The real storytelling in New Brunswick began around the campfires and in the smoke-filled taverns packed tight with burly men. It was a kind of underground literature. A literature born from the oral traditions that for decades lay dormant in the Maritime soil. The clean form and elitist ideals of the Loyalist writers, who for the first 150 years dominated the literature in New Brunswick, was thrown aside. And what you got were stories of place; of the long days spent hunting moose, or the way the moon lay mirrored in the calm Miramichi River.
A widow, an Irish wanderer, a house built on a fault line and a mysterious light form the essential furniture of Gerard Beirne’s fine new story “Fault Lines.” Beirne is an Irish writer and you can hear the fierce rhetoric of the Irish in his opening cadences, the insistent lists and parallel constructions. The story is dark, almost noir in its atmosphere of eroticism and constant menace.
Place of Birth: Ottawa, Ontario, 1956. My father was a Mountie stationed on Parliament Hill but we left when I was eight months old to come to Miramichi, then lived in Moncton and Fredericton. My Dad was an NS lad and my mother hails from Sussex. So I’m a Nova Brunswickan or a New Scotian ---with deep Acadian roots.
David Carpenter reviews Facing the Hunter, by David Adams Richards...
On its dust jacket, this book is classified as memoir/sports, but as David Adams Richards takes pains to point out, his way of hunting has very little to do with sports. The way he sees it, a sport hunter seeks pleasure in killing animals and will often favour trophy hunting over hunting to fill the pot for winter.
But for Richards and his people, hunting is a way of life.
A Review of Paul Marlowe’s Knights of the Sea(Sybertooth Inc., 2010) By Derek Newman-Stille Submarines are the maritime SteamPunk equivalent of the airship. In his Knights of the Sea, New Brunswick author Paul Marlowe explores Victorian era Nova Scotia through the lens of a quirky cast of characters ...
In Haunted Girl: Esther Cox and the Great Amherst Mystery - Laurie Glenn Norris together with Barbara Thompson tell the story of one truly troubled Nova Scotian - creating a hauntingly Great Summer Read
In 1878 eighteen-year-old Esther Cox arrived in Amherst, Nova Scotia, to live with her sister’s family. Shortly after Esther moved in, the story goes, the house was plagued by unexplained occurrences—something (or someone) knocked on the walls, hid household items, moved furniture around, and set fires.
Sanctuary: The Story of Naturalist Mary Majka by Deborah Carr $19.95 Paperback Goose Lane Editions Nominated for the 2011 Atlantic Independent Booksellers' C...
Mark Anthony Jarman’s new collection of stories is something of a rarity in Canadian short fiction. It does not follow the tried-and-true template of the traditional Chekhovian story, which prizes naturalism and a familiar narrative arc. Rather, Jarman’s stories more closely resemble the postmodern collages of Donald Barthelme.
M. Travis Lane’s fourteenth poetry title is a meditation on loss and reorientation, continuity and memory. Widowhood and mortality are at the centre of this quiet collection, but fear and self-pity are not to be found here: only a clear-eyed coming-to-terms. Lane’s metaphors are unforced, natural yet always surprising: a beggar sitting at the midpoint of a footbridge “like the small bubble balancing/ midway in a plumber’s level,” trees in a night plaza that “hold/ like dark peaches the late street lamps.” Her acute powers of observation are entwined with historical and cultural awareness, attunement to the natural world, and a music that holds it all together.
This is the first of two serials from “A Nation Plays Chopsticks,” by Mark Anthony Jarman (Thomas Allen Publishers). You can download the entire short story at cStories.
Drive the night, driving out to old-timer hockey in January in New Brunswick, new fallen snow and a full moon on Acadian and Loyalist fields, fields beautiful and ice-smooth and curved like old bathtubs. In this blue light Baptist churches and ordinary farms become cathode, hallucinatory. Old Indian islands in the wide river and trees up like fingers and the strange shape of the snowbanks.
The reviewer of poetry is taking up the extremely limited public space given to poetry reviews, and, therefore, has an ethical responsibility...
There is no question that Michael Lista is a master of rhetoric, a skill that he has employed in his many reviews to provocative effect. I have learned a number of things about poetry from reading his reviews, but I inevitably find I learn most when he is enthusiastic. In his negative reviews his rhetoric gets the better of him and he doesn’t seem to be able to resist lighting the books on fire before throwing them in the trash bin.
The poems are About the Size of It, Half Past, I Am the Cross of Mirrors, Music for a While, The Stars Perspire and The Thing Outside. M. Travis Lane reads from Night Physics. Find out more at http://www.brickbooks.ca
One of the most prominent Irish transplants now dwelling in Atlantic Canada, Gerard Beirne was quick to root himself here, and foster its writing community. He’s currently teaching at UNB, where he has also been a writer in residence, and acts as an editor at one of Canada’s finest literary journals, The Fiddlehead. He also plays a big role in a fantastic organization — The Writers Federation of New Brunswick — who do as much or more for their members as any similar organization.
A Special Evening Celebrating the Launch of The Essential Robert Gibbs The UNB Reading Series Presents: A Special Evening Celebrating the Launch of The Essential Robert Gibbs, Monday, April 30th at 8 pm in the Alumni Memorial Lounge.
To celebrate the release of The Essential Robert Gibbs, selected by Brian Bartlett (The Porcupine’s Quill 2012) writers, including Buck Richards, Shari Andrews, David Adams Richards, Nancy Bauer, Travis Lane, Ted Colson, Brian Bartlett, Michael Pacey, Ian LaTourneau, Robert Hawkes, Lynn Davies, Ross Leckie, Gerard Beirne, Sue Sinclair, and Robert Gibbs, will gather in the Alumni Memorial Lounge on the UNB Fredericton campus to read selections from Robert Gibbs’ poetry.
The Proust Questionnaire is believed to reveal an individual’s true nature. We have asked 2012 Festival authors 16 questions inspired by the questionnaire in an attempt to uncover who they are...
What is your idea of perfect happiness? I am not sure that perfect happiness is attainable, but I’m pretty darn happy right now.
What does your ideal day look like? As long as the sun is out, the potential to be ideal is there.
Born in 1945, The Fiddlehead, based in UNB's English Department, is Canada's longest living literary journal, and honestly, one of the best curated in the the country. The short stories, the poetry, the essays, the reviews: all worth subscribing for. As their website states, “Do not look at this journal as old! It is experienced; wise enough to recognize excellence; always looking for freshness and surprise.”
So I talked to two great guys/writers on the Fiddlehead Fiction Team about all things Fiddlehead, and more. Enjoy. Subscribe. Submit. Also, read Jarman and Beirne’s work, like My White Planet, 19 Knives (Jarman) and Turtle or Games of Chance (Beirne).
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