Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Snag a Bystander with a Hook: Jay Ruzesky's Bicoastal Conversation with Bill Gaston and Mark Anthony Jarman

Bill Gaston
Bill Gaston came to the University of Victoria's Writing Department in 1998 following a dozen years in the Maritimes, mostly at UNB, in Fredericton. There he was Director of the Creative Writing Program, and, for a time, editor of Canada's oldest literary journal, The Fiddlehead.

Mark Anthony Jarman
Mark Anthony Jarman is a graduate of The Iowa Writers' Workshop, a Yaddo fellow, has taught at the University of Victoria, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and now teaches at the University of New Brunswick, where he is fiction editor of The Fiddlehead.



As I remember it, Mark, you were a sessional instructor at UVic and left to take a position at UNB in 1998, and Bill, you were a sessional at UNB and left to take a position at UVic in 1998 so you switched east for west and west for east. Have I got that right? Do you feel at home where you are now?

Monday, October 29, 2012

Review of E. Alex Pierce and Sue Goyette by Jane Munro

E. Alex Pierce, Vox Humana (London: Brick, 2011). Paperbound, 76pp., $19.
Sue Goyette, outskirts (London: Brick, 2011). Paperbound, 88pp., $19.

Vox Humana, the title of E. Alex Pierce’s first collection, comes from the name of a pipe-organ stop designed to produce tones resembling those of the human voice. Voice is important in these poems. So is theatre. For the most part, we’re listening to the stories of women, though the poems dramatize a wide range of characters: porcupines, Penthesilea’s horse, a German-speaking man, a fetus.
 
Taken together, these poems perform a universal voice—“the under-singing.” This is also the voice of the book’s narrator: it is her story, though its versions are legion. In “A girl awake” her father says, “What a waste…. You should have been a boy.”

East Coast and West Coast Issues Officially Launched on East Coast

On October 25, The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review partnered up to launch the west coast and east coast editions of their magazines in Fredericton after two years of planning. Eight writers published in The Malahat's east coast issue were on hand to read from their contribution and to tease listeners with excerpts chosen from The Fiddlehead's west coast issue.

The Malahat plans a similar launch in Victoria November 12.

Visit our Facebook page to see more photos!

Friday, October 26, 2012

A Poetics of Decolonization

An Interview with Tim Lilburn
By Shane Rhodes

The following is a conversation between Shane Rhodes and Tim Lilburn about Lilburn’s recently published, Assiniboia, and Rhodes’ work in progress, X. The conversation took place over a few weeks this summer and was conducted by email.

Shane Rhodes: Assiniboia is built on an argument that the colonization of the land on which we live in Canada is not only a process of the past but an ongoing process that invades and engenders the present of our settler society, our relationship to land, our relationship to First Nations, our relationships to each other, and even our poetics. What you seem to be proposing in Assiniboia (and propose is almost too weak of a word for your insistence) is a different way of thinking about the past, the present, and colonization. What is some of the thinking that made you want to attempt Assiniboia? Why now?

Tim Lilburn: The Harper government is proposing a model of this country that places Western Canada’s resource wealth, especially tar sands oil, at its centre. I, along with many others, am uncomfortable with an understanding of the West that is built entirely on an extractive, and environmentally irresponsible and dangerous, approach to wealth — the snatch it and leave strategy, decamping to England or a gated community on Vancouver Island — the old Hudson Bay Company, Rupert’s Land model, the new big oil model. I would like an alternative way of imagining where I live.

Review of Don McKay's The Shell of the Tortoise by Theresa Kishkan

Don McKay, The Shell of the Tortoise (Kentville: Gaspereau, 2011). Paperbound, 149pp., $25.95.

Don McKay and Gaspereau Press have done it again. They’ve collaborated— Don’s writing, Gaspereau’s design aesthetic and production values—to create an object as beautiful to hold in the hand as it is to weigh and ponder in the mind. Four essays and an assemblage, though in truth these essays are to some degree assemblages too. McKay is a writer who isn’t shy of including poetry, asides, jokes, and geological detours to embellish the map, fill the jar, add harmony to the melody of the lyre’s first music.

The first essay in this collection, “Ediacaran and Anthropocene: Poetry as a Reader of Deep Time,” takes us into McKay territory, the terrain of geopoetry, “the place where materialism and mysticism, those ancient enemies, finally come together, have a conversation in which each harkens to the other, then go out for a drink.” This is a deceptively casual invitation to the reader to pay attention to recent thinking about time, both as meditation on geological periods and their nomenclature, and the relationship of our species within that meditation. McKay, at once playful and deeply (even gravely) serious, guides our hands across the fossils on the “flat tilted beds of sedimentary rock” at Mistaken Point on the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland, and encourages us to experience astonishment.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

The Fiddlehead's West Coast Issue has Arrived!

