Marfa, TX

This interview with Marfa Book Co. owner Tim Johnson, posted yesterday on Poetry magazine's excellent blog, made me wish I'd known about the shop when I was through there a few years ago. Finding a great independent bookstore in the desert is a heady combination I've written about before.

And because I love a good geographic theme, an old poem I have been doing some new tinkering with:

Outside Marfa

Scrub the lives we have had
to now, let the skirmish
of details slither off into
the reaches. For the last
hundred miles it has seemed
unimportant to carry on with this
mastery of the ambitions we've
been telling ourselves we are about.

Let's lie flat and let the wideness
we've funnelled into so many straight
days and weeks loose to bloom
a moment into this sky.

As far as the eye knows
this day and where we lie is all
and who is the eye to deceive?
Now whatever stray reluctance left
on the part of the mind is slipping
off as the sky looms back,
and life till now buckles, slain,
and washes out across West Texas.
Hear, the car has ceased its
cricket ticking, last trace
of how we got here silenced,
and now who am I to say?

You Could Believe in Nothing

I was thrilled to see this almost entirely glowing review of St. John's author Jamie Fitzpatrick's new (and first) novel, You Could Believe in Nothing, in the Globe and Mail's online books coverage yesterday. I had the pleasure of working with Jamie on the manuscript and it's satisfying to see it so well received.

Summer reading

Seven Rivers of Canada by Hugh MacLennan (Macmillan, 1961)

I found this at our neighbourhood used bookstore early in the summer and was really taken with the design. The cover stripes (seven blue ones for seven rivers) I think are a subtle way of illustrating the subject without being too literal or, alternatively, having to choose one river to stand in for all. Can we please have more of this again in cover design?



The interior is equally simple but well thought out. Each chapter start includes a map of the respective river – running to two pages if the river requires it, one page if it’s more compact. The book’s designer was Leslie (Sam) Smart, one of the founding members of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, and whose name I know mainly because of Canadian type designer Rod McDonald’s font Smart Sans, created to commemorate Smart after his death in 1998.

In his introduction MacLennan says: “A knowledge of the Canadian rivers will recover this earlier sense of time in Canada. It will bring the old experience of the people out of the subconscious regions where it lies buried.” And by old experience he means not just pre-air travel but pre-railroad, although I have to say that while I’ve travelled more slowly (by bicycle) cross country, it’s mainly been during long train trips that I’ve felt any real inkling of what the whole project of Canada might mean to anyone at a personal level. Maybe I’m just softheaded about trains.

For each river (Mackenzie, St. Lawrence, Ottawa, Red, Saskatchewan, Fraser and St. John) MacLennan combines his own experiences of it with its history, including some of the earlier explorers to navigate it, the settlers who became dependent on it and what it brought, and the gradually changing role of each one in settlement patterns and economics across the country.

Some of the history was fairly engrained in me, some I was a bit rusty on, but to look at it all through the lens of rivers – the ability to travel them and how speedily and carrying what – is fascinating.

I read this back in July, but writing about it on the edge of fall feels appropriate somehow because for reasons I haven’t quite figured out, apart from trains fall always puts me in a slightly patriotic mood. All in one week I’ve found myself signing out a stack of Glenn Gould cds from the library, roping a bunch of people into going to a Massey lecture and being invited to visit a friend up in Yellowknife. Solomon Gursky lurks on the nightstand. It's getting really disgusting.

Ryga, Vol. 3

I have eight (8!) poems in the latest issue of Ryga. I really respect this journal's editorial mission (which I wrote about in a post last year), so am very pleased to be published here. The issue is on newsstands now, and one of the poems in my set is also available to read online.

Books & Bikes

A little later this month I'll be getting together with a bunch of the cyclists from a cross-Canada trip I was part of ten years ago, and to gear up for our reunion ride I wanted some appropriate reading material. I follow a few cycle touring blogs, some of them quite well written, but I find the focus on day-to-day logistics sometimes overwhelms any sense of the landscapes and communities the writers are riding through. This is partly the nature of blogs, I guess, and I know the updates I wrote for our trip are filled with minutiae that no longer seem at all relevant, if they even were back then. In any case, this time I was looking for something a bit different.

