to do with fiction all the things I like seeing done with fiction. A distinctive voice, engaging from start to finish, that hauls you into a story, keeps you there, clipping along at a good pace, and you hit the ending like a brick wall. (Because that’s how accidents happen: you forget about your surroundings, absorbed in something else, like, say a Larry Mathews’ story.)

His characters might be oddballs or they might not be. They’re certainly great to spend time with. Larry is masterful, yes, masterful, at what the old books call character development. In an opening paragraph: you know the characters, right away, just like that. They’re off-kilter, yet fully realized and convincing, and plain fun. They’re also unabashedly human.

Mathews, on his characters, “My guys are clowns in the sense that they see the Fall of Man whenever they slip on a banana peel. Then they take you backstage and you can see that, without makeup and costume props, they’re not much different from you and me.”

The Sandblasting Hall of Fame was longlisted for the 2003 ReLit Award, and features stories that have appeared in various esteemed literary journals, including Prairie Fire, Grain, and Fiddlehead. “Hanrahan Agnoistes” was anthologized in Coming Attractions 02′.

There are countless book bloggers in the country, but there’s about a dozen busybodies who really stand out, and do some truly exciting things. In the case of Erin Balser and Jen Knoch, some of these bookish types do multiple great things. Like Books in 140 seconds: a Keepin’ it Real Bookclub co-project between Jen and Erin. They video the two of them reviewing a book … in 140 seconds. They do it well, a great blend of summary and selling points. Watch their take on Jessica Grant’s multi-award-winning, so-very fantastic Come, Thou Tortoise, and Joey Comeau’s — yes, that guy from asofterworld.com – One Bloody Thing After Another.

BOOKS IN 140 SECONDS ON COME, THOU TORTOISE

BOOKS IN 140 SECONDS ON ONE BLOODY THING AFTER ANOTHER

I had no idea Joey Comeau was originally from Halifax. Until today. I’ve been a fan of his work on http://www.asofterworld.com/ for years. If you haven’t heard of  asofterworld.com: Basically, since 2003, Joey and PEI’s Emily Horne pair up and post these weekly: (note: their website seems to be temporarily broken.)

Click images to enlarge and read them

Joey’s Latest Books

Overqualified (2009, ECW Press) – A Collection of Shorts so Good they Caused a (ten-grand) Danuta Gleed Literary Award Scandal!

Joey’s 2009 collection of shorts — a collection of shorts in the form of cover letters – was so good it was shortlisted for one of the country’s top literary awards — the $10,000 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, for a first collection of shorts. Unfortunately, after being shortlisted, the issue of Overqualified not having technically been his first collection of shorts came to the surface: he’d self-published a book of shorts a few years earlier. A book called It’s Too Late to Say I’m Sorry.

“A collection of wry, clever and demoniacal job-application letters, teeming with knife-edged malice and stomach-tearing hilarity. If Comeau’s rebel-yell manifesto catches on like old Prometheus’s gift did all those years ago, human resources will never be the same again.” – Globe & Mail.

“Overqualified by Joey Comeau is a collection of satiric cover letters handcrafted to make any HR worker cringe and every job seeker smile. Ranging from pithy and heartwarming to darkly funny and bizarre, the letters sparkle with the inappropriate use of unabashed personal honesty in a traditionally dry and humourless form. . . . [Overqualified is] beautifully executed satire, perfect for anyone who needs a good laugh (like the unemployed).” – Geist

One Bloody Thing After Another (ECW Press 2010) - A Short Novel Blending Comedy, Literary Fiction, and Horror

From an excerpt on ECW’s website: Charlie worries sometimes that his dog is an idiot. When Mitchie wants to lie down, he just falls over on his side. When he gets excited, he pees a little. But what can Charlie do? You can’t take a dog back after fifteen years and say, “You gave me a lemon.” Charlie’s too old to find another dog, anyway.

ECW’s summary: Jackie has a map of the city on the wall of her bedroom, with a green pin for each of her trees. She has a first-kiss tree and a broken-arm tree. She has a car-accident tree. There is a tree at the hospital where Jackie’s mother passed away into the long good night. When one of them gets cut down, Jackie doesn’t know what to do but she doesn’t let that stop her. She picks up the biggest rock she can carry and puts it through the window of a car. Smash. She intends to leave before the police arrive, but they’re early. Ann is Jackie’s best friend, but she’s got problems of her own. Her mother is chained up in the basement. How do you bring that up in casual conversation? “Oh, sorry I’ve been so distant, Jackie. My mother has more teeth than she’s supposed to, and she won’t eat anything that’s already dead.”

