Something happened as 2012 rolled it: after a decade of writing fiction, I’ve finally figured out how to craft a proper novel.

Something else happened, as 2012 rolled in: I haven’t been writing (unless two short stories counts) half as much as I’m accustomed to.

Salty Ink is fabulous and I enjoy it more than anyone. But it’s 40 hours a month of plotting, crafting, posting, and promoting articles … about other peoples’ work. And if I don’t have time to make it a fun and engaging and insightful site, then I don’t want it to drag on like a bad Hollywood trilogy. (Not to mention, it’s hard to turn down paid opportunities to review for magazines and papers, because I’m trying to keep up on Atlantic Lit).

I need to devote the next four months to intensively starting a third, and finally, solid novel. Third time’s a charm and all that. Until now, I’ve relied on emotionally engaging readers, and driving the story along on tragedies and inter-character tensions. That’s fine. But I need to start embedding that formula in a stronger story/plot. The first 50 pages of a first draft are the hardest to get down, and summer is publishing’s downtime … so tah tah till September and thanks for following.

Want one suggestion for summer reading? Riel Nason’s The Town That Drowned is a very well written novel, currently on THREE shortlists. Most notably, she’s one of three Canadians on This year’s International award: The Commonwealth Book Prize.

I can’t quit my odd need to plug other artists altogether. I launched a new, lower maintenance website this week, that I’ll run  all through the summer, maybe forever, that plugs one good writer, musician, artist, or filmmaker every day. Like a glorified tumblr. Not in depth, but highly reliable, should we share tastes. it’ll be mainly music though. My first true love. (In fact, I’m writing more songs lately than fiction). Click the image to check it out (There’s a Facebook Page to follow along too): http://somethingdaily.com/

George Murray is an award-winning, internationally published, and a much lauded poet, also well known as the man behind Bookninja.com. Whiteout is his sixth book.

Click here for yesterday’s review of and a sample poem from Whiteout.

They’re saying you’ve peaked with this collection. You’re certainly on top of your game. But do you think a writer gets “better” over time of just different?

Peaked?! I certainly hope not. How disappointing that would be! I appreciate the confidence it shows, but it’s one of those killing compliments. I still think of myself in my apprentice phase, which is to say that while this book is good, and while I might be successful in other ways in terms of my “career” as a poet (whatever that means), and am teaching others through various venues, I am also still learning who I am as a poet and what my art will be. I don’t think of being in an apprentice phase as an insult or pejorative judgement, I think of it as an asset. Why does everyone want to grow up so fast?

We kind of throw around these plaudits and blurbs for poets: “brilliant”, “top of their game”, “height of their powers”, etc., all of which are useful for publicity bumf, but which make no justifiable sense in the on-the-ground real world of writing. The most “successful” poets in the world will, over the course of their careers, maybe produce between 20 and 50 indelible poems — poems that are undeniably good and important to understanding the scope of their art. They will be studied in schools for their value to the local literature and traded among admirers for their value to beauty. In terms of poems that are undeniably PERFECT and important to the history of the world, a truly successful poet might get between one and five. I mean, let’s be realistic here. Seamus Heany, Wislawa Szymborska, WS Merwin, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, whomever you hold up as your hero: how many of their poems are actually great? How many are actually “perfect”? Ideally, I’d like to one day create one of these perfect poems. Until then, I’ll get as close to my definitions of good and great as I can. And this is why I still call myself an apprentice.

To actually answer (or avoid) the question: I am getting better over time, but I’ve watched many others get worse. So it’s largely dependent on the poet.

The backcover description and book design play heavily into the title, Whiteout. Explain the title to readers; if the book’s poems share a concept, what is it?

Most of my previous books had a shared concept or throughline, whether in terms of form, imagery, narrative, or that ugly university term, “theme”. I hadn’t really thought of Whiteout in that way, but as I built it, and discussed it with my editor at ECW, Michael Holmes, I realized the book does largely focus on seeking order in chaos. It’s a post-divorce book in much of its subject matter and, as such, plumbs and organizes that chaotic mental space and time, but it’s also about allowing that rampant confusion, grief, and chaotic rebirth to exist within the confines of a life that requires some illusion of dignity, stability, and grace. The cover is monochromatic and the back is clear and clean. Only the bars of colour on the spine show what’s going on inside: chaos and beauty.

Canadian folk band The Once adapted a poem of yours from this collection – “Song for Memory” – into a song. How did the collaboration come to be, and how closely did you work with them in their adapting the words into a song?

We worked fairly closely, passing the melody and words back and forth, and adapting them to fit. There were words in the original poem that just didn’t fit a song. Later, I even decided that many didn’t fit the poem. The poem itself was altered by the song, and made better, just as the melody was altered and made better by the words. It’s an incredibly interesting process and something I’m actively seeking to do more of. Very energizing.

Play the song here:
“Song for Memory” by The Once

In the opening poem, “Dante’s Sheppard,” you “revisit” 15 lines of a famous piece of work by Dante Alighieri. What was it about this piece that spurred you into writing a poem in reaction to it?

Many years ago while living in New York City, I was somehow invited to read as part of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine’s yearly marathon reading of Dante’s Inferno on Maundy Thursday (the day before Good Friday). I was assigned the first half of Canto 24, the canto of thieves, shared with American poet Mark Rudman. I studied the HELL out of that canto over and over in preparation (I read from the Ciardi translation), and having just returned from living in Italy, I began to translate the poem myself, starting with Canto 24. The first fifteen lines are an interesting parable, a respite from the narrative of Hell, in which a shepherd who has no stored grain for his sheep goes out one spring morning and finds the hills covered in frost, which means his flock won’t eat. He gets frustrated and goes inside and has a wee cry and by the time he’s done feeling sorry for himself, the sun has melted the snow. It’s beautiful. When I had a very similar experience of walking to the bank in the cold rain, the bank where I probably had very little money, I instantly made the association and thought, I wish I could write that poem instead of Dante. Well, I just did.

You’re not from Newfoundland, and yet Newfoundland is featured prominently in several of these poems. Has the place absorbed you this much, or are you still observing it with a poet’s eye and pen?

Newfoundland has become home for me. I’m very much here to stay. But place isn’t a primary consideration of my work, I don’t think. I don’t consider myself a “St. John’s” poet, or a “Newfoundland” poet, or even a “Canadian” poet. I’m a poet who writes in English, but I happen to live in Newfoundland, Canada, so these places sometimes appear in my poetry. It’s a rich place, culturally and visually, so it’s bound to have an effect. Would Brampton, Ontario appear in my poems if that’s where I’d ended up? Probably not, but who knows.

Many people claim Newfoundland artists are exceptionally supportive of each other, including those who move here. Would you agree?

The writing and arts community in Newfoundland has been exceptionally kind to me. I don’t know if it has much to do with the arts and more to do with Newfoundlanders. It’s just a kind, considerate, and welcoming place full of kind, considerate, and welcoming people. I know that sounds like a stereotype, but there you go. It’s my experience. I hope I end up like them.

Another common point of rumination in these poems is the passing of time, as seen in some of my favourites here, like “Child’s Play,” and “The Accident.” What’s drawn you to this subject matter?

Dude, I’m 41. One of the aphorisms in my previous book Glimpse read something like, “Turning 40 is like looking up and realizing it’s 2 in the afternoon.”

I think this is the first time you’ve published twice in a row with the same publisher? What are the pros of doing so?

I published twice with McClelland & Stewart and twice now with ECW. ECW has been very good to me in terms of publicity effort and spending real time and money on my book and tour. It’s a no-brainer to work with a press this good. Why would I leave?

Sometimes publishers are like people: you need to go regretfully through a few before you find the right one. After that, you know enough about what you want and don’t want to be happy and to make them happy.

This is where I am in both my personal and publishing lives. It’s kind of nice.

The poems in Whiteout have clearly been crafted with great care over time – not a word of it feels weak, extraneous, or out of place. How long have you been working on this collection to get it so solid? When do you know when a poem is done?

The book itself is comprised of poems from the last 10 years. These are mostly culled from poems I published in magazines and journals, but then edited with an eye to their flow and readability as a book. Several of the obviously divorce related poems are from the last few years, but other than that, they’re from many years of writing between longer projects. Books like Glimpse, The Rush to Here, and The Hunter were large “concept” books that were written as sequences. The work of Whiteout appeared in bits and pieces during this time, but fortunately seemed to be “of a piece” when collected together. I think that’s what they call “voice”, but I’m still skeptical of this.

Is there one writer in particular you’ve learned from, or, a piece of advice that’s stuck?

I am often wary of those platitudes that creative writing programmes foist on their young/new clientele, but there is one that’s always made sense to me: You can’t fix an empty page.

What’s the last great book or two you’ve read?

I quite liked Patrick de Witt’s The Sisters Brothers. It was one of the few well-hyped books I’ve ever read that fully lived up to its accolades. Exceptionally entertaining and thoughtful.

And what is it you’re looking for in a book – poetry fiction or otherwise – when you crack its spine?

I just want one thing in a book: words that won’t let me forget about them on the nightstand. You’d be surprised to see the number of bookmarks I have in shelved titles around my house; set 100 pages, or halfway, in.

Is there one fundamental trait all great writers share?

A heart.

I’m in the camp that literature is supposed to make you feel something, otherwise it’s failed, or at best, cheap entertainment. A good book of poetry is a bridge between a writer’s mind and a reader’s mind, and every once in a while those minds converge over a passage that rattles a reader in a way that’s nothing short of magic. The thing with Murray’s books is the abundance of those magic moments. And it’s no mystery why. A good poet is not just good with stringing words together; they’re good at observing the world, whether they want to be or not, they’re prone to a voyeuristic moment they can make relate to their personal life or extrapolate and prune some higher truth from, without trying — like the way Murray sees a metaphor for aging in his kids’ poorly stacked toy blocks in “Child’s Play.”  The ability to X-ray those moments for meaning, into metaphorical rich and powerful poems, is what makes him shine as a poet.

As expected, Whiteout offers Murray’s prophet-like insight into humanity alongside calculated diction that leaves no word out of place and no poem one line too long. And if what I’m saying is bordering on  hyperbole, go Google reviews of his work — there’s an uncommon authenticity in peoples’ praise of the poignancy of his work. He has an uncanny knack for metaphorically rich writing that captures all the hidden meaning and truth a fleeting moment can hold — in a way that never feels like poetry so much as a well-worded  moment of revelation any of us could have, if we had his words and patience to craft them. There’s something unique about his poems, and more importantly, something powerful that stirs readers, poem after poem after poem.

Sample Poem

Dante’s Shepherd
(Inferno, Canto XXIV, Lines 1-15 Revisited)

At dawn I walk to the bank in the rain,
hood-peak pinned with one blue hand and wrist
forced from its sleeve (while its twin does not deign

to ditch the cuff, but hides instead, a fist
worrying, a clenching/unclenching tide,
mulling its wish to progress and subsist).

The sky clears itself while I am inside,
scuttling the dull clouds of a coastal morning
for white litter on blue with sun cockeyed.

It leans down on the hills as though scorning
any doubt that the universe still lives
without my happiness in bloom, warning,

Look down at those matching hands: where one thieves,
flush with life, if stiff and warming, the other,
also red and aching, only now arrives.

Visit http://audioboo.fm/BrickBooks for a whopping 515 poetry podcasts that feature close to 600 poems read aloud (typically 6 per book). The project was created by the admirable Book Madam herself, Julie Wilson.

