Judging the Journey Prize

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it here before or not, but I was on this year's Journey Prize jury! I still feel pretty lucky to have been selected. Lucky in a very peculiar, synchronous way: the day before I was asked to participate, I was actually idly wishing that I could be part of the jury. I was reading something about short fiction in Canada, thinking about how I hadn't read any short stories in a little while and how fun it would be to read all the best ones of the year. I even wondered if there was a way to go about being invited...like tweeting about it or emailing someone. But I did nothing except think it and the very next day when I got an email about it I basically fell off my chair in the office. (And yes, promptly began all manner of very earnest wishing...for a sudden million-dollar windfall, for perfect bangs, etc...but I'm still waiting on all of those.)

The Journey Prize Anthology 26

I wrote a little bit about the judging process in our collective introduction to the anthology (which you should go buy right now!), as well as in a more detailed Q & A with Brad de Roo just posted on the blog of Guelph's wonderful bookstore, the Bookshelf.

So I'd planned to write about it here, but I think I've pretty much covered it everywhere else. I'll just say, again, that it was a true pleasure and honour to read and discuss these stories by so many talented Canadian authors. I also feel really fortunate to have been paired with Steven W. Beattie and Craig Davidson, who are both very perceptive and fine writers --- as well as gentlemen and all-round good guys.

All still smiling after a long day of judging!

I've written about it before, but winning the Journey Prize in 2008 was truly one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me...and not only because it helped me to pay off my student loans many, many (many) years earlier than expected. The Writers' Trust does so much good work for writers in this country. Check out this week's profile in Maclean's, aptly titled "How the Writers' Trust of Canada Saves Authors," where you can also read excerpts of the five shortlisted books that are up for the fiction prize.

Tomorrow night all of the prize winners, including the winner of the Journey, will be revealed at the Writers' Trust gala, but before that happens I want to again congratulate all of the amazing writers who appear in the anthology. It was a privilege to read your work, and thank you for writing.

Why Natalee Caple teaches brand-new CanLit (and why you should, too!)

In case you missed it, novelist and English professor Natalee Caple contributed a brilliant guest post to the QWF Writes blog called "Why I teach Brand-New CanLit." 

I urge you to read the original post, but I am going to quote at length from it here about her excellent reasons for teaching new Canadian books, even when it makes her job as a professor (in terms of constantly redesigning her syllabi and lecture notes, etc.) harder:

• The books are never out of print.
• Pre-ordering books helps to let the publisher and the bookstore know that the titles are desired.
• The material is often quite relevant to students’ daily lives. This allows students to identify better with the settings, characters and scenarios.
• Authors are accessible, alive and often available to Skype into the classroom so that students can ask them questions directly.
• Student presentations are much better. Instead of Googling a biography and retyping a handful of academic quotes they have to read the whole book (they do complain about this).
• Student essays are much better. Their close reading skills really improve because that is all they have to rely on.
• Student confidence in their own readings improves. Because they don’t have to compete with the scholarly opinions of experts they learn that it is okay to rely on and develop faith in their own readings. This causes them to engage more deeply and so…
• Students get better marks. When they see this they start to appreciate the work they did.
• Students become more willing to take risks in thinking.
• Plagiarism is greatly reduced. In fact, because a brand new book is so unlikely to have essays on it in circulation, to plagiarize really means paying someone to create an essay. Far fewer students are willing to take this extra step as it requires more planning and seems somehow more actively dishonest.
• Canadian culture is reinforced as real and ongoing, lively, diverse and present.
• Book sales show up in a timely fashion for authors. Titles get circulating at a time when it is most beneficial. We all know that numbers have become incredibly important to the sale of future books and that there is some self-fulfilling prophesy there.
• I get to stay engaged with my peers in the writing community. I am giving them my support and staying on top of my field.
• I get to read all the books I wanted to anyway and call it work! Did I say that it is my dream job?

Isn't this amazing? I can say that as an aspiring writer in university, it was completely life-changing (and ambition-fueling) to read contemporary Canadian Literature in the classroom. One professor assigned Strange Heaven as an extra-credit assignment in an Atlantic Fiction course and mentioned how Lynn Coady had been a student in his classroom not that many years earlier. (And I felt affirmed, somehow, to hear that she was quiet in class, like me.) I can only imagine how much more galvanized I would have been if I had had the opportunity to meet or Skype in class with one of the writers whose work I had read and studied. 

I also strongly agree that close reading develops crucial critical faculties. Education shouldn't be all about research and organizational skills, important as those are. When students begin grappling with texts on their own and developing their own arguments, learning becomes more profound and, I think, more rewarding. But Natalee has already covered all this more succinctly in her original post....

...so I'll just add that as a published writer, it has truly been a privilege to be invited into several classrooms where students have read and studied my work. The experience has been incredibly positive -- and instructive, too. Students actively engaged in trying to make sense of a text will ask very incisive questions. And of course it is intensely rewarding to know that students are reading and engaging with your work at that level. I might even go so far as to say there is almost nothing MORE rewarding for me as a writer. This is the kind of knowledge that gets you through the occasional long bad days of struggling to finish the next story or novel, slogging away at the day job unjamming another photocopier, or thinking about people with business degrees who make eight zillion times more money, etc.