“For a zombie novel featuring a monstrously ravenous mother chained in the basement who won’t eat dead food — so her daughter steals live kittens for her to gnaw on — this is a remarkably tender novel. Quirky to a marvelous fault, Comeau’s fourth book is an intricate exercise in offbeat storytelling.” – Q Syndicate

Kathleen Winter is no stranger to writing, in any form. She has written for television — from Sesame Street to CBC documentaries — and for newspapers, including her former weekly column, Naturally, in The Telegram.

Her last book, boYs, a top-notch collection of short stories, won the hip-assuring Metcalf-Rooke Award and the prestigious Winterset award. boYs is a rare gem of a collection, showcasing a rare vibrancy of language. The book is alive, sentences pop like firecrackers: it is ultra-modern, punchy, lucid diction. Every paragraph is blocked full with a microscopic attention to detail, and it makes for captivating read that is a lesson in creative writing. Click here to buy boYs now.

Her latest novel, Annabel — hot off Anansi’s press and only a month old — was released to immediate acclaim and buzz, and Kathleen has been reading that wave of success on a very engaging and remarkable blog tour. Her writerly stamina is commendable. Catch her being interviewed or thinking out loud at palces like The Afterword, Open Book Toronto (who have just revealed that Annabel is part of Ben McNally’s Summer Reading Presentation), Kevin from Canada, and a rather fantastic read on The Globe and Mail’s website.

Already a bestseller in many of the country’s finest bookshops,  and already sold into the US and the UK, critics are eating it up.

“Read it because it’s a story told with sensitivity to language that compels to the last page, and read it because it asks the most existential of questions. Stripped of the trappings of gender, Winter asks, what are we?”- Globe & Mail

“Finely observed detail and gut-wrenching honesty, together with some rich characters and a perfectly rendered world, make Annabel a rare treat.” – Winnipeg Free Press

Annabel is an unforgettable novel of struggles, personal and inter-personal, and Kathleen’s empathetic voice does them justice in a way that connects reader to story. Destined to be one of the biggest novels out of Newfoundland this year, this is a story of isolation and a communication breakdown that breaks a family down, and breaks the reader down along with them. Click here to Read Salty Ink’s summary and review of this sure-to-be-a-book-of-the-year novel. Her writing is a mesmerizing combination of crisp language, deep empathy for her well-wrought characters, and a world-savvy wisdom. Click here to buy Annabel now

For a chance to win a copy of Annabel, email chad@saltyink.com by July 10th — subject line Annabel giveaway. (Also, she will be having a St. John’s launch on July 20th, at The Ship. 8 pm.)

Click the book covers below to read more about boYs and Annabel at their publisher’s websites.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Enjoy the Interview Below ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really liked by a fellow Atlantic Canadian author.

Well I have to say the first one is House of Hate by Percy Janes. It is a dark book but beautifully written, and it is set in Corner Brook where I lived from the ages of 12 to 16, so reading it was the first time I read a piece of literature that was set in a place about which I had my own intimate perspective. Another work that affected me is the journal of Lucy Maud Montgomery, with its compelling undercurrents of isolation and revelations about barricades of class and gender.

How did you end up writing books?

My dad taught me to read phonetically long before I went to school. I knew when I was four that I wanted to write books, because I loved them so much. There was always a library near where we lived – at one point, in Curling, the library was a mobile library in a van.  I have learned how to live in the real world by now, but I remember that feeling of escape, entering a book, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t just assume I would make that happen for other people; create worlds.

What, in your mind, marked a turning point or real upswing in your writing career?

I will never forget the night John Metcalf phoned me to talk about some stories I had mailed to him. I was at a point where I began writing notes to myself on the outsides of the stamped, self-addressed envelopes you have to include with fiction submissions to editors. I was receiving so many rejection slips that I felt a need to write, on the envelopes that I knew would come back to me containing these rejections, “Kathleen, you are a good writer. Keep going and do not give up.” Believe it or not these notes cheered me up, though I had written them to myself, sometimes six months before. So John Metcalf phoned me and said he loved my stories. He said he felt, on reading them, as if he had come home, and he wanted to put the manuscript on the shortlist of the Metcalf-Rooke Award, which I later won.  The award was in his name but was also named after Leon Rooke. I had no money then, and before this phone call I used to visit the local bookshop and take Leon Rooke’s stories off the shelf and read them, and rejoice that someone in Canada was writing crazy, wonderful, immensely satisfying stories like this. Rooke was my hero. And now John Metcalf, one of the most eminent editors in Canada, was telling me I was being considered for the Metcalf-Rooke Award. That was the turning point, the upswing, in my writing career.

Any advice for aspiring writers?

Take rejection slips as reminders that you can improve. Look at the stories when they come back. It takes a long time to get a story back, so you have time to gain perspective about how to write it better. What is the reader getting out of it? Have you a clear vision? Work on a new draft, and send it out again. Always have something sent out. No matter how wretched you feel when it returns, have another piece ready and send it the day you are rejected. Then hope will come back to you. That crazy bird, hope. I felt hopeless all the way to the post office the day I sent my stories to John Metcalf. Always have a package of big envelopes nearby (many submissions still cannot be done online) and remember postage is less if you write the address horizontally.