There’s also 97 poetry podcasts  included on their YouTube channel as well, featuring some  interviews with their authors and their books. Have a look at http://www.youtube.com/brickbooks

Authors featured in these initiatives include:

Agnes Walsh | Al Moritz | Alexander Hutchison | Ann Scowcroft | Antony Di Nardo | Barry Dempster | Brian Charlton | Brian Henderson | Carla Hartsfield | Carolyn Smart | Catherine Greenwood | Chris Hutchinson | Colin Browne | Cornelia Hoogland | David Bromige | David Seymour | David Waltner-Toews | Dennis Lee | Derk Wynand | Diana Bryden | Don McKay | Douglas Smith | Eve Joseph | Frances Itani | Heather Cadsby | J.A. Hamilton | Jan Conn | Jan Zwicky | Jane Munro | Janice Kulyk Keefer | Jennifer Still | Jesus Lopez Pacheco | John Barton | John Donlan | John Reibetanz | Julia McCarthy | Karen Connelly | Karen Enns | Kim Maltman | Lorri Neilsen Glenn | Lyn King | Lynn Davies | M. Travis Lane | Margaret Avison | Marianne Bluger | Maureen Harris | Maureen Hynes | Meira Cook | Michael Kenyon | Naomi Guttman | Neile Graham | Nico Rogers | Pain Not Bread | Patrick Friesen | Randall Maggs | Rhonda Batchelor | Ross Leckie |S.E. Venart | Stephanie Bolster | Steve McOrmond | Steve Noyes | Steven Price | Susan Elmslie | Sue Sinclair | Sue Wheeler | Terry Humby | Tim Lilburn | Nadine McInnis | Monty Reid | Brenda Leifso

Whiteout (ECW); By George Murray

Whiteout Made Quill & Quire‘s poetry bestsellers’ list 2 weeks before it was even on the shelves, and yes, it’s that good. I got a review copy in the mail yesterday, and a bout of strep throat has me slowed down enough to really savour it. This is Murray’s sixth book of poetry, and he’s won or been shortlisted for several awards. He’s also regularly introduced as The Bookninja Guy, but My God should that be secondary to his being one of the top 5 poets in a country crawling with talented poets.

Kudos to publishers for all the short fiction I’m seeing this year — it was never the reader saying we didn’t want this stuff.

Also: what a  trend towards wacky CanLit in 2012.

Ablutions (Anansi), a novel by Patrick DeWitt

2011′s big book of the year — and a personal favourite — was undoubtedly DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers. Anansi have just released his first novel, Ablutions. I don’t think it’s been available in Canada until now?

Ablutions is a dark, boozy, and hilarious tale from the LA underworld. A nameless barman tends a decaying bar in Hollywood and takes notes for a book about his clientele. Initially, he is morbidly amused by watching the regulars roll in and fall into their nightly oblivion, pitying them and their loneliness. In hopes of uncovering their secrets and motives, he establishes tentative friendships with them. He also knocks back pills indiscriminately and treats himself to gallons of Jameson’s. But as his tenure at the bar continues, he begins to lose himself, trapped by addiction and indecision. When his wife leaves him, he embarks on a series of squalidly random sexual encounters and a downward spiral of self-damage and irrational violence. To cleanse himself and save his soul, he attempts to escape …

A Blessed Snarl (Breakwater Books), a novel by Samuel Thomas Martin

Sam Martin moved to Newfoundland after an undergrad degree sparked an interest in Atlantic fiction, namely Michael Crummey and Alistair MacLeod. Since moving here, his work’s been very well received, and his last book, This Ramshackle Tabernacle, was a finalist for the Winterset Award for Excellence in Newfoundland Writing, and a finalist for the ReLit.

Patrick Wiseman moved his wife and son back to Newfoundland to start a new Pentecostal church, but when his wife Anne leaves him for a man she meets on Facebook and his son Hab moves in with his girlfriend Natalie—a burgeoning alcoholic with a fiery past—Patrick takes a suicidal leap of faith that brings him face to face with his estranged father Des, a Catholic mystic who might be covering up an old crime.  While Patrick wrestles to come to terms with his failed marriage, Hab struggles to hang on to his tenuous relationship with Natalie. But when a woman is almost burned alive in a nearby house fire and a neighborhood drunk is beaten within an inch of life, Hab begins to wonder if Natalie and her housemate Gerry know more than they let on.

Mad Hope (Coach House), Short Fiction by Heather Birrell

Heather Birrell is a three-time Journey Prize finalist (and 2007′s winner). Not much more to say to entice you to check out her new collection. Except that she’s been shortlisted for National and Western Magazine Awards as well, in addition to other accolades. There’s already a lot of hype swelling around this one.

A science teacher and former doctor is forced to re-examine the role he played in Ceauşescu’s Romania after a student makes a shocking request; a tragic plane crash becomes the basis for a meditation on motherhood and its discontents; women in an online chat group share (and overshare) their anxieties and personal histories; and a chance encounter in a waiting room tests the ties that bind us. Using precise, inventive language, Birrell creates astute and empathetic portraits of people we thought we knew – and deftly captures the lovely, maddening mess of being human.

An Instruction Manual for Swallowing (ECW), short fiction by Adam Marek

Adam Marek won the 2011 Arts Foundation Short Story Fellowship and was shortlisted for the inaugural Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. This story collection was also  nominated for the Frank O’Connor Prize in 2007; this is the Canadian release.

An engaging new voice in absurdist fiction. A new North American edition of an acclaimed short story collection, Instruction Manual for Swallowing explores what happens when ordinary people collide with bizarre, fantastical situations. A man discovers he has testicular cancer on the day that a Godzilla–like monster attacks the city he lives in; a kitchen–hand is put under terrible peer pressure in a restaurant for zombies; a husband and wife discover they are pregnant with 37 babies; and a man travels into the engine room of his own body to discover Busta Rhymes at the controls. The 14 stories are grotesque, hilarious, unnerving, and moving. No matter how outrageous the subject matter of the stories, they have at their heart genuine human experiences that are common to us all.

The Land of Decoration (HarperCollins), a novel by Grace McCleen

Musician Grace McCleen’s debut novel might be one of the most hyped books of the spring. Elle Magazine called it rapturous, ” The first sentence sets the tone for this rapturous, daringly imaginative tale of love, loss, and salvation.”

Ten-year-old Judith McPherson is a believer. Her world is carefully constructed around her faith: nightly scripture reading with her father, weekly gatherings at the Meeting Hall and daily proselytizing to the lost. With no TV and no books “of the world” to entertain her, she passes time by creating The Land of Decoration, a model in miniature of The Promised Land which she has made of collected discarded scraps—divine treasures that she squirrels away.

But Judith’s troubles are mounting. At school, Neil Lewis’s relentless terrorizing has reached a feverish, dangerous pitch and, in town, a strike threatens the factory where her father works. One Sunday night, terrified of the violence that awaits her in the halls on Monday, Judith conjures a snowstorm in The Land of Decoration made of shaving cream, cotton and cellophane. The next morning the ground outside her window is a crisp, dazzling white. Judith can perform miracles. In fact, she might just be God’s chosen instrument. But with power comes weighty consequences, and Judith must face them head on to keep her faith—and her family—alive.

With its intensely taut storytelling and gorgeous prose, The Land of Decoration is a harrowing story of good and evil, belonging and isolation, faith and doubt, and it introduces us to a classic new heroine. It’s a novel that gives us many incredible gifts, but its most exciting is the gift of Grace McCleen, a brilliant, heartbreaking new voice in fiction.

The Last Hiccup (ECW), A Novel by Christopher Meades

Meades’ last book — The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark — was well known for being a product of the 3-Day Novel Contest that actually went places. In 2009, his short story “The Walking Lady” won the Advisor’s Prize in Fiction, and Meades has also won a 2008 fiction contest staged by the Vancouver Province.

A darkly funny, tragic, and ultimately heroic novel set in 1930s Russia, The Last Hiccup is the story of Vladimir, an eight–year–old boy stricken with a case of the hiccups — that lasts over a decade. Put through a series of extraordinary, often bizarre treatments by a famous physician, Sergei Namestikov, Vlad is spirited away from his rural home and doting mother to a hospital in Moscow. But Sergei’s chief medical rival, the brilliant Alexander Afiniganov, believes that beneath Vladimir’s mirror–less eyes lurks a pure, unbridled evil, and Vlad is removed from polite society. Isolated from everyone and everything — save his hiccups — Vladimir grows up to find inner peace among the hiccupping. On his way back into the world he once knew, through a country now in the midst of war, he encounters many strange people and situations, and worries about what would happen to him should a cure for his now–comforting affliction be found.

Floating like the Dead (McClelland & Stewart), Short Fiction by Yasuko Thanh

The title story of this collection won the 2009 Journey Prize, and her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Prairie Fire, Descant, PRISM, and Vancouver Review. She was a finalist for the Future Generations Millennium Prize, the Hudson Prize, and the David Adams Richards Prize, which recognizes unpublished manuscripts.

In this sharply observed and erotically charged debut collection, Journey Prize-winner Yasuko Thanh immerses us in the lives of people on the knife edge of desire and regret, hungry for change yet still yearning for a place to call home, if only for a little while.
 
In a story set in 1960s Germany and crackling with sexual tension, a young woman on the verge of making a life-changing decision is sent to work as a homemaker for a farmer and his family while his wife is away. When his dying lover becomes convinced he is being visited by a ghost, a man is forced to confront his own fears about being left behind. In a Mexican resort town where anything goes, a woman searching for a place to belong pushes herself to the limits of love and despair. And in the Journey Prize-winning story “Floating Like the Dead,” a group of Chinese lepers spend their last days dreaming of escape after they are exiled to a remote island off the coast of B.C., at the turn of the twentieth century.

Many of the characters in these stories are expats, outlaws, and outsiders, some by choice, others by circumstance. Yet in their struggles to be themselves and to belong, they remind us of our own deepest longings and desires. With this seductive and emotionally compelling collection, Yasuko Thanh announces herself as an exciting new voice in Canadian fiction.

The Rest is Silence (Goose Lane), A Novel by Scott Fotheringham

Scott Fotheringham used his experience as a research scientist in New York to write this novel … he holds a PhD from Cornell University in molecular genetics, and left Manhattan and a life in science to live in the country.

In the backwoods of Nova Scotia, a man slowly withdraws himself from the world. He fills his days with planting a garden. Building a cabin. Carving out friendships. Falling in love. His nights are for storytelling. A saga of youthful passions, of idealism and hope, of science and rebellion. Outside the forest, news reports trickle in. A worldwide catastrophe is brewing. People are frightened. Governments are in turmoil. The future is uncertain. And as the story unfolds, we learn the consequences of believing we were ever ready to open Pandora’s Box.

Bold of theme, sensual of language, and astonishing in its implications, The Rest is Silence is a stunning achievement.

People Who Disappear (Freehand), Short Fiction by Alex Leslie

Leslie’s short fiction has been published in many Canadian literary journals and in the Best Canadian Stories anthology series. She has won a Gold National Magazine Award for personal journalism and a CBC Literary Award for fiction.

An oil spill on the West Coast coincides with a loved one’s death. An enigmatic young musician experiences the rise and fall of his career, as told through videos posted to YouTube.

Sometimes romantic, sometimes elegiac, Alex Leslie’s coastal stories take place in ocean inlets and city streets. Haunted as much by technology as by their own ghosts, Leslie’s characters face the disappearance of sanity, love, and landscape. An electric, poetic debut.

Click here to read Salty Ink’s review of Whirl Away.

Click here to read Salty Ink’s interview with Russell about Whirl Away and more.

“BOLT”

The bolt came through the open back window of the truck. It came in end over end. From a distance, if anyone had been watching it, concentrating, it might actually have appeared that the truck was doing the tumbling, and that the bolt was flying perfectly straight.

Just a rusty bolt John had found in the driveway, a bolt that he’d tossed in the back of the pickup with the duffle bags and the mitre saw and the rest of his stuff.

He didn’t hear the bolt whisper as it spun, the rushing air whistling along the even gaps of the threads; he had his hands full trying to figure out just what was happening to the pickup as it cut through the bright pink flowering fireweed, the truck leaving a four-wheeled, mown trail behind it, the wheels throwing up grass and mud and the petals of the flowers.

The bolt caught him in the curve at the back of his skull, at the midline and just below his hair, hitting that smooth dent where a lover might rest the heel of her hand. John had a brief moment to think about what-if—what if he hadn’t reached across the seat towards the glove compartment, what if he hadn’t over-corrected when the wheels touched the shoulder. He didn’t even get to “What if I hadn’t put the bolt in the back?” or more importantly, “Why did it fly so straight?” or “What are the chances of that happening?”

The bolt was still moving at close to a hundred kilometres an hour, the same speed the truck had been going before the front end smashed nose first into the bank. John, safely held in the grasp of the seat belt, had slowed as quickly as the truck had. He didn’t feel the bolt hit. John, for once, didn’t feel anything at all.

The truck ended up on its roof, one wheel crookedly spinning long after the other three had stopped, and no one noticed the wreck until the next morning. Then a long-haul driver, riding high up in the cab of his Freightliner, saw the rusting bottom of the chassis standing out against the green and pink of the fireweed, rectangular and ochre and perched on the edge of a small peaty stream. There was already cold dew on the windshield when the driver waded down through the high plants to look through the window on the driver’s side.

“John was coming home,” Bev said.

“No, he wasn’t.”

“Yes he was, bitch. He was on his way here when he crashed. He was coming home for good. Why do you think he had all his stuff?”

