tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40759928941468951412011-07-07T17:11:53.917-07:00Fiery First Fiction is a Canada-wide campaign promoting first-time fiction writers across the country. Please read with caution, as these books may cause cerebral combustion.Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.comBlogger761100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-133807449892796822008-06-23T07:48:00.000-07:002008-05-29T09:13:19.271-07:00Visit this link each day to see <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search?q=Dey+Blogs">who's blogging</a>!<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-13380744989279682?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com43tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-40446404949745051372008-05-31T11:36:00.000-07:002008-03-28T14:25:04.204-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R-AL5TtxtuI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/wkSPbw_n1a0/s1600-h/FFF_sign%2812x8inches_on_vinyl%29.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R-AL5TtxtuI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/wkSPbw_n1a0/s400/FFF_sign%2812x8inches_on_vinyl%29.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5179152650648794850" border="0" /></a>Read before proceeding. Click to enlarge.<br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-4044640494974505137?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-64588103007406777352008-05-30T08:07:00.000-07:002008-04-10T08:18:47.325-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">The Literary Press Group of Canada announces its Fiery First Fiction campaign</span><br /><br />The Literary Press Group of Canada (LPG) announces its national reading campaign called Fiery First Fiction, which will take place during the month of May 2008.<br /><br />The campaign features 14 fiction titles from literary presses across the country. The books will be sold in select participating independent bookstores, and supported by readings, contests, reader participation opportunities, giveaways, and a nation-wide tongue-in-cheek promotional in-store campaign warning readers about the hazards of reading Fiery First Fiction books.<br /><br />The idea came about from the desire to support independent publishers who often take great risks by believing in and signing on new literary voices in a small industry burgeoning with bestselling books from south of the border. “Challenging the blockbuster-reading mentality is not easy,” says Ronda Kellington, Executive Director of the LPG. “Historically, Literary publishers across Canada have introduced some of our greatest literary voices, and yet, each year they face the uphill battle of bringing recognition to emerging new voices with increasingly limited resources. There are so many wonderful books out there that are deserving of attention.”<br /><br />The selected short story and long fiction titles came into print in early 2008, and feature a roster of new talent from various backgrounds.<br /><br />“With the Fiery First Fiction campaign, our goal is to introduce readers to new Canadian fiction, get them involved with the work, and create a momentum that encourages more people to walk into a store and pick up a book that isn’t on a bestseller list,” says Martha Bucci, LPG Sales and Marketing Manager. “The diversity of titles in the Canadian marketplace has shrunk and LPG publishers in particular are responsible largely for creating the breadth and depth of literature available to Canadian readers.”<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-6458810300740677735?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-75815900819957928132008-05-29T06:35:00.000-07:002008-04-10T08:19:31.148-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R-1lPi97mZI/AAAAAAAAAGw/iXIm620oNOw/s1600-h/fff-posterblog.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R-1lPi97mZI/AAAAAAAAAGw/iXIm620oNOw/s400/fff-posterblog.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5182910063932316050" border="0" /></a> Look out for this poster in participating bookstores.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-7581590081995792813?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-44498300619911500032008-05-01T08:41:00.001-07:002008-05-01T09:25:45.293-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SBnlu0nlhYI/AAAAAAAAAH4/gXcqyYtNA4s/s1600-h/fffbag1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SBnlu0nlhYI/AAAAAAAAAH4/gXcqyYtNA4s/s400/fffbag1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5195436237710001538" border="0" /></a>Here's a list of our <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/2008/04/participating-bookstores.html">participating independent bookstores</a>.<br /><br />Buy a Fiery First Fiction book and get this durable canvas tote bag that carries just about anything your backpack can and more!<br /><br />Bag stocks are limited, so make sure you get yours.<br /><br />You can also visit Indigo's <a href="http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Fiery-First-Fiction/fieryfiction-btq.html">online boutique</a> to see our titles showcased there on special offer.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-4449830061991150003?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-4277236874793958072008-04-10T08:19:00.000-07:002008-05-16T08:42:29.843-07:00ALBERTA<br /><a href="http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/about">McNally's: Calgary, Calgary</a> <br /><a href="http://maps.google.ca/maps?q=4952+50+St+Camrose++AB++T4V+1R2&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;um=1&amp;sa=N&amp;tab=wl"></a><a href="http://www.audreysbooks.com/">Audreys Books, Edmonton </a><br /><a href="http://www.uleth.ca/bookstore/">University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge</a><br /><br />BRITISH COLUMBIA<br /><a href="http://www.heronsbooks.ca/">Heron's Bookstore, Pitt Meadows</a><br /><a href="http://www.duthiebooks.com/">Duthie Books, Vancouver</a><br /><a href="http://www.peoplescoopbookstore.com/">People's Co-op, Vancouver</a><br /><br />MANITOBA<br /><a href="http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/about">McNally's: Grant Park, Winnipeg</a><br /><a href="http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/about">McNally's: Polo Park, Winnipeg</a><br /><a href="http://www.umanitoba.ca/bookstore/">Univ of Manitoba, Winnipeg</a><br /><br />ONTARIO<br /><a href="http://www.princebooks.net/">Bryan Prince Booksellers, Hamilton</a><br /><a href="http://www.mcmaster.ca/services/books.cfm">McMaster, Hamilton</a><br /><a href="http://www.gulliversbookstore.com/">Gulliver's Quality Books and Toys, North Bay</a><br /><a href="http://www.collected-works.com/">Collected Works, Ottawa</a><br /><a href="http://www.pictonbookstore.com/">Books &amp; Company, Picton</a><br /><a href="http://www.anotherstory.ca/frames.html">Another Story, Toronto</a><br /><a href="http://www.bookcity.ca/locations/#annex">Book City: Annex, Toronto</a><br /><a href="http://www.bookcity.ca/locations/#annex">Book City: Danforth, Toronto</a><br /><a href="http://www.uoftbookstore.com/online/">U of T Bookstore, Toronto</a><br /><a href="http://bookstore.yorku.ca/index.cfm?index=LOCATION&amp;cfid=935860&amp;cftoken=49402446">York University: The York Shop, York Lanes, Toronto</a><br /><a href="http://www.bookstore.uwaterloo.ca/home.html">University of Waterloo Bookstore, Waterloo</a><br /><br />QUÉBEC<br /><a href="http://www.mcgill.ca/bookstore/">McGill U Bookstore, Montréal</a><br /><a href="http://www.paragraphbooks.com/">Paragraphe Books, Montréal</a><br /><br />SASKATCHEWAN<br /><a href="http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/about">McNally's: Saskatoon, Saskatoon<br /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-427723687479395807?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-32924384752182498542008-04-03T13:16:00.000-07:002008-04-23T08:19:00.989-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R_U7US97meI/AAAAAAAAAHY/EQs8aFiX80s/s1600-h/ffflogosmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R_U7US97meI/AAAAAAAAAHY/EQs8aFiX80s/s400/ffflogosmall.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5185115765862013410" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);"><br />FIERY FIRST FICTION READING</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">PLEASE WEAR FLAME-PROOF CLOTHING</span><br /></div><br />Our trailblazing authors will read from their newly published works.<br /><br />DATE: May 27, 2008<br />TIME: 6:30 PM (Readings begin at 7:15 PM)<br />VENUE: Cafe Montmartre<br />4362 Main Street <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&amp;hl=en&amp;q=4362+Main+Street%2C+Vancouver%2C+BC">Map</a><br />Vancouver, BC<br /><br />Reading at the Cafe Montmartre are Fiery First Fiction authors:<br /><br />Julie Paul - <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Jealousy%20Bone"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Jealousy Bone</span></a><br /><br />Tricia Dower - <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Silent%20Girl"><span style="font-style: italic;">Silent Girl</span></a><br /><br />Pamela Stewart - <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Elysium"><span style="font-style: italic;">Elysium</span></a><br /><br />AND<br /><br />Madeline Sonik, poet.<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span><span><a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Ramasseur"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></a></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-3292438475218249854?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-46183152071824885352008-04-03T13:11:00.001-07:002008-04-23T08:19:14.660-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R_U6Dy97mdI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/R3eGPkTakJw/s1600-h/ffflogosmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R_U6Dy97mdI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/R3eGPkTakJw/s400/ffflogosmall.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5185114382882544082" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">FIERY FIRST FICTION READING</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">PLEASE WEAR FLAME-PROOF CLOTHING</span><br /></div><br />Our trailblazing authors will read from their newly published works.<br /><br />DATE: May 12, 2008<br />TIME: 6:30 PM (Readings begin at 7:00 PM)<br />VENUE: Audreys Books<br /><div class="datawrap">10702 Jasper Avenue <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&amp;hl=en&amp;q=10702+Jasper+Avenue%2C+Edmonton%2C+AB">Map</a><br /></div>Edmonton, AB<br /><br />ORDER OF READINGS<br /><br />Naomi K. Lewis - <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Cricket%20in%20a%20Fist"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Cricket in a Fist</span></span></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><span>Jason Brink - <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Fly%20on%20the%20Wall"><span style="font-style: italic;">Fly on the Wall</span></a></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-4618315207182488535?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-18531680122471135192008-04-03T13:04:00.000-07:002008-04-23T08:19:44.045-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R_U4qC97mcI/AAAAAAAAAHI/bE7mAD6c_Dk/s1600-h/ffflogosmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R_U4qC97mcI/AAAAAAAAAHI/bE7mAD6c_Dk/s400/ffflogosmall.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5185112840989284802" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">FIERY FIRST FICTION READING</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">PLEASE WEAR FLAME-PROOF CLOTHING</span><br /></div><br />Our trailblazing authors will read from their newly published works.<br /><br />DATE: May 8, 2008<br />TIME: 7 PM (Readings begin at 7:30 PM)<br />VENUE: Gullivers Quality Books and Toys<br />157 Main Street West <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&amp;hl=en&amp;q=157+Main+Street+West%2C+North+Bay%2C+ON">Map</a><br />North Bay, ON<br /><br />ORDER OF READINGS<br /><br />Lesley Belleau - <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Colour%20of%20Dried%20Bones"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Colour of Dried Bones</span></span></a><a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Silent%20Girl"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><span>Richard deMeulles - <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Ramasseur"><span style="font-style: italic;">Ramasseur</span></a></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-1853168012247113519?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-66376075750612348272008-04-03T12:55:00.000-07:002008-04-23T08:18:49.181-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R_U2kS97mbI/AAAAAAAAAHA/DJtqEZDY0Kg/s1600-h/ffflogosmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R_U2kS97mbI/AAAAAAAAAHA/DJtqEZDY0Kg/s400/ffflogosmall.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5185110543181781426" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">FIERY FIRST FICTION READING</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">PLEASE WEAR FLAME-PROOF CLOTHING</span><br /></div><br />Our trailblazing authors will read from their newly published works.<br /><br />DATE: May 5, 2008<br />TIME: 6:30 PM (Readings begin at 7:00 PM)<br />VENUE: Casa del Popolo<br /><div class="datawrap">4873 boul. St-Laurent <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&amp;hl=en&amp;q=4873+boul.+St-Laurent%2C+Montreal%2C+QC">Map</a><br /></div>Montreal, QC<br /><br />ORDER OF READINGS<br /><br /><span>Pamela Stewart</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> - <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Elysium">Elysium</a><br /><br /></span>Nila Gupta - <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Sherpa%20and%20Other%20Fictions">The Sherpa and Other Fictions</a><br /><br /></span><span>Richard deMeulles - <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Ramasseur"><span style="font-style: italic;">Ramasseur</span></a></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Elysium"></a>- </span>BREAK<span style="font-style: italic;"> -<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span>Nathan Whitlock - <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/A%20Week%20of%20This">A Week of This</a><br /><br /></span><span>Arjun Basu -</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Squishy">Squishy</a><br /></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-6637607575061234827?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-54228684371203080752008-04-03T11:03:00.000-07:002008-04-23T08:19:33.646-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R_UgCi97maI/AAAAAAAAAG4/nz_pEZiyo1A/s1600-h/ffflogosmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R_UgCi97maI/AAAAAAAAAG4/nz_pEZiyo1A/s400/ffflogosmall.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5185085774105385378" border="0" /></a><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">FIERY FIRST FICTION READING</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">PLEASE WEAR FLAME-PROOF CLOTHING</span><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Our trailblazing authors will read from their newly published works.<br /><br />DATE: May 12, 2008<br />TIME: 7 PM (Readings begin at 7:30 PM)<br />VENUE: The Supermarket<br /> 268 Augusta Ave. <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&amp;hl=en&amp;q=268+Augusta+Ave.%2C+Toronto%2C+ON">Map</a><br /> Toronto, ON<br /><br />ORDER OF READINGS<br /><br />Tricia Dower - <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Silent%20Girl"><span style="font-style: italic;">Silent Girl</span></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span>Pamela Stewart - <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Elysium">Elysium</a><br /><br /></span>Nila Gupta - <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Sherpa%20and%20Other%20Fictions">The Sherpa and Other Fictions</a><br /><br /></span>Lien Chao - <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Chinese%20Knot">The Chinese Knot</a><br /><br />- </span>BREAK<span style="font-style: italic;"> -<br /><br /></span>Shari Lapena - <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Things%20Go%20Flying">Things Go Flying</a><br /><br /></span>Nathan Whitlock - <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/A%20Week%20of%20This">A Week of This</a><br /><br /></span>Claudia Dey - <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Stunt"><span style="font-style: italic;">Stunt</span></a><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-5422868437120308075?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-15956869968632592532008-04-02T13:56:00.000-07:002008-04-16T14:57:44.450-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SAZ2SXIiJEI/AAAAAAAAAHg/R5YnSJ7z_hw/s1600-h/YSP_Ramasseur_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SAZ2SXIiJEI/AAAAAAAAAHg/R5YnSJ7z_hw/s400/YSP_Ramasseur_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5189965678410605634" border="0" /></a>At point of death, a man attempts to make sense of lightning-bright shards of memory — of a house with foster children and a foster mother, each of them with a history that forms a series of tales shading off into myth in the shadow of Shabaqua mountain, where the witch created time... A magical-realist novel in the form of a story-sequence, Ramasseur is a series of exquisitely crafted tales that draws readers into a larger puzzle sure to keep them up late into the night. This work draws to mind the contemporary Irish writers Dermot Healy and Patrick McCabe.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97cFjtxtbI/AAAAAAAAADg/KU8djLeWD58/s1600-h/RicdeMeulles.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97cFjtxtbI/AAAAAAAAADg/KU8djLeWD58/s200/RicdeMeulles.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178818609567348146" border="0" /></a>RICHARD deMEULLES of Sudbury, ON, was raised in a large, Franco-Celtic household in the mining town of Timmins, and has spent most of his working life in and around mining and forestry. For over 25 years his stories have appeared in magazines such as Descant, On Spec, and Cross Canada Writers’ Magazine. His work is anthologized in On Spec: The First Five Years and Bluffs: Northeastern Ontario Stories from the Edge; in 1988 he was awarded second place in the Cross Canada Writers’ Magazine’s writing contest.<br /><br />Published by Your Scrivener Press<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-1595686996863259253?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-11955107134070715382008-04-02T13:27:00.000-07:002008-04-10T09:44:52.680-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97WiztxtQI/AAAAAAAAACI/L1mZEJ9LiXs/s1600-h/ECW-Week_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97WiztxtQI/AAAAAAAAACI/L1mZEJ9LiXs/s400/ECW-Week_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178812515008754946" border="0" /></a>This darkly comic novel follows the lives of a family over one increasingly desperate week. Manda, a tough, sarcastic woman, has yet to make peace with the town she was brought to as a teenager after her parents’ messy divorce. Her mother is crazy, her father ill and in retreat, her damaged older brother restless and distant, her stepbrother a grown-up teenager without any friends, and her husband a tight-lipped store-owner who presses Manda to have a baby. Full of barbed dialogue and deadpan descriptions of family dynamics and the kind of awkward social dances that get performed every day, this is a book for people who always feel a little out of place, right where they are.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97WuTtxtRI/AAAAAAAAACQ/FJhxQ6vUzCc/s1600-h/NathanWhitlock.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97WuTtxtRI/AAAAAAAAACQ/FJhxQ6vUzCc/s200/NathanWhitlock.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178812712577250578" border="0" /></a>NATHAN WHITLOCK has won the inaugural Emerging Artist in Creative Writing Award and the Short Prose for Developing Writers Award. He is the reviews editor of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Quill &amp; Quire</span>, and has written for the <span style="font-style: italic;">Toronto Star</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Saturday Night</span>, the <span style="font-style: italic;">Globe and Mail</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Maisonneuve</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Toro</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Geist</span>, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Toronto with his wife and two children.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-1195510713407071538?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-30110833385999509092008-04-01T13:49:00.000-07:002008-03-31T12:29:38.409-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97ZlDtxtWI/AAAAAAAAAC4/ZbcKeUVB6a0/s1600-h/DCB_Squishy_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97ZlDtxtWI/AAAAAAAAAC4/ZbcKeUVB6a0/s400/DCB_Squishy_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178815852198344034" border="0" /></a>Arjun Basu’s fiction collection is a wry and provocative book which exposes the realities beneath social conventions. Squishy asks: Do you still love me? Do you want fries with that? Do I look fat? Life is full of small moments that define us, tangents that lead us to unexpected places, bad decisions and no decisions with repercussions you couldn’t possibly predict. This is the world of Squishy — an aspiring actress fast approaching her best-before date, a world weary travel writer, a disgraced ballplayer suffering the lingering effects of a wardrobe malfunction — all characters aware of life’s promise and impossibility, tempted by something just beyond, something surely delicious.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97aATtxtXI/AAAAAAAAADA/Jiani2f0x3Q/s1600-h/ArjunBasu.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97aATtxtXI/AAAAAAAAADA/Jiani2f0x3Q/s200/ArjunBasu.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178816320349779314" border="0" /></a>ARJUN BASU was born in Montreal. He was editor in chief of <span style="font-style: italic;">enRoute</span> magazine between 2001 and 2007. He continues to live in Montreal, with his wife and son, and his life is as squishy as anyone else’s. His work has previously appeared in <span style="font-style: italic;">AWOL</span> (Vintage Canada) and magazines such as <span style="font-style: italic;">Matrix</span> and the most recent <span style="font-style: italic;">Moosehead Anthology</span>.<br /><br />Published by DC Books<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-3011083338599950909?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-82987834066805485672008-04-01T13:42:00.000-07:002008-03-31T12:38:45.144-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97YPjtxtUI/AAAAAAAAACo/OVEzoV0MJGM/s1600-h/CHB-Stunt_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97YPjtxtUI/AAAAAAAAACo/OVEzoV0MJGM/s400/CHB-Stunt_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178814383319528770" border="0" /></a>Eugenia Ledoux, nine years old, wakes to a note from her father: ‘gone to save the world. sorry. yours, sheb wooly ledoux. asshole.’ Eugenia is left behind with her mother, the sharp-edged B-movie actress Mink, and her sister, the death-obsessed and hauntingly beautiful Immaculata. When Mink climbs into the family car and vanishes, Eugenia doubles in age overnight, but remains the dark and diminutive creature who earned the nickname ‘Stunt.’ Studded with postcards from outer space, twins, levitation, the explosion of a shoulder-pad factory, and some accomplished taxidermy, this is part dirge, part cowboy poetry, and part love letter to the wilder corners of Toronto and of ourselves.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97ZDDtxtVI/AAAAAAAAACw/sfXZvuJEMHA/s1600-h/Claudiadey.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97ZDDtxtVI/AAAAAAAAACw/sfXZvuJEMHA/s200/Claudiadey.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178815268082791762" border="0" /></a>CLAUDIA DEY’s plays have been translated into French and German, and produced internationally. They include the GG- and Trillium- Award-nominated <span style="font-style: italic;">The Gwendolyn Poems</span>. Claudia is a graduate of McGill University and the National Theatre School. She writes the ‘Group Therapy’ column for the <span style="font-style: italic;">Globe and Mail</span>.<br /><br />Published by Coach House Books<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-8298783406680548567?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-3603116463827695332008-04-01T12:18:00.000-07:002008-04-01T12:26:44.913-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">This is your first foray into fiction. How did you come up with the idea for this work? </span><br /><br /><a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/2008/03/week-of-this.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">A Week of This</span></a> came out of a terrible short story I wrote six or seven years ago that featured two of the main characters from the novel. The story was my attempt at something vaguely <span style="font-style: italic;">avant garde</span> in that it was all told in very deadpan, absurdist dialogue. I did my best to forget about it. The characters never really left me, though, and when I finally made the conscious decision to attempt a novel, I kept going back to them – much to my horror, as I couldn’t see how I could stretch their story out over 200+ pages, and I was hoping to write something a little more ambitious, thematically. Something clicked as I started writing this, however, some kind of self-recognition in terms of my own writing and imagination. Writing the novel showed me the kind of fiction I wanted to write, if that makes any sense. The kinds of lives I was interested in writing about.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What was the creative process like for you? </span><br /><br />I wrote most of the book while I was at home with my daughter. I wrote it in daily two-hour bursts during her nap. It was nerve-racking and more than a little lonesome, but it was the best writing discipline I have ever experienced, and part of me misses it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who did you read as a kid, and how did these first forays into reading fiction affect your sensibilities as a writer?</span><br /><br />When I was in elementary school, I read <span style="font-style: italic;">War of the Worlds</span> by H.G. Wells nearly a dozen times. (I counted.) It is still implanted in my head, as I discovered when I recently read it to my son. The book’s political allegory sailed over my head – and still does – but the visceral nature of some of the scenes and the descriptions, the patience with which Wells outlined some unimaginable horrors, that stuck with me. I don’t write horror or sci-fi – not yet, anyway – but that sense of visceral detail got into my own writing, I think. Corrupted it, maybe.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What are you reading right now? </span><br /><br />I just finished reading Reinhold Kramer’s new biography of Mordecai Richler and Carl Honore’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from Hyper-Parenting</span> – both of those for reviews I am writing for the <span style="font-style: italic;">Toronto Star</span>. I’m looking forward to getting back to Anthony Powell’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Dance to the Music of Time</span>, which I am midway through, and which was urged on me by a friend. It’s about four thousand pages long, with twelve separate volumes, all mostly plotless and dry as a bone, but completely addictive.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How and where do you write? </span><br /><br />When and wherever I can, but not as often as I’d like.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do you write with a certain audience in mind? Who is your “ideal reader”? </span><br /><br />Not sure that I have one. Probably myself, but alternately more forgiving and more critical. And gentler, and more charismatic, and more prone to spontaneous laughter and joyful abandon, and with a lots of spending money put aside for first novels.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Name one person in your life who profoundly infuenced your work, and why did you choose this person? </span><br /><br />As corny as this sounds, probably my son, though not for the soft-focus reasons you might expect. When he was about to be born, I realized that I needed to actually accomplish something and to commit fully to writing. It made me realize what a dilettante I’d been up until then, and how much time I’d wasted. It also has a huge effect on your imagination to suddenly have someone relying on you for their survival.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who is your favourite protagonist in a work of fiction or poetry, and why? </span><br /><br />At the moment, it’s Widmerpool, the humourless social-climber from <span style="font-style: italic;">Dance to the Music of Time</span>. He’s offstage for most of the volumes, but he looms the largest in the reader’s imagination. He’s a perfect illustration of how to create a character who is consistently repellent and aggravating, without ever going over the top and making him merely a cariacature or a cartoon character. It shows the kind of control that the best comedy requires, and how to write fiction that is funny without being HA HA HILARIOUS.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?</span><br /><br />The character of the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-forgiving narrator. He reminds me the most of myself.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it. </span><br /><br />For the forseeable future, my theme is Boring People. People who are not quite marginal, but are being drawn along in society’s wake. A lot of writers are drawn to characters that are full of will and power, characters who create themselves – killers, leaders, other artists – but I am more interested with people who lack will, who get created by others and have to learn to live with it. Being such a person myself, the fascination is probably not that hard to figure out. Mordecai Richler said that novelists should act as “the loser’s advocate.” I heard that about a decade and a half ago, and it stuck.