Malahat editor John Barton holds a copy
of The Fiddlehead's west coast issue
at our office in Fredericton

And we launch it tonight along with The Malahat Review's East Coast issue!

This special event takes place at 8pm in the Bailey Auditorium, Tilley Hall, UNB Fredericton. Refreshments will be served; doors open at 7:30.

Copies of both issues will be available for sale (cash or cheque). This event is free and everyone is welcome.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Nothing Too Small to Say: Anita Lahey in Conversation with M. Travis Lane

M. Travis Lane
Millicent Travis Lane lives on a quiet street “up the hill” in Fredericton, New Brunswick, across the street from the campus of the University of New Brunswick, where she has been an honorary research associate since 1967. A PhD graduate of Cornell University, where she marked for Vladimir Nabokov and wrote her dissertation on agnosticism as technique in the work of Robert Frost, Lane has published fourteen volumes of poetry plus several chapbooks, and has been reviewing poetry for The Fiddlehead since the late sixties. She’s a recipient of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Alden Nowlan Prize for Literary Excellence, the Bliss Carman Prize, and several other awards. We spoke in her living room on a mild May evening, amid her enchanting collection of art and bric-a-brac, and two very sociable cats. (We continued our conversation via email afterward, and parts of this further exchange are incorporated below)

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

David Godkin Reviews John Wall Barger


John Wall Barger, Hummingbird (Kingsville: Palimpsest, 2012). Paperbound, 75pp., $18.

Anyone who writes with the flourish and intensity of John Wall Barger deserves to be read and re-read. His ability to linger over a scene, to ruminate over its history and give himself over to the poetic impulse is complete and genuine. That capacity reaches its apex in the title poem of Hummingbird, a wild subterranean journey into the underbelly of modern Mexico that takes as its model similar descents in the works of Homer, Virgil, and Dante:

…I turn to face Octavio Paz,
eyes broad & generous, he takes
my hand—where are we going? I ask
he smiles, leads me back to market,
now a blueprint of hell, mobs of urban nomads,
lawyers, fishermen, scabby-headed urchins
converge on a man in a straw costume
panting, bleeding at the mouth…

West Coast and East Coast Issues to Launch October 25!

On October 25, join The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review, two of Canada’s most respected literary journals, as they present their West Coast and East Coast editions.

The Fiddlehead surveys West Coast writing and The Malahat Review shines a lighthouse beam on East Coast writing. A number of authors will be present to read from these two journals, and the event will be hosted by Ross Leckie, editor of The Fiddlehead, and by John Barton, editor of The Malahat.

The event takes place at 8pm in the Bailey Auditorium, Tilley Hall, UNB. Refreshments will be provided. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.

Thanks to our sponsor

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Like the Star-Nosed Mole: John Barton in Conversation with Mary Dalton on Her Cento Variations


Mary Dalton
Malahat editor John Barton interviews St. John’s poet Mary Dalton about her contemporary use of the cento, an ancient poetic form. Three of Mary’s centos, “Netted,” “Appliqué,” and “Invitation Cards” are a highlight of Essential East Coast Writing, The Malahat Review’s Autumn 2012 issue. A list of the source texts she drew from to assemble these poems is found on the Malahat website.

Can you define what a cento is classically and then explain how you’ve modified the rules—or broken them—and for what purpose?

In writing seminars I’ve told my students that you don’t work in a form by accident, yet in a sense that’s what happened with me and the cento. I had made several of these collage pieces before I learned that I was working variations on a form that had ancient antecedents.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Ragged and True

Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan. Thomas Allen, 2011
Winner of the Giller Prize

The remarkable story in this book is told in a voice most of us have never heard before. It is the voice of an old, black jazz musician from Baltimore recalling in his own unique dialect the precarious life he lived with other black musicians, first fleeing the Nazis from pre-War Germany to wartime France, and finally escaping to America.

