Caught w/ String

Riddle Me This

2012-01-27T17:31:00.000-08:00

Well hello there. Some little bits of news to report. First, old standby "Eat Fist!", a well-travelled short story that originally appeared in Event, has been scooped up by the Body Electric anthology, put out by and/or Publishing. Nifty! More recently, Riddle Fence, a great great journal from out east, scooped up my short story, "Up, Away, Here, Gone," for their March 2012 issue. How do I know RF is great? They published Andrew Sullivan's slick short story, "Stray Dogs." So. Good stuff.

Not good? I missed my flight to Tampa today by not showing up early enough, and by having a disgusting passport. I had to switch my flight to an 8pm (later delayed to 10pm) shitshow to Orlando. My ride back to Tampa probably wants me dead. So does my bank account. The switch cost me $230 extra.

On the brightside, I wrote 5,000 words as punishment. And watched four episodes of Jersey Shore (spoiler: Vinny peaces out). Oh, and I started reading John Irving's new novel about a bisexual dude! I scammed an ARC. I sort of wish he would stop writing about sex with older women and characters who are writers.

Anyway. I'll be dressing like a pirate this weekend, as per Tampa's pirate festival. Good day.

Hodge Podge, plus Divinity Gene review

2011-11-27T12:30:00.000-08:00

S'looking like I'll have an essay in an upcoming anthology of writers writing about their mentors called A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors. Unsure if it's official or not, but I'm excited and wanted to share my excitement on my blog, which is this place. My essay is about how mentoring someone is like figuring out the best way to get someone off. I think it makes sense, and sounds less pervy, in context.

Anyway.

On a completely unrelated note, Diane Arbus is creepy. I'm reading about her in this book:

She's weird and her pictures make me feel bad about myself and the world, kind of like Radiohead. In any case, I have her pictures taped to the wall above my writing desk.

This thing below is one half of a review I wrote for MTLS, where I look at two short story collections. You can find the entire review here.

The Divinity Gene

by Matthew J. Trafford

Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011

192 pp. $22.95

Distillery Songs

by Mike Spry

London, ON: Insomniac Press, 2011

160 pp. $19.95

In her stint as guest-judge for The Giller Prize, British writer Victoria Glendinning railed against Canadian literature for being too boring, too regional, too . . . Canadian. In her eyes, we Canucks lack imagination, a willingness to take risks. See, for example, this excerpt from a piece in The Globe:

It seems in Canada that you only have to write a novel to get grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and from your provincial Arts Council, who are also thanked. Complaints were once voiced that most shortlisted Giller novels emanated from just three big-name publishers, all owned by Bertelsmann, and that virtually every winner lived in the Toronto area. Now, many of the submitted authors, and their rugged subject matter, hail from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland. That’s maybe because small publishers too are now subsidised, and they proliferate. If you want to get your novel published, be Canadian.

Though one can concede that maybe, just maybe, Ms. Glendinning has a point, it’s also clear she hasn’t read Matthew J. Trafford or Mike Spry. The Divinity Gene, Trafford’s debut collection, is a wicked fusion of Italo Calvino and the kind of funky grist you’d find in McSweeney’s, while Spry’s own debut collection, Distillery Songs, is a welcome knee to the groin of anyone who says that Canadian’s can’t be funny, subversive, or over-the-top.

The stories in The Divinity Gene tend to go one of two ways. Either they’re intensely creative pieces – a dance club run by angels demands of its patrons an odd sort of bartering, the son of a fisherman watches as dad slices open a mermaid – that challenge perception, or more conventionally realist stories where character trumps concept.

While the cover blurbs praise The Divinity Gene’s imagination, this reader found the glitzier pieces at times lacking. Take iFaust, for example. Here a new app for iPhones lets its users sell their souls for material ends. Once our justly-warped minds regain their natural shape, we start to consider the lives in the story. The problem, I suspect, has to do with length, lay-out, and what Trafford chooses to dwell on; (too) much of the story deals with the glamour of the Faustian narrative trajectory, at the cost of actually getting to know the characters.