What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

I guess I love the inspiration part, the new idea part, the “what if” part, when a magical world opens up, a new story with its own rules of physics, psychology, spirit and event. I also love the craft part though, working alone and with an editor on things like structure and technique. What I don’t like is those moments or hours or days when the writing is dead. You write it and you look at it and it is a corpse and it stinks and you are afraid the life inside the work has abandoned you.

Which piece of yours are you the most satisfied with in hindsight?

In my story collection, boYs,  I’m particularly happy with the stories Binocular and The History of Zero, because they pack an emotional punch. Binocular is a big, fully-realized story that might have become a novel there is so much that happens, but because it is  short it is highly concentrated. Binocular makes people cry, and The History of Zero makes some people laugh until they cry, though it was inspired by events that I originally thought were tragic. I don’t have hindsight yet about Annabel since the book has just been released.

Annabel is a novel about many things. It is also, undeniably, an evocative portraiture of ethereal Labrador. It is convincing, right down to the plants, the smells, or how a blind man can navigate a canoe and hunt ducks, and the details of work on a trapline. How much research was involved here, or how much time have you spent in Labrador?

Labrador captivated me the first time I went there. I made a television documentary there, and for that documentary I spent quite a bit of time on the land, and was invited to stay with an Innu family in their hunting encampment. I also met people of Scottish and Inuit descent, like Treadway in  Annabel, and these people too showed me a great deal of beauty in the land, taking me ice fishing and teaching me how to do Labrador arts like making moccasins. The description of Labrador in Annabel as having a unique, magnetic energy, comes from my personal experience of the land. I have visited with children as part of the Labrador Arts Festival, and I have also visited for personal reasons. Each time I have been, the land has deeply affected my spirit. I have also studied Labrador maps and non fiction.

In Annabel, there is an engaging tenderness and empathy in the writing that connects the reader to the story. It must have been exhausting to dip yourself in and out of these people’s lives? What were some of the biggest challenges in writing Annabel?

The biggest challenge for me is always telling a story. I love writing character, and I love the characters in this novel. They surprised me, especially Treadway. But the bones of the story, that’s what I find hard, because my natural tendency is toward character and atmosphere and I have to remember the reader needs reasons beyond these to keep turning the page. The reader has to be dying to know what happens next. I have had to work like a dog to know how to achieve this compelling quality in a book. I practice in hope that my weakness can, with hard work, become a strength. The tenderness and empathy come easily to me, compared with the bones of the story, and I’m really happy that reviewers of Annabel have called this story compelling to the last page. That is a huge achievement for me.

Despite Wayne/Annabel’s hermaphrodism, predicaments, and role as the main character, in my mind, the father, Treadway, is the most complex character in this novel. He is a man whose ability to connect with the natural world exceeds his ability to connect with his family, yet he is there, faithfully, when needed, and out of love, not fatherly or marital duty. Knowing how the writing process works, would I be right in saying his character evolved as you wrote the book? Were you, in the end, as taken by his depth of character and complexity as readers were/will be? 

Yes, Treadway really surprised me during the writing. I had no idea he would become so conflicted, or that he would show so many sides. He has made me think a lot about the difference between who we appear to be (both to ourselves and others) and the true selves or longed-for selves inside us. He has made me look at people differently and not come to conclusions about them so fast. I love that this could happen even though, supposedly, I am the one who created his character. Maybe the depth of people I have known in my life has manifested in Treadway. I write unconsciously much of the time, before the technical work, and I stop if the writing goes dead, so maybe this is how Treadway came alive for me in a way I did not predict.

Wayne/Annabel’s physical status is a crux of the book, but, in my reading, wasn’t “what the book is about.” What is the book “about” in your mind?

The book is about how point of view can change identity. I deliberately chose an omniscient point of view for the writing, as well as a consecutive storyline that you might call old-fashioned. I wanted to restrain myself structurally so that I could know, and the reader could know, what was going on in everyone’s minds as well as how the big picture looked. This is not my ordinary way of writing. I like to get more close-up and more stream of consciousness. But to me this story was always about other possibilities inside the self we choose to project at any one moment.  For Wayne, there was an obvious and dramatic conflict between the inner and the outer person. But we all possess unexpressed selves, and this story explores the tension in that. I would love to know what you think the book is about. Thank you for these wonderful questions.

 [Salty Ink: the pleasure was mine, so thank you. And what did I think the book was about? I thought that Wayne/Annabel's gender ambiguity was simply a great means by which to explore questions of identity, and several societal constructs that can box us in. Also: that it was a novel about the basic desires and humanity that overide gender and age and connect us all.]

