You Comma Idiot’s author Doug Harris is not Atlantic Canadian, nor does he live here, but, Goose Lane, one of my favourite publishers, are based here and this book is so worth being the first one I break the rules for. (Just this once.)

You Comma Idiot, a novel in second-person, puts the fun back in books and is sure to be one of the fall’s most entertaining reads. You’ll bust your guts laughing and you might even crack a rib. More importantly, all humour aside, Harris is great writer. There is a praise-worthy attention to detail here, and that’s what makes it the pageturning accomplishment it is.

In stores September 17th, 2010. Get it, trust me. And hats off to Julie Scriver for yet another top-notch bookcover.

Excerpt:

From the first two pages, “You are the kind of guy who falls in love after one date. You’re the kind of guy who rehearses a conversation fifty times in your head head and then blows it when it’s for real … You are not, it is fair to say, a good-looking guy. You were given a look too dreary and drawn … you are skinny and tall. Very Tall … Jackets hang off you like they’re sopping wet and sweatshirts engulf your laughable shoulders. The average tie covers half your chest. Clothes hate your guts. As soon as you step outside your apartment you feel as though you’re on display for all to cringe at … Strangely, you don’t do well with women. You are, more accurately, the kind of guy who gives other men the confidence to approach them.”

Backcover Summary:

Marginalized and alienated, perennial fuck-up Lee Goodstone is a resounding zero: a small-time hash-dealing slacker with no ambition about where his life isn’t going. One morning, Honey, his best friend’s girlfriend, inexplicably jumps into bed with him. Then another friend, Henry, is accused of kidnapping a teenaged girl no one knew he was seeing. Lee gets embroiled in the mêlée, finds himself making flip remarks to the media, and his mediocre existence officially spirals out of control.

Told in the second person, YOU comma Idiot is a cringeworthy, laugh-out-loud flight on the wings of the protagonist. The roller-coaster ride of a plot leads at breakneck speed to places even Lee can’t anticipate.

 Great Trailer:

Kenneth J. Harvey celebrates the 10th anniversary of the ReLit awards by signing with an independent Canadian press. Harvey published his last two highly successful novels, Inside and Blackstrap Hawco with Random House, but will be returning to an independent press with his latest, Reinventing the Rose, which is already a Russian bestseller. Harvey’s been supporting Canadian independent presses for 10 years now, via his highly successful ReLit awards initiative, but this move is what they call practicing what you preach. Considering his name in Canada and his wild international success — Harvey is published in 15 countries – he can pull this move, sure, but it’s really quite something that he actually did. So, may the move have a karmic marketing effect for you, Kenneth.

Reinventing the Rose “features a pregnant artist whose gynecologist boyfriend takes her to court in order to force her to abort her fetus. Alongside the main story is the detailed day-by-day development of the embryo.” Dundurn, which Harvey chose after a number of bids from other publishers, will release it in Spring 2011. Michael Carroll was the acquiring editor, whom Harvey’s worked with in the past. Carroll had this to say of Harvey: ”I’ve worked with Kenneth twice before with two previous publishers and have always been struck by his no-holds-barred commitment to his craft and his intense, vivid, and searing vision. In Reinventing the Rose, Kenneth, as always, challenges readers and sweeps them along in a never-to-be-forgotten probing of life’s verities and falsehoods.”

“I have been published by any number of presses in Canada, both large and small,” said Harvey, “and I look forward to working with my old editor, Michael Carroll, and to revisiting the independent press environment. As for supporting the independent presses, I thought it time to put my money where my mouth is.”  

Harvey is a good guy and a talented writer with a clever business sense. Here’s a sample of what he’s accomplished: an international bestselling author with books published in Canada, the US, the UK, Russia, Germany, China, Japan, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark and France, who has won awards like: the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, the Winterset Award, Italy’s Libro Del Mare, and has been nominated for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and twice for both the Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Overqualified (ECW, 2009)
a novel (sort of) by Joey Comeau

Joey Comeau’s Overqualified is September’s Book of the Month because it is what we’re all looking for, or at least what I am: something new, fresh, different, that works. People use the term “very original” too freely. They waste it as a descriptor. Overqualified, however, really is “very original,” because it is unprecedented.

Overqualified is a novel written in the form of one- to two-page cover letters to various establishments — from New York Times to Xerox Canada — but details of the main character’s life and mental dilemmas often trickle into these letters, most notably about his brother Adrian, who has been hit by a drunk driver, and his girlfriend Susan, who he loves, “honestly,” even though he occasionally panics that she’s the last girl he’ll ever love and … “be with.” Recollections of what he and his brother used to do slip into these cover letters, or, more crassly, stories of what he’d like to do to a girl other than Susan, and these are funny and occasionally piercingly sad divergences from why he is the best candidate for the job to which he is applying. He tells Absolut Vodka, “My brother and I used to fight to the death on the top of barns … [and] made up characters for ourselves. We hummed our own fight music.”

He tells Paramount Pictures he wants to write horror movies because he watched Pet Cemetery four times before he ever “saw more than a flash of the dead guy,” but that he likes being scared. That he and his brother Adrian used to go out to their grandparents’ barn with flash lights, and one of them sit outside while the other would go in without his flashlight and see how long he could stand in there alone in the black room. “It wasn’t the sort of game where anyone won or lost,” he tells Paramount, “I want to write horror movies that scare you, but leave you with the feeling that your brother is right outside the door, waiting.”