“You’re lying.” Anne said the words quickly, as if saying them could force the doubt away, but she heard the tremble in her own voice—and she hated herself for betraying that feeling, even slightly. Because she hadn’t known where he was going. Sleeping, caught up in the false, warm security of comforter, sheets and pillow, she hadn’t even realized he had left.

They were speaking in undertones, barely more than hissing the words, aware that there were other people in the funeral home but focused on each other. Outside, the sun had come out around a huge grey bank of cloud, and individual shafts of sunlight were sifting down onto the surface of Bay Bulls, lighting irregular, ragged patches of ocean as if the light actually meant to single something out amongst the choppy grey waves.

Bev was small and blond and strangely angular. She gave the sense of always having her elbows in close to her sides and her hands up high, as if spoiling for a fight. That, and she finished her sentences by pushing her face forwards, like she was punctuating her words with her chin, daring the other person to disagree. It was the sort of habit that some people found off-putting, as much of a shove as if she had reached out and pushed them with both hands palm-flat against their chest.

Whenever she saw Bev, whenever she spoke with the other woman, Anne was always left with the same disconcerting thought: just how had John ever ended up married to her? It made her wonder if there was some kind of hidden, underlying character flaw in him that she knew nothing about, or that she was trying to ignore. When she asked John about it, after they’d moved in together, he would shrug. “I was young, okay?” he would say, as if that was excuse enough. “We were both young.”

But she found that hard to accept—trying to imagine how it was that someone as easygoing as John would choose to marry someone so abrasive. Other people offered up old sayings like “Opposites attract,” but Anne couldn’t see it.

“No, really,” she’d ask him. “How’d you even get in the same room with each other, let alone end up married?”

And John would do what he always did, pushing his hands through the hair at his temples, where it grew coarser and with slightly more curl than on the rest of his head. It was a motion that always dislodged flecks of fugitive sawdust from the day’s work with the sander or fine curls of shavings from the planer. There was always sawdust on him somewhere, Anne knew, fragrant small chips that gave him an unexpected air of solidity, the green of birch, the closer, sticky familiarity of pine—a smell that was as much him as any other. He’d push his hands through his hair once or twice every time, but it was a way of saying that he wouldn’t answer, that the conversation was done. It was a signal that he was about to shut down. It was the one thing about him that she found infuriating — the ability to stop any discussion by withdrawing completely. He’d always done it, even before they’d moved into the old green house on the side of the hill, before he’d put up the new clapboard and trim on the outside, before he’d taken every single window down and replaced it with a new one. Before he’d built the walkway and the tidy, hiphigh white fence with the gate and the big deck where they sometimes sat late into the night and looked out over the water at the wide white strip of reflected moonlight.

Russell Wangersky is the multi-award-winning author of The Hour of Bad Decisions, Burning Down the House, The Glass Harmonica, and as of this month, Whirl Away.

Read Salty Ink’s review of Whirl Away here: http://saltyink.com/2012/04/04/salty-ink-on-russell-wangerskys-whirl-away/

In what ways has being a journalist helped you be a better writer?

Being a journalist – particularly in print – has helped tremendously, first, because it means I’m always working with words. That helps with finding the right language, with pace and pitch, it’s just a huge value to other writing. The other thing it helps with is concentration: every newsroom I’ve ever worked in has been noisy and chaotic – if you can write in that clamour, slipping into a story in the relative quiet of your own home seems far easier.

The authenticity of your characters is both commendable and notable, like how Dennis in “McNally’s Fair” knew everything that can go wrong with a rollercoaster and how to cheat your way into passing a safety inspection. Is it just a matter of meticulous research, an inherent need to be accurate, or has your day job made you an all-around trivia buff know-it-all?

My day job involves paying attention all the time, and poking into scores of things that I find interesting. I worked with a firefighter for several years who was a pressure vessel inspector – it sets you to thinking about what that involves. In order to do my job, I have to see things, and I have to talk to people about what they do, how they do it, and what they find irritating. Luckily, that’s become a skill I never turn off. It bugs family members sometimes, who wonder why I have to talk on and on with everyone I meet, but it’s hugely valuable.

Pick three stories from the collection, and tell us where the idea came from or what you were setting out to capture:

“Echo” — it’s a story that started while I was out running, when I ran past a small boy who said as clear as a bell “You don’t care what I think.” That made me wonder: what is his world like? Where do those adult words come from? Most of my stories start that way: trying to answer the question “what if you took that to the logical extreme?”

“Sharp Corner” — The idea actually came from a small piece of road just outside of St. John’s where there have been a series of accidents on what should be a relatively easy-to-navigate gentle curve. There’s a house right on that corner, and, after passing it a few times, I began to wonder what it would be like to live there.

“I Like” — I actually quite like cooking, and wondered what a relationship would be like if someone began to replace their need for physical contact with a kind sensual relationship with food.

You’re writing both shorts and novels – when an idea or character comes to you, how do you decide whether it’d be best served as a short or a novel?

I almost always think things will end up being longer than they are — if I think an idea might be a 5,000 word short story, even if I think it’s going to be that length right while I’m in the middle of writing it, it tends to come to a relatively quick end as soon as I understand just how it’s going to end. I like to make the characters, let them do their thing, and bring the piece to a close when they’ve decided what’s going to happen. I’m not a writer who does long-term planning of narrative arcs with maps or models – I don’t enjoy that, because I always feel that you end up forcing your characters to do things that they might not, if you let them do the talking. So, I guess that, in reality, I let the characters and the issue decide whether it’s a story or a novel – and I’ve only had limited experience with novels.

I find, personally, delivering a powerful short story is harder than writing a powerful novel. Why do YOU think that is?

I’m not sure I do: I think it’s harder to deliver a powerful collection of short stories, because there are so many different kinds of readers, and it’s hard to deliver a collection that people consistently enjoy – everyone has favourites, and ones they don’t like. The beauty of short stories, to me, is that as a writer you can sit and work and hold the whole thing in your head – you never lose your place or have to go back and see where and when things happen.

Do you have any favorite short stories, collections, or short story writers?

Oh, that changes a lot. Right now, I’m really taken with three short-story collections: Dan Chaon’s Stay Awake, the horrendously harsh but intriguing Guilt — Stories by Ferdinand von Schirach and Zsuszi Gartner’s wonderful Better Living Through Plastic Explosives.

Is there one book you wish you wrote, or, learned a lot from as a writer?

I think the book I learned the most from was Alistair MacLeod’s The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, which I first read in high school. It was the first book that actually sent the message that the things that were happening in the close world around me could actually have a broader value to others.

There’s certainly a thematic link in all these stories – people with one foot past their tipping point. Was this intentional, to write a suite of stories around a concept, or are you always writing stories, and grouped these together for their theme? Do you prefer themed collections as a reader?

I think themed collections and linked stories seem to be more popular with publishers — perhaps because they feel that it’s one way to try and subvert readers who the publisher believe are more attracted to novels. In Whirl Away, the theme came after the stories – they just seemed to naturally group together after the fact. I like both kinds – except sometimes, you run into collections that stretch too far to make the theme work. And that can actually weaken the package.

What’s the one story from this collection that’s stayed with you the most? Any reason why?

For me, “Echo” — just because the boy in that story seems to be so caught in the way his whole life will unfold. And that’s a tragedy.

You’ve done very well with awards recognition, and have been well-reviewed. But what’s been one comment from media so far that you just couldn’t wrap your head around?

I know that journalists and reviewers have busy lives and many other duties — by far the strangest comment I had to deal with, in terms of just leaving me stunned, was when I was on private radio in Halifax for my memoir Burning Down the House. I was on a call-in show, and the host sat me down, an ad started to run, and he said “I haven’t read anything except the back cover. You’ve got 30 seconds to fill me in on what it’s about.” I think I wasted 10 of those seconds with my mouth hanging open.

This is your third book in a row by the fantastic Thomas Allen. Have you worked with the same editor each time, and is that a good thing, that familiarity with each other?

I’ve worked with Janice Zawerbny for all three: she is a very gentle editor, although one that just politely won’t give up when she sees a problem. We get along very well, and it is a good thing – you get an idea when either of you is uncomfortable with something. You also get to know the mechanics of the publishing house pretty well, and that helps a lot if anything gets in a jam – you know who and when to call.

You’re writing books at quite a pace: 1 every 2 years since 2006. You’ve probably got another one well underway, do you?

I’ve just finished the first draft of a novel – but a first draft that still has a lot of work to be done, because it is quite a peculiar thing. I like writing much more than editing – and I like to be working on something all the time. It means the house doesn’t get painted, but I do manage to get potatoes in the ground in the spring.

Whirl Away is the fourth book by multi-award-winning author and journalist Russell Wangersky, and his powerful body of work has been more than enough to mark him as one of the biggest players in the booming Newfoundland literary scene. Funnily enough, for a “come from away” who moved here, his fiction, as much as anyone’s, embodies the traits that historically define Newfoundland fiction: a meticulous attention to detail, and a fearless foray into raw human psyche. The resulting darkness – be it disturbing, disarming, or tender – reveals the core of humanity that binds us all: a need to connect in a world where the big things in life are beyond us, resting in the hands of fate.

No matter what their situation, the characters in Whirl Away have one foot in a whirlpool threatening to tug them into darkness. Only some pull back in time. As the backcover puts it: it’s a collection of stories about people whose coping mechanisms have failed. In the opening story, “Bolt,” a man’s car is found over turned  between his current partner’s and ex wife’s house; each woman is left wanting to believe it was their house he was heading towards, and each woman has reasons to doubt herself. In “Echo,” a child, polluted by his parents’ toxic relationship, plays on his patio; oblivious to the irrevocable change that’s happening around him. In “911” a man is punished for breaking protocol to do the right thing. In “No Harm, No Foul” a traveling salesman realizes just how isolated and alone he is when he lets his mind wander too far with the latest hitchhiker in his car.

What stands out, as always with Wangersky book, is his dazzling diction. In a backcover endorsement, Sarah Selecky writes, “These stories are written with an uncommon care and patience.” He is, quite simply, one of the finest sentence-level writers in CanLit. And his ability to map the emotional terrain of his characters is uncanny; it’s as though he’s sat and interviewed his characters before writing their stories. Alongside that skill, and synergistically augmenting it, is the authenticity of his characters. Whether it’s a maintenance man’s in-depth knowledge of everything that can go wrong with a rollercoaster, and how to cheat your way through a safety inspection in “McNally’s Fair,” or knowing how a crime scene investigator could unveil the truth behind a car crash because of how tiny beads of glass formed on a filament (in “911”), these are exceptionally authentic, convincing, and well-researched stories. You’re not left wondering a thing about who this people are, what motivates them, and what they long for.  And you shouldn’t be.  He’s also a champion of the powerfully metaphoric closing line that bangs like a cymbal, but subtly, in summing up the core of the story.

One approach to writing a short story is to take a single moment and magnify it, exposing all of its physical and emotional details until that moment is exploding with a resonant story. That’s Wangersky’s gift here, and his stories linger after you’ve read them. Lastly, should you be a writer reading this review: educate yourself. There’s a lot a writer can learn from reading Wangersky’s descriptions and carefully crafted fiction.

Kerri Cull, curator of the fine book blog, The Book Fridge, put out a debut collection of poems this spring, called Soak. It’s an admirable, accessible, enjoyable read for pretty much everyone, given its truly universal appeal, and like any good collection, there’s a fair share of lines to stop you dead in your tracks and tip your hat to her poetic prowess, and insight into what makes a moment explode with enough meaning to mull over. In a previous article I did with Kerri, she  told me “Soak follows the life of one woman from childhood to death … Divided into three sections, the collection asks questions about the nature of identity, our connections with place and home, love and death.”

It’s written in three conceptual sections: Stretch, she’s told me, “refers to stretching toward something.  Its poems are about first experiences, innocence, and imagination.” the second section, Run focuses on “running toward what we will become, that part of your life where you have your first adult experiences, the time when you feel strong, powerful and certain.” The book closes with Bend, which “hosts poems that are about bending toward the end of something such as a period in your life, a relationship, death, be it yours or someone else’s.  The last poem tells the story of the speaker on the day of her own death.”

Read a poem from each section here: http://saltyink.com/2012/03/14/a-perfect-introduction-to-kerri-culls-soak-from-kerri-herself/

Share a title of a great book you’ve read so far in 2012.

Glass Boys by Nicole Lundrigan

What are you reading right now?