     A weird feeling rose up in me. Last I seen Unter den Linden, they torn out all them linden trees that gave the boulevard its name, tossed up white columns in their place, sanded the pavement so their damn jackboots wouldn’t slip.
     "This ain’t our Berlin, Sid," said Chip.
     I nodded. "It’s lost something I bet ain’t nobody even remember what it was."
     "Except us, brother. Except you and me."
I took a very short survey of my friends who read this book. One of them, a Canadian, thought it was the best book he had ever read, and this was because of the reality of that voice. Another reader, an American, found the voice annoying, and felt the book was patronizing, or worse, even an insult. However you feel about this book is how you respond to the voice of the narrator.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

The View from T/Here: The Expanded Online Introduction

In late August 2010, I flew east from Victoria to be writer in residence at the University of New Brunswick, landing at the Fredericton airport the night before Hurricane Earl made landfall. To a boy who grew up in Calgary, the hail capital of landlocked Alberta, the prospect of a hurricane was exotic. Fortunately, news of Earl was overblown, and it hardly made a ripple in the St. John River, though for two or three minutes I did get drenched by very warm rain outside my new apartment, bested by a key that didn’t work.

The Malahat Review's
East Coast Issue
The impact of my time in New Brunswick turned out to be much more profound. I came to know a province with a literary heritage many outside of Atlantic Canada would be surprised to view as a cradle of our national literature. Charles G. D. Roberts was born and raised in Fredericton, as was Bliss Carman, whom I discovered grew up on Shore Street not far from my great-great-grandfather’s on Waterloo Row. As a boy, Bliss must have known my great-grandmother, for they were only a year apart. For me, this place and its literature quickly became more personal.

Over the winter of 2010–11, Ross Leckie, The Fiddlehead’s editor, and I agreed our magazines should each publish an issue celebrating the writing of the other’s coast in a kind of East-meets-West entente cordiale. Though by reputation, both magazines are known to be national, even international, in scope, each is also intrinsically regional, though I should only speak for the Malahat about a dichotomy that I nevertheless suspect is true of many magazines.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

The West Coast Issue

The Fiddlehead's
West Coast Issue
It is about one thousand miles from Ireland to Slovenia. It is a little less than three thousand from Fredericton to Victoria. I know a number of people in Atlantic Canada who have never been to British Columbia. If you have not been, the mountains and narrow valleys of BC are as strange and fantastical as the Slovenian Alps. From the perspective of Atlantic Canada, BC is unimaginably vast and variable. Atlantic Canada is surprisingly bigger than it seems when looking at its small cluster of provinces on a map, and the difference between the four provinces is remarkable. Beyond tourism photos how do we explain ourselves to each other?

Well, to some extent, we don’t, but there are many ways we can. We have the marvelous Canada Council for the Arts that maintains a mandate to get artists and writers back and forth across the country, and in 2010-11 we were lucky to have John Barton in Fredericton as writer-in-residence. One night over beer at The Lunar Rogue we realized that The Fiddlehead still tends to get submissions from the Atlantic region and The Malahat from British Columbia. We started to concoct a scheme we knew we’d forget in the morning for some kind of cumbersome joint issue crossing work from our two regions.

The Lunar Rogue pub in downtown Fredericton
The problem niggled at us, though. John was discovering writers out here he hadn’t read or even heard of, and I became increasingly aware of how little I knew of the far west. The collaborative Fiddlehead/Malahat issues became a firm commitment. Of course, it isn’t obvious what makes a writer an east coast or west coast writer, or even if we should care. One thing that became evident, however, is that many writers care. Whether “born and raised” or “transplanted,” writers in Canada think deeply about how we imagine home, environment, place, and space. They are not afraid to be identified with a region, or a city, a town, an island, a rural habitat, or a “middle of nowhere.”

Our west coast issue is, of course, an idiosyncratic assemblage. The writers included are a small and in some ways quirky sample of the extensive array of BC writers, and we didn’t spend much time worrying if the works we selected reflected some aspect of BC landscape or culture, though most do. As editors we understood that British Columbia is an “imagined community,” held together as a political construct. There is, however, some unidentifiable evanescent thread that runs through this our west coast issue, and, after reading it, you will know so much more about BC than you did before.

Ross Leckie
Editor

Friday, October 12, 2012

East Coast Issues Arrive on East Coast!

Poetry co-editor Ian LeTourneau and Fiddlehead Editor
Ross Leckie hold copies of The Malahat's East Coast issue.
Things are starting to get very exciting around The Fiddlehead office! Copies of The Malahat Review's East Coast issue have recently arrived, and our special West Coast issue is due back from the printer soon!

As readers are no doubt aware, both magazines have been working for some time on curating these special editions for this fall. And the time to launch them is fast approaching: October 25 in Fredericton, NB, and November 12 in Victoria, BC. More details forthcoming soon!

So welcome to our joint blog, where we'll be publishing selections from the printed copies (some expanded for the web!), and some original web-exclusive content that no one has seen before (podcasts, interviews, and reviews)!

Bottom line? Watch this space! We'll be updating it regularly and frequently!