These memories of the brother are cleverly structured, potent, and well-written. But the book is in no way sombre for any period of time. Overall, it is offkilter and amusing; hilarious in parts with perfectly placed ridiculous moments. The honesty is often as funny as it is sad, like when he tells New York Times, “A stint in juvenile hall adds a much needed bit of excitement to a childhood I can barely remember.” He tells the Park Lane Mall he is the ideal candidate for the Santa Claus position because his hating kids means he isn’t a pervert, and that when he worked at the Mattel toy company, he hired people of “small stature” and designed a new uniform for them of “green slippers and ridiculous hats” and made people sing as they worked until he was fired on three counts of racism towards Irish midgets he allegedly referred to as “my north pole leprechauns.”

And he’s a visionary, this guy. “Dear Gillette, do you remember when you were the best a man could get? … you need to get back to your roots, Gillette … bring back the straight razor. That was a product … You want Gillette razors against a businessman’s throat in an alley. Gillette razors hidden in the mouths of inmates.”

If not overqualified on some of his cover letters, he is often humourously over-confident: “Dear Parker Brothers … I have never designed a board game before, but I think I’d be good at it. You roll the dice and make your move. How hard can that be?”

And he has a tendency to get amusingly off topic, as in his cover letter to Irving Oil, “I want to get drunk in a bar and take a pool cue and fuck up a dude with a scar down the side of his face,” or telling HBO why he is the man for the boxing show because, “I don’t make collect calls, I make the operator pay.”

All gags aside, Comeau is a good, solid writer. He knows what detail can do. And the book is funny, a pleasure to read, a lesson in innovation, a laugh-out-loud stab North America, and an occasionally unexpected heartbreaker. It is a book for everyone with an iota of life in them.

The ReLit Awards, dubbed “The country’s pre-eminent literary prize recognizing independent presses” by the Globe and Mail, is benevolently spearheaded by Newfoundlandland’s internationally acclaimed author Kenneth J. Harvey. The ReLit awards stand apart from all other Canadian literary awards. How?  They honour writers from independent presses, not the ones signed on with big powerhouse publishers. In other words, they shine a light where it needs to be shined: on the writers (and publishers) who benefit the most from additional attention. Harvey’s ReLit awards are one man making a difference. They achieve the real purpose of awards: recognition. Or, as Harvey says “Ideas, not money.” Kenneth sifts through hundreds of books in three categories — every year for ten years now – and picks a longlist, which he hands over to a secret jury to choose from.

Novel Category

Click Here to Read More about Chad Pelley’s Away from Everywhere

Click Here to Read More about Joey Comeau’s Overqualified

Short Fiction

Click Here to Read More about Amy Jones’s What Boys Like

Click Here to Read More about Ryan Turner’s What We’re Made Of

Click Here to Read More about Steven Mayoff’s Fatted Calf Blues

Award Announcements

PEI poet Steve McOrmond made his mark in 2004 when his debut, Lean Days, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award ( an award for the best first book by a Canadian poet.) His follow up, Primer on the Hereafter, won the Atlantic Poetry Prize. As expected, his 2010 release, The Good News about Armageddon, is a great, and, distinctive collection of poetry.

As the title implies, these are poems that tackle contemporary crises, but with a sort of matter-of-factness that is quite powerful and, impressively, never trite. The collection is topical and yet not solipsistic or a warning or offering answers. Cynical, though not without comedy. The poems are “just saying,” and doing so with a well-spent economy of words. Its outright fortitude spares it a preachiness or a purple tinge, and intellect and truth spare it from bordering on angst. It is written with an effective fervor that gives teeth to these biting, mostly splendid poems. Something meaningful echoes back as you read, and the weight of its subject matter is partially unloaded with a share of comedic relief as well. If crying about it can’t change the world, you might as well laugh about it.

Its finer moments are nothing less than potent: the language and how it is delivered, the imagery, the humour as a vessel to best carry substance. My favourite aspects of the collection get at the absurdity of this: we’re living on a planet we know we are destroying, and we’re living in a world fraught with increasing issues, and increasing apathy to them. It’s just another oil spill, it’s just another war, it’s just another talentless teen celebrity getting all the media spotlight.

“Online, I am no closer
To the blessed interconnectedness.

Deaf woman mauled by mountain lion.
Are Paris Hilton’s 15 minutes over yet?

Outside, a cold wind scatters
the last of the fallen leaves.

Human disinterest story.
Corpse lay next to TV for 3 years.

This just in from Hubble: a pair of black holes
locked in death dance. Make it your screensaver.

Are we winning the war on terror?
I think it might snow.”

What’s evident in reading this: Maybe the end of the world isn’t a big and sudden bang. Maybe it is a slow death, like a socio-economic-environmental cancer, already metastasizing through the planet as I type this …

“When there are no more wolves,
What will you cry then?”

CLICK A BOOK COVER TO READ MORE ABOUT THAT BOOK

Very Promising Novels

Short Fiction

Poetry

Fun Non-Fiction

Everyone is raging or applauding about Steven Beattie and Alex Good’s bold article — Don’t Believe the Hype: 10 Overrated Canadian Authors — that appeared in The Afterword this week. On it, names like Michael Ondaatje and Yann Martel.

Why all the hoopla over one article?

I don’t like outright attacks — they lack critical merit — but an article like this, co-penned by a man of Beattie’s literary intellect, is entirely important for the very fact that it can cause such uproar. It is the spirit of the article that I am behind: making Canadian readers, critics, and jurors as comfortable with talking poorly of a big name as readily as they would talk poorly of a less established name. Otherwise a writer coasts along on their name and not their literary merit. Not to say I agree with their whole list, just that, at some point, this industry became all about marketing over literary merit, and that creates a disparity between our most acclaimed writers and our finest writers. An article like this — right or wrong — gets people talking. And that takes a lot these days. It takes an article as bold as this.