Why Men Lie by Linden MacIntyre, Mad Hope by Heather Birrell, Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, Grace Must Wander by Stephanie McKenzie

Without struggling for favourites, who are some Atlantic Canadian poets you admire?

Randall Maggs, Robin McGrath, Michael Crummey

Fiction writers?

Wayne Johnston, Jessica Grant, Joel Thomas Hynes, Michelle Butler Hallett, Sara Tilley

Poetry, fiction, whatever: What are you looking for in a book when you crack its spine?

A good story.  It doesn’t have to be complex but it needs to be intimate, authentic and solid.  I want to experience something when I open a book. I don’t want to necessarily read a book because of dedication to craft; I want to remember a character, have a reaction.

What’s been a highlight so far for you and your brand new book?

A couple months ago I had a chance to go into my old high school and do some poetry workshops. It was the first time I stepped into that building since I graduated in 1997.  The students were so gracious and fun. We had a great time.

That same week I read at the March Hare in Corner Brook.  I participated about ten years ago as the “new poet” and this was the first time a new poet came back as an established author.  Being recognized like that by the Hare was really amazing.

What’s one piece of writing advice you’ve heard that’s really stuck?

To keep at it.

You published Soak with Breakwater Books. One of their best known writers was Al Pittman. What’s this I hear about you having learned a few things from Al? How did you two meet?

I did my undergrad degree at Grenfell in Corner Brook and while I wasn’t failing math for the second time or figuring out how to wear pants to the skirt-above-the-knee nights at the Studio and still get free drinks, I worked as a bartender at Casual Jack’s Roadhouse, a small pub that hosted arts events. Al was there on my first shift and he was there when I did my last. During that year, especially when it was slow, we’d sit at the end of the bar smoking, talking about poetry and exchanging stories.  He would red-pen my work and write little poems on napkins.

What sparked this concept for a collection of poems?

When I had a body of work I discovered a narrative thread so I felt that there could be some separation between the stages almost like chapters in a novel. I also wanted a trace of a storyline that readers could follow.  I’ve noticed, too, that readers tend to connect to the sections that represent their present life stage.

To quote “Make-Up”:

“She used to look like a doll, wore glasses at three:
big innocent eyes had no idea what they would see.”

What is it we all revere about childhood, and what is lost as we move into adulthood?

I think we can learn a lot from children, how they live in the moment and take things at face value.  They’re generally happy unless we do something to mess them up.  To pull from fiction: look at Wayne Johnston’s characters, Deacon Druken and Bobby O’Malley, We revere them for their innocent take on the world which is lost as we age and move into adulthood with all its stresses and responsibilities. It’s what makes his books so good. We fall in love with these characters in the same way we fall in love with the children in our own lives.

Most poetry fixates on emotional explorations of memories, or moments, or the natural world. Soak seems big on physical experience, the physical world, and descriptions thereof. For example, the fingerprint on the wine glass in “Mark,” or these lines, “Our skin is all over that apartment—
ledge corners, tops of door frames, book spines—
remaining silently the same.”

Was writing about the physical world a conscious effort?

I think it’s common for us to have trouble centering ourselves in that we’re always thinking about the future or the past or whatever.  Like Esther Greenwood in Plath’s The Bell Jar, I think we grapple with the Self at some point or another—what we want, the different paths our lives can take, who we want to be versus whom we feel we should be.  Esther’s Mind/Body disconnect is very wide and gets wider as her depression worsens.  I think we all have that potential to lose sight of our Self.  Focusing on the physical world—nature, our bodies, our senses–and using that to help us appreciate daily life can help keep the Self intact.

You’re teaching English these days. What if you weren’t a teacher? What’s one profession that got away?

Something that has to do with Women’s Rights.  Not sure what.  I got lots of working years left in me yet so maybe something like that will happen.  Who knows.

You’re working on a collection of short stories now, correct? Halfway done a collection yet? Can you tell us anything about it?

I haven’t really accomplished much with that yet.  The stories are mostly drafts of ideas.  I feel like an arsehole just saying that I’m working on a collection… it’s more of a grab bag of potential stories. Nothing to tell yet.

You run a great book blog over at The Book Fridge. I often ask myself why I sink so much unpaid time into a book blog. I have no answer beyond passion, excitement, and knowing books need a voice to get sold. What makes you blog books?

To talk about books.  To motivate readers to try new genres.  To get people reading.  Selfishness.  Love.

Every year The John and Margaret Savage First Book award is awarded to the very best of Atlantic Canada’s new voices. This year in particular I commend the jury’s good taste and eye for fresh new fiction …

Heather Jessup currently teaches “really smart and stylish students ” in the English Department at Dalhousie University. Before that, she was co-editor and publisher of Delirium Press chapbooks with Griffin Prize finalist, Kate Hall. In addition to being up for this award, I think her bio on her website should win an award. And congrats to her for being shortlisted for this year’s PRISM International short fiction award.

Click Here for an interview with Heather

The Lightning Field follows the lives of Peter and Lucy Jacobs from their post-war courtship through marriage and child-rearing in the suburbs. Though spanning four decades, the book pivots on the events of a single day: October 4, 1957. On this day, the Russians launch Sputnik into orbit, the Avro Arrow—the most advanced jet plane of its time, whose wings Peter Jacobs has engineered … in a nearby field, Lucy Jacobs is struck by lightning on her way to the event. In the aftermath of that day, Peter struggles with his wife’s hospitalization and recovery, the care of their children. Their children—Kier, Andy and Rose—grow up in the sheltered cul-de-sacs of their Toronto suburb, troubled by the disappointments of their parents’ world, yet drawn to the infinite possibilities inspired by Laika the space dog and the mysteries of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. If so much of what their parents hoped for in life seemed ultimately out of reach, how will this next generation of dreamers find their way? The Lightning Field is about loss and unexpected offerings, personal dismantling and reassembly.

Riel Nason’s The Town that Drowned is also on another shortlist over at the Canadian Library Association’s awards. Her short fiction has been published by The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review, Grain, and The Dalhousie Review.

Click here for a chat with Riel about her book

Living with a weird brother in a small town can be tough enough. Having a spectacular fall through the ice at a skating party and nearly drowning are grounds for embarrassment. But having a vision and narrating it to the assembled crowd solidifies your status as an outcast. What Ruby Carson saw during that fateful day was her entire town — buildings and people — floating underwater. Then an orange-tipped surveyor stake turns up in a farmer’s field. Another is found in the cemetery. A man with surveying equipment is spotted eating lunch near Pokiok Falls. The residents of Haventon soon discover that a massive dam is being constructed and that most of their homes will be swallowed by the rising water. Suspicions mount, tempers flare, and secrets are revealed. As the town prepares for its own demise, 14-year-old Ruby Carson sees it all from a front-row seat. Set in the 1960s, The Town That Drowned evokes the awkwardness of childhood, the thrill of first love, and the importance of having a place to call home. Deftly written in a deceptively unassuming style, Nason’s keen insights into human nature and the depth of human attachment to place make this novel ripple in an amber tension of light and shadow.

Michael Murphy has been published in The Fiddlehead, The Windsor Review, and filling Station. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Windsor, and is currently studying at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.

He also put out an album with his brother (and frontman of the band Wintersleep) in 2010, under the name Postdata, which I’ve written quite a bit of fiction to. Here’s ‘Tobias Grey” off that album

After Morgan Wells’s wife leaves him, a postcard from France arrives. It is addressed to a Morgan Wells—but not the Morgan Wells who receives it. Desperate to be led out of his despair, Morgan decides to read the postcard as a sign and embark upon a surreal journey to find, observe, and meet the other Morgan Wellses in the city of Toronto. On the day that a 2003 citywide power outage submerges Toronto in darkness, a teenage boy finds a missive of his own: a copy of Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, one of the first science fiction novels ever written. The boy, obsessed with the Choose Your Own Adventure series, interprets the coincidence of finding the book during the blackout as a premonition, and begins looking for proof that the end of the world is near. A Description of the Blazing World interlaces two narratives in a novel about the city in the new millennium: a crowded space that incubates signs of an apocalypse that never quite materializes. But it is this very threat of imminent danger—that everything could go up in blazes—that drives a reclusive man and a lonely boy to search for their respective revelations.

Damian Lethbridge of AM/FM Dreams on “Red Milk White Meat” off Their 2012 RPM Challenge Album Red Milk

“This was the first song recorded for AM/FM Dreams 2012 RPM Challenge album Red Milk. We wanted to do something really different for this album. We started with the idea of using no guitar on the record to get us out of our comfort zone, although we still ended up using an acoustic on five of the twelve tracks. I just recently started playing violin and picked up piano accordion so I wanted to incorporate those instruments in the song which created this pseudo-creepy atmosphere. There’s something unsettling about the squeak of the violin strings as played by a novice and the click of the accordion keys which are audible at various points in the track. This song really set the tone for the rest of the album.

The lyrics were inspired by an older gentlemen I know who lives in my neighbourhood. I visit him from time to time and he regales me with stories from his glory days as a security guard and tells me about his problems with his health, family and dilapidated old house. It’s like everything around him is always collapsing. I just started writing down lines and phrases he would say to me and that ended up being most of the lyrical content for this song.

I also had a terrible cold for most of February so I think that contributed to the worn down, defeated sound in the vocals on this song which fit the narrative. That’s the thing about RPM, you’ve only got one month to make the album so you play the cards you’re dealt and try to make potential setbacks work for you.”

Photo by Bryhanna Greenough

Rebecca South of The Drows on “Melody” off Her 2012 RPM Challenge Album Picking Flowers

“A favorite song, that is a toughy. To be totally honest I’m not sure my favorite song has been recorded yet. However, I have many songs which make me feel quite cheerful and smiley. I find this is usually the case when I sit down and write. I almost always write a song while I am in a relatively good/great mood therefore they never really turn out to be sad. Perhaps my next challenge will be something of a more somber quality. I’m up for it!

The song I’m going to pick is actually the first song that I was wonderfully happy with. It took me less than an hour to write as words came wafting in one after the other followed by the tune. The song is called Melody. I was surrounded by oodles of music at the time as it was the end of the RPM challenge and the beginning of Lawnya Vawnya festival when I wrote it. Melody is about how the night has its own unique song though it eventually blends into the sights and sounds that dawn may bring thus resulting in a sort of perpetual cycle. I would have to say it was the first song I felt confident singing in a public setting. Another added bonus was having Andrea McGuire and Shona Stacey’s lovely harmonies which simply made for a wonderfully full and beautiful sound.”

Mo Kenney on “Eden” off her upcoming album she’s currently working on with Joel Plaskett

“I wrote this song when I was 17. I’m happy with the way it turned out. I was sitting in my living room fiddling around with a guitar part I had come up with a while before, and after coming up with a melody words sort of just appeared. I like it because it came about pretty effortlessly and naturally. It was like the song already existed and I just had to pluck the words out of the air. I love when songwriting happens like that, it’s very satisfying. ”

Kat McLevey on “Friend in Me” off her 2012 RPM Challenge Album Turn Here, My Friend

Bonus Song to Blow Your Mind: Ben Caplan’s As Yet Unreleased “40 Days and 40 Nights”

I discovered this song a few days ago, and Ben is on a world tour, somewhere between the States and The Netherlands, so I didn’t bother emailing him. The song speaks for itself, and the performance so impassioned Ben losses glasses and breaks a strap.

Don McKay wins the 2011 BMO Winterset Award!

Stellar poet and essayist Don McKay is up one more award today, and it’s a big one, for his collection of essays, The Shell of the Tortoise: Four Essays and an Assemblage. These essays “continue his investigation into the relationship between poetry and wilderness.”

The prize is worth $10,000, plus $2,500 to the other two finalists, making it one of the richest regional awards in Canada. It rewards the very best book out of Newfoundland & Labrador every year, based solely on excellence of writing. Considering it considers all genres, in a province known for its outrageous literary talent, this is one of the most flattering awards to win, period.

He had, as always, stiff competition on the shortlist, trumping Ed Riche from being the first male to win this award twice, with Easy to Like. Fellow poet Mark Callanan, one of the country’s finest under 40, was marked by many as the one to take it this year, with Gift Horse.

This year’s jury of 39 books was a damn good one: Noreen Golfman, Kevin Major, and Lisa Moore. This was also the first year a book of essays won this award

Don McKay is a poet, teacher and editor. He has published about a dozen books in a career that spans four decades. He has twice won the Governor General’s Literary Awards for poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip in 2007. His previous essay collections include the GG-shortlisted Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness and Deactivated West 100. McKay lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.