Newfoundland poet and Fiddlehead poetry editor James Langer recently won the prestigious Gerald Lampert Award for his debut collection Gun Dogs (Anansi, 2009), an award that recognizes the best first book of poetry by a Canadian poet.

Langer was up against some great company, including Kate Hall’s The Certainty Dream and Soraya Mariam Peerbaye’s Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names.

The 2010 jury – Barbara Pelman, David Seymour, Sheri-D Wilson — had this to say about Gun Dogs.
“Gun Dogs by James Langer, is a remarkable debut collection. The temptation is to quote huge pieces of these poems, to show off Langer’s dexterity with language, its “thrust and load and drag,” the cleverness of “Half Full,” the intimacy of voice in “Home Suite,” the accomplished play on the Anglo-Saxon poem “Seafarer.” The poems in Gun Dogs range in style from free verse to blank verse to sonnet, quatrains and couplets. Their subject matter is the get-down-and-dirty of ordinary life on the backroads, the bars, the trout-filled rivers and open sea as well as the urban landscapes. Yet there is the whole history of the poetry tradition in these poems: metrical rhythms mixed with references to Pound and F.R. Scott, Ondaatje and Dante. Here is a poet who is sure of his craft, and whose work it is a pleasure to reread again and again.”

Dubbed a “spectacular mouthful” by The Globe & Mail, Gund Dogs has been very well-received. Click here to buy Gun Dogs now

Here is a sample poem, “Thug and Gull,” courtesy of Anansi’s website.

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Danila Botha’s short fiction collection, Got No Secrets, is on the shelves and much buzzed already. She is guest blogging on The Afterword this week, so follow along.

Publisher’s note: 

A startling and original new voice that owes as much to Black Flag and Bikini Kill as it does to J.D. Salinger and Heather O’Neill.

A South African copywriter is transplanted to the urban jungle of Manhattan. A recovering rape victim tries to resume a normal life. A Toronto nurse cuts herself to fill her emptiness. In Got No Secrets, Danila Botha takes us into the private lives of twelve different women, with only one question in mind: What if these women were you? From addiction to abuse, from childhood to suicide, from Hillbrow, Johannesburg, to downtown Toronto, Botha’s prose is compassionate, provocative, often funny, and always fearless.

Click Here to buy Got No Secrets

Stephen’s Bio:

Stephen Rowe was born in Heart’s Content, but now makes his home in Gander, NL. Recently, his poetry has appeared in such print journals as CV2, The Antigonish Review, The Toronto Quarterly, Iota, and Paragon, as well as in the online journals Rhythm Poetry Magazine, and Triggerfish Review. His first collection, Never More There, was released by Nightwood Editions in October 2009. He blogs at http://stephenrowe.ca/.

Publisher’s Note on Never More There:

How do we reconcile story with fact? What must one lose for the other to exist? In this debut collection, Rowe explores the nature of mythology and how it morphs in time to retain cultural and personal significance. Folk tales, supernatural creatures, family histories and personal elegies come together to expose the cohabitation of the dead and the living; the relationship between cold absence and stark presence.

Michael Crummey on Stephen Rowe: “Again and again while reading Never More There I was struck by arresting lines and images, by Stephen Rowe’s rigorous attention to the natural world and the world of words. Eloquent and passionate, Rowe is poet of real promise.”

Sample Poem from Never More There:

“The Wallet”

A gentle arc in leather, pocket-pressed,
curved sharply at the corners; weathered hide,
the tiny geometrics in the flesh
age-torn where seam and edge have creased. Inside:

a debit card, a Visa, MCP,
social insurance number, Blue Cross Care.
In a plastic flap, adjacent teacher ID,
he kept our faces in a family picture.

The day he drove himself along the shore
my mother, stirring in her seat, could hear
him talk of politics and not the tight

grip on his chest. And waiting for the doctor,
he didn’t say a word, but turned to her
with his wallet, yellow eyes and all their weight.

Click here to buy Never More There now

“Mesmerizing scenes worthy of a national epic. Its meticulous construction and control contain a breadth of incident and characterization seen only in the most ambitious and imposing novels.” – The Globe & Mail

With more than ten books under his belt — books that showcase an astounding versatility in style and story, from creepy slipstream to innovative literary fiction — Kenneth J. Harvey has become an international icon, and “Canada’s heavyweight champion of brash and beautiful literature.” His signature style, and his graceful-but-gritty delivery has been emulated but unmatched. His career took off from the get go, long before Newfoundland was the country’s literary goldmine and publishers were lining up for a pieces of that gold. His first book, Directions for an Open Body, was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize (Canada and Caribean Region). Impressive career highlights:  His 2003 release, The Town That Forgot to Breathe, has been published in over a dozen countries. His 2006 mega-hit, Inside, remains the only Canadian-authored book to have won Italy’s prestigious Libro Del Mare Award, and his latest book, not even available in Canada, is currently a Russian bestseller. Kenneth is also the man behind the ReLit awards: the country’s most meaningful literary award.