Sure, their article was harsh, and glossed over the fact that “good literature” is subjective — Ondaatje is brilliant to some and densely impenetrable to others, but those others should be able to say so, without repercussion, shouldn’t they? The point of all of this hoopla over one article is this: No one loses it over a critic calling an established writer subpar unless that writer is someone like Ondaatje. If his next book is crap his next book is crap, and a critic would say so about anyone else. If you grant an iconic writer immunity from criticism it is a disservice to what CanLit is, because what it is to me is a fresh, crisp, ever-evolving thing. But not if we are buying and awarding names over books. Not even when the author earned their reputation, because people in every profession  — boxing, carpentry, politics — know when to retire. (Or when to make a comeback. I am not implying writers whither over time, as most do not. I’d like to think we improve with each book, as I certainly hope to.) Besides, a writer without a thick skin is in the wrong profession anyway, and, a writer who thinks s/he is great, too great for criticism, is done evolving and getting better. And is therefore done.

Back on track here: I know people who think Ondaatje is a literary Jesus … yet they’ve read one, if that, of his books. Where does that mentality come from? It comes from an industry more preoccupied with marketing than literary merit. And fair enough, we all want books to sell, but not if selling names over selling stellar writing stunts CanLit’s evolution and becomes the difference between who its key players are and who they ought to be. Now. Not then. Take Amy Jones’s What Boys Like, for example. It did as much for the evolution of CanLit in 2009 as any other book, but if an article had of called it crap and over rated, would the country have dropped its jaw and lost its mind? No. It wouldn’t have. That’s my point. Everyone should be equally susceptible to criticism, but the reaction to this article means they’re not. That is not good for Canadian literature. I like David Adams Richards, when someone says there’s no story in CanLit anymore, I throw a copy of Mercy Among the Children in their lap. But it is okay by me that these two don’t like the guy. In fact, they’ve earned my respect for expressing the bold opinion.

Steven W. Beattie is not God, Michael Ondaatje is not God, and no one is going to write a book that everyone likes. The important thing is that it remains okay for people to say what they want, despite who they are saying it about, because that is what keeps literature diverse. It is healthy that big-named authors be as susceptible to slander as lesser known or emerging authors, and it is a good sign no one can agree who the best and worst writers are: because what a lame and stagnant thing CanLit would be if we could all agree about that.

Cowardly disclaimer: I am not endorsing Beattie and Good’s list or the nature of their comments, just applauding the spirit behind it.

Got No Secrets (Tightrope Books, 2010)
Short Fiction by Danila Botha

Here’s a book for those of you who like your literature hungover, angst-ridden, strung out, and with trackmarks.  Though I hate comparisons, if someone called her Halifax’s female form response to Joel Thomas Hynes, I wouldn’t agree — the writing and narrative hook differs — but I would see the parallel in content. Many of her characters could be the girlfriend of many of Hynes’s characters. As an example, the protagonist of “Jesus was a Punk Rocker” wakes up in last night’s clothes, pinned to her bed under the weight of a nasty hangover: “I still have to piss, so I grab the vase next to my bed that once held eighteen long-stemmed red roses. It’s been empty for a while. I undo my fly and peel off my jeans … take care of business … [and] briefly consider sending it to him, with a note, This is what a sincere sentiment looks like, asshole.”

A quick read, Got No Secrets clearly shows that Botha has a real fire in her belly, and you feel the flames in this debut. I could say the stories lack subtlety, or I could say they roar. I can also say that there are moments of surprisingly original imagery in this book. There are also some too-true slaps across the face of the western world. “Being an addict to most people is way cooler than being overweight.” But there’ll be one plague looming over this book: the fine line between being repetitive and being consistent. There are some distinctive and more unique stories here: a story of a daughter and her boyfriend murdering her parents, or the world’s first pregnant (soon-to-be) man, but they are overwhelmed by a consistent presence of heroin, coke, booze, and never-subtle angst of the “real artist.” If everyone’s throwing up and angst-ridden all the time, it is hard to separate one story from the next. That said, I tasted some of her vomit-related lines, kudos there, her writing can get quite evocative. Her potential is quite evident, if that’s the goal of a debut, and she’s earned my attention with her vehement debut.

The title of the book, by the way, comes from a catchy Brendan Benson song:

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This fall will see two highly acclaimed authors go criminal for the first time. Two very different approaches to the genre by two very different writers have become highly anticipated fall books.

The Death of Donna Whelan by Michael Winter (Hamish Hamilton, Aug. 31, 2010)
St. John’s Book Launch!: August 30th at The Ship, 8-10 p.m.