List of Previous Winners

2010 — Russell Wangersky – The Glass Harmonica
2009 — Jessica Grant – Come, Thou Tortoise
2008 — Randall Maggs – Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems
2007 — Kathleen Winter – boYs
2006 — Kenneth J. Harvey – Inside
2005 — Joan Clark – An Audience of Chairs
2004 — Ed Riche – The Nine Planets
2003 — Robert Mellin – Tilting
2002 — Joan Clark – The Word for Home
2001 — Michael Crummey – The River Thieves
2000 — Michael Winter – This All Happened

This year’s shortlists for the Atlantic Book Awards are just out. I’ve noticed two things:

1.) There’s some great fiction here you should all check out

2.) The heavy hitter, the $20,000 Thomas Head Raddall award for the best novel by an Atlantic Canadian, is missing, as is the Atlantic Poetry Prize. I’m hunting down an explanation. Maybe they’ve gone their own way? I hope they haven’t simply vanished.

Here they are, minus the children’s and non-fiction ones (genres outside of Salty Ink’s scope):

APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award, sponsored by Friesens
Eco-Innovators: Sustainability in Atlantic Canada by Chris Benjamin (Nimbus Publishing)
Salmon Country by Doug Underhill, photographs by André Gallant (Goose Lane Editions)
That Forgetful Shore by Trudy J. Morgan-Cole (Breakwater Books)

Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award (Fiction), presented by Boyne Clarke
Mary Rose Donnelly, Great Village (Cormorant Books)
Bruce Graham, Diligent River Daughter (Pottersfield Press)
Frank Macdonald, A Possible Madness (Cape Breton University Press)

Margaret and John Savage First Book Award
Heather Jessup, The Lightning Field (Gaspereau Press)
Michael Murphy, A Description of the Blazing World (Freehand Books)
Riel Nason, The Town That Drowned (Goose Lane Editions)

Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Fiction
Gerard Collins, Moonlight Sketches (Creative Book Publishing)
Kevin Major, New Under the Sun (Cormorant Books)
Patrick Warner, double talk (Breakwater Books)

FOR ALL SHORTLISTS, SEE: http://www.atlanticbookawards.ca/

The 2012 Atlantic Book Awards and Festival runs May 10–17 with free literary events taking place in all four Atlantic Provinces. Details are forthcoming. Winners of the 2012 Atlantic Book Awards will be announced at a special awards show on the last night of the week-long festival, Thursday, May 17, at 7:00 p.m. at the LSPU Hall in St. John’s, Newfoundland, marking the first time this event has ventured outside Nova Scotia. Newfoundland comedienne Amy House will host the awards celebration, which also features a performance by Andy Jones. Tickets for the awards celebration are $12; as of April 1, they will be available at the LSPU Hall box office, by phone at 709-753-4531, or online at rca.nf.ca.

UPDAtE: “Nominations for the Raddall Fiction, Richardson Non-Fiction, and Atlantic Poetry Prizes will be announced just after Atlantic Book Week (May 10-17) wraps up, with related events throughout the summer and a presentation in the fall.”

Also worth reading: One agent goes to bat for authors on The Book Seller

And two great authors — Lynn Coady and Russell Smith — debate the big question of, To write sex scenes or to not write sex scenes. Valid arguments on both sides.

“The Meteorite Hunter” by Laura Boudreau

DAVID’S FIRST THOUGHT when she was born
was that she was dead. She was blue and rubbery,
rimed in thick whiteness like a freezer-burned
steak. All lumps of fat flesh and shivery lengths of bone, fists clenched and ready to fight their way into an afterlife that had already started there on the starched sheet, stained with tired blood and greasy lubricant. Her name was going to be Lily, because it had sounded sweet and pure and clean and
white.But that was before they saw her there, dead and turning purple.

“Oh fuck,” Julie said, and those were the first words the dead baby heard, her heart still beating, her mouth open. David almost had the courage to reach between his baby’s blackened lips with a hooked finger. Something he had seen on television somewhere. Something a father would do. But the doctor, wearing a bandana patterned with cowboys roping steer, swooped in and picked her up, twisting her upside down and holding onto her neck while her body sat limp on his forearm, barely making it to his elbow. He slapped his
gloved fingers against her blue backside.

“Come on, girl,” he said, slapping her again before flipping
her over his arm and sucking the snot and phlegm out of
her nose and mouth with what looked to David like an enema
bulb.“That’s right, come on,” the doctor said, slapping.
She didn’t come on. They took her to a table under a
bright light and spoke incantations of acronyms, taping
electrodes to her ribs and shoving a long and silvery plastic
tube down her nose and into her flat belly. David looked on
while Julie, numb from the waist down, legs flopping out of
the stirrups, yelled at the nurses, “Is she okay? Is she okay?”
No, their aproned backs said. She is not okay.
Another doctor came to work on Julie with thick and
steady hands that scared David. “It’s alright, sir,” the doctor
had said.“You can go with your daughter.”
David wondered if everyone saw right through him.
Once his baby stopped dying and started breathing, he
held her in his arms and thought about what kind of warrior
name he should give the baby girl who used to be called Lily.
A name that had some strength to it, some meat. A name
that would ward off the curses of birth trauma. Muscle
weakness. Brain damage.

“David.” Julie’s voice was soft as she reached for the baby
with her long,white arms.
“Let’s name her Diana,” David said.
Julie looked at the baby and at David in his running shoes
and faded t-shirt, his beard red and grey, his hands clumsy as
he passed his daughter to her mother.
“I love you,Deedee.You did good,” Julie had said to the
baby who came back from the dead, as if it were the easiest
thing in the world.

And it had been easy then, David thought, looking over
at the awkward contortion of girl that Diana was now, all
elbows and knees beside him in the front seat of the rusted out
Rabbit. Her face was pressed against the passenger side
window as she slept. He thought about reaching over and
brushing the hair from her forehead, but he didn’t want her
to wake up and look him in the eye. It was better just to drive.
He wanted to pull over soon, even if it was a long way to
Whiteshell and Rick had told him to get there fast.
“We don’t want Explore to hear about this guy, Dave,” he
had said. “There just aren’t enough crazy Indian stories to
go around these days.”

Rick in David’s cubicle, wearing those hiking boots that
squeaked on the office carpet, which was made of reconstituted
pop bottles, didn’t David know. Rick’s khakis pouching
around his crotch as he sat on the edge of David’s desk.
“The guy is an obvious nut job, but whatever, right?
People are into that kind of New Age bullshit. Makes our
readers feel more connected to the land,whatever,whatever.
Call him The Meteorite Hunter, or something. Yeah.Write
that down.”
David wrote it down.
“Make sure you get a shot of him all mystical. Looking
up at the sky, holding the meteorites like he’s talking to the
bloody aliens.”
“Aliens, right.”
“But don’t get too bogged down in the science,”Rick said.
“All people need to know is that shit falls from space and then
this guy finds it and picks it up. But stress the Native thing.
Seriously, it’s nothing without the Indian connection. Hell,
the world could probably learn a thing or two from wackos
like this.And it’s a long drive to Whiteshell.”
“Already said.”
Rick had walked away from the desk in his wool socks
and leather boots like he was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.
Well, David had been camping, too. Once. Julie’s idea. He
still remembered the image of her legs planted in an upside
down V as she waited under the canoe for him to catch up
on the portage. David, puffing and pale. His skin clammy
and his ass itchy. Nothing left to do but hump the pack
while Julie called out, You okay? Fine, David thought, heart
exploding. Yes. The smell of Julie on his body mixing with
his sweat, the smoke in his hair, the grit in his teeth.
Julie. Her voice into his blood like a heart attack when
she called:

“David? It’s me.”
His fingers had gone numb at the sound of her taking in
a breath. By the way she said his name.
“David, are you there?”
She had told him she was sorry that everything was last
minute, that he hadn’t seen Diana for so long.No, she was sure
she didn’t want Deedee at the funeral, she needed to go alone.
It was okay with her if Diana went to Whiteshell, as long as
he swore up and down that the car was in okay shape and he
could have Diana back on the bus by Sunday afternoon.
“David, can you handle this?”
David had hung up the phone and looked again at the
map, retracing his route along the Trans-Canada highway
with a dull pencil.Nothing left to do but drive.
And now Diana was snoring, thick little gasps that made
David nervous. He went faster still, racing the sun to the
horizon.

* * *

“Do you have to go to the bathroom?”David asked.
“No,”Diana said, rubbing her eyes.
“Are you sure? ’Cause we can’t stop for a while, and . . .”
David trailed off, wondering if ten-year-olds still pissed
themselves every once in a while.He had no idea.
“I know. I’m fine.”Her voice like Julie’s.All sass and pity.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.“Do you like hamburgers?”
“I’m not really supposed to eat them.Mom says that they
feed the cows unhealthy things, like antibiotics and groundup
animals.Makes you sick.”
“Yeah,” David said, eyes on the road, watching for deer.
“I guess that probably isn’t too good.” Shit, Julie.
She yawned. “But what doesn’t kill you makes you
stronger, right?”
“Where’d you get that?”
Diana shrugged.“Oprah.”
David glanced over as she talked, watching her so-what
palms punctuate her sentences. You still drive the Rabbit,
she had said as they walked across the empty bus station
parking lot, careful not to make it a question.That’s cool, she
added. Sensitive, for a ten-year-old. Brave to travel alone, to
carry her backpack so casually over just one shoulder. Now
her fingers, pink and raw like skinny newborn mice, were
finding the holes in the upholstery, burrowing. One day she
would be pretty, David hoped.
She hugged her knees as she talked, her feet weaving
back and forth across the dashboard leaving behind a figureeight
of dust from the dried mud on her sneakers.Her grey
eyes reflected the high beams of passing cars, like she was
lit up from the inside. Then a blurry little halo of hands
because she was excited. That. That he knew. That was all
Julie.
“But what do you think?” she asked, eyes on him. High
beams.
Shit.
“Are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening,” David said, eyes on the road. “It’s just
hard to know what to think sometimes.”
“Yeah, but if Mom had her way, we’d all be living in
teepees and eating organic rocks,or whatever.”Diana looked
out the window.“How much longer?”
“Maybe we’d be better off,”David said.He pushed harder
on the accelerator.
It was all Julie’s fault, in a way. She had landed him the
job at the magazine. Begged it for him. Five months pregnant
then and constipated.Her hands like rabid bats, flying
into her hair as she said to David,Well, what the hell do you
think it’s going to eat? Breast milk until it goes to college?
David worked at the grocery store, knew the codes for all the
produce: 4020, Golden Delicious apples; 6113, kiwi fruit.He
bought a crib with loose rails from a garage sale and Julie
painted it yellow wearing her nurse’s mask, worried about
paint fumes and deformities.They fought until Julie threw a
mug of green tea through the front window, but no, David
still wasn’t taking the job from Rick. He had cleaned up the
broken glass and duct-taped a garbage bag into the frame.
There was just no way. It was a pity job, and it was from
Rick. Rick the Dick. The guy who got drunk at the hospital
Christmas party and grabbed Julie’s ass as he said with a
slurred tongue, A nurse is a wonderful thing for a woman
to be. Rick’s wife Tricia cried into her plastic cup of wine,
her mascara plopping onto her red velvet dress. David had
noticed how pretty she was, how beautiful a woman she
could be with her hair in curls and her make-up running.
How lovely it was when she put her soft, cool hand on his
and said, Oh, David. Julie had come up to them then with
their jackets in her arms, telling Tricia it was okay, they were
going to have a good laugh about it all on Monday.
“For Christ’s sake, let’s get them home,” Julie had whispered
to David.He had helped Tricia button her coat.
“Sorry,” he said when he touched her breasts.
David drove. Rick in the front seat, his forehead pressed
against the window, unrolled a little to let in flakes of sobering
snow. Julie and Tricia were in the backseat, Tricia still
snuffling, but laughing here and there at Julie’s little jokes.
David had watched in the rear-view mirror as Tricia touched
at her mascara with a tissue.
“Dad?”Diana said. “I am hungry, actually.”
She pointed to a sign at the side of the road: Tasty and
Delicious Diner, 1 km. A picture of a hamburger, fries. A
milkshake. David checked the map again. He wasn’t any
closer.