Blackstrap Hawco, his 2008 release, a work fifteen years in the writing, has been declared the #1 best book out of Canada in 2008 by Amazon.com, it then made Amazon.ca’s top 50 books of the decade. A Giller and IMPAC finalist, and a Globe & Mail and Quill & Quire book of the year, Blackstrap Hawco is an epic, 848-page family saga about  Newfoundland’s working class, and spans more than a century.

From Random House’s website: “Named in a moment of anger, Blackstrap Hawco is heir to an island dominion picked over by its adoptive nation … [and] the family legend might be all his people have left to live for. But as Blackstrap Hawco – a novel that will consume you in its dazzling swirl of voices, legends and beautiful hearsay – testifies, a story this haunting, this powerful, might just be enough.”

“ A masterpiece … brutal, poignant, stunning, infuriating, heartbreaking and hopeful, hard to read and harder still to put aside.” – The Chronicle Herald
 

Blackstrap Hawco also features Kenneth’s own narrative invention, the transcomposite narrative, which transcomposes passages of non-fiction with fiction. It takes the exact wording of newspaper articles, journal entries, or letters written by real people and attributes them to supposedly fictional characters. Kenneth says, “The transcomposite narrative tries to mirror what we actually see in our memories, because what we see in our minds is always a mixture of fact and fiction or history and myth. It is never entirely one or the other.”

~~~

Salty Ink: Blackstrap Hawco has been dubbed your masterpiece, and it is certainly epic in every way: The unique transcomposite narrative, the fact it was fifteen years in the making, the fact Amazon.ca included it as a top 50 books of the decade, or that Amazon.com called it the #1 book out of Canada in 2008. What’s been the biggest thrill for you about Blackstrap Hawco.

Kenneth J. Harvey: The biggest thrill was having legendary editor, Geoff Mulligan publish Blackstrap in the UK under the Harvill Secker imprint at Random House UK.  Geoff edits Jose Saramago, J.M. Coetzee, Joseph O’Connor, Louis de Bernieres and other renowned authors. It was an honour to be published by him.

Salty Ink: As a versatile author of more than 10 books spanning many genres and styles of writing, what sets Blackstrap Hawco apart from your other work, in your mind?

Kenneth J. Harvey: The 15 years of torment it caused me.

Click here to buy Blackstrap Hawco now

Annabel, by Kathleen Winter (Anansi, 2010)

* Note: A slightly different form of this review appeared in The Telegram

Kathleen Winter is no stranger to writing, in any form. She has written for television — from Sesame Street to CBC documentaries — and for newspapers, including her former weekly column, Naturally, in The Telegram. Her last book, boYs, a vibrant collection of short stories, won the prestigious Winterset Award and the Metcalfe-Rooke Award. Annabel is her debut novel.

Annabel tells the story of a child who is born both male and female, in the hyper-male hunting culture of 1960’s Labrador. Surgically altered at birth and given the name Wayne, only three people know of his secret: his parents and a trusted neighbour. But as Wayne approaches adulthood, as his identity strives to lay a foundation, the woman literally buried inside of him, Annabel, refuses to be forgotten. It is the story of a “son” who wants to swim in an orange bathing suit, not trunks. It is the story of a mother who has to deny her son, who could have been her daughter, that one, simple wish, and live with that denial. It is the story of a wife who loves her husband, but not wholly enough to stop longing for her life back in St. John’s, and who she could be. It is the story of a Labrador man whose ability to connect with the natural world exceeds his ability to connect with his family, yet he is there, faithfully, when needed, and out of love, not fatherly or marital duty, genuinely doing what he thinks is right by them: providing for his wife and forcing a maleness on Wayne, but never without empathy, admitted hypocrisy, or guilt.

“Treadway loved his wife because he had promised he would. But the centre of the wilderness called him, and he loved that centre more than any promise.”

It is just as much a novel about the characters as it is about their predicament, and Winter can channel her varied characters masterfully, switching points of view between her five characters as they encase themselves in private worlds. In showing us all angles of her five main characters, from inside and out, whether it was her intention or just gifted writing, she’s showing us the humanity that overrides gender and age, and the basic human traits and desires that unite us all.

Annabel is also an evocative portraiture of ethereal Labrador. Winter’s writing reaches a hand out of those pages and hauls her reader down into an authentic Labrador you’ll feel like you know by sight, smell, sound, and experience. It is convincing, right down to the plants, the smells, or how a blind man can navigate a canoe and hunt ducks. You’ll see its desolation and its draw, depending on the character she channeling. “The village of Croydon Harbour, on the southeast Labrador coast, has that magnetic earth all Labrador shares. You sense a striation, a pulse, as the land drinks light and emits vibration … the visitor has to be an open circuit, available to the power coming off the land.” Her skill in this regard is crucial, because setting plays a big role in how these characters are shaped or misshapen, isolated or liberated, together or alone.

