Ha!

Every year I plan to observe Robbie Burns Day and every year it passes me by. This year, however, we have a supply of Scotch on hand and I have been quietly rehearsing a poem to recite (after, definitely after, the Scotch). I decided on "To A Louse," mainly because although the rest of the lines wandered off shortly after I read them back in high school, that "O wad some Power" has stayed randomly lodged. If it goes well maybe next year will include haggis and a guest or two. Happy birthday, Robert.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Old Year/New Year

Since tidying it up a few days ago I've been really taken with this little corner of my office. (The rest of the room remains much less photogenic.) On the desk is one of my Christmas gifts, The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. Look out, manuscripts. I've got a thousand+ pages of authority at my fingertips. And it's current.

I love making New Year's resolutions and I think this year I'll include building myself a better editorial/biblio resource library at home. Chicago, of course, will have a place of honour (maybe even a little stand). I'll also want to upgrade my house dictionary from my mum's 1954 Oxford Concise, sans spine, to the newest Oxford Canadian. And if the Dalhousie library system is determined to stick to its three renewal limit, I'm going to need the History of the Book in Canada set, which I mentioned last post but have made only a very small dent in since. Hmm. What else?

So You Want to Write a Novel

An editor friend sent this along and it completely slayed me. If you've ever told me you were working on a book and received an unimpressed squint in return, it is because this video is not much of an exaggeration in terms of some of the expectations of a particularly naive brand of aspiring writer. The makers of this nailed so many of the finer details. Clearly an inside job.

Johanna & the Giller

My sentiments exactly.

Kate Atkinson

One more day until the new Kate Atkinson novel, Started Early, Took My Dog, is released in Canada. Warning to all other books in my stack: You are about to experience a bout of fierce neglect. But I can promise it won't be for long.

One fall launch and one Giller long list

A couple of bits of local-ish book news:

First, Allan Donaldson's new novel, The Case Against Owen Williams, will be launching at Westminster Books in Fredericton this Thursday night at 7:00pm. The book's been getting some good reviews, so if you're in the neighbourhood I hope you'll come hear Allan read. He'll also be in Halifax next month. The full book description can be found here, on the Nimbus site.

Second, I was thrilled today to see a book I worked on last year, Scotsburn, NS, author Johanna Skibsrud's debut novel, The Sentimentalists, on this year's Giller Prize long list. It's great both to see Johanna's (amazing) book on there and to see some small presses in the mix (including Gaspereau, Coach House and Biblioasis). The full list is here.

In other news I borrowed Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist (remember book club?) from a friend and roared through it in a couple of sittings this weekend. I'll be back with more to say on that very soon.

Narrating

The other day I came across an essay by American poet Tony Hoagland, called "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment." It originally appeared in a 2006 issue of Poetry magazine, and is available on their website. Well worth reading if you're interested in some of the current debate about what might characterize (at least a part of) the current poetic era.

I've been mulling the question of narrative in poetry for a good while now, both in relation to my own work and in my reading of other poets. My own work tends to fall really naturally into a "Once upon a time" kind of lilt, and in the face of a lot of the more associative, less "I" driven work being published lately, I've often felt compelled to rethink my inclinations. Do I write this way because it comes naturally or because I'm too lazy or not a strong enough poet to jog myself out of it? The conclusion I've come to is that at this point, anyway, this is the position from which the work I'm happiest with comes, and that if the things I find myself interested in writing about present themselves as stories then my job is to try to shape the strongest narratives I can, rather than try to bash them into ghazal-like series of sideways glances. (Both the ghazals and the glances being entirely respectable modes, but decidedly not mine.)

Noah Richler's beach reads

Speaking (as I was last post) about books and place, I've been following the Globe and Mail's "My Books, My Place" series for the last several weeks. Some are more interesting takes on the pairing than others. Lisa Moore's this weekend was a goody, I thought. And last weekend I was delighted to see Fredericton author Allan Donaldson's first novel Maclean (2005) perched on a dozing Noah Richler's chest as one of his beach reads. You can find the article here. This spring I had the pleasure of working with Allan on his new novel, a literary mystery called The Case Against Owen Williams, which is at the printer now and will launch next month. Full book description can be found here.

The Good Ship Publishing

I had a hunch when I saw the job title Publishing Assistant/Bosun on the Quill and Quire website today that the position advertised was probably at Coach House Books in Toronto, and I was right. Jobs at small publishers never quite fit the parameters of the traditional titles, but it's nice when the people advertising let you know that from the start.

Seeing that word bosun also reminded me of the first time I encountered it, which was just a few years ago (not enough seafaring literature in my childhood, obviously) in the manuscript for a chapbook I was working on with Dennis Lee. I queried it, thinking it might be a typo, and then after some other correspondence in which I audaciously/stupidly suggested his rhythm might be off at one point in another poem, he called and proceeded to recite, with gusto, that entire poem over the phone, and I had to conclude that in fact his rhythm was bang on. Even though it did nothing much to bolster my confidence in my editorial sensibilities, it will probably always be one of the highlights of my career.

Expensive how?

When did we decide that books were expensive? Through this two-week heatwave, reading the old Count (see previous post) through the hottest hours of the day, this is a question I keep coming back to. It was sparked in part by the fifth installment in the Globe & Mail's The Future of Books series from last Saturday (also online here) on the future of booksellers. To someone who has always harboured the dream of someday opening a bookstore, the talk of books and bookstores dying really rankles. And Toronto bookseller Ben McNally, for one, thinks the future of the business will depend in some measure on bringing customers back around to the idea "that books are great value at regular price." Amen.