As expected, Michael Winter’s Capote-esque venture into crime fiction isn’t straight forward. Known as one of the freshest voices in the country, multi-award-winning Michael Winter has a history of, and a knack for re-invigorating whatever genre he is working with. His crisp, detail-rich short fiction is modelled after by leagues of emerging writers, his 2000 journal-a-clef, This All Happened, is a lesson in creative and sentence-level writing: say it fresh, The Big Why turned historical fiction inside out, and his last novel, The Architects are Here boldly soars through many genres, effectively beating down the walls that trap most writers. More and more we’re hearing of terms like “literary mystery,” or “fictional memoir,” and it’s because of innovative, fearless, ambitious writers like Winter that Canadian fiction can evolve. Winter is responsible for a shift in CanLit towards a freedom in experimentation. Nowhere is this more evident than in his new novel, The Death of Donna Whelan, hitting shelves next week. Continuing with this groundbreaking trait of his, his latest book is a work of “documentary fiction.” The Death of Donna Whalen pieces together the actual transcripts and court testimonies of the real-life St. John’s based murder trial of Donna Whelan:  a woman stabbed 31 times by, her friends and family felt, an abusive boyfriend. The course of justice “takes many unpredictable twists and turns before the truth is finally revealed,” and Winter “preserves the nuanced voice of each witness.” The Death of Donna Whelan, like his innovative 2000 breakout journal-a-clef novel, This All Happened, promises to be another unforgettable mark on the face of Canadian literature.

The Case Agaisnt Owen Williams by Allan Donaldson (Nimbus Publishing, Sept. 2010)

Fredericton Book Launch!: Sept 23, 7:00pm at Westminster Books.

The fall of 2010 also marks Allan Donaldson’s foray into crime fiction. His 2005 debut novel, MacLean, was a harrowing, literal day in the life of a shellshocked, alcoholic WWI veteran searching for booze and a birthday gift for his mother. It made the Globe and Mail state, “This book merits a media frenzy,” and that it did. It was also shortlisted for the prestigious Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Donaldson’s follow-up novel is a venture into “literary mystery.” The Case Against Owen Williams tells the story of Owen Williams, a quiet soldier stationed with a garrison of conscripted men dubbed “the Zombies,” who are unwilling to serve overseas. When a teenage girl is found dead in a gravel pit after a dance, Owen Williams was the last person reported to have seen her. What follows is a novel that “explores the circumstances of a wrongful conviction and the gaps in the justice system that allow it to flourish.”

George Murray, aka “The Bookninja guy,” aka “one of Canada’s finest extant poets,” just put out a book of 409 aphorisms. Snappy one- or two-liners of wisdom and wit. In a nutshell, an aphorism is a poetry-philosophy fusion, and something more accessible than either. It is the core thought upon which language is laid to construct a poem … minus the poem. They are poetic thoughts, adages, Murray has called them, “The smallest unit of poetry or philosophy.” 

Given this definition of an aphorism, it is a given that Murray be the Canadian poet to put out a book of aphorisms. His poetry is not only accessible, but brilliant, crisp, piercing … and gorged with wisdom. His last collection, one of, if not my personal favourite book of poetry — The Rush to Here — is literally brimming and overflowing with aphoristic pull quotes and epigrammatic qualities. (In fact, yours truly is using a Murray line as the epigram for his current novel in progress: “The same leaf that turns to the light shies from the blaze.”). 

George Murray is that hungry hounddog you’ve seen probe-nosing through brush or rubble, but what Murray is foraging for is truth and understanding in a complex world. And he always finds it, and, more impressively, articulates it in a way that makes the reader nod their head in agreement. It is one thing to write a glistening line of poetry; it is another to have that line be accessible to a reader. To brighten their bulb’s glow, if you will. To enlighten them, with your epiphany. George Murray is that guy. A masterful, accessible poet who is or should be or will be seen as a voice of our times. And he makes it seem so easy. (He’s also the kind of guy that can pull off using shitcrazy as an adverb without faltering the cerebral nature of his poem.) 

So of course he’s the right poet for a book of aphorisms. Famed Irish poet Paul Durcan was one of many to comment on the aphoristic qualities of Murray’s writing and to prod him into releasing a book of aphorisms. Of Glimpse, Durcan has said, “Murray is as philosophically as he is humourously exact: what more can one ask of Glimpse?” This book can be a coffee table book, a fun and quick read, or a work of poetry worthy of being rumpled up in acclaimed poet Don McKay’s back pocket (see photo below). Aphorism authority James Richardson endorsed the book, saying, “He doesn’t preach or teach. He sneaks up on truths from unexpected directions … I’ve got a dozens of collections of aphorisms on my shelves. This one I’ll keep right on my desk.”  

Note: ECW have developed an iPhone app: you can have an aphorism a day sent to your phone! How great is modern book marketing, and aren’t ECW at the forefront of it? 

 Sample Aphorisms 

 3 Funny Ones 

 Writing the erotic poem is like ironing in the nude—sexy for women, dangerous for men. 

 A slot machine is the idiot’s ATM. 

 As we age we study anatomy by witnessing it fail. 

 Seven More Good Ones 

 She looks like a million bucks, but it’s all in fives. 

 The brain is also gut. 

 All your mistakes can tell you is there’s something to the idea things can be perfect. 

 Clinging is climbing without ascent. 

 Coincidence without you here is just incidence, lacking in both interest and potential. 

 Fathers are answers to questions children may never ask. 

 Facing your discontent and being unable to name it is the definition of failure. 

 The universe remains mum on the subject of itself, yet still we hold a mic to its lips as though waiting for comment. 

Esteeemd Poet Don McKay with a copy of Glimpse in his back pocket

Sharon’s Bio:

 Sharon McCartney is the author of the highly praised collection Under the Abdominal Wall, which was selected for the BC 2000 Book Awards Program. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a law degree from the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Her poems have been published in journals such as Queen’s Quarterly, Grain, Event, Prism International and The Malahat Review. A former resident of Victoria, she taught legal research and was the coordinator of the Arts and Writing Co-op at the University of Victoria. McCartney is a volunteer member of the editorial staff of The Fiddlehead in Fredericton.

