Photograph (C) Denis Sinyakov/AFP/Getty Images

In the above photograph, it’s clear that piracy advocate and international bestseller Paulo Coehlo is not hurting for money and attention. He’s sold millions and millions of his many, many books. He’s also joined forces with the notorious free file sharing website, Pirate Bay, where you can get just about any eBook, movie, song, TV show, or software program with the click of a button. By joining forces, I mean he’s shouting, “pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written.”

Why? Because if Russia has proven one thing to the world, lately, it’s this: Piracy is seemingly not hurting authors. Or publishers. Coehlo’s The Alchemist was Russia’s number 1 pirated book for several years there … and has sold a whopping 12 million copies to date.

How? Piracy is about discovery, not thievery. We live in the age of Internet samples: YouTube and Grooveshark are ways to sample music, IMDB and movie trailers inform us on movies … but books? it’s only recently some publishers are wise enough to offer a first chapter online. This I guarantee you: that’s not giving anything away for free. It’s letting me sample, and if I like I buy. But if I can’t sample, I don’t buy. Why would I? I don’t trust critics and jurors, they’re not me. And backcovers, meh. Sampling is like the first date: is there chemistry between me and the first page? Do I want another page/date? Without access to a sample, I can’t tell. That’s how I’ve come to understand how piracy and sales are going hand in hand. That and the sheer convenience of piracy: Any book, music, movie, or show I want, right there right away. I equate it to the mixtape days. I never made a mixtape for my crush to streal royalties from Kurt Cobain, I shared his music out of sheer enthusiasm, so people would go buy his records. Do I like the idea of being pirated? Not really. But what I’d hate more is being unread and inaccessible to anyone interested.

“If I wasn’t a pirate I never would read your books! I consider it a preview, if you like it, buy it!” – Guy on Pirate Bay in reaction to Coehlo’s partnership with them

A large part of Coehlo’s argument is simply that writers want to be read, and being accessible makes that easier. In turn, publishers making file sharing impossible, in the interest of their and their authors books, is strangely and counterproductively damaging for exposure of these books. To quote the man who has opened my mind on the subject, Sean Cranbury, “What we call piracy is a basic function of the Internet.” But copyright protection and its people have not yet accepted that reality. Or embraced it in the fruitful, productive ways the music industry has.

Here’s Neil Gaiman on why he’s converted to be pro piracy:

Robbie MacGregor, Publisher at Invisible Publishing, on Piracy

Piracy concerns me not at all. I’m the head of a publishing firm that owns the ‘exclusive world right’ to publish, distribute, etc. the words of a bunch of authors, forever-and-ever, and piracy concerns me
not at all.

Digital systems facilitate sharing, they make the act of copying utterly trivial and have since sometime around when the unix command ‘dd’ came into popular use (approximately ten years before I was born, and some 25 years before something resembling the commercial internet really got rolling).

It doesn’t make sense to enumerate all the new and interesting ways in which users can share and copy a set of bits, losing sleep over the myriad ways your files could end up in the hands of unknown others for free. A job like that would be way too big, hopelessly futile … and it would be wrong-headed to boot.

In my opinion, producers, promoters, creators, should be focusing on ways to deliver better service, better files, to make things easier. When someone searches for an album, a book, whatever, make sure they find you first. Have the file there, ready to go, and don’t stick too many obstacles, logins, etc. between visitors and the stuff they came for. That’s how you win on the aggregate. It’s not that complicated. What’s the alternative? To engage in some massive, and likely futile attempt, at terraforming the web? The internet wasn’t built for commerce. Attempts to reshape it, to make it reflect and support more traditional ideas of exchange or protect the established business models of media companies will fail. Those who support these kinds of projects will invariably end up looking impotent, ignorant, stupid. Again, I’m saying this as someone who runs a fairly traditional media company in many respects.

It seems more sensible to accept the network’s biases, try to realize some net benefit in (unauthorized) sharing, in so much as it might facilitate discovery or supplement direct promotional efforts, maybe try to get your files/ideas/stories into the mix. That’s probably the best you can do.

Kimberly Walsh, All-around Industry Insider, on Piracy

Personally, I agree with Gaiman. Obscurity, particularly for a debut or new author, is a challenge. In a way, we can think of illegal copies as marketing in these cases. It costs money to make money. At BookCamp in Halifax this year, I was part of a break-out session that discussed the correlation between book purchasing after reading frees copies. Librarians, book bloggers. readers, and booksellers all said that if they enjoy the book, they’ll buy a personal copy. I’ve been in the same situation where a friend has loaned me a book and, if I loved it, I went out and bought a copy even if I wound up not reading it from cover to cover again.I don’t think I’ve seen any quantitative data on this hypothesis but the theory is that people who do “steal” your work and never pay for it are the ones who never would have paid for it to begin with. That’s not a lost sale. In some cases, piracy is actually about distribution channels. We’re living in a society of instant gratification. If a reader can’t get a book at the moment s/he wants it, that’s a lost sale. Sometimes we’re talking about bridging a gap with a “pirated” copy until a legal one can be purchased.

Here is a list ofthe most stunning bookstores in the world, with the photos to back it.

Here are 25 tips on opening a bookstore.

And here’s why Barnes and Noble are not supporting Amazon as a publisher, by not stocking their titles.

Photo (c) Paul Daly

The Canadian League of Poets  and the Canada Council for the Arts have launched a nationwide reading campaign, in the name of Canadian poet PK Page. The PK Page Trust Fund will be used to support Canadian poets, and all poets participating in this reading series are donating their earnings to its pot. Writers across the country have read, as part of it, and it stops on Thursday night, February 2nd, 7:30, at Memorial University (Room A1046), with the incomparable Mary Dalton. There will also be a silent auction of a special letterpress printing of a poem by P.K. Page. Dalton, happy to participate, considers Page “one of Canada’s greatest poets.”

Speaking of great Canadian poets, CBC recently and officially declared Mary as one of Canada’s top 10 living poets, still contributing to our national body of work. I would not disagree. And nor would those who’ve read and praised her distinctive work. She’s received various awards for her poetry; Merrybegot in particular wooed jurors, bagging the 2005 E.J. Pratt Poetry Award, and landing itself on the shortlist for several others. Namely, the Winterset Award for Excellence in NL Writing and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for the best Canadian book of poetry by a female. Red Ledger, my own introduction to Mary’s bright work, was shortlisted for the 2007 Atlantic Poetry Prize and the E.J. Pratt Poetry Award. I’ve since read and savoured her previous books.

In the poetic world of Mary Dalton, everything seems in a state constant flux, fluidity and change; there’s more than meets the eye when seen with her eyes. There is a punchy intensity at play; a taut muscularity of language. Mary’s work has a distinctive trait of immediately engaging you, and leaving you dumbstruck. She employs the kind of economic and exact diction that good poetry is made of. Hers are taut poems, pulled coils ready to snap with wit, wordsmithery, and substance.

Freely participating  in this PK Page Trust fund campaign is part of Mary’s benevolent way. She’s a big supporter of the arts and fledgling new writers here in Newfoundland, mainly through her role as a professor at Memorial University (where she even goes so far as to oversee the publication of her creative writing students’ work). As far back as the early 1980s, she was involved with Newfoundland’s now defunct Tickle Ace literary magazine, which was crucial to giving a voice to our writers long before the national spotlight was shone upon us. Most recently, she’s spearheaded, and is the director of, St. John’s SPARKS Literary festival: A day-long showcasing of Newfoundland & Labrador’s literary talent in all genres. In just three years, it’s featured about 30 writers, at all stages of their careers. As of this year, it also has two awards associated with it: one for the best haiku involving fire imagery, and now, as they’ve committed to doing this again, the Cox & Palmer SPARKS Creative Writing Award for a current or recent graduate of Memorial University’s Creative Writing Program. I could not be more impressed with Mary Dalton for spearheading this, and for going so far above and beyond. It’s quickly become THE St. John’s literary event, and something we were in desperate need of, here, in the nation’s literary goldmine.

8 Poems from a Larger Series, Waste Ground, which appeared in Fiddlehead in 2005.

Tansy

Athanasia, ferny,
pert, buttoned up
in that yellow cardigan.
Wouldn’t peg you for a
necrophiliac.
Inside the corpses’
cavities you’re radiant—
no sweet talk of rebirth,
just a delay, a lingering.

Juniper

What a falling off here.
Hippocrates’ crony,
soother of kidneys—
you and your demure blue.
Then the long slide
down to gutters and mothers’ ruin—
that delirium, that
smouldering.

Daisy

Yep, I’m the sunny one,
chirpy, day’s eye,
your throwaway
love calculator,
your good luck bundle.
Wart remover, hairdresser.
Little do you care
I sprang from the Magdalen’s tears,
am sown by the still-born:
ghost gift for the sorrowing.

Parsley

Hard to believe
he hangs around tombs.
They toss him compliments:
A dapper fellow—curly head—
such fresh breath.
A prince of temperance.
Still, it’s whispered in alleys
he and the Devil
are just like that.

Stinging Nettle

Burn, baby, burn.
Such acid wit—
and a spinner,
a healer. But they want
a milquetoast, cliché.
You languish in waste fields.
You’re too
Jane Austen by far.

Sorrel

Young sourpuss,
summoner of grimaces.
Blood-washer,
belly-calmer.
Your touch
might banish
the bag-lady’s sores,
the squeegee boy’s scabs.

Hops

Okay, so the joke’s on me:
a climber, I’ve fallen.
Me: a king among bakers and tailors.
Morpheus’ right-hand man.
Most days now
I slouch over the bar,
full of bluster,
rheumy-eyed, belching
beer-fuelled sagas.

Clover

Scuttling out,
Eve made off with me.
You’ll find me where mares foal.
You think to read my leaves,
apply your puny
numbers.
Your questions.
I never yet
saved a man from the army.

If Goose Lane isn’t Atlantic Canada’s finest publisher, it’ll give any competition a run for its money: a standard for quality literature and good-looking books, that get national media attention, with some wild success stories, like Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven, Joan Thomas’s Reading by Lightning, and Douglas Glover’s Elle. They also happen to be Canada’s first independent publisher: admirable.

In 1994, before everyone had computers, let alone the Internet, these guys made history by becoming one of the first publishing houses in the world to launch their own website. Since that time, they’ve continuously made changes to it, to evolve and meet your needs and industry demands. Like being able buy ebooks right off their site (which you ought to be doing, when you buy any book, by the way! Buy direct).

As of today they’ve officially launched a sleek, pleasure-to-browse website that makes discovering and buying book a breeze. It’s got new features, like ongoing staff blogs, new content, like sample chapters, and a new promotional kick-off. Exciting stuff.  To celebrate the launch, they’re extending a special offer. For every day the week of January 30, they’ll be offering one book a day at a special discounted price. Every day of the week one of these titles will be “drastically discounted to help celebrate the new website and attitude,” so get it then. Roadsworth, YOU comma Idiot, The Famished Lover, Miller Brittain, The Black Watch, Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy, and Ganong: A Sweet History of Chocolate 

Like a good workout, there are perks to writing, but like a good workout, it’s exhausting once you really get into it. I’m not the first writer to occasionally ponder why I’m even doing this. George Orwell once likened writing to a curse, an addiction he tried to fight against. One of the reasons I keep at it came up in Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s new book. Lorri is a former Haligonian Poet Laureate. Her new book, entitled, Threading Light: Reflections on Loss and Poetry, contained a quote I thought I’d bounce off a handful of writers.

In Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s new book, Threading Light, she says, ‘Language is a hinge that connects us to the flesh of our experience.’ Much of my own writing is a conversation with myself, on a topic I’ve steeped in the guise of a story. At the end of the day, what is it that compels you to write? What percentage of the urge is an attempt to better understand the world?”

Kathleen Winter (Annabel, BoYs)

“There’s an underground stream running through my body, underneath the contact my body makes with life and the earth, and that underground stream contains inchoate material from two sources, like estuary waters: inchoate material or silt from within myself, my inner life, and inchoate material from the world that appears to be outside myself. These two kinds of silt or stardust swish around together and form incoherent messages which grow more and more insistent. What are they saying? What do they mean? Before they ignite and blow me to pieces, I try to catch them and join them in a delicate line which, if I’m lucky, become words, become some sort of message, become my writing …”

Chris Benjamin (Drive-by Saviours, Eco-Innovators)

“There is a push and a pull factor at work. The push is a love for reading and stories that is either innate or developed at a very young age in me. I wrote my first story when I was six. It was about a dinosaur, and it was essentially a ripoff of Danny and the Dinosaur, a children’s book about a dinosaur and boy who paint the town red together. Within a few years I was more creative but still aping, writing stories about the age-old person-monster war. I loved a good yarn, and was equally adept at telling my friends tall tales on the playground. And in high school I discovered poetry and realized how you could play with form and the words themselves, twist them and make them mean different things than even you intended, bring them alive. When I sit down with a pen and blank paper the thrill is the same, the excitement that there is something in my head and heart and eventually something will be on the page, possibly similar but only writing it down will tell. It’s fun.

The push factor is that stories are everything. They are what we think and feel, and how we understand the world. They are our passions and beliefs. We think ourselves rational but that’s just a story – we’re making 99 percent of our decisions based on stories we’ve learned and thus values we’ve internalized, memories we have of what felt right. If I’m not part of that conversation, who is? Whoever they are they’re really fucking things up. My stories are my way to study that question and understand not only the way things are, but how they got this way, and how we fix them. And it’s also my wee little attempt steer this vessel away from the monsters. ”

Russell Wangersky (The Hour of Bad Decisions, Burning Down the House, The Glass Harmonica)

“I don’t know that I write to try and better understand the world – I think it’s more that I’m trying to explain. Explain what I see, explain why I behave the way I do, explain myself – and I think I need to do it because I’m remarkably unable to explain myself in spoken words, especially to the people I care about. If language is a hinge, it’s a hinge on a door that I otherwise keep closed, simply because I find it really hard to let people open it and look inside at me in any sort of real time.”

Leslie Vryenhoek (Scrabble Lessons, Gulf)

“Not so much an attempt to understand the world–more an attempt to understand what the hell it is I really believe. That’s close to 90% of the impulse, anyway. Most of the rest, of course, is an attempt to convert others to my way of thinking once that way has revealed itself to me. Either that, or it’s to ask forgiveness for thinking such things.”

Lorri Neilsen Glenn (Combustion, Lost Gospels, Threading Light, and many more)

“What compels me to write?

Paul MacDonald of Cox & Palmer congratulates Randy Drover, winner of the inaugural Cox & Palmer SPARKS Creative Writing Award

Randy Drover is, in my opinion, one of the best emerging writers in the country. And I’ve been a fan for years. In 2008, to grow as a writer, I took a creative writing course at MUN,  and on the first night there, Randy read a piece. It was some of the best writing I’d ever heard.  Not a word out of place: evocative, lush, and perfect enough that I felt pretty small as a writer, and fondly jealous of the guy. I wrote an article in a local paper at the time, saying he’d be one of the next big names out of Newfoundland, filling the daunting shoes of our Lisa Moores, Michael Winters, and John Stefflers. And since that time he’s won some awards, published some poems and short stories, and is currently the poetry editor for Canada’s hippest new literary Journal, Riddle Fence. He’s an old soul and the exciting new voice out of Newfoundland.

This Sunday past, Randy won the inaugural Cox & Palmer SPARKS Creative Writing Award. It’s an award for a current or recent graduate of Memorial University’s Creative Writing Program who seems set for success, and there were many to choose from. MUN’s creative writing program is taught by the likes of Mary Dalton, Larry Mathews, Robert Finlay, Jessica Grant, and Don McKay, among others. The award, sponsored by the law firm, Cox & Palmer,is given out as part of the annual SPARKS literary festival in St. John’s every year. SPARKS is a fantastic, day-long festival, broken up in to 4 sessions with 4 Newfoundland writers a piece, that was borne out of Memorial’s Faulty of Arts, and is spearheaded by the admirable, internationally acclaimed poet, Mary Dalton. It started in 2010, and since then, has featured more than 30 of Newfoundland & Labrador’s finest writers, alongside our newest writers. Mary and others have been building more and more excitement around the festival, including video productions, radio broadcasts, and two awards: one for the best haiku involving fire imagery, and now, as they’ve committed to doing this again, the Cox & Palmer SPARKS Creative Writing award. I could not be more impressed with Mary Dalton for spearheading what St. John’s had been truly  needing, and for going so far above and beyond.

Randy agrees. I sent him an email of congrats and a few questions about the award and SPARKS in general.

