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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
October 7, 2013 12:25 PM
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
October 6, 2013 9:19 PM
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Kingston WritersFest, writers festival, festival, authors, books, poetry
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
October 7, 2013 12:29 PM
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 29, 2013 11:06 AM
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Douglas Glover is a distinguished member of the tribe of Nabokov. Glover is as gifted a writer as Canada has ever produced and the source of his strength is the ferocious quirkiness of his sentences. Glover’s new story collection, Savage Love, is an astonishing book only partly because of the loopy and incessant inventiveness of his narratives. The 22 stories range daringly in space and time, taking us from a stomach-turning battle scene during the War of 1812 to a contemporary farm family whose sheer wackiness, condensed into 25 pages, puts to shame any eccentric clan one can think of, whether it be J.D. Salinger’s Glass family or Wes Anderson’s Tenenbaums.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 19, 2013 9:01 AM
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Launch of new Poetry Collection by Lynn Davies
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 17, 2013 7:26 PM
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DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS of Newcastle, NB, has grown up on the Miramichi and has been fishing his entire life. David has written 20 books to date, including “Lines on the Water”, a non-fiction book about fishing on the Miramichi. He has won most of the Canadian literary awards including the Governor General’s Award in 1998. David will be inducted in the ANGLER and WRITER CATEGORY.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 17, 2013 7:20 PM
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Fog Lit is a not for profit festival for readers and writers of all ages. We intend to offer a modern all inclusive family festival, providing an exciting line up of mainstream events, workshops, panel discussions and readings. Fog Lit Festival’s aim is to encourage reading and writing, while recognizing the achievements of our many talented Atlantic Canadian writers.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 17, 2013 8:38 AM
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Judges sifted through 147 books submitted by 61 publishers to arrive at the 13 on the longlist. Giller juror Esi Edugyan, former Giller winner for her workHalf-Blood Blues, was at the Vancouver event to present the titles chosen from a field of 147, submitted by 61 publishers from across the country.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 12, 2013 4:40 PM
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This is the last in a series of short essays on "building sentences." I wrote this series for the National Post in Toronto. They all appeared in the online section of the newspapers this week. To g...
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 11, 2013 2:39 PM
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Form never limits a writer; it creates openings for fresh invention
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 7, 2013 10:10 AM
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Cataract City is indebted to genre fiction such as adventure novels and thrillers, and its many set pieces (depicting, for instance, pitbull-fighting, bare-knuckle boxing, embalming, a demolition derby and the effects of frostbite) are often savage. But Davidson balances his headlong plotting with fresh, poetic language and finds fascinating details in even the most morbid scenes. Moreover, his exploration of bromance, violence and thwarted dreams can be both bracing and poignant.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 28, 2013 12:16 PM
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 27, 2013 11:30 AM
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A Lament for Bats
The late twilight's darks are simply dark.
The birds have settled in and nothing flies
except the blood lust making buzz.
The stark
of moon is drained of rising's blush, and dries
a far and bone-bleached white. But there!
is nothing....
Once, I thought, I'd hear the cries
that echoed bugs if I'd just take the care
to stand that still, and hold my breath, and poise
my frame into a sort of aural stare,
but never could I catch a chirpy noise
nor webby rustle of a velvet wing....
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
October 7, 2013 11:51 AM
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For his most recent book, Savage Love, a collection of short stories released by Goose Lane Editions last month, its weddings that preoccupied his imagination. "I've just been thinking of literatur...
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
October 3, 2013 8:15 AM
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Counting Back From Nine, Valerie Sherrard, is finalist for the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Awards (the GGs). Each year, with the GGs, the Canada Council for the Arts honours the best in Canadian literature.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
October 1, 2013 12:38 PM
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Packed house, fresh chairs had to be brought in, vivid paintings all around the walls, bad lighting for photos (sorry). The first question in the aftermath was whether DG used psychotropic drugs to...