Goose Lane’s note on For and Against:

Sharon McCartney’s visceral exploration of relationships — how they begin and end, the tenuous threads that hold people together, and the events that can tear them apart is unstintingly, eyes-wide-open aware. Beginnings, endings, transitions — none elude the sometimes sardonic but always sensitive, sinuous, and frank language of McCartney’s finely wrought poems. Shedding wilful blindness in favour of life-affirming humour, McCartney pushes language from absolute rawness to moments of intimate retrospection, revealing a delicate tension between anger and calm, past and present, denial and acceptance.

George Elliot Clarke on For and Against: “You don’t read these poems, you feel them: Hammer in the head, shod foot on the throat, stiletto in the heart. It’s those combos of wild, piercing insights (or unusual but poignant images).”

Sample Poem from For and Against

“Through”

Remember the night I completely lost it?
Pouring shots in the kitchen. To irony!
Then dancing into bookshelves. Wasn’t
it obvious I was desperate? Unhappiness
a conflagration I was attempting to douse
with thimblefuls of alcohol. Nothing gets
easier. Nothing. Winter-stunned denizens
of this hateful municipality, boot-tongues
flapping, wandering the Superstore aisles
brokenly, mouths open. No, dear 84-year-old
Margaret greeting me at the pool, no, it isn’t
a fresh, crisp day. It’s a truly fucked-up day,
my marriage moribund, thoughts a mutinous
rabble. Your small town pride, morality,
just more ways to get suckered, hoodwinked,
hand over your taxes. Peace, charity, warmth
like the dog’s favourite ball lost under snow
until April, or the cold lump of flesh incised,
the wound cauterized with the iron of desire,
blind passion — when he wants to slap me,
but gently, I let him. My life like a party
I’m dying to leave — the wrong people came.

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia just released the winners of its 33^rd! Atlantic Writing Competition.  The Atlantic Writing Competition serves a great and necesary role in promoting the unpublished work of writers looking to climb the long and rickety ladder of literary recognition. It has, over the years, been a springboard for names as notable today as Amy Jones, Budge Wilson, Ami McKay and George Elliott Clarke. Past winner of the H.R Bill Percy prize, Syr Ruus released her debut novel, Lovesongs of Emmanuel Taggart, which has just been longlisted for the 2010 ReLit award. Chris Benjamin won the 2008 Percy prize, and his debut novel, Drive-By Saviors, is just about to hit the shelves, and hipcat publisher Goose Lane will be publishing last year’s Percy prize winner, Scott Fotheringham’s The Rest Is Silence in 2012.

The Joyce Barkhouse Writing For Children Prize

FIRST: Stephanie Reidy (Halifax, NS), “Callum’s Bed”
SECOND: Daphne Greer (Newport, NS), “Oh Glorious Glasses” 
THIRD: David Murray (Elmwood, NB), “ The Goat in the Moat.”
HONOURABLE MENTION: Rhonda MacGrath (Truro, NS), “Sarah’s Vegetables”

The Young Adult/Juvenile Novel Prize

FIRST: Susan White (Clifton Royal, NB), “The Day Mrs. Montague Cried”
SECOND: Graham Bullock (Halifax, NS), “Mazing Blade”
THIRD: Kristen McLean (Northwest River, NL), “Melting Snow”
HONOURABLE MENTION: Katie Bowden (Quispamsis, NS), “The Seedkeeper’s Secret”

The Poetry Prize

FIRST: Rita Wilson, (Pictou County, NS), “Lost and Found”
SECOND: Edwin Head (Dartmouth, NS), “Dusk”
HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Jeremy Lutes (Halifax, NS), “Notes From the Black Book;” Carey Bray (Newport, NS), “A Life of Water”

The Budge Wilson Short Story Prize

FIRST: Julie Strong (Halifax, NS), “Alice’s Bonfire”
SECOND: Colin Duerden (Dartmouth, NS), “Blame it on the Durango Kid”
THIRD: Theresa O’Brien (Glace Bay, NS), “Pandemic”
HONOURABLE MENTION: Rick Myers (Lunenburg, NS), “The Souvenir”

The H.R. (Bill) Percy Novel Prize

FIRST: Wanda Campbell (Wolfville, NS), “Hat Girl”
SECOND: Diana Clarke (Blockhouse, NS), “The Holbein Provenance”
THIRD: Mary Ediger (Port Mouton, NS), “Welcome Inn”
HONOURABLE MENTION: Brendan Dunbar (Halifax, NS) for “The Scoop”

Take note: The deadline for the 34^th Atlantic Writing Competition is December 3, 2010.

The winners in each category will receive their prizes at the Jane Buss Gala Celebration of Writers and Writing on Saturday, September 25, 2010 at the Alderney Landing Theatre in Dartmouth, NS. The first-place winners in all categories will read from their manuscripts.

 For some time now, internationally acclaimed author of Life of Pi, Yann Martel, has been sending the prime minister a book every two weeks. It’s part of his very popular What is Stephen Harper Reading? initiative.

In a nutshell, quoting from the website, here is Martel’s rationale and action plan: “No doubt he sounds and governs like one who cares little for the arts. But he must have moments of stillness. And so this is what I propose to do: not to educate—that would be arrogant, less than that—to make suggestions to his stillness.For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness. That book will be inscribed and will be accompanied by a letter I will have written.”

He has been faithfully doing so for some time now, sometimes asking other authors to send one along (with an accompanying note) when he is busy promoting his own work. Book #82 sent to Harper was John Steffler’s classic, epic, The Grey Islands (Brick Books), suggested by esteemed poet Don McKay. Read the accompanying letter here.