Mary Dalton’s effort in bringing this festival to life is nothing short of extraordinary. I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of this festival since its inaugural year, as a reader, a volunteer and audience member, and the crowd drawn each year certainly lends credence to the fact that this is something that St. John’s needs. When you mix emerging writers with multi-award winning novelists, playwrights and poets, you attract a diverse audience, and offer a great escape on a cold January day. There is such a rich arts community in Newfoundland, and to have a yearly showcase for this talent is merited and incredibly worthwhile.

Earlier, I mentioned the calibre of caring, insightful, and talented professors MUN”s creative Writing Program has amassed, of which Randy had this to say, “The creative writing program at MUN is responsible for many of the successes I have seen in my writing life. The program offers a variety of courses in many disciplines and when testing these waters you really find your niche. Working with peers, writers, and professors on a weekly basis makes these courses a joy to participate in, and lends encouragement to any emerging writer. And a little encouragement stretches a long way when beginning.”

Poet, MUN professor, and SPARKS’ festival co-ordinator Mary Dalton shares my enthusiasm for Randy’s bright, crisp work. “Randy Drover is a gifted young writer,” she says, “who has done outstanding work in  the creative writing program. This award will buy him some time and foster the writing energies, we hope.”

While I wasn’t surprised Randy won the Cox & Palmer award, I’m glad to hear he was surprised and excited. “More than anything, [I was] awakened. To win an award like this is a huge motivation to continue. Thanks go out to SPARKS and Cox and Palmer for their support of the arts community and my future within it. It’s an exceptional boost for a fledgling writer.”

Without further ado, since he’s ambi- or -tridextrous, like most people coming out of MUN’s creative program, I’ll close this with a poem and a short story of his …

Before Going Out
……………………Two Tankas

Ten lines to doll-up
the hearsay woman, old crow
with gimlet eyes. Ear
to the telephone, hands on
the clothesline. Patch quilts, patch quilts.

Five now, to straighten
jars and jars, pickles and jam,
turn the moose soup down.
Juice glass with lilac perfume.
Homemade cream near the face pan.

Of Sidney

The mill is always cold, even on days where lightning-beaked gulls snatch ice cream out of sweaty hands. The paint has faded and is rotting with the wooden exterior. Those boards were sawed and shaved by grandfather’s hands. There is no electricity now, and when the kerosene lantern is lit, the inside stone walls appear dusted black. Light reveals wooden pulley wheels and still saw blades, sharp as they were twenty years ago. The engine room is a museum of rusted thumb wrenches, files, moonshine bottles of oil, and the engine that hasn’t started since Sidney died.

Rumor is that Joseph Tad dug up the corpse one late night in July. Carried Sidney in a wheelbarrow, over seaweed and lichen, and laid him in the water. Many believe he should have been buried at sea. After all, he was born on a trawler. It was a pleasant surprise for grandfather, dancing over rolling logs to see his son. The happiest log driver’s waltz. Men say that Sidney had gills. He could dive deeper than any man, swim farther and faster. He is Jonah. He is Nemo. A pirate, with lobster pots out all year. The fables and books conjure images of him. Sixteen, though he lived ten years longer, fit and trim like the photograph that hangs in the mill.

…

When the water was still innocent, and the days were bright and salty, I would perch on the flat stones before the tide swallowed the landwash. Rob was always with me, and we had makeshift bamboo rods and a tin can full of bent hooks we picked up from the wharf. We wanted cod, but usually caught sculpins. We’d beat their heads off rocks then throw them at each other, barbed backs ripping our old shirts.

When the water began to lap at our shoes, we headed to the stage. We could already see bobbing skiffs coming in for dinner. Father was among them, and grandfather, motoring out from some narrow cove. Grandfather was first, and had the most fish. He wore a tailored suit each day under his oilskins. Father followed with Percy, Popeye-grin on his face. I sat watching on blue barrel in the corner of the stage, scales flying like flour at a bakery.

We all had napes for dinner, and afterwards, the men would head out again, leaving us to wander. We would go farther each day atop the jagged and craggy cliffs. The water was infinite then.

In June, we spotted a shack in the distance, down between the hills. It was small and orange, likely abandoned. A short dock with rotting planks, tin chimney flute. Clear water carrying colorations of the sea.

The connection I felt was magnetic, as if I had lived there before, or wanted to. We followed the slender goat path down. It was a clubhouse then, our own. A perfect place for smoking the cigarettes Rob lifted from his parent’s store.

…

April, years later, the sky seemed as if it had gotten dark, but it was the mood that darkened. The water was treacherous, snow still, and flurries. I sat in the front of the dory, cold and sick from the waves and the breeze off the water. It was Easter, and we were not after cod. I was now part of this annual excursion. We motored past the narrows and up past Nelly’s Arm. Percy took bearings from the cliff face that looks like a lady, and pointed out her features. An ear, nose, deep craters for eyes. We traveled east from there, to an abandoned wharf in a small patch of high cliffs. The shack had changed. It had aged.

It happened here twenty years ago, they told me. This was where Sidney died. I wouldn’t tell them that I knew this place well. We docked, and the boat crashing against the rotting wharf chipped splinters of board that floated past in the water. Percy told me that Annie Sheppard used to live here, and always had bread and lassie for anybody who came out this far. We laid a wreath for Sidney and saved one flower for Annie.

Percy took the guitar from the boat and sang Fiddler’s Green. They told me that they were all here when he died, and grandfather was with them. The only day they saw him cry. After the boil-up, they all set out for an afternoon of fishing. Sidney jumped in the boat first, and an errant plank was tossed up, seesaw-like, throwing him onto the jagged rocks beneath the shallow water. The damage was enough then, to hospitalize him. The water though, was what did him in: bobbing underneath the wooden dock.

It was a sad spectacle; a long lament for a man I barely know.

On the way home, the men sensed my uneasiness. When Percy spotted a small shark ahead of the boat, he decided to lighten the mood. He revved the engine and chased it for a quarter of a mile, father leaning from the stern trying to stab it with a grappling hook. When the hook pierced its gills, the fish thrashed, water dyed red. We were poachers, like Sidney, and it felt right.

We stopped then, under the mountains, to clean the shark and cut it into sections that would fit neatly in our coolers and rubber boots. We heard the sounds of livestock from atop the mountain – Ned Angel’s farm. The harsh angle of the cliffs made it impossible to see. Peering over, though, was a kid. Light brown and white. Glancing once out over the ocean and then back again, it leapt, nearly ninety feet down.

We heard the harsh sound of bones ripping. It slid off the rocks, floated towards us like a ragdoll. The guttural bleating came next, from a Billy peering downwards, searching. It wanted to jump, I’m sure, but had other kids, a mate. The bleating continued, long after we hauled anchor and left that morbid place.

…

Sometimes, when the sky is like a beaten tin plate, and heavy with fog, I go there. I don’t take the boat – I never take the boat, but climb over rocks and brambles until I am at the dock. Days like this, when the calm sea carts fog on its back, I can see it drifting by, bleating.

Today, though, father and I are painting the mill. Grandfather has been gone a year now. After dinner at grandmothers, I lie on the old sofa and nap. Sidney is with me. He rows an old dory, the one upturned in the lumberyard. We talk for a while, until he tells me he’s fine. He is searching, though, for his father. For grandfather. I tell him I know where to find him.

In the afternoon, after the second coat is on, we wander inside the mill and open the windows. Light shines on the wooden beams, chiseled with the names of grandfather and Sidney. It has always been grandfather’s pain, never Sidney’s. I know that now, and I know he is here, as Sidney is in the ocean. The engine will start today, I’m sure of it.

Glass Boys is the fourth novel by Newfoundland novelist Nicole Lundrigan, an author dubbed as “a serious contender for the next great Canadian novelist” by critic Sarah Weinman. It received rave reviews throughout 2011, and landed on Amazon.ca’s top 100 books of 2011.

Her previous work has enjoyed plenty of recognition, including comparisons to Faulkner & David Adams Richards, and the Globe and Mail‘s Margaret Cannon put her debut, Unraveling Arva, on her Top 10 Books of the Year list. But Glass Boys, in keeping with her consistent growth between books, is her best one yet.

It’s a family saga, sped-up and clipped of as much filler as possible, centering on a tension-filled history between the Trench and Fagan families. Lundrigan presents us with the daily lives and histories of Lewis Trench and Eli Fagan, along with their wives and children, and the ways they shape — and misshape — one another. The book features a full cast of broken characters: there’s the troubled son and the mother too spiritually withered to see it; the wife and the bad man she married to get a roof over her son’s head; the perfect son and the guilt-ridden mother who cannot reciprocate his love; the husband turning a blind eye to his wife’s dark side until she’s literally out of his sight. For a book juggling half-a-dozen points of view, Lundrigan does a commendable job keeping them all distinct.

There are enough commendable qualities in Lundrigan’s approach to the family saga to put her novel in the same ranks as similar contemporary classics, such as David Adams Richards’ Mercy Among the Children. In fact, Lundrigan and Richards share many of the same strengths as writers. But Nicole’s writing is distinct, and something of a “best of” collection of my favourite traits of Newfoundland writing: raw human stories with crisp, lush writing, and empathetic in a way that connects reader to story like a fly in a web. This was one of the best Canadian novels of the year.

Read Salty Ink’s Review of Glass Boys (in the National Post) here.

What’s been a highlight for you and Glass Boys this year?

There have been a number of highlights, but the best has been the reader reaction. I’ve had so many readers contact me through my website to share their impressions, and I’m so touched by some of the notes. For me, the best highlight is when a reader says, “I can’t wait for your next book.”

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

Kathleen Winter’s Annabel and Lisa Moore’s February always jump to mind. I’ll never forget Lure of the Labrador Wild by Dillon Wallace, and my childhood favourite Down by Jim Long’s Stage by Al Pittman.

What are some of the best books you read in 2011?

I read both Annabel and February, which were amazing. And I loved Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Florence and Giles by John Harding, and The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano.

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

It really depends on the book. Could be simply information, or a good laugh, or to have a creepy feeling when the lights go out, or to have my heart squeezed.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

No pet peeves really. Everyone I’ve met who writes or is in publishing works incredibly hard. Some things are certainly disheartening, like independent bookstores closing. Or large bookstores shipping books back to the publisher after what seems like a blink. It’s a real knuckle to the heart. Does that count?

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

My favourite part of writing is adding to the bones. Least favourite is building the skeleton.

You’ve got an interesting background. You’re an archeologist turned writer, you’ve played a role in sea turtle conservation, you’ve played a hands-on role in bringing healthcare to small villages in Guyana. You’ve lived in France with a Baron and Baroness in the Chateau de Prouzel. Do you think living a “storied life” helps an author in crafting stories? Or is the recipe for literary fiction simply:  imagination meets rumination on life?

Imagination is key, of course, but I think there’s more to it. I’ve always had an adventurous spirit, and like to do things that feel difficult. Travel was so important to me, and it really helped to shape who I am. Certain experiences were very humbling.

In addition to imagination and a wide variety of interests, I suspect writers need a stubborn streak as well. When I first started writing Unraveling Arva, I told someone I was writing a book, and he said, “Sure, tell me again when you’ve got ten pages.” Now I tend to be somewhat secretive about my progress, as I never know when I’ll run into a snarl.

You’ve written for some interesting places. How’d you end up writing for Law & Order: Police Management? Was your freelance writing a gateway into writing fiction?

When I was freelance writing I tapped into various personal experiences (my trip to Guyana) or my education (the Law & Order stuff). With Law & Order, I just contacted the editor of the magazine through email, explained my background, and asked if he’d review an article I’d written. He said yes, liked it, published it, and it went from there.

In some ways freelance writing gave me courage. The editors were all very positive about my writing. So in that way, it was a gateway to this crazy world of fiction.

As tragedy falls around all of the characters in Glass Boys, somehow Toby remains the spark of light in the novel. He’s not happy go lucky, so much as he is where the reader lays their hope. Was that a conscious decision? Do you have a reason for this?

No, not a conscious decision, that’s just who he was. I try to get to know my characters as I write them, and from the onset, Toby was different from the others. He dealt with sadness, but didn’t quite absorb it. He was very open and aware of others, and not a hurtful kid. He always wanted to make things easier, better.

The book features a full cast of broken characters: the spiritually withered mother who doesn’t notice a budding darkness in her troubled son; the wife and the bad man she married to get a roof over her son’s head; the perfect son and the guilt-ridden mother who cannot reciprocate his love; the husband turning a blind eye to his wife’s dark side until she’s literally out of his sight. Which relationship in the novel was the most tragic in your mind? The most beautiful?

This is a tough question, and I might change my answer tomorrow. Right now I’d say the connection between the mother and her sons. For various reasons, she is unable to connect to them, doesn’t feel that she deserves the adoration they are offering. I found this heartbreaking – for the mother, but mostly for the boys. The rejection is devastating.

Most beautiful I would say is the bond between the two brothers. There’s a part in the story near the end when Toby goes to visit Melvin. Every time I read it my eyes well up. I’m a bit of a softie, but I love how deeply they care for each other.

Everyone has a history, and this novel feels built on that premise. Would you agree writing a novel is merely answering a series of questions about your characters, once you’ve put them into the very first scene and observed their reactions?

No, I wouldn’t agree with that statement. Questions, yes, but I feel it’s about so much more than that. It’s about believing, understanding, respecting, exploring, and connecting. And stepping out of the way.

Speaking of which, what’s it like as a writer to hear other people making presumptions, and taking away different reactions about your work?

I certainly find people’s reactions interesting. I recently attended a book club via Skype and one of the readers expressed her fears over a particular scene. And her interpretation of it was entirely (and I mean completely) different from what I’d intended. The thoughts she had never even entered my mind. I was really surprised, but I could easily see her point.

When a male writer takes on the voice of a female character, or the opposite, there’s always the question of “How’d you do that?” or “How did you find that?” Personally, I don’t find it difficult or that much different, as we’re embodying characters, not genders. And, ultimately, don’t we all share the same emotions. Do you agree, disagree, fall in the middle?

I don’t really give it much thought. I just write the character’s personality in a way that feels authentic.

Notable critic Sarah Weinman dubbed you “a serious contender for the next great Canadian novelist.” How, if at all, has your approach to crafting a novel changed now that you have both the experience of having written 4, and, experienced public reaction to your work?

I like to think I’m getting better at telling a story, but I still find it super hard work. Public reaction is wonderful (when it’s positive), but it really doesn’t affect the way I write.

You leave a lot up to the reader in this novel, like if the death in the opening scene was an accident or murder. It enriches the reading experience, I believe, to let readers write some of the story themselves. Is this a conscious effort? And, do you have the answers you don’t give on the page, like, if Roy Trench’s death was murder or an accident?

To be honest, when I working on a manuscript, not much is a conscious effort. I really try to let my characters dictate what will happen. Occasionally I try to impose my own ideas or toss in some lines that I think sound clever, but I always go back and delete. If I’m re-reading my writing, and am aware of myself, notice myself on the edge of the page, I have to remove it.

I do have an impression about Roy’s death, but only Eli Fagan knows for sure what was in his heart at that moment.

Can you give us a few lines on what your manuscript in progress is about and when it’ll be published?

I’m writing a literary mystery about three children who discover something valuable in a government field in the 1950s, in Yugoslavia, and make the risky decision to keep it. Shortly afterwards, one of the children disappears. The story covers the before and after of the two remaining children, as well as the mother of the missing boy.

The esteemed Patrick Crean, who spent the last dozen years making Thomas Allen one of the country’s finest publishers — recent hits including this year’s Giller winner, Half-blood Blues, last year’s Giller finalist, This Cake is for the Party, and Russell Wangersky’s latest books — will be stepping down. Stepping up to the plate will be the reputable Marc Côté (Who will remain on staff at Cormorant as well. More here.

The latest book book craze is in full swing: CanLit is Sexy, which takes book titles and tries to make them sexy. Warning: it favours quantity over quality, to the point of obscurity.

And, here’s a dozen theater-bound Hollywood adaptations set for 2012.

It might be a debut novel, but it seems strange to call it that, given how seasoned and stellar a writer Compton is. She’s been doing this for twenty years, teaches the stuff of writing, has contributed to the country’s finest publications, and her work has appeared in many journals. In fact, a chunk of this novel was shortlisted for the CBC’s annual short fiction award in 2004, and an excerpt was published in Riddle Fence.

Tide Road tells the story of a mother whose daughter drowned under unsettling circumstances, leaving behind troubling questions and a husband and daughter left stunned by her sudden absence.  The police declare it an accidental drowning, but her mother Sonia suspects otherwise, including foul play at the hands of her son-in-law. Her daughter’s death forces Sonia to “revise her perception of her daughter’s life and dramatically change the way she lives her own.” It is a fantastic novel.