* * *

THE HAMBURGERS were flat and steaming, served by a
woman with large breasts that sagged inside her waitress
blouse. Regina, her nametag read. “Enjoy your meal,” she
said when she plopped the plates down on the Formica
table, making the pickle slices bounce.“I hope it’s tasty and
delicious.”
Diana sat opposite him in the booth, cross-legged. She
wrapped her long hair into curls around her index finger.
Her eyes were puffy. She poked at the burger with her fork,
sipped her chocolate milkshake. She tested a french fry and
looked right at him.High beams.
“Why didn’t Mom let me go with her? I’m not a little kid
anymore.”
“Well, she thinks you’re old enough to handle a weekend
with me,”David said, not sure if he was joking.
Diana shrugged. “Everybody else was busy.Mom called
like twenty people.”
“Twenty?”
“But it wasn’t like she thought it was a bad idea, or anything,”
Diana said quickly. “In the end, I mean.” She paused.
“Listen,” David said, leaning into the table, “I’m sure
your mom has her reasons for why she didn’t want you to
go. She probably just didn’t want you to have to see all that
funeral stuff. It can be kind of scary.”He ate his fries.
“I heard Mom say on the phone that Grandpa was a
class-A shithead.”
Regina came over and poured more coffee into David’s
cup, spilling some on the table, wiping it up with a dirty rag
she took out of her apron pocket.David took out the map to
Whiteshell to have something to look at.
“So, was he?”Diana, relentless.
“What?”
“A shithead.”
“Diana, language.”More fries in his mouth. “But yeah,
sometimes. Not always, though. I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
The last time David had pulled into the driveway of the
cigarette-stained bungalow, he had heard the tinny sound
of a shoot-em-up blasting out of the television and seen the
stacks of stale dishes festering on the counters. There was a
vase of tulips on the kitchen table, Grace’s favourite, just
starting to wilt.
“Hello, sir,”David had said.“Julie sent me to pick up a few
things for her mother.That she needs.The hospital made me
a list.”
“You still working at the goddamn grocery store?” The
voice soggy like wet cardboard.
“Actually, I write for a magazine now. It’s called The
Adventurist and it’s for men who—”
“Fucking great,” Frank said, his eyes on the television.
“Now get outta my house.”
“I’ve got the list right here,” David said, offering the
crumpled paper and wishing he had just gone to a drugstore
instead of dealing with the old prick again, regardless of
what Julie said about Grace needing her own things, that
patients always did better with a few things from home.
“What part of get the fuck outta here didn’t you understand?”
Frank stood, his knees cracking under the weight. His
flesh flowed down his body, settling somewhere in his lower
gut.His face was loose and jowly, ready to stretch into tissuethin
skin.He wore an unbuttoned flannel shirt, stained jogging
pants that sagged. Shoes with bursting seams like split
sausages.His thick hair was perfectly combed.
“The nurses said she needs a nightgown, a toothbrush.”
“Get outta my house.”
Frank shuffled past David into the kitchen, his fat hands
inching him along the greasy wall, the stink of liquor and
sweat drifting back.
“You can just tell me where to look and I’ll get them
myself.”
“If you don’t leave, I’ll make you,” Frank said, his lungs
whistling.
“Oh Jesus, Frank,” David said. “This is ridiculous. Just
give me her fucking toothbrush and I’ll tell her you send
your love, okay?”
Frank took the vase of tulips to the sink, filling it to the
brim with cloudy water.
“Gracie is dying,” Frank said, his eyes the pale blue of
soft ice.“Don’t you tell me about love.”
David had given up and bought Grace a flannel nightgown
from The Bay. Slippers. A new toothbrush, a hairbrush,
and a gossip magazine. But by the time he got to the
hospital, her room had been cleaned, the bed made. Julie sat
on a plastic chair in the corner of the waiting room, feeding
Diana and crying, her left breast leaking through her shirt.
“I’m so sorry, Julie.”He let the bag of useless items drop
onto the seat beside her.
“It’s not his fault, Dave,” she had said, wiping the tears
off her lips. “I know you think it is, but it’s not.”
She told him that once, for her birthday, Frank had given
her a beautiful doll wrapped in pink tissue paper and a
white box.
“It had real glass eyes.Bright robin’s egg blue.” She shook
her head.“The memory alone.”
Julie had put Diana over her shoulder to burp her, and
the sound of her hand on their baby’s back had seemed
shockingly hollow to David.
“Mom’s just so unfair,”Diana whined, her high-pitched
voice carrying through the diner and making Regina raise
her eyebrows.
“Finish your fries,” David said, laying bills on the table.
“We’re leaving.”

* * *

DAVID SAW THE HOUSE just as his eyes started to swerve
blankly across the dirt road, the sun coming up.
The small, squat cabin was built of thick timber that was
greyed with weather. Stray red and yellow leaves skittered
down the steep roof, crackling like old, dry bones.David was
going to get a picture when the sun was higher and the leaves
were spinning.When The Meteorite Hunter was backlit and
holding a blood-red stone from outer space. The kind of
picture Rick liked.He would say,Yeah, Dave, now that looks
authentic.
Diana stretched in the front seat. “I have to go to the
bathroom.”
“Just go in the bushes.”
“What, the Lord of the Meteorites doesn’t have a bathroom?”
“Just pee in the bushes.”
“This trip sucks.”
“Pretend it’s an adventure.”
Diana slammed the car door and tramped off into the
brush, hiking up her jeans with defiant fists. David leaned
back in his seat and closed his eyes, thinking to himself what
Julie was going to say about all of this, how she might not
say anything at all, just turn away and hunch her shoulders,
curving her spine into a question mark.
It had all been so stupid. Julie knew he wasn’t working on
a last-minute story for the winter issue. She had phoned the
office—four messages when he went in the next morning—
before getting him on his cell, her voice as thin as a splinter.
“Deedee’s crying and the car isn’t starting,” she had said,
“but I need to go for a drive to calm her down.When are
you going to be home? Don’t we have a computer at home?
Why did we buy that fucking computer anyway?”
But David wasn’t listening. He was looking at Tricia on
the bed as she pulled the sheets over her breasts and brushed
the bangs out of her eyes.He considered the possibility then
that it had all been a weird coincidence, a trick of physics
that made their respective trajectories collide, bodies tangling
in the same space and the same time. It didn’t mean
anything. It was just the kind of accidental intimacy that
comes at the end of a tense conversation, or after a long
wait.Tricia said the problem was they were bored with their
lives but resigned to them. They should just give up.“But I
can’t,”David said.“That’s what kills me.”Once for fun they
took pills that Tricia stole from the hospital and David had
had an allergic reaction, his tongue swelling, his breathing
panicked.
“You’re the one in a million, David. Lucky you,” Tricia
had said then, jamming the needle of epinephrine into his
thigh as she drove him to the emergency room.
“David?” Julie’s voice from the phone, Tricia reaching
for her robe.
“Julie,”David said, “I love you, you know.”
Tricia rolled her eyes and cinched the belt.
“Dave,” Julie, surprised.“That’s worse.”
“I’ll fix the Rabbit, first thing tomorrow,” he said, but
Julie had already hung up the phone. Tricia looked at him
like she was trying to keep back a laugh.
“No offense, David,” she had said, “but who drives a
Rabbit?”
This trip to Whiteshell was going to wreck the car, if it
hadn’t already. David envisioned himself at the side of the
road, working uselessly under the smoking hood, telling
Diana to stop thumbing for rides. Julie was going to be mad
if he didn’t have her back for school on Monday, even if he
tried to convince her that this meteorite guy was educational
or spiritual, or even just plain crazy and interesting. David
sat up in his seat and turned the key in the ignition, to be
safe. The engine revved and Diana came running back, her
hair long and tangled,weeds catching her feet.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said, leaning over to open her door,“did
you think I was leaving without you?”
Diana slammed the door behind her and locked it. She
looked at David with drowning eyes,wild and dark.
“What’s wrong, Dee? Are you sick?” That hamburger.
Shit. Julie was going to kill him.
“I was just going to see if I could use the bathroom,”
Diana said, starting to cry,“I opened the door, and, that, that
man . . .”
David’s heart cramped in his chest. She had only been
gone a minute.
“Diana,what happened?”
Fuck, that’s what parents said when their children were
molested or kidnapped. A minute was more than enough.
“Diana!”
But she was sobbing so hard now she couldn’t speak, her
fists balled into her eyes as her small body shook, curled up
in the front seat of the car, the mud on her shoes grinding
itself into the torn upholstery of the seat.
David ran towards the cabin. How could he have let her
go by herself? They were out in the middle of nowhere, and
this guy was some kind of crazy hermit who probably hadn’t
seen anything female in years, probably had fucking booby
traps on the door and hunting knives lining the walls.Was
Diana hurt? Christ! He hadn’t even checked.God.
David sprinted, bursting through the door of the cabin
ready to kill the sonofabitch.
But he was already dead. The Meteorite Hunter was
sitting in a chair, his face on the oily wood table, his bloated
black cheek touching the rough edge of a blood-coloured
rock. David might have thought he was sleeping if not for
the strange and broken angle of his neck, the way his arms
dangled ridiculously, his blue skin dotted with industrious
ants that pooled in the rotting practice cuts on his arms, his
stomach. The knife handle that stuck out of his bare chest
like an accidental bone. The dried blood and the flies. The
stink, like cabbage left in the sun.
“Don’t come in here, Diana!” David shouted over his
shoulder, knowing that it didn’t matter anymore. She was
sobbing in the car while David, gagging now, rushed into the
stale emergency of the rank cabin, shouting brave-sounding,
stupid things like Don’t come in here,Diana. Shit.
David saw a pad of paper under the blood-red stone.
Careful not to touch the man, David moved the rock, heavy
for its size, and picked up the smudged notebook. FOUND,
it said at the top. In the left-hand column was a list of numbers,
latitude and longitude.Then a weather report, followed
by a catalogue of stones. A record of a lifetime spent searching.
David looked at Diana in the car, how small she was
against the landscape of dying trees. He wondered how he
was supposed to know what to find.Where to look.
The Meteorite Hunter didn’t have a phone, which was
no surprise. They were going to have to drive to a police station
and file a report. The officers were going to ask Diana
about what she saw, and what could she say to that? David
looked at the Meteorite Hunter rotting in his chair. Who
was going to bury him? He hoped someone was going to
mourn what had been lost. That there had been something
to lose, after all.
David walked slowly back to the car with the notebook
in his hand, opening the passenger door as gently as he could
but Diana still jumped. He picked her up and slid into the
seat, rocking her as she cried.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said, even though he had seen
the expression on the man’s face, flies feasting on his eyes
as they stared unblinking at the one dusty window of the
cabin, the glass as thin as paper at the top of the pane. The
hunter’s lips were purple and peeled back from his teeth. It
might have been a smile or a scream, David didn’t know, but
it was a silent answer to the one question he couldn’t bring
himself to ask.
“It’s okay,” David said again, and Diana buried her face
in his shoulder the way she had done as a baby, tired and
squalling. It was almost a selfish thought, but he knew there
was a small chance she still somehow remembered that, him
cradling the warmth of her tiny body as it howled against
the night.

Because it really is quite fantastic, Laura Boudreau’s debut, Suitable Precautions, made the top 5 “Best Books of 2011,” after votes were cast by readers of the country’s finest book blog: the National Post‘s The Afterword.

Her deeply human and deftly crafted stories feature the right balance oddness and ordinariness to make them both original and universally appealing. Not to mention poignant and memorable. Her fine balance of humour and profound humanity — the kind that defines the best of ultra-modern Canadian short fiction — shines like stars here. I’m not alone in thinking so. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including The Journey Prize Stories 22, Grain, The New Quarterly, PRISM international, Canadian Notes & Queries, and Oberon’s trustworthy Best Canadian Stories series.

Her fresh writing and engaging stories show good range, and are unified by, to quote the backcover, “a sense for the strange, tenuous fragility of human bonds.” Laura Boudreau is among the next wave of Canadian writers to watch for. That’s a fact. The thing with all the good first books coming out lately is they’re pumping new blood into CanLit, and diversifying it. I would, comfortably, place this book into the hands of any reader curious of what I mean by the new wave of contemporary CanLit. Suitable Precautions, among other things, captures  what it is to be human in an unfair and unpredictable world.

“Strange Pilgrims” was a stand-out Story for me. Tell us Something about it. Anything.

“Strange Pilgrims” is secretly one of my favourites. Its logic is 99% emotional and 1% rational, and yet the story manages to be plot-driven, almost detective-y. At one point I wanted to call the entire collection Strange Pilgrims and Other Stories, but that was before I realized that Gabriel García Márquez had beaten me to the punch.