Haven’t Read Steffler’s Grey Islands Yourself?: Check Out Rattling Books’s Audiobook Version for a Sampling of Rattling Books at Their Finest

There are a lot of perks with audiobooks, like making your iPod a little more literary, shortening the long drive to a cabin, or conveniently taking in some Lisa Moore as you lay in the sun or clean the kitchen. But Rattling Books, who I’ll call Canada’s hippest audiobook publisher, tapped into something beyond perks when they recorded Steffler’s The Grey Islands. This is a top-notch listening experience that transcends reading and enters the realm of experiencing literature in a rare and intimate way. When the narrator is put up for the night in a stranger’s house, we hear the clinks of forks off plates as they eat dinner, the next day when he joins a family out squiding, there are the sounds of men at work in boats in the background. These background sounds are never corny, gimmicky, or obtrusive, and they are perfectly placed and weaved into the narration so that the reader feels embedded in the story. Such treatment gives a whole new meaning to putting a reader in your story, and brings an already great piece of literature to life in a whole new way.

It opens with a dispirited man driving along the west coast of Newfoundland, headed towards a remote community, population one, to interview the man. As he narrates his story and drives toward this community of one, there are the unobtrusive background noises of passing cars, horns, and radio stations coming in and out. When he reaches his destination, we hear his footsteps through brush, and gulls and other birds singing in the distance. The narrator is spoken by one voice, the other characters by another. The writing itself, and the sentiment and imagery, is really quite stellar: “A way to corner myself is what I want. Some blunt place I can’t go beyond, where excuses stop.”

The story opens with him describing his drive to the Grey Islands. “Girls on the highway, three abreast, eating French fries … I wave and give them a wide berth. People always strolling right on the pavement here, bored and playing chicken with the passing cars, hunting bold proposals, long rides … I like this.” The details of his drive are juxtaposed with his interesting back story: how he got to be on that highway, a bored city planner looking for something more from life as his life is coming undone. “Both of us wondering: is this how the end begins? … [her] going back to her family alone … all of them so alert to the smell of divorce.”

“I’m going, not for the island only now – the space and the solitude – but to meet this man who spent his life out there … one look, and I’ll see what I’d become, completely alone.”

Start to finish, it is beautiful prose heightened by well placed audio accentuation. Rattling Books’ version of John Steffler’s The Grey Islands is literature evolved, and gives new meaning to “sinking into a story.” It is a book we can finally see, hear, touch, taste, and smell.

The ReLit Awards, dubbed “The country’s pre-eminent literary prize recognizing independent presses” by the Globe and Mail, is benevolently spearheaded by Newfoundlandland’s internationally acclaimed author Kenneth J. Harvey. The ReLit awards stand apart from all other Canadian literary awards. How?  They honour writers from independent presses, not the ones signed on with big powerhouse publishers. In other words, they shine a light where it needs to be shined: on the writers (and publishers) who benefit the most from additional attention. Harvey’s ReLit awards are one man making a difference. They achieve the real purpose of awards: recognition. Or, as Harvey says “Ideas, not money.” Kenneth sifts through hundreds of books in three categories — every year for ten years now – and picks a longlist, which he hands over to a secret jury to choose from.

SHORT FICTION Titles by Atlantic Canadians

Sheila James’ In the Wake of Loss
Leslie Vryenhoek’s Scrabble Lessons
Amy Jones’ What Boys Like
Steven Mayoff’s Fatted Calf Blues
Ryan Turner’s What We’re Made Of

 NOVELS by Atlantic Canadians

Chad Pelley’s Away from Everywhere
Paul Butler’s Hero
Lisa Moore’s February
Joey Comeau’s Overqualified
Gerald Beirne’s Turtle
Binnie Brenan’s Harbour View
Elainwe McCluskey’s Going Fast
Syr Ruus’s Lovesongs of Emmanuel Taggart
Jeannette Lynes’s The Factory Voice

POETRY Titles by Atlantic Canadians

Harry Thurston’s Animals of My Own Kind
Serge Patrice Thibodeau’s One
Zacharia Wells’s Track & Trace
George Elliot Clarke’s I & I
Stephen Rowe’s Never More There
Pam Calabrese MacLean’s The Dead Can’t Dance

In its fall edition, Atlantic Books Today listed Tanya Davis, Jon Tattrie, Ryan Turner, Chad Pelley, and Jesse Patrick Ferguson as “Five Atlantic Canadian Writers to Watch.”

And, well, now you can literally watch Tanya Davis in this poetry-music video sensation that’s all over the Internet this week.

That’s … pretty adorable.
Get to know Tanya and her stuff more at her website: http://www.tanyadavis.ca/

It’s the vivacity of Lynn Coady’s writing that I really like. Her authentic voice and lively characters.

And she’s had quite a remarkable career, right from the start. Her recently re-released debut novel, Strange Heaven, was a GG finalist and shortlisted for Thomas Head Raddall Award, and it won the Atlantic Bookseller’s Choice Award and the Dartmouth Book Award, earning her the Canadian Author Association’s Emerging Writer Award. Her follow-up was a very, very good collection of short stories, Play the Monster Blind. A national bestseller, it was declared a Globe and Mail book of the Year and won the CAA Jubilee award. She followed up with Saints of Big Harbour and possible fan-favourite  Mean Boy — both of which were national bestselling Globe and Mail Books of the Year. See the pattern?