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-360311646382769533?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-39122173059198531562008-04-01T12:14:00.000-07:002008-04-29T14:53:29.581-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">This is your first foray into fiction. How did you come up with the idea for this work?</span><br /><br />The characters have been hanging around for years, and have popped up here and there in other stories. I didn’t know they were connected until the central character came into view and I realized that all the other characters orbited around this one.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What was the creative process like for you? </span><br /><br />Henry Miller says of his writing that he writes to discover what it is that he is writing about. I found that description to hold true for me. Each of the story components in my novel started off in one direction then took a turn, at which time I discovered what the story was really about. The work took seven years.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who did you read as a kid, and how did these first forays into reading fiction affect your sensibilities as a writer? </span><br /><br />I didn’t read as a kid or young adult. I grew up in a hard rock mining town where other interests captured my attention. When I discovered reading, it was like discovering a lost continent.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What are you reading right now? </span><br /><br />I’m plowing through the philosophy of Charles Taylor. And for the last year or more I’ve been reading contemporary Irish writers: Dermot Healy, Roddy Doyle, Patrick McCabe; Colum McCann, John Banville.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How and where do you write? </span><br /><br />James Thurber’s wife would often grab his elbow at social gatherings and whisper, “Thurber, stop writing!”<br />I write all the time.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do you write with a certain audience in mind? Who is your “ideal reader”? </span><br /><br />Each work has its own reader. Sometimes even a fictive reader.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Name one person in your life who profoundly infuenced your work, and why did you choose this person? </span><br /><br />Our influences aren’t chosen by us; they choose us. It happens the way grace happens.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who is your favourite protagonist in a work of fiction or poetry, and why?</span><br /><br />I’ve always been fascinated by the way Bob Dylan keeps coming up with new images for himself. Are any of these the real Dylan, or are they just fictive versions? How do we differentiate between fictive images of ‘real’ people and fictional characters? I like Trudeau, Dylan, Don Quixote, and Odysseus. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?</span><br /><br />I’m attached to them all, even the most broken.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it.</span><br /><br />I was hoping you’d ask what were the five causes of the French Revolution. OK, here’s the theme: stories are unstable. They change with each telling. And each telling reveals a piece we might not have discovered before. Same goes with reconstructing our “selves” from fragments of memory.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-3912217305919853156?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-51656927185443189722008-03-31T12:33:00.000-07:002008-04-01T12:26:28.975-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;"> This is your first foray into fiction. How did you come up with the idea for this work? </span><br /><br /><a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Stunt"><span style="font-style: italic;">Stunt</span></a> began with an image of a girl tightrope-walking above Kensington Market. I lived near the market and for a few years, walked through it every morning on my way to the Factory Theatre where I had a small office for writing. The image of the girl on the rope persisted and became the point of departure for the book.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What was the creative process like for you? </span><br /><br />It took five years.<br /><br />I often felt like the only waitress in a very busy restaurant where every customer had a different need – dessert, menu, bill, water, high chair. It was an enormous amount of information to balance in the brain. A constant chatter, every surface of the world became one for scribbling stray notes. I imagine that this is what it is to be haunted – or a lunatic.<br /><br />From draft to draft, the process alternated between rapture and drudgery; you are the pioneer discovering land for the first time, and then you are the meticulous draftsperson mapping this discovery. I am still astonished by the amount of time the book required and the focus. I worked with a monk-like devotion and forgot the rules of civility; I had to check that I was dressed whenever I left the house.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who did you read as a kid, and how did these first forays into reading fiction affect your sensibilities as a writer? </span><br /><br />My father read the <span style="font-style: italic;">Narnia</span> series aloud to my sister and I at bedtime. It purported other possible universes; this lateral thinking was very appealing to me. It told me that the world had a false bottom - that behind one door might be another door, and behind it, unnamed treasures and threats. The Brothers Grimm’s classic fairy tales had a macabre quality that I loved. Dr. Seuss and Dennis Lee taught me that language can be so playful as to be re-invented; there are no rules to story telling other than the ones you declare.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What are you reading right now? </span><br /><br />The <span style="font-style: italic;">New Yorker</span>, Carl Wilson’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Let’s Talk About Love</span>, and a collection of short stories by Aimee Bender. I just finished Michael Winter’s <span style="font-style: italic;">The Architects are Here</span>; it was boisterous and incandescent, the prose lightning-fast and assured. I would be remiss if I did not mention <span style="font-style: italic;">Anna Karenina</span>. Though I read it two summers ago, I am still reading it – or being read by it – in that it continues to be present in my mind. Tolstoy wrote our interiors with such deftness and specificity that I came to believe we could understand each other profoundly if we wished. Through this form, we could uncover our essential humanity.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How and where do you write? </span><br /><br />In the morning, uninterrupted, in a third floor office in my home.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do you write with a certain audience in mind? Who is your “ideal reader”? </span><br /><br />A leftover of my theatre training, I still imagine bodies in red velvet chairs filling a darkened hall. I am not entirely sure who they are, but they are willing to be still and to pay attention.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Name one person in your life who profoundly influenced your work, and why did you choose this person? </span><br /><br />Gwendolyn MacEwen. Her work could never be confused for another’s; her voice was so distinct. She excavated ancient cultures and chose extraordinary twins for her verse – T.E. Lawrence, the Loch Ness monster, escape artists, Grey Owl. Her curiosity was untameable. She was a sensualist, a scholar, and as far as creatures of the mind investigating what it is to be human, an unmatched daredevil.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who is your favourite protagonist in a work of fiction or poetry, and why?</span><br /><br />This is a musical, albeit poetic choice: any construction of David Bowie’s. His blue eye shadow, his high heels, his bad teeth, his excellent suits. He is androgynous and otherworldly; his capacity for transformation is limitless.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?</span><br /><br />Eugenia Stunt Ledoux of <span style="font-style: italic;">Stunt</span> because she is able to alchemize her grief into a form of daring.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it. </span><br /><br />I am fascinated by questions of belonging. How do we define ourselves when the obvious markers of identity are gone? Are we alone in this world or are we twins, who upon finding each other, complete puzzles?<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-5165692718544318972?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-46156827673333584932008-03-31T12:16:00.000-07:002008-04-01T12:26:19.489-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">This is your first foray into fiction. How did you come up with the idea for this work? </span><br /><br />An editor walks into a bar….Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, I know, but it’s true. The editor in this case is Dave McGimpsey, poet, pop culture critic, guitarist, essayist and friend. He had called me and said “I need to ask you something. Wanna meet for a beer?” Sounds ominous – guys don’t talk this way. So a few days later I go to the bar. And . . . an editor walks in. He asks me if I want to write a book. He says think about it. I say ok. And now, the book is out. Writing the stories (there were three that had already been written and published), I didn’t set out to create an over arching theme. But as I thought about what I wanted to write, a theme developed, a loose theme about chance and choice and the collision between the two. Life isn’t black and white. No matter how much control we want to or try to exert on our lives, we can’t. Life is more gray. Or, using my word, squishy.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What was the creative process like for you? </span><br /><br />I have a full time job. When I was writing the stories, I was editing a magazine (<a href="http://www.enroutemag.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">enRoute</span></a>) and I was overseeing a dozen other editorial projects. I don’t know how I managed to get this thing done to be honest. I wrote the first draft of the entire book in about four months. I used any spare time I had: mornings, evenings, weekends. Each story had me lost in a different world during its creation. After the first two stories were on paper, I had a very productive evening where I mapped out, in very basic form, another five or six. I had one line synopses or situations down on paper, four of which ended up in the book. I’ve never been one to plan out my fiction much – especially short stories. But the process worked. As an editor, I understand the importance of deadlines. At least I like to think so. Dave had given me a deadline and that date loomed over my head with a force that I found kind of surprising. I handed in my manuscript with a day to spare. And then the real work began.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who did you read as a kid, and how did these first forays into reading fiction affect your sensibilities as a writer?</span><br /><br />I wasn’t a huge reader as a kid. I liked dinosaurs and whales and space (I still do). I had lots of books – I was a big Dr. Seuss fan. Charlie Brown. I got into the Hardy Boys. The latter aren’t squishy at all, though Dr. Seuss and Charlie Brown both, come to think of it, celebrate squishiness, albeit in simple ways.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What are you reading right now? </span><br /><br />I don’t have much time to read. It’s one of the ironies of my life. I just finished an advance review copy of Mark Abley’s <span style="font-style: italic;">The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English</span>. I’m in the middle of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Falling Man</span>, by Don Dellilo. I have four or five books on my nightstand and another two in my office, waiting to be read.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do you write with a certain audience in mind? Who is your “ideal reader”? </span><br /><br />I write for myself. When I’m working on a magazine, I have an audience in mind. An ideal reader. But when I’m writing fiction, it’s for me. If other people connect with my writing, that’s a bonus.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Name one person in your life who profoundly infuenced your work, and why did you choose this person? </span><br /><br />Raymond Carver. Does that age me? Reading Carver, I understood, finally, that art exists in every moment of every life. Art doesn’t have to be “big.” A real story, no matter how seemingly insignificant, exists everywhere. You just have to look for it. Carver influenced me profoundly. My son’s middle name is Carver.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who is your favourite protagonist in a work of fiction or poetry, and why? </span><br /><br />Frank Bascombe. I think. The protagonist in Richard Ford’s <span style="font-style: italic;">The Sportswriter</span> is a world weary kind of guy, someone who has been punched more than once by life, though much of his weariness is self-inflicted. Though I’m not entirely sure about Bascombe: by the time <span style="font-style: italic;">Independence Day</span> came around, I wasn’t interested in him anywhere. He’d grown too melancholy – to me, at least, he was the same person as he was in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Sportswriter</span>. I have to throw in Holden Caulfield in here as well. Maybe because he was the first character who voiced some of the same concerns I was feeling – of course, I read him when I was 15. And The Lorax. Yes, he’s the first pop environmentalist but later I also saw him as the personification of William Buckley’s definition of a conservative: who want to sit athwart history and yell “stop!” Ironic, then, that conservatives don’t naturally embrace environmentalism. I’m not a conservative. But I can see The Lorax in that vein. In any case, The Lorax is a tremendous character – his defeat at the end is our collective loss.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it. </span><br /><br />I’ve always been interested by the tangents life takes. That <span style="font-style: italic;">Sliding Doors</span> movie explored this theme and I wanted to like that movie but just couldn’t. I’m not a Gwyneth Paltrow fan, I guess – and all Hollywood movies set in London seem false to me. Back to tangents: we’re like pinballs in a pinball machine. Minute moments or insignificant decisions change our lives without our knowing it. That’s what the stories in <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/2008/03/squishy.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Squishy</span></a> are about mostly. An example: Elliott Spitzer. Getting caught wasn’t the squishy moment. The first time he decided to call the escort service, or even the first time he thought about using an escort at all – which may have occurred years before he actually picked up the phone – that was the squishy moment. Everything that transpired started there. That’s the moment I’m interested in.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-4615682767333358493?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-35307462721506461592008-03-28T16:43:00.000-07:002008-03-28T14:08:03.160-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97TpTtxtKI/AAAAAAAAABY/wog5LyiUWWM/s1600-h/BRIN-Things_Flying_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97TpTtxtKI/AAAAAAAAABY/wog5LyiUWWM/s400/BRIN-Things_Flying_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178809328143021218" border="0" /></a>If you knew that life went on forever—because your mother had been a medium, and you’d had ghosts in the house all the time—and you were middle-aged and depressed and knew you could never end it all, what would you do? This comic novel about death raises some questions relevant to us all: how are we to find meaning in this life? What are we to make of the human soul? This is Harold Walker’s dilemma—he is facing the prospect of eternity, with no real belief system to give him solace or direction.<br /><br />“I think once you reach a certain age, you do ask yourself—what comes after this? And if you’re at all curious, it’s a rather big question. We live in a time when there aren’t really any easy or automatic answers,” says author Shari Lapeña. “But you don’t want to shoot yourself to find out.”<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Things Go Flying</span> is a funny, entertaining novel about a man who has refused to fully engage with the world his entire life. But he is flung out of his comfort zone when ghosts from the past come back to haunt him, smashing the china and spilling family secrets. Ultimately, Harold’s communion with the dead--and his sessions with a really good philosopher—enable him to really begin to live.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R9lafTtxtFI/AAAAAAAAAAw/aJnw2O-s8yM/s1600-h/P1010468.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R9lafTtxtFI/AAAAAAAAAAw/aJnw2O-s8yM/s200/P1010468.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5177268740553815122" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;">SHARI LAPEÑA</span> worked as a lawyer and as an English teacher before turning to writing fiction. She is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers, where her mentor was David Adams Richards. Her work has appeared in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Dalhousie Review</span>, and the <span style="font-style: italic;">Globe and Mail</span>. She was shortlisted for the 2006 CBC Literary Awards. She is married with two children, and lives in Toronto, where she is currently at work on her second novel.<br /><br />Published by Brindle &amp; Glass<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-3530746272150646159?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-64636375461569420432008-03-28T16:33:00.001-07:002008-03-28T14:00:19.759-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97V_DtxtPI/AAAAAAAAACA/Ae3k4t6g0S0/s1600-h/INAN-Silent_Girl_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97V_DtxtPI/AAAAAAAAACA/Ae3k4t6g0S0/s400/INAN-Silent_Girl_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178811900828431602" border="0" /></a>This collection of stories takes us into the remarkable and poignant lives of fictional daughters, sisters, friends, lovers, wives, and mothers through a story collection inspired by Shakespeare’s plays. Set in twentieth and twenty-first century Canada, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand, and the United States, these insightful stories portray girls and women dealing with a range of contemporary issues such as racism, social isolation, sexual slavery, kidnapping, violence, family dynamics, and the fluid boundaries of gender.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97XiTtxtSI/AAAAAAAAACY/-PdbARi4J3o/s1600-h/TDowerlow.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97XiTtxtSI/AAAAAAAAACY/-PdbARi4J3o/s200/TDowerlow.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178813605930448162" border="0" /></a>TRICIA DOWER was a corporate communications and human resources executive before reinventing herself as a writer in 2002. Her short fiction has been published in <span style="font-style: italic;">Room of One’s Own</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">New Quarterly</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Hemispheres</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Cicada</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">NEO</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Insolent Rudder</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Big Muddy</span>. Having explored life in various North American locations, she now lives and writes in Victoria, BC.<br /><br />Published by Inanna Publications<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-6463637546156942043?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-87368747032506376822008-03-28T16:33:00.000-07:002008-03-28T13:33:58.369-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97aqjtxtYI/AAAAAAAAADI/JeGQ4PEgU1U/s1600-h/ANV-Elysium_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97aqjtxtYI/AAAAAAAAADI/JeGQ4PEgU1U/s400/ANV-Elysium_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178817046199252354" border="0" /></a>Pamela Stewart is a self-described “literary proctologist” and her writing often looks into places that people generally don’t want to lok. The stories in “Elysium” are about the difficulties of life we all encounter as human beings, the fragility of life -- the physical, mental, and spiritual challenges we must try to overcome. They are about ordinary people, characters searching for meaning. People are rescued, but not always in the way they hoped for or expected.<br /><br />PAMELA STEWART lives in downtown Toronto. Her stories have been published in <span style="font-style: italic;">Ars Medica</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Descant</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Other Voices</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">subTerrain</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Rosebud</span>. She took second place in the Toronto Star’s short story contest, and was short-listed in the 3-Day Novel Contest. Stewart is alsp a photographer and has had her photos exhibited at various venues, and published in a variety of magazines. She’s been involved in social activism and causes for social justice, in particular as a peace activist. She makes jewellery, and has her own business, Pamela’s Planet, with a portion of proceeds going to charity. She attends Quaker meetings, and is a breast cancer survivor.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-8736874703250637682?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-4188377548935995072008-03-28T16:07:00.000-07:002008-03-28T14:10:26.106-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97SCjtxtII/AAAAAAAAABI/bTld05331h0/s1600-h/emD-Jealousy_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97SCjtxtII/AAAAAAAAABI/bTld05331h0/s400/emD-Jealousy_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178807562911462530" border="0" /></a>In this collection of short stories, characters fall in love, fall out of love, and deal with the fallout of feelings in both cases. They sometimes have messy lives: unfinished business which keeps them from moving on in relationship, or which comes back to haunt them in amusing and poignant ways. All of them want love, or connection. They are rarely content to carry on living their lives in the same way they’ve always done. A restlessness rides in them. Whether it’s to procreate, leave their families, save a child or take a lover, they take matters into their own hands. Sometimes, they meet success.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97SLjtxtJI/AAAAAAAAABQ/dlbprILBsKQ/s1600-h/juliepaul.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97SLjtxtJI/AAAAAAAAABQ/dlbprILBsKQ/s200/juliepaul.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178807717530285202" border="0" /></a>JULIE PAUL’s fiction has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including <span style="font-style: italic;">Fiddlehead</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Dalhousie Review</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Geist</span>, the <span style="font-style: italic;">Antigonish Review</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Coming Attractions 07</span>. She was raised in the village of Lanark, ON, and has made her home in Victoria, BC for many years. She is currently writing a novel.<br /><br />Published by emDash Press<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-418837754893599507?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-47622945651801608162008-03-28T16:01:00.000-07:002008-03-28T14:01:30.795-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97cyztxtcI/AAAAAAAAADo/sopSBG_y2Fs/s1600-h/GSE-Cricket_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97cyztxtcI/AAAAAAAAADo/sopSBG_y2Fs/s400/GSE-Cricket_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178819386956428738" border="0" /></a>In this psychologically sophisticated novel, Lewis burrows into the inner sanctum of a family whose collective memory is purposefully vanishing. Agatha and Jasmine Winter, children of a flashy self-help guru who preaches “willing amnesia,” seek truth in the tangled strands of past and present. On the anniversary of their mother’s accident, they are thrown together in a struggle to break free of the burden of family silence — their grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s experiences of the Holocaust, their mother’s betrayal, and their own secrets, lies, and denials. Yet, enmeshed among the filaments, there is hope and possibility.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97c8TtxtdI/AAAAAAAAADw/Pz10fZewbbQ/s1600-h/Lewis_Naomi_thumb.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97c8TtxtdI/AAAAAAAAADw/Pz10fZewbbQ/s200/Lewis_Naomi_thumb.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178819550165186002" border="0" /></a>NAOMI K. LEWIS was born in England and grew up in Ottawa. Her stories have been published in <span style="font-style: italic;">Fiddlehead</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">New Quarterly</span>, A<span style="font-style: italic;">ntigonish Review</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Prairie Fire</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Grain</span>. “The Guiding Light,” a selection from an early draft of this novel, won the 2007 Fiddlehead Fiction Prize. Lewis now lives in Edmonton, AB, where she works as an editor for <span style="font-style: italic;">Legacy Magazine</span>.<br /><br />Published by Goose Lane Editions<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-4762294565180160816?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-36867462615045658472008-03-28T15:05:00.000-07:002008-03-28T14:40:26.984-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97eVDtxteI/AAAAAAAAAD4/_vDlyNXpyQE/s1600-h/ECW-Fly_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97eVDtxteI/AAAAAAAAAD4/_vDlyNXpyQE/s400/ECW-Fly_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178821074878576098" border="0" /></a>Privy to the details of all your secret moments, private conversations and indulgences, the fly on the wall is neutral. It doesn’t care that you cheat on your income tax, and it won’t call the police when you eliminate the neighbor’s cat. This is a finely illustrated collection of short “punch fiction” stories intended for adults. The short stories and pen-and-ink drawings throughout this novel are dark and subversive by nature, with an inherent wry humour. Along with the fly, the reader eavesdrops on church confessionals, jail visits, funerals, hitchhiking, cross-dressing, and murder . . . to name a few. Reminiscent of the storytelling in a Robert Altman film, this collection is sure to provoke, shock, and inspire.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97ebztxtfI/AAAAAAAAAEA/cjR_SVplQ28/s1600-h/Jason+Brinklow.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97ebztxtfI/AAAAAAAAAEA/cjR_SVplQ28/s200/Jason+Brinklow.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178821190842693106" border="0" /></a>JASON BRINK published short fiction in the University of Victoria’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Inner Harbour Review </span>and won the Praxis Screenplay Competition for his Drama, <span style="font-style: italic;">Summer Fallow</span>. He lives in Red Deer, AB.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R-KYhi97mYI/AAAAAAAAAGo/mnsIz1H2n0E/s1600-h/JimWestergard_sm.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R-KYhi97mYI/AAAAAAAAAGo/mnsIz1H2n0E/s200/JimWestergard_sm.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5179870223519160706" border="0" /></a>JIM WESTERGARD’s wood engravings and drawings have been exhibited internationally. He is the author and illustrator of <span style="font-style: italic;">Mother Goose Eggs, sunnyside up</span> (Porcupine’s Quill). He lives in Red Deer, AB.<br /><br />Published by ECW Press<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-3686746261504565847?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-32221328361761107272008-03-28T14:22:00.000-07:002008-03-28T14:07:07.516-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97hsztxtmI/AAAAAAAAAE4/I82RjaR8580/s1600-h/Suma_Sherpa_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97hsztxtmI/AAAAAAAAAE4/I82RjaR8580/s400/Suma_Sherpa_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178824781435352674" border="0" /></a>A young Canadian travels to India to explore her roots and find the woman who loved her like a daughter; a doctor struggles against military corruption as he investigates a soldier’s suspicious injuries in Kashmir; a gay man returns to the India of his childhood in search of redemption for his betrayal of his first love. Readers take a rickety tin bus up the side of a mountain, experience the tension between a young Canadian-raised woman and her father and sink into the scented jostle of the ladies compartment on an Indian train. Drawing on her own connections to India and her reflections as a Canadian, Gupta renders with a sure hand the layered realities of the two cultures.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97hmTtxtlI/AAAAAAAAAEw/NhvOrvKe2Pc/s1600-h/Gupta,Nila+5"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97hmTtxtlI/AAAAAAAAAEw/NhvOrvKe2Pc/s200/Gupta,Nila+5" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178824669766202962" border="0" /></a>NILA GUPTA was born in Montreal, QC and spent several childhood years in India before returning to Canada. In 2004, she won the Ontario Arts Council K.M. Hunter Award for Literature. She currently teaches and is enrolled in the M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program at the University of Guelph-Humber. Gupta has had work published in numerous journals and anthologies.