In “Hurricane Season,” a tourist in Cuba chooses to stick around for an incoming, dangerous storm, while the rest of the tourists flee. What sparked the idea for this story?

I don’t typically look to images for inspiration, so it’s unusual that “Hurricane Season” was sparked by a photograph — specifically, the one on the dust jacket of Open, Lisa Moore’s collection of short stories. The photo is of a woman wearing a bikini and a cardigan, and she’s looking out over the water, or maybe it’s the sky. It’s cropped just below her eyes. I found the image vulnerable and sad, but also purposeful and sexy. My fascination became a thought experiment: what is that woman’s story?

 In “The D and D Report” a premed student bonds with another girl over mocking their weirdo pool-owner boss. A friendship forms and one never gets to repay the other’s favour. What inspired the story?

“The D and D Report” is, in part, a meditation on the nature of friendship. Although it’s not autobiographical, I’ve certainly experienced or enacted the kind of callousness (or is it carelessness?) that takes place between Alexa and Cheryl in the story. I think many young women have. There was a headline a few weeks ago in The Onion that read “Female Friends Spend Raucous Night Validating The Living Shit Out Of Each Other,” and I thought, Yeah, this is what I’m talking about. What makes that headline funny is also what makes “The D and D Report” such a kick in the teeth.

What about “The Meteorite Hunter”

“The Meteorite Hunter” was inspired by a magazine article about, well, a meteorite hunter. This man’s quest to collect space rocks struck me as both noble and fruitless, and I wanted to capture that dichotomy in my main character’s struggle to connect with his daughter. I found it difficult to focalize the narrative through David, a divorced man and estranged dad (that’s pretty far from my own experience, and subject position), but I must have done something right because the story seems to resonate with readers, particularly men. I think it’s healthy for writers to stretch their voices. If you find you’re writing endless incarnations of yourself, you’d probably be better off investing in a private diary. As one of my teachers used to say, nobody cares about what it feels like to be a potato.

I’ve been calling Biblioasis the country’s metal detector for short fiction gold these last few years. What’s a collection they’ve recently published that you recently read and liked?

Last October I had the pleasure of being part of the Women of the Short Story Book Tour, with Biblioasis writers Rebecca Rosenblum and Cathy Stonehouse. I knew Rebecca and was familiar with her work, but all I knew about Cathy was what I had read in reviews, which scared me. My work is sometimes characterized as dark and disturbing, but the stuff I read about Cathy’s book, Something About the Animal, made me fear sharing a hotel room with her. However, not only was Cathy a charming, insightful, entirely non-psychotic person with whom to spend a week, I’ve also been really impressed with the nuance and humour of her collection. I think Cathy is one of the very few people who can write a story about an animal psychic and a Ritalin-medicated dog and get away with calling it “Child Abuse.”

 What about a few favourite shorts or collections overall?

Some of my all-time favourite short stories are “Tell The Women We’re Going” by Raymond Carver, “People Like That Are the Only People In Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” by Lorrie Moore, and “Emergency” by Denis Johnson. I guess I’ve got a thing for the Americans.

My favourite Canadian collection is Natasha by David Bezmozgis.

What are you working on now, and how’s that going?

I’ve started work on a novel. It’s called Anonymous Anonymous, and it’s about a self-help group for people who have purchased new identities for themselves. Let’s just say it’s going slowly.

I’ve read hundreds upon hundreds of novels, but now that I’m faced with writing one, I realize that I’m not exactly sure about what makes the form work from page to page. The scaffolding of a novel is fundamentally different from that of a short story, and it’s not just about being bigger or necessarily more complicated. (In fact, I think the best short stories do the work of novels, and their structures can be just as challenging.) Maybe it has something to do with the novel being on a more horizontal axis, over time, and the short story being on a more vertical axis, through time? Actually, that sounds a bit like bullshit. It probably has more to do with me being a chicken in the face of a really big and scary project.

Salty Ink authorial intrusion: that did not sound like bullshit, and was one of the best novel versus short story comparisons to have appeared on this blog

 I find, when writing a short, where I start and where I end can surprise me as much as a reader. I get the sense that in some of these stories, that was the case with you. Was there one story in particular here that took a direction you weren’t planning on?

“The Dead Dad Game” definitely took a left turn. In the original version, Mickey the pot-bellied pig was a dog, and the story was falling flat on its face, just not working at all. It was part of my University of Toronto MA thesis (which went on to become Suitable Precautions), and it was my good fortune to have Michael Winter as a mentor for that project. He refused to let me cut “The Dead Dad Game” from the collection, and so instead we met in a café and had this thirty-second conversation:

Michael: What if Mickey weren’t a dog. What if she were something else?

Laura: Like what?

Michael: What about those pigs people have. Where are they from? Korea?

Laura: Vietnam. Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs.

Michael: Vietnam? Okay. I think we’re done here.

I think the story works because that change wasn’t about using a gimmick to get out of a jam (“Look, a freaky pet!”), but rather about opening up the life story of a character. It’s like I was aiming for one target, but then at the last second the arrow turned 90 degrees, hitting another bulls-eye altogether. As a writer and a reader, these are the kinds of endings that I like best — the ones that are both absolutely inevitable and yet completely surprising.

Another Salty Ink authorial intrusion: it should be noted, since Laura shared that fantastic cafe chat, that “The Dead Dad Game” went on to be a Journey Prize finalist: the country’s top award for a short story.

What are you looking for in a book, when you crack the spine and read?

All I really ask for is psychological realism and emotional honesty. For example, let’s say there’s something really crazy/emotional/interesting going on in a story (think bombs going off, or a heart-wrenching death, or even just a man on a unicycle appearing out of nowhere) — is it really believable, in the middle of that, to have a character contemplate the particular cochineal red of a sunset from his childhood? Probably not. In my opinion, there is so much overly descriptive, nostalgia-laden junk in Canadian fiction. It drives me bananas. It can be such a downer, too. All that big, baggy prose. Give me insight, give me action, and give me irony! And step away from the window: people don’t spend all the days of their lives looking into the middle distance, wondering how things might have been different. Life is funny, sometimes horribly so. Show me that.

You’ve taken writing courses with people like Michael Winter. What is it, ultimately, that a writer takes away from these kinds of classes?

My work with Michael Winter was a one-on-one mentorship, so it wasn’t so much a class as it was a conversation, but it certainly happened within the context of a creative writing program. I think the highest function of writing courses is to create an environment that fosters these kinds of conversations, an environment that brings new writers together and invites them to take themselves and their work seriously. I remember attending a party that Rosemary Sullivan and Constance Rooke organized for their creative writing students, and it was surreal: Thomas King was there, reading his work, and I was there, reading my work (!!!), and we were drinking wine and eating prosciutto. It was a revelation! And a dare. Like, Welcome to the club, now show us what you’ve got. The confidence I got from these encounters changed my life, and I don’t think they would have happened outside of the creative writing school framework.

Short fiction is getting its due lately. More of it is being published, read, and awarded. What are some pros of short fiction, in your mind, as both a reader and writer?

Pros for readers:

1. You can live an entire lifetime during your morning commute. In a good way.

2. You can dip in and out of, and return to, short story collections. It’s not always so easy to do that with a novel.

3. Short stories are demanding, and so for discerning readers. Who doesn’t want to be one of those?

Pros for writers:

1. The short story is a beautiful, challenging, unique form. Nail it, and you earn your stripes.

2. Short stories can get written (and maybe even finished) in the time after dinner, before breakfast, on a plane…

3. Publishing short stories builds your bibliography, and your professional credibility. Seeing your work in a literary journal is excellent motivation to keep writing.

What is the ultimate, most barebones trait a writer should possess?

Tenacity.

Kerri Cull is has been a bartender, bookseller, waitress, administrator, radio show host, columnist, instructor, and is the creator of The Book Fridge. This is her first book. it’s a concept collection broken into three parts; I asked her to explain this concept.

Soak follows the life of one woman from childhood to death.  From finding a turnip on the side of the road and bringing it home to regretting one last meeting with a dying relative.  Divided into three sections, the collection asks questions about the nature of identity, our connections with place and home, love and death.

The first section is called Stretch which refers to stretching toward something, growing and reaching.  Its poems are about first experiences, innocence, and imagination.

Sample Poem from Section 1: “Make Up”

Braille dots of mascara line her eyelids,
a hint of hazard for those
paying attention.

Hair, a question-mark ponytail,
except for one piece curved to the slope of her head
crossing her forehead and secure behind her ear.

Jeans rest on her bursting flesh, keeping her together.
She used to look like a doll, wore glasses at three:
big innocent eyes had no idea what they would see.

They say it happens to half of us
but did they include you in that percentage?
Brother, cat, dog, thirteen years
and all the rest of it?

The poems in the second section Run are about running toward what we will become, that part of your life where you have your first adult experiences, the time when you feel strong, powerful and certain.

Sample poem from section 2: “Opening”

The newly single woman sits next to her
plush orange sofa pillows
flipping magazine pages
as if asking questions.
She presses the spongy tip
of her gloss applicator to
her perfectly posed mouth.

This newly single woman makes chicken parm for two
and saves half for tomorrow’s lunch.
She sits with the TV on in the background
and enjoys the taste of food folding
over her tongue.

The single woman goes shopping for no reason
but to find that perfect kitchen mat and returns it
the next day when she finds it’s half an inch too short.
She has her fridge stocked with walnuts,
peaches, turnovers and plums.
She has the perfect reading lamp next to her bed
and glasses lie sleepily over the open book.

The single woman drinks tea after supper
and watches the news,
calls her sister to have a chat,
makes her own space
and sits in it
honestly.

Bend, the last section, hosts poems that are about bending toward the end of something such as a period in your life, a relationship, death, be it yours or someone else’s.  The last poem tells the story of the speaker on the day of her own death.

Sample poem from section 3: “Skating”

I could not
understand why
when he lay dying
my father would watch
figure skating
over
and over
again.
………Then
he told me
his childhood
was spent outside,
skating

on fragile
frozen ponds.

The Love Monster; A Novel by Missy Marston (Vehicule, March 15th)

Missy Marston‘s writing has appeared in places like Grain and Arc Poetry Magazine, but this is her first book. here’s a quick excerpt:

Her name is Margaret Atwood. That’s right. She is no relation, bears no resemblance, has no literary ambitions; she simply bears the same damn good name. She has explained all these things to shop clerks and bank tellers and office nurses throughout her adult life. Yet they persist. In fact, her name is Margaret H. Atwood, but don’t ask her about the “H”. Really. Never ask.

The Love Monster is the tall tale of one woman’s struggle with mid-life issues. The main character, Margaret H. Atwood, has psoriasis, a boring job, and a bad attitude. Her cheating husband has left her. And none of her pants fit any more. Marston takes the reader on a hilarious journey of recovery. Hope comes in the form of a dope-smoking senior citizen, a religious fanatic, a good lawyer, a talking turtle, and, of course, hope comes in the form of a love-sick alien speaking in the voice of Donald Sutherland. More than an irreverent joyride, The Love Monster is also a sweet and tender look at the pain and indignity of being an adult human and a sincere exploration of the very few available remedies: art, love, religion, relentless optimism, and alien intervention.

Malarky; A Novel by Anakana Schofield (Biblioasis, March 15th)

“Our Woman will not be sunk by what life’s about to serve her. Our Woman catches her son in the hay with another man, and is soon after accosted by Red-the-Twit, who claims to have done things with Our Woman’s husband that could frankly have gone without mentioning. And now her son’s gone and joined the army, and Our Woman has found a young fella to do unmentionable things with herself, just so she might understand it all. She embarks on an odyssey through grief and madness toward the realization of something all-too-human.

“Everything about this primly raunchy, uproarious novel is unexpected—each draught poured from the teapot marks another moment of pure literary audacity.” – Lynn Coady, author of The Antagonist

Radio Belly; Short Fiction by Buffy Cram (Douglas & McIntyre, March 23rd)

Buffy’s stories have appeared in Prairie Fire, The Bellevue Literary Review and the much heralded anthology, Darwin’s Bastards. Her fiction was a finalist for the 2009 Western Magazine Award and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She’s spent the last decade teaching and writing in Vancouver, Montreal, Boston, Texas, Mexico, South Korea, South America and various parts of Europe, and currently  divides her time between San Francisco and Germany.