So all of you wonderful, lovely, gorgeous Canadian Literature professors out there: please consider teaching brand-new CanLit!

Victoria: the rest

The day after the festival I lingered over my breakfast. One of my favourite things about my (admittedly limited) experience with British Columbia is the food.I love the health food obsession in that province. It's nice to know that anywhere I go, there will be an option with edamame or wheat germ.

The hotel had a continental breakfast that was kind of like my dream breakfast, with cottage cheese and fruit, yogurt, oatmeal, hard boiled eggs, and coffee with vanilla soy milk.   The muffin and yummy (and very helpfully wrapped) cereal bar were squirrelled away with me and eaten mid-morning.

First breakfast: consumed. Second breakfast: pictured.

Harbour breakfast view

Then I wandered around Victoria, where I was lucky enough to have two days free after the festival. This was exciting because a) I'd never been there before and b) my friend H. just moved there a few months ago. She kindly consented to playing tour guide and hanging out tons. I hope she doesn't mind starring in many of these photos! I took way too many one-handed cell phone photos,using my knuckle to click the shutter on the touchscreen, and unsurprisingly most of them are blurry. But I took a little more care when there was a person in the frame.

Major features included coffee (I also love B.C.'s coffee obsession and expertise), vintage clothing shopping and an amazing stationery store. We also tasted tons of fancy olive oil and vinegar at this neat place in the market. I would probably have been tempted to bring some home if it wasn't for the potential suitcase disaster involved.

Photos from our wandering:

There are bronies among us.

Victoria: looking pretty

I can really get behind this pie shop sign

Amazing fancy olive oil and vinegar place!

We went to Rebar for dinner, which I'd heard of thanks to the famous cookbook but somehow always thought was in NYC. It was yummy.
 

Rebar, lovely friend, and a bottle of Blue Buck!

Another thrill about my stay in Victoria was that my hotel room was also one of the most amazing hotel rooms I've ever stayed in. It was roughly the size of my old apartment, except with real furniture.

Oh hello, home-away-from-home

The best part was the fully equipped kitchen that made it perfect for saving and reheating leftovers. (Being without food and the fear of being without food is one of my major travelling paranoias.)

Precious, precious leftovers in my hotel fridge

My second day in Victoria was not unlike the first: long breakfast, wandering/shopping, meeting up with H for a movie and late drinks/food. Hurrah for true vacations.

Beautiful sky

More Victoria vintage heaven
 

A trip to Victoria would not have been complete without a visit to Munro's Books.

Munro's Books of Victoria has a surprisingly imposing street presence (former bank?)

At first I thought they didn't carry Bone & Bread and I was sad, but then I turned around and saw that they had a whole special section for Canadian Literature!

Beautiful CanLit shelves at Munro's Books

 (I love the proximity of Bone & Bread to Dear Life by Alice Munro)

The next morning I left to catch the ferry to Vancouver to attend the Vancouver International Writers Festival... To be continued...!

Salty Ink, Type Books, and Oscar blabbing

Salty Ink, one of my favourite Can Lit websites has featured Bone and Bread in the first installment of its Spring Fiction Spotlight -- 15 Novels to Put on Your Reading Radar.  Hurray! 

Also, you have probably already seen this if you’re on Twitter (or if you live in Toronto!), but I love it too much not to belatedly share it here: a beautiful window display at Type Books by Kalpna Patel, who has one of my all-time favourite handles on Twitter and who snapped the photo below:

Display for Freedom to Read Week at Type Books

Did you watch the Oscars?  I watched the whole thing at a lovely, low-key Oscar party with delicious eats, but today I find I don’t have much to say about it besides a deeper love of Adele, whose performance of Skyfall was amazing and almost nonchalant, and who, in the context of these Hollywood award shows, just seems refreshingly real every time she opens her mouth.   Also, in the days leading up to the Oscars, I stumbled upon this insider’s look at Oscar voting, which was being linked to as some kind of shocking revelation (people vote without watching the movies!) but is not really very surprising at all. 

It was also a big night for Life of Pi, which I’m looking forward to seeing, and I felt some real Can Lit pride to see it do so well.  I was happy that at least two of the people who won (including Ang Lee for best director) acknowledged Yann Martel’s novel.  (I wonder…if a movie based on your book is nominated for an Oscar, do they stick you up in the balcony?)  

One of several delicious courses last night.  Carrot-apple-ginger soup by M, hostess extraordinare:

Hold Fast

I remember reading Hold Fast one evening when I’d accompanied my mother to university.  She was doing her master’s in Education, and since I was a child who infinitely preferred hanging out in a library to staying home with a babysitter (whom we probably couldn’t have afforded, anyway), she took me along as usual.