<br /><br />Published by Sumach Press<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-3222132836176110727?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-16578571873003207652008-03-28T13:43:00.000-07:002008-04-01T12:25:35.814-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">This is your first foray into fiction. How did you come up with the idea for this work? </span><br /><br />I actually started off as a short fiction writer, and then turned my focus more to screenwriting after finishing university. I was in between screenplays and had this idea for a children’s story I wanted to write called “The Flyswatter”, about an old man who chases a fly around his house but is never able to catch it. Around the same time I had gotten to know <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Jim%20Westergard">Jim Westergard</a>, whose artwork I was instantly drawn to because I recognized a similar dark, somewhat twisted sensibility in his art that often appears in my writing.<br /><br />As I started thinking about the fly as a character I considered the age old expression, “Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall for that (conversation, experience, moment…)?” From there I scrapped the children’s story idea and decided to write a collection of voyeuristic scenarios witnessed by a ubiquitous fly, with the hope of getting Jim to create accompanying pen and ink drawings for each story. I wrote about six of these short stories, or “flies” as we came to call them, and when I showed them to him his imagination locked into the concept immediately, and shortly after we began our collaboration.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What was the creative process like for you? </span><br /><br />It was a very interesting process as a collaboration in, essentially, a new genre. Because it’s an unusual project in the sense that it’s an illustrated collection of short short fiction for adults, (it’s not for children, it’s not a graphic novel and it’s not a collection of postcard stories or flash fiction as those forms of writing have come to be known) it took a while to decide how exactly I would tell the stories and how we would juxtapose the stories with the drawings. Because the book was to be such a visual experience I wrote sparsely, with an emphasis on dialogue and plot versus overly descriptive passages. In order to keep all 53 stories consistent and lean I found myself mercilessly trimming off “fat” more than I have ever done before with any project. So it was a real lesson in economy for me.<br /><br />The most fascinating part of the process was working with a visual artist throughout the creation of the book, rather than afterwards, as is most typically done. In most cases I would draft a story, give it to Jim, he would mull it over and come up with a drawing, we’d discuss both the story and the drawing, make some adjustments based on the other’s feedback, and we’d end up with a completed story and drawing. There were occasions, however, when we would reverse the process and Jim would come up with a drawing first and I would create a story from that drawing. It was a true collaboration from start to finish.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who did you read as a kid, and how did these first forays into reading fiction affect your sensibilities as a writer?</span><br /><br />I read a lot of “choose your own adventure” type books as a kid. I loved the unconventional notion of being able to experience the same characters in completely different situations and outcomes in the same book. I think those books were quite revolutionary and really created an interactive experience for readers. For me, fiction has always been either a looking glass into the unknown and the unfamiliar or a magnifying glass of the known and recognizable, so I think of writing in terms of seeing things in ways we haven’t necessarily seen before.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What are you reading right now? </span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">God is not Great</span> by Christopher Higgins and <span style="font-style: italic;">Stiff</span> by Mary Roach.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How and where do you write?</span><br /><br />I write sporadically, mostly in the evenings, at my desk, usually listening to music (unless I’m rewriting). I write every first draft by hand in lined journals and find this far more intuitive and synaptic than trying to compose material on a keyboard.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do you write with a certain audience in mind? Who is your “ideal reader”? </span><br /><br />Absolutely. A great writing professor of mine at UVic, Bill Valgardson, told me to always write for my “best” reader, versus trying to appeal to a mass audience. I consider my “best” or “ideal reader” someone who is openminded, curious, thick-skinned, yet vulnerable and empathetic.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Name one person in your life who profoundly infuenced your work, and why did you choose this person? </span><br /><br />My grandfather. He was a captain in the Danish navy who immigrated to Alberta and became a farmer. The fact that he transitioned from a high seas life of adventure to a radically more serene lifestyle in his thirties was reflected in the way he told stories with both passion and subtlety. I strive to tell stories in the same way.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who is your favourite protagonist in a work of fiction or poetry, and why? </span><br /><br />Ew, tough one. Like trying to pick your favourite band or movie. I don’t know, he’s really not even the protagonist, but I always think of <span style="font-style: italic;">Lenny in Of Mice and Men</span>. Steinbeck created an innocence in that character that I find more beautiful and profound than any other I’ve ever encountered.<br /><br />In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?<br /><br />I’m currently rewriting a feature length screenplay about an elderly hermit named Angus Thorpe who hasn’t stepped foot off his land since he was a teenager. I’m drawn to his psychological survival skills in terms of how he’s lived alone for most of his life, eked out a modest existence with minimal human contact, and yet his reach for something more exceeds his grasp at an almost tragic level. I feel an obligation to help him if I can.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it. </span><br /><br />At the heart of <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/2008/03/fly-on-wall.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Fly on the Wall</span></a> is the concept of voyeurism and the idea that we can find truths about people by witnessing their behaviours in compromised situations when they don’t know they’re being watched. I’m fascinated by human nature, both the good and the bad, and I believe we’re often at our most authentic in our private, unguarded moments.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-1657857187300320765?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-25144641841952046122008-03-28T13:17:00.000-07:002008-04-01T12:25:26.482-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">This is your first collaborative work. How did you come up with the idea?</span><br /><br /><a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/2008/03/fly-on-wall.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Fly on the Wall</span></a> happened when <a href="http://fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Jason%20Brink">Jason Brink</a> approached me, after seeing some of my wood engravings of insects and asked if I would be interested in working with him on the project and he showed me a couple of stories he had written. I knew immediately we were going to make it work.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What was the creative process like for you?<br /><br /></span>The process started with Jason sending me a story, which always opened with a fly sitting or flying somewhere, observing an incident. We would discuss points of the story, which might be problematic and make adjustments, and then I would create a sketch for a drawing of the fly in that situation and I would show it to him. We would discuss whether it might work or not and make any necessary changes in the sketch. After a while I began to send Jason drawings, which he sometimes was able to use as a basis for a story.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who did you read as a kid, and how did these first forays into reading fiction affect your sensibilities as a writer? </span><br /><br />I read science fiction and comic books as a kid. The artists in the comic books such as EC Comics and Mad Comics inspired me to draw.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What are you reading right now? </span><br /><br />I read history, biographies and fiction authors such as Cormac McCarthy.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How and where do you work? </span><br /><br />When I have finished my research for a wood engraving or drawing I sit down in the studio and digest the information and write short descriptions of the people who are the subjects of my prints.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do you create with a certain audience in mind? Who is your “ideal audience?” </span><br /><br />I try to create the images in my wood engravings and drawings for myself and when I write, it’s also for myself.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Name one person in your life who profoundly influenced your work, and why did you choose this person?</span><br /><br />The wood engravings of Leonard Baskin influenced me profoundly.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it. </span><br /><br />The theme of the drawings in this work is somewhat dark and satirical and the concept of voyeurism, which is at the root of the stories, motivated the drawings.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-2514464184195204612?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-45368736662756668912008-03-28T13:01:00.000-07:002008-04-01T12:25:16.757-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">This is your first foray into fiction. How did you come up with the idea for this work? </span><br /><br />A University of Toronto production of <span style="font-style: italic;">Othello</span> sparked <span style="font-style: italic;">Silent Girl</span>. I had studied the play years before without having seen it performed. Reflecting on how willingly Desdemona allowed her life to end, I thought of domestic abuse victims and the seeming collusion of some in their own misfortune. Many, like Desdemona, are socially isolated. The story that resulted from that evening – "Nobody; I Myself" – ended up being as much about idealism and racism as it was about social isolation, but that’s the thing about stories: they often end up being about something other than what you intended. Anyway, after conceiving of the first Shakespeare-inspired story, I wondered how many other contemporary counterparts of Shakespeare’s female characters I could find and I set out in search of them.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What was the creative process like for you? </span><br /><br />It took me three years to write the eight stories in <span style="font-style: italic;">Silent Girl</span>. I might have been done sooner except my husband and I uprooted ourselves partway through. We sold our house in Toronto and headed out for parts unknown with only whatever fit in the car. We arrived in Victoria two years ago and haven’t left. Creating the collection involved the typical highs and lows for me: conceiving a “perfect” story in my mind and being unable to translate it to the page; gathering so much research I was sure a story would write itself and discovering it would take the usual hard work. Near the end of the collection I was impatient to be done until I stumbled onto the eighth story which so energized me I have decided to develop it into my next book.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who did you read as a kid, and how did these first forays into reading fiction affect your sensibilities as a writer? </span><br /><br />I was an early, quick reader, but other than Wonder Woman comics, I can’t remember much of what I read when I was very young. When I was about twelve or thirteen, I read <span style="font-style: italic;">A Tree Grows in Brooklyn</span> by Betty Smith and, possibly because the protagonist was a girl my age, I began to think I could write a story like that one day. Another book that left an impression on me was a fictionalized account of Anne Boleyn’s life. I was sure I had been her in another life.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What are you reading right now? </span><br /><br />I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s powerful <span style="font-style: italic;">The Road</span> and am mid-way through Bill Gaston’s wonderfully-researched and engaging <span style="font-style: italic;">Sointula</span>. Gaston must have been a woman in another life the way he gets into the skin of the main character Evelyn.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How and where do you write? </span><br /><br />I have a sanctuary that gets the morning sun from a window, framing an ivy-encrusted tree. I have the luxury of being able to write every day and I spend hours at it. I use a computer most of the time, but occasionally I’ll take notepad and pencil out to the kitchen table to do some “thinking writing.” This is usually when I need to get deeper into the emotions of one of my characters in a particular scene.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do you write with a certain audience in mind? Who is your “ideal reader”? </span><br /><br />No. My ideal reader, I guess, is me! If a story doesn’t work for me, no one else is ever going to see it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Name one person in your life who profoundly influenced your work, and why did you choose this person? </span><br /><br />I’d have to say Alice Munro because her stories and the way she writes them resonate with me deeply. She knows her characters so intimately their contradictions come across as the most natural of phenomena. By trying to emulate her, I’ve been rewarded: the more I learn about my characters, the more interested I am in writing about them, so it’s a technique that not only informs the writing but nourishes the writer. I also admire the way Munro can make the most ordinary character’s life extraordinary.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who is your favourite protagonist in a work of fiction or poetry, and why? </span><br /><br />No real favourite comes to mind, but a contemporary one I responded to from the heart was Silver in Jeanette Winterson’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Lighthousekeeping</span>. She’s heartbreakingly courageous, vulnerable, resourceful, poetic, and thoroughly original.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?</span><br /><br />I suppose I identify most with the narrator in the fifth story in the collection, “Nobody; I Myself.” The story is set in my “era,” and I was once as idealistic and naive as she is. I could easily have been in her situation given different circumstances. However, I’m probably most “attached to” Selanna in the last story, the novella-length “The Snow People: AGM 30-46,” because of the both proud and pragmatic way she deals with oppression.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Which story was most difficult to write and why?</span><br /><br />Emotionally, the title story, “Silent Girl,” was the most difficult because of the subject matter: sex trafficking of children. I was astonished at the scope of this brutal business and to learn that it isn’t just happening “over there, somewhere.” I wanted readers to experience how devastating trafficking is to even one child but there were times when I wondered if I was wrong to write the story, if I was not contributing to the horror.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it. </span><br /><br />Most of the stories in <span style="font-style: italic;">Silent Girl</span> are, in some way, about women who are silenced by oppression, by the “system,” or by their own fears. That’s too simple a statement, of course, because the characters are more complex than that. But it became apparent to me as I got deeper into the research and writing of this collection that some things haven’t changed for women since Shakespeare’s time. The reason, I suspect, is that we are still locked into gender roles and a patriarchal value system despite the efforts of many women and men to change their thinking and their behaviour. I felt compelled to explore this, I think, to understand my own life, to help free myself and move on.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-4536873666275666891?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-2623513361691063592008-03-28T12:22:00.000-07:002008-04-10T12:48:51.288-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">This is your first foray into fiction. How did you come up with the idea for this work? </span><br /><br />The ideas for <span style="font-style: italic;">Cricket in a Fist</span> came together over a long time. Initially, I just had the idea to write a story set in a hair salon; then I wanted to write about a character that suffers some kind of accident and uses it as excuse to remake herself. I’ve always been fascinated by how a group of people can witness the same event and each interpret it completely differently. All those ideas and others eventually clicked together – or maybe I forced them together.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What was the creative process like for you? </span><br /><br />It took me about three years, once I started writing seriously. I wrote almost every day for a year and then I spent a year sending the manuscript to publishers. Once it was accepted for publication, I spent another year revising and rewriting, which was challenging, because I was working almost full-time as general manager of a magazine. I wrote about 100 new pages for the second version, and completely changed the book’s structure.<br /><br />When I began <span style="font-style: italic;">Cricket in a Fist</span>, I only had a clear picture of two characters, Agatha and Ginny, and of a few key scenes. I gradually got to know the rest of the characters and it took even longer to figure out what was actually going on with these people. I just kept writing scenes and struggling to see the big picture. Goose Lane's fiction editor told me that first novels are the hardest, because the writer hasn’t yet learned how to hold the whole story in her head at once. She said that first-time novelists usually have an aha-moment, when they suddenly see the forest for the trees. I think that was true for me.<br /><br />Everything became easier when I went back, late in the process, and actually started writing again from the beginning. I even retyped sections that I didn’t want to change. And at that point, I could finally conceive of my work as one coherent narrative.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who did you read as a kid, and how did these first forays into reading fiction affect your sensibilities as a writer?<br /><br /></span>As a kid, I read anything I could get my hands on. I preferred reading fiction over any other activity, and read all my books two or three times at least. I loved Madeleine’s L’Engle and Judy Blume, the Ramona books, the <span style="font-style: italic;">Little House</span> books, <span style="font-style: italic;">Anne of Green Gables</span>, all the typical girl stuff. I also read random books from my parents’ bookshelf, probably traumatizing myself for life by reading 1984 at the age of 10 or so. All that reading definitely made me want to be a writer. I thought I would write novel for young adults, since those were my first love, book-wise. I still I think I might do that eventually, and I’m always drawn to writing about children and teenagers. I’m just fascinated by childhood and adolescence –when every experience is new and surprising.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What are you reading right now? </span><br /><br />I’m reading a lot of non-fiction, since I’m doing research for a new novel. I’m reading about international adoption right now, and also books about Judaism and Islam. In terms of fiction, I’m reading <span style="font-style: italic;">The Fighter</span> by Craig Davidson, and also <span style="font-style: italic;">King Leary</span> by Paul Quarrington.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How and where do you write? </span><br /><br />I write in my home office, and often at the public library and in cafes.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do you write with a certain audience in mind? Who is your “ideal reader”? </span><br /><br />I don’t write with an audience in mind at all. As soon as I start thinking about audience, I start to worry about offending someone, or that people won’t like my work. So I write in a totally self-absorbed state of mind.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Name one person in your life who profoundly influenced your work, and why did you choose this person?</span><br /><br />I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that everyone I know influences my writing, since all my relationships and even conversations help me see the world in novel ways.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who is your favourite protagonist in a work of fiction or poetry, and why? </span><br /><br />If I have to choose just one, I’ll go with Scout in <span style="font-style: italic;">To Kill a Mockingbird</span>. I love how Harper Lee portrays the story through the eyes of this little girl, who sees situations in idiosyncratic ways, and who takes her time figuring out the strange actions of the adults around her. As Scout struggles to understand to understand the complexities of the adult world, the reader can see how absurd and tragic those events really are. There’s just something so compelling about seeing a story through the eyes of a child.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?</span><br /><br />In a way, I’m most interested in Ginny, the character in <span style="font-style: italic;">Cricket in a Fist</span> that readers tend to despise. She’s so selfish that she doesn’t even realize how she affects people. There’s something fascinating to me about a character who doesn’t think about other people at all, except to blame them for things – who pushes those solipsistic moments we all have to their extreme, and turns them into a philosophy.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it.<br /><br /></span>I guess you could say that the overarching theme of <span style="font-style: italic;">Cricket in a Fist</span> is family and selfhood, and the continuity of self over time. I was thinking about children and parents, and how, in adolescence, we often fantasize about replacing our flawed parents with perfect ones. Sometimes we say horrible things to our parents during those years, almost verging on homicidal, and they just have to take it. I imagined a scenario in which a young girl wished her mother’s personality would change and then had to deal with the reality of that wish coming true. That’s where the idea started.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-262351336169106359?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-87605779314453163212008-03-28T12:00:00.000-07:002008-04-01T12:25:07.501-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">This is your first foray into fiction. How did you come up with the idea for this work?</span><br /><br />I was a private investigator for many years. I watched people who did not know they were being watched. So many people live lives of such routine, going to work, picking up kids at school, grocery shopping. I cannot tell you how many times I have followed someone to Walmart. I often worked in poor neighbourhoods. It broke my heart seeing people, especially children, living in these apartment buildings. I marvel at the strength of people in tough circumstances.<br /><br />My work has also been coloured by my own life as a mother, for some years a single mother of two boys, and my health problems, living with breast cancer, fibromyalgia, arthritis and IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). You have to have a sense of humour to be a private investigator on surveillance, with IBS. I use humour in my work because laughter brings people together, and because many of my stories could be considered depressing, “not the Hollywood ending” kind of stories.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What was the creative process like for you? </span><br /><br />I never have an outline. I just write. Not in any kind of order, it is all over the place and then just comes together. Some really short stories almost come to me whole. I wrote the stories at different times and sometimes work on more than one thing at a time.<br /><br />I like to write an opening line that is different and will make people want to read the rest of it. Endings are the most difficult for me to write, although sometimes the ending comes to me first.<br /><br />I have a terrible memory and if I have an idea and don’t write it down right away, I’ll lose it. I don’t write a lot of drafts because I will edit as I go.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who did you read as a kid, and how did these first forays into reading fiction affect your sensibilities as a writer? </span><br /><br />As a young girl, I read all the Nancy Drew books, which probably had an effect on me becoming a PI later in life. Nancy Drew brought girls together; we would trade and discuss them. I also read the Cherry Ames nurse books. It was inspiring to read about girls who were strong and independent and had dreams.<br /><br />We lived in an apartment building where pets were not allowed but I read horse books, such as <span style="font-style: italic;">My Friend Flicka</span>. The bookmobile came every week, and I always took out the maximum allowed books. Since I was kind of a loner and a morbid sort, I connected with Edgar Allan Poe's work. As a teen and young adult I read a lot of poetry. Reading saved me spiritually and literally.<br /><br />One time, I was around 19; I was locked in a room at a house party with a big mean biker. I was trying to talk my way out. I had a book of poetry by Yevgeny Yevteshenko with me. He then confessed that he didn’t know how to read. I read to him. It had an effect on him; he stopped harassing me and listened. It sounds unbelievable, but it’s true.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What are you reading right now? </span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The God of Animals</span> by Aryn Kyle. This is her first novel. It also happens to involve horses and a young girl and it’s a wonderful book.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How and where do you write? </span><br /><br />I write at home, on my computer, I don’t have a lap top and can’t type on one, so have to sit at a desk. I sometimes write by hand in notebooks. Sometimes I like to write until 3 in the morning. I am a scattered person, I prefer to say that I am good at multitasking, but the truth is that I have a mind that is always all over the place, so reining it in is probably the most difficult thing I have to do to write.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do you write with a certain audience in mind? Who is your “ideal reader”? </span><br /><br />Someone with an open mind or who wants to have an open mind. I am not an intellectual or an academic, I dropped out of school in grade 11 (It was the 60’s). I would like it if someone read my work and learned something, such as being more accepting of people. I would like it if it saved a little bit of a person the way reading did and does for me.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Name one person in your life who profoundly influenced your work, and why did you choose this person? </span><br /><br />Barbara Gowdy. I took a writing course with her at Ryerson some years ago and she made me feel like I could be a writer. I came to it later in life. I wanted to be a writer when I was young, but was very sensitive to criticism and had no sense of self at that time, so I suppressed my desires. Becoming a mother gave me the courage to try new things. I have done so much more with my life. It is as if my sons gave me life, so I guess they are my biggest influence.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who is your favourite protagonist in a work of fiction or poetry, and why? </span><br /><br />Scout, the narrator and protagonist of <span style="font-style: italic;">To Kill a Mockingbird</span>. She loves to read, and she is very curious. I love all the characters in that book, Atticus Finch, Boo Radley. I would like to see more good female characters in my age range: 55. Barbara Gowdy and Tom Walmsley write characters that are lost and struggling but in a much different way than the ones I write about.<br /><br />I also really like Razovsky, who is the protagonist in a number of poems by Stuart Ross. Ross has a brilliant, funny, and bizarre mind. He also gives the most fabulous readings.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?</span><br /><br />A girl named Luna who is a teenager and lives with her older gay brother and his lover. Her mother is dead and she did not know her father. I like her because I made her question everything, especially God. She values the things in people that some other people might be afraid of.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it. </span><br /><br />I guess the main theme of my work is questioning God about why things are the way they are. I am interested in how our souls become corrupted by society, materialism and violence. How we deal with loss and death is something I’m really interested in exploring in my work.