Compton’s crisp, bright writing, paired with Tide Road’s motif of dealing with loss, brings to mind Lisa Moore’s masterpiece, February. They share a similar narrative structure, and with a dazzling style, x-ray a compelling character’s  life and coming to terms with how it’s been irrevocably changed. Compton’s novel and style, however similar, do stand on there own here, in a way that’s made her one of my favourite finds in Atlantic Canadian writers in recent years. The novel largely centres on these lines from the book:

Memory changes, as the events of history never do …it depends on where you start, on the details you attend to, and the ones you let slip away.

The Winnipeg Review called her writing “a beauty to behold.” Big praise that she lives up to. It’s got all the teeth, heart, punch, and tenderness I want out of a novel; it flared my desire to write myself, and that’s my favourite reaction to a book. Her style of storytelling does what it should with this story: It sets you in the shoes of a shocked mother and shaken family, where a mind wonders, wanders, and wants an answer it might never get. Her short, supple, non-linear chapters were just the right way to tell this story, as they do exactly what Richard Cumnyn’s endorsement promised, “deliver the truth with a kind of fierce economy [of words].”

I expect to see this novel turn up on some Atlantic Book Award shortlists soon …

What’s been a highlight or two for you and Tide Road this year?

It’s been thrilling to hear from readers who have been touched by the novel and its characters. Before publication, I’d not really imagined what this might be like. So I’ve been surprised and delighted to discover that when a reader speaks or writes to me about Tide Road, the experience feels just the same as when I read a book I love, then burst with wanting to tell people about it.

I love reading aloud from the novel because doing so allows me to be inside the story again, and to feel as I did when I was writing it. This too confirms my belief that writing and reading are somehow almost the same activity.

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

This year I reread Lisa Moore’s February and Anne Simpson’s Falling, two gorgeous novels about loss. I love Anne and Lisa’s sentences and piercing insights, and the compelling uniqueness of each of their voices. I can’t wait for whatever they do next, and I know I’ll read both of these books again.

What are some of the best books you read in 2011?

Outside the Maritimes, two books I’ve admired this year are Helen Humphreys’ deft, mature and elegant The Reinvention of Love and Rosemary Nixon’s emotionally brave, smart and stunningly beautiful Kalila. These novels enlarged my life.

What makes a good book a good book, anyway?

A magnetic connection with its reader’s heart and mind. Since the reader is fifty percent of this equation, there can never be one good book: that definition is slightly different for each of us.

You teach creative writing. What’s one or two things you’d impart on any writer?

Listen to the story. It will tell you things.

What’s some writing advice you’ve read or been told, that’s stuck?

The brilliant American novelist Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping) has said: “Usually in fiction there’s something that leaps out—an image or a moment that is strong enough to center the story.” This is what she tries to teach her students. “If they can see it, they can exploit it, enhance it, and build a fiction that is subtle and new. I don’t try to teach technique, because frankly most technical problems go away when a writer realizes where the life of the story lies.”

Is there such thing as one writer we can all learn from?

Probably not, since we are all different.

What would you have to say to a bright-eyed first year English student with dreams of being a rich, widely heralded published author?

Oh, dear. Does this student buy lottery tickets?

I would say, Write because you love sentences. Understand that poverty and silence are the norm, and that the road to publication is unimaginably long. Savour sentences the way a sommelier savours wine. Taste broadly, and develop your palate. One day you will be rich (not monetarily).

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

My favourite part of writing is revising. Least favourite: sorting out the muddle that is plot.

In Tide Road, a woman’s daughter simply vanishes, leaving her husband and young daughter bewildered, but Sonia suspects her daughter’s disappearance was no accident. What sparked your idea for this novel?

After the fact, it can be very difficult to tease out the true origins of a novel. Some decisions are the result of instinctive impulses, and some result from attempts to solve technical problems.

I lived happily for years with the setting and main character of the novel before I realized something dramatic had to happen. In a way, Sonia’s search for her daughter is a manifestation of an interior search for her own younger self. It’s possible I created the outer drama in order to justify the interior story that compelled me.

What was the biggest challenge of writing this novel?

The biggest challenge in the writing was finding the wisdom necessary to tell the story from Sonia’s point of view. Until the final revision, the novel was from her daughters’ perspectives.

I’ve heard it took you 7 or 8 years to write this wonderful novel. To what do you attribute sucking up most of that time?

Yes, Tide Road was eight years from start to finish.

Novels take time. Some of this is time is necessary to solve the emotional, intellectual and technical puzzles the novel presents. Some of it is simply a function of real life intervening. I moved house three times during the years I wrote Tide Road. I wrote it in all three Maritime provinces!

You’re an accomplished short story writer, but this is a debut novel. What was the hardest part of upping a story’s wordcount to novel length?

It’s not a matter of upping the word count so much as solving the dilemmas of a story that is too complex to be resolved in small span of words. A novel does, and should, require depth and breadth and time to complete.

Why do you write?

I write in order to discover what I know; because I love sentences—and words and lines; because, despite all my complaining, I have come to relish the vexing puzzle that is plot. And I write because I love to read: writing is like getting to read the story you most crave, every day.

Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist was shortlisted for the Giller Prize this year, the country’s most illustrious literary award. Over the course of her career, she’s written a body of work that’s helped keep CanLit fresh. It’s the vivacity of her writing that I really like. Her authentic voice and lively characters, and how they’re bursting with humanity and life and convincing universal conflicts. And she’s funny with substance, a great sentence-level writer whose writing isn’t overly adorned with lyrical tendencies: It cuts right to the chase, to drive the story along. These are rare qualities, rare balances that I’ve not seen shine so brightly in another writer, which might be what makes her books so distinctly Lynn Coady. And so very good.

In The Antagonist, Lynn crafts characters who’ll make the real-life people you know seem lifeless and unconvincing. It’s a novel about a man born big, and his sheer size has had an outside influence on his life. By 21, “Rank” had three violent stains on his life, all attributable, somehow, to his not knowing his own strength, or, others knowing his strength and using it to accomplish their own goals. Rank tried desperately to wash himself clean of that past, but nearing 40, he finds out his college roommate has written a novel that shines a spotlight on those very stains.

The entirety of the novel is one big rant from Rank to his old friend. It’s Rank trying to set the record straight. And turning himself inside out to do so reveals the life of Gordie Rankin Jr. in all its tenderness, sadness, hilarity, and absurdness. It’s all memorably delivered by Lynn’s skilful storytelling, witty turns of phrase, and eye for what really defines a life.

Over the course of her career, the headlines about Coady’s work have gone from “One of the best new writers in Canada,” or “One of the most lively writers in Canada” to simply, “One of the best writers in Canada,” because of a suite of trademarked traits.  Those traits have never been more alive in one of Coady’s novels as they are in The Antagonist. Here, they’ve clicked together and made an exceptionally vivacious Giller-worthy read.

What’s been a highlight or two for you and The Antagonist this year?

Hearing from readers online has been the best—this is the first novel I’ve published in the age of social media and it’s been exciting and pretty heart-warming to have people tweet their enthusiasm at me when they’re in the middle of the novel, or have just finished it.  Someone Facebooked me the other day to say The Antagonist is one of only two novels that made her cry in her life.  To get that kind of feedback from a total stranger is about as gratifying as it gets.

What are some of the best books you read in 2011?

I really liked How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. It’s probably the most original thing I’ve read all year.

What are you looking for from a book once you crack the spine?

A voice that strikes me as honest, breathing, uncontrived.

What would you have to say to a bright-eyed first year English student with dreams of being a rich, widely heralded published author?

Probably “Why are you talking to me?”  Then I’d say maybe try to read everything by Dan Brown, Stig Larson and Stephanie Meyer and see if you can distil what they are doing down to some kind of cross-genre formula, applicable to all three authors.  Then follow that formula.  Then send me the formula.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

I don’t like to kick people when they’re down.

Now that you’re 5 or 6 books into your career, do you approach writing or crafting a novel any differently now that you’ve had a lot of experience and public reaction to your work? Are there things you’ve learned from writing the first few you applied to The Antagonist, for example?

Yep, I’m better at plot I think and I have a lot more respect for plot than I did as a younger writer.  Around the time I was writing Mean Boy I started to develop an appreciation for the well-paced novel.  I decided the reader’s experience was more important than my wish to indulge all my Big Philosophical Ideas, and I realized the writers I admired most were writers who were able to explore big ideas via basic storytelling, without a lot of fancy footwork. Now I believe that anything worth saying in a novel can be articulated through character and conflict—the two most rudimentary aspects of narrative. The writer just has to stand back and let the story do the work, weave its own profundities.

You’ve created some of the most memorable characters in CanLit, as far as I am concerned. If characters could get any more real or fun to read, yours would make half the real-life  people I know seem dull and unconvincing. I know there’s no formula, but are there any tricks or conscious steps you take in your characterization to craft such well-wrought characters?

I pay pretty close attention to what makes people distinctive in real life, and I take a lot of pleasure in that distinctiveness.  Cape Breton was a good place to cultivate an appreciation of “characters” growing up—forceful, undeniable personalities; people who express themselves in ways that make them unforgettable.  At the heart of it, I’m just an aficionado.  I’m naturally interested in the kind of people who make an impression, so subsequently I pay close attention to how it is they do it.

Also, a key to writing character is never losing sight of a) what your character most wants; b) what he or she is most afraid of.  If you have those two things down cold they will be elucidated by everything your character says and every move he or she makes.  And those two things have to be pretty big, cosmos-level things.  It can’t be something like: He wants a car and he is afraid of getting beaten up—it’s gotta be, He wants to belong somewhere and he is afraid he will never be loved.

Many writers seem struck by the glitz and glamour of the Giller Award Gala. How was your experience?

What is there to say?  I live in Edmonton and barely ever leave my house.  Next thing I know I’m sitting one table over from Robbie Roberson and getting tapped on the shoulder by Malcolm Gladwell.  Also: people in headsets chasing me with panicked looks on their faces every time I got up to go to the bathroom.  It was a lot of fun.

Writers wind up in all sorts of day jobs, but how’d you become an advice columnist at the Globe and Mail?

This is a boring answer: They asked me and I said yes.  I’m done now, though, I just wrapped that gig up in the new year.

Folk is a concept collection. Its inciting incident is the 1998 crash of SwissAir Flight 111 off the coast of Nova Scotia, not far at all from Mooney’s bedroom window at the time. The collection is divided into two sections: Peggy’s Cove Nova Scotia, after the crash, and the modern day immigrant communities around Toronto’s Pearson Airport, where Mooney also lived for some time. It deals with motifs of identity and community.

Click here to read yesterday’s interview with Jacob.

“Vectorfieldfolk”

Everything that has ever been called ‘Folk Art’ has always reflected domination.
-Theodor Adorno

Source and sink. That each association gleaned
is just the spherical allowing us a peek inside its head.

That no one made us ready for the speed the earth was moving,
something kept us sheltered from the spin. That there are

ancillary lives on the surfaces of solids, a Coriolis Effect
to the tragedy patterns. That we can claim homes without knowing

the birthplace of the lumber that plays hostess to our story, the
species of grass seeds scattered on the lawn. Map the air around

the wingspan, pull the wind into a sock. We can study
and be honest. We can opt for better answers:

humanism, Godlessness. We can loop our finer points into
a brainwave to replay them, but the Where of us will always win.

“The Vector Field”

So now the world is coming
with its cameras to document,
to register an audience, to blur away our
hard-scrubbed
homogeneity, our
hardiness, our
hardness.

Everyone can tell you where they were
when the world arrived. Everybody happened
to be walking their dog,
eyes on the ocean, 11
PM and raining.

Those who didn’t own dogs
went out walking their intentions.

Everyone can illustrate
the actions of the airplane
in the seconds before impact. A
roll, a
twist. A
wing bent across its face like a
feign, a
faint, a
knowing inward sigh.

We spent the next three weeks
discussing windows. Every cracked window in every
eastward facing pane
was a witness. It passed through us. Drunk husbands
and accidental breaks were recast,
……………………………………………..their perspectives were flattened
in the neighbours’ rushed retellings. And everyone wanted
to pause for their portrait. Everyone wanted
to figure.

“The Vector Field” and “Vectorfieldfolk” from Folk ©2011 by Jacob McArthur Mooney. Published by McClelland & Stewart. Used with permission of the author and the publisher.

There are a lot of people in the world.  Billions. To make a national or even regional award’s shortlist is quite a feat, but to land on one for an international award is astounding; something fewer than 1% of people will ever do. In 2011, Jacob McArthur Mooney was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, which recognizes exceptional authors under 30, in all genres. Mooney is an award-wining poet with two collections and a novel in progress. His latest release is 2011′s Folk, which is what got him on this shortlist, alongside Orange Prize winner, Téa Obreht, the author of the international sensation, The Tiger’s Wife, and London’s Lucy Caldwell who made the list a second time. He was the only Canadian shortlisted.

“Throughout the book, short terse poems full of memorable phrases capture a sense of place and the lives of people coming to terms with their identity and communal realities.” – Dylan Thomas Prize Jury

It’s the strong, unifying concept in Folk that draws a reader in and holds them there. Its inciting incident is the 1998 crash of SwissAir Flight 111 off the coast of Nova Scotia, not far at all from Mooney’s bedroom window at the time. The collection is divided into two sections: Peggy’s Cove Nova Scotia, after the crash, and the modern day immigrant communities around Toronto’s Pearson Airport, where Mooney also lived for some time. It deals with motifs of identity and community; how towns, and the individual, react separately and together to, in his own words, “the psycho-cultural reorganization of what a small place means before and after being reframed by the sudden impact of such a massive thing as the death of 200 plus people.” Many of the book’s passages are subtle, understated commentary on the world’s and the townspeoples’ appropriation of the tragedy.

“Everyone can tell you where they were
when the world arrived. Everybody happened
to be walking their dog,
eyes on the ocean, 11
P.M. and raining.

Those who didn’t own dogs
went out walking their intentions

…. And everyone wanted to pose for their portrait. Everyone wanted
to figure.”

But it is the poems and passages that scale back from the community “we” to the narrator’s “I” that reveal an affecting personal affinity for the disaster.

“Newsprint on my hands
Drowned names smudged free and left to float
to foreign surfaces. A pen. A desk. The greying tape at the handle
of my Little League bat. Death gets into things like that.”

Quill & Quire’s review of Folk spoke of Mooney’s “unsettling poetic grace” throughout the collection, and I can say it was the most satisfying collection of poetry I read in 2011. The poems in Folk are compelling, confidently constructed, muscular in form, and tender in content. It’s also a collection of poems as accessible as it is insightful: if you’re not be an avid reader of poetry, but find Mooney’s concept intriguing, trust me and buy yourself a copy.

 What’s been a highlight or two for you and Folk this year?

Let’s see. I went to the Yukon for three months. I went to Europe for three more. I fell in love. I learned to bake. Folk has of course had its own adventures, too, but mostly we’ve been spending the year apart, after the launch and the readings I did back in the spring. We haven’t really been in touch much.

Making the 2011 Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist technicality crowns you as one of the world’s best under-30 writers. How do you like that, and what’s your stance on literary awards?

It’s nothing if not ambitious, isn’t it? I will say this: I was honestly and unironically excited by the news, both for my own rotund ego and for the possibility of an expanded readership it gave the book. But let’s not kid ourselves; I live in a rich and youthful literary community filled to overflow with dazzling with young brains, and I’m lucky if I go out to a reading or a coffee shop and I’m the best writer under 30 at the bar, let alone the world. It all depends on the tastes of the jury, and I guess this was just my year. Next year it’ll be five other people’s year and then they can be the best writers under 30.

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

Recent books? I’ll assume so. I liked Sue Goyette’s new collection quite a bit.  David Hickey is a PEI guy originally and I can definitely shout some love for his new collection, Open Air Bindery. There’s a lot of books on my must-read list right now, what with all the time I’ve been away, and chief among them is Mark Callanan’s second book, Gift Horse.

What about a book or two from people you’ve met up there in Toronto?

A pretty endless list, really, for reasons detailed by that “overflow of dazzling brains” line above. I think my favourite new collection of the year, and I say this having missed a lot of books I’d likely love, is Ken Babstock’s Methodist Hatchet. His life’s work, from Mean to now, is an incredible little object lesson in the tension and the joy of a constantly expanding aesthetic. Ken refuses to break anything down, to erase; he just wants to build and build and add and add, you know? People think his new work is too antic, too obscure, but that’s because they loved Mean too much and they refuse to let him move beyond it. If, say, Airstream Land Yacht had been his debut, nobody would bat an eyelash: the new collection is just a more assured, more politically and sociologically mature continuation from his last one. This is the thing people don’t get, everything Ken’s done is built directly on the husk of what came before it, with no clearing away or even any recommission. Starting from that intimate specificity of Mean and just building out, out, more and more and more. It’s like watching someone construct a pyramid upside down, starting with the tip on the ground floor and expanding out toward the base. It’s foolish and wasteful until you pause enough in your complaining to see the miracle present itself. That fucking thing actually stands. It somehow doesn’t fall over on the greedy dude who made it.