Her writing is a mesmerizing combination of crisp language, deep empathy for her well-wrought characters, and a world-savvy wisdom. There is an unobtrusively aphoristic quality to the writing that will at times stir your mind. This aspect of the novel comes through particularly well in the world-travelling, tender-hearted, deeply intelligent character, Thomasina. “To Thomasina people were rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming.”

She delivers her story with a gracefulness that matches the mystique of Labrador and the tenderness required to carry this story. Annabel is an unforgettable novel of struggles, personal and inter-personal, and Kathleen’s empathetic voice does them justice in a way that connects reader to story. Destined to be one of the biggest novels out of Newfoundland this year, this is a story of isolation and a communication breakdown that breaks a family down, and breaks the reader down along with them.

- Answer Each Multiple Choice Question to Win a Copy of  That Book!

- You may answer all six questions, and enter the draw for each book.

*Please send answers in the format “1a, 2b, 3c” and include your mailing address.

- Email your answers to chad@saltyink by July 5th.

1.) Trivia Question to Win a copy of Lisa Moore’s February

Which statement is false?

A.) Lisa Moore’s Open was declared a book of the decade by Amazon.ca.
B.) February was a New York Times’ Editor’s Choice.
C.) February was Salty Ink’s Featured Book of the Month in March.
D.) Lisa Moore is an original member of the revered Burning Rock Fiction Group.

2.) Trivia Question to win a Copy of Kenneth J. Harvey’s Blackstrap Hawco

Which Statement is false?

A.) Blackstrap Hawco was declared the best book out of Canada in 2008 by Amazon.com.
B.) Harvey’s newest novel, Reinventing the Rose, is currently a Russian bestseller, though not yet available in Canada.
C.) Blackstrap Hawco is a novella.
D.) Kenneth J. Harvey is the founder of the ReLit Awards, i.e the most meaningful award in Canada as far as Salty Ink is concerned.

3.) Trivia Question to Win a Copy of Lesley Choyce’s The Republic of Nothing

Which Statement is false?

A.) Lesley Choyce is also a recording musician, surfer, and TV show host.
B.) Lesley Choyce has written more than 50 books.
C.) Lesley Choyce is the mayor of his hometown.
D.) Lesley Choyce runs Pottersfield Press

Trivia Question to Win a copy of George Elliott Clarke’s George & Rue

Which Statement is false?

A.) Clarke has been named to the order of Canada.
B.) George & Rue is based on a horrific true crime story of relatives of Clarke’s.
C.) George & Rue stemmed from Clarke’s GG-winning poetry collection, Execution Poems.
D.) George & Rue is the newest novel in this competition.

Trivia Question to Win a Copy of Darryl Whetter’s The Push & The Pull

Which Statement is false?

A.) Whetter has taught university-level English, and is a prolific book critic.
B.) Whetter’s previous book, A Sharp Tooth in the Fur, was a Globe & Mail book of the year.
C.) As mentioned in the comments on the Atlantic Canada Reads page, the Bronwen Wallace award-winning defender, Nicole Dixon, is, in fact, in a relationship with Darryl Whetter.
D.) The main character’s name in The Push & The Pull is Andy Night.

Trivia Question to Win a Copy of Kathleen Winter’s Annabel

Which Statement is false?

A.) Kathleen Winter has written for Sesame Street.
B.) Annabel is brand new, not even a month old yet.
C.) Her last book, a top-notch collection of short stories, boYs, won both the Winterset Award and the Metcalf-Rooke Award.
D.) Her last book, a top-notch collection of short stories, boYs, won both the Winterset Award and Danuta Gleed Award.

Click here to go to the Atlantic Canada Reads Page

After getting  hooked on the fiction of Alistair MacLeod and Michael Crummey, Samuel Thomas Martin enrolled in the MA in Creative Writing program at the University of Toronto, where he worked with David Adams Richards. A few months after arriving in his new home, St. John’s, Newfoundland, he submitted a manuscript of This Ramshackle Tabernacle to Breakwater Books, and the entire staff were immediately excited by this original new voice. Click here to read more about This Ramshackle Tabernacle, including some great endorsements by David Adams Richards and Jessica Grant.

Writing About God and Using the F-word

God: you love him or you hate him… or you think he’s a she. The F-word: a hatchet-chop of a word that can function as any type of speech. (Troy Duffy’s The Boondock Saints aptly demonstrates “the versatility of the word”). Both God and the F-word seem to polarize opinions: people on both sides saying you have to be for or against.

 But what if somebody wrote about God and used the F-word?

 Rudy Wiebe said in his memoir Of this earth that for him the F-word belonged to the sewer of language along with demeaning sexual jokes and innuendoes. On the other side of the country you have David Adams Richards’ early novel Blood Ties being critically trashed for consistent use of the F-bomb. But both writers come from faith perspectives (one Mennonite and the other Catholic).