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-8760577931445316321?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-59729454937849013992008-03-28T11:04:00.000-07:002008-04-01T12:30:26.984-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">This is your first foray into fiction. How did you come up with the idea for this work? </span><br /><br />When I started <span style="font-style: italic;">Things Go Flying</span>, I had no idea where I was going with it. I just sat down one day and started writing about this depressed, middle-aged character, afraid of death. But I knew a man whose mother was a medium, and he could remember, as a kid, things flying around the room, and having to duck. I loved that as a background for my character, but I had no idea how it would play out. In fact, I called the book my “plotless wonder” for a long time, and it was amazing to me how it all came together in the end. Since then, I’ve had a lot of respect for the unconscious mind.<br /><br />I was well into the book when I discovered that Harold wasn't afraid of death, but of life going on forever, because he’d had all these ghosts growing up. A depressed person doesn’t want to hear that there is no out, ever, so Harold had a real problem. I got the idea of his seeing a philosopher to help him with this. I had a lot of fun with that. How are we to find meaning in this world, and what, in this day and age, are we to make of the human soul?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What was the creative process like for you?</span><br /><br />I wanted to write a novel, so I sat down one day and started, with no idea what I was going to write about, or the kind of book it would be. It’s funny now that I think about it, because I’m a planner — I plan everything, but in my writing I don’t plan much at all.<br /><br />I started writing <span style="font-style: italic;">Things Go Flying</span> when I was home with two young children. I wrote it in two-hour stints, during their nap time. It may have contributed to the novel's fast-moving feeling — I had to get my thousand words done before the baby awoke! I didn’t have a lot of time to sit and think about it, but maybe that was a liberating thing for a first-time writer.<br /><br />I had the draft done in about a year. Then I did the Humber School for Writers correspondence program with David Adams Richards as a mentor. I got an agent right off the bat, which I realize was really lucky. It took a year to sell the book. Brindle &amp; Glass got me Lynn Coady as an editor. She is talented and committed, and has a wonderful gift for comic writing.<br /><br />I tend to write the first draft quickly. That’s the part I enjoy most. I love to be in a scene that takes off and surprises me. I don’t find rewrites to be as much fun. It’s more analytical, more like work rather than play. Of course, as more of an organic writer, I do spend a lot of time in rewrites.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who did you read as a kid, and how did these first forays into reading fiction affect your sensibilities as a writer? </span><br /><br />I was a huge Nancy Drew fan, and I loved pony books. I loved to escape into the world of whatever I was reading. I read voluminously as a kid, and a lot of stuff I read was way over my head — like Camus. I’ve always loved those big thick books like <span style="font-style: italic;">Dr. Zhivago</span> that take on the scope of history. I could never write anything like that, so I really admire anyone who can.<br /><br />I still love to escape into a book, so I tend to prefer books with a strong narrative point of view. I don’t like writing that is self-conscious, precious, or affected. There is nothing wrong with being entertaining, either. I suspect that comic writing is not valued in Canada as highly as it is in the UK for example, or in the US. We seem to like our Canadian literature to be serious.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What are you reading right now? </span><br /><br />Robert Hough’s <span style="font-style: italic;">The Final Confession of Mable Stark</span>. A very good book. I don’t have time to read nearly as much as I would like, which I think is a universal problem these days—not enough leisure time for reading.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How and where do you write?</span><br /><br />I have a very small, wiggly desk I got at IKEA and it sits in front of a window in my bedroom. It has a computer monitor on it, there’s room for a cup of coffee and not much else. I used to work in the basement, but the kids took that over as a play room. I’m better in the morning, but to be honest, I’ve had to change my writing schedule around constantly depending on what my kids were doing, so although I’m best in the morning, with a clear four hours of time, I can also write in the afternoon in short chunks if I have to. I’m no good at night though. And I have to go weeks at a time for school holidays when I don’t write at all, but then I get right back to it when I can. I’m very disciplined. It helps that I enjoy it, and that I write fun books. I often wonder if I’d enjoy it if I wrote a really depressing book. I might try it to find out.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do you write with a certain audience in mind? Who is your “ideal reader”? </span><br /><br />I don’t write with an audience in mind. I start with an idea, and it goes where it goes, and if I’m enjoying it, the book just takes off. I’ve written the first draft of a second novel, and I started out with the idea of an economist who loses her mind and tries to find the mathematical equation for happiness, but her husband turned out to be a frustrated poet, and he was far more interesting, so it’s more his story. It’s tentatively titled <span style="font-style: italic;">The Poets’ Preservation Society</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Name one person in your life who profoundly influenced your work, and why did you choose this person? </span><br /><br />That’s a tough one. I guess I’d say Dennis Bock, because he was the first one to ever read any of <span style="font-style: italic;">Things Go Flying</span> and he basically told me to come out of the closet. I was writing secretly at home, and he was writer-in-residence at the Toronto Public Library. I submitted the first chapter — I was very nervous about it — but he was very positive about my writing, so I started to admit to myself that I could be a writer, and that’s probably the most important thing.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who is your favourite protagonist in a work of fiction or poetry, and why? </span><br /><br />Characters that have really stuck with me—one would be Nomi, in Miriam Toews’ <span style="font-style: italic;">A Complicated Kindness</span>. Also Chip, in Jonathan Franzen’s <span style="font-style: italic;">The Corrections</span>, was absolutely brilliant. With both of those characters you get very deep into their point of view, and although both are handled with great humour, you get the darker side too.<br /><br />I tend to not focus so much on the protagonist of what I’m reading, but more on the book as a whole, whether it really engaged me. I think Nick Hornby is very good — very clever and funny and his dialogue is bang on.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Things Go Flying</span> is comic, but it does raise some important questions. How are we to find meaning in our lives? And what if life goes on forever? Most of us don’t know what happens after that big leap, if anything. But there’s really no way to find out either, until the time comes. In my story, Harold “knows” life goes on indefinitely—he just doesn’t know why.<br /><br />I’m interested in exploring that question because as I get older, I’m having to face the idea of mortality. I think it’s important to be open to the mysteries of life. We can’t know everything. I guess I’m a bit like Harold — an incrementalist. (If that’s a real word. If it isn’t it should be.) Small changes can have tremendous results over time—with the environment, for instance. But there’s that caveat that you can’t do it alone. Sometimes you feel you’re the size of a bug in an ever-expanding universe.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-5972945493784901399?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-47394837331076910112008-03-28T10:54:00.000-07:002008-04-01T12:24:35.312-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">This is your first foray into fiction. How did you come up with the idea for this work?</span><br /><br />The stories were written before I actually realized that they had some sort of thematic link. I’ve been writing short stories for years, always with the idea of creating a collection, but I never set out to write “about” something in particular. Generally, I begin a story with a character and his or her problem. Without a problem, there isn’t much of a story.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What was the creative process like for you? </span><br /><br />Writing is fun for me, no matter what stage I’m at. Otherwise, I don’t think I’d still be doing it. I love trying to get the exact word, fitting the pieces together, honing stories until they pack the most punch. I enjoy stretching the language. I sometimes call writing a sort of affliction; if I don’t write, I don’t feel so good.<br /><br />The “oldest” story in the collection was started in 2002. Normally a story takes a couple of years from inception to being ready to send out for publication. This includes leaving it to mellow or ferment. After many months, you can tell what parts of it stink. Occasionally there are “gift” stories that come and don’t need a lot of revision, but those are rare. And a cause for celebration when they do come!<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who did you read as a kid, and how did these first forays into reading fiction affect your sensibilities as a writer? </span><br /><br />I read whatever I could find; the one-room library in our village was a familiar place for me. I read a Nancy Drew a day in the summers, at the cottage; old Trixie Beldens and Bobbsey Twins of my mother’s, Judy Blume, the usual suspects.<br /><br />One book that affected me deeply was a book by Madeline L’Engle, called <span style="font-style: italic;">Camilla</span>. Strangely, it’s one from a romance series she wrote, and not in print any longer. I recently re-read it, and I still love it. It’s like a gentler <span style="font-style: italic;">Catcher in the Rye </span>with a female protagonist. Its New York setting was so completely foreign to me in my Canadian village of 800. I was given a new way of seeing the world, and an escape from rural Ontario.<br /><br />As a teenager I was drawn to short stories. I still remember that classic story by Carl Stephenson, “Leiningen Versus the Ants.” I read it in Grade Nine, at the same school my father read it, when he was in the same grade. “Pell-mell the rabble swarmed…” A fierce old plot-driven story that hooked me. And I was deeply influenced by Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, but I didn’t write much fiction until later on. I also read and wrote a lot of poetry. Most of my poetry was rather maudlin, but that’s a necessary part of growing up. I also loved song lyrics, and wrote my favourite poems and lyrics on my window’s vinyl roller blinds—everything from The Smiths to William Carlos Williams.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What are you reading right now? </span><br /><br />I’m reading The Poisonwood Bible right now, because I’m looking at books with multiple POV. I’m writing a novel that has more than one voice telling the story. I’m also reading TC Boyle’s collection “Tooth and Claw.” He’s one of my favourite story writers: his premises are so fraught with tension and possibility.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How and where do you write? </span><br /><br />I write at home, when it’s quiet, and occasionally at coffee shops. I also write once a month with one of my writing groups. I like doing this: writing in the same space with other writers, and then reading our fresh work aloud. I’ve also written a lot on weekend retreats to Salt Spring Island with a group of other women who write. A fantastic, fruitful and flavourful process. We always have the best food and books to sustain us.<br /><br />I don’t have a dedicated office space, but we’re moving soon and that will be an essential part of our new home. I like being at home, though, being comfortable and close to my books and computer. Although email is a bad distraction.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do you write with a certain audience in mind? Who is your “ideal reader”? </span><br /><br />I write with myself as my audience, and ask myself this basic question: what kind of story would I like to read? My husband is the first reader of most of my work, and he calls himself “the average reader.” If it passes his inspection, then I carry on, knowing I’m on the right track. My ideal reader would be someone who loves character-driven short fiction, someone who can appreciate the multiple possibilities a story’s ending can open up.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Name one person in your life who profoundly influenced your work, and why did you choose this person? </span><br /><br />My daughter, because mothering has played a huge part in my stories, and without having had this experience, I could never have written about families in quite the same way. Of course, having a child has influenced my work in other ways: the way I work is dictated by school pick-up times and PD days and lunches. But it’s made me work harder, in a more focused way, when I do have writing time.<br /><br />And since I can’t keep to the instructions, I’d have to say two of my high school teachers: Mrs. Munroe and Mrs. Mason, who encouraged my love of writing and reading in the last years of high school.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who is your favourite protagonist in a work of fiction or poetry, and why? </span><br /><br />I can’t limit myself to only one.<br /><br />Rose in “The Beggar Maid” by Alice Munro. Lionel Essrog in <span style="font-style: italic;">Motherless Brooklyn</span> by Jonathan Lethem. Ruthie in <span style="font-style: italic;">Housekeeping</span> by Marilynne Robinson. Max in the story “Green Fluorescent Protein” by Neil Smith. The tree in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Giving Tree</span> by Shel Silverstein. Catherine in <span style="font-style: italic;">Wuthering Heights</span>. Rhoda in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Rhoda</span> stories by Ellen Gilchrist. Almost everyone in Sharon Olds’ poetry. And so on…<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?</span><br /><br />In my collection, I am attached to Maddy in “Staking the Delphiniums,” because she is such a strong woman and yet caught in a tricky, human situation. I also really sympathize with Leah, in the story “False Spring,” who displays similar characteristics. Interestingly, both of them have been unfaithful to their partners… And then there’s Drew, in “Antidote,” whose wife has just left him for their house painter. I think I like all my characters, especially at their crisis points.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it. </span><br /><br />All the stories deal with jealousy in some form. It felt compelled to come through me, since I didn’t even know this was what I was exploring until I took a step back and scanned the stories as a group. But I think jealousy is something we don’t talk about much, and it can be quite destructive. It is also a very human emotion. I tend to think of myself as someone who isn’t very jealous, but I think we’re all capable of it in the right (or wrong) situation.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-4739483733107691011?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-57425775449847436652008-03-19T10:45:00.001-07:002008-04-01T12:24:15.629-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">How does a young writer such as yourself come to have the perception and inner resources necessary to create a collection so mature and complex in range and depth?</span><br /><br />I didn’t set out to write an inter-related short story collection about war in Kashmir. I had lived in India for the first six years of my childhood and had only been back once in my early 20’s. The only time I thought about my early home was when my father received letters from our relatives in Jammu or when the “trouble” in the region made front-page news. My parents rarely talked about our time in India, either. They were busy with the usual challenges of immigration, and in my mother’s case, migration from Quebec to Ontario, the learning of new languages, the settling of four children in a new country, the racism that was endemic in the 70’s, the struggle with loneliness and feelings of dislocation. Nobody was more shocked than me that when the stories in this collection first made their way from my mind to the page, they were largely about the region.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How long a creative period did it take before this collection took definitive shape in your mind?</span><br /><br />The title story, “The Sherpa,” started as a character description exercise in a short story class I took at a community college. My instructor suggested that I put more of myself in the story. I didn’t find myself that interesting, so I invented a fictional self for the “I” voice and the story grew from there. The second story I wrote was “Honeymoon in Kashmir,” and I almost tossed it away when a classmate suggested (erroneously!) that my writing resembled V.S. Naipaul’s. I wanted my writing to reflect my own voice, not that of an established author. It was only after I wrote another story set in Kashmir, “The Boy He Left Behind,” that I started to clue in to the fact that the region was operating as a powerful, though unconscious, muse and instead of resisting, I could choose to embrace her. It took me two years to write the stories in this collection, and another two years to polish and hone them.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">There is a beautifully engaging poetic sensibility in your writing. Who are some of your favourite poets? Do they influence your work?</span><br /><br />I fell in love with poetry after reading T. S. Eliot’s the Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock in high school. Poetry had always seemed to be such a serious and sombre affair, but Prufrock was different, a hilarious and salacious read -- a story about a man trying to get up his courage to enter a brothel. The fact that I, a young girl of colour, could in some way relate to his struggle, his indecision, showed me that poetry does not operate on the level of words or images alone, that there is something more mysterious at play. To me the best writing is writing that does not explain itself, and I think Prufrock is a poem that does not explain itself.<br /><br />Eliot’s famous lines, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas…” also taught me about the power of words to create memorable images, and I have been experimenting with that same self-consciously ironical voice ever since,.<br /><br />Other poets I have loved? Too many to name and I might get into trouble!<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">You seem to have great insight into the experiences and dilemmas of growing up between two cultures. Could you tell us a little about how you derived such insight?</span><br /><br />When I list my occupation on my tax form, I should check off “translator”! In the 60’s and 70’s inter-racial marriage was rare. My father was an Indian foreign student when he met and married my mother, a French-Canadian philosophy student. They decided to settle in Jammu, but the war over Kashmir pushed my family from India to Montreal and then to various parts of Toronto. In each place, I spent a great deal of time trying to translate one parent to the other or the outside world to the both of them, or myself to the outside world. I certainly felt that at times I was seen as, like my character May in “Only Child,” the Frankenstein heir of a praying mantis mating with a butterfly. I can’t tell you how many times in childhood my family and I have been the victims of, at its most benign, the “double take” — I remember someone actually running into pole while turning to look at us. Thankfully, living in cosmopolitan Toronto I no longer experience this level of curiosity.<br /><br />In fact, our cities have always been filled with people like me, people with stories of migrating between two or more cultures — from town to city or one country to another, from straight to gay communities, from a tightly knit religious environment to a secular urban one. We are all travellers trying to find a welcoming home somewhere.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The stories in this collection are filled with a broad range of memorable characters; did people from your own life influence the creation of these fictitious characters?</span><br /><br />Everything and everyone influences the development of characters in my writing, but I am fascinated by people who are struggling with powerful demons, perhaps because I feel myself inhabited by ghosts, devils, and mischievous gods. Struggle is what makes one human being in one part of the world able to empathize with another human being in a totally different part of the world, a Sherpa with no scrub for her sheep and goats to eat understandable to a single mom with no money for groceries.<br /><br />My characters are invented or composite characters, but if you go digging you might be able to make a claim that parts of a character resemble someone I have known or met in my life. You might even claim to find a piece of me in this collection. Would you be right in this claim? If truth is stranger than fiction, then fiction can often be much more evocative of real life. I hope that in my fictions, readers find truth and aspects of themselves in my characters, and that is what they fall in love with.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Which stories are you most ‘attached’ to? Did some feel more natural to write? Others more challenging?</span><br /><br />I feel most attached to the first and last story and then every story in between. Though each story is discrete and can be read as a complete story on its own, if you read it again you will start to notice that there is an overall story that arcs it way through the collection. Characters in the first story might reappear in other stories, so that readers will be able to follow the life of a character past the individual story in which they first appeared. In a way, you get two books for the price of one, each story adding other layers of both mystery and meaning to the collection. I think writing in this way made it easier for me to get over my grief at leaving a character when I dotted the last period of a story, because I got to journey with them for a little while longer.<br /><br />Although I love all of my characters, I have a special tenderness for outsider characters, characters such as the chemist in “The Boy He Left Behind,” who simply for being gay is shunned by his father. Or “bad” boys and girls, such as Mandir in "Honeymoon in Kashmir" who schemes not only to arrange a marriage with the daughter of the sweetshop owner next door but also to take over her business. Although I have never schemed to arrange a marriage or take over someone’s business, I certainly understand what drives Mandir — his loneliness, his ambition to correct what he perceives as a historical wrong, and his hunger for companionship. Most of all, I love characters who are not always conscious of what drives them, for example, the free-spirited but emotionally neglected Sadia who longs for the approval of her aunt in "The Mouser," and goes about getting it in all the wrong ways.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-5742577544984743665?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-61720232151505444822008-03-17T14:19:00.000-07:002008-03-18T11:29:53.033-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97g0jtxtjI/AAAAAAAAAEg/BfVQ9J9lr0E/s1600-h/TSAR-Chinese_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97g0jtxtjI/AAAAAAAAAEg/BfVQ9J9lr0E/s400/TSAR-Chinese_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178823815067711026" border="0" /></a>In this new collection, award-winning author Lien Chao weaves together nine emotionally charged short stories focusing on Chinese immigrants in Toronto’s multiracial neighbourhoods. In Chinatown and mixed neighbourhoods, in condos and tenements, in public parks and in college, the protagonists of these stories find love, face loneliness, confront generational crises, and overcome racial stereotypes as they evolve and grow in this exciting, ever-changing multicultural society.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97g-DtxtkI/AAAAAAAAAEo/AUWEoRVFZWk/s1600-h/LienChao.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97g-DtxtkI/AAAAAAAAAEo/AUWEoRVFZWk/s200/LienChao.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178823978276468290" border="0" /></a>LIEN CHAO has observed Chinese life through her work in the community as well as her interactions with Chinese immigrants in ESL classrooms. She came to Canada in 1984. Her first book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond Silence: Chinese Canadian Literature in English</span>, was published in 1997 and won the Gabrielle Roy Award for Canadian Criticism. Her works include <span style="font-style: italic;">Maples and the Stream</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">More Than Skin Deep </span>(poetry), <span style="font-style: italic;">Tiger Girl (Hu Nu)</span> (memoir), and <span style="font-style: italic;">Strike the Wok: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Canadian Fiction </span>(anthology).<br /><br />Published by TSAR Publications<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-6172023215150544482?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-7711624928860873192008-03-17T14:12:00.000-07:002008-03-18T11:29:15.095-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97fiTtxthI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/fygR5uvdFA4/s1600-h/KEG-Dried_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97fiTtxthI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/fygR5uvdFA4/s400/KEG-Dried_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178822402023470610" border="0" /></a>This collection of intertwined short stories shows the life of a young Ojibway woman as she struggles to find her place in society, within her relationships, and within her own body. In her exploration of different moments in her life, she also explores her relationships with her family, her people, and the people around her. Through observation and intense seeking, she breaks through her confusion and eventually, finds a voice that is her own-even if she does not yet recognize it. Ultimately, she discovers that she must look within herself to determine her outcome. That only by travelling homeward, to her roots at her reserve, can she find the path that leads to healing and rest.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97gFztxtiI/AAAAAAAAAEY/N1kyNgYW0Co/s1600-h/LesleyBelleauthumb.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97gFztxtiI/AAAAAAAAAEY/N1kyNgYW0Co/s200/LesleyBelleauthumb.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178823011908826658" border="0" /></a>LESLEY BELLEAU was born and raised in Garden River First Nation, located outside Sault Ste. Marie, ON. She is Ojibway, and holds an MA in Literature and Creative Writing. She writes fiction, poetry plays, and spoken word pieces. Her poetry and short stories have been published in <span style="font-style: italic;">Rampike Magazine</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Yellow Medicine Review</span>, and by Theytus Books. She is currently a faculty member at Algoma University.<br /><br />Published by Kegedonce Press<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-771162492886087319?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-9939333323192866602008-03-17T13:20:00.000-07:002008-03-18T10:33:45.354-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97T4ztxtLI/AAAAAAAAABg/WEZeVD4Y72g/s1600-h/ACORN-Shape_5in.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97T4ztxtLI/AAAAAAAAABg/WEZeVD4Y72g/s400/ACORN-Shape_5in.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178809594430993586" border="0" /></a>Lemm’s hard-living characters follow paths through relationships with family, friends, and lovers, discovering and crossing their limits as they try to find their way in the world. A man takes a chance on love after he encounters an exotic opera singer on an airplane. Two brothers face their own ghosts as they come to terms with their father’s death. A young man tries to live with his friends’ idea of justice after one of them crosses the line. The stories resonate long after the pages are closed, offering a fresh voice from one of Atlantic Canada’s finest poets.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97UBztxtMI/AAAAAAAAABo/l6gC-2WLYvs/s1600-h/Lemm_Richardcrop.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahyPffBDO8/R97UBztxtMI/AAAAAAAAABo/l6gC-2WLYvs/s200/Lemm_Richardcrop.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178809749049816258" border="0" /></a>RICHARD LEMM has been a faculty member at the Banff School of Fine Arts, and writer in residence and poetry instructor for various community colleges, libraries, school districts, and writing programs across the country. He is currently a professor of Canadian and English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Prince Edward Island. He is the author of several volumes of poetry, as well the biography, <span style="font-style: italic;">Milton Acorn: In Love and Anger</span>.<br /><br />Published by Acorn Press.