Then I discovered one of Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy's books at the library. South from the Limpopo: Travels through South Africa recounts three solo cycling trips Murphy made: the first in 1993, just prior to the country's first multi-racial election, the second in April and May of 1994 to witness the elections, and the third a few months after Mandela took office. Her books are cleaned-up versions of her journal entries, so there's the immediacy of life on the road, but Murphy's central concern is talking to South Africans about their country's politics and history. A rough night has less to do with a flat tire or food and shelter than with finding people who will speak candidly about their lives and opinions. But by and large she finds them, and has an incredible knack for getting them to open up. More importantly, she has the patience to listen long enough to get past the better-rehearsed versions of their stories, getting closer to the source of some deeply ingrained ideas about racial differences. I've started and deleted a couple of paragraphs about these ideas, but the fact is that for ignorant me, Murphy's book was a bit of a crash course on South African history, so I'd rather let it percolate a while longer and not totally embarrass myself here. Still, I think even readers who do know more of the history than I do/did will find some of their assumptions checked in this book.

What I will say is how much I appreciated Murphy's determination to locate her own prejudices. Although she develops friendships with many black South Africans, and lives for a time in the township of Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town, she is honest about her involuntary responses in certain situations, and ponders what these reveal about her. There is a moment when she has finished speaking with the driver of a truck and pedalled off, only to realize that in the back of the truck were three black men whose presence she had entirely failed to acknowledge. She forces herself to question whether she would have done the same thing had it been a crew of white men and concludes that it would have been impossible for her not to have noticed them.

Well worth reading. And there are many more. Murphy's first book, Full Tilt: From Ireland to India with a Bicycle, was published in 1965 and she's written another twenty-odd since then. She's known for being disinterested in publicity, but there's a recent article about her here. She turns eighty this year and is still travelling by bicycle.

Wild Libraries

I just did a guest post over at Pickle Me This about my fond memories of visits to the West Vancouver Memorial Library. Thanks to Kerry Clare for including me in her Wild Libraries series.

Whittling

Underneath that fern, not so convincingly or fetchingly concealed by an old cotton blanket, are four egg boxes full of books that, after a year and half, still don't have a home in this apartment, despite there being shelves in every room but the bathroom. Every few months I attack the boxes looking for something and in the process try to whittle the contents back. Rereading this passage from Lawrence Clark Powell's Islands of Books, I was inspired to take a slightly different approach:

Somewhere in his notebooks Leonardo observed that small rooms are best because they discipline the mind. I have proved for myself the truth of his dictum. My study measures 9 by 9.... When we lived in the canyon my study measured 9 by 12. It was almost completely lined with shelves which held my total private library of 1500 volumes. Now I own twice as many in spite of constant discarding (to my college library), and the smaller room will hold only part of my books. This compels me to discipline my tastes and to choose for roommates only those volumes which I feel that I must see every day. (p. 9)

Roommates. Every day. Okay. Fiction I find fairly easy. If I loved it, I'll keep it. If I think I might get something more from it the next time, I'll keep it. But poetry I find trickier. There are poets I don't take to until a fourth or fifth reading when for whatever reason, they finally get through. They don't do their dishes, they hog the newspaper and then chastise you for not knowing what's going on. But one day they make you the best cup of coffee you've ever had in your life and none of the rest matters. My tastes have also changed somewhat in the last decade or so, and some of the poets I used to blather on about now seem either glib or sentimental. There's a fondness still, but I don't go back to their work anymore. How to choose.

In the process of all the hemming and hawing, I thought I'd share some of the collections that I know I am definitely going to keep for roommates. The first is Dart by Alice Oswald (Faber & Faber, 2002). Concept collections can be deceiving. They sound good on jacket copy, and in grant proposals, but they don't always hold up in the reading. Dart is a great example of how satisfying it is when they do. Alice Oswald spent three years interviewing people who lived and worked along the river Dart, in Devon, England, and transposed it into a long poem that captures the sounds of populations connected by their dependence on the same body of water. There are the voices of fishermen, oyster gatherers, a stone wall builder, a boat builder, swimmers, boaters, a ferryman, a sewage worker, a milk bottler. Parts are recorded more or less verbatim, and others are spun into mythologies almost. By the time I finished it (the first and the second time) I truly did feel as though I'd meandered my way down a river, hovering along the surface and being submerged at times. So, Dart, please stay on. You can steal whatever you want from my closet.

Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum

There has been a lot of talk of sailing at my house in the last couple of years, but so far very little action. We hope to remedy that this summer, and so to get into a suitably, or perhaps overly, ambitious mindset, I've been reading Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World, his account of the journey (24 April 1895 to 27 June 1898) that made him the first to circumnavigate the world single-handedly, by sail.