 So, WTF (or What’s The Flipside to all this)? Sure the F-word is a turd in language’s sewer. It’s also an opening to that sewer, to that underground that is both linguistic and actual. When it comes to humanity, what we say often sign-posts where we are inside—and most of us are knee-deep in everyone else’s crap… and our own.

 Bleak? Yeah. But here’s the challenge to the writer: to wade into the muck of human lives and show the reader there’s more to this underground than she or he may think. There is more to language than the F-word, just as there is more mystery to God and life on this earth than either judgment or grace can tell.

 In This Ramshackle Tabernacle, I try, through connected stories, to get inside human lives using whatever linguistic crawlspaces are available—including the F-bomb. And I endeavor, once inside a life or story, to let the characters speak for themselves. This means wading with them through a lot of crap. But it also means following them as they search in their own ways “to achieve a saving grace,” as Hugh Cook has said of the collection.

Sometimes this is wrestling with God, cursing him, questioning, even fantasizing about him. Sometimes it is in finding the strength to stand-up to an abuser or working through a forty-year silence to say a first apology. Sometimes it is in trying to figure out how in hell to write about something other than hell.

That’s the trick: to see the flipside of f—k as the grace necessary to get beyond language and into the lives of characters who return us to ourselves other-wise, whether that other is God or the guy cussing you out across the street. The next trick—the double-or-nothing test of a story—is to make you, the reader, feel for that guy who keeps asking you what the f—k you’re looking at.

Finding the holy in the carnal, that’s what I’m interested in. That and redemption… but that’s another story altogether.

- Samuel Thomas Martin

The Canadian Authors Association Literary Awards were handed out last night in BC. The CAA Literary awards reward “writing that achieves exellence without sacrificing popular appeal.”

Michael Crummey’s Galore  won the $2,500 MOSAID Fiction award, over Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean and Ian Weir’s Daniel O’Thunder.

Tom Dawe’s poetry-art collaboration with Gerald Squires, Where Genesis Begins, won the $1000 CAA Poetry award, over Joan Crate and Susan Musgrave.

Full list of winners: http://www.canauthors.org/awards/winners.html

- Possibly Canada’s coolest magazine, The Walrus, recently asked 10 top-notch Canadian authors to write “the most Canadian story” they could think of for their summer reading issue.  Click Here to see that list, which includes new stories by Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, and Linden MacIntyre. 

- Speaking of new Michael Winter: if you haven’t heard, being the innovative writer he is, he has something new and different coming your way in the fall: The Death of Donna Whelan.

- There’s a particularly great article / interview / review combo of Annabel in The Chronicle Herald today. So good, I’m linking to it for you.

- Are you a writer and WANL member, living in Newfoundland, with a newly released book? If so, WANL are looking for submissions to their new reading series: Spring Tides. get in touch by September first.

- Have a novella on your hands? Get it in the mail by June 30th, to Quattro Books, for their Ken Klonsky Novella Contest.

–> Last year’s co-winner of the Ken Klonsky Novella Contest, by the way, was Binnie Brennan’s Harbour View. A nice read that was also shortlisted for the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award. Sheree Fitch on Harbour View, “Brennan’s writing is symphonic in nature and scope, her characters so fully human you may think you hear them whisper in your ear. Here is prose filled with surprising microscopic observation; sometimes funny, other times poignant, these details are heart-stopping in their truth and beauty.”

Jesse’s Bio:

Jesse Patrick Ferguson currently lives in Fredericton with his wife and son. Jesse has published poetry and reviews in ten countries, in both print and online formats. Recently, his poems have appeared in Canadian Literature, Prairie Fire, The Walrus, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry and Harper’s. His work also appears in the anthologies Best Canadian Poetry, 2009 and Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament. Jesse is a poetry editor for The Fiddlehead, and he plays several musical instruments. In 2009, Freehand Books published his first full-length poetry collection, Harmonics.

Publisher’s Note on Harmonics:

Jesse Patrick Ferguson melds music and words in this compelling debut collection of poetry. Modeled on the harmonic series, carefully placed poems riff on each other and individual words resonate sympathetically, with all the energy and buzz of a firmly plucked mandolin string. Throughout, Ferguson pays playful homage to poetic traditions, infusing age-old forms like the sonnet and the villanelle with an astute and contemporary political sensibility, a unique and fresh aesthetic energy, and a breezy, brazen East Coast swagger. In dense and vivacious language, he tunefully explicates a range of subjects from climate change to rent cheques to various incarnations of love, offering us a tin can telephone to the raucous and beautiful symphony of everyday life.