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-993933332319286660?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-69658251090695056342008-03-17T09:47:00.000-07:002008-04-03T10:50:21.625-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">This is your first foray into fiction. How did you come up with the idea for this work? </span><br /><br />With short stories, obviously, there is no single idea. To backtrack a long way, when I began writing in a disciplined way in my late twenties, I was writing and publishing short stories as well as poetry. A fiction mentor (a novelist) challenged me to write a novel, and I did so, and secured an agent, and a half-dozen encouraging rejection notes, saying, “Let us see your next novel.” I grew faint of heart about fiction, since my poetry was being published with increasing frequency in journals and books. And I’d finished a Ph.D. and scored a full-time teaching gig at the University of Prince Edward Island. Poetry jived better with the demands of teaching in a small undergraduate university, and with my work for various writers’ associations. Call it dedication, and call it avoidance (fear of more rejection) of the fiction I did love to write.<br /><br />My poetry has strong narrative elements, and I’ve always loved telling stories. About ten years ago, on a holiday in Vancouver’s Sylvia Hotel near Stanley Park, I wrote my first short story, “The Gold Chev,” in over fifteen years. The idea was a young white man living in Seattle’s Central area, buys a gold ’55 Chev, but it’s a lemon and he has to sell it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What was the creative process like for you? </span><br /><br />I don’t write with “ideas” in mind. Stories (and poems) begin with a condensed “image” of an experience, a predicament. And often there’s a phrase or sentence that crystallizes it. I have to find out why, who they are, what is the “bone sticking in their craw” (as my bartender grandfather used to say), and what they’re going to do about it.<br /><br />One story began with an “image” of a young trendy couple sitting on their condo balcony overlooking English Bay in Vancouver, and the line, “Nicole was the one who suggested an open relationship, not me.” There followed an aurora borealis rushing through my mind of various people I’ve known who openly or not-so-honestly had affairs.<br /><br />With poetry, the first draft comes more slowly, and with a lot of psychic intensity. With fiction, the first draft flows with a smoother energy. I ran track in high school, the 400 and middle-distance. When I trained for the 400, we did a series of intense 300-metre sprints. That’s what poetry feels like. Training for longer distances, we did long runs, often along Lake Washington, and that’s fiction for me.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who did you read as a kid, and how did these first forays into reading fiction affect your sensibilities as a writer? </span><br /><br />There was a forgotten sub-genre of novel called “hot rod” novels, and I loved those. I devoured comic books, from <span style="font-style: italic;">Archie</span> to Classics Illustrated (especially <span style="font-style: italic;">Moby Dick</span>, which had a huge impact on me), which helped me do book reports at school. I honestly can’t remember most of what I read but I can vividly see myself waking at 5:30 on damp winter mornings to sit on the hallway heating vent in my pj’s, reading a novel before getting ready for school. I do remember reading, in addition to Zane Grey, books by Thomas B. Costain, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Ben-Hur</span>.<br /><br />I had an amazing great-grandmother, who died at age 99. I spent parts of my summers with her in her pioneer home on the Washington coast, where she lived until the day she died. She had books by Twain, Alcott, Dickens, Fenimore Cooper, and Poe. And I do remember reading aloud from those books, by kerosene lamp (Great-grandma had no electricity), to her.<br /><br />In my teens, I began reading books in the library of an African-American family in my neighbourhood. The Gaytons were part of a pioneer black family in Seattle. I found in their library novels by Frank Yerby, Willard Motley’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Knock on Any Door</span>, and Richard Wright’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Native Son</span>. The turning point in my future as a writer, was when I came down with the mumps in 11th grade. I lay in bed reading James Michener’s, <span style="font-style: italic;">Hawaii</span>, and it left me wondrous. I read Kyle Onstott's, <span style="font-style: italic;">Mandingo</span>. That book opened my eyes to another world I wanted to delve into. Then, the Gaytons’ oldest son, Tom, started giving me heady stuff: Nietzche, and H.L. Mencken, and James Baldwin. Another Gayton, a football teammate, introduced me to Russian fiction writers. Edna St. Vincent Millay was the poet I first fell in love with, and shortly thereafter Walt Whitman, Sandburg, Frost, Ferlinghetti, and Ginsburg.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What are you reading right now? </span><br /><br />Right now, I’m reading Amy Hempel, Lawrence Hill, Mary Karr, Eduardo Galeano, Kathy Page, Wayne Johnston, Chima Ngozi Adichi, Pankaj Misra, Jeannette Winterson, Anne Simpson, Don Domanski, Sue Sinclair.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How and where do you write?<br /><br /></span>In the cold months, I write in my study overlooking Charlottetown Harbour in PEI. In the summer, I write in my back yard or at Café Diem on Victoria Row in downtown Charlottetown, a street blocked off to traffic in summer and with sidewalk cafes, and with a small bandstand occupied all afternoon and evening by jazz combos. I also love to travel, and to write in outdoor cafes and pubs, whether it’s the Byward Market in Ottawa or a quayside taverna in Crete.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do you write with a certain audience in mind? Who is your “ideal reader”?</span><br /><br />I have no audience in mind when I write. But when I finish the draft of a story or poem, I do have several people in mind as my ideal readers. Most of them are writer-friends. But I also have in mind a few other people who are not writers, and that’s just as important. One of my main “ideal readers” and critics was a friend named Rick Arsenault. Rick is a log cabin builder. He is not much of a reader, preferring technical manuals. But he does play guitar and sings Stan Rogers songs beautifully, and he likes poetry when it comes his way. I always trusted Rick’s response to my poems. Now that my first book of short stories is out, I deeply appreciate the responses of readers who do not normally read fiction or poetry.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Name one person in your life who profoundly influenced your work, and why?</span><br /><br />I’ll single out Dr. Robert Grimm, in Portland, OR, who with his wife Nancy, became my chosen family. The Grimms are lovers of the arts; conservationists and naturalists; democratic activists; and wonderful story-tellers, whose home has been home to many amazing people, from poets to ornithologists. He did not directly influence my writing, but he influenced everything else about me. Now, he is about to publish his memoir, <span style="font-style: italic;">Neurology Works</span>. As for writing, the people who crucially influenced me early on were David Zieroth, Sandra Jones, W.O. Mitchell, Sylvia Fraser, and Alistair MacLeod.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who is your favourite protagonist in a work of fiction?</span><br /><br />For years, I’d answer this by saying Clea in Durrell’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Alexandria Quartet</span> and Mr. Toad in <span style="font-style: italic;">Wind in the Willows</span>. Lately, its Ada in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Poisonwood Bible</span>, Aminata Diallo in Lawrence Hill’s <span style="font-style: italic;">The Book of Negroes</span>, Kahu in <span style="font-style: italic;">Whale Rider</span>, and Lillian in Kate Grenville’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Lillian’s Story</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it. <br /><br /></span>“The Gold Chev” is the first story in my book. I grew up in Seattle, surrounded by interracial and intraracial class consciousness. The main character is a composite of some of the prejudice and suspicion I observed.<br /><br />Most of the other stories deal with love-and sex relationships. A woman who read the stories in manuscript said, “Wow, there’s a lot of sex here.” I was startled, and said, “No, there’s a lotta relationship stuff.” “Yeah,” she said, “but those relationships definitely do sex.”<br /><br />As I resumed writing short fiction, I did, in fact, become preoccupied with love/sex relationships. Maybe that’s the dominant “idea” in this collection. That preoccupation poured out into the fiction, and then spilled over into my recent poetry. My poetry has occasionally been called “political,” and that aspect of my writing appears in some of the stories in terms of social/economic class. I grew up lower-middle class, raised by a bartender and a logger’s daughter, and class consciousness was subtly and sometimes not so subtly present in my family. I emphasize class in my teaching, especially when I teach postcolonial literature, which is more class-conscious than Canadian lit. That’s another “idea” that percolates through some of my fiction.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-6965825109069505634?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-79018536482142789372008-03-03T11:26:00.000-08:002008-03-03T11:27:40.986-08:00Here’s where it all begins, for some of you folks. Here’s where we showcase upcoming Canadian talent, bringing you tomorrow’s great Canadian writers.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-7901853648214278937?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-92156504674228761312008-02-19T12:18:00.000-08:002008-04-10T12:38:40.596-07:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">This is your first foray into fiction. How did you come up with the idea for this work?<br /><br /></span>I came up with the idea for this work one piece at a time. Everything I wrote about had an underlying truth beneath the final work, which were sometimes relational in nature, sometimes painful, sometimes sensual. Each segment had a life truth that I felt some people may or may not relate to, but that all people could sense stirring. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What was the creative process like for you?<br /><br /></span>The creative process is always fascinating to me, as I never know what is going to pour forth until I begin writing. I am not a planner, but I am a passionate writer who hates to stop, even when morning calls, the phone rings or life insists. It felt natural, like a long run before daybreak, something that the soul and body needs.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who did you read as a kid, and how did these first forays into reading fiction affect your sensibilities as a writer?<br /><br /></span>I read anything I could get my hands on. My mother found three huge boxes of books at a garage sale (I can’t even remember the authors), but I read everything furiously until the boxes were empty and I had to go hunting for more.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">What are you reading right now?<br /><br /></span>I am reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Marquez.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">How and where do you write?<br /><br /></span> I write when my children fall asleep at night. I indulge during these quiet times with hot tea and a warm robe on.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Do you write with a certain audience in mind? Who is your “ideal reader”?<br /><br /></span>My ideal reader would be an audience who is hungry for real life, the sometimes impermanent, and often ugly and beautiful.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Name one person in your life who profoundly influenced your work, and why did you choose this person?<br /><br /></span>Tomson Highway profoundly influenced my work because he was never afraid to reveal the truth to his audience no matter how brutal or distasteful. In another light, he was so comfortable writing about sexuality and its impact (positive and negative) on society.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Who is your favourite protagonist in a work of fiction or poetry, and why?<br /><br /></span>My favourite protagonist in a work of fiction is Dinah from <span style="font-style: italic;">A Red Tent</span> because she is so rich and surrounded by mothers, yet motherhood is stolen from her and happiness is fought for and fought for until she holds it in her hand. She is persistent and gentle and almost forgotten until she screams her story out loud.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?<br /><br /></span>I am most attached to the unnamed protagonist (the main character) because she is strong without knowing it and can pull from her spiritual well a confidence and hope that is not only valuable, but reassuring. She brings a sensual element to the book that is stronger than her lack of confidence and fears, that brings a connective element of the spiritual and physical and emotional and winds them together beautifully.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it.<br /><br /></span>The overarching theme of my work is the tenacity of my people, specifically Native women in Canada. I felt compelled to explore it, besides the fact that I am a Native woman, because of the issues and struggles that are within our lives commonly. Native women are the strongest women I know and pull strength from their community, each other, the wisdom of our grandmothers, and mostly from our Creator. I find that our woman are resilient, are warriors and not the victims that are portrayed/stereotyped often in society and must be seen as such. Though I approach issues such as alcoholism, drug abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, these do not weaken my characters; they express the strength that will be used to pull through these things.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-9215650467422876131?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-4710770022432337362008-02-17T11:56:00.000-08:002008-04-17T12:11:24.472-07:00From: Elysium &amp; Other Stories by Pamela Stewart<br />Anvil Press, Spring 2008<br />ISBN: 1-89563-691-4<br /><br />The doctor comes. Everyone leaves the room and he can’t tell how much time has passed, but it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. The doctor leaves.<br /><br />It is night because it is dark and Rose is in the bed. She wanted to sleep on the cot next to the bed but he wants her there even if it causes pain.<br /><br />“Let me rest my head on you,” he says. “Oh, that’s your breastless side.”<br /><br />“Breathless?” she feigns. “Yes. You still leave me breathless.”<br /><br />“No. I mean...”<br /><br />“I know. It was supposed to be the other way around,” she says. “I was supposed to go first.”<br /><br />He touches his hand to the scar and around her remaining breast. “Thank God it wasn’t.”<br /><br />“I am space and time encased in skin. I am. Don’t tell me I’m not,” he says when he wakes up in the middle of the night.<br /><br />“I know you are.”<br /><br />“Take off our clothes.”<br /><br />She fumbles under the covers. It takes a long time.<br /><br />Everything falls away. The one-night-stand he had when he was forty-five with a younger woman. He was out of town at a conference. Rose had not been feeling sexual for a while. Drinks, a stranger, a hotel room and he slipped. One time. He felt as if he had lost a part of himself with that woman and could never get it back. A strange strangling dark thing held him for days but he did not tell Rose. He did not come home with flowers. He was cold to her for a while as if he blamed her, and then one night she fell asleep in front of the television and he woke up alone in bed and realized how much he loved her. He went out to the living room and sat on the floor and looked at her face illuminated by the glow of a television preacher and then lifted her and carried her into bed.<br /><br />The policeman at the door telling them their son had been killed in a car accident. The decision to divide his body as gifts to others who were dying.<br /><br />The time he lost his job and didn’t tell her for two weeks. Dressing for work everyday and spending the day looking for a job then sitting at the library.<br /><br />The month after their youngest daughter left home, and Rose checked into a motel because she didn’t know how to be anything except a mother, and he was neglecting her as a wife. A cheap motel, because she didn’t want to spend the money. She left him a note and told him she was okay so he wouldn’t think something bad had happened to her.<br /><br />He still believes she had an affair but chose to forgive her. She was alone for three days and in that time watched television, knit him a sweater, and filled two notebooks with her fears about growing old and not knowing what to do with her life. When she came home, he took her to the Royal York. They had room service and champagne, though they couldn’t really afford it.<br />She holds him and listens to his breathing.<br /><br />Then he falls away from her. His father and mother lay naked on the bed. He sits between them, eight months old.<br /><br />The boy reaches for his father’s penis with his tiny hand. They laugh and his father picks the boy up and puts him in his crib. He watches them make love. He is inside his mother’s womb and his father holds her tight.<br /><br />He is in God’s eye.<br /><br />God looks down and he drops out like a tear. The tear lands on Rose’s face as she kisses him goodbye.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-471077002243233736?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-25987744885446380432008-02-17T10:20:00.000-08:002008-04-17T11:10:59.335-07:00Excerpt from Things Go Flying by Shari Lapeña<br />ISBN: 1897142307<br />(Brindle &amp; Glass, 2008)<br /><br /> He stared fixedly at his bedroom window, and suddenly he remembered exactly what it was like—forty years simply fell away—to sit cross legged on his single bed, with its old brown chenille bedspread, trying to read. He remembered the smell of the pages of his Hardy Boys books—how he loved them!—and how there was never quite enough light from the lamp on the wall above his bed because it couldn’t take more than a forty watt bulb. When he looked up from his place on the bed he could see the branches of the tree outside his bedroom window. But he tried not to look up; he tried to lose himself in the safe and familiar world of Frank and Joe Hardy—those brave boys. They were so much braver than he was. But then, they had only practical, tangible mysteries to deal with.<br /> <br />Harold now remembered one particular evening. He remembered sitting on his bed with his book, and the dreaded sound of the front door opening, and his mother’s voice, blending with another woman’s. Then he heard them go into the front room, and heard the doors shut firmly behind them. It was quiet for a long time, as if his mother wasn’t having any luck, and then Harold heard the chandelier begin to shake, and he had to start back at the beginning of his paragraph.<br /><br /> “What’s that awful smell?” he heard the woman’s voice cry, clear as a bell.<br /><br /> His mother murmured something in response. Then the knocking began in the room downstairs, and keys were slammed on the piano, as if a fist had been brought down forcefully and repeatedly on the keys—from the higher octaves to the lower—which had a very dramatic effect.<br /><br /> The woman’s voice rang out into the sudden silence, “I don’t think that’s my husband!”<br /> Next Harold heard the doors to the front room flung back so violently that they crashed against the wall behind. Heavy footsteps—like those of a large man in work boots—ran out of the room and up the uncarpeted stairs, and Harold almost fainted with fear. The footsteps reached the landing, and then thundered up and past his bedroom door and up the narrow flight of stairs to the third floor, where they suddenly stopped.<br /><br /> Harold heard the front door being wrestled open and the woman gasping, “Ahhhhh, Ahhhhh,” to herself as she fled out the door and down the short walk. Harold, who’d scrambled off his bed and backed away from his bedroom door until his back was up against the window, turned his head and looked out. He saw the woman—whom he now identified as Mrs. Mohan, a neighbour—run out into the cold dark night and down the street. She’d left her coat behind.<br /><br /> When his mother had come up to check on him, she’d asked him if he’d mind returning Mrs. Mohan’s coat the next morning before school. He’d left it on her front porch when she wouldn’t come to the door, even though she’d heard his knock. Harold knew, because he saw her peeking out the curtains.<br /><br /> Funny how he’d forgotten all about it until now, but there were big gaps in Harold’s memory. And since that was a fairly striking and memorable event, he wondered how it was that he’d forgotten all about it.<br /><br /> There’d been enough drama in that house to mark a life.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-2598774488544638043?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-68262617841993200662008-02-17T10:16:00.000-08:002008-04-17T10:20:31.311-07:00Excerpt from "Thursday" from <span style="font-style: italic;">Squishy</span> by Arjun Basu<br />ISBN: 1-89719-036-0 / (DC Books, 2008)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Thursday</span><br /><br />Someone says, “Maybe, but not now.”<br /> <br /> Someone else says, “That means he owes you nothing.”<br /><br /> There are men here, deep under the city, but the audible voices are all of women. There’s some kind of message in that, surely, a sociological truth, except that I have yet to eat breakfast and the symbolism is lost on me.<br /><br /> The meaning of life only comes to those with sustenance. Didn’t the Buddha figure this out? Isn’t that why he’s so palatable to the middle class?<br /><br /> Between stations, the subway’s lights flicker and in that split second half of us are thinking Al Qaeda and if that isn’t a victory for them I don’t know what is.<br /><br /> The train pulls into the station and bodies are exchanged. Germs move around. Jump hosts. Different strands of DNA. Constant mitosis.<br /><br /> The fashion changes. A pack of teenagers board, three black kids and a Latino, and you can sense everyone clutching their handbags, moving over, trying desperately to ignore them, the knowledge that their feelings are both unfair and possibly racist, but also a matter of survival. There’s history in the flinch, the hesitation. Lessons learned during a long and systemic education.<br /><br /> The kids are well behaved despite the fact their pants start half way down their asses. I have yet to figure out the physics of these things. Nothing makes me feel older than hip hop jeans. Not even the parade of starlets on the covers of the gossip magazines, or the fact that so many magazines like that exist, or that CNN now quotes those magazines to announce their own breaking news. I once heard a story about a kid running from the cops and tripping over his own pants. There was a lesson in there for everyone but mostly for the arbiters of fashion who I have figured out don’t read the papers. Ever.<br /><br /> The subway smells of fried foods, of a moldy type thing that in any other situation would offend as unhealthy. Body odors. Newsprint. French fries squished underfoot. The science of dirt must have a lot of interesting things to say about subway odors. The science of dirt.<br /><br /> This morning, in my haste to get to the doctor quickly, I neglected the following: my morning coffee; brushing my teeth; reading the sports pages; taking in the days’ forecast. My ignorance of everything I need to know, combined with the fuzzy feeling coating my teeth, has rendered me numb. My ignorance is an odd shame, like your parents walking in on you and your girlfriend, naked on the floor, only because you once gave them the keys to the house, and no one ever discusses it again but it has happened and it becomes that unspoken thing that everyone remembers. Always. That’s what all family conversations are: tip toeing around the unspoken. I picked up a coffee at the corner deli and it burned the roof of my mouth. I didn’t dress warmly enough.<br /><br /> The doctor thing is nothing serious, simply a regular check-up. The joys of employment. Of a good benefits package.<br /><br /> When I was twelve, and still seeing a pediatrician, my mother watched as the doctor examined a stool sample, poking at my crap with a wooden stick. I can’t even shit in my parents’ house now for fear of my mother reliving that experience. And then telling everyone about it. There is nothing more humiliating than a stranger examining your stool. The intimacy is too much.<br /> Another stop and an unequal exchange of bodies means the teenagers find places to sit. Each of them bops their head about to the beat in their earbuds. The train moves forward and then stops suddenly and then starts up again. Heads bob and none of them<br />are in synch with the teenage heads. Breakfast would feel good right now. A light breakfast. Granola with yogurt. Some juice. An unhurried coffee. My morning won’t really start until I get some acceptable coffee inside of me.<br /><br /> There is no excuse for bad coffee. Anywhere. Not in this century.<br /><br /> A pregnant woman takes the seat next to me. She wears dark glasses, the kind that hides either abuse or some kind of visual impairment. How do you ask someone if they are blind or not? How do you ask a perfect stranger, “what’s wrong?” Or, “how did you get this way?” I mean in the real world and not on the Internet. Would the world be more civil if we could jump-start conversations without dancing our way to the inevitable questions? Civility is just another way of getting in trouble. It’s when we most say what we don’t mean.<br /><br /> Someone says, “I can’t live like this anymore.”<br /><br /> Someone else says, “Where does it say he can be this way?”<br /><br /> And then the train stops. It comes to a slow, gentle stop in the middle of the tunnel. I check my watch and realize something else I forgot to do this morning. I hear variations on expressions of exasperation. Now you can hear the male voices. “What the fuck?” I hear.<br /><br /> “Fucking hell.”<br /><br /> “Oh, fuck.”<br /><br /> Complaints bring out the baritones.<br /><br /> The train stays stopped. Shuffling. The futility of a cellphone inside a subway tunnel. The four teenagers debate the reasons for the stoppage in that loud, indifferent way teenagers have; everyone can hear their conversation. Would that teenagers were halfway eloquent.<br /><br /> The lights go out. And now that Al Qaeda feeling becomes something profound and palpable. As much as we don’t want to admit to this, as much as we want to show the lengths of our courage, we think these things. When the slightest thing goes wrong in a public space, one of the possibilities that races through the mind is a fresh attack, a new atrocity, another unspeakable act that adds something astonishing to our vocabulary. The collective mind. One can feel that everyone else feels it. Possibility as electricity. That thought is now also what makes us New Yorkers. I imagine there are other places in the world where similar thoughts occur, similar glimpses into a very specific kind of denouement. We are not so special in this sense.<br /><br /> And then the lights flicker and then they are on again and then the train lurches forward and everyone loses their balance and then we pick up speed and those lurid thoughts of fires and people falling through the air and the smoke and flesh and computer parts and office stationary vanish and are replaced by smiles of relief to more than one face. Happy thoughts.<br /><br /> We smile when we are embarrassed and when we are frightened and when we are happy. Does that mean there is not much difference between the three? Or does that just note the social taboo against punching?<br /><br /> The train pulls into another station and the teenagers get off and two girls get on, each over six feet tall. They are so thin they hardly occupy the horizontal plane. They’re all vertical these two. And one of them plays with her gum and says, “Can you believe it?” and the other one replies: “Assholes” to which the first one replies, “I hate them” and that’s all they say.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-6826261784199320066?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-43000818650534324242008-02-17T09:40:00.000-08:002008-04-17T10:13:13.682-07:00Excerpt from Fly on the Wall by Jason Brink / Illustrated by Jim Westergard<br />ISBN: 1550228161 / (ECW Press, 2008)<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >The Jail Visit</span><br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SAeBhXIiJGI/AAAAAAAAAHw/hws3o5Z3RJw/s1600-h/Jail.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SAeBhXIiJGI/AAAAAAAAAHw/hws3o5Z3RJw/s400/Jail.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5190259505713259618" border="0" /></a> The fly flits against the glass partition separating the little girl from the convict.<br /><br />The convict picks up the telephone receiver on his side and motions for the little girl to do the same. The fly lands on her receiver as she puts it to her ear.<br /><br />“Where’s your mom?” he asks.<br /><br />“Waiting in the car.”<br /><br />“She’s mad at me, isn’t she? Did she get my message?”<br /><br />The little girl shrugs.<br /><br />“I need you to do me a favour, squirt. When you get home I need you to go out to the woodpile<br />behind the garage and get the thermos tucked behind the biggest log at the bottom right hand corner. You know your right from left?”<br /><br />The little girl nods.<br /><br />“Show me.”