For between thirty and forty dollars, sometimes even fifteen or twenty, depending on the genre and the format, we get, what, six, ten, twenty hours of entertainment and education (often both) to be consumed entirely at our leisure. I don't find comparisons between art/entertainment forms to be especially useful, but it occurs to me that the question does lend itself to a very crude tally: the hours of engagement offered (six, ten, twenty hours with a book vs four hours at a concert, two at a movie, etc), a coefficient for the ability to do so privately (as opposed to say a concert or a visit to an art gallery or a movie theatre) in an age when privacy and control and independence are supposed to be among our chief concerns, another for the relative ease of taking this wonderful little invention with us wherever we go (portability: this is what gets us fired up about iPods and cell phones and lightweight camping equipment). And we want this for under ten dollars?

Rant over. I'm off to St. John's, Newfoundland, tomorrow and hope to do some good skulking around its bookish offerings. Recommendations welcome.

Jim Rimmer makes the Chicago Manual of Style's June Q&A

I'll admit it. I get the Chicago Manual of Style's Q&A alerts straight to my inbox. Once a month. I snort at the questions that plagued me a few years ago, mull the ones that still have me stumped. Last month's list included a little reference to Jim Rimmer, a well-loved type designer, caster, letterpress printer, and owner of Pie Tree Press in New Westminster, BC, who passed away this past January. A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of working with Jim on a trade edition of his illustrated memoirs published by Gaspereau Press (and originally published as a limited edition at Pie Tree). Incidentally, it was while working on this project that I found out Jim had also designed the Whistler logo embroidered on the pink sweatshirt I wore for most of grade one. I wouldn't say it's what he'll necessarily be most remembered for, but it was a happy discovery for me.

Here's the question from the CMS Q&A:

Q. Hello, Chicago. You state that “an opening parenthesis should be preceded by a comma or a semicolon only in an enumeration” as in (1) a brown fox, (2) a silver fox. There are no other exceptions. You also say that the same rules apply to brackets. Another editor wants this: New Westminster, BC: Pie Tree Press, [1988]. It looks very wrong to me! I say the comma goes, because the bracketed matter is an interpolation, not part of the original text, and the comma has no function. Therefore the punctuation should be as if that interpolation doesn’t exist.

I would have cut that comma (although Chicago disagrees).

And if you want to know more about Jim Rimmer, there's a brief summary of his work and samples on the Heavenly Monkey site.

Writing Responsibly

A couple of articles I’ve read recently have got me thinking about a tough issue in poetry, and I suppose in all forms of art. It’s the question of how to address the real, wide world and all its shortcomings in a way that does justice to the ugliness and to the art form itself. As an editor I’ve seen a lot of rants arranged on the page as poetry and novels that are thinly disguised vehicles for educating on a historical event or marginalized group of people. But the vacuous opposite is just as bad, right? The tight, witty object poem that ultimately leaves you cold. The virtually asexual love song. The ones getting it right, I think, are pretty brave. They’ve learned something about how many boxes and bird cages and babies and goats they can pile onto the bicycle and still keep pedalling across the tightrope. They could run across by themselves, but then it’s just about them. James McMurtry has it down. He can pack Walmart, Iraq, George Bush, and small-town Texas into a song and it doesn’t feel clumsy.

In last month’s issue of Poetry, in an essay called “This Land is Our Land,” David Biespiel wrote about the shrinking interest in poetry in America and the reluctance of American poets to write about the issues currently facing Americans. He thinks there might be a connection. I’m inclined to agree, though it’s not entirely clear-cut. You can read the essay here, and check out the range of responses in the comments section.

On our side of the border, operating out of Okanagan College in Kelowna, BC, there’s a new journal in town. It’s called Ryga, after novelist and playwright George Ryga, who also has a more established award for social awareness in literature named after him. They’ve got two issues out, and another in the works. In his inaugural editorial Sean Johnston talks about the journal’s mission:

George Ryga wrote about this world now and that currency, that urgency is what we want to carry on here. Ryga will seek the best stories, essays, poems and plays in this tradition – the literature that our country is so rich in: literature that writes its way home without giving in to nostalgia; literature that celebrates all our competing traditions and resists any safe homogeneity; but literature that refuses to romanticize the voices of the past in a way that denies them a life in the present or the right to presume a central role in the future.

In “Ryga Redux,” the introduction to the second issue, Johnston rearticulates from the vantage point of having reviewed some submissions to a journal with this particular stated mission:

Since we first started putting together the material for Ryga, many people have submitted. The difference in submissions is shown most tellingly, I think, in the authors' notion of the political in art. This is where we differ -- art does not succeed very often when it shouts. It rarely succeeds when its primary audience is in the room, at the artist's feet. The scale of our world doesn't always allow us to work beside those who are suffering because of our material wealth, but they still suffer. We still feast. The true artist's imagination must keep those who suffer in the room with him.

It was hard to pick just one paragraph from each essay to include here. You can find both by following the links on the journal’s website.

In my own work I think I started out with a great willingness to expound on world as I saw it, and then as I got a little further along in figuring out how I say what I say, started to focus that mainly on things that were inarguably my own. I’ve felt inspired in the last couple of years to risk being a little clumsy again in order to say things worth saying. Some poems of mine will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Ryga, and I was thrilled when I got that news. But when I reread them now I think about the different ways I could have fit more onto the bike.

Heather Reisman

I have absolutely no idea how I missed this last week, but here it is now:

Start here: Mount Allison profs protest Reisman degree (CBC)

then check this: Open letter to the university from part-time instructor Amanda Jernigan (Book Ninja)