15 Oct 2011

Word on the Street, Halifax 2011

This Sunday you are all once more invited as the Word on the Street festival celebrates literacy and the written word on the Halifax Waterfront. The Halifax festival was first held in 1995 on Spring Garden Road and attracted over 10,000 people.  It was, by any standards, an enormous success.  Spring Garden Road was closed off and tents, booths and stalls spanned over three blocks.  Year after year, people have continued to flock to this free literary festival of books and words.

However, Nova Scotia weather is notoriously unpredictable, and paper and water don’t mix.  After the festival in 2000 was rained out, it was moved inside, first to Pier 20 and then to the Cunard Centre, where it has continued to flourish.  But organizers always believed that an outdoor festival has a flavour that is truly special and last year The Word went back to the Streets under the trees at Victoria Park.
This year is an exciting time of change for the festival as it shifts once again to where Executive Director Colleen Ritchie hopes will be a more permanent home.  In true Maritime tradition, the festival is moving to the Halifax Waterfront.  On Sunday, September 25th, the spaces in and around the Maritime Museum will be hopping. There will be author readings aboard the CSS Acadia.  Sheree Fitch (There Were Monkeys In My Kitchen), Ron Lightburn (Juba This, Juba That) Hugh MacDonald (Chung Lee Loves Lobsters) and Doretta Groenendyk (Thank You for My Bed), will host readings on Theodore Tugboat for the small people among us, and there will be readings on the ferry for the older folk. And that’s just the beginning! 

For the first time, Word on the Street will cross the harbour.  Exhibits and the Graphic Novel workshop will be held at Alderney Landing.  “It’s a start”, says Ritchie, “and we hope to continue to build and expand the Dartmouth site in future years.  It’s important that the festival be accessible to everyone.  And it’s all free”, she emphasizes.

The theme for this year’s festival is “The Book that Got Me Hooked!”  Can you remember the name of the book that first turned you on to reading?  The one you couldn’t put down?  The one that kept you up late, reading with a flashlight under the covers?

The Halifax Waterfront will be abuzz this weekend.  It is an inspired choice.  Partnerships with the Francophone Cultural Festival and the African Diaspora Heritage Trail Conference will infuse a multicultural flavour.  The vibrant, colourful booths of the International African Bazaar at Sackville Landing from 22nd to 25th will offer a taste of Africa as part of the seventh African Diaspora Heritage Trail Conference.  Guest speakers at that conference include Lawrence Hill, author of the best-seller, The Book of Negroes.

At Queen’s Landing from Sept 23 – 25, the Francophone Cultural Festival will be celebrating the diversity of its community. Acadian, Quebec and African music will have visitors dancing, while a visual arts exhibition, a literary café, and Acadian and Lebanese food will offer the taste and sights of the diversity of French culture.  And there’s no admission charge!

There are some out there who have written novels, poems or a children’s book.  You know who you are! It’s time to Pitch the Publisher!  Sponsored by the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association, a panel of publishers at Word on the Street will give feedback and make suggestions on your work. More than one book has been published this way, so dust off those manuscripts and register for your time slot (pre-register by email: apma.admin@atlanticpublishers.ca or call 902 420-0711. You’ve done the work, so what do you have to lose!  

No literary festival would be complete without writers and the lineup this year reads like a Who’s Who of local and national authors. George Elliot Clarke, Shauntay Grant, Harry Thurston, Richard Zurawski, Jill MacLean, Sheree Fitch, Sue Goyette, Jessica Grant, Good Reads author Joy Fielding, Lynn Coady (whose new book The Antagonist is up for the Giller Prize), Alexander MacLeod, Don Aker – the list is long.  More than fifty-five writers will captivate their audiences on stages at the Waterfront, on Theodore Tugboat, on the ferry, in the Museum and in Dartmouth.  Into the middle of it all, throw face painting, creating art, reading and listening to stories.  It’s a wonderful mix.

Ultimately, Word on the Street is a family literary celebration. It’s about reading and writing words, and about promoting the love of reading, because the ability to read and write joyfully gives us all a better chance to participate fully in our lives.  Reading makes a difference to us all, and those involved in Word on the Street know this.  Colleen Ritchie knows this, and she speaks with passion about engaging people, of making the festival more than a once a year event.  “And did I mention that it’s free,” she says? 

17 May 2011

Gracie The Public Gardens Duck

Gracie lives under the azalea bushes in the Halifax Public Gardens. She has a happy, lazy life until one day new signs appear in all four corners of the gardens. She doesn’t understand all the words on the signs, but she gets the last few which clearly say Please Don’t Feed the Ducks! Gracie is appalled. The popcorn, the muffins, the peanut butter sandwiches. It can’t be over! But it is. The free food is no more. 

However, Gracie is a resourceful duck and she develops A Plan. And while her plan is successful, life does NOT return to normal. This is the story of a very special duck coming to terms with a new reality.  

Gracie The Public Gardens Duck is in its second printing. and was on Nova Scotia's best seller list for two years.  

Gracie is listed as a recommended read on the  Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University. https://celebrateurbanbirds.org/resources/recommended-books-and-articles/

Reviews:
"Gracie, The Public Gardens Duck, a children's book about a duck that lives in the Halifax Public Gardens, earned a best published book nomination for writer Judith Meyrick and a best illustration nomination for Richard Rudnicki in the 2008 Atlantic Book Awards." CBC News online, April 16, 2008. Note: Gracie won the award in both categories.