That particular evening, she’d taken me to the Education library, which was a less interesting place from my perspective (there was something spookier and therefore intriguing about Morrisset, the larger arts and science library), but which had a few aisles of quality children’s literature.  I browsed the shelves just as I would in a regular library and stumbled upon Kevin Major’s classic, which held me spellbound until my mother’s class was over.  Since it was a library book and not one of my own, it's one of the few books I loved as a child that I have not since reread (as opposed to many others I’ve reread half a dozen times or more).  Until I read a little about it as an adult, I couldn’t have told you it was set in Newfoundland, though it may have subliminally helped set in motion my love of that place…I’ve hitchhiked along the same highway since, and visited Gros Morne, the (truly spectacular) national park that Michael and his cousin Curtis are trying to reach after they run away.  At the time, I was a major devotee of L.M. Montgomery and all of her books about orphans and their extended families, and Hold Fast was a story about an orphan that seemed so brutal, harsh, and realistic in comparison – it felt like a very adult book to be reading at nine, and maybe that's why it was so memorable for me. 

The occasion for this reminiscence is that they are making a movie of Hold Fast (with the wonderful Molly Parker).  I hope the filmmakers can do it justice!  

Speaking of Lucy Maud, the first volume of her complete journals have just been published.  I once took her selected journals out of the library (though this was probably also around the age of nine or ten) and found them spectacularly boring, despite my best efforts.  But I'm intrigued by these more complete editions, although no doubt I'd find even the selected journals more interesting now than I did back then.  

this and that

I’ve been slowly updating the list of links in the sidebar. Since becoming a blog slacker, I’ve been relying exclusively on my wildly disorganized (or formerly organized but now ossified and only marginally useful) set of folders on Google Reader. Meanwhile, check out the new additions!

Exchanged some more emails today re: a freelancing payment I am still waiting on from something I wrote back in August. In this case, and upon request, I had invoiced promptly – the very same day I filed the story. But such is the life of a freelancer. I am full of admiration for people who can survive on this kind of piecemeal salary, and no doubt those who are most successful at it have (one hopes) at least a few reliable gigs to bank on. But I am far too practical/anxiety-ridden when it comes to money matters to be able to try this at the moment.

The best thing I have read lately is a letter from John Steinbeck to his son on the subject of love. It has reminded me of grandness of Steinbeck’s heart, and it is good, warm, soul-expanding advice. I found it via the wonderful Classic Penguin tumblr, but it was originally posted on Letters of Note, a site I'm very happy to know about.

The best thing I saw earlier this week was the amazing Can Lit is Sexy tumblr. I hope whoever is doing it keeps it up!

And the last thing worth sharing is the great sale being run by ECW Press. Buy any Spring 2012 title and get the eBook for free. A terrific deal!

classroom visit to Concordia

So at the last Pilot Reading Series at Blizzarts a few weeks ago, I met someone who, upon introducing herself, told me we'd just missed meeting the night before at the roller derby (we were sitting close to one another in the stands, with a mutual friend between us) AND that she, K, was teaching a story of mine in her Canadian Literature summer class at Concordia.

Teaching my story in a university class. My story. University class. (!!!)

It was so shocking that I didn’t even ask a single follow-up question, not even to ask which story. I think I changed the subject back to roller derby. I was thrilled and too bashful to bring it up again. Then a few days later K emailed me to ask if I'd be willing to visit the class on the day they were scheduled to talk about the story. I could come at the end, after the lecture, and do a brief reading and answer questions. So I did!

Really, the headiness of the whole thing is enough to dine on for months, if not a lifetime. But I’ve been so busy I haven’t had a chance to give it its due here, so let me do so now.

I’m a Can Lit student myself, and the other story on the syllabus that night was Lynn Coady's wonderful "Play the Monster Blind" (from the collection of the same name), which was a story I'd studied in one of my graduate seminars. The idea that 70-odd students also had a story by me in their coursepacks is still almost more than I can really take in at the moment. (In case you're wondering which story, it's "Bloodlines" -- incidentally, the story I'm currently developing into a novel. A fact which was also brought up during the question period by one of the students, who had done some Googling!)

It was a diverse and very bright group of students and they were very nice to me and asked lots of questions and made me feel welcome. I could tell, too, that a number of them were writers themselves. One of them put me on the spot with a question about whether or not I consider myself a Quebecker (I'm still puzzling this one out. I said, Montrealer, absolutely. But the implications of this are a bit tricky.)

One of the first things I told the class was that I no longer commit the intentional fallacy --- that is , I don't think that what the author says about his or her story is the final word. I was nervous about inadvertently contradicting or undermining something K. had said in her lecture. (I needn't have worried, of course. She had already warned them that I might have a different take on things.)

One of the questions from the students did give me a clue as to a bit of what was discussed in the lecture: “If hair is such an important theme in the story, why didn’t you bring that out more?” Good question!

(My answer, minus a bit of extraneous babbling: it's difficult as a writer to know what's coming across as blatantly heavy-handed or overly subtle. Walking that fine line is a what a lot of the work of writing is about, and editing even more so.)

So all in all, it was an amazing experience. I left the loneliness of my apartment where I'd been shut up working on the novel all day long to go an evening class full of smart and enthusiastic students who were asking me questions about the very same characters. To say "renewed sense of purpose" would be an understatement! I'm so grateful to K. for having read and liked the story enough to include it in her course, and for inviting me to do the visit.