Your blog, Vox Populism, is fantastic, even if you’ve been understandably sidelined lately. Where do you think book blogs fit in, in the modern online world? Are they an alternative to straight-laced traditional media, or a distraction from them? And why write an unpaid blog instead of a paid gig? To write about whatsoever you want?

I’m not sure what blogs are. They’re not an antidote to anything, surely. I started Vox Pop to try and capture, in a semi-permanent place, the energy and vocabulary of informal conversation, by intelligent people, about ethereal things. I wanted the bar room rants and the overcaffeinated arguments that are the lifeblood of my sense of literary community to have a sort of sandbox where we could bounce things around between each other, where we (or sometimes just I) could be flippant, audacious, ignorant, impassioned, rude, all these things that get–quite rightly–edited out of official essays and reviews. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next with the blog. Doesn’t it seem, looking around at the poetry bloggers that are left, that’s it’s just become a bunch of gig announcements and reading lists?

Obviously, I’m partly responsible for that. I’m going to try and bring Vox Pop back this year though, in one form in another. Mostly, the blog has served as an instrument to make people I’ve never met feel confident in their hatred of me. And that’s a shame, because I imagine many of those haters are decent and committed people with whom I’d agree with on 95% of the world’s important topics. Blogs eat subtlety and poop out earnestness.

You’ve been away at the Berton House Writers Retreat in the Yukon. I’ve only heard good things about people who’ve been there. How was that?

It’s awesome. How could it not be awesome? It’s you, in a historically resonant cabin in the middle of a historically resonant small town in the middle of the most beautiful landscape in the country, for three well-paid months with nothing to weigh on your time except the books you’re reading and the book you’re writing. Nothing has been more comfortable since the womb. Well, maybe I’m saying this because I was there in the summer. It’s not quite womb-temperature there now, I understand.

Tell us a little about your novel-in-progress?

Sure. It’s about 400 pages long, and it’s set on The Earth, and it’s typed up in Times New Roman on 8.5 X 11 paper, and that’s all the information you’re getting until I finish it, Chad

You’re a graduate of the University of Guelph-Humber’s MFA in Creative Writing program. What’s one concrete thing you can say you took away from that experience.

Friendships with generous and intelligent people that I hope to hang onto forever, both among my classmates and my teachers. Also, time. Authors always say that grants are a form of time, they let you quit your job and take time out to focus on writing. I’d argue that an MFA program is a gift of structured time. It makes you throw your life away for a couple years, to push your tired old dreams and authorly pretensions to the forefront.

Also, I took my girlfriend away from my MFA experience. She’s not made of concrete, though. She’s made of skin and patience and something I can’t identify that always smells like lavender.

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

My favourite part is editing. I love taking something that I’ve cobbled together, or written down in haste, and begin pulling it apart, jostling it and making it uncomfortable. I love relineating a poem completely, on a hunch that the natural grain of the thing wants to be a sonnet, or all long couplets, or prose. First drafts are an emergency, really, you drop what you’re doing and tend to their intensity, but editing is where it’s at for me. I like to move things around in the quiet.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

Sure, but why bother? I mean, there’s too few good book stores, too many shitty ones, and the wrong books get read by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. But my problem with complaining is this: my dad is a butcher. My grandfather worked odd jobs for forty years. They both would have been much happier doing something else with their lives.  There are many injustices afoot in the book world, and people have often said brilliant things about those injustices’ root causes, but I can’t stay invested in that conversation. I always find myself drifting back to the historical unlikelihood of my being able to spend this much time with something as beautiful and useless as a poem. It shocks me out of the minutia. Not to be a brute about serious and complex things, but I’m just too fucking lucky to care.

Maybe that’s Vox Pop’s problem. Maybe I can’t maintain the day-to-day grumblings of the blog when the above is my core opinion…

Folk is divided into two sections. Peggy’s Cove Nova Scotia, after the 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111, and modern day neighbourhoods around Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Explain the origin and the concept of the collection to those who haven’t read it.

Okay. Well, it’s what you said, a two-parter. The throughlines connecting the two parts are in descending order of importance: airplanes, community planning, geometry, atheism, and me.

You were still living in Nova Scotia at the time of the crash in 1998, and it occurred quite close to your home. What lingered so much that you wrote about its effect a dozen years later, or, have you been working on this set of poems for quite  some time now?

I’ve been working on them on and off for a few years. The necessity of having to wrap something up for use in my MFA thesis spurned the decision to focus on the crash more directly. What I wanted to capture in the Swissair section is the tension between the diversity of individual expressions of grief and the homogeneity of the public face of that grief.  And that tension really becomes the tension of the book: How do you belong to something? How to you manage beholdenness,  in the context of being an individual?

Do you think people and places shape each other equally, or, do we shape our communities more than our communities shape us? How has being a Haligonian transplanted in Toronto affected your identity (if at all)?

Being a Haligonian gives me a place to cover myself in outsiderness when talking about Toronto. It’s a bit like being a Canadian when talking about, say, American popular culture. You can shield yourself away in a sort of truculent “we don’t do that back home,” stand separate when you need to feel superior to something. I love Halifax, love Nova Scotia, but life here is more all-in, it’s more naked and weighty somehow. I know that sounds awful and people who hate Toronto are going to love that answer, but so do I. I love this city and feel protective of it. But maybe that’s me being shaped by where I came from, even there. To be a Maritimer is to fall quickly in love, and turn on a dime to protect it. Or maybe it’s just me.

I love these four lines and could interpret them so many different ways. “Every night in winter / a forgotten million snowflakes fall / on the ocean and so all / they learn about is water.” What’s it like to write a poem, put it out there, and hear other peoples’ interpretations (or misinterpretations) of your work? Likewise, do past reactions – criticism, or praise of specific qualities — affect your mindset as you write a new poem? 

It’s great, you know, it makes the heartache of publication worthwhile. We have to take our individual readers so seriously, as poets, because there are so few of them. I try to read the critical work that’s out there, because I feel like it’s part of the process, part of the conversation. You need to scan over the adjectives a bit though, those words that get affixed to you, for better or worse, can start to pull you apart. My adjectives tend to be conspicuously tied to my being a younger person: lots of boyishness and brashness and (in the negative reviews) naivete. They’re words you use to describe kids. But I still think you need to look into the fire all the same, you need to read other people’s readings of you.

There’s a line in your book. “everyone / is nationless. Everyone’s a nation.” I think it’s fair to say there are very few things that unite me and the people in my neighbourhood. I think it’s fair to say PEI and Alberta are two very different provinces. So what makes a “nation” or country, beyond geographical borders? Anything?

This is a question of political sociology really. A nation is a geographical expression of shared history: linguistic history, ethnic history, religious history, whatever. A country is a self-governing political construct. Some countries are nations (France) some nations are not countries (Tibet) and we happen to live in one of the few countries that aren’t nations. I’m not being disparaging of Canada when I say that, I prefer our calmer acceptance of the truth (despite the occasional nostalgic hymnals from the Don Cherrys of the world) to the attempt to force the lie of nationhood on non-nations or supernational entities like what so often happens in America. America is my favourite country but it makes me cry a lot.

Ours is a post-modern country, and we should embrace everything that word post-modern encompasses. We should embrace the irony and obscurity of ourselves. It doesn’t mean we don’t have a culture, or lots of shared experience, it just means that we live less in our borders than everyone else. And that’s a good thing. There’s another poem in the book that ends on something like, “This isn’t patriotism. Maybe it’s the opposite, the decision to bend in the wind.” I could bend in the wind with others, I could be beholden to that gesture, within a crowd of fellow post-modernists. Who wouldn’t want that?

Warner on Double Talk, winner of the Percy Janes First Novel Award …

Ireland’s poet and novelist, Patrick Warner, moved to Newfoundland in 1980 “in search of better weather and economic prosperity. Bitterly disappointed on both counts, he turned to writing.” He’s currently bunkered down in Memorial University’s library as their Special Collections Librarian, and has penned three genuinely great, critically acclaimed collections of poetry between 2001 and 2009. Among his many accolades, he’s won the EJ Pratt Poetry award twice, and I so revere his brand of poetry I won’t try and capture why in words, for fear of doing it an injustice. I can only, confidently, call him one of our best extant poets. Hilarious and profoundly insightful, poignant and unpretentious, his poems resonate, linger, and make its readers want to pick up a pen themselves.

Double Talk is his debut novel. Any expectations that, as a poet, Warner would approach this story with a poet’s voice are not there. This novel is piercing and fearless; there is less CanLit emotionality here, and more barb-wired honesty. Marketed as a “love story in reverse,” it takes a scalpel to the idea of marriage, and shows, with shocking precision, how easily dissected it is. It’s also dryly hilarious. Warner ought to be a stand-up comedian on the side. The story is a truthful look at the potholes any two people in love are going to hit along the way, until they break down, or patch up who they are to each other. He uses alternating chapters of third-person Violet and first-person Brian to show how differently two people can experience the same moment, hammering home the notion that there is no right and wrong in a lovers’ quarrel, just conflict. In showing us that, Double Talk is one of the most potent he-said she-said novels of its kind. Using alternating points of view also lets the reader get to know both characters equally well, so they can choose sides, which was a goal of Warner’s.

Click here to read Salty Ink’s review of Double Talk

What’s been a highlight for you and Double Talk this year?

A highlight for me has been the number of people who have read the book. I’m used to the poetry world where the readership is very small. A highlight for Double Talk has been the number of strange bedrooms and bathrooms it has visited.

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

 Tom Dawe’s In Hardy Country. Ed Riche’s Rare Birds and Paul Bowdring’s The Roncevalles Pass.

What are some of the best books you read in 2011?

The Possibility of an Island, Michel Houellebecq
Room, Emma Donoghue
Selected Poems, Mick Imlah
The Meaning of Life: A very short introduction, Terry Eagleton
Gift Horse, Mark Callanan
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Hiruke Murakami
Bull Fighting, Roddy Doyle

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

I’m looking for excitement, for that feeling of being drawn into the work, time disappearing. I want the book to have a moral centre. I want to laugh. I want the book to have ideas. I want to be shocked and amazed by the writing. I want the book to occupy my mind long after I’ve put it down.

What’s some writing advice you’ve read or been told, that’s stuck?

Learn the rules and then break them.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

Yes, but I will bore the hell out of your readers if I go on about them. Let me just say this, boot camp for publishers should include several years of pouring heart and soul into the writing of a manuscript which they then have to take to market.

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

I love the initial ideas phase, the excitement of fragments coming together, the work gaining traction. I also really like the final sentence-by-sentence polishing.

I’ve heard your interest in writing was spurred on by Paul Durcan’s Daddy, Daddy. How so?

Durcan was the first poet I read who put his poems together in a way that felt completely natural to me, natural in the sense that the poems sounded very much like my own inner voice. I liked that he was a very serious poet who didn’t feel that he had to sacrifice humour, playfulness or social commentary at the high altar of capital P poetry.  I had a similar experience this year with Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. His approach to storytelling lit up a map of the novel that was already in my head but that no one else had found. I had the sense when reading both books that I had found a match for something that needed matching.

Michael Crummey said, of your novel, “It’s an exhilarating and sometimes terrifying look at the murky complexities that lie under the surface of all relationships.”  There’s so much for a writer to explore in that underlying surface he speaks of (and you write about), Is that why you tackle relationships in this novel? 

Relationships are profoundly interesting to me. Even those that appear superficial have a breathless complexity to them when you look closely. Other people are both windows and mirrors. We see them, we see through them, we see ourselves in them, and the view never stops changing. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we never stop asking Who are you? Who am I? Paradoxically, the answers to those questions can only be found in relation to the “other.”

 There’s so much going on to pull two people apart that it’s a miracle any relationship lasts; there’s so many reasons to stay with the person you’re with that it’s perplexing any relationships end. This is perhaps a question for Dr. Phil more than you, but what ultimately makes one couple stay together and another fall apart?

Like a great poem or a great novel a successful relationship has its own force field, a delicate web of tensions and counterbalances. It’s highly specific, though infinitely mutable.

You’re an acclaimed, multi-award-winning poet. This is your first novel. I’m sure people are asking you how hard it was to go from 30 lines to 300 pages, but I’d bet you probably found it more liberating than challenging, did you? To have all that space to dissect a relationship, versus one page?

I found it both liberating and challenging. There is so much craft to learn with any form.  Often the key to artistic breakthrough is not a personal insight it’s a technical one. I have built this new arm….now what can it reach? There are whole areas of my experience I have never been able to capture in a poem, whereas I was able to capture some of them in my novel.

Poetry crams you into a small space, word count wise, while a starting novel is like being lost in a boundless, endless field. Which do you prefer, and what are you working on right now?

I’m now infatuated with both forms. Frustratingly, I still only have the same amount of time to write.

 I adhere to the philosophical dogma: “There is no reality, just perception.” I loved your novel because it proved that. Your use of alternating chapters between both Brian’s and Violet’s points of views show how differently two people can experience the same moment, and how there is no right and wrong in a lovers’ quarrel, just conflict. Was that your goal? Did you ever choose sides? Have your readers?

My goal was to create two convincing characters. I think what you say about “There is no reality, just perception” is largely true for Brian and Violet, though it is not true for me. That probably because I’m middle-aged. The world is not just a social construct. It has a reality independent of us. And yet, you are right in the sense that we often behave as though the world is whatever we perceive it to be, which is a great recipe for comedy. It always amazes me just how differently people read the same event, the same book, the same e-mail (oh the confusion a group e-mail can unleash). But getting back to Brian and Violet, I didn’t choose sides, though I hoped my readers would. Many did.

You balance dark subject and humour as good as anyone I know. In both your poetry and this novel. Is this a task and something you’re conscious of doing, and if so, why?

Humour is often the most intelligent response to life. It seems to kick in when our other systems fail. Stand-up comedians are the philosophers of our age! Humour is so present in our everyday lives that it boggles my mind why it is not present in more poems and novels. Also, the mechanism that operates in most humour–the quick turn–is the same one that underlies good writing. As ee cummings famously put it: “Would you hit a woman with a child? No, I’d hit her with a brick.” That kind of momentary shifting of the ground under our feet–that kind of lift–is magical because it offers us a radically different perspective. Suddenly the world is fresh and full of possibilities, if only for a few minutes. Another word for it is insight. Irony is hugely important for me. It’s a powerful tool for artists and writers who are trying to construct a mirror of the time they live in. Irony is also a spectrum, with satire at one end and compassion at the other. It’s a brilliant way of acknowledging and accommodating “the other.”

When a male writer takes on the voice of a female character, there’s always the question of “How’d you do that?” or “How did you find that?” Personally, I don’t find it that much different, as we’re embodying characters, not genders. And, ultimately, don’t we share the same emotions? Do you agree, disagree, fall in the middle?

I think you are right in that the core is the same, but that we express ourselves differently for lots of reasons. I found that my wife and female friends were critical not so much of what Violet said but how she said it.

Does writing a book like this, about the effect of time and children on a marriage, make one’s partner a little paranoid?

Not my wife. She is a profoundly secure person, emotional intelligence out the wazoo. There is nothing in the book that we hadn’t discussed in one way or another over the years, though we often revisited those discussions as we looked at drafts of the book. We both guessed that some readers would read the book as autobiography. And we have had comments from readers that lend themselves to that conclusion. If only they knew!

Jeff Bursey on Ratcheting Up Your Readings …

Jeff Bursey’s Verbatim: A Novel (Enfield & Wizenty) is an unusual and highly political book to say the least. Jeff, from St. John’s and now living in PEI, tells me, “First, it’s not a narrative set on The Rock. It takes place in an unnamed fictional province in Canada–definitely not Newfoundland and Labrador–in the 1990s. Second, it’s a book that uses politics as its base and is set in a fictional legislature. Third, it’s told in lists of members of the fictional political parties, letters between bureaucrats, and debates in the legislature–and those are set out in two columns on each page. This looks different on the page, and it’s a heckuva handsome physical book.” It’s a new form, “combining emotion and realism, that is timeless and timely.” The country’s hippest new literary journal, Riddle Fence, gave Bursey’s innovative novel due praise, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction called it “a tour de force of verbal dexterity that wields irony so deftly that the book, despite its intimidating scale, both challenges and delights.”