"Gracie the Public Gardens Duck meets all my criteria for collectible picture books for Canadian schools; is well written and illustrated, mentions a Canadian place name, will be enjoyed by all children, and can be used as a part of a number of different thematic teaching units. Definitely worth having in your school or classroom." Canadian Teacher Magazine

Available in Canada from Nimbus Publishing and Amazon.ca
https://www.amazon.ca/Gracie-Public-Gardens-Duck-pb/dp/1551096455

Available in the US from Orca Book Publishing (US)
http://us.orcabook.com/Gracie-the-Public-Gardens-Duck-P4426.aspx

19 Apr 2011

A Cold Night for Alligators

 by Nick Crowe ~ Knopf Canada
   ~ Review: Halifax Herald, April 17, 2011

Jasper is twenty-something, working for an insurance company and living in the suburbs of Toronto.   His brother, Coleman, was odd throughout their childhood, worryingly obsessed about building what he truly believed would be a working space ship in the back yard.  His affinity for alligators is not yet seen as a problem.

After a family incident (involving the space ship), Coleman walks out the back gate and never returns. Every effort to find him turns up nothing, but every birthday Jasper gets a call with silence on the other end.

One evening, while waiting for the subway, Jasper is pushed in the path of an oncoming train by a random act of violence. After seven months in a coma, he surfaces to find his girl friend has moved on, his job has evaporated and he has a lot of time on his hands.  He comes to the stunning realization that his life so far is a life half lived. 

His birthday comes once again, along with the annual silent phone call.  But this year Jasper is able to identify the area code and with his ex-girlfriends current boyfriend and the perpetually drunk Duane, he gasses up and hits the road, heading for Sanibel, Florida. Alligator country!

A Cold Night for Alligators is a road trip before it becomes a family saga after it becomes a mystery.  It is loaded with quirky, funny characters, some endearing, some not so much. Crowes people dont mince words or have fancy ways. They hit life with gusto, dealing with the fallout as incidental irritations. Threaded through the humour of Crowe’s writing is an undercurrent of mystery, of family secrets unresolved with Coleman right in the middle.  What really did happen in the everglades all those years ago?  A Cold Night for Alligators becomes a page turner with an ending that is very hard to see coming!

Nick Crowe has worked as a paperboy, dishwasher, psychiatric hospital janitor, laundry worker and guitar player before starting a career in television.  He lives in Toronto.

Every Time We Say Goodbye

by Jamie Zeppa ~ Knopf Canada
   ~ Review: Halifax Herald, April 17, 2011

There is a quality to Jamie Zeppas writing that aims directly at the reader.  Her characters speak their hearts in a way that makes Every Time We Say Goodbye read a little like a memoir as it follows the story of the Turners, a complicated family living in Sault Ste. Marie.

Dawn and her brother Jimmy live with their grandparents, but their lives are changing. Their father and his new wife are finally coming for them, and Dawn absolutely and positively knows that this is Day One of her new beginning.  Dreams do come true.  Without a backward glance, she and her brother Jimmy drive off to become, in Dawns mind, the quintessential fairy tale family.  But Dawns faith is a little shaken when it is takes longer than she anticipated, and after three months “it could still be considered the beginning.”  She makes allowances.  “Some beginnings (take) longer than others. It varied.”

Every Time We Say Goodbye moves through three generations of Turners, linking their lives, deceptions, dreams and mysteries. It pivots around Dawns father, Dean, the adopted son of Vera and Frank. It is the adoption that creates the underlying mystery of Zeppas novel.  These are times when adoption was kept secret, unwanted pregnancies hidden and saving face to the neighbours was paramount. 

Zeppa manages the shifting timelines seemingly without effort.  The Turner’s story shifts between families and generations, a style that is sometimes difficult to pull off without jarring the reader. But Zeppa’s narrative flows, linking her characters and their stories as we are pulled deep into their lives, always pleased to pick up their story once again.

Zeppa took a long time to produce her first novel, almost 10 years.  Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait that long for her next one.

Jamie Zeppa teaches English at Seneca College.  She won the Banff Mountain Book Festival Award for Adventure Travel Writing and the CBC Canadian Literary Award for Memoir. This is her first novel.

Touch

by Alexi Zetner ~ Knopf Canada
   Review: Halifax Herald, April 17, 2011

Touch is set in the fictional village of Sawgamet, BC, a logging and mining area where the winters are so cold that one year the snow was piled three stories high until July. The ensuring melt caused a runoff akin to a small tsunami. So goes the legend!

Stephen has returned home to be with his dying mother.  He is beset by memories of his childhood, and while he is often the narrator, the story reaches back to his grandfather, Jeannot, who found gold and sparked a gold rush in the northern frontier town.

A terrible accident on the melting river kills Stephens father and sister, and the image of them frozen in ice, hands reaching toward each other, floats through the novel, visually eerie and yet strangely comforting.  “Even through the plate of frozen river covering them, we saw clearly that little more than the width of an ax blade separated my father’s two hands from my sister’s one.”

A profound sense of cold pervades Zentners novel. The timelines are fluid as he weaves his story through the generations and his intense narrative style breathes life into the startling lives of the townspeople as they struggle to survive the harsh northern winters.  Drifting around the edges of the story are spirits and golden caribou, magic realism born of the north and integrated into the culture of the frontier towns and villages. Touch is a terrific story by a talented new Canadian writer.

Alexi Zentners short stories have been published in magazines, journals and anthologies.  Touch is his first novel and will be published internationally as well as in North America. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, he now lives in Ithaca, New York.

10 Apr 2011

Your Voice in my Head

Your Voice in My Headby Emma Forrest ~ Random House Canada
  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, March 2011

Emma Forrest began writing a column for the (UK) Sunday Times at the precocious age of 16.  At 21, she was writing for The Guardian.  She published her first novel at 22, moved to New York and fell in love with a movie star she calls GH, her Gypsy Husband.  The world was at her feet.

But the reality of Forrest’s life was far from idyllic. She was sinking deep into mental illness and one day she realized that “her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity, past the warm waters of weird to those cold, deep patches of sea where people lose their lives.”  Bulimia and cutting were her way to feel, to bring her back to the present and she slid into a spiral of destruction and self hate that almost claimed her life.

Forrest was lucky.  She found Dr. R, a psychiatrist of enormous compassion and wisdom, “a man who though I never saw him outside one small room, believed that life is vast and worth living.”  He is the voice in her head, her connection to sanity.