<br /><br />She lifts her right hand. The convict smiles.<br /><br />“Okay, you’re gonna take the thermos over to Uncle Jack’s and tell him to bail me out, okay?”<br /><br />The little girl smiles.<br /><br />“Uncle Jack and Mommy already found the thermos. Uncle Jack says when they get back from Las Vegas we can live with him and I can get a budgie. Can I keep the thermos, or do you want me to put it back behind the woodpile?”<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The Falcon</span><br /><br /></span></div><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SAeBKXIiJFI/AAAAAAAAAHo/wHHFJzYVSvY/s1600-h/Eagle.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SAeBKXIiJFI/AAAAAAAAAHo/wHHFJzYVSvY/s400/Eagle.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5190259110576268370" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span>The fly straddles the beak of the peregrine falcon perched on the fence outside the barn.<br /></div><br />A monotone, scholarly voice lectures from the ghetto blaster on top of a nearby fencepost:<br /><blockquote> Prior to flight it is imperative that you find and retain access to a suitable and reasonably convenient area for flying your raptor. Accipiters, also known as short-winged hawks, should be flown in the enclosed wooded areas that comprise their natural habitat, while falcons, or long-winged hawks, require open space, no less than one mile across, where they may be flown from a position high over the falconer. Once again, apprentice falconers are strongly advised not to attempt a hunt without the direct supervision of their sponsor or a certified master falconer. That concludes lesson four: “Establishing an Effective Training Regiment and Work Area for Your Raptor.”<br /> Now that you’ve successfully leashed and tethered your raptor, and introduced him or her to their intended work area you’re 10 ready for lesson five: “Prepping Your Raptor for Flight, the Stoop and the Kill.” When you’re ready, please insert lesson five into your player and we’ll begin. In the meantime . . . happy hawking!</blockquote>As the lesson ends, the falcon shifts its weight to its bare leg, then shakes the bell strapped above its anklet on the other leg.<br /><br />On the ground below, still holding the leather leash and the other bell, lies the dead falconer, one eye shredded recklessly from its socket and his jugular drained by a single talon slash.<br /><br />The fly leaves though the falcon remains perched on the fence and the instructional CD loops back to the beginning.<br /><blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>Hello, and welcome to lesson four. . . .<br /><br /></blockquote><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-4300081865053432424?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-17490910662004000412008-02-17T09:37:00.000-08:002008-04-17T10:16:05.507-07:00Excerpt from A Week of This by Nathan Whitlock<br />ISBN: 1550228153<br />(ECW Press, 2008)<br /><br />Manda liked to make clear how awful she thought the place had become – how awful he’d let it become. “This used to be a cool little apartment,” she’d tell him. She hardly ever came over anymore, and when she did, she couldn’t help but condemn it.<br /><br />“This is why your mom doesn’t come around. She thinks it’s full of mold and doesn’t want to get sick from it.”<br /><br />“She doesn’t like the stairs,” Marcus countered sleepily. “She doesn’t give a shit how the place smells – her house is like an ashtray, you know that. She just can’t get up the stairs easy. She almost went down on her back a couple times.”<br /><br />Marcus’s hair flopped down over his forehead like an omelette. He didn’t get up.<br /><br />“She told me that, too,” Manda said. She pulled at the living room window, and her fingernails crunched the baked corpses of wasps and flies. The window wouldn’t budge.<br /><br />“It smells dead,” she added. “Do these windows even open?”<br /><br />“Not usually.”<br /><br />“Oh, but wait!” Manda said suddenly, and out she went while Marcus hid himself further under his blanket. He was sure she would bring in some new thing for her house, and he was so sick of looking at chairs and paint samples. Instead, she walked back in with her whole upper half magically transformed into a plant.<br /><br />“Move all that,” she said from behind the thing’s leaves. She bent her knees in the direction of the trunk he used as a coffee table. Manda flopped the plant on the trunk and stepped back without taking her eyes off it. “For <span style="font-style: italic;">colour</span>,” she said in a serious tone, as if colour were something he was being rewarded for, like bravery. “You need some green in here.”<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-1749091066200400041?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-40932412192049692332008-02-16T07:44:00.000-08:002008-04-23T07:49:13.648-07:00Writing about writing is too meta for me. Writers have been writing about writing forever, of course – it’s the ultimate in the “write what you know” school of writing (let’s see how many times I can, um, write this word in this missive) but it’s not one I subscribe to. Some of this kind of meta works: Doug Coupland’s <span style="font-style: italic;">The Gum Thief</span> is a good example of an entertaining book about a writer writing a book. That Coupland also satirizes the process and the result in the same book – in a kind of book within a book (which means he has a writer writing about writing writing about writing) – probably enhanced the novel for me: I knew he was having fun poking fun at himself.<br /><br />OK, enough with these elliptical sentences.<br /><br />My book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Squishy</span>, comes out soon. Next week hopefully. I say hopefully to acknowledge the vagaries of small press publishing and because it is a fervent wish: the book’s still at the printer. The book has no stories about writers writing. It has stories about would-be starlets and everyday people caught up with their own humiliations (meaning they could have been writers, I suppose – who knows humiliation more intimately than a writer, after all?). There are a lot of office folk in the book. So in this sense, I’m in the “write what you know” school.<br /><br />My day so far: looking after my son after he had sprained his ankle. Walking to work – and as I write this I am once again thankful that I can say I walk to work. It’s a 10-minute walk. Lucky me. And then a meeting. With about 18 people. A short meeting but a meeting nonetheless. Is there anyone in the world who enjoys meetings? I think one of my characters asks that question in the book.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Squishy</span> is a collection of 14 short stories. Some are set in Montreal (where I live); one is set in New York. One in LA. One in India. The rest are kind of placeless though if you read carefully enough, they are probably set in Montreal. One contains a rant about the highway between Toronto and Montreal, one of the world’s most boring expanses of asphalt.<br /><br />Over the next two days, I’m going to be updating this blog – hey, look Ma, I’m blogging! – but a big theme, I can tell, will be this: anticipation. My book is launching on May 4 at Montreal’s Blue Met Literary Festival. And then there’s a reading with other Fiery First Fiction writers at the great Casa del Popolo on The Main just south of St. Joseph on May 5. I can’t wait to get this book out there. But first, I’d just settle for getting the darned thing in my hands. And then I’ll know it’s real.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-4093241219204969233?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-68181259478224495552008-02-15T12:04:00.000-08:002008-04-25T12:07:36.164-07:00There’s a school of critical thought that insists that the writer is the teller of the story, that the author speaks directly to the reader through the story. Richard Kearney, the Irish philosopher and critic, defines narrative as somebody saying something to somebody about something. I believe this to be true, that the author is speaking to the reader through the story. However, I would add to this that the author is not the teller of the tale; that the teller mediates between the reader and the author. <br /><br />Let me elaborate. I view the writer and the teller of the tale as two different persons. I remember coming to this realization back in my mid twenties when I was reading Henry Miller. I’d always assumed that the narrator in the books was Miller, but then one day I heard him talking about his first person narrator as a created character. From that point on I began shaping my personal view on the relationship between writer and story. <br /><br />Rather than speaking generally about writing, let me personalize my view by saying that all my stories have a teller who is someone other than me. Each of my stories is seen through the eyes of a teller who is unique to that story. By “eyes” I am talking about the physical perspective, but I also refer to a consciousness through which the story is filtered. The teller of the tale knows the story as a result of some form of personal experience: he has lived a part of it, or heard of it or has been affected by it. But how could he have lived it if it is fictive? And who would he have heard it from if not from fictive characters who populate the story? That means that the narrator — the teller — that I am referring to is, himself, fictive.<br /><br />This sounds like beer talk. Let me explain how it works with specific reference to my writing. When I start thinking about a new story it’s a result of having gotten a hunch about something; that is, I feel a story brewing. What I do then is try to get a feel for what this nascent story is about and who it is happening to. This all happens in my head. But I find that I still can start the writing of it unless I know who the teller is, how well he knows the story, and what sort of take he has on it. I’d have to say the teller is probably the first character I get to know because it is through his eyes that I get to see the story.<br /><br />What I am saying is that I don’t sit down to write some story I’ve already got in my head. I see a vague image of something and need to get a clearer view of it. But I cant get to know it first hand because it is all fictive, doesn’t exist. Therefore I need someone who lives in this fictive existence to help me see the story. I need this other set of eyes. These are the eyes of the teller. As I get to know who this teller is, I come to see his relationship to the story. As I come to understand this, I come to see what the story is about, who it affects and how it might unfold.<br /><br />You could say I construct the teller as if he were another character; but the spooky thing about the fictive character is that he has a foot in the fictive world of the story and a foot in my world. As such he is able to mediate between me and the story. And also mediate between the reader and the story.<br /><br />Sometimes, I chose to make this teller of the tale obvious — a character as obviously fictive as Augie March or Huck Finn. Other times I don’t give him a name, and leave his personality undefined by any self-consciousness on his part. In these instances the teller is almost invisible. Nevertheless, he’s always there. Like Waldo, you’ve got to look for him.<br /><br />Now, when I read a story I always try to get to know the fictive teller. And I feel by doing that I enter more deeply into the fictive world that exists between the front and back covers.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-6818125947822449555?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-488368869923985062008-02-15T08:05:00.000-08:002008-04-23T08:06:30.720-07:00What passes for information? Today I’ve Googled “London train stations,” “Bombay train stations,” (no, I’m not writing about trains, but am researching “transport hubs”) “karate,” “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” “the Stans” (as in the countries of central Asia) and “plastic.” These are the Googles I remember. I’m sure I’ve searched for more today.<br /><br />I learned today that my son has an ankle sprain. He’s on crutches for a few days, delaying the start of his soccer season tomorrow. Last year, I shredded my ankle, tearing all the ligaments, and went from crutches to what I called an “ankle bra” and then a thick sock. When the accident occurred, the pain was absolutely tremendous, the kind of pain that makes one hallucinate and recoil and ill. Seeing my son’s little sprained ankle brought all that back to me. I can feel a twinge in my ankle right now. Information.<br /><br />There’s a passage in one of my stories: Ignorance may be bliss but it sure isn’t fun. That’s the character talking. I think ignorance in this day and age is kind of interesting. It’s almost a luxury. Yes, ignorance can lead to awful, hurtful things. Don’t get me wrong. But I kind of like the thought of not knowing. We live in information overload. Not knowing is an idea with a certain appeal.<br /><br />When I was writing my book, and I suppose this is true of all writers, the blank pages in my notepad were pages of possibility, pages of potential, scrims of ignorance waiting for the information. The Information. After the day I’ve spent, in meetings (I had three long meetings today), working, Googling “London train stations,” not knowing is bourbon at the end of a long day. I’m a big fan of bourbon.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-48836886992398506?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-54697290623964815672008-02-15T07:56:00.000-08:002008-04-30T08:06:51.642-07:00To pick up on something Tricia said about when those books first arrive, and being afraid of typos… I know what you mean! You proof it, your people proof it, and you think it must be perfect, and I’m here to tell you, it probably isn’t. But that’s ok, because probably all books have the odd typo, and it doesn’t wreck the book. Unless it’s something like “pubic” instead of “public”. Actually, I have a few editor friends, and one told me a funny story about mixing it up the other way—it was a book about puberty and the typo was “public” for “pubic,” so there you go. One of those copyediting friends found a couple of typos in my book, and yes, part of the reason I’d love to go into reprints is to fix those typos!<br /><br />One funny thing that happened when my books arrived—a very exciting moment, savour it!—was that my six-year-old daughter picked out the first one, saw the dedication page (it was dedicated to my husband) and pulled out book after book, checking them all and bursting into tears because none of them were dedicated to her! You can probably imagine to whom I will dedicate my next book.<br /><br />And yes, it’s unsettling at first, to see your words go out and actually get read. Especially if you don’t have a history of publishing short stories, which I don’t, so you don’t have the chance to get used to it gradually. You work for years and then you send out your book and it’s a bit like opening your raincoat to strangers when you’re buck naked underneath. And then you get used to it, and if the response to the book is good, you kind of get to like it, and find you actually want to open your raincoat to strangers…<br /><br />Of course, we all Google ourselves all the time, it’s like an illness. There should be a name for it. Why don’t we think of one? Authorgooglitis? Obsessive Compulsive Googling Disorder? Wait till you start tracking your numbers on Amazon…that way madness lies.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-5469729062396481567?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-11392042471605764932008-02-15T07:45:00.000-08:002008-04-28T07:52:49.239-07:00I’m embarrassingly old to be having a first book. Like a long-barren woman who miraculously conceives, stretch marks triumphantly claiming her dry, wrinkled skin.<br /><br />When I started writing fiction six years ago and workshopping stories online, I closely guarded my age. No anecdotes about adorable grandkids in chat rooms. I didn’t want younger writers dismissing my work out of hand. It took time for me to trust them, to feel comfortable slipping in the odd reference to the ‘50s and ‘60s. I needed the anonymity of the ‘Net to gradually unveil first my writing and then myself.<br /><br />That’s all about to change with the publication of <span style="font-style: italic;">Silent Girl</span>. I’m scheduled for five readings, possibly seven, in May. Readings that – oh no – strangers will attend. Strangers who might speculate about the black hole of those years leading up to this one and wonder why I couldn’t get a book published before now.<br /><br />Our culture celebrates youth. CNN has a blog called Young People Who Rock—interviews with people under 30. Granta publishes a list of the 21 Best Writers Under 35. And then there’s the 30 Under 30 Awards for journalism and the worldwide Young President’s Organization. The pressure is on to “make it” as early as possible. A talented woman who’s dear to me said she didn’t want to celebrate her recent 38th birthday because she hadn’t “done enough.”<br /><br />“Are you sorry you didn’t start writing when you were younger?” my daughter asked.<br /><br />“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t have had those stories in me then.” It’s true. I wouldn’t have understood at any but a surface level the oppression and drive for freedom I give words to in <span style="font-style: italic;">Silent Girl</span>. Besides, I seemed to have needed to get other things out of the way first: Getting married and birthing children. Divorcing and marrying again, divorcing and marrying again. Breaking through the corporate glass ceiling. Proving whatever it was I had to prove to myself.<br /><br />A well-known Vancouver author wrote to me recently, “It's better to start publishing with a little less dew on the on the petals. You've got something real to say now.”<br /><br />I sure hope that’s true.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-1139204247160576493?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-45405509355305254362008-02-14T10:24:00.000-08:002008-05-23T12:46:13.906-07:00JIM WESTERGARD<br /><br />In 2005, during a conversation with Jason Brink, he asked if I would consider working with him on an idea for a book he had been developing. He had seen some of my wood engravings of insects and he had been thinking of writing a series of extremely short stories, centered around the phrase “wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall during that conversation?” I liked the idea immediately and was on board before seeing the first story. A few days later I had three or four of Jason’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Fly on the Wall</span> stories to read and couldn’t wait to start on some drawings. His stories were charged with visual stimuli.<br /><br />A book takes a circuitous and complicated route as it is born. My first book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Mother Goose Eggs, sunnyside up</span>, took four years to finish. It was a self-printed (letterpress) and self-published book (later published in soft cover by Porcupine Quill Press). The four-year birthing of that book was the result of having to learn type-setting and book design “on the job” and there was a point prior to binding when I decided to redesign and reprint the book, to get it right.<br /><br />Jason sent “Fly” stories to me by e-mail. If I had some issues or concerns about a story I would send a message back or call on the phone and sometimes we would agree the story should be re-written. I would work on a sketch or two or three and scan them and send them to him. A similar discussion on email or phone would follow until the sketch worked for both of us. Then I would do the pen and ink drawing. There were also times when the finished drawing just did not work and needed to be re-drawn. There was a point where the supply of stories slowed, so to keep the ball moving I did a drawing and sent it to Jason. He either wrote a story, motivated by the drawing (example: Church Council which I created visualizing a court scene), or said he just couldn't come up with something (example: a drawing of a fly on an ornately framed painting in a museum), or the drawing didn't fit the tenor of the other stories (example: Jurassic Fly which depicts a fly on a dinosaur's eyelid). There were, I think, about 6 or 8 drawings, which spawned stories.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-4540550935530525436?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-32710578457595800032008-02-14T08:40:00.000-08:002008-05-23T12:43:23.052-07:00JASON BRINK<br /><br />I love the quote I’m about to bastardize, and I have no idea who said it, but hopefully somebody else might and I can give credit where credit is due. “Writing is easy. You just sit in front of a blank page until your forehead bleeds.”<br /><br />When I went through the Creative Writing program at Uvic, a great writer and fiction prof of mine, Bill Valgardson, would start each writing class with what he called his “daily affirmations”. I’ll stop using quotes after this, I promise. One of the most memorable of his daily affirmations, perhaps because it did not resonate with me at all, was: “Writing is easy and fun for me.” I know, I know – another quote. I lied. I’m a writer. Get used to it.<br /><br />I guess the idea was that we could speak these affirmations to ourselves each morning while we brushed our teeth, or at our desks as we dabbed the blood from our foreheads with said blank pages, to stay positive, focused and survive the inherent challenges in being writers. The truth is, writing is NOT easy and fun for me. I wish it was, and I know it is for some, but for me, writing is the hardest thing I do, and in terms of fun it ranks somewhere below scraping burnt cheese off a casserole dish and passing a kidney stone.<br /><br />For me, the fun part of writing are those initial flashes of unadulterated brilliance that formulate in my brain and then inevitably get lost in translation when I try and convert them into words. I suspect most writers are better at this conversion than I am, and perhaps with practice and more daily affirmations I’ll better develop this skillful art, but for now, I’m most enjoying this time after the writing is done. This is easy and fun for me. People buying me drinks, others trying creative ways to finagle free books from me, me practicing my author signature before signings and trying to think of cool boiler plate inscriptions I can write for people I don’t know who might actually buy the book. All of this is gravy, and I wish I could milk it forever. But I know I’m already approaching minute fifteen and that an actual career in this masochistic field requires a plethora of blood-soaked blank pages, so as a means of coping, I’ve made a slightly modified affirmation for myself that I’m happy to share with any other writer who may benefit from it: “Writing is hard and painful for me…but I’m still gonna do it.” And I will.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-3271057845759580003?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-26963670684781596822008-02-14T08:07:00.000-08:002008-04-30T08:12:19.046-07:00This is probably a bit presumptuous of me, but here goes—what I’ve learned about book publishing so far, or, my advice for new writers:<br /><br />Be persistent. Be realistic. Publishing a book probably isn’t going to change your life, but it can be very satisfying. I remember hearing Helen Humphreys say once, that you just keep reaching a higher level of rejection, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. You think you’ve got it made when you get an agent, because it’s so difficult to get an agent, but then, it’s even harder to get a publisher, and then it’s even harder to get the book buyer’s attention in the book store, and to get the attention of the reviewers and so on. These are very hard times for writers, I think.<br /><br />I remember one of the more memorable rejections I’ve ever had—it was something like, “Thank you, but we’ve gone bankrupt.”<br /><br />Also, growing up in a dysfunctional family is good preparation for a novelist.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-2696367068478159682?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-21670091171474290072008-02-14T07:52:00.000-08:002008-04-29T14:10:02.074-07:00What if I missed a typo? I proofread those galleys so thoroughly I can recite most of the stories by heart. My husband proofread them. The editor proofed them and hired a professional reader, too. All of us found different things. Is that good or bad?<br /><br />What if I spot an error when my copies of the book arrive this week? Will it be like finding a cigarette burn on a new table or a wine stain on a favourite sweater? Will the book feel ruined to me?<br /><br />What if other people find a typo and don’t tell me? I still recall the error I found nearly thirty years ago while a communications flak for an insurance company. The woman who edited the policyholder magazine was meticulous about proofreading. She had just dropped the latest issue off at my desk when I let out a little, involuntary gasp.<br /><br />“What?” she demanded.<br /><br />“Nothing,” I said.<br /><br />“Tell me!”<br /><br />She’d reprinted the words to the Simon and Garfunkel song “Old Friends” on the cover. Except it read “Old Fiends.” She never forgave me for spotting that. In a meeting later that week she referred to me as “Miss Eagle Eye in her prison suit.” (I thought that navy pinstripe number of mine was quite smart.)<br /><br />A friend who just learned her book is going into second printing is happier about being able to correct typos than she is about the brisk sales. I can relate.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-2167009117147429007?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-32007227675946256292008-02-13T12:01:00.000-08:002008-04-25T12:02:24.078-07:00You create words and you put them together and you hope they mean something. You hope they sound good together. You hope one word leads to the next and that one sentence leads to the next and that the end result of all these words is something that changes things if only a little. You hope that the reader reads these strings of words and comes out of the experience changed. You hope these words tells the reader something about what it means to be alive.<br /><br />That’s the hope.<br /><br />So when Squishy gets published soon, that’s what I hope. I hope I have connected with the reader reading words I’ve put together and that this connection changes the reader in somehow, however slight that change may be.<br /><br />It’s been a long road. Not as long as my novel (not published, but kind of looking for a publisher) but long, with lots of hard work, lonely moments. I learned things. About myself. About the world. About others. Writing a book is a profound thing, an act of creation that seems completely silly when you stop to think about it. The arrogance of the writer!<br /><br />No one writes because they want to but because they have to. It’s an itch you have to scratch. Well, I scratched. And that in itself is satisfying. That I managed to publish a book out of that scratch seems like a bonus. Though the real bonus, I think, comes from the connection. From that one reader who comes up to you and says….well, I guess I’ll find out.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-3200722767594625629?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-8493062560169294762008-02-13T11:18:00.000-08:002008-04-23T11:35:05.464-07:007“One is the loneliest number,” the song goes. True, I guess (though you could argue that zero is the loneliest number but that’s another topic). How about “writer is the loneliest profession.” Which is what makes the upcoming launch of my book something that fills me with excitement, dread, trepidation. Even a little awe. Being a first book, I feel like a deb before the ball. Suddenly, you’re not so alone. Suddenly, you’re up on stage sharing your work with people. Reviews are written. Emails come from long lost friends. At this point, writing doesn’t become so lonely again. And then…you’re back at your desk, with a blank piece of paper staring you in the face, and you’re alone. Again.<br /><br />I suppose some people like the serenity of the process. Having spent most of my working life in an office, in places where collaboration is necessary (I used to work at a children’s press and then I started working at enRoute magazine, where I was editor in chief from 2001 to 2007), where all the output is a group effort, the aloneness of writing is strange. It makes a hard job even harder. It’s necessary of course. Before I sit down to tackle more fiction, maybe I should get a dog. Or at least think about it. Though a dog is probably an excuse to ignore your work.<br /><br />I’m easily distracted.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-849306256016929476?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-13393239328602666762008-02-13T07:53:00.000-08:002008-04-28T07:55:52.967-07:00I got <a href="http://www.oldmustybooks.com/2008/04/07/tricia-dower-silent-girl/#more-2549">my first review</a> a few weeks ago. Discovered it quite by accident while googling my name. (C’mon, admit it. You google yours, too.) My body went all jangly when I saw it up on the screen. My baby suddenly was “out there,” exposed to the judgment of others who will “scrutinize your literary soul,” as a writer friend put it.<br /><br />The review was positive and especially gratifying because the reviewer said my stories caused her to reflect on what could be done about specific social issues affecting women. One friend thought the review focused too much on those issues and not enough on the writing. Another said it didn’t acknowledge that some characters resisted patriarchal forces “with courage and intelligence.” <br /><br />Their comments led to an “aha” moment for me: people were now discussing my stories as if they existed apart from me. I felt a little panicky. As though I’d turned my head for a moment and let my toddler run into a busy street. I hadn’t given much thought before that to how it would feel when my characters were released into a wider world, no longer to be interpreted and defended by me.