Point being it’s an atypical novel that posed a unique challenge for readings as Bursey geared up to go on tour. Here’s how Jeff presented the novel while out on the literary equivalent of a politician’s stump.
____________________________________________________________

When Verbatim: A Novel came out I knew I’d be doing a book tour. That would be exciting, and new, and a challenge. Of course, any book tour is a challenge, but this would be of a particular kind. Why? The bulk of my novel has various politicians speaking on a variety of topics, and they get introduced by the Speaker, as well as interrupted by other members. Was I going to read all the parts, and what amounted to stage directions? How tiring would that be for me?  Would the audience be bored?

In 2006 I went to the launch in Charlottetown, PEI of The Enchanted House, a poetry collection by Beth Janzen. She had the nifty idea of asking her writing group to read poems from the book that they liked, and she read some as well. That meant variety, and brought idiosyncratic line readings of her work to the audience. When it came time for my launch in October 2010, also in Charlottetown, I took that approach and changed it a bit. I asked members of the Prince Edward Island Writers’ Guild, as well as some friends, if they’d take this or that part, and we wound up with a great set of readers. Let me say their names here, in thanks: Kathleen Hamilton, Beth Janzen, Richard Lemm, Brent MacLaine, Liza Oliver, Kele Redmond, Patti Sinclair, John Smith, and J.J. Steinfield. We interrupted each other, ran over the other’s lines, and made faces and noises, exactly what members do in a legislature. Six of us were visible on the stage we used, and three jumped up from the audience, startling the people near them.

However, we needed one more element. As a look at any Hansard transcript will show, there are often calls from unknown members, or just one, that are in agreement or disagreement with the person speaking. These are set down as “Hear, hear!” and “Oh, oh!” When something, or someone, is regarded as particularly odious there may be calls of “Shame, shame!,” or if a member has behaved in a way that’s regarded as poor, “Resign, resign!” will ring out. Those familiar with Greek drama will know that the chorus is the voice of the people, and it often interprets (as well as projects) the worries of the populace. The unknown backbenchers in a democracy who call out this or that remark are both representatives of the people and a debased Greek chorus. Brent, who introduced me and the reading, asked the audience if they’d join in by calling out those things as the spirit moved them. They warmed up to this unusual request, and by the time we were into our parts a collective had formed before our eyes. The audience has become one; and they had become backbenchers.What I’ve witnessed, reading in different cities, is that people are much more inclined to say Hear, hear! than Oh, oh!, perhaps out of courtesy, but I encourage them (though those who find a public display of distaste in itself distasteful might term it goading) to think of my reading (usually from inflammatory passages) as an opportunity to enter the spirit of the book, and to be, for about thirty minutes, the members of unnamed political parties. Perhaps this form of participation is the closest any of them comes to political involvement. Wanting to cover other bases, I say that if they don’t like my writing, or my delivery, then they can use “Oh, oh!” as a way of expressing dissatisfaction. How often does an audience get invited–and sanctioned–to boo a writer?

What starts out quietly increases in volume by the time the reading is over.

The launch went very well in this regard, as did the reading a week later in St. John’s, where I tapped some people I knew to take different parts. Thanks to friends in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and BC, two writers in Toronto, and one in Ottawa, as well as helpful library or book store staff, since October I’ve had the chance to introduce unfamiliar voices into the experience and make my book, or my House, include them, if only temporarily. In fact, they helped make my House.

At one reading in Vancouver, to an audience filled with writers and their friends, and where alcohol flowed freely, I asked them to toss in those choral remarks. To say they got into the spirit of the event would be an understatement. The reader after me, a young poet, was the recipient of good-natured cries of “Hear, hear!” and “Oh, oh!” when he made this or that remark, or after finishing a poem.

What I’ve learned is that each audience is unique in its energy, and that each is united in a desire, when given the chance, to take part in a communal event if it’s fun. It enlivens the evening for them, and allows bottled up resentment, amusement, and who knows what else, to come out. The evening is more pleasurable for us all, and more memorable too.

I don’t know if this experience can be taken with every novel, but for writers out there, perhaps the next time you read, if there’s dialogue and a friend or willing salesperson is present, think about asking him or her to join in the reading with you.

January needn’t be a bore, in the wake of December’s holidays. Kerri Cull, book blogger with a poetry book out very soon (Soak) is having 5 Newfoundland Artists answer 6 questions about a book by a Newfoundlander they think everyone should read. Then, they all vote — not for their own. They’ll privately rank their adversaries picks 4,3,2,1, and Kerri does the math and you buy the book. Follow it all month-long at http://www.bookfridge.com/

Gerard’s been winning awards for a decade, and finally gave us a published collection last spring. In Moonlight Sketches, Collins excels in hooking his reader with a well-paced sense of impending tragedy, and the stories ring true to the irrevocability of isolated moments. He’s got a cast of convincing characters here, many of whom having been wrung through the wringer of small-town mentality. Collins knows the recipe of his own work: when to add nuanced comedic relief to a dark story, and when to add a closing line that clangs like a gong. These are these well-structured, well-paced stories that ride on a tension of some kind, as a sense of looming danger bait and hook its readers. The sharpest images from these stories will sink in like a knife, and I take that as the sign of a dedicated, talented writer. If a reader isn’t feeling a story, they’re reading a lesser book.

What’s been a highlight or two for you and Moonlight Sketches this year?

The invitations to readings and literary festivals like Winterset at Eastport and Word on The Street in Halifax, as well as the Mixed Type event in St. John’s were just thrilling to be a part of because of the feeling of acceptance into a larger writing community. Also, being asked to talk to young people about the writing life was particularly gratifying. A third (because 1 or 2 means 3, just like a 50 km/h speed limit means 60 km/h) was meeting people like Stan Dragland, Don McKay and Ed Riche and having them say, “I know who you are.” I’m also going to sneak in that the book launch rocked with all those old and new friends, and students from over the last few years.

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

Annabel by Kathleen Winter and Baltimore’s Mansion by Wayne Johnston. And, in the spirit of my earlier response, I’ll add Anne-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, along with Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and The Valley.

What are some of the best books you read in 2011?

It’s hard making time to read when teaching and writing, but I try. Winter’s Annabel was the best I read last year and also a poetry book by Leslie Vryenhoek, Gulf. I was very impressed with the juxtaposition of rugged and peaceful beauty in Samuel Thomas Martin’s This Ramshackle Tabernacle. I’ve started on both Deluded Your Sailors by Michelle Butler Hallett and Glass Boys by Nicole Lundrigan, as well as a sneak peak at Stephen King’s gigantic 11-22-63 on my new e-reader and they’re all captivating. When I do have time to read, I have several books on the go at once. I write manuscripts the same way, in fact, always with one on the front burner and another one or two simmering on the back burners.

What makes a good book a good book, anyway?

Two things: first, when you’ve finished, you know in your gut, that you’ve just read something quite satisfying, even if you didn’t like some of what just happened in the plot.  Second, while you’re in the process of reading it, you have at least the occasional euphoric moment when you know you just swallowed something tasty and perfect. I’m a sucker for the quiet moments in a book, more than the exciting bits. To answer your question, I really haven’t a clue. But if I feel like I’ve gotten some insight into the human condition—which really means I’ve had my own suspicions validated—by the end of the book, then the writer has given me what I paid for.

 You teach University English. Why?

I am addicted to the intellectual energy of a classroom setting. My classroom, I once told my students, is a “sacred space” in which you can think and say anything you want without fear of reprisals or censure. It’s one of the few places I’m aware of where you’re encouraged to have an opinion, and your opinions are expected to evolve over a certain period of time. I’m a philosopher and a writer, and I’m interested in who we are, how we got this way, how we get along or hurt each other, and where we’re headed as a race. So I teach university English, just for kicks. It’s an extension of what I am.

 What’s one piece you always teach and why?

“Always” suggests infinity, but there are some pieces I’ve used many times. The novel I most enjoy teaching is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, for all the reasons I stated above. It’s spare and powerful. It’s about who we are and the road we’re on. But, mostly, it’s about what is the essence of humanity and our world. “Apocalypse”—which is what the novel is about—simply means “revelation” or the lifting of a veil, and that’s how McCarthy treats the supposed end of days, showing us what can be learned about ourselves even in the darkest of moments and, if we can learn that lesson now, we can maybe avoid the worst case scenario. Only literature and art can go where he goes.

What would you have to say to a bright-eyed first year English student with dreams of being a rich, widely heralded published author?

I’ve actually never met one of those. They’re pretty savvy these days about what to expect. Mostly what they’re hearing is how difficult it is to make a living as a writer. That’s good because the ones who do it anyway, despite knowing how hard and, at times soul-sucking the business side of it can be, those people actually stand a chance of being the last writer standing, the ones who publish. I tell them all that, but I also tell them to seek a mentor they can trust, to work hard at their craft, revise until your fingers bleed and submit work to any place that will offer feedback even if they reject you. Oh, and I also say, “Don’t take rejection personal. It is personal; you just shouldn’t take it that way.”

If you weren’t a writer/instructor, you’d be a … ?

Singing-songwriting-picture-taking, filmmaking-painting-drawing-beachwalking-foresthiking-financially-constrained savant. In other words, really living well on my way to an early death.

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

To quote Mumford and Sons: “The blank white page.” That’s the best part, and then watching that infinite number of blank pages fill up with words, feeling characters come to life. The least favourite part is that moment when I’m finished the first draft. I hate that feeling of closure, of limiting the possibilities because, before that, it’s all possibilities.

Which story in Moonlight Sketches are you the most satisfied with in hindsight?

None, really. I’m proud of all of them for what they attempt, and some of them actually come close to what I set out to do. “Hold Out” might be the best written story, but “The Darkness and Darcy Knight” gets the biggest reactions. A lot of people say, “Really? You had to go there?” But a great many readers confess it’s their favourite story of the collection because it’s so unflinching in its depiction of darkness. I can do better, though. I can be even more unflinching.

Which Story was the easiest to write / came the fastest, and which did you really struggle with (and why)?

“Break, Break, Break” was the result of an intense four-hour writing session and amazingly little revision after, even though it’s been published in two different collections. I’d spent all night lying awake and listening to the characters’ voices in my head (or seemingly outside of it), and the next morning, I just skipped breakfast, sat at the computer and wrote without a break. The title seems apt, in many ways.

“Our Julia” was a struggle. It was the last one I wrote for Moonlight Sketches—and I think I was putting a lot of pressure on that story—on that poor little teenage girl and her family—to say so much that I hadn’t said already about the state of Newfoundland culture, the outports and the crossroads we’re at. Also, the idiocy of certain intelligentsia in trying to tell people who to be. My editor didn’t seem to particularly like the first draft that he saw, so I worked on it for two or three weeks, and then again some more before I finally had a draft that we were both happy with. Julia is very real to me—a first-year university student on the doorstep of life, with so much energy and curiosity and maybe too much love for the world. It was hard getting that one right. I hope I did.

Break, Break, Break, really hit me in the guts, and I know it’s won an award and been anthologized.  Did you know anyone affected by the Ocean Ranger disaster?

Not directly. But the real answer is yes: everyone. And that includes me. I avoided writing about that disaster for the same reason I avoided writing about my father’s death for many years: it was too close and too raw, and I needed to process my own grief. I truly didn’t think I had any right to write about the Ocean Ranger because it wasn’t my tale to tell. But then the story came, and I found a way to write about it that made sense to me and gave me the most artistic satisfaction. Curiously, Mike Heffernan’s Rig and Lisa Moore’s February—both fantastic books—came out around the same time that one was first accepted for publication. To me, it feels that Newfoundland literature is really coming of age when we are able to process events like that in a visceral, meaningful way.

You’ve set all your stories in the small fictional town of Darwin, tell us why you went with this concept, and how it fostered many of your themes and tensions. And, was calling it Darwin as bit of a veiled stab? Darwin being synonymous with evolution and several of your peripheral characters needing to evolve a little socially. 

I started writing about Darwin nearly twenty years ago as a university student—short stories and then novel manuscripts. Since then, no matter where the stories are set, for me, it’s always been a question of, “Will this take place in Darwin or somewhere else?” After some of my Darwin stories won awards, I decided a collection was taking shape and Darwin had to be the common ground. It was partly a way to help myself grow as a writer, my own personal evolution, to challenge myself to see if I could get inside the head of a sixteen-year-old girl, a twenty-something schoolteacher, or an eighty-year-old woman. Or if I could make sense of my own reaction to something like the Ocean Ranger, gender prejudices, and certain kinds of darkness to which I’d been privy. “Chosey Bilch” is probably the most discomforting character in the book, and that’s precisely why I wanted to get inside his head, regardless of what I would find there.

Oh, and the town is called “Darwin” for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is, as you suggest, the actual lack of evolution one sometimes sees in society, specifically in an isolated, rural community. I’d rather not explain them all—although there was one critic who wrote a nice review but questioned why it was called Darwin, ruling that the name didn’t fit. I responded with a two-page explanation of why Darwin was, in fact, the perfect name for that town. I didn’t send my response to the critic, but it was an exercise in self-reassurance….or justification. Either way, it’s about the devolution of the town, of society in general, of our province, but also about survival of the fittest—meaning those who are best able to adapt, as Charles Darwin says. Every story is a study in survival, in some way, but then so is the collection as a whole. One example: the Ocean Ranger is often said to have “no survivors,” but truly it did—the survivors were those on land, who were faced with the challenge of adapting to a new and cruel reality. Every story is one of adapting—or not adapting, or surviving or not—or about who or what survives under the cruelest of circumstances.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

Yes. They won’t give me as much money as I want.  Also, I’m not a big fan of the tendency in the Canadian industry sometimes to publish, or favourably review, books based on whether they might be capable of winning a Giller or GG award. It seems that if you’re not considered for one of those major awards, somehow you’re relegated to the “whatever” pile. On the other hand, there are publishers, obviously, who will take a good story and run with it. To me, that’s more culturally important than basing your list on somebody else’s criteria. I think a star system is kind of important, and I do think those awards people play a strong role in helping establish one. But I wish publishers and agents in Canada were a bit more open-minded about what was worthy of notice—if only to reduce some of the sameness, not just of content, but of style as well.

Tell us about Finton Moon? When is it out, and what’s it about in 10 sentences or less?

Finton Moon is a gothic adult fairytale novel, set in the fictional town of Darwin. It’s about a misfit boy with an odd perspective on the smalltown Catholic world in which he grows up. He finds early on that he possesses the ability to heal people’s injuries and diseases, which further sets him apart. It’s dark and funny, filled with all the important issues of life, mortality, faith, hope and the nature of family. It’s scheduled for release this April (2012).

One of my favourite stories in Moonlight Sketches was “Run, Mother, Run!” The surname, Moon, was in that story I believe. Am I right to predict we’ll be hearing more about the Moons in Finton Moon?

Yes.  Elsie Fyme, the pregnant, female protagonist of “Run, Mother, Run” is the mother of Finton Moon. Other characters recur too, including her ultra-Catholic mother-in-law, now known as “Nanny Moon.” The novel begins about seven years after the events of the short story.

Salty Ink Bestsellers!

One of the survey questions was which specific books have you bought because of Salty Ink, and what a thrill to see responses like, “‘I’m a librarian and have probably purchased about $1000 worth of books in the last 8 months based on Salty Ink rec’s and info.”

Here’s the top six responses in no particular order …

Nicole Lundrigan’s Glass Boys
Samuel Thomas Martin’s This Ramshackle Tabernacle
Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise
Gerard Collins’ Moonlight Sketches
Jamie Fitzpatrick’s You Could Believe in Nothing
Craig Francis Power’s Blood Relatives

Buy one if you haven’t yet! I vouch for them all, honestly.

Surprising Finds … Call for Guest Posts from publicists, etc:

96.6% of you like Salty Ink’s casual, informal tone. Phew. Because half of the other 3.4% got nasty about it. I don’t mind those 1.7% of people casting their haughty eyes elsewhere.

The favourite “type of post” was author interviews, according to 74% of you. Who knew. Let there be more mics-in-faces in 2012.

Thanks for kind words and for the constructive feedback too. “Fewer typos in 2012.” That’s funny and fair and doable, and at least 10 people said so. It does look sloppy on the website and I can’t hide behind “I write these posts in a rush” when it only takes a quick second spell check. Others feel there’s a Newfoundland favouritism. I’ll keep my eye on that. It’s just, I live here, and there’s so many writers from here (statistically, more than any province, hence the slant, to some degree?). But I will be more inclusive of the maritimes. And by all means, I scan publishers catalogues, but if I miss a book this year, get in touch. And perhaps I’ll do a mid-month round-up of open contests and competitions and workshops and the like, since you’ve asked so kindly. I did that in the past, but cut it out for some reason. There’s also a few people who’d like Salty Ink to cover genre fiction. I’m not opposed to genre fiction. I am concerned with branding the website to a certain kind of fiction, but that certain kind of fiction can be genre, absolutely.