Slocum's story begins quite near here, actually, as he was born on the Annapolis Valley's North Mountain. The journey itself begins at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and from there north toward Sable Island and across the Atlantic to Gibraltar. But at this point he was warned that he should avoid the Mediterranean, which was then teeming with pirates, so he crossed back across the Atlantic to South America, through the Strait of Magellan, across the Pacific to Australia, to Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and then northward, eventually tying up at the same “cedar spile” in Fairhaven again three years later.

Although he does give several lectures along the way, in order to fund his trip, Slocum also seems to have had to do very little to publicize, and his arrival on new continents is generally preceded by newspaper reports of his progress and invitations to visit heads of state, self-appointed and otherwise. Among the people he encounters is President Kruger, of what is now South Africa, a believer in the Flat Earth theory:

Had this good but misguided fanatic been armed with a real weapon, the crew of the Spray would have died a martyr there and then. The next day, seeing him across the street, I bowed and made curves with my hands. He responded with a level, swimming movement of his hands, meaning “the world is flat.” (Chapter XVII)

And in Samoa, Slocum spends time with Robert Louis Stevenson's widow, Fanny, who gives him her husband's sailing directories for the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

But it's Slocum's relationship with himself as crew of one, and with his ship, the Spray, that I found most entertaining. He gets a lot of pleasure out of little references to himself in his different responsibilities as “part” of the crew:

But the turtle-steak was good. I found no fault with the cook, and it was the rule of the voyage that the cook found no fault with me. There was never a ship's crew so well agreed. (Chapter IV)

That said, he also confesses fairly early on to occasionally needing someone outside the crew to talk to:

Then I turned my face eastward, and there, apparently at the very end of the bowsprit, was the smiling full moon rising out of the sea. Neptune himself coming over the bows could not have startled me more. “Good evening, sir,” I cried; “I'm glad to see you.” Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. (Chapter III)

About his trusty ship:

The Spray struggled and tossed for ten days, making only three hundred miles on her course in all that time. I didn't say anything! (Chapter V)

Many of the incidents were ludicrous. When I found myself, for instance, disentangling the sloop's mast from the branches of a tree after she had drifted three times around a small island, against my will, it seemed more than one's nerves could bear, and I had to speak about it, so I thought, or die of lockjaw, and I apostrophized the Spray as an impatient farmer might his horse or his ox. “Didn't you know,” cried I—“didn't you know that you couldn't climb a tree?” But the poor old Spray had essayed, and successfully too, nearly everything else in the Strait of Magellan, and my heart softened toward her when I thought of what she had gone through. (Chapter X)

Reading Slocum has reminded me that most of the travel literature I read is fairly recent in vintage, not more than three or four decades old in most cases, and I'd like to add some more of the ur-travelogues. Here are a few I'd like to track down:

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Amateur Emigrant (In three parts, it details the journey Stevenson made from Scotland to California to reunite with his future wife Fanny–whom Slocum later met in Samoa–once she'd determined to divorce her first husband.)
Basho's The Narrow Road to the Interior and The Narrow Road to the Deep North (These are haibun, part prose and part poetry.)
Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle
Freya Stark's accounts of her travels in the Middle East (There is an interesting article about Stark in The New Yorker's April 18th issue.)
J. Smeaton Chase's California Coast Trails and Yosemite Trails
William Morris's Icelandic Journals

Other recommendations?

Fiddleheads

It's fiddlehead season here in the Maritimes, and I've had three helpings so far. The ones above were the crispest I found, floating in a big stainless steel bowl of water at Local Source on Charles Street in Halifax.

Fiddleheads being one of my favourite foods, I was thrilled when I happened upon Nicholas Catanoy's The Fiddlehead Republic (Hounslow Press, 1979) at a second-hand shop a few years ago. Although I wound up being less than enthusiastic about the long poem inside, I've saved the book both for the bright green fiddlehead motif on its cover (borrowed with permission from McCain Foods) and because it's inscribed to poet Robert Kroetsch, making it kind of an interesting CanLit specimen. Catanoy is a Romanian doctor and author who spent a few years in the late 1960s living in Fredericton, New Brunswick. The Fiddlehead Republic is a curious book, not unenjoyable but not really poetry either.