They’ve done the same with a Top Ten List of the Best Fictional Bookstores of All Time

And here’s Kurt Vonnegut, in less than two minutes, laying out how to write the perfect short story:

The Winterset Award celebrates excellence in Newfoundland and Labrador writing, and packs a $10,000 prize, with 2.5 grand each to the other finalists. There’s also the honour of being crowned the best book out of Newfoundland in a year, considering it’s the country’s literary goldmine. To make it more difficult and meaningful to win, the award considers all genres, as exemplified by the spread on this year’s shortlist: essays, fiction, and poetry.

The winner will be announced at Government House on Thursday, March 22^nd , and this year’s jury was Lisa Moore, Kevin Major, and Noreen Golfman.

Notable: This could make Ed Riche the first male writer to win Winterset twice. Joan Clark, however, has already been there and done that.

About the 2011 BMO Winterset Award finalists:

The Shell of the Tortoise: Four Essays and an Assemblage (Gaspereau) is exactly what the subtitle says it is, and written by one of the country’s most well decorated poets (a two-time GG winner, and Griffin Prize winner!) These essays “continue his investigation into the relationship between poetry and wilderness, particularly into the characteristics of metaphor as a tool.”

Easy to Like (Novel, Anansi) by Edward Riche. Whether writing for the stage, page, screen, or radio, Ed Riche has always been a wise and witty satirist, but with Easy to Like, he crowns himself the Atlantic Canadian king of satire by tackling open-ended questions of modern taste. As he knocks everything from Hollywood trophy wives to cheap tricks in winemaking to the inner workings of CBC, the satire flirts with slapstick humour, and the funniest thing about the novel is this: it’s all based in truth. Click here to read Salty Ink’s review of Easy to Like

Gift Horse (Poetry, Vehicule) is Mark Callanan”s second full-length collection of poetry, and “was largely written following a near-fatal medical emergency in 2007. The poems offer up the story of a young man whose gratitude at being alive is undercut by Lazarus-like confusion and ambivalence. Brandishing a newly acute sense of mortality.” Click here to read a Salty Ink Article on this book that features two of its poems.

List of Previous Winners

2010 — Russell Wangersky – The Glass Harmonica
2009 — Jessica Grant – Come, Thou Tortoise
2008 — Randall Maggs – Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems
2007 — Kathleen Winter – boYs
2006 — Kenneth J. Harvey – Inside
2005 — Joan Clark – An Audience of Chairs
2004 — Ed Riche – The Nine Planets
2003 — Robert Mellin – Tilting
2002 — Joan Clark – The Word for Home
2001 — Michael Crummey – The River Thieves
2000 — Michael Winter – This All Happened

It takes a minute or two for him to set himself up, but you’ll be clapping by the end. Grab some popcorn.

David Adams Richards has written numerous novels, most recently, Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul, and perhaps most notably, one of my favourites anyway: Mercy among the Children.

Whirl Away: Short Fiction by Russell Wangersky

I’m extremely excited for this one. Russell’s writing is crystalline and affecting. Quite often: flawless. And this multi-award-winner is at his best with short fiction.

“Brutal and gentle. Funny and cruel. Timely and timeless.” – Giller winner, Joseph Boyden

Everyone has something they’re good at: one particular personal skill that they use to keep their lives moving forward when their worlds suddenly become difficult or near-impossible. For some, it’s denial; for others, blunt pragmatism. Still others depend on an over-inflated view of self to keep criticism and doubt at bay. In his new short story collection, Whirl Away, Russell Wangersky—author of critically-acclaimed fiction and non-fiction including The Glass Harmonica, Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself and The Hour of Bad Decisions— looks at what happens when people’s personal coping skills go awry. These are people who discover their anchor-chain has broken: characters safe in the world of self-deception or even self-delusion, forced to face the fact that their main line of defense has become their greatest weakness.

Read More at Thomas Allen’s Website

Soak: Poetry by Kerri Cull

I’ve had the opportunity to read Kerri’s manuscript, and I really liked the evocative, universal, and accessible nature of her work. You might know Kerri as the curator of  The Book Fridge.

“The poems are remarkable for the balance they strike between self and world.” – Patrick Warner, two-time winner of the EJ Pratt Poetry prize

Kerri has been a bartender, bookseller, waitress, administrator, radio show host, columnist, and instructor. This collection focuses on physical experience and contemplates the beauty of everyday life – the objects, the stories, and the people that drift in and out. It finds the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Read More about Soak at Breakwater Books’ Website

Why Men Lie: a novel by Linden MacIntyre

This new novel by CBC’s Linden MacIntyre is not only his follow-up to the 2009 Giller-winning novel, The Bishop’s Man, it features a female character from that novel as its protagonist. (The novels are unrelated.)

Random House Big Wig Anne Collins raves a little here:

A brilliant, deeply wise and challenging new novel. Why do men lie? Effie MacAskill Gillis, a self-sufficient woman of her time, is confident she knows. She learned the hard way—from a war-damaged father and a troubled brother who became a priest, through failed marriages and doomed relationships with weak and needy men. Men lie to satisfy the needs they never can articulate: for sex, for love, and reassurance.  Now at middle age, she feels immunized against the damage men can do and enjoys a hard-won independence. But then a chance encounter with a man on a subway platform changes everything—an old friend looks like he, like her, has evolved into an assured and confident maturity. That he seems to have outgrown the need for telling lies is irresistible, and Effie gambles her emotional resources as she never has before. Only to learn that men must lie, and that the consequences of an unexpected lie can be disastrous.

Read more at Random House’s website.

Paradoxides: Poetry by Don McKay

Don McKay is a Griffin Poetry Prize winner. He’s known as the country’s finest nature poet, and the title, Paradoxides, is a genus of trilobite: his new book “enters the astonishments of deep time lying in the rocks around us. “Who needs ghosts when matter/ nonchalantly haunts us?”

Don McKay is known, among other things, as Canada’s foremost poet of the natural world. Readers have come to expect a playful extravagance in his poetry. Most recently, he has opened himself to the mysteries of geologic wonder. “Who needs ghosts when matter /nonchalantly haunts us,” he writes. In his new book, perhaps his most stunning yet, it’s fossils and deep time that provide the awe. The landscape of Newfoundland has taken his linguistic virtuosity even further, sharpened his wit, and given him a lyric energy that sometimes feels as if he’s lifting the planet into song.

Read more the McClelland & Stewart’s website

A Matter of Life and Death or Something: A Novel by Ben Stephenson

Ben Stephenson, only 25 yet thriving in the Halifax literary scene, wrote his first book at age 7. Later, took a break from NASCAD to write this one.

“Ben Stephenson takes us down the rabbit hole into the refracted and hilarious world of a child on a very serious quest. A Matter of Life and Death or Something will leave you less grown up — and all the wiser for it. Curiouser and curiouser. A marvel of a book.” – Jessica Grant

The big-hearted story of a ten-year-old boy, a notebook and the meaning of the universe. Even though he’s only ten years old, Arthur Williams knows lots of things for sure. He knows all about trilobites, and bridge, and that he doesn’t want to be Victoria Brown’s boyfriend, and that tapping maple trees causes them excruciating pain. He knows his real dad is probably flying a hot-air balloon across the Pacific, or paving a city with moss. And he knows that Simon, the guy who pretends to be his dad, does absolutely nothing interesting. But when Arthur finds a weather-worn notebook in the woods behind his house, all he has are questions. Why was its author, Phil, so sad, and why does it end on page 43? Suddenly, there are other questions too: Why do people abandon people? Why do they abandon themselves? A Matter of Life and Death Or Something marks the exciting debut of an inventive and gifted storyteller.

Read more about A Matter of Life and Death or Something at Douglas & McInyre’s website

The Port Inventory: Poetry by Donald McGrath

This is Donald’s first book of poetry in 17 years. He’s been maturing like a good port in the meantime?

The Saint Lawrence River glides beneath high windows while, close by, schoolchildren’s bright winter coats glow in Parthenais Prison’s shade. In a hotel on a cliff above Biarritz, a man peers down into a darkened courtyard and thinks he hears low sobbing through the plashing of a fountain. In an east coast fishing village, a bedridden child experiences heightened lucidity in delirium. A slum landlord in Prince Rupert gives lessons on the British Empire. These are a few moments in The Port Inventory. Spanning the distances between the Newfoundland fishing village where he grew up and Montreal, the city he has made his home, McGrath’s poems drop a ladder into memory’s root cellar and find it luminescent.

Read more about The Port Inventory at Cormorant’s website

Shandi Mitchell Wins The Kobzar Award

Shandi Mitchell’s already multi-award-winning novel, Under this Unbroken Sky, got more multi-award winning with this week’s win of the bi-annual Kobzar literary award. It’s a $25,000 prize for the best book in any genre with the strongest Canadian-Ukrainian theme. I’ve always thought there should be more award with specific mandates, like “best first book of shorts” or “best characters.”

Read more about her novel at Penguin’s website.

Riel Nason Shortlisted for a Canadian Library Associations Award

Riel Nason’s debut novel, The Town That Drowned, has made the shortlist for the CLA’s elusive YA award. This shortlist often includes adult novels that sit well in the YA market too. The award “recognizes an author of an outstanding English-language Canadian work of fiction that appeals to young adults between the ages of 13 and 18.”

The winner will be announced on May 31 at the annual awards reception.

Read more about The Town That Drowned at Goose Lane’s website

Heather O’Neil’s Tips on “How to Date a Writer”

Chad Pelley Takes The Proust Questionnaire

A book shopping list of “The New Face of CanLit” from Amazon.

Newfoundland’s Breakwater Books are hiring a Sales and Marketing Coordinator

Don’t lose interest in the meantime, hey? This slow, 1 or 2 articles a week won’t last. March should be great. More chats with writers and publishers, etc.

As an author, he’s ambidextrous, with plenty of poetry and fiction out there waiting for you to read. And he’s been leaving his mark as he moves around: his collection poetry Digging My Own Grave (published by Daedalus Press in Ireland) was runner-up in the Patrick Kavanagh Award, and his novel, The Eskimo in the Net, was published by Marion Boyars Publishers in London), and was shortlisted for The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, and was selected by the editor of the Daily Express as his Book of the Year for 2004. Before moving here, he won two Sunday Tribune/Hennessy Awards, including New Irish Writer of the Year. Not bad.  Also quite notable, his short story Sightings of Bono was made into a short film that featured Bono himself. In keeping with his conquering the world, the short was published in Italy, by Scritturapura Editore, as  part of their international short story series. He also holds an MFA in Creative Writing, from Eastern Washington University in 1992.

Since landing here, he has most recently published the novel, Turtle, and this collection of poetry, Games of Chance, which is merely months old. It’s conceptually an interesting collection. Beirne has studied both mathematics and engineering, and in this collection, “seeks to reconcile art and science with spirituality.”

“Rotation Transformations”

Having fixed the stars in space
Nicolaus Copernicus sets the world
(by default) into motion

(the only possible deduction)

dispelling the notion
of an earth at rest
at the centre of the universe.

Incredulous at his own audacity
Copernicus repeatedly wipes his brow
and furiously paces his study.

What now?

All too aware of the consequences
the sealing of his fate
he looks down
observes the movement of his feet.

His world never to stand still again.

Thereafter:
the nature of rotation transformations
the ongoing search for the centre
the point about which all else revolves.

Copernicus in a spin
maps out his life
its daily and yearly revolutions
defines his rotation about the origin

keeping his distance
maintaining his isometry.

While elsewhere all around him
the earth is stationary
motionless amidst concentric rotating spheres
of outdated postulations
the fear of a heliocentric theory replacing self
and God, that other great astronomer,
of little help.

Copernicus the church administrator
counts the cost
his uncle (Bishop Lukasz Watsenrode) aghast.

His world precessing on its axis
while Copernicus observes his own occultation
the obscuration of his greatest work
De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium.

Finding his own place in space
Copernicus awaits his death

a rigid motion transformation.

And us?  Even yet
our coordinates unknown
our centre unnamed
our images translated to another plane
a geocentric cosmology continuing to reign.

“Bone” (an extract)

The spine:

A sea-horse rippling through the waters of my back
a new man at your nerve centre
eggs fertilising in a brood pouch
attached to your belly

cervical, dorsal, lumbar, sacral, coccygeal

The cranium:

I don an armoured skullcap
to protect your ancient wisdom
your woodland cures for convulsions and hysteria

occipital, parietal, frontal, temporal, sphenoid, ethmoid

The face:

The flat surface of our regulated earth
an apparatus ready to grind us down

nasal, superior maxillary, lachrymal,  inferior maxillary

The hyoid bone:

For good fortune
I forge sound into iron upsilons
cast words to the root of my tongue

lingual