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? 

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

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-girlfriend’s 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. Crowe’s people don’t 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 Zeppa’s 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 Dawn’s mind, the quintessential fairy tale family.  But Dawn’s 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 Dawn’s father, Dean, the adopted son of Vera and Frank. It is the adoption that creates the underlying mystery of Zeppa’s 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 Stephen’s 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 Zentner’s 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 Zentner’s 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.

Your Voice in my Head

by 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

edited 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

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

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.