As Forrest fights to gain solid ground, her perspective begins to shift.  The men who had loved and left her – GH, Dr. R. “... were good and kind to me, they loved me and I loved them back and the shock at the finish holds no wisdom.”

Forrest’s writing has a flavour of Lara Jefferson’s compelling memoir, These are my Sisters. Jefferson was committed to a mid-west insane asylum in the early 50's and decided that her way back to the world was to write her way sane.  She was successful.

Forrest’s memoir is equally compelling.  In spite of the craziness of the places she fights to rise above, her writing is witty and cool.  Actually, Forrest is cool, and even in her darkest days she manages to keep an engaging humour in her prose as she writes her way back from the edge.

Emma Forrest has been writing since she was a child.  She is a columnist, the author of four books and a successful screenwriter. She lives in LA.

They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children

by Roméo Dallaire ~ Random House Canada
  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, March 2011

It is becoming common to read about ‘child soldiers’ forced to fight in the ranks of warring factions in distant countries. These children are used by armies as weapons of war, often sent in as the first wave in combat.  They are expendable and they commit atrocities beyond imagining.

There are many reasons armies use children as weapons. “Children … are easy and cheap to maintain. They eat and drink less, they are not paid, they do not have to be particularly well clothed, sheltered, armed or logistically sustained ... There are no rights for child soldier, only privileges.”

In his new book, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children, Roméo Dallaire exposes the terrible circumstances of child soldiers. These children are taken from their families, brainwashed with drugs and violence, raped and forced to perform acts of violence beyond comprehension. If they falter, they are beaten or sometimes shot, often by another child.  They have nowhere to turn, and there is none to help.

Children are hard to fight against and rebel armies count on this. Adult soldiers hesitate to shoot or harm a child.  “Not only do children present moral dilemmas for legitimate forces, but they also throw the ‘game of war’ into a tailspin.”

They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children is a call to action. Dallaire’s writing is dispassionate and calm and yet the urgency of his message is aimed at us all. Protection of children is a responsibility of the world, he says. We must stop this now. We must agree how to take action so not one more child loses what all our children deserve – a childhood.

Roméo Dallaire’s first book, Shake Hands with the Devil, won the Governor General's Award for non-fiction.  He has received numerous honours and awards and has spearheaded the Child Soldiers Initiative, a partnership of organizations working to eliminate the use of child soldiers in armed conflicts.

Best Canadian Stories 10

10: Best Canadian Storiesedited by John Metcalf ~ Oberon Press
  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, March 2011

“Mavis Gallant said that the one question to ask of a story, a book, a painting or a building is: ‘Is it alive or dead?’ Check this year’s vital signs,” writes John Metcalf  in the introduction to Best Canadian Stories 10.   Metcalf is right of course. Oberon’s 2010 short story collection speaks for itself.  These stories overflow with life and living and once again, Metcalf shows his ability to find the best.

Hold Me Now (Stephen Gauer) tells the story of a father who is given the shocking news that his son has been murdered.  As he attempts to make sense of it all, his life becomes linked with that of Curtis, his son’s underage killer.  Gauer’s understated tension through the ensuing trial and the events that follow is masterful. Anna (A Small Haunting by Shaena Lambert) begins to think she is quietly going mad when she finds her house is haunted by a small child. And Maude befriends a strange young girl called Kreetch (Daytrip by Patricia Young) who arrives at the library every day after school.   The gentle tenderness of Young’s story is the perfect opening to this year’s collection.

Oberon’s commitment to providing a platform for new and emerging short story writers in Canada is laudable, and this year’s collection stands with the best. Bring on Best Canadian Stories 11!

John Metcalf is a well-known Canadian author and editor.  He immigrated to Montreal from the UK as a young man.  He has been editing this collection for Oberon for many years, in the company of authors such as David Helwig and Joan Harcourt.  He lives in Ottawa.

Granta: Going Back

edited by John Freeman ~ House of Anansi Press
  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, February 2011 

Short stories are often the first thing new writers publish.  They go in and out of popularity, and finding a home for that first story can be difficult.  Since it’s makeover in the 1970's, Granta has played a significant role in providing a market for new writers and artists, publishing short stories, photojournalism, poetry, biographies, indeed anything that is able to loosely fit within its pages.  It is indeed “The Magazine of New Writing”.

Going Back is a ‘themed’ issue based somewhat loosely on “what happens after we go back”. It diverges from Granta’s norm in that the writers and artists are well established. Editor John Freeman has put together a splendid collection of stories, poetry, art and photography about loss, memories, joy and finding the ability to let go. 

Janine di Giovanni’s The Book of the Dead brings into sharp focus the human spirit’s ability of to survive under seemingly impossible conditions of deprivation and loss during the war in Sarajevo.  Ian Teh’s stark photography of industrial China (Traces: China 1999 - 2010) speaks volumes and Missing Out by Leila Aboulela tells the story of the collision of cultural values within a marriage.  Elizabeth McCracken’s Property shows the heart of a young widower as he struggles with his loss.

There is a previously unpublished excerpt from Mark Twain’s diaries, and a series of letters written over 30 years by Iris Murdoch to French writer Raymond Queneau. (It is believed that she destroyed his letters to her.)  It is tricky to find a favourite amidst such talent.

Since its inception in Cambridge, UK, in 1889, Granta has published the works of writers such as A. A. Milne, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Arundhati Roy and Sylvia Plath. It was rescued from oblivion in the 1970s, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb ~ Doubleday Canada
   ~ Review: Halifax Herald, February 2011

Maggie Ly realizes early in her life that a career in art does not need to be defined by her lack of talent.  She becomes a curator and seizes an opportunity to return to Vietnam to catalogue a collection of art which somehow survived the war in a bomb shelter.  She has her own agenda - to look for her father, a dissident artist who vanished after the fall of Saigon. 