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 23, 2013 8:20 AM
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Baffled King Collage (from What if red ran out) What if the things we fear are
Leonard Cohen covers, or
coats made of chagrin,
well worn and unintentionally
the right size; what if
a peculiar scarcity
of bell tollers left
coppery gothic whistles stunning
the city; what if
red ran out; what if it ends up
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 19, 2013 8:58 AM
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Douglas Glover is this year's UNB writer-in-residence, and he leads off the 2013-14 reading series with his new book Savage Love(Goose Lane Editions). Last week Glover was the guest editor ofThe National Post's Afterword, posting thought-provoking pieces on writing.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 17, 2013 7:22 PM
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This is the beginning of things, the Ur-essay, the thought-lode out of which most everything else I have written about literature has evolved. It was written in the late 1980s and so, to an ever so slight extent, is a period piece.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 17, 2013 6:39 PM
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Shane Rhodes is the author of five books of poetry including his most recent X (2013), and Err (2011 and a finalist for the City of Ottawa Book Award) both with Nightwood Editions. He has also published three earlier books with NeWest Press. His poetry has won an Alberta Book Award, two Lampman-Scott Awards, the P. K. Page Founder's Award for Poetry and a National Magazine Gold Award. Shane is the poetry editor forArc, Canada’s national poetry magazine, and is the 2013 Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 17, 2013 7:18 AM
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One of the strengths of regional, small-press publishers – meaning, most presses outside of Toronto – is, to use a clinical term, their “catchment area.” If a publisher decides to publish a collection of writing from their region, then they are the ones uniquely placed to do it. They are the houses that would do it because they have a captive audience of readers to buy the book. An interesting effect of this natural anthologizing advantage is the resultant effect in the larger, national academic world in terms of canonization… but I digress. My point is that anthologies of regional writing are of interest to the featured region, of course, but they are also of interest to the wider world. That’s how regionalism works. But a twist comes with Running The Whale’s Back, an anthology of Atlantic Canadian writing published this year by Goose Lane Editions out of Fredericton, New Brunswick. Editors Andrew Atkinson and Mark Harris decided to collect short fiction written by prominent living writers from the region. In order to be included, the short stories required belief (or faith) and doubt (questioning, decrying, hating faith) to be a prominent theme.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 12, 2013 2:51 PM
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Despite the cooler temperature today in downtown Fredericton, fiction co-editor Mark Jarman entertained a small, but appreciative, audience from his Fredericton Arts Alliance artist-in-residence studio in the old soldiers' barracks...
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 11, 2013 9:36 AM
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The first technique I learned and applied consciously was the list
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 29, 2013 3:05 PM
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This is the first year since 2010 that I didn't do a dedicated feature on Canuck Steampunk. As I said earlier in 2013, I'm no longer looking to produce vast reams of content, both because I'm done writing my dissertation, and also because I'm a bit sick of all the content out there on the 'Net. I'm tired of lists telling you what sucks, instead of encouraging you to read something you'll genuinely enjoy.
Which is why I'm glad to tell you about Paul Marlowe's Ether Frolics. Marlowe's a Canadian writer of speculative fiction whose steampunk short stories in Ether Frolics veer decidely to the fantasy side of neo-Victorian technofantasies. Marlowe is a smart writer who is clearly well read, who knows that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were obsessed with spiritualism. He's also a very good writer, at his best when writing in first person, which the majority of Ether Frolics' tales are.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
August 27, 2013 8:46 PM
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Recently I’ve been taking steps to change my writing habits; to unPavlov my dogs, so to speak. It’s not so much that my routine to date is destructive to life and/or limb. Nor have I been salivating at the sound of a bell. It’s that I have somehow conditioned myself to rationalize a lazy and overtly random writing schedule as some kind of effective work ethic. And it works fine for me, if by “fine” you mean that I’ve achieved measureable results despite a professional approach to writing that borders on the pathologically lackadaisical. Basically, up until now I’ve written what I’ve wanted, when I’ve wanted, and how I’ve wanted. Which means I had a great deal of free time, but not much in the way of success. So now I’m taking steps to remove such windows of enjoyment from my life. It seems counterintuitive, but I’m discovering, as I get older, that I’m more interested in reaching personal goals than re-watching episodes of Star Trek.
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