Another story, “The Grimpils,” offers a plot almost as absurd as the story’s title: the call of a mysterious writer draws friends and family of our main characters to Paris, where, it turns out, they’ve somehow been assimilated into an odd kind of cult. They become, to use Trafford’s term, ‘grimpils,’ a play on the word ‘pilgrim.’

The story never quite transcends its conceit. When Canadian Richard visits the American embassy for answers, his plea for help sounds almost comical. “We’re here to talk to you about a very serious situation,” he explains, and he’s right: if someone close to me flew to Paris, heeding the siren-song of some writer, and became a weird nihilistic fanatic, I’d be concerned, too. But the sense of loss swirling at the story’s core gets lost in what feels like a running joke, while the seemingly superfluous inclusion of footnotes gives the impression that what we’re reading is actually some kind of science experiment.

Again, the story is strongest when Trafford focuses on the emotional cores of his characters and limits the time we spend vacationing in Absurd-istan. The shared grief of Richard and co. is heartbreaking enough to almost transcend the story’s silly conceit, and the ending, I have to admit, arrives with surprising power.

Stronger are more subtle stories like “Thoracic Exam,” which brilliantly uses a medical exam as a narrative frame, and “Forgetting Helen,” where our narrator, who has literally spent his entire life in a library, might have found his Helen of Troy roaming the stacks. In both cases, Trafford never loses sight of what this reader considers the most important part of story-telling: making me care, truly, about the people he’s created.

To my eye, two stories stand out from the others as evidence that Trafford can tell one hell of a story.

“Past Perfect” follows its queer lead as he struggles to comprehend his partner’s descent into dementia. There are no otherworldly creatures, no supernatural occurrences, no blinding pyrotechnics, just a man who loves another man who is dying, their relationship masterfully captured with a subtlety often at odds with the rest of the collection.

Impressively, Trafford manages to do something similar with “The Divinity Gene,” the story that probably first got the author noticed when it appeared in the brilliant Darwin’s Bastards, a collection of Canadian speculative fiction published by the same folks who put out Trafford’s debut.

The conceit isn’t entirely unfamiliar: some intrepid scientist breaks down Jesus’ DNA, spawning an entire race of Christs who behave in weirdly opaque ways. The story takes its time, developing into a surprising meditation on grief, spirituality, and humanity. Surprising, I say, because a lesser writer might milk the Christ-resurrection angle to gimmick proportions. Not Trafford. Once he’s got logistics out of the way, his attention shifts from Godliness to base humanity, where the inner struggles of Maciej, the man who cracks the ‘Divinity Gene,’ force the reader to ask big questions about faith and the capacity to hurt and hurt others.

The story anchors the collection and proves that, when he isn’t playing mad scientist, Trafford can work wondrous, heartfelt alchemy, a skill he shares with Chris Adrian, an American writer known for playfully bending reality. Like Adrian, recently named one of the New Yorker’s best writers under 40, Trafford juggles humour, sadness, and an often delicious sense of the surreal. The result, fictions that play to either mind or heart but rarely both, suggest that Trafford has the potential to become a force in Canada’s literary world. He just needs to slow down and listen to his characters, first and foremost.

[First published in MTLS]

PRISM-matic (Now in technicolor!)

2011-10-31T07:13:00.000-07:00

Fresh from the seedy underbelly of Canadian literature comes "Krupkee, on a Molecular Level," a short story of mine published in the recently-released new issue of PRISM International. Gazooks!

I've already mentioned this, but the story is about a Ukrainian punk band on the run from the law. It also features alcholic toilet water.

Much as I'd like to explain what that means, you should probably just head to your local magazine, book, and journal distributor and pick up a copy of the magazine to read for yourself. As a bonus, you'll be supporting two industries that badly needs you support: literary journals in Canada (yay!) and me ( *crickets* ).

xo!

- Andrew

MTLS

2011-10-26T11:57:00.000-07:00

Another bout of blog left untended. Shame on me. Shame shame. Especially when I have a review of Mike Spry's Distillery Songs and Matt Trafford's The Divinity Gene online in the latest edition of MTLS.

Interested in what I have to say? That's sweet of you to say. You can sate your review-lust here!