Her search leads her to Hung, an elderly itinerant cook whose pho is legendary, and it is Hung’s story that is the heart of Camilla Gibb’s new novel.  Hung has made pho at his street cart for decades, moving from place to place, creating a daily challenge for his dedicated customers who continue seek him out, chopsticks and bowl in hand.

Through years of poverty, war and hardship, Hung has endured, changing little as the city changed around him.  In the years since the war, Hanoi has become modern, bustling tourist city brimming with energy and youth.

The importance of family and community flows through Gibbs’s novel, with the elderly Hung holding the threads which gently bind the characters to each other.  They embrace Maggie, sympathizing with her need to find the truth, to understand her beginnings so she can finally feel that she belongs.  “She had always felt herself [to be] an alien to some degree ...you have no attachment to the history or geography of a place ... your roots are buried in some faraway earth.” 

Camilla Gibb is a winner of the Trillium Book Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the CBC Canadian Literary Award for short fiction.  The jury of the Orange Prize listed her as one of 21 writers to watch in the new century.  She lives in Toronto.

The Paper Garden: Mrs Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72

by Molly Peacock ~ McClelland & Stewart
  Review: Halifax Herald, February 2011
                                   
Mary Granville Pendarves Delany was born into a minor branch of an important British family at the turn of the eighteenth century.  At the tender age of 17, this vivacious young woman was married off to a boorish drunkard old enough to be her grandfather, to improve the family fortunes.  She was widowed after seven difficult years.  She married again twenty years later, a union which afforded her much contentment and happiness, but it wasn’t until after the death of her second husband that Mrs Delany picked up scissors and paints and invented a medium now known as mixed-media collage.  She was 72.

Over the next ten years, Mrs Delany worked tirelessly at her art, creating botanically correct cut-paper flowers, precisely accurate in both detail and colour. These exquisite reproductions are often hard to recognize as paper and paint. In all, she produced 985 flowers, and it was her failing eyesight that finally stopped her.  The collection, known as Flora Delanica, is housed in the British Museum.

In The Paper Garden, Molly Peacock focuses on eleven of these extraordinary pieces of art, weaving through the narrative snippets of her own life as it parallels that of Mrs Delany’s. Her language is both visual and poetic, with an attention to detail that takes her readers into the heart of court life in eighteenth century England.

In the continuing debate about the future of print publications, McClelland & Stewart have triumphed. An electronic version of The Paper Garden would be a mere shadow, only hinting at the pleasure readers will get from this miniature art book.  The silken pages, the writing, the careful stitching, the wonderful reproductions, the subtle perfume of new ink, the size (it tucks perfectly in the corner of a bag) – these all combine to a whole that is a pleasure to hold and to read.  M & S and Molly Peacock have done Mrs Delany proud, and she would surely have been delighted.

Molly Peacock is a poet, essayist and author.  She was one of the creators of New York's Poetry in Motion program and is the Series Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English.  A transplanted New Yorker, she lives in Toronto.

I Am a Japanese Writer

I Am a Japanese Writerby Dany Laferrière ~ Douglas & McIntyre
  Review: Halifax Herald, January 2011

I Am a Japanese Writer is a book about a writer who pitches a title to his publisher, takes the publisher’s advance and immediately develops writer’s block as he contemplates actually writing the book. While he waits for it to pass, he decides he must understand a little of Japanese culture.

Trolling the city for insights, he finds the self-obsessed Midori and her hangers-on, who are immersed in the decadent, ‘uber-cool’ subcultures of fashion and drugs. They amuse him. He reads haiku master Basho on the subway. He is transported. He begins to believe his artifice.  “... when I became a writer and people asked me, ‘Are you a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer or a French-language writer?’ I answered without hesitation: I take on my reader’s nationality.  Which means that when a Japanese person reads me, I immediately become a Japanese writer.” 

When the writer announces this in a mall, the results are astounding.  The book becomes a cult phenomenon and he is suddenly an international celebrity.  He is now famous for a book not yet written. Without reality, it exists because the writer is celebrated for it and therefore it no longer matters whether or not it exists, because it has taken off and, in the words of Tom Waites, he’s “Big in Japan”, which clearly raises the question of who makes art!

Translated from French by David Homel.

Dany Laferrière was born in Haiti and immigrated to Canada in 1978.  He is the author of twenty novels, and has won several awards, including the Prix Medicis for his semi-autobiographical novel, L'Enigme du retour (The Enigma of the Return).  His first children’s book, Je suis fou de Vava, won the Governor General’s award in 2006.  He lives in Montreal.

9 Apr 2011

Our Tragic Universe

OurTragicUniverseby Scarlett Thomas ~ Thomas Allen & Son
  Review: Halifax Herald January 2011
           
Meg is a writer, just managing to get by writing book reviews and ghost writing genre fiction for adolescents, which nets her just enough cash to buy groceries and keep her damp basement apartment slightly above freezing.

Her moody, jealous boyfriend seems oblivious to the ever rising damp and Meg’s efforts to jolly him out of his funks are met with indifference at best.  It is hard to understand what Meg sees in this sad-sack boyfriend, and when she finally makes a break for freedom from both him and the damp-infested apartment, Thomas’s reader will be thankful and slightly puzzled as to what took her so long.

A book mysteriously arrives in the mail, The Science of Living Forever, a pseudo-scientific book
about the end of time.  The very idea stops Meg in her tracks. Instead of dismissing the content as pop-psyche at best, Meg is pulled into the book’s premise.  Her‘proper’ novel morphs into a ‘storyless’ story, untidy and plot-less.

Our Tragic Universe is brimming with existential energy and philosophical debates as Meg struggles to extricate herself from her marginal existence.  Once again, Thomas explores relationships and the human condition, but these explorations are tempered by the application of the ‘storyless’ story, which does mean that the plot (or non-plot) takes place primarily in the debates of the characters.  Our Tragic Universe meanders, as was Thomas’s intention.  However, the wit and nuance of her writing hold it together, making Meg’s story sympathetic and compelling.