The door is now wide open for guest posts. If you’re a publicists at a publisher, tell us all about your new books, if you’re a writer with a new book out, or you just read a great book, whatever. email posts to me: chad@saltyink.com. Publicists: Please prod your authors into writing guest posts … about anything at all related to them or their book.

Happy Holidays, dear readers.

So, 2011 was a great year for books, and strange year for Salty Ink. There was the disappearance in the spring, and the occasional lull as I got distracted with other fleeting blogs, like the On the Line Magazine incident. I really appreciated all the feedback to bring it back and keep it alive. Anyway. Salty Ink wants to return to its 2009/2010 glory days, and be better than ever. To assist, please take 5 minutes to fill out this survey. It is 100% anonymous. You can answer all 9 questions or just a couple, but please do follow the link. Its goal is to make Salty Ink a better thing in 2012. If you’re going to be reading this blog, you may as well like what you’re reading …

Click here to take survey

See you in the New year, January 2nd, and we’ll run through 25 days of the very best of 2011 by Atlantic Canadians. Enjoy the holidays and read yourselves blind.

I hereby declare, with absolute authority, while knowing I’ll inevitably forget at least one or two collections, that these titles are the official top 10 books of short fiction by Canadians this year.  If you can read and not like books like And Also Sharks, The Beggar’s Garden, Once You Break a Knuckle, or Up Up Up, then you have poor taste in modern literature. Sorry. But you do. I can’t even offer you any condolences, as it must, simply, be unfortunate to be so afflicted. And those wild Vancouverites Zsuzsi Gartner and at Matthew J. Trafford, talk about breaking down some walls with short fiction. All 10 of these (11 if you’re counting) made me want to be a better writer.

Alphabetically:

And Also Sharks by Jessica Westhead (Cormorant)

Selected Accolades!

A Globe and Mail Book  of the Year
A Kobo’s Best Book of 2011

From the Backcover:

The forlornly funny stories in And Also Sharks celebrate the socially awkward, the insecure, the unfulfilled, and the obsessed. A disgruntled follower of a self-esteem blog posts a rambling critical comment. On the hunt for the perfect coffee table, a pregnant woman and her husband stop to visit his terminally ill ex-wife. The office cat lady reluctantly joins her fellow employees’ crusade to cheer up their dying co-worker. A man grieving his wife’s miscarriages follows his deluded friend on a stealth photo-taking mission at the Auto Show. A shoplifter creates her own narrative with stolen anecdotes and a kidnapped baby. In this collection, society’s misfits and losers are portrayed sympathetically, and sometimes even heroically. As desperately as these characters long to fit in, they also take pride in what sets them apart.

The Beggar’s Garden by Michael Christie (HarperCollins)

Selected Accolades!

Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust Award
Longlisted for the Giller Prize

From the Backcover

Brilliantly sure-footed, strikingly original, tender and funny, this collection of nine linked stories follows a diverse group of curiously interrelated characters—from bank manager to crackhead to retired Samaritan to web designer to car thief–as they drift through each others’ lives in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside. These engrossing stories, gleefully free of moral judgment, are about people who are searching in the jagged margins of life — for homes, drugs, love, forgiveness.  Ranging from the tragically funny opening story “Emergency Contact” to the audacious, crack-fuelled rush of “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” to the deranged and thrilling extreme of “King Me,” The Beggar’s Garden is a powerful and affecting debut, written with an exceptional eye and ear and heart.

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner (Hamish Hamilton)

Selected Accolades!

Shortlisted for the Giller Prize.

From the Backcover:

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives is Zsuzsi Gartner’s eagerly anticipated depth charge of deadly satire and trademark dark humour. Whether she takes on evolution and modern manhood, international adoption, real estate, the movie industry, science and faith, art, or terrorism, Gartner fillets the righteous and the ridiculous with dexterity in equal, heartbreaking, and glorious measure. Angels crash land, lovers speak IKEA, a mountain swallows tony West Coast properties, a killer stalks the great motivational speakers of North America. These stories ruthlessly expose our covert fears and fathomless desires and allow us to snort with laughter, while grieving, at the grotesque world we’d live in if we all got what we wanted.

The Big Dream by Rebecca Rosenblum (Biblioasis)

Fancy fact about Rebecca:

Rebecca’s an exclusive writer of the short story, who’s been compared to Alice Munro by critic Steven Beattie. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for all three of the country’s major short story gold detectors: the Journey Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the Danuta Gleed Award.

From the Back Cover:

At Dream Inc., a lifestyle-magazine publisher, people are struggling to do more than their jobs. They struggle to fall in love. They struggle to stay that way. They struggle to be good parents, and to be good children. They struggle to have friends, to eat lunch, to be happy, and to answer the phone. And all that struggle can be pretty interesting . . . especially on company time. In The Big Dream, acclaimed short story writer Rebecca Rosenblum documents a new generation coming of age in the workplace. With its transparent, biting, understated prose, The Big Dream is an In Our Time for the twenty-first century.

The Divinity Gene by Matthew J. Trafford (Douglas & McIntyre)

Trafford’s short fiction has appeared in journals like The Malahat Review and in anthologies as amazing as D&M’s Darwin’s Bastards. He’s also won the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction, and been shortlisted for the CBC Literary award … twice.  I reviewed this glowingly for Quill & Quire, and said something like, “In these unique and wildly imaginative stories, Trafford pairs crisp diction with unpredictable plots: you think you’re going to arrive on the third floor, but the elevator takes you elsewhere.” I hereby predict this book will win Trafford the Danuta Gleed Award. He will at least be shortlisted.

From the Backcover:

A beguiling and bizarre collection of stories from a remarkable new voice in Canadian fiction. A mob of teens descends upon Paris in the thrall of a self-help author; the hottest club in town is staffed by angels. This is the uncanny world of The Divinity Gene. It bristles with humour, pathos and imaginative power [and] maps the frailty of the human heart. Its characters—bereaved, sidelined, cast adrift—journey forth to the undiscovered places, in search of something to believe in, someone to love, always with disarming results. Masterfully original, deeply human, The Divinity Gene introduces a bold and evocative new writer.

The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise (Biblioasis)

Selected Accolades

Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust Award
Longlisted for the Giller Prize

From the backcover:

The Meagre Tarmac explores the places where tradition, innovation, culture, and power meet with explosive force.  It begins with Vivek Waldekar, who refused to attend his father’s funeral because he was “trying to please an American girl who thought starting a fire in his father’s body too gross a sacrilege to contemplate.” It ends with Pranab Dasgupta, the Rockefeller of India, who can only describe himself as “‘a very lonely, very rich, very guilty immigrant.’” And in between is a cluster of remarkable characters, incensed by the conflict between personal desire and responsibility, who exhaust themselves in pursuit of the miraculous. Fearless and ferociously intelligent, these stories are vintage Blaise, whose outsider’s view of the changing heart of America has always been ruthless and moving and tender.

The Meaning of Children by Beverly Akerman (Exile)

Selected Accolades

A Finalist for the Readers’ Choice for this Year’s Giller
Won the David Adams Richards Prize

From the backcover:

These fourteen stories approach the world”s complexities through a child”s eyes, grapple with the sorrows and ecstasies of child-bearing years, and probe the truths that touch us with a child-like clarity at the end of life”s journey. A thirty- something venture fund manager frets over his daughter”s paternity; an orphan whose hands kill whatever they touch is accused of homophobia; a mother of two can only bear to consider abortion in the second person; the wife of a retirement-aged professor finds him unconscious near his computer. The Meaning of Children speaks to all of us who – although aware the world can be a very dark place-can”t help but long for redemption through children

Moonlight Sketches by Gerard Collins (Killick Press)

Gerard Collins has been winning awards in Newfoundland for maybe a decade now. It’s about time he gave us a first collection …

From the backcover:

These stories are set in Darwin, Newfoundland, a small town with big secrets. On the surface, nothing ever changes and everyone is content. But the truth is as restless, cold, and mutable as the ocean in these sixteen linked short stories. In Darwin, people’s secrets are hidden and their fears are buried. But night after night, the moon bears quiet witness to their brightest moments and darkest days. A Catholic girl finds herself pregnant and feels hopelessly trapped. An elderly couple fears the end of their happy, quiet life when their money sock goes missing. Two lesbians walk into the wrong bar on a Saturday night. A wild youth seeks to rectify his life, but first takes his bookish friend on one last heist. With his trademark dark humour and a nod to the unknown, the author shines a light on the difficulty of being human and yet somehow surviving with grace, dignity, and a modicum of happiness.

Once You Break a Knuckle by DW Wilson (Hamish Hamilton)

This one’s the most newly released of the lot, and its stories have appeared in all the right places, including this year’s Journey Prize Anthology, Vol.23. It is absolutely great.

From the backcover:

Once You Break a Knuckle tells stories of good people doing bad things: two bullied adolescents sabotage a rope swing, resulting in another boy’s death; a heartbroken young man refuses to warn his best friend about an approaching car; sons challenge fathers and break taboos. Crackling with tension and propelled by jagged, cutting dialogue, the stories interconnect and reveal to us how our best intentions are doomed to fail or injure, how our loves can fall short or mislead us, how even friendship–especially friendship–can be something dangerously temporary. Wilson’s world is always dangerous, barbed with violence and the possibility of betrayal. And yet, in this small, finely-wrought universe, a dogged, wry dignity is usually enough to see us through. Once You Break a Knuckle is about the courage it takes just to make it through the day.

The Reverse Cowgirl by David Whitton (Freehand)

David Whitton’s debut is one of the most talked about short fiction releases of the year — Lynn Coady picked it on The Afterword as one of the 2011 books she’s most looking forward to, and Sean Cranbury plugged it on The Advent Book Blog — and yet his bio the most scant I’ve seen. “David lives in Toronto.” How alluring. Who is this young man with the racy book title?

From the backcover:

Keen, intense, and darkly comic, the short stories of David Whitton are full of misfits, oddballs, dropouts, klutzes, and loners. You might dress em up, but it’s just a matter of moments till they unravel back into their fallen, and fascinating, selves. Their mistakes and misdeeds, temptations and transgressions thread their way through these stories, stirring up surprises on every corner. Whitton navigates current life and future worlds, dirty truths and murky fantasies, continually setting up, if only to send up, modern romantic scenarios. In the end, whether the lovers meet online or on acid, at a wedding or in battle, the object of ardour might be in for a rough ride. Maybe they’ll stay afloat—tremulous and tentative—or plunge to earth in delightful and refreshing ways.

Up Up Up by Julie Booker (Anansi)

Full Publisher’s note:

Up Up Up heralds the arrival of a writer of astonishing range, compassion, and acuity. In this stunning short story collection, Julie Booker grabs the reins from writers like Lydia Millet and Miranda July and takes off at full speed, and in directions all her own.

A pair of plus-sized friends make tracks for a kayaking trip in Alaska. A woman vacations with her parents at a Texas trailer park, wondering why she can’t meet a man. A worldly member of a tour group selects sacrifices from among the most cherished belongings of her fellow travellers. A young man dreams of rescuing an abusive friend’s girlfriend — and of having her for himself … Through these deceptively simple storylines, Booker reminds us of the power of words to enlighten and move us — but most of all, to delight us. Her writing is a revelation — wildly whimsical and yet razorsharp, highly unusual and yet prompting gasps of recognition on every page. Reader, prepare to meet your new favourite writer.

___________________________________________________________

Twice a month, Salty Ink Takes a Look at What’s Going on up in Canada, Profiling Some of Our Notable Canadian Counterparts and/or Books I’ve Deemed Worth Cheating on Salty Ink’s focus for …

Salty Ink's Chad Pelley, possibly caught between identities

Last Month they revealed the winners of the 2011 Cuffer Prize. Because the stories have a max word count of 1,200, they let you submit two. I submitted two. One, I spent 6 months crafting, rearranging, rewording. It was a typical, intense, weighty Chad Pelley piece where every sentence flirted dangerously with being overdone to really get its hooks into the reader. At the last minute, I tried something a little more fun for a second story, because I’ve noticed, as a reader, that a little edge and humour helps sink a story deeper into a reader. And the judges’ citation for the second, quirkier story, it still spoke of themes and commentary on the human condition, despite its not being so serious. Which means I can have fun and still write stuff that’s ”about something.” It was the second story that won me a thousand dollars. What to do with that? Here’s the story:

“What the Difference Is” by Chad Pelley

The guy sitting next to me tried to pop the top off a Corona with a Bic lighter, and now he’s only got half a face. His left cheek is like pink Play-Doh stretched so thin it’s tearing, and there’s slots you could fit coins through. Having no eyelashes makes him look like a man-sized baby or almost reptilian, so I’m staring. Cleverly though: side on, so his eyes can’t see what my eyes are doing. I Google “What is the purpose of eyelashes,” confident he can’t see the small screen on my phone, and it turns out this man will be getting a lot of dust in his eye.

On closer inspection, Bic-man’s burnt flesh is a bit like melted plastic that’s re-solidified. I know because I had a doll for twelve years, a doll that smelled like my mother did — like limes — that my father threw in the fireplace once to prove a point about Who sets the rules around here.

He felt so bad the next day that he gave me twenty bucks to buy a new doll, but dolls with nostalgic value that smell like limes are hard to come by. And dead moms can’t give you new things to get attached to. Because they are dead. And it’s not like I don’t know what he and “uncle” Jimmy are up to when they force me out to walk the dog. Sometimes in the rain. Sometimes it’s “Pick up some bread while you’re out” too, and I hate that, because sometimes it’s not even bread, it’s something a twelve-year-old girl wouldn’t need. So I get that look from the woman at the store, like, “What’s a little girl like you doing buying coffee filters on a rainy night, all dripping wet like that?”

I come here to St. Clare’s hospital most nights I’m forced out for a walk. It’s like a soap opera minus the commercials. People really do sleep with their best friend’s wife, you know, and they do it with a startling regularity. Free healthcare means a doctor will always be there to stitch up your dumb-busted knuckles. The doctors here know the regulars, by name, and they shake their heads a little slower each time they see them back in again. One time I saw a man’s middle finger bone, the bone, because the flesh was torn away. It looked like an eyeball had sprouted on his finger: splayed flesh as eyelids and the white of his bone as the eyeball. He’d punched a wall. Most injuries are the injured person’s fault. I’ve always felt they should segregate the lines into accidents and self-destruction, so the poor seniors who fall over stairs, or whatever, don’t have to wait around for the self-destructioionists to get stitched back up.

I have a top five too-good-to-be-true-but-true stories from this place:

5.) A kid named Pete lost a chunk of his tongue on a cold bus stop pole on LeMarchant Road. He was testing the myth that isn’t a myth at all: tongues stick to cold metal. Of course they do: saying they don’t is like saying water doesn’t freeze. Because that’s what happens: your saliva freezes to the pole. So Pete’s dumb. He lost the very tip of it, so his tongue was blunt-edged when he showed me. I Googled what that would mean for Pete, and it was bad news: the front of the tongue is where the “sweet-sensing” tastebuds are. He’d lost the best part of his tongue on a dare, and now his life will be forever bitter. Or salty.

4.) A blonde, university-aged girl was so drunk she kept sliding out of her chair. She liked my boots, she said. And my freckles. And for a few hours I pretended we were best friends. Bffs. Out late getting drunk and stared at by hot guys who wanted something they weren’t going to get, because we were class acts, me and my best friend. And then she went home without saying goodbye as I waved to her.

3.) This big — I mean tall and obese — cowboy of a man had a crazy belt buckle. It was a bull with pointy horns. He must have bent over too far and too hard, because he had two puncture wounds in his gut from the horns. Two blood-rimmed holes in his white cotton T-shirt, like two mini bullet holes. But that’s not the funny part, this is: he was still wearing the belt buckle, and being very careful about how far he bent forward. Nobody wants another two holes in their gut. He was kind enough to let a crying baby and its mother go ahead of him, but never covered his mouth when he sneezed. I never saw it coming. Little dots all over my t-shirt.

2.) I saw an albino girl in here one day. Gorgeous! And I wanted to touch her for the same reason I want to touch a powdery-looking moth when I see one. Whatever that’s all about. She smelled like limes too.