This is the kind of praise she prompts:

“It’s a miracle when a book as good as Lynn Coady’s comes along. Saints of Big Harbour is as good as it gets.”  – The Calgary Herald

“Lynn Coady is a brilliant new voice in Canadian literature.” – David Adams Richards

“Lynn Coady is the best young writer in Canada.” — The Gazette (Montreal)

Lynn has also edited the anthologies Victory Meat: New Fiction from Atlantic Canada, The Anansi 40^th Anniversary Reader, and The Journey Prize Stories: 20. She’s also recently written “A butt-kicking comedy about couplehood” called Mark.

 Click a book cover to read more about that book:

 Q&A with Lynn Coady

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

I don’t have to struggle for this particular ‘favourite’—David Adams Richards’ Road to the Stilt House.  It’s unflinching—leaves all the flinching to the reader.

I’m also a big fan of Michael Winter—tossup between his story collection One Last Good Look and his novel This All Happened.

How did you end up writing books?

Stories were my favourite thing growing up, so I assumed that meant they must be the most important thing in the world and arranged my adulthood as if that were the case.  By the time I realized that only a small percentage of the world agreed with me I was past the point of no return.

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

My favourite and least favourite thing about writing have turned out to be the same: the utter self-indulgence of the process.

What book of yours came the easiest/hardest, and any guesses as to why?

Strange Heaven came the easiest because it was the first and I was completely unselfconscious in the writing process.  It was pure experimentation: let’s see if I can write a novel.  Everything I’d learned up to that point told me that it was next to impossible to get a novel published so I genuinely didn’t expect it to ever see the light of day.  That’s the ultimate creative freedom, when you’re young at least.

What is taking up too much of your time lately?

My day job. As they do.

There is a passage on page 54 of Strange Heaven, “It seemed like, even if you didn’t want to, or even if you paid no attention to it whatsoever, life, existence, whatever it was, carried on and it carried you with it.” Is Strange Heaven in some ways about the awkwardness of life at 18: floating between child- and adulthood? Or is it more about life being beyond us, as expressed in a following line, “You can build a nice little house on the shore and a tidal wave will come and eat it up.”

It’s about helplessness, which in some ways, yes, is a big part of crossing the bridge from childhood into adulthood.  But it’s also the realization that adulthood entails a certain degree of helplessness too.  I think Bridget’s so obsessed with that idea because she finds it intolerable—she wants adulthood to be about exerting control but so far the defining experience of her newfound adulthood—giving birth—has been steeped in helplessness.

You followed up Strange Heaven with a collection of shorts, Play the Monster Blind. One of the shorts featured Bridget and Allan from Strange Heaven. You weren’t done with them?

It was a pretty straightforward affair. I had this story with two characters who I realized were exactly like Bridget and Allan.  I thought: That’s lame.  Don’t write about the same characters and give them different names.

I loved every single story in Play the Monster Blind. Out of curiosity, what’s your favourite, if I forced you to pick one.

“Jesus Christ, Murdeena” because it was fun.  The writing of that story represented, for me, an acceptance of all the things that were infuriating about the place I grew up and having fun with that—making light.  It still has an edge of anger, and sadness and futility, because that’s inevitable, but there’s an element of fuck-you glee too as represented by Murdeena once she has fully “come out”.  Nobody understands her and everyone is ashamed of her but she doesn’t care—she knows who she is and it makes her ecstatic. She’s going to share it with people whether they want it or not.

When I talk to someone about Play the Monster Blind, they are quick to talk about “Jesus Christ, Murdeena.” A story about an always-walking young woman who stops wearing shoes and starts telling people she is Jesus, round 2. Where did this idea come from?

It’s a straightforward metaphor for what Alice Munro identifies as the “who do you think you are” factor of growing up in small towns.  Never dream, never imagine great things, never suppose the world holds anything more in store for you than it does for anyone else.  I remember the moment I came up with the idea for the story. I was making a joke about something—some decision I’d made when I was young that had astonished and exasperated some people.  I spoke the words: “You’d think I’d announced that I was Jesus Christ or something.”

All of your work has a rare and highly enjoyable liveliness to it. Particularly your characters. In my review of Strange Heaven, I’ve said, “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.” What’s your favourite character from all of your novels?

I think Isadore from Saints of Big Harbour, because I pushed him very far, in terms of his unconscionable behavior, and he kept surprising me—he would one up me.  He’d be like: Oh yeah, you think that’s bad?  Well what if I do this?  And I’d be appalled.  But even more exciting than his capacity for bad behavior was his ability to deflect blame—he did it automatically, without a moment’s reflection. He’s the kind of character you just let loose on the page and sit back and watch in astonishment.

Your work tends to be a delicate balance of laugh-out-loud humour and gasp-out-loud moments of pathos. Is this just how it comes out, or is it intentional?

It’s just how it comes out. Writing fiction is a kind of primal scream therapy for me.  I just close my eyes and give ‘er.

Click Here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/canlit-on-the-beach/article1662812/

- For those aspiring and emerging writers in Nova Scotia, and established ones looking to share wisdom: The WFNS is now accepting applications to its mentorship program. Really, these programs are invaluable and productive experiences. I say that with personal experience. So click that link and read more about how to have another writing weigh in on a work in progress, or the opposite.

- Darwin’s Bastards is a pretty damn fun concept anthology of short stories set in the future or parallel universes, etc. It’s got great Canadian writers like Heather O’neill, Neil Smith, Douglas Coupeland, Lee Henderson, and Pasha Malla, and some big names like Annabel Lyon and Yann Martel. It also has two superb Atlantic Canadian short fictionists, Jessica Grant and Mark Anthony Jarman. Geist Magazine just said that Jessica’s is a top 3 from the 23-story collection. (of course she is!)