Scarlett Thomas is a teacher, award-winning novelist and book reviewer. In 2002, she was listed as one of the twenty best young British writers.  She teaches at the University of Kent in the UK where she specializes in the contemporary novel and narrative theory and practice.

Hooked on Canadian Books: The Good, the Better and the Best Canadian Novels since 1984

Hooked on Canadian Books: The Good, the Better, and the Best Canadian Novels Since 1984 [Book]by T. F. Rigelhof ~ Cormorant Books
  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, January 2010

“For me,” writes T. F. Rigelhof in the introduction to Hooked on Canadian Books, “reading a novel means any of at least a half dozen things, three of which are reflected in the phrase ‘good, better, and the best’.”

In this collection of reviews, essays and commentaries, the opinions expressed are unashamedly Rigelhof’s. For him, the book is “a celebration of novels written in English by Canadian writers that have made a difference in this reader’s life”.  For readers, it is a thoughtful discussion of the Canadian literary landscape in the context of individual writers and their work.  Rigelhof opens the door to discussion about the works presented and about the meat and bones of Canadian literature, and what sets it apart from, say, American literature.

Rigelhof has collected one hundred of Canada’s finest, gathering in one place a list of titles and authors who have contributed to the landscape of Canadian writing over the last twenty-five years.  “To be ‘good’ reading”, he says, “a book must insist on being read . . . A ‘better’ book makes you stop after fifty pages and start afresh ...[and] the ‘best’ novel is one that can be read over and over again ...”

This is not a book for the faint hearted. “There is blood in this book - gusto, passion, zest, good humor” and just opening it will add significantly to the lengthy list of ‘must reads’ pinned to your fridge. So many books.  So little time. You might need a taller fridge!


T. F. Rigelhof is a retired professor of literature from Montreal’s Dawson College. He is a contributing reviewer to the Globe and Mail and the author of nine previous books.  He lives in Westmount, Quebec.

You Better Watch Out

by Greg Malone ~ Knopf Canada
  Review: Halifax Herald March 2009
                       
‘Our memories are the bread crumbs that lead us home.
Without them, we stand bereft and alone.’

Greg Malone is a former member of CODCO. He is also a screenwriter, actor, director, activist and a one-time wannabe politician. Now he has added author to his impressive list of credits. ‘I love performing,’ he says as we drink mint tea in a busy Halifax coffee shop. ‘But there’s something very satisfying about [writing], to write something that’s just how I see things. I’ve always wanted to write.’ So he did. He wrote a book about growing up in Newfoundland. He began over ten years ago, writing down the more traumatic stories ‘for my sanity. I enjoyed it and people laughed, so I kept going.’

You Better Watch Out is a series of vignettes, snapshots of a childhood where friendships with Andy Jones, Cathy Jones and Danny Williams (who went on to become the Premier of Newfoundland) are cemented. The clarity of remembrance is striking and I asked Malone if he had embellished them at all. ‘No,’ he says. ‘They’re childhood memories. I don’t have these memories as an adult. I was a child, totally dependent and nowhere to go, which feels like life and death to an 8 year old, life and death in terms of your heart. This fascinates me, these dramas where the heart changes. It’s Jane Austen stuff, the little stuff that means so much to your whole life. And when you are 8 years old, it’s everything.’

It is the young Greg who tells these stories. He begins school but he ‘could not warm to Miss Snow. She carried a bright red stick, which she rapped our fingers with.’ There is a simplicity in the beginning stories as Malone sets the stage on St. John’s hilly, cramped streets. They are factual and descriptive. But as the young Greg settles into his narration and moves through grade school, the stories mature with him. He is able to see glimmerings of understanding in the incomprehensibility of the adults around him.

Malone does this well. He holds fast to the young boy, letting him tell it like it was, warts and all. Never does it seem to be imposed from an adult perspective and it is always infused with humour and insight, even those moments of terror that was part of growing up Catholic in Newfoundland.

Malone maintains his childhood perspective throughout, along with a fantastic sense of the absurd – even in Brother Clancey’s class. Br. Clancey is ‘six feet tall, (and) this overwrought celibate was not at his best in grade two.’ Br. Clancey has serious anger issues, and he has a profound and negative effect on Malone’s life.

But Greg was very young and the contradictions of religion and cruelty in the name of god and love are not to be challenged. He is traumatized. His understanding of the powerlessness of his situation develops, and by the time he is 9, his narrator’s voice has matured into the sophistication of a child who realizes that survival was not going to be on his terms.

An occasional PG warning would be in order for the more sensitive souls among us. Disasters. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be fine,’ was the comment from the dentist ‘as (Gregg) went out holding his raw, bloody mouth.’ Betrayals. The Strap and Who is God horrify, taking the glory from school days when being strapped and terrorized was considered discipline. But even the harshest stories are softened by the humour of a bright and tender child who is determined to make sense of it all.

Malone’s love of St. John’s infuse these pages. His connection to Newfoundland is deep and clear and he has remained friends with many of the kids in the book, kids from early grade school. ‘It’s so rich,’ he says. ‘I’m so lucky. People from the Grade 4 class came to the launch (in St. John’s), kids from my street that I hadn’t seen in years. One of the [teaching] brothers came, friends came. It was a great laugh.’
           
When he can, in between acting and writing, Malone reads. ‘Sometimes I have to stop my life and read. Jane Austen is so fun, the way she plays with language. Dostoevsky, Margaret Lawrence. Doris Lessing sends chills down my spine. The Edwardian writers, Thackerary, they have so much passion.’
                                   
Will there be a sequel? We must hope! But now it’s time for something completely different! Malone is already writing another book, this time about Newfoundland joining Confederation. ‘I’m a history buff,’ he says enthusiastically, ‘and there was so much politicking and intrigue surrounding that period. It’s my type of history!’

‘What’s it like to win a Gemini?’ I ask as we finish our tea. Malone laughs out loud. ‘It’s a bit of fun!’ he says.