Under the title, on the half-title page in my copy, Catanoy has written "log book" which is actually the better way to approach the work. It's arranged as verse, but contains large excerpts from historic monuments, road signs and tourist brochures, and lists the contents of several museum collections. It reads like a car-ride, or multiple car-rides, through the province of New Brunswick, largely verbatim, which I suppose is why I have trouble with it as poetry.

Rereading this year I also discovered an unsourced line from Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses," which I wouldn't have caught previously: "Down by one of the fish-houses an old man sits netting." Catanoy has hyphenated fish-houses, which Bishop didn't, and capitalized "down" which appears partway through the first line in Bishop's poem, but otherwise it's identical. Could it be a coincidence? I don't know.

In any case, reading it all again this week was a good reminder that I am overdue for a visit to the province where I ate my first fiddleheads – in fiddlehead soup with a side of fries on the Miramichi River with my friend Mary. In case I've piqued your interest, here's a short, foody sample from Catanoy's section on Hartland:

HARTLAND, Potato Blossom Festival

French fries & milkshakes
Bumpers of cars

Sweet flute music.

Jean-Brillat Savarin:
"...The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they nourish themselves."

The Antigonish Review (#165)

I have two poems, "December 31" and "The Afternoon Show," in the new issue of The Antigonish Review (#165). This issue also features poems by Tom Wayman, Emily McGiffin and Jesse Patrick Ferguson, to name a few I like, so worth picking up a copy.

Return of The Intern

I've been battling a real diehard of a cold the last couple of weeks and managing not much of anything outside of work, but I did note the other day that a blog that I was sorry to see go on hiatus is now back. The Intern got me through a bout of unemployment a couple of years ago when I feared I might never find work again. She's an unnamed now former intern with a large publishing house in New York. Or is wickedly inventive and possesses an uncanny knowledge of the innards of a such an establishment and of the industry in general. In any case, she is pretty funny and I am delighted to see she's back, now writing from a farm in California but still with her finger on the pulse of the weirdness that is my chosen field. Check it out, and I will be back with some real live content as soon as my sinuses stop throbbing long enough to allow for the assemblage of a coherent thought or two.

Skulking in San Francisco

I spent last week in California, mainly in San Francisco, where there is some very good book shopping to be had. Here's what I came back with:

From Aardvark Books (used) near the corner of Church and Market Street:
–Selected Poems by Robinson Jeffers. Just a little Vintage paperback, but Jeffers, a California poet, has been on my to-read list for a couple of years now, so I decided to pounce in case I didn't happen to see any other editions of his work during the visit. A few days later when we travelled south, I was able to read the poem "Morro Bay" in downtown Morro Bay while in view of the town's legendary rock. Yes, this is the sort of dorky tourism I go in for.
–An Oregon Message by William Stafford. The first poem is about writing in a journal and the last about riding a bicycle. Sold.

From Booksmith on Haight:
–Sorry, Tree by Eileen Myles. A California poet, and an enticing cover design from Wave Books.
–Praise by Robert Hass, who I suppose needs no introduction though I have read very little of his poetry.
–In Search of Small Gods by Jim Harrison, of Legends of the Fall fame and a fellow Arizona enthusiast. (Also poetry.)

From William Stout Architectural Books on Montgomery Street:
–An Essay on Typography by Eric Gill
–Anatomy of a Typeface by Alexander Lawson
–The Business of Books by André Schiffrin

William Stout is well worth a visit if you have any architectural, interior design, visual art interests. They have a small typography section downstairs and I spent most of my time there. The Eric Gill essay is, I understand, sort of a classic, and since Gill's Joanna is one of my favourite fonts and one of the small handful I can pick out in a lineup, he is big in my would-be-expert world. The Lawson book is an in-depth look at the history and composition of thirty typefaces. Perhaps my repertoire of ones I can identify will have grown a bit by the time I've finished reading it. The Schiffrin I had heard nothing about previously, but the subtitle, "How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read," suggests a topic that looms fairly large in my life, so I couldn't not get it.

The trip wasn't all books, though. My sister and I also visited the Heath Ceramics shop at the Ferry Building for made-in-California dishware and glass jars, which then had to be carefully transported around the state, then through three airports, and finally home.