- Halifax’s Open Heart Forgery — a monthly journal of poetry and lyrics — just made its August edition (Vol1., no.5) available for download.

- CNQ reviews editor, poet, critic,  and cerebral essayist Zach Wells brought this funny bit to my attention. A regular Salty Ink comic strip might be fun. Hmm … Anyway, poke around on Zach’s website, there’s some great stuff there. Literary and occasionally otherwise (Check out the YouTube clip of the birds, for instance).

These are well worth a watch. Particularly for you writers knee deep in the process of writing a novel, like myself. (And wondering why.)

These are snippets from TickleScratch Productions’ Writers’ Confession series that aires on Bravo.

Michael Winter on Writing

Lisa Moore on Writing

Michael Crummey on Writing

Joel Thomas Hynes. A distinct voice and a busy man with many hats: novelist (Down to the Dirt, Right Away Monday), playwright (Say Nothing, Saw Wood, Broken Accidents), actor (Crackie, Down to the Dirt, Hatching Matching and Dispatching), part-time musician, dad, creative writing teacher at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary. People cite the guy as Newfoundland’s literary bad-ass, and he’s authentic in that role, but it shouldn’t overwhelm the fact he’s a born literary type and speaks well, engagingly, and unpretentiously about writing. He’s undeniably a literary force, based on merit not persona. He’s always up to something. He puts the work in, he has earned his acclaim.  

This spring is a showcase of the playwright side of Hynes.

–> Creative Books are just about to release the script for The Devil You Don’t Know, which he co-wrote with screenwriter and actress Sherry White. 

–> Also very exciting: He’s just written a new play, Broken Accidents, inspired by Philip Arima’s collection of short fiction, Broken Accidents. The LSPU Hall in St. John’s, NL, will be running nightly shows of the play from August 11-15th, 8 p.m., with a pay-what-you-can matinee on Sunday the 15th. You can book your tickets here.  ”This dark but funny satire is set in a future where you can get a two-for-one discount to have your parents put down.”

Speaking of Hynes’ plays. If you missed his one-man play Say Nothing, Saw Wood, Rattling Books have an audio version for sale here.

I stumbled on a video of Hynes talking plays,

And here’s him on his last novel, Right Away Monday,

This Ramshackle Tabernacle (Breakwater Books, 2010)
Short fiction by Samuel Thomas Martin

I hate writing reviews because what is left to say, really? “An exciting debut.” “A real pageturner.” The pleasure with This Ramshackle Tabernacle is that you don’t have to dig for words, these stories evoke something in you and draw it to the surface. No digging required.

 It is quite common for reviews to compare first books to similar books as a helpful way to inform readers about a new author. But it would be counterproductive of me to make any comparisons in this case — because what struck me about this book is that Martin is a truly unique and powerful voice in his own distinctive way, and this is a truly unique collection of linked short stories. A compelling one. It is emotionally engaging and impressively written.

 There is an impressive range of voices in this collection too, and Martin has a handle on each — from troubled teens to bickering old married couples, and he is always so truly convincing. This range extends beyond points of view to tone and story content, among other things, and deserves applause: I laughed out loud at “Becoming Maria” and “Crafty old Dragon” but was conversely riveted and shook up by the harrowing and fearlessly written “Shaver.” There are shockers, like “Eight Ball,” and “Roulette,” while stories like “Adrift” simply and effectively strum a reader’s heartstrings. Tender, though, all of them: the shockers, the tearjerkers, and the funnier ones.

In Jessica Grant’s wonderful endorsement quote, she says, “You will laugh and be lacerated.” Echo: you will laugh and you will be lacerated. Sam has all the tricks up his sleeve, but more importantly, he has a deep empathy and sincere compassion that punches through and unites all of his stories. Collectively, the book will rattle you, and ultimately these are stories about outcasts, broken lives, or characters on edge. True. The characters are downtrodden or at a mental impasse, but really, and in the author’s own words, “These stories deal with both the rundown aspects of our humanity, but also with the redeeming love that can hold a community together when tragedies threaten to make it crumble.”

Noticeably, there is an undercurrent motif of “faith versus religion” here, but it is transient and incidental. It provides thematic meat for those who want that, but does so unobtrusively, so that those who don’t want it won’t trip up on it. 

Another noteworthy praise: There is no filler in this collection; each story packs its own punch. Though some of those punches are an uppercut that could take Mike Tyson and others are a playful slap on the shoulder.

It’s hard to believe this is a debut. If there are any kinks to be worked out they have nothing to do with the barebones writing, which is assured and not overly adorned: less is more, and it is like he has found his voice and Is honing his trademarks already. But I guess that’s what a masters degree in creative writing, studying under icon David Adams Richards does for a guy? Martin has a very articulate and distinctive diction and voice. This Ramshackle Tabernacle packs a real emotional resonance. It is weighty and lingers and swims in a rare and profound humanity. Most writers fail to engage this well, and what a nice dose of surprising imagery. “The slump in his shoulders makes him look like a cracked branch walking.”

It is a rare treat to find a new voice you are this excited about, to know you’ll be buying his next book. There should be bets on emerging voices, just for fun. Much like horse racing or poker: there are equal parts talent and luck involved in how a writer’s career unfolds. I might go all In on Martin though. Not quite 30 and writing this well? That’s worth a tall stack of chips. It leaves the guy, what, five decades to master his craft?

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.”