Greg Malone is a Newfoundland actor, AIDS activist and writer. He lives in St. John’s.

Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis

Sea Sickby Alanna Mitchell ~  McClelland & Stewart
   Review: Halifax Herald, March 2009

When Alanna Mitchell set out to write a book about the oceans of the world, she was unclear where to start. “ It is such a huge topic,” she said,  “and the concepts are vast.  I expected to write it in chunks, but it changed organically as I researched it.” Mitchell’s new book, Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis, is a call to arms that we can ignore at our peril.  There is one thing that becomes clear when reading it, a thing that scientists around the world repeat over and over in different words and ways - the oceans of the world are one, and it can live without us, but we cannot live without the ocean. “The vital signs of this critical medium of life are showing clear signs of distress.”  Some scientists believe that the ocean is dying.
                                                                                               
Mitchell traveled the world talking to these scientists, men and women who spend their lives researching and studying the ocean, both in and out of it.  They uniformly believe the ocean is sick and getting sicker.  Indeed, there are some who believe that we are fast reaching a tipping point, that place where systems stop trying to repair themselves and begin the process of shutting down. “I had been thinking about vital signs,” said Mitchell. “Then I met Tim Flannery (an Australian ecologist and author).  He said it looked like I was cataloging the death of a system.”

Sea Sick is the first book to examine the current state of the world’s oceans, a body of water that regulates our climate and provides most of the world’s oxygen.  Mitchell does this thoughtfully and methodically, and because she is a award winning environmental reporter and not a scientist, she has written a very readable and accessible book. The clarity of her writing causes the reader many ‘EUREKA!’ moments as understanding dawns. These moments make for thoughtful walks and impassioned dinner convewrsation.              

Mitchell managed to have a lot of fun while writing Sea Sick.  She went snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, attended a coral spawn on a boat in the dawn of a Caribbean morning, and went deeper than any journalist has ever gone in a submersible, trembling with fear in an isolated back compartment while the scientist who was ‘driving’ read a novel. “ It was terrifying,” she said. “I was a wreck, before and during. I was in a dark cramped space and the intercom didn’t work. I always like a plan B and there was no Plan B.”

Mitchell’s research took her to far flung countries, following leads and suggestions as she gathered information and data from scientists and their research studies. “Scientists,” she says, “all work in isolation on their own part of the puzzle. No one participates in the big picture - there is a holistic piece missing.” Sea Sick puts those pieces together.

Traveling the globe made Sea Sick an expensive book to write. “I made a deal with the researchers and scientists that I would pay my costs,” she said.  “I wrote and sold magazine articles and got a grant from Canada Council.  I did it on the cheap, people I met billeted me. Sometimes I worked as crew and spent long hours with scientists - no email! They were very generous with their time.  They want people to ask questions, they want to tell their stories.  They were uniformly fabulous.” 

In Halifax, she found Boris Worm, whose work at Dalhousie University calculates present and future populations of fish in the sea.  He believes we are at an exceptional point in time, that we are “at the stage of losing the ability of things to come back on their own . . . That would represent a threshold, he said.”

In spite of the gravity of her topic, Mitchell’s clear writing flows with a softening humour. “The coral,” she writes, “was frankly hard to bond with.  It is the most urgently endangered group of life known in the world.”  For those that want proof or more scientific theory, there is an excellent bibliography.

China is a key player in all of this, Mitchell believes.  It is a country big enough to already feel the impact of climate change, a country where ‘water quality is appalling and glaciers are in retreat’.  But China is developing muscular environmental policies.  A recent article in the China Daily says, “In China . . . the conservation of energy and other resources (is) of paramount importance. It indicates just how civilized a country really is.”  Perhaps all is not yet lost.  Perhaps we can follow China’s example and show just how civilized we are.

Alanna Mitchell is an environmental reporter and author. She was named the best environmental reporter in the world in 2000, by Reuters Foundation, and has won international awards for her work. She lives in Toronto and is working on her next book.

Skin Room

by Sara Tilley ~ Pedlar Press
  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, May 2009

More and more, Canada is producing exciting new writers who present the Canadian culture and landscape in ways that are as different and unique as the individuals who write them. With the publication of Skin Room, we can add another writer to the list.  Sara Tilley shows us a north that is “white and flat and goes on forever”, a dream-scape of white and snow. I talked with her earlier this week when she was in Halifax for Atlantic Ink: TheWriters’ Festival.  Skin Room was shortlisted for the Thomas Raddall Prize for Fiction, an excellent achievement for a first novel.
                       
Like her fictional character, Tilley’s family moved to Sanikiluaq, NWT, when she was in early grade school.  Like Theresa, she is pale, white, and there is no way she can slip unnoticed into a class of bronze, black haired Inuit children. “It was a difficult book to write,” said Tilley.  “The north was a buried subject for me after we left and no-one talked about it. It was hard, living in the north.  I was a supersensitive kid in a class of Inuit teenagers who didn’t want me there.  My brother was younger so he slipped under the radar, but I stuck out.  I was an easy target.”

Tilley started working on Skin Room in 2001, writing in bits and pieces. At Banff in 2003, she ‘started going at it hard’. Twenty-three drafts and four years later, it was done!  “It was a very intense time,” she says.  “Theresa is a strong character, damaged but strong, and she kept teaching me things I needed to know.  While her view of the world is not mine, I learned from her.  Her voice wrote itself and it kept me going.”  

Tilley captures the awe of a pre-adolescent girl who is captivated by the northern landscapes, the geography, and who falls deeply and silently in love with Willassie Ippaq, the boy who flicks a pencil at her on her first day, resulting in several stitches in her face. Willassie is a schoolboy, a bully and a sculptor who can “look at a stone and see an animal living inside.”  Theresa yearns and loves with a childish simplicity that fully understands the impossibility of the cultural chasm, and an internal sophistication that allows her to hold that love for years after she leaves the north.