Borrower's Card: Lillooet Public Library

A couple of years ago I set out to write a series of poems about libraries: the public library in my town, the book swap that may or may not still operate in its very casual fashion on Mayne Island, BC, the little branch of the Buenos Aires public library system in the neighbourhood where I lived for a month one recent spring. But these poems just didn't turn out the way I had hoped, so a few months back I finally gave them up as un-editable and moved them into my Discards folder where they've been hanging out with all the work I did in university, set to auto-detonate the day I die. Then I started reading Kerry Clare's book blog, Pickle Me This, where she has a semi-regular feature she calls "Wild Libraries I Have Known." Perhaps, I thought, my little failures would be happier transposed into prose. I sent Kerry a note telling her of my plan. Libraries are for everyone, she said (more or less).

In the mid-eighties the Lillooet Public Library was housed an a one-storey building at the corner of Main Street and 8th Avenue. 8th Avenue is on an incline, so from inside the library, near the twirling paperback racks, you could see the sidewalk and the legs of pedestrians disappearing up the hill. My mother was one of the librarians and so my sisters and I spent a lot of time looking out the window, perusing the stacks, and in all the places other kids weren't allowed to be, like behind the giant check-out desk on the rolly chair using the date stamp, and in the glassed-in staff room behind it eating snacks.

The children's area was next as you came in, boxed in on two sides by higher shelving, with a colourful carpet and slant-topped tables with Richard Scarry, Robert Munsch, and the rest displayed. The book I remember best, though, was actually a Via Rail promotion of some sort, with photos of a girl, maybe early twenties, travelling across the country by train, getting off in Banff, then Winnipeg, and Montreal. I would love to find a copy of that book. It obviously had a lasting impact on my travel preferences. Good marketing, Via.

Speaking of trains, in the middle of the library was a large glass case where holiday-themed displays were housed. And one snowy day when I was maybe five or six my mum packed all the candy from the Christmas display into a bag and my dad and I got to take it on the train with us to Vancouver. (Kids, if your parents ever ask you for career advice, librarian is a really good pick. The perks for you will be endless.)

Toward the back of the adult section, near the large-print editions – which I always thought were intended for kids who were ready for adult fiction but not the drop in font size that went along with it – had been created a little sitting area with a couple of vinyl-covered armchairs and a reading lamp. I remember it as surprisingly civilized back there, and along with the fiction, I looked forward to the armchair and lamp that might go along with adulthood. Still waiting on the armchair.

Then, in the late eighties they moved our high school to a new building and transformed the old building into a rec centre. The library was relocated to this new complex, and it's never been quite the same for me.

PrairyErth

William Least Heat-Moon
Houghton Mifflin (1991)

I bought this on one of my last visits to The Odd Book in Wolfville, N.S., before moving to Halifax almost a year ago. The Odd Book is relatively small, but it's well organized and specific without being snobbish. There are dedicated Classics, archaeology and linguistics sections, for example, but also a wall of mass-market mysteries and a good stash of Archie comics. A friend of mine once said, before coming home for a summer while doing his Master's degree, that the only place in the Valley he wanted to work was The Odd Book and that if he couldn't work there he wasn't really sure what he was going to do. They weren't hiring. I'll have to check and see if he's over that yet.

On this visit I came to the cash with William Least Heat-Moon’s first book, Blue Highways, in my hand, and the store’s owner, Jim Tillotson, steered me toward PrairyErth on the new arrivals shelf. I read the first couple of chapters soon after, but was just too buried in the minutiae of moving into a new place and learning how to be a working person again – lunch-packing, for instance, eluded me for the first few weeks – and so I put the book aside. Then, after finishing The Great Railway Bazaar back before Christmas I found myself still in the mood for non-fiction but wanting something a bit more…stationary, and PrairyErth beamed from the shelf, looking fat and happy and entirely unscathed from its previous rejection.

The book is subtitled (a deep map) and that's exactly what it is. Heat-Moon went to Chase County, Kansas, a place where not much is thought to happen, and just inched his way through it, sometimes walking, sometimes rooting in courthouse records and the journals of those who settled or passed through, and sometimes waiting, in the grass or in a bar or in his van, to see what does happen. Some of his research has to do with particular routes through the county – railroads, secondary highways and paths. In one of my favourite sections he tries to uncover the Orient Line, a railway that was to have connected Kansas City and China, via Mexico, but that he begins to suspect may be no more than rumour.