<br /><br />I did have an earlier taste of it, though, when my son read one of the stories in the collection. “I love the way you get us to feel sorry for Kyal at first,” he said, “but then make us see she has to make the decision she does for the sake of her people.”<br /><br />“I do?” I said. I hadn’t meant to.<br /><br />I asked if he thought Kyal would get to achieve her ambitions after the story ended. He said No, but that it was okay. When he explained why it was okay with him, I saw that my son, a proud former Marine, had read the story through the lens of Duty. To sacrifice individual wants for the greater good is the logical, moral choice for him. It made me realize that other readers will be reading through their own lenses, some of them quite different from mine.<br /><br />It’s kind of scary but also kind of wonderful.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-1339323932860266676?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-33651322002122260212008-02-12T12:08:00.000-08:002008-04-25T12:15:54.616-07:00In his 2007 Massey Lecture, Alberto Manguel retells a story he heard that explains why birds sing. As the story goes, the bird’s song is an adaptive behaviour meant to protect the flock from predators: when one bird spots a kestrel or cat it begins singing to alert the others to take flight. The alarm saves the flock but, unfortunately, things don’t go so well for the whistleblower who by sounding the alarm draws the predator’s attention to himself.<br /><br />There is an argument that this story metaphorically applies to writers of stories, suggesting that the writer alerts the rest of us of a contemporary danger, be it some existential anomie or creeping social evil. I find it hard to argue with this functional explanation. If one were inclined to look for proof of the social role of the writer one would need to look no further than those titles that have claimed not only our imagination but our most prestigious writing awards —<span style="font-style: italic;"> To Kill a Mockingbird</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Grapes of Wrath</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Night Breakfast on Pluto</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">American Pastoral</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Disgrace</span> — stories that have made us look deeply at those forces that tend to corrode our world. If one were inclined to extend the analogy just a little further, one might see what fate waits for the writer-as-whistleblower in less tolerant societies. For example: Salman Rushdie, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Yang Lian, Gao Xingjian, Chinua Achebe, . . . the list goes on and on.<br /><br />And given that it is difficult to contest that the writer plays a critical role in alerting us to those ills or evils we have not yet come to see, or are too close to see, I’d like to suggest another perspective on why a writer writes. <br /><br />A couple of years ago I purchased a series of tapes called <span style="font-style: italic;">Birding By Ear</span> that identified birds by their songs; the introduction suggested reasons why birds sing, one of these being the desire to be identified by the mate. Even when the partner is out of sight the mate would be reassured that the two of them are still connected through voice alone. The thought of the possibility of being connected to our mates through the unique sound of our voices struck me. Reassured me. Caused me to reflect on how the tone and sound of our voice distinguishes us, and weaves us into a web of belonging.<br /><br />This explanation of why a bird sings comes closer to my personal understanding of why a writer writes. <br /><br />But if we are going to accept this ornithological metaphor, one must then question: Who is the mate? Is it literally, our loved ones? Or is there some sort of literary extension of meaning, with the mate being some idealized reader? I’d like to suggest that the definition of “mate” be extended even more broadly than just an idealized reader ... for an idealized reader is constructed in our imagination and therefore known to us. I think the “mate” is someone we don’t know. What this means is that the one we sing to, the one we don’t want to lose contact with, is a foreign “other,” someone not known to us, but someone whose very otherness completes us. I know I am in deep waters here. And I don’t want to sound like I’m talking from thirty thousand feet above <span style="font-style: italic;">terra firma</span>, but I think that recognizing our need to be connected to the unknown “other” is at the heart of why a writer writes. <br /><br />I feel I’ve got to reiterate that I don’t disagree with the perspective that the writer’s role can be functionally defined as helping us all see what we can not otherwise see and thereby alerting us to social ills or evils in our midst. This is a critical social role, and one not free from risk. (The risk here is not just the fear of social or political sanction, but the risk of becoming mired in moral righteousness or political ideology. When that happens the writing loses its capacity to reach anyone.) And although I believe the functional definition of why a writer writes is important and must be preserved, I also feel that this explanation must be supplemented by an understanding that enriches it. What I am suggesting is that the writer is more than a social or moral critic, but one who has discovered the uniqueness of his voice and with that voice reaches out, across space, time, and human distance to that unknown, alien “other” who is waiting to be reassured by the sound of that voice.<br /><br />Who is the “other”? Someone we need to be connected to, someone whose foreignness completes us. And perhaps it is not always a separate person, but a strangeness we sometimes find within our own hearts.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-3365132200212226021?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-25573235381854688032008-02-12T08:45:00.000-08:002008-05-03T08:50:22.266-07:00<p class="MsoNormal">I'm worried that last post was a bit negative. Let me emphasize that writing itself is FUN and very satisfying, at least for me. I feel really lucky that I get to indulge myself this way.<br /><br />About reading: we don't do enough of it, as a society. I don't do enough of it, as an individual. It all boils down to not having enough leisure time. Marcuse was wrong: all this technology is making us busier than ever! For one thing, we have to Google ourselves all the time. Most people I know seem to have very little time, and there are many more things competing for our attention. I don't even watch TV (not much anyway. I liked Jpod but they canceled it. I wish they'd bring it back) and I still don't have the time to read all the books I'd love to read. I'd like to lie on a couch all day nibbling chocolates and reading all the Fiery First Fiction books, for a start.<br /><br />I really admire what Yann Martel is doing, <a href="http://www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca/">sending Stephen Harper a book every two weeks</a>, for as long as he is Prime Minister of Canada. Martel has a point to make. Harper doesn't know how lucky he is to get all those great books free! Plus an intelligent, thought-provoking letter from Yann Martel.<br /><br />For one thing, I think good fiction is about perspective. That's one reason why we read -- and write -- fiction. It's a way of trying to get perspective on things. In life we are mostly governed in everything we do by our own point of view, our own perspective on things. This is why wars happen, and why marriages fall apart. A lot of the problems in the world, and between individuals, occur because of this inability to understand another point of view. This is the value of very good literature‹it offers a perspective other than our own, and if it's well done, we can enter into that other point of view and understand it, if not agree with it. Reading good fiction<br />develops empathy and encourages open-mindedness, probably more effectively than reading a very well-reasoned argument could, because it operates on the level of emotion. How could anyone be mean to an animal after reading Black Beauty? So, everybody should read more! And that would bring about harmony and world peace. And increase book sales, which would be a good thing too.</p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-2557323538185468803?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-89251221317471444132008-02-08T08:53:00.000-08:002008-05-23T09:01:03.993-07:00Something happens when I hit certain point in a writing project (and it’s not just me; I’ve checked) where the world starts conspiring to give me what I need. Everyone I meet seems to have some vital information or some sparkling anecdote that’s perfect for the chapter I’m working on; messages written in gravel at the side of the highway give me poignant lines; a song on the radio gives me my title. There’s a word for this phenomenon, apparently: serendipity – an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident. But sometimes it’s tempting to get new-agey about it, to entertain the thought that the story you’re writing already exists as some sort of Platonic Idea, and that God is giving you these small pieces of it, guiding you in your work to put the whole thing into words. (I don’t really believe that but it’s fun to pretend to sometimes.)<br /><br />I enjoy the sensation that, wherever the story’s coming from, it’s not from me. Not from the part of me that makes choices, anyway. And this becomes most clear when I want my characters to do something, or I want something to happen, and it just won’t work. My characters refuse to do what I tell them. I write down my preferred version of events, but it’s not real; there’s only one way it can go, and feel right. This must be something like using a Ouija board – we feel like something external is at work, but most of us accept the explanation that the voices we access are actually coming for somewhere deeply internal.<br /><br />What this amounts to, for me, is the belief (that I can’t shake, however flakey it may sound), that the leap I need to make, in order to create something out of nothing, is more one of faith than one of massive effort. I sit down with my notebook turned to a new page, or my computer’s cursor blinking on a stark white screen, and I think this is going to be so hard. But then, once I start, it’s not hard. It just happens. Words appear on the page that never occurred to me until I was writing them.<br /><br />This is the opposite of paranoia, I guess – the conviction that the whole universe is conspiring to help me.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-8925122131747144413?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-44552473551580830982008-02-07T10:17:00.000-08:002008-05-21T10:18:38.821-07:00I’ve been staying at the Banff Centre for the Arts for the last 3 weeks, as part of the 2008 Writer’s Studio, and I’ll be here for two weeks more. In my real life, I hardly ever talk about writing. I only have a few friends who write, and even with them, it’s a topic that comes up rarely. But living in close quarters with 23 other fiction writers and poets, writing-related issues come up frequently – more frequently that anything else. Reviews, for instance, or the etiquette of walking into a bookstore and offering to sign your own book (a humiliating venture if it turns out they don’t have it in stock) – and, of course, the daily confrontation with the blank page. It’s soothing to discover that even seasoned, successful writers still have moments of self doubt, and still wonder, with each project, if they really have it in them to write another book.<br /><br />Once I finished my first novel, I thought, the hard part would be over. No longer would I have to wonder if I was really a novelist; I’d know I had it in me to repeat the performance again and again for the rest of my life. So now I’m struggling with the opening scenes of novel #2, and, as it turns out, the second one is far more difficult than the first. Now I have to write something different – something better – than I did before. Now I have reviewers’ words haunting me as I write. Am I doing that thing again? I wonder, that reviewer X didn’t like? And then I think – maybe one novel is enough. Who needs to write more than one book, anyway? It’s funny that we sit at the breakfast table here sharing stories of the struggles and disappointments of publishing; go for walks and chat about the financial risks – probably insane in most people’s eyes – necessary to finish a first book; and then all go back to our rooms to write some more. Maybe all the stuff that comes after publication is just the icing, and so what if it’s not quite as sweet as we imagined.<br /><br />For me, it seems I can’t be content unless I’m working on an extended work of fiction. So another novel it will have to be.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-4455247355158083098?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-80700859672843400802008-02-03T08:50:00.000-08:002008-05-03T08:58:38.451-07:00<span style="font-family: arial;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >Look ma, I'm blogging! And publishing. And being promoted. At the risk of getting mushy, I feel truly blessed to have such supportive, creative people in my life. The people who know me, the ones who know me through my work alone, and weren't afraid to chance it with a relatively unknown writer (such as editors of lit mags, and my publisher, who turned my words into such a beautiful object) and those who don't know me from a speck on the sidewalk.<br /><br />Cases in point: I sent a couple of emails, and before long I was launching my collection in Perth, Ontario, my old stomping ground, where familiar faces kept coming into Valley Bookshop to get their signed copies. I set up a reading at Type Books in Toronto, a fabulous independent bookstore on West Queen West, where it seemed like the audience would've sat and listened to<br />another story or two. I was feted, grandly, at a house party in Toronto afterward, where my friends actually created a drink list inspired by my stories, with a cocktail to match each story, complete with a quote from the work. Lucky, indeed. And now FFF!<br /><br />All of this is not to brag or boast, but to acknowledge the community that springs up around a book. A few of us have mentioned the fear of launching our "babies" out into the wide world, and this has certainly visited me from time to time. (I had to give my grandmother repeated warnings and disclaimers before actually setting the book in her hands: the first story's<br />narrator drops an F bomb in the first paragraph. She surprised me by reading half the book in a day.)<br /><br />Generally, I've found this community to be an encouraging one. This month I'm featured in a local Victoria magazine. Mothers at my daughter's school are pitching the book to their book clubs. I've had a couple of strong reviews. Books are actually selling. But what will happen when I receive the inevitable bad review? My husband swears he'll read all reviews first, to screen them. I'll read them anyway. If nothing else, the years of "Sorry, we aren't taking your work" from lit magazines do get a writer used to rejection.<br /><br />Hopefully, I'll just have a "False Spring" (a.k.a. a Margarita) or three, and get back to work on my novel.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-8070085967284340080?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-52911464158247306522008-02-02T12:01:00.000-08:002008-05-26T10:55:12.257-07:00JIM WESTERGARD<br /><br />When I’m developing an idea for an illustration I have the text to suggest the direction, the mood and the content of the image. My first step is usually to find a point of view, which is also suggested in the text. By point of view I mean not only the eye level of the viewer but the attitude or emotional context. If a visual idea begins to form itself in my mind I draw it in my sketchbook so I can see it and get feedback from it. I move on to another sketch, playing the “what if” game. (What if I move in a little closer on the subject? What if I change to a lower perspective? What if I change the composition?)<br /><br />After drawing a number of different versions of the idea, I have something to choose from. If I can find a sketch that satisfies me I use it as a basis for the finished image and if not I keep working on more sketches. If I need references for images or something to look at to draw, I turn to my filing cabinet of clipped images or the internet or I take photos of things, or I may even use a mirror (with a little work I can alter things to make amazing improvements).<br /><br />I use the chosen sketch as a reference and I lay out some light pencil lines on the paper to indicate the composition, and then begin to draw the image directly on paper with pen and ink. I pause now and then to get a fresh look at what I’m doing. Looking at the drawing in a mirror helps because I can see things in the mirror as if I’m looking at the drawing for the first time.<br /><br />Besides the drawings I’ve created for the book, I created a wood engraving, which is reproduced opposite the title page and on the dust jacket. If I’m working on a wood engraving my next step, after choosing the sketch, is to draw the image on a block of end grain wood. Then I engrave the image by removing the wood where I want white lines or white shapes. This process is time consuming and at various points I stop engraving and print the block to see what has developed. The resulting print is the reverse of the image on the block and “proofing” needs to be done to insure that I don’t remove too much wood.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-5291146415824730652?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-88869486864499022822008-02-02T09:06:00.000-08:002008-05-29T09:13:40.260-07:00It is important not to confuse ‘blog’ with ‘blag’ which is a ‘robbery, esp. with violence.’<br /><br />Once you have written your book, you can become anything: merchant, murderess, inn keeper - for your life as a novelist has been secured, if only in this single iteration. You can glue a dusty moustache to your face and rename your pets. You can declare <span style="font-style: italic;">I hate Scotch and will drink only Zywiec</span>. You can drive out to the airport and say <span style="font-style: italic;">one way to Arizona will the desert flowers be in bloom?</span> You can become a shouter, a brawler, even a blagger. You can undertake a whole new set of skills. <span style="font-style: italic;">Please, my garden. Here, my window dressing</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">There, a rhubarb pie. Forgive me, your spleen</span>. As the writer is constantly spying on those they love and those they love less; as the writer takes dutiful notes and spits and howls for Faulkner and Mann and Woolf; now, the writer can abandon all of these slave-like habits and adopt new ones. M<span style="font-style: italic;">edical school! Circus school! A silent protest. Call me Palomino.</span><br /><br />It is a particular afterlife, the afterlife of making a book. There are no harps. No persistent light. Instead, it is populated. Populated by people with questions. There is more time in cars. There is less muttering. There is more proper attire. There is less scrawling across grocery lists: <span style="font-style: italic;">his hands were hard as branches</span>. The obsessions are different.<br /><br />In my office today, as we approach noon and somewhere horses are sleeping standing up, I have books behind me. Piled on the shelves. Notebooks. Black ones. How their stacks are headstones. How ‘Stunt’ came of them. How one hundred notebooks make a single book.<br /><br />Yesterday, I went to the art store and I bought more notebooks. Black ones. Four of them. 9 by 12 with a ringed sleeve so that the page lays flat and open. In my arms they were a reunion. High heels in the wet grass of a cemetery. They were on sale. Something is taking shape in my mind and like the familiar tug of illness, it is pulling me away from all those other things I might have been. A flight attendant, a lecturer, a fetishist. Even though I wear my pilot goggles and my knapsack full of water to combat the forest fires, even though I drink <span style="font-style: italic;">Zywiec</span> and want <span style="font-style: italic;">Arizona</span> and call the cat <span style="font-style: italic;">Fool</span>, I cannot deny the dark seed starting to define itself. Again.<br /><br />When I stall in some habit of reverie before paying for the notebooks, the art cashier says, ‘Are you finding everything you need?’<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-8886948686449902282?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-8649458397802940022008-02-02T08:18:00.000-08:002008-05-09T08:29:04.044-07:00I’m actually cheating a little here. I wrote this post almost a week ago and sent it in to be posted today, so that it may appear fresh off the griddle, when in fact it is stale and already starting to harden around the edges. There’s an analogy to publishing in here: what we are all hoping to promote here as “fiery” is in fact mere glowing embers at this point. Because even in the most maniacally foreshortened publishing process – the kind that might result in, say, a quickie celebrity bio – by the time the book appears between covers, the major work of writing and editing it was done months earlier.<br /><br />Literary fiction is rarely published under those conditions, and almost always, the book that appears fresh and clean and bursting with newborn health in a bookstore one day was actually signed off on in a previous season. There’s always last-minute proofing and the whole process of typesetting, but very often the book exists in a near-final state for nearly half a year before the actual publication date – sometimes longer. Sometimes so long that a subsequent book is already in the works by the time the previous one arrives in print. In fact, this was a piece of advice I was given years ago by a fairly well-known writer: get far enough into your next book, so that when your first one comes out, it’s all gravy. Everything that happens to that first book is good or bad, but the real prize is being sought elsewhere.<br /><br />Very often what authors must do when they are promoting their new book is a kind of act of intense nostalgia. When they read from the book in public or read reviews of it or talk about it with someone, it’s as if they are revisiting some past glory. You’re getting your back patted for something a slightly younger self accomplished, months, if not years, ago.<br /><br />Which, by the way, is the reason I’m writing this in advance: at the moment I’m driving around with boxes of books and a pen, reading from my novel and accepting congratulations (I hope) on something I did a while ago. It’s a little indulgent, but it’s necessary – for the sake of both publicity and one’s own ego. Having done all that work, it’s good to get patted on the back, to get bought a drink. Already though, I can feel the pull of that second book, already well underway. It’s waiting for me to get this nostalgia bit over with and get back to the real work.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-864945839780294002?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-81469519512075047732008-02-02T08:00:00.000-08:002008-05-09T08:07:45.998-07:00I'm in Ashland, Oregon, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the largest repertory theatre in North America, with a dozen plays per season, 4-5 of them Shakespeare's. Ashland and the festival have been part of my annual Pacific Northwest pilgrimage for the past seven years. I'm here with several other couples who have been coming to Ashland and the festival for thirty years. Vocationally, they're medical and scientific people: neurologist, psychiatrist,<br />histochemist, neurosurgeon, a family physician who was Ken Kesey's doctor (but, ethically flawless, will say nothing about him), a long-time caregiver for two of the people who have post-polio syndrome and MS. They all love theatre. The neurosurgeon was trained at Cambridge and quotes Auden, Baudelaire in French, and Monty Python. The psychiatrist has<br />read <span style="font-style: italic;">Faust</span> in German. The neurologist was friends with John Cage. The conversation over supper is sparkling, often irreverent, and rippling with cross-currents of the arts, the sciences, history, and politics (Elizabethan through Bushian).<br /><br />I'd sent these people copies of my book. Yes, they are friends -- two of them since I was seventeen years old. But that didn't make it any easier, wondering what they thought, what they might say, or not say. The friendships, in fact, made me feel more nervous, which made me toughen myself even more in anticipation of their polite silence. These aren't the kind of people who would mutter kind niceties or feign enthusiasm to make me feel better. Disappointed, or bored, or astonished that I could write something so uninspired and insipid, they would simply say nothing. As I have said nothing to a number of acquaintances about unmemorable books. And these are people who have been reading with taste and discernment for long lifetimes. When I say "nervous" I don't mean that my self-worth teetered over a precipice. I'd published enough books (poetry and biography) to know that I'd be able to go on living, and writing. But,<br />hey, this was my first book of fiction. I'd started writing fiction when I was still playing touch football. It had taken me several forevers finally to get my act together, and have a collection to give to friends. Some of whom had been waiting as long as I'd been writing.<br /><br />Over a glass of Booker‚s bourbon (none better), the neurosurgeon said, "Thank you so much for the book. I'm very grateful. But do you know that you misspelled haute couture and nouveau riche? You have the gender wrong."<br /><br />What a relief! If he thought the book sucked, he probably would have said so. I was getting off lightly. Then, he began asking me what motivated certain characters, if he had interpreted certain behaviours as I had intended. This was a good sign. But he said nothing that let me know what he thought of its quality. That was cool. He didn't give my book the silent treatment. And he was engaged with the characters. That was more than enough.<br /><br />The next day, the histochemist said, "I can't wait to read your book. T. [neurosurgeon] has been raving about it."<br /><br />One friend down, a couple dozen still politely silent friends to go.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-8146951951207504773?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-1289372802246275652008-02-02T06:23:00.000-08:002008-05-05T06:25:18.781-07:00I’ve just finished reading Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. It was recommended to me by a woman in my writing group because I was looking for a compelling novel with short chapters to read as an example. We writers need models like everyone else! In any case, that part worked well, and I enjoyed the story, whether or not it was a perfectly accurate depiction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life and loss.<br /><br />What is staying with me, more than Wright’s larger-than-life personality or his lover Mamah Cheney Borthwick’s intelligent view of the world, is the exploration of social expectations of their era, approximately a hundred years ago. The pressure to conform and live in a certain way, especially as married people, contrasted strongly with my personal freedoms now, especially as a writer.<br /><br />Yes, there is still censorship, and inequity, and artists generally don’t make enough money as a result of their creative work. But I am not chastised for being a writer and a mother at the same time. In my stories, my characters explore the often un-talked about terrain of parenting and not always loving it. Or of deciding to not have children at all. I can only imagine what I might have had to contend with in the early 1900s.<br /><br />For me, writing takes time, and perseverance, and many unwashed dishes. To live a creative, untraditional life a hundred years ago took immense bravery and resolve.<br /><br />On a completely different note, I’d love to hear what others are listening to as they write. The recent PRISM International issue deals with music and asks a few writers for their writing soundtracks. I just discovered the Gryphon Trio, and their album “Constantinople.” Passionate and inspiring to me. I also love an album by Christopher O’Riley, called “True Love Waits,” on which he plays Radiohead songs on solo piano. Other than that, Espace Music on CBC Radio can work, and Ane Brun, and Gotan Project.<br /><br />What I really love is silence, but I have 4 year old twins living above me, and a husband who’s a musician, and a kid who likes Sponge Bob. And, we’re moving to Montreal soon. Ah, music. My urban saviour.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-128937280224627565?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-8301489766659204102008-02-01T13:06:00.000-08:002008-05-30T13:11:11.433-07:00These are stories about men in love, sports and flowered neckties.<br /><br />There is a couple. They live in a yurt in the desert. He is a monk. They made a vow never to stray more than fifteen feet away from each other. If she goes to the washroom in an airport, he stands by the entrance. If they cannot be seated together on an airplane, they do not get on it. If he has a persistent, knocking shot of brilliance in the middle of the night, they both trudge the one hundred feet to his study. They wear robes. They do not have running water. They have many disciples. He has been shunned because the other monks presume the relationship to be sexual. There is a photograph of them in the wind not touching.<br /><br />A man with a scar and the middle name Galore sent me a letter about wrestling, ears and Church rectories.