Anne Simpson on Harmonics: “Jesse Ferguson’s vibrant poetry not only makes music, it is music: in this collection, poems resonate with one another as if they were part of the harmonic series. Here’s a poet who shows us how to put an ear to the world and listen.”

Sample Poem from Harmonics:

Work

 Men tickled work beneath the chin,
he shat out pellets for them to burn.
They took pictures of their wives in front of him,
work made abandoned petrol stations of their pride.
The men staged protests at each of his orifices,
work’s belly grumbled like a distant gravel mill.
They drove their picket signs into his hide
with mallets improvised from their fathers’ bones,
he taught them to pronounce Behemoth.
They blew whistles through megaphones
directly into his ears,
but then had to line up for tetanus shots.
Cars on the highway were coerced
to honk if they hate work,
but he had just bought a new iPod.

Finally, the strongest man from each province
was given a bullwhip to lash work and learn ’im,
but like a hippo he’s surprisingly fast on land.
He loped across the Laurentian Shield,
each footfall an open-pit mine, his trail
red and corrosive as nickel tailings.
He built a fleet of supertankers then sailed
it to China, leaving the delegates
whipping Atlantic foam
somewhere on the banks of Nova Scotia.
The long-faced men regrouped at Union Headquarters
where Mr. Speaker offered to let him
eat the soft leather lining of his wallet.
But as work hung up on the conference call
Mr. Speaker’s bullwhip knotted itself to a noose.

- The fine folks at Anansi Press have declared Saturday the 26th Annabel day. “One Day. One Book. One Bestseller.” Play along! On Saturday, June 26th, 2010, head out to your local bookstore or go online and buy a copy of Kathleen Winter’s brilliant new novel. Moreover, if you post a picture of your receipt on the new Annabel fanpage , showing that you bought the book on the 26th, you could win a “sweet prize pack” from Anansi and Kathleen (Kathleen is making a handmade Annabel doll for the prize basket, check out the pics).

- Annabel, by the way, is currently the number two bestseller at Canada’s favourite, Libris award-winning independent bookstore, The Bookmark. In Halifax. 

- The Bookmark, by the way, has a brand new website!

- As Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise continues be blaze on literary fire, Salty Ink wasn’t the only one going backwards and looking for more Jessica Grant. And finding the remarkable collection of shorts, Making Light of Tragedy. I’m seeing it everywhere, most recently, the enjoyable Sasquatch Radio demands you “Read it Now!”

- If you’re a writer living in Newfoundland, you’ve only got one week left to submit a short story to the Cuffer Prize. Details here. See the coverage of Salty Ink’s Chad Pelley happily winning last year’s Cuffer Prize. So happily winning it, he adds in the name of friendly competition, that I invite you to try and steal it from me this year …

There’s only seven days left to vote, if you haven’t yet: http://saltyink.com/atlantic-canada-reads-competition/

I polled a variety of people this week to see who they voted for.

Steven Beattie, Review Editor for the Quill & Quire, and the man behind That Shakespearean Rag:
Blackstrap Hawco was my favourite Canadian novel of 2008. It’s epic in scope and in ambition: the fractured narrative, the multiple points of view, the scenes that get recapitulated and refashioned such that the truth of the narrative remains elusive. It’s a long book that never wears out its welcome, and its aggressive, punchy style is a welcome respite from the kind of recondite lyricism that characterizes much CanLit these days. It’s a bruiser, which in my mind is a compliment. Oh, and it’s also very funny.

Book Blog guru Julie Wilson, of Book Madam and Seen Reading fame (among other fun stuff). 
I’m voting for February by Lisa Moore. I’ve had a soft spot for Lisa for years, and got to work on behalf of February while I was at House of Anansi. Alliances aside, as a reader I’ve been vocal that I thought this book was horribly overlooked when first published. It’s the book that got away. Quiet and fierce, it sneaks up on you like tragedy. It’s a short read that sticks for a long time. I don’t doubt that February is the kind of book that readers will reference over their lifetimes.

Diane Faulkner, Marketing Manager for Nimbus Publishing.
I voted for Annabel and Blackstrap Hawco. I haven’t read any of the books yet, but after reading through the essays, I am looking forward to cracking open these two.

Samuel Thomas Martin, brand new author of a solid collection of shorts, This Ramshackle Tabernacle.
I’m at a bit of a disadvantage on the list, as I have only read half (looking forward to Annabel though, but I haven’t got to it yet). My vote is for Lisa Moore’s February.

Random email from a Salty Ink reader:
I think you should be able to vote for all six books. I think they all deserve to win. A diverse list and hard to choose from. Well introduced and sincerely defended. people can vote for whatever they want, but I’m reading all six this summer.