1.) An adorable Senior citizen with missing teeth named Harry LeBlanc eating JuJubes in a calculated manner with his 4 good teeth. He fell off his roof re-shingling. He high-fived me goodbye — and felt cool about it —when they called his name and ruined our chat. I don’t know why Harry made number 1. Numbers 2 through 5 change quite frequently, but Harry’s the man. Frozen-tongued Pete was okay too, but didn’t have much to say. Pole had his tongue.

For a while, whenever it was “time to walk the dog” in the daytime, I’d go to the flower shop on Water Street. There’s a cute woman with wavy orange hair who waters those flowers so tenderly, like she wants them to know they’re pretty. She’s sweet. She always ate strawberry-flavoured candies and shared them. Some days, she’d give me wilting flowers, flowers with “another day left in them,” and flash me that white- and perfectly square-toothed smile. I’d tell her that her teeth are perfect, but she’d say, “Oh stop it, you” like I’m the only one who’s ever said a nice thing to her.

That’s the difference between her and me. She can’t take a compliment. I intuit she has lousy parents or a mean boyfriend and doesn’t defend herself. So I stopped going there. Pitying someone makes them pitiful. It’s why I won’t let the girl in the corner store see me out buying coffee filters for Dad at midnight. I steal them. I will not be pitiful like that perfectly pretty redhead at the flower shop who I hadn’t seen for months, until tonight. Flower Girl is in the emergency waiting room. She’s bent over herself, so that her chin is level with her knees and her hair is almost touching the dirty floor. It blows like a curtain every time someone opens the door down the hall.

You’re only supposed to leave them on for so long, but she fell asleep with Crest Whitening Strips on her teeth, and now she can’t take the pain. I’m Googling her situation for her, how long she’ll be in pain and if her teeth are ruined, but her story doesn’t make my top five.

If my secret admirers and stalkers are listening, I want one gift for Christmas this year: the entire collection of the Journey Prize anthologies: Volumes 1 through 23. (Check with me first, I have some already.)

If you’re not familiar with the Journey Prize, it is the country’s biggest award for a single short story: it’s worth 10 grand and a pile of glory. It’s a win you really want in your writer’s bio. Ever year, McClelland & Stewart form a jury of three great short story writers to sift through all the short stories published in Canada’s literary journals that year. They create a “best of” list of what they read, and McClelland & Stewart publish it as an anthology. And then pick a winner (this year it was Miranda Hill’s “Petitions to Saint Chronic”). So, technically, it’s the best of short fiction that year.  This year had a great jury: last year’s short fiction champs, Sarah Selecky and Alexander MacLeod, as well as a Booker prize finalist, Alison Pick. Three writers I love curated quite a mixed bag, each story admirable for different reason.

A few Atlantic Canadians who’ve made the cut:

Jessica Grant and Devon Code have both won it.

Michael Crummey, Lisa Moore, Pahsa Malla, Alexander MacLeod, Mark Anthony Jarman, Anne Simpson, Elaine McCluskey, and Libby Creelman, among others, have been featured in it.

Some great Canadian short fiction champs who’ve been featured in them:

Jessica Westhead, Craig Boyko, Neil SMith, Heather O’neill, Sarah Selecky, Michael Christie, Annabel Lyon, Lee Henderson, David Whitton, and Rebbecca Rosenblum

Check out the whole archive here: http://www.mcclelland.com/jps/jpa_volumes.html

And an interview on CBC’s Weekend Arts Magazine:

http://www.cbc.ca/wam/episodes/2011/09/11/wam-sept-10-11-new-book—easy-to-like/

Tanya Davis Takes Salty Ink’s 2011 Judge a Book by Its Cover Contest!

Massive congrats to designer Matt Reid

After 757 votes, Tanya Davis’s long awaited-for debut, At First, Lonely, won the 2011 Judge a Book by Its Cover Contest. Interesting that this is her debut, as she was Halifax’s poet Laureate just before her debut hit the shelves!

How?

She’s won the CBC National Poetry Face-Off twice, that’s how, and because of her renowned reputation as a spoken word performer, and for her witty, wonderful lyrics, as Tanya is also a musician. She has an album called Clocks and Hearts Keep Going for God’s sake. How wonderful is that? See her CBC 3 page. And if you’re in Halifax, she’s playing at The Company House on Saturday night.

It wasn’t that long ago that Tanya Davis collaborated with filmmaker Andrea Dorfman to adapt her poem, “How to be Alone.” It  had over a million hits be week’s end. Making her the first Canadian poet to go viral?

Tanya has an uncanny ability to shrink the biggest human emotions, struggles, and sources of joy down to single, spot-on sentences. She pairs this gifted wordsmithery with a stunning honesty (that some critics call vulnerability). She’s distinct, immediately recognizable, what more can an artist hope to be? She’s a national marvel, and it shouldn’t have taken that above video for her to be so heralded. They even had her write and read a poem for the Canada Games. Sports and poems, you know the country loves you when. it’s because her poetry just cracks your heart open and lets her in.

Here’s a song of hers about the artist’s contemplative struggle with making art …

Congrats Again, on Having the The Jivest Jacket:

Kudos too, to the two runners up, hey?

Author Ed Riche in the vines of Chateau Beaucastel, Chateauneuf du Pape.

The main character in Ed Riche’s new novel, Easy to Like, is a screenwriter turned winemaker … Ed knows his stuff, so read up and learn what to serve with your Christmas turkey and then some. Also, buy the book.

If I restricted your wine shopping to three countries, what would they be?

France, Italy, Germany in that order, steeply declining .  I’m tempted to say France, France, France

Name your top three varietals. And one varietal that should not be sold as a standalone.

Pinot Noir, Nebbiolo but as I can no longer afford the best examples from Barolo and Barbaresco I will say instead, Sangiovese.  I’d say Chardonnay, but as I mean only in its manifestation in some parts of Burgundy, I will, instead, say Riesling.

Counoise is a great grape that I had the good fortune of tasting vinified on its own, courtesy (and he was extremely courteous and generous) of Robert Haas at Tablas Creek.  It is weird, like (as I say in the book) raspberry kimchi.  But since having had that pleasure I can detect the note in wines in which it is a tiny part of the blend.

Name three blends you love, and why Elliot is such a fan of Chateauneuf du Papes.

Strangely I don’t like many Chateauneuf de Papes.  They are mostly hugely overblown wines with far too much alcohol for their own good. At their rare best, when made with restraint, they capture the heat and sun of the Southern Rhone so that it can warm a winter meal of roasted meat, so you get a gust of that smell of garrique from the hills down there when you need to be reminded of summer. And while the wine is famous as a blend, some of the best examples are Grenache alone. Chianti blends are great, and some of my favourite wines from Bordeaux have unusually high percentages of cabernet franc or petit verdot (another grape that doesn’t seem to work alone).  Eliot likes Chateauneuf  du Pape because he tasted a great example at a perfect moment in his life, when everything seemed possible.  He believes it is because of the fascinating agricultural alchemy involved.  He doesn’t know it but he is actually driven by the wine’s associations rather than the wine itself, he’s trying the reinvent the past and create a perfect, fanciful, future to resemble it.

Some of the best Côte Rôties are syrah, not only blended with, but co-fermented with small amounts of viognier (there is a good reason to do this beyond taste that is too long to explain here). I used to be able to afford those fantastic wines – nose like a field of wild flowers, inky blueberries, smoked meat and black olives in the mouth – but they’ve gotten too dear for a writer.

What’s your take on Italian “Super Tuscans” and other blends that break rules? Blasphemy or tasty?

Mostly a waste of time and a huge waste of money – they are really pricey.  Sure they are good but they are too much like wines from Napa or Bordeaux most of the time.  Why they would want to mess with brilliant sangiovese magic with additions of merlot and small oak barrels I do not know.   The decision was based on the perceived direction of the market I suppose.  I could be saucy and say “The best are brilliant bores,” but I have also really enjoyed Sassicaia and Tignello – again wines that are now ludicrously overpriced.

What should we drink with our turkey on Christmas day?

Lightly built pinot noir, even try a Canadian example (see below) or top Morgon or Moulin-a-vent from Beaujolais.  Good German Kabinett works.  Nothing heavily built as the meal is too rich and even gluey on its own.  I think I may have eaten enough turkey for a lifetime.

Recommend a few great bottles of wine under $25.

Pelee Island Reserve Pinot Noir out of Ontario will surprise you. It’s not Grand Cru Côte d’Or by any means, but it’s got something going.  Perquita from Portugal is a perfectly good drink for under $15.  A Bordeaux Superior from a great year can often be affordable and surprisingly good – but avoid in a bad vintage.  Any of the Perrin wines from the designated villages in the southern Rhone i.e. Vinsobres or Carainne are great value for people who like wines with some fur on them.  Many of the top makers of the great and costly wines of Piemonte,  Barolo and Barbaresco, also make great Dolcetto d’alba and Barbera d’alba.  The prestige nebbiolo wines are north of $60 a bottle and the dolcettos and barberas south of $25. They won’t be as complex as the more august wines but they are tart, honest wines that are great with food.   Whites are trickier.  A solid bet is a Muscadet but make sure the words “sur lie” are on the label.  Spain makes interesting affordable whites in Rueda.  I can drink the inexpensive Torres white called, I think, “Vina Sol.”

For super bargains go sherry.  Fino or Manzanilla sherry, served cold on a hot day, with a salty snack, are a lavish experience for very little dough.  Same for quality Oloroso or Palo Cortado sherry on a cold night in front of a fire.   Careful though, they have more booze than you think.  On a hot day you can drink a lot of dry sherry fast and get blasted.

Name a bottle or two of wine everyone should treat themselves to over the holidays

If you can get a grower/maker champagne, not big brand name stuff, split one with your partner.   They are usually twice the quality and half the price of brands. Unless you salt them away in good spot in your basement you are not going to be able to buy mature red burgundy, which would be my choice.  The same is true of the Barolos and Barbarescos,  those that are at maturity aren’t to be found in stores, so unless you’ve taken the time to cellar them …

There is usually decent Rioja that is ready to drink in the stores.  Get a decent reserva.

There’s a great quote early on in your book. “The best winemaking is no winemaking at all.” What are 1 or 2 particularly cheap, dirty tricks that taint/enhance wine these days?

Most of the mass produced stuff, the critter labels from Australia for instance, is really made in a factory with all kinds of weird intrusions, added sugars or acids, stabilizing agents etc.  Almost everything is subjected to some sort of sulphur exposure to stop strange things happening in the bottle, but some measure is necessary if it is being shipped around the world.  The thing I most dislike is too much residual sugar and too little acid – tastes like flat Pepsi.

What’s meant by “Dry Farming?”

Not using irrigation.  All fruit that is grown with irrigation at the surface finds it unnecessary to drive their roots deep into the ground in search of a drink.  En route those roots pick up all kinds of trace goodies from the earth that positively affect the taste of your wine.  Put grapes aside and taste the “strawberries” they grow using drip irrigation in the Salinas Valley of California.  They look like strawberries but they taste of nothing. Also stressed fruit must make an extra effort to continue their greedy genes by putting more into their fewer seed bearing packages.

The eco-conscious oenophiles are worried about global warming’s effect on wine. What’s meant by “A Baked Wine?” And how can we tell a wine’s grapes have been “baked”?

The wine has a flabby, over sweet character, there isn’t enough acid to get that bracingly, puckering feeling in your mouth.  Graves apple juice from Nova Scotia has terrific acidic zip but American stuff grown in warmer climes has this flabby character to which I refer. Baked wines have a raisin taste and do nothing to cut through the fat from the meat that was just in your mouth.  Global warming is going to make Prince Edward County in Ontario the best pinot producer outside of Burgundy, and Nova Scotia the equal of Champagne when it comes to bubbly.

Sideways remains the most popular modern film about wine, and its protagonist, Miles, argues that merlot is an over-rated, easy to like, berry-licious grape not capable of greatness, and he loves pinot noir because it so embodies its terroir, and requires such care on behalf of its producers to make a good bottle. Would Elliott agree with Miles on both accounts? What’s your take on Sideways, anyway? I loved the movie, and, like both Miles and Elliot, default to pinot noirs and chateauneuf du papes. Do you have a default wine type, one you can always count on when you can’t make up your mind?

I liked Sideways, it was a good yarn about the way men think, but didn’t care much for Miles’ moronic take on Merlot.  Merlot can make brilliant wine.  Merlot in the right setting can be as much about terroir as the most rigourously biodynamically neo-french-hippy grown Cab Franc in the Loire.

I have a couple of defaults that relate to food.  Inexpensive sur lie Muscadet is default with fried or grilled fish or with mussels, clams and oysters; with game it’s always red Burgundy; with leg of lamb it’s got to be a Bordeaux or one of the few good California knock-offs.

Your protagonist’s vineyard is in California. California is the exclusive source for zinfandels. What’s your take on zinfandels? Elliot didn’t seem a fan, when his help suggested he sell a brand, Zebra Zinfandel, with the zinfandel growing on their property.

Ridge makes a couple of passable Zins but most of it is awful, one dimensional junk.  I now avoid Zin and Australian Shiraz like the plague.   Back in the 90s guys were selling Zin from California with slogans like “no wimpy wines”  or “wines with  giant balls.”   It’s like they were selling bear spray, not something you were going to put in your mouth.  Those Zins are just awful garbage.

When people tell me they find red wine “too harsh,” I assume it’s the snap of tannins turning them off. So I recommend the lowest tannin-containing red, Beaujolais: it’s like drinking a juice box, but it’ll get them started. What would you recommend to white wine drinkers as a gateway into reds?

I’d love to say Burgundy but buying a bottle really requires knowledge, boring wine bore knowledge.  I think some of the less “horsey” riojas people gotta love.  A truly gastronomic rosé from the south of France, like Bandol,  on a hot day on the back deck, munching a few olives and other nibblies has to win anyone over. I don’t care who they are, or what they have drunk in the past a great bottle of red from Burgundy or a mature Paulliac is going to wow anyone.

I’m almost exclusively a red wine drinker. The whites just lack the complexity, boldness, and magic I’m after. Am I missing something? Do you have a readymade suggestion list of whites you can share with me?

Yep, you are missing something.  Get your hands on a good 5 year old Chablis Premier Cru (it’s going to set you back $40) get it cold, DECANT IT, and have it with a great piece of fresh fish.  You’re there.

Ed Riche, recently crowned Atlantic Canada’s King of Satire by Salty Ink, writes for the page, stage, screen, and radio. Well. A Chemistry student turned film school graduate, he co-created and wrote for the radio program, The Great Eastern, which won him the CBC Vice-President’s Award and a Writers Guild of Canada Award.  From there he’s built an extensive and impressive array of radio, television, and feature film scripts that have earned serious recognition, awards-wise and other wise …

But this is a book blog, right, and I really wanted to mention he’s the guy who wrote Rare Birds. It’s one of the best novels out of Newfoundland, ever, and a funny as hell story of a man whose restaurant by the sea is failing, so, to attract a crowd, his eccentric neighbour carves fake rare birds to lay out at sea. Hilarity ensues. It was adapted (by Ed) into a feature film that starred Molly Parker of HBO’s Deadwood and William Hurt.  The film was nominated for a Genie Award. I think “a funny as hell take on the human condition” is a fine enough one-line summary. If everyone has a book that reminds them of a time and place in their lives, this one’s mine. I was clewing up university, and realizing it was sham, ending a 6-year relationship, and I read the thing in a hospital bed, recovering from a surgery, where they attached a chunk of metal to my heart. So, I was really relating to Dave “fuck up Man” Purcell to say the least.

Penguin published his second novel in 2004, The Nine Planets. It made The Globe‘s year end best of list, and won both the Winterset award (for the best book out of Newfoundland that year) and the Thomas Head Raddall Award (for the best novel out of Atlantic Canada that year). He also won the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council’s Artist of The Year in 2004.

The fine-tasted folks at Anansi have just published his latest, Easy to Like. It’s a scathing satire of modern taste, and the corporations who cater to it, that tells the hilarious story of a screenwriter turned winemaker, striving to save his vineyard and the CBC. Funny as this book is, there’s no nonsense when it comes to what’s being knocked, which adds poignancy to the punchlines. Consider the novel your companion in disdain for the way things are, and if you can’t change them, you may as well laugh at them. See yesterday’s post for more on this new novel.

CLICK A BOOK COVER TO READ MORE ABOUT THAT BOOK

Shedding Some Ink on Ed Riche

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

Recently Craig Francis Power’s Blood Relatives impressed me.  Dark and funny and with very mature prose for a first timer, there was more storytelling and less writing than one usually sees these days and that was to my taste. A couple of years ago I had to read, for the first time, Anne of Green Gables.  I had formed prejudices about the book without having read it but it turned out to be an exceptional book.

