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.
Exciting, the rink in halifax. I was skating (indoors unfortunately) with a bunch of children the other day and couldn't understand why one boy didn't want to join us out on the rink. His mother later clarified he didn't like that everyone was going in the same direction...
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