My Author Website

I've been neglecting my blog shamefully of late while working to build myself an author website. But it's mission accomplished now, I think. You'll find the website here. Please let me know what you think of it. I promise that with that done, several new blog posts are on the way...

Capsule Review

What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman (2007).

A woman emerges from a highway traffic accident on the edge of Baltimore claiming to be one of two sisters who had disappeared as adolescents from a local shopping mall three decades before. Is she or isn’t she? If so, what happened back then and where has she been since? If not, who is she, and how does she know what she knows?

I’m often impatient when the author of a favourite series takes a break to write a standalone. Not this time. This is Laura Lippman’s best book yet. It is at once a riveting mystery and a powerful meditation on identity, deception, memory, and loss. I recommend it highly.

Spell with Flickr

I came across this very cool "Spell with Flickr" program (created by Erik Kastner) thanks to missv.

Check it out here.

Steven Heighton on Literary Fiction

Steven Heighton on literary fiction:

But in truly literary fiction, the writing is never just functional. Literary fiction uses a number of fascinating techniques—essentially the techniques of poetry, though generally deployed in a more subtle way—so that the writing actually embodies or becomes the thing it’s about, acoustically recreating what it describes, the words in their artful patterns re-enacting the scene, image, or description so that the writing and what’s written about are indissolubly fused. Form and content, welded together.

From Steven Heighton, “Writing as Re-enaction” in Eliza Clark, ed., Writer’s Gym: Exercises and Training Tips for Writers (2007).

What's Your Favourite Novel?

In his new collection of essays, Reading Life: Books for the Ages, Sven Birkerts identifies Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow as his favourite novel. He explains what he means by favourite in the opening paragraph of the chapter that he devotes to discussion of this novel:

Whenever someone asks me to name my favourite novel, I find myself putting on a ridiculous but revealing little performance. I pretend to a natural consternation—after all, who can narrow a lifetime’s evolving preferences down to a single title?—but I use that as a cover for the real calculation, which is whether I have the interest or energy to explain my choice. For in fact I do have a favourite novel—Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow—but I know it to be an eccentric work, one that a number of reputable critics had problems with when it was published, and that many intelligent readers that I know have shaken their heads over. How much easier to cite Under the Volcano, or The Portrait of a Lady, or Ulysses, or To the Lighthouse, all works that I admire without reservation. But the question was favourite novel, which novel I visit most often in my thoughts, know most intimately, down to the structure of its cadences, and which fills me with the greatest covetousness and inspires me to emulation. This is my truest test: when I think of Humboldt’s Gift I immediately want to write.

I probably shouldn't ask this question, because I'm not sure that I can answer it myself, but here I go anyway. Employing Birkerts' definition of favourite, what's your favourite novel?

I'm tempted to say that Muriel Spark's The Comforters is mine, but I'm not entirely sure if that's true. I must mull over the question a little longer...

Recent Acquisitions: The Prairie Edition

I acquired many new books on my recent travels. There was ample opportunity for book shopping. In Saskatoon, there was the vast book fair attached to the conference that I was attending—book stalls representing a glorious array of publishers, large and small, corporate and indie, Canadian and international, academic and literary. I confess that despite the fact that I was there in my academic capacity, I bought mostly fiction and poetry; however, I did note down the titles of many tantalizing academic tomes for future purchase. In both Saskatoon and Winnipeg, there are branches of McNally Robinson Booksellers, a Western Canadian outfit which manages to blend the best features of the big box stores with the ethos of the indies. There, as always, I stocked up on the prairie titles that are often regrettably absent from Toronto bookstores, as well as whatever else jumped out at me from the shelves. In Winnipeg, there was also a visit to a very good second-hand bookstore called Aqua Books—recommended by my friend Ben who very graciously provided me with a tour of downtown Winnipeg. To my purchases from these various sources, add a generous stack of belated birthday presents from my parents, acquired during their recent trip to Victoria—several Emily Carr titles selected by my mom, and a couple of wonderful old Scottish books that my dad picked up at the gloriously named Haunted Bookshop (Vancouver Island’s Oldest Antiquarian Bookshop)—and imagine how heavy my suitcase was on the return journey…

Here’s the list:

Fast Forward: New Saskatchewan Poets
     edited by Barbara Klar & Paul Wilson;
Rental Van by Clint Burnham;
Two Families: Treaties and Government by Harold Johnson;
The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara
     edited by William Corbett;
Biography: A Brief History by Nigel Hamilton;
The Winnipeg Connection: Writing Lives at Mid-Century
     edited by Birk Sproxton;
Reading Life: Books for the Ages by Sven Birkerts;
The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories by Muriel Spark;
The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound;
The Book of Small by Emily Carr;
Klee Wyck by Emily Carr;
This and That by Emily Carr;
Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr;
Letters On Shetland by Peter Jamieson; and,
Traditions of Edinburgh by Robert Chambers.

Several of these books lend themselves to dipping in and out, so I am taking great pleasure in ricocheting between them.

Reading in Winnipeg

I'll be reading in Winnipeg tomorrow night, Wednesday, May 30th at 7 pm at McNally Robinson at Grant Park. If you're in Winnipeg, please come! It's such a happy thing to have an opportunity to meet far flung blog friends and acquaintances in person...

Bruce Meyer on Reading

Bruce Meyer on reading:

Here is a simple truth: nothing prepares us better for reading than reading. Reading is a process not just of assimilating ideas but of learning the skills, the fundamental structures, and the repeated story lines that make further reading a richer, more enjoyable, and much more powerful experience. Countless authors through the ages have learned the craft of writing by reading the works of their predecessors, and in part their publications are commentaries on what they have read. But more to the point, each writer has felt an obligation to extend the tradition. Tradition in literature is not how a work becomes static over a period of time, but how it is constantly reinvented.

From Bruce Meyer, The Golden Thread: A Reader's Journey Through the Great Books (2000).

Saskatoon Launch

I'm very excited to be having a little launch party for my new book in my hometown of Saskatoon this weekend. It will be on Sunday afternoon (May 27th) at 3 pm at Amigos Cantina (on the corner of 10th Street and Dufferin, a block east of Broadway). If you're in or near Saskatoon, please come!

Mavis Gallant on Reading Short Stories

Mavis Gallant on reading short stories:

There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I may never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

From the Preface to The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (1996).