You’re big into theatre and screenwriting. What’s the draw there, What do they offer you that novels do not?

Most of the screenwriting I do is to order, it’s at the behest of a producer who often comes with a story (or part of one) so the draw for me is mostly the paycheck.

The theatre is the danger and excitement of witnessing a story take on its own life, having a story respire in time with the breath of its audience. It’s as if your book caught fire in your hands.

If you weren’t a writer, you’d be a … ?

Chef.

What is great about being a writer? What isn’t so great?

The solitude.

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

The opening night of a play I wrote many years ago called Possible Maps.  The show ended and I thought, “Wow, that’s exactly what I intended.”  I’m happy with my novels.  There are things I would change in some film and television work and one play in particular.

You’re being dubbed one of the country’s finest satirists. Is knocking things cathartic, or just fun?

It isn’t much fun at all, it’s an expression of outrage and a call of warning.  It might just come from frustration over  a feeling of impotence to effect change. I know people get laughs from the humour, from your showing them the absurdities, but you can get angry rooting around in the darkness locating them.

If you were to write a satire of CanLit, what might you mock?

Its mawkish lyricism, its preoccupation with pioneer days, its pandering to female readers, the tendancy to mistake the notation for the music.

A lot of Elliott’s frustrations with the film and TV industries, with regards to catering to taste and marketability, translate to frustrations shared by authors/readers about today’s book industry. Publishers, for example, pay attention to sales, as if, because a book sold it was loved by its reader. Not the case, yet they associate sales with taste. Do you have any frustrations with regards to the Canadian book industry?

First I really have to say that the people I’ve met in the industry have been great.  Easy to Like was my first dance with House of Anansi, and I couldn’t have worked with kinder, smarter folk.  But it is so hopeless a business these days one wonders whether they have the right to use the term “industry.”  Some of the big national awards that were created to promote the whole have ended up creating a “winner-takes-all” situation, where only the award winners are in the public consciousness.  This can be disasterous when something like the Giller so often gives the prize to an incredibly shitty book.

It’s a mess out there now, bookstores are a thing of the past, the big box places are more about housewares and chocolates than books.  A title has to be associated with some sort of stunt, like Canada Reads, to get attention.  But bitch as I might, I have no solutions. We’re in an interegnum, not only in writing, but in the creation of any sort of content that can be copied.  The prediction that the internet would make anything than can be reproduced valueless has happened much faster than anyone expected.  We are in the midst of revolutionary change so no one knows what’s going to happen.  I was grousing to Lisa Moore the other day about how meagre was the financial reward for writing a serious novel and she said that writing was becoming “a priesthood.”  My heart isn’t as big as Lisa’s, so I have no time for that kind of “vocation.”  I adhere to Dr. Johnson’s dictum that, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

You’ve done some research to inform this novel. What are some of the most notable things you dug up about wine, CBC, Hollywood, whatever? Does the existence of feral zebras in California take the cake? What was the highlight of all your research?

Some of the things I learned about F. Scott Fitzgerald have really stuck with me.  I went to the house in which he died in Los Angeles, and I felt some sort of fraternal sympathy with the guy.  He was a joke from the past when he died, a relic from a bygone era that wasn’t 20 years earlier.  I feel, regardless of how much more important an author he might be, that he and I are somehow in this racket together.

The wiretap stuff in the novel is based in fact.  I think I was surprised how genuinely thuggish Hollywood gets at its worst.  The suggestion in the novel that scary people would conspire to keep Elliot in Toronto isn’t a stretch.

I learned much much more about winemaking than is in the book, lots of details that I judged would lose readers.  Similarly, and I regret some of this, I greatly simplified some aspects.  I referred to both vine stock and root stock in an early draft and made them the same (which they are not) in later drafts so as not to confuse the larger audience.  I think I will change that if there is another edition.

Funny as this book is, there’s no nonsense when it comes to what’s being knocked, which adds poignancy to the punchlines. Do you agree humour helps sink the core of a novel even deeper into a reader?

Absolutely, that’s the very trick of it.  Nobody can talk as candidly about society’s failings, about perfidy, as a someone who can dress it up with laughs.  There is also nothing more dangerous to tyrannies, from the grand to the petty, than being mocked.

I’ve read an encyclopaedia on wine (literally, I even ran a blog called Red Teeth for a while), so I like to think that I appreciate wine more than casual drinker, via my knowledge thereof. Yet I have friends who drink sloppy wine, who couldn’t even tell you what they’re drinking — what zinfandel or super tuscan even means — and yet they talk about how much they’re loving it, while I’m finding my more expensive, properly prepared wine a little disappointing. Where do you stand in the debate that the more we know about wines (or a particular artform), the more we enjoy them? 

You’ve gotten to the essence of my book with that question.  Is it possible that having a more informed taste diminishes your ability to be satisfied?  Maybe a naïve, uninformed approach to anything that has simple enjoyment as an objective is the best?

Elliott works on shitty scripts to fund what he really loves: his vineyard. Are there examples of real life screenwriters like this that you know of?

Francis Ford Coppola most famously.  No screenwriters I know personally have vineyards, but every single one of them has wrtiten shitty scripts.

How is a good bottle of wine like a good film/book?

You can’t identify what it is that moves you, or rather what it is that moves you is elusive or changing.  In both cases you just keep thinking about when it’s over.  They talk about “length” in wine, the same should hold true for good literature.

If this book was taught in a university classroom, 9 out of 10 professors would tell their students that Elliot’s going looking for that elusive, possibly extinct Matou grape (to perfect his wine) is a metaphor for the key ingredient, and what’s gone missing in the recipe big corporations use to make films/books these days. Care to take credit for the metaphor?

Thank you, I will.

Your new novel is a pretty scathing attack on CBC and similar corporations. I liked the line, “the ornate poetry of management non-speak.” What’s the deal, Do you feel like the goal of a company like CBC gets lost in its management, mandates, and regulations?

Yes, [having] too many layers between the creators and the managers always manages to fuck the product.

I found Elliott admirable, particularly with his refusing to make Easy to Like wines. There are two kinds of artists. Those who make what they love, and hope people love it. And those who make what people love, so they’ll love it. Are the former really more noble, if both are making things at the end of the day? (I think so, but I am asking you.)

I’m too long in the racket now to know. I’ve tried to make crowd pleasing work and have not always managed to pull it off.  Rare Birds was certainly an extremely popular piece but not by design.   Audiences ate up my most recent play, Hail, and it was not a light, fluffy piece with a redemptive ending.  My novel The Nine Planets was never meant to be a crowd pleaser and, to my ultimate regret, it really wasn’t.  Yet I think more highly of that book every day.   I would like to believe what I’m doing is noble, I really would, but I don’t feel that.  There have a couple of occasions when I’ve taken a pass on a paycheque to write crap but as many others where I’ve sold out.

Your novels feature normal people striving to be decent and happy, and making mistakes like the rest of us. Like “fuck up man Dave” from Rare Birds.  Is that intentional, not having heroes and happy endings? What’s wrong with books that do that?

There is nothing wrong with happy endings.  They don’t seem to be part of my act.  I cannot stomach “heroic” characters because I never believe them.  And I find happy or redemptive endings deny the story in the novel a continued life beyond the last page.  It’s like, “My work here is done, tuck the kids in and go to sleep out of it.” My work tends to come to conclusion before the characters have completed their journey, they are only ending a stage and there is evidently more to come.  I just like that better myself.

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.

The novel’s protagonist, Elliot Johnson, is a “C-list screenwriter.” He moved to Hollywood to be in movies, but the industry turns him off and he falls more in love with Californias’s wine than its star-studded Hollywood lore. All he learned from the latter was that Hollywood wasn’t about good films so much as good-selling films.  “The important part of any program is that it is on somewhere,” he discovered, not that it was “good.” His agent encourages him to schmooze more,  and follow formulas instead of his heart, so to speak. So he winds up writing Hollywood drivel to fund a failing vineyard. The issue with his vineyard being that he refuses to cater to public taste there, too.

With both his screenwriting career and vineyard on the rocks, and enough personal problems to want to run away from, Elliot is convinced taking off to France will at least save his vineyard. He’s looking for a possibly extinct grape that he’s sure is the missing ingredient in his wine. But he gets waylaid in Toronto because his passport is about to expire. Long, funny story short, some well-connected folks conspire to keep him in Canada by arranging an interview with CBC, for the position of VP of English programming. He lands the job by dropping buzz words and playing into what they wanted to hear.

A lot of Elliott’s frustrations with the film and TV industries, with regards to catering to taste and marketability, translate to frustrations shared by authors/readers about today’s book industry. Most publishers, for example, pay attention to sales in deciding what they’ll publish, as if, because a book sold, it was loved by its reader. Not the case, raise your hand if many a buzzed book has let you down in the past, yet they associate sales with taste. Funny as this book is, there’s no nonsense when it comes to what’s being knocked, which adds poignancy to the punchlines. It’s humour helps sink the core of the novel even deeper into a reader, and gets you thinking.  He jokes about the “the ornate poetry of management non-speak” in CBC bureaucracy, but it raises the question as to whether or not the very purpose a company like CBC gets lost in its management, mandates, and regulations.

Easy to Like is spot on in what it conceptually takes on, sharper than a broken wine glass, wittier than the water is wet, and scathing in its portrayal of corporations who counterproductively kill their cause by striving to make films, TV, wine, or whatever, easy to like and sitting on bestseller lists. Elliot jokes of writing a screenplay called The Feinting Spell, about a “blue-balled teen who pretends to be a vampire to get girls.” A hilarious concept that would actually go gold in theatres right now.  But what’s funny on the surface raises serious, open-ended, philosophical questions on modern taste, and catering to it. It’s a fickle, varied, and ever-changing thing, public taste. And too many bigwigs cater to the lowest common denominator. What is the cost to quality art? Alongside that, Easy to Like raises another question about taste: does the well-informed wine lover really enjoy wine more than the unsophisticated palette of someone who claims to love a technically crappy bottle of wine? Is the pretentious hipster film buff really getting more out of an art film than a teenie booper at a Bieber biopic? Who knows, the author himself doesn’t claim to.

As a winemaker, Elliot contests that “the best winemaking is none at all.” He names his own wine 305 Locura Canyon Road because “that’s where it comes from and that’s what it should taste like.” Most  wine purists would agree that wine is about authenticity, and likewise, most good critics would agree any good novel is about authenticity. It’s another thing that stands out about this novel: Ed Riche was the right man to write this novel. He knows what he’s writing about here: he’s an oenophile, who’s written for CBC, and the screen, and has done considerable research and arm-bending to inform this blazing book. It’s also authentic satire: largely subtle mockery, based in truth, that makes a reader feel smart for liking and laughing at what was said. Consider the novel your companion in disdain for the way things are, and if you can’t change them, you may as well laugh at them.

This video will be disabled shortly …

This is his second film to star his daughter, Emma. I don’t know what you other dads do with your daughters, but you’re likely not topping Kenneth this year. Not everyone gives their kid movie stardom, maybe just ten bucks to go to the movies … 

HERE’S HOW IT WORKS:

- Do NOT vote for your favourite book or because you like that author.

- Pretend you’ve read none of these.

- Vote for the book whose design, paired with its backcover summary, would entice you the most to read the book.

Click a cover to enlarge and read text:

A Description of the Blazing World
by Michael Murphy
Design by: Grace Cheong

Fun Fact about Michael Murphy:
His brother is the frontman for the popular band Wintersleep, and they have done a musical side project together, called Postdata, and I love it. Here’s a song called “Paranoid Clusters” of that album:

At First, Lonely
by Tanya Davis
Design: Matt Reid

Fun Fact about Tanya Davis:
She is adorable. And also a musician. She’s also the poet laureate of Halifax, and you’ll know her as the poet who went viral with this delightful collaboration with filmmaker Andrea Dorfman.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs&feature=player_embedded

Deluded Your Sailors
by Michelle Butler Hallett
Design: Todd Manning

Fun Fact about Michelle Butler Hallett:
She’s played a big role in helping Riddle Fence, Canada’s classiest, hippest, youngest literary journal become the great, glossy, full-colour magazine it is. She’s also published not just four books of fiction, but has had non-fiction, poetry, and scripts published or win awards.

Double Talk
by Patrick Warner
Designer: Rhonda Molloy

Fun fact about Patrick Warner:
Patrick is also a poet and librarian, and hilarious. IN fact he’s a two-time winner of the EJ Pratt Poetry award. Double Talk, featured here,  is his debut novel, and his most recent book of (stellar) poems, Mole, placed 7 out of 23 in Salty Ink’s 2009 Judge a Book by its Cover Contest.

Easy to Like
by Ed Riche
Design: Daniel Cullen

Fun Fact about Ed Riche:
Ed knows more about wine than Miles from Sideways (an amazing movie, by the way), so this book is a wine lover’s delight. Also, Ed’s first novel, Rare Birds, was a major league movie, featuring Molly Parker of Deadwood fame and William Hurt. I was recently asked to share a top 10 list of the best books out of Newfoundland for an upcoming book. Rare Birds made the cut.

Glass Boys
by Nicole Lundrigan
Design: Jessica Sullivan

Fun Fact about Nicole Lundrigan:
Nicole is a trained physical anthropologist; has been hunched over archeological digs, conjuring up stories of how people lived. A natural segue into fiction? or just a cool one. To borrow from the Winnipeg Free PRess review, ” Lundrigan no longer digs for bones, but conjures her characters with a vivid imagination while never quite abandoning the empirical sensibility of an anthropologist.”  She’s also lived with a Baron and Baroness in the Chateau de Prouzel, France.

Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul
by David Adams Richards
Design: Andrew Roberts

Fun Fact about David Adams Richards:
David Adams Richards is such a literary icon he’s been named to the Order of Canada. Top that. He also wrote one of my favourite books: Mercy Among the Children. If you’d like your heart torn out of your chest and stamped upon, I would recommend all 400 pages of it.

Maintenance
by Rob Benvie
Design: Bill Kennedy

Fun Fact about Rob Benvie:
There’s a reason musician Joel Plaskett endorsed this novel on the back cover: they used to be in a band together. An epic 90′s band not too far off the epicness of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, in terms of the Canadian indie rock scene of the 1990s. Here’s a Thrush Hermit song where they shared the mic quite a bit more than most songs: “Western Dreamz”:

This Will be Difficult to Explain
by Johanna Skibsrud
Design: Michael Vrana

Fun Fact about Johanna Skibsrud:
Johanna won last year’s Giller Prize, Canada’s richest, most esteemed literary award. And if that’s not enough to impress you, she’s also a poet who, maybe for the first time ever, had both a novel and a book of poems up for an Atlantic Book Award in the same year.

Tide Road
by Valerie Compton
Design: Jaye Haworth

Fun Fact about Valerie Compton:
This is Valerie’s amazing debut novel, but she’s been writing for years, cleaning up with her short fiction (shortlisted for the CBC literary award, published in Grain, Malahat Review, etc) and is a critic for many a place and teaches writing as well. I came across a line of hers I liked in an interview: “When I teach fiction writing, I do not say ‘write what you know.’ I say, ‘write what you want to know.’ How else to sustain one’s interest in an imagined narrative over the course of many years?” There’s a deeper meaning there. Personally, when I write, it’s just one long conversation with myself, asking questions I wish I had the answer to. In Valerie’s case, this novel stemmed from ”an attempt to understand a strong image I’d had of Sonia.”

The Virgin Cure
by Ami McKay
Design: Kelly Hill

Fun Fact about Ami McKay:
Ami’s debut, The Birth House, was one of the most wildly successful Canadian novels of the last decade. The Virgin Cure, her latest, is inspired by the life of her great-grandmother. And digging around the family closet is nothing new to Ami. “When I was a child I loved finding things … a jar of my grandmother’s old buttons, a cigar box filled with boy scout badges and river stones … with every relic I discovered, there came a story. Real or imagined, the tales that surrounded each object were magic, making the ‘thing’ more immediate, something more than it was before I’d found it. Fact or fiction, fantastic, joyful or sad, stories make us more than we were before we found them.”

You Could Believe in Nothing
by Jamie Fitzpatrick
Design: by Jennifer Embree

Fun Fact about Jamie Fitzpatrick:
Jamie is the host of CBC’s The Performance Hour. This is his debut, so notable it was winning awards before it was even published.

 NOTE: You can only vote once per computer / IP Address. If you cannot vote, it means someone has already voted from your compuer, home, or place of work.

POLL CLOSES WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14th, at MIDNIGHT NL Time