<br /><br />The other night, a man at a bar said when I walked in: <span style="font-style: italic;">I bet she can read look she wears glasses</span>. And when I sat down almost beside him, he asked <span style="font-style: italic;">what is your favourite sport?</span> I hesitated. Sports are something other people do. The man had a round face the colour of concrete. I said <span style="font-style: italic;">windsurfing.</span> I did not say that it was because once I had windsurfed across a lake when I was twelve and thought I might lift off. (An uncle did the same route while holding a glass of wine. An aunt did it in her white bra and underwear.) The cement man said <span style="font-style: italic;">I worked for the guy who invented the mast, guy made a fortune</span>. The mast joins the sail to the board. This: like the printing press, like gunpowder. The cement man did the inventor’s bathroom in his house on Poplar Plains Road. All of the fixtures were 22 carat gold. When I was a child and heard carat, I heard ‘carrot.’ Like you?<br /><br />Last night I had the <span style="font-style: italic;">If I was rich</span> conversation with a man in a hallway in a suit and what I guessed was an expensive tie. He had fruit in the bottom of his glass. I told him that I <span style="font-style: italic;">if I was rich</span> I would have an art collection and a place outside the city that I could retreat to. He wanted an island. South. But vacations made him restless. He could stand a few days at most. This morning, I thought about <span style="font-style: italic;">If I was rich </span>again. Answering the needs of our families went unspoken. Now I would buy time. Time to read a thousand books that loom like intimacies I did not chase down but should have.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-830148976665920410?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-18550435851146366662008-02-01T11:29:00.000-08:002008-05-29T09:45:16.736-07:00Writing is the easy part for me, compared to reading my work in public. I have long had a fear of public speaking. When I was a private investigator, I often had to testify in court. I would be a nervous wreck for weeks before, even though I knew that 99% of the time it was settled out of court and I would not have to testify.<br /><br />I joined Toastmasters a few months ago to get help with this and it has really made a difference. I still get nervous, but it is getting better. Having to give a speech in front of the people in Toastmasters gave me confidence. A speech is even more difficult than reading from a book. So I am happy that the readings in Montreal and Toronto went so well for me.<br /><br />Not that writing is easy. I used to write when I was on surveillance. I had hours of time alone and loved it. I would listen to the radio or write. Of course if you are going through something difficult in your life being alone all the time isn’t good because you end up just making yourself crazy. I didn’t like it as much when I left the road and went into management. I wasn’t used to spending 8 hours with people and no time to write during the day. I like people, I’m social, but I have always needed lots of alone time, even as a child. I grew up in an apartment. We had three bedrooms and I can’t believe how selfish I was, but I demanded that my younger two sisters and brother share a room, while I had my own bedroom. And I can’t believe my parents gave in to me. Maybe because no one wanted to share a room with me. I always wanted pets but we weren’t allowed to have a cat or dog in the building so I had hamsters or mice and they would run on their wheel at night. I also decorated my room in a manner that would deter others from wanting to share, for instance I had doll heads hanging from the ceiling and many stuffed animals which I would line up around the edges of the bed at night so that the thing under the bed couldn’t reach me. I still don’t feel comfortable with my legs or arms hanging over the bed even though I know that there could not be anything under there, for one thing, I use that space for storage so there is no way anyone or anything could fit.<br /><br />I’ve always lived in my head, daydreaming, and at night I have many dreams and nightmares. Writing is good for me in that way: to connect with others and to get outside myself.<br /><br />People are always saying to me that I should write about my life and all the things that have happened to me, but maybe I just don’t want to yet, I don’t know. I was always a private person, although that is changing now.<br /><br />For instance, when Kulsum introduced me at the Toronto reading she mentioned something I had written about how you have to have a sense of humour to be a Private Investigator with IBS. For years I was embarrassed about having irritable bowel syndrome and didn’t want anyone to know, but obviously I had to let the people at work know I had it.<br /><br />Imodium is my drug of choice, what can I say, it was the only way to get through the day stuck in a car on surveillance. Clients don’t want to hear that you lost the subject of the investigation because you had to leave to go to the washroom.<br /><br />People at work would often make jokes about it but since I can be very self deprecating they thought it was okay and I realized that talking about it is better than the stress of hiding it because stress just makes it worse.<br /><br />I have written about it, one of the stories in my book is about a woman with diarrhea. I don’t remember saying that thing in my bio about being a literary proctologist. That sounds so strange, maybe I did, I don’t know, I have a bad memory.<br /><br />At the Toronto reading, Claudia Dey, who is incredibly sweet, when I told her how nervous I was giving readings said that she gets nervous, but we are all human. And all humans have to go to the bathroom, so why not write about it.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-1855043585114636666?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-37516713333918405972008-02-01T11:16:00.000-08:002008-04-29T14:47:22.501-07:00Excerpt: “Saint Anselm’s hook” from Ramasseur by Richard deMeulles<br />ISBN: 1896350283<br />(Your Scrivener Press, 2008)<br /><br />...the boy had seen what hooks do, hadn’t he watched Billy Moses? a couple of weeks after Ash Wednesday; he met Billy Moses on Saturday morning, followed him up Polish Hill, past the grey stone library guarded by Michael and Gabriel, past the rusty brick hospital where they’d taken his mother, then out the highway until they reached the overhead cable that ran buckets of sandfill to shaft number two; they walked beneath the bucket-line until they reached Sandy Lake,<br /><br />...Billy Moses had a rod but no ice auger; how were they supposed to catch anything?<br /><br /> You’ll see, said Billy Moses,<br /><br />...Billy took bread from his pocket, broke it into pieces and scattered them over the frozen ice; gulls began to circle above the bait; from his vest pocket Billy Moses removed a hand-tied fly, attached it to the monofilament line,<br /><br /> Light test, he laughed,<br /><br />...the hungry gulls swooped, landed on the crystalline ice, walked woodenly toward the bread, bobbing their heads as they screamed curses at each other, the insides of their mouths crimson with anger; when the last of bread was eaten they rose and fought in the air,<br /><br />...then Billy Moses rolled a piece of bread into a ball, slipped it onto the hook and cast it into the air; the light line hung on the breeze like censer smoke; gulls dived at the bait but missed and the breaded hook fell to the ice; Billy Moses reeled it in before the birds could land,<br /><br />...when he cast again, the boy tried to shout, No! but found he was as mute as the Ejit,<br /><br />...he wanted to run over and snatch the rod away but was too frightened; then he saw a swooping gull take the airborne bait; it never knew the danger, cried at first in victory then screamed in agony when Billy Moses yanked the line to set the hook,<br /><br /> Watch, said Billy Moses; the caught gull rose and fell and twisted like a kite, it swooped down low and then ascended; Billy Moses played out line and then reeled back; in desperation and knowing that it’s fate was sealed, the white bird tried to fly as high as it could, a trick it’d known even before it was born; it took out all the line, screamed at the low clouds to open so that it might fly home but the sky did not separate and the victim was left stranded,<br /><br />...the bird hung there until Billy Moses yanked him back to earth,<br /><br />...then he came spiralling down, exhausted,<br /><br />...the boy knew he was seeing something more terrible than he had ever seen,<br /><br /> Watch her fall, Billy Moses told the boy,<br /><br />...the boy knew what he was watching, saw the paraclete hit the frozen beach, its wing twisted unnaturally behind it, not yet dead,<br /><br />...the boy tired to turn away but Billy Moses commanded him, Watch!<br /><br />....the paraclete tried to rise but toppled to the ice and lay looking at the lake, eyes wide and unquestioning, accepting not only the victory of death, but the torment and abandonment that went with it,<br /><br />See! proclaimed Billy Moses, and all at once the boy understood that this whole play had been acted out for his sake; he felt shame and began to run; Billy Moses laughed at him; but the boy knew the laughter was not directed at his running but at his stupidity for having allowed himself to be tricked into watching; the innocent victim would still be alive if he hadn’t been here to see it killed…<br /><br />***<br /><br />Excerpt: “Ramasseur” from Ramasseur by Richard deMeulles<br /><br />...the story starts on a spring day that began with a great noise and puff of distant smoke; the cook sent a boy down to the river by himself to do a job no one else would do,<br /><br />...see that boy standing still now, on the shore of the river in the hot spring sun, he is looking at the surface, hard and flat as steel, he turns his back on the water and gazes at the hill above the river where a grove of trees stand: splintered shafts of sunlight stab through the boughs and impale the earth,<br /><br />...the boy stares at the cool trees then walks again, he sweats beneath his black suit coat and dark cap, a brown burlap bag tied to his belt hangs to his knees; his eyes scan the grass and the muddy flats, every once in a while he stops, bends down and picks up something with great care, puts it into the bag and walks further; at one point he feels a sudden tiredness and walks away from the water and part way up the grassy slope, he leans back on his hands and stares at the indifferent sun that burns into his eyes; when he looks back at the earth everything seems to be covered with splotches of blood and when these fade he sees a soft white object in the supple grass; he reaches to it, touches it and, averting his eyes from its ugliness, puts it into the burlap sack...<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-3751671333391840597?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-18813384948432792902008-02-01T09:58:00.000-08:002008-05-29T09:42:51.899-07:00<p class="MsoNormal">Here is what good writing should do:<span style=""> </span>About a month ago I was reading the <span style="font-style: italic;">God of Animals</span> by Aryn Kyle. I was on a crowded subway and nearing the end of the book. There was a heartbreaking scene (I won’t ruin the book for anyone by telling what it was). I wanted to burst out crying and had to really control myself. As it was, tears started to fall from my eyes and I thought maybe I should just stop reading and wait until I get home, but I couldn’t stop. I didn’t care what people thought because I was in the story.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> Another occasion where I was reading a book didn’t turn out so well. Years ago, when I was on surveillance, I had to watch someone who was working in a bar/restaurant. It was a tiny, really run down kind of place in Parkdale where only locals went. The kind of place where people really go for the cheap beer.</p><p class="MsoNormal">I knew I would have to sit in there for a number of hours, so I brought a book with me so I could pretend to read and no one would bother me. I could read and look up when the person I was watching came into view. I had a pinhole video camera and this person was working in the kitchen but would come out everyone once in a while.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">I didn’t want to eat the food, that’s the kind of place it was, so I sat there with a beer and my book. This was in the afternoon and it was not dark, therefore reading would not be that unusual. I don’t even remember now what book it was. After about half an hour, someone pointed out to their friend, loudly, “Look, she’s reading a book,” </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Everyone, about 12 or 15 people, looked over at me.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""></span>“Reading a book?” </p> <p class="MsoNormal">It was unbelievable, like they had never seen a book before. Someone came over and asked me why I was reading and what it was. I knew it would be futile to try to explain it to them but I tried anyway. I finally had to leave because I didn’t want the person I was watching to become involved in this. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> I felt sad. I mean the kind of people that were in there were mostly poor and alcoholic but still, to have that reaction. When I think about it now, I should have gone home and got a bunch of books and brought them back and left them there. Maybe someone would have read one. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> Embarrassing things are always happening to me. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> Just now I went out to get a coffee and a man standing on the street, very polite, said “Hello Madam.” I said hello. “You have a dog,” he said. I figured he had seen me before walking my dog, but then he pointed to my tee shirt which was covered in pet hair. One of my cats likes to sit on me when I am at the computer. My sisters always get on my case for looking like a bum. When I am at home I just wear tee shirts and old jeans. I live in a condo downtown and there are men coming and going all day in their suits and the women are all dressed fashionably, so it is true that I probably don’t fit in but I’m not working at a job right now and I like to be comfortable.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> I haven’t worked (except for writing of course) in over 6 months because I had to have an operation on my feet and the pi agency I was with was not doing well, but I don’t want to go back to that occupation, even though I was good at it. I worked hard and was the first woman in Canada to receive the PCI, the Professional Certified Investigator certification. I’m just tired and fed up with the industry, but I don’t know what to do now to make money. I am collecting so- called employment insurance. They prodded me to apply for this course and said I could get EI for a year and keep all the money I made on top of that, but after many hours of putting together proposals and attending meetings where they said I would be an excellent candidate, another department of the government, the one that funds the course said I was too overqualified to be accepted and that I was doing way better than others in the program. And the fact that I had a book coming out meant I would not need their money.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> I tried to explain to him that this is Canada and I am not Margaret Atwood and a first book of short stories published by a small press is not going to make me rich, but he didn’t believe me. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> I’m pretty good at landing on my feet though, so I’m sure something will happen. When you are an investigator you don’t make a regular salary, but you do make very good money.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> I’ve had some even stranger jobs in my life. One time, in my twenties, I was an elevator operator for an exclusive women’s store that used to be on Yonge St.<span style=""> </span>It was one of those old fashioned manually operated elevators. There were only three floors. At each floor, I would announce: women’s evening wear, accessories, etc., but I didn’t always stop level with the floor and some of the women would trip and yell at me. They also said I was driving too fast. The woman who I replaced had been doing this job for over 10 years and finally got promoted to floor sales. I quit after 3 days.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> I worked two summers as a tour guide taking people around the city in a horse and buggy. I lied when I told them I had horse experience; the closest I had come was reading horse books as a young girl. Still, it was easy, the horses were one step from the glue factory and pretty much knew the routes on their own. However occasionally they would get spooked by something and take off at a full gallop, whether there were tourists onboard or not. We also had to scoop their poop and it’s not like picking up after your dog.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> Next, I had a job as the only waitress at a small restaurant. The boss was a very nice man who put up with my spilling coffee on the customers and forgetting orders and tried to show his faith in me by telling me he had to go out one day on an emergency and I was in charge of the kitchen. I told him I didn’t know how to cook, but he said just take simple orders, like hamburgers.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">He came back to find me standing in the middle of the restaurant crying while a few regular customers consoled me and one was behind the counter cooking.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">So, I am not afraid to try new things and it is always great for a writer to gain experience and meet people in areas they may not usually get involved in.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-1881338494843279290?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-56119863389300940152008-02-01T08:38:00.000-08:002008-05-26T09:22:03.284-07:00JIM WESTERGARD<br /><br />Over the past two or three decades wood engraving has been my medium of choice. When I’ve had requests to illustrate books I’ve often made the decision to use wood engraving or the publisher has requested it. I print the wood engraving illustrations in limited editions as well. When the <span style="font-style: italic;">Fly on the Wall</span> project began I considered using wood engravings for each story but discarded that notion early when I thought about the number of images I would have to create and the time it would take to create a wood engraving for each of these. I chose to use pen and ink drawings for the images because the marks were similar to those used in wood engraving, except in reverse (black marks on white for the drawings and white on black for the wood engravings). Here’s are two wood engravings:<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SDri6kKlLfI/AAAAAAAAAIY/8JTFZMj_wmY/s1600-h/farmwife.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SDri6kKlLfI/AAAAAAAAAIY/8JTFZMj_wmY/s400/farmwife.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5204721815148375538" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SDrjaEKlLgI/AAAAAAAAAIg/BvPcW9sVKMY/s1600-h/nedkelly.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SDrjaEKlLgI/AAAAAAAAAIg/BvPcW9sVKMY/s400/nedkelly.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5204722356314254850" border="0" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-5611986338930094015?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-56046239242775043172008-02-01T08:29:00.000-08:002008-05-09T08:30:12.454-07:00I admitted in the last blog that I wrote these in advance because I am out reading from and promoting the novel. This is at it should be, and with any luck, it’s been going well – books are being sold by the trunkload; readings are being met with laughter, joy, tears; I am getting carried out of every venue on the audience’s shoulders. Such was the plan, anyway. I hope it worked.<br /><br />The only thing interesting in what I’m doing is that I am doing a few of these events in the Ottawa Valley, where I grew up, but where I haven’t lived since moving away 17 years ago. Although by next year I will have lived away from the place for as many years as I lived there, it’s still a kind of home to me. It’s impossible to fully erase the imprint of the place in which you grew up. There was a time, I will admit, when I would have been happy to erase that particular imprint. I spent most of my high school years like a lot of small town kids: desperate to get out. I’ve lived in cities ever since, and plan to keep on doing so.<br /><br />At some point, however – either because I mellowed, or because I had kids, or because I was simply away long enough to feel nostalgic – I made a certain kind of provisional peace with the place. In my head, anway. And it’s more like a cease fire than actual peace, but still – progress was made. I accepted that a lot of what I am is from that place, and that a large part of my imagination is rooted in it.<br /><br />Though I fudged the geography a bit, sliding the whole place closer to Toronto, where I live, the setting of my novel is very much the place I grew up in. Actually going there to read from the book and meet people who have read it, or will read it, is a little unnerving. After all, it may not be laughter and joy and the rest of it that greets the book – I may yet get the crap beat out of me. I’m certainly overdue. But then, that would be a kind of homecoming, too.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-5604623924277504317?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-59829052710403529022008-02-01T08:07:00.000-08:002008-05-09T08:11:43.396-07:00There is a definite difference in people's reactions when you publish a book of fiction rather than a book of poetry. Only once has someone stopped me in the street to say, "I liked your new poetry book," and he was a fiction writer and playwright. I've had people speak to me about my fiction book on the street, in cafes, at City Cinema, and in the men's locker room at UPEI when a Vet prof I didn‚t know told me his wife was enjoying my book. This feedback was so startling, and gratifying, that I'd get discouraged when nobody said anything to me for several days, and almost paranoid after a week. Then I'd get two positive responses in the same day (in contrast with two positive responses in a year for poetry) and want to invite all my friends out for drinks that night. Wow, readers!<br /><br />And then I started feeling insensitive and crummy about all the books by friends and acquaintances which I have not yet read. People I see or e-mail and to whom I fail to say, "By<br />the way, I haven't read your book yet, so don't take my silence as indifference or dislike." <br /><br />Back to the neurosurgeon. We were walking down the street in Ashland today, and he asked, "What happens to the character in <span style="font-style: italic;">Wait Here</span>‚ after the story ends?" I tried to think if I'd heard of that book, but drew a blank.<br /><br />"Who wrote it?" I asked.<br /><br />"You did," he said, "It's in your book."<br /><br />So I wait for people's responses, and also the stories recede into the realm of someone else's history, the writer I was back then. Again, like a poet or literary scholar: startled that somebody (other than another poet or scholar) has not only read my stories, but is thinking about them. And when I see my book sticking out of my disabled friends' caregiver's handbag, I feel both a little bemused -- I mean, why's she reading that -- and more than a little<br />content, and grateful.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-5982905271040352902?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-18474970884540793472008-01-31T10:21:00.000-08:002008-05-26T10:31:44.973-07:00JIM WESTERGARD<br /><br />I use a variety of tools to engrave on the end-grain block of wood (usually maple). The most common hand tool is the “spitsticker”, seen here, sitting on a block of boxwood.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SDrzV0KlLkI/AAAAAAAAAJA/2d7pkXCDdU0/s1600-h/blockburin.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SDrzV0KlLkI/AAAAAAAAAJA/2d7pkXCDdU0/s400/blockburin.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5204739875485855298" border="0" /></a><br />This next picture shows how the tool is used during the engraving process.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SDrzVkKlLiI/AAAAAAAAAIw/ue_J5zFKDYA/s1600-h/engr_sptstkr.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SDrzVkKlLiI/AAAAAAAAAIw/ue_J5zFKDYA/s400/engr_sptstkr.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5204739871190887970" border="0" /></a><br /><br />I also use an electric engraving tool, shown in this photo. It’s similar to a dentist’s drill and sounds like one too.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SDrzVkKlLjI/AAAAAAAAAI4/XtqYsvGXIKk/s1600-h/engr_frdm.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SDrzVkKlLjI/AAAAAAAAAI4/XtqYsvGXIKk/s400/engr_frdm.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5204739871190887986" border="0" /></a><br /><br />It’s important to pay close attention to what’s going on and to avoid distractions when using a power tool. The results of being distracted can be dangerous and discouraging, as you can see in this photo.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SDrzVUKlLhI/AAAAAAAAAIo/DLC7XK_VAJY/s1600-h/slipofthedrill.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_DahyPffBDO8/SDrzVUKlLhI/AAAAAAAAAIo/DLC7XK_VAJY/s400/slipofthedrill.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5204739866895920658" border="0" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-1847497088454079347?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4075992894146895141.post-70135575112463340402008-01-31T08:11:00.000-08:002008-05-09T08:17:59.553-07:00Yesterday, a fabulous play <span style="font-style: italic;">The Further Adventures of Hedda </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Gabler</span> by an Oregon playwright, Jeff Whitty. Hedda and her servant, Mammy from <span style="font-style: italic;">Gone With the Wind</span>, become deeply discontent with their literary roles. Hedda wants to stop killing herself, and Mammy doesn't want to be a slave. They encounter other characters: the two stars from <span style="font-style: italic;">La Cage au </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Folles</span>, Medea, etc. Hedda and Mammy learn of the "Furnace" where all characters are created, in the minds of their authors. They set out on a quest to re-enter the Furnace and to be "changed." At one point, a character says, "We do not live on in the minds of our authors, we live on in the minds of our audience."<br /><br />And that's what I was thinking about the past two days, here in Ashland, the audience for my book -- readers, friends I sent the book to, wondering if the characters would live on even for a few minutes, or, if lucky, for a day, a week...<br /><br />But much of the time in Ashland, and up in Seattle and Vancouver and Victoria (other pilgrimage stops), in fact, ever since I finished marking essays and exams two weeks ago, I've mostly been thinking and fretting about "What I Will Write Next," like, this summer, when I have the luxury to write for hours every day. This mulling was compounded by visits with dear friends who are writers, who ask in the most unintrusive, gentle way: "So, what are you working on now? What'll you be working on this summer?"<br /><br />For sure, I have all kinds of possibilities in my notebooks, and in my head. But at the moment, none of them are what William Stafford, the late poet laureate of Oregon, called "emergencies." Yes, I did write first (crummy) drafts of three (icky) poems these past two weeks. And there‚s a<br />constellation of characters and situations for a novel in my head, like a snow globe somebody keeps shaking -- and which freaks me out because I'd rather write lots of new poems and<br />stories, and not submerge myself in a novel for the next umpteen months (or I would love to if I magically had only five students per class next year). My agent has a novel out on the circuit, and tactfully inquires about my "next novel" ("Publishers just aren't buying short stories, they<br />just don't sell.").<br /><br />The first sport I played was baseball, back in the days when baseball was still "America's pastime." I'm sure I could catch and throw before I could read. I was very good on the sandlot. Then I tried out for Seattle's best Little League team, and that Saturday morning there were crowds of kids at every position waiting for ground balls and fly balls and lined up by the plate for a swing or two. This moment, I see my "ideas" for poems and stories, scrawled in my notebook, as all those eager, nervous, diffident or cocky, awkward, hopeless, or promising kids waiting for a try-out, for a chance to play. I'm the coach, waiting for one to stand out, then another, to catch my eye, to catch fire, to compel me to devote the coming days and weeks and months to its development.<br /><br />Writing that last paragraph, the excitement started to feel stronger than the dull dismay that maybe, this time, this summer, I won't feel again the electricity I've felt with all those now-published stories, all those poems in my new poetry ms. And it will come. It always does. Often when I feel most empty, unwilling, lackadaisical, evasive. Suddenly, zap! and I'm hauling my laptop and water bottle and thermos of coffee out to the patio table and writing away through the sound of lawn mowers and basketballs.<br /><br />That's where I'll be next week.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4075992894146895141-7013557511246334040?l=fieryfirstfiction.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Fiery First Fictionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02552764760510579295noreply@blogger.com0