Skin Room alternates between the older Theresa who lives in St John’s, and her younger self.  Tilley has managed the timelines perfectly. Both realities feel real and immediate. The adult Theresa continues the internal intensity of her connection to the north, mourning as Willassie fades.  “... you’ve slipped too far into the past and I don’t have the skill to bring you back.”

“When I was in theatre school at York University, I did a project about problems in our childhoods,” says Tilley. “When my teacher asked how my voice felt, I told her sometimes it feels like there’s a fist in my throat.  She encouraged me to write my memories, to get out things that had not been discussed.  Once I started, the character took over and I understood that the story was about someone whose memories are still affecting their life a decade later.”

As a reader, there can be anxious moments when we are unable to know where the writer is going, willing them not to cross that line into cultural appropriation.  “I worried about that,” says Tilley, “about taking ownership of something that is not mine.  But I write from a child’s point of view, as a white child in an alien culture. I grew up there, it was my home and I still connect with the landscape.  It’s the landscape I think about.”

Her next novel is also set in the north, Alaska this time. She received an inheritance of letters from her great-grandfather, who kept a daily logbook of his life in Alaska during the gold rush.  For 14 years, he noted everything, journaling the minutiae of his daily life. “I am working with this,” she says, “but its taking a long time to transcribe and compile.  While it’s definitely a work of fiction, I can feel my great-grandfather, my father’s father, becoming vibrant, coming alive. It’s a little nerve-wracking, opening up family closets, but that’s how life is.”

These days, Tilley is a busy person.  As well as the novel in production, she writes, acts, and runs She Said Yes, a small theatre company based in St John’s. “It started as a way to produce my work when I graduated,” she says. “We get enough funding to put on shows and run a dramaturgy program.”  She finds theatre production very complementary to writing novels.  “They are finite,” she says.  “They end!”

Sara Tilley is an actress, playwright, theatre producer and author. Skin Room is her first novel and was short listed for the Thomas Raddall Fiction award at Atlantic Ink: The Writers’ Festival in 2009.  She lives in St John’s, Newfoundland.

6 Apr 2011

The Story of a Widow

by Musharraf Ali Farooqi - Knopff Canada
 ~ Review: Halifax Herald, January 2009

Mona Ahmad is recently widowed. After the initial shock, she is surprised to find she has been left in very comfortable circumstances. She settles back into her house in Karachi, her days no longer defined by her husband’s presence.  She is gently intoxicated by her new freedom.

An unexpected marriage proposal, brokered through her neighbour, disrupts Mona’s quiet widowhood.  Her daughters, uncles, aunts and in-laws rush to her side, determined to protect both her and the family’s honour.  Their well oiled, highly effective gossip machine springs into action and in the absence of hard facts, hearsay and innuendo suffice.  Mona’s peaceful life collapses.

Surprising everyone, most of all herself, Mona rebels against tradition and remarries.  The consequences of this decision lead her to a contemplation of her life so far. She questions her first marriage and the roles she willingly shouldered as wife and mother, until finally she asks a profound question of herself.  The answer comes clearly as she begins to understand that her unhappiness is “a condition of her own creation”.  Her path becomes clearer.

The narrator takes a back seat in this book, functioning as a keen observer whose role is to keep us informed.  It is an effective technique, allowing the story to flow through the intricate nuances of family and Pakistani tradition.  Farooqi’s first novel is an entertaining and touching account of a traditional woman moving toward an understanding that life can be hers for the taking.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi is a writer and translator who was born in Hyderabad, Pakistan. His first children’s book, The Cobbler’s Holiday or Why Ants Don’t Where Shoes was released in 2008.  Musharraf Ali Farooqi lives in Toronto.

8 Mar 2011

The Disappeared

The Disappeared book, by Kim Echlinby Kim Echlin ~ Hamish Hamilton
  ~ Review: Halifax Herald June 2009

Serey is a young Cambodian sent to Montreal to study.  He meets Anne and they fall in love, prowling the jazz clubs of Montreal.  But the rise of the Khymer Rouge closes Cambodia’s borders, and years pass before Serey is able to return home to look for his family.  He vanishes without word.  Eleven years later, Anne sees a blurred likeness on a TV news clip and flies to Phnom Penh to search for him.  

The backdrop of the Khymer Rouge’s regime of terror in the 1970's, which leaves an entire population traumatized and was responsible for the deaths of almost 2 million people, is not an easy counterpoint for a love story.  The challenge for Echlin ‘was to find a language that could tell the stories’, not just Anne’s story but of the people who suffered around her. 

Echlin writes with poetic intensity, moving through place and time with ease. The desperate poignancy of the stories Anne hears as she searches for her lover, and the sensual language of the love she feels is a mix that seems incompatible.  There are times when the magnitude of loss and grief seems beyond words.”  But Echlin’s ability to pare language to its essence is near perfect.

When an old woman tells Anne that she “lost my whole family during Pol Pot”, Anne is unsure how to respond, but there is nothing to say.  “I only want you to know,” she the woman.  It is for  Anne to bear witness. “And once we know, what do we do?”

In the final chapters Anne’s now middle-aged heart grieves for her lost lover, for those long lost and her story ends with a lament that has resounded through centuries.  “People everywhere look for their missing . . .Can no one find me even a bone to bury?” 

Kim Echlin is an author who completed her doctoral thesis on Ojibway storytelling.  She has travelled the world in search of stories and spent time in Cambodia researching The Disappeared.  She lives in Toronto.

2 Mar 2011

The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb ~ Doubleday Canada
  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, January 2011
           
Maggie Ly realizes early in her life that a career in art does not need to be defined by her lack of talent.  She becomes a curator and seizes an opportunity to return to Vietnam to catalogue a collection of art which somehow survived the war in a bomb shelter.  She has her own agenda - to look for her father, a dissident artist who vanished after the fall of Saigon. 

Her search leads her to Hung, an elderly itinerant cook whose pho is legendary, and it is Hung’s story that is the heart of Camilla Gibb’s new novel.  Hung has made pho at his street cart for decades, moving from place to place, creating a daily challenge for his dedicated customers who continue seek him out, chopsticks and bowl in hand.