Kansas is more or less the dead middle of the (contiguous) United States, and it's also where east becomes west, or vice versa. It's got the last large expanse of tallgrass prairie in the country, and one of the recurring elements in PrairyErth is the position of various people Heat-Moon interviews on the proposed Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve (which was successfully established a few years after the book's publication). It's a contentious issue for Kansans who still dream of a return to the days when a viable living could be made working prairie rangeland. In one chapter Heat-Moon recounts a conversation he has with essayist Wes Jackson in which Jackson outlines his vision for a new kind of agricultural community for a post-oil future, a model suited to the current economic reality in Chase County: relying and putting a greater value on human labour and keeping more of the products of that labour in the local area.

PrairyErth is of a piece with some of John McPhee's writing, in terms of the steady, on-the-ground chipping away at history, geology, ecology, economics, and ... I don't know, maybe happenstance, and the implied conviction that these need to be studied together. My one disappointment with it was that the parts I expected to like the most I actually liked least. These are where the author examines the effect of the prairie on his mindset. I travelled across Montana and North Dakota by train a couple of years ago and I guess had secretly hoped to find a closer articulation of my own experience of that landscape. The sentiments seem quite genuine, but the language he used often left me cold. Walking kept wandering into dreaming and into baggy statements about time. Given how much I like the rest of the book I'm tempted to say this is really a matter of vocabulary. Or a cultural divide, and I am just being ignorant.

Or maybe it's all the solitude. In the final chapter Heat-Moon and a friend, a fellow writer the (now) late Clive Scott Chisholm, embark on a multi-day walk to try to find the Kaw Trail, a path through the county, once travelled by the Wind People tribe when they were relegated to territory south of their original lands. Together the pair bounce ideas about the prairie off each other that to me are much more accurate and interesting than much of Heat-Moon's deeper solo musings. With Chisholm Heat-Moon has a sympathetic ear (Chisholm himself wrote a book about a long walk he did following the Mormon route from the Missouri River to the Great Salt Lake Valley) and someone to jog him out of the most earnest of his ruminations. There is a Tent Dwellers-like repartee here, both in terms of the wit and a particular brand of checked intuition. It was a good note to go out on, I thought.

Kay Ryan

One of my resolutions for 2011 is to try to memorize some poems I like. I don’t have a notion yet of whether this will necessarily improve my enjoyment of them, but I’m interested to see what the process will be like.

Although the obvious choices might be old favourites, I decided to make it all new with a new-to-me poet, American Kay Ryan. Like many, many other people, I had not heard of her before she took up her post as poet laureate (2008–2010). She’s stayed out of the mainstream – she lives in Marin County, California, and made a living teaching remedial English at the local college. When she was twenty-nine she took a cross-country cycling trip to try to decide whether or not to continue writing poetry. Somewhere in Colorado she posed herself the question “Do you like it?” and responded yes and then went from there. If you want to know more about her writing life, there’s a good interview with her here, from the Winter 2008 issue of The Paris Review.

Her poems are about asking the right questions, too. What is this? I thought it was this, but instead it’s this. You thought it was this, but I think maybe it’s this. From The Best of It: New & Selected Poems (2010) I bookmarked six I liked best, on first read, and have decided to start the memorizing with "Easter Island." Once I've done that I have the ukulele and Spanish to learn, and more nuts and legumes to eat. Should be a busy year.

The Geography of Arrival

The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction released its shortlist yesterday and I was pleased to see George Sipos's The Geography of Arrival (Gaspereau, 2010) on there. I had the pleasure of working with George on his manuscript a couple of years ago. The book is a memoir of his family's years in London, Ontario, following their immigration from Hungary in the late 1950s.

Here in Halifax we have a new outdoor skating oval, built for the upcoming Canada Games, and all over the city you can see people with their skates slung over their shoulders and hear the speculation as to whether the oval will be maintained following the Games. So in the spirit of skating here's a little bit of George's "Rink" chapter:

That fine counter-clockwise swirl always had an inherent flaw, however. Regardless of whether one went early or late, on a weekday or weekend, somewhere on the sheet of ice there was, inevitably, one gaping gouge. Often it was no more than a few inches long or a mere inch or so deep, but enough to catch the blade of a skate and send you sprawling. The secret, which the whole circling crowd (except the very little kids who spent most of their time on all fours anyway) understood, was to find out where the crack was on the first circuit and then avoid it. As we skated round and round, as the pucks whacked into the boards of the adjacent hockey rink, we all knew as one body where the flaw was, and the exact moment to swerve or to step lightly over it.

The winner of the prize will be announced on February 14.