Through years of poverty, war and hardship, Hung has endured, changing little as the city changed around him.  In the years since the war, Hanoi has become modern, bustling tourist city brimming with energy and youth.

The importance of family and community flows through Gibbs’s novel, with the elderly Hung holding the threads which gently bind the characters to each other.  They embrace Maggie, sympathizing with her need to find the truth, to understand her beginnings so she can finally feel that she belongs.  “She had always felt herself [to be] an alien to some degree ...you have no attachment to the history or geography of a place ... your roots are buried in some faraway earth.” 

Camilla Gibb is a winner of the Trillium Book Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the CBC Canadian Literary Award for short fiction.  The jury of the Orange Prize listed her as one of 21 writers to watch in the new century.  She lives in Toronto.

The Paper Garden: Mrs Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72

by Molly Peacock ~ McClelland & Stewart
Review: Halifax Herald, February 2011
Mary Granville Pendarves Delany was born into a minor branch of an important British family at the turn of the eighteenth century.  At the tender age of 17, this vivacious young woman was married off to a boorish drunkard old enough to be her grandfather, to improve the family fortunes.  She was widowed after seven difficult years.  She married again twenty years later, a union which afforded her much contentment and happiness, but it wasn’t until after the death of her second husband that Mrs Delany picked up scissors and paints and invented a medium now known as mixed-media collage.  She was 72.

Over the next ten years, Mrs Delany worked tirelessly at her art, creating botanically correct cut-paper flowers, precisely accurate in both detail and colour. These exquisite reproductions are often hard to recognize as paper and paint. In all, she produced 985 flowers, and it was her failing eyesight that finally stopped her.  The collection, known as Flora Delanica, is housed in the British Museum.

In The Paper Garden, Molly Peacock focuses on eleven of these extraordinary pieces of art, weaving through the narrative snippets of her own life as it parallels that of Mrs Delany’s. Her language is both visual and poetic, with an attention to detail that takes her readers into the heart of court life in eighteenth century England.

In the continuing debate about the future of print publications, McClelland & Stewart have triumphed. An electronic version of The Paper Garden would be a mere shadow, only hinting at the pleasure readers will get from this miniature art book.  The silken pages, the writing, the careful stitching, the wonderful reproductions, the subtle perfume of new ink, the size (it tucks perfectly in the corner of a bag) – these all combine to a whole that is a pleasure to hold and to read.  M & S and Molly Peacock have done Mrs Delany proud, and she would surely have been delighted.

Molly Peacock is a poet, essayist and author.  She was one of the creators of New York's Poetry in Motion program and is the Series Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English.  A transplanted New Yorker, she lives in Toronto.

I Am a Japanese Writer

by Dany Laferrière ~ Douglas & McIntyre
  ~ Review: Haliax Herald, January 2011

I Am a Japanese Writer is a book about a writer who pitches a title to his publisher, takes the publisher’s advance and immediately develops writer’s block as he contemplates actually writing the book. While he waits for it to pass, he decides he must understand a little of Japanese culture.

Trolling the city for insights, he finds the self-obsessed Midori and her hangers-on, who are immersed in the decadent, ‘uber-cool’ subcultures of fashion and drugs. They amuse him. He reads haiku master Basho on the subway. He is transported. He begins to believe his artifice.  “... when I became a writer and people asked me, ‘Are you a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer or a French-language writer?’ I answered without hesitation: I take on my reader’s nationality.  Which means that when a Japanese person reads me, I immediately become a Japanese writer.” 

When the writer announces this in a mall, the results are astounding.  The book becomes a cult phenomenon and he is suddenly an international celebrity.  He is now famous for a book not yet written. Without reality, it exists because the writer is celebrated for it and therefore it no longer matters whether or not it exists, because it has taken off and, in the words of Tom Waites, he’s “Big in Japan”, which clearly raises the question of who makes art!

Translated from French by David Homel.

Dany Laferrière was born in Haiti and immigrated to Canada in 1978.  He is the author of twenty novels, and has won several awards, including the Prix Medicis for his semi-autobiographical novel, L'Enigme du retour (The Enigma of the Return).  His first children’s book, Je suis fou de Vava, won the Governor General’s award in 2006.  He lives in Montreal.

Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas ~ Thomas Allen & Son
  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, January 2011
           
Meg is a writer, just managing to get by writing book reviews and ghost writing genre fiction for adolescents, which nets her just enough cash to buy groceries and keep her damp basement apartment slightly above freezing.

Her moody, jealous boyfriend seems oblivious to the ever rising damp and Meg’s efforts to jolly him out of his funks are met with indifference at best.  It is hard to understand what Meg sees in this sad-sack boyfriend, and when she finally makes a break for freedom from both him and the damp-infested apartment, Thomas’s reader will be thankful and slightly puzzled as to what took her so long.

A book mysteriously arrives in the mail, The Science of Living Forever, a pseudo-scientific book
about the end of time.  The very idea stops Meg in her tracks. Instead of dismissing the content as pop-psyche at best, Meg is pulled into the book’s premise.  Her‘proper’ novel morphs into a ‘storyless’ story, untidy and plot-less.

Our Tragic Universe is brimming with existential energy and philosophical debates as Meg struggles to extricate herself from her marginal existence.  Once again, Thomas explores relationships and the human condition, but these explorations are tempered by the application of the ‘storyless’ story, which does mean that the plot (or non-plot) takes place primarily in the debates of the characters.  Our Tragic Universe meanders, as was Thomas’s intention.  However, the wit and nuance of her writing hold it together, making Meg’s story sympathetic and compelling.

Scarlett Thomas is a teacher, award-winning novelist and book reviewer. In 2002, she was listed as one of the twenty best young British writers.  She teaches at the University of Kent in the UK where she specializes in the contemporary novel and narrative theory and practice.