Review: The Reinvention of the Human Hand by Paul Vermeersch

2011-08-09T06:40:00.001-07:00

Poetry Review
Andrew MacDonald

The Reinvention of the Human Hand
by Paul Vermeersch
Tonronto, ON: McClleland & Stewart, 2010
88 pp. $ 18.99

Toronto-based poet and former Lampert Award nominee Paul Vermeersch returns with The Reinvention of the Human Hand, a book of 38 pitch-perfect poems that test the boundaries between man and beast. The collection follows The Fad Kid, Burn, and Between the Walls, showcasing Vermeersch’s trademark wit and an artisan’s talent for crafting thought-provoking poems from the most unexpected of materials.

In “The Painted Beasts of Lascaux,” the “Yellow ochre horses” painted on cave walls may predate starships and the centaurs of our imagination, but they sing the primordial song “that’s been snarled in your heart – breaking it, / trying to pound its way free – for your entire life.” Meanwhile, an ostensibly benign encounter with the natural world in “A Scorpion in Alcohol” introduces “a venom so subtle, it lingers / and threatens to ruin you still,” the realization that the realm of the bestial might just be closer than we think.

Time and again, Vermeersch asks us to re-examine where we place ourselves in relation to the natural world. Not surprisingly, a number of poems hinge on our relationship to primates. In “Twenty-one Days with a Baboon Heart,” for example, an ape – the most striking of “our primordial reflections” – gives up its heart to fix an ailing human infant. More Orwell than medical miracle, the transplant brings with it the spectral presence of an animalistic “fear what we cannot know.” Though the poem appears to end rhetorically – “how long / do you suppose she survived with their terror?” – Vermeersch cleverly embeds the answer in the poem’s title. A longer piece, “Ape,” suggests that the aforementioned terror might be of our own making. Broken into three sections, the poem addresses mankind’s exploitation of its nearest link, concluding with actual dialogue between Michael, an ape capable of speaking sign language, and researchers eager to learn the fate of Michael’s mother. From Michael’s harrowing account, you almost wish they hadn’t asked.

Like much of the collection, “Ape” confronts its reader with some heady, deeply troubling philosophical questions about what it means to be human. Which is not to suggest that Vermeersch can’t make us laugh; comedy has its place in the collection, but only at the service of provoking more self-analysis. “Last of the Blondes,” a clever riff on recessive genetics, asks Ingrid, the world’s sole natural blonde, if her birth will be “co-opted / by governments and syndicates?” Will she become “their Golden Child, their Chosen One, their Brand?” We laugh at the absurdity of Ingrid’s celebrity status. Laugh, that is, until our flaxen-haired Everywoman’s dissolution into legend leaves us wondering what—existentially, biologically, and culturally—a world without blondes would mean. Another poem, “Three Anthropomorphic Studies,” features a familiar trio of Warner Bros. cartoon characters consumed by an almost existential despair. Here again, the gap between man and beast dissolves.

At times Vermeersch seems to laud the natural world, envying the way it has “mastered the arts of giving and taking,” (a doozy of a line from “Ode to Amoebus Proteus”), while poems like “In the Glorious Absence of Gods” and “Boys Who Envy Werewolves” point to the disastrous consequences in store for those who ignore their primeval selves.

If the collection has a weakness, it’s that the poems may cohere a bit too much, offering slightly different takes on a thesis that Vermeersch has no trouble proving in a single go. But that is a minor quibble. Both a swan song to our shared primordial past and an examination of how the animal within thrives in spite of, or perhaps in retaliation to, our best efforts to subdue it, The Reinvention of the Human Hand might very well be the year’s most astute meditation on human nature and its lingering past.

(Originally published in MTLS)

Review: I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore by Anne Perdue

2011-07-15T11:40:00.000-07:00

Fiction Review
Andrew MacDonald

I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore
by Anne Perdue
London, ON: Insomniac Press, 2010
258 pp. $19.95

I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore, Anne Perdue’s provocatively titled debut, is a collection of eight funny-sad short stories about the lengths we go to find love in a world of pawned dreams and everyday catastrophe. Perdue’s characters are jerks, spazzes and obnoxious boozehounds. They cuss, kvetch and refuse to play nice. But they are also expectably human and just as susceptible to the wiles of hope and love as the rest of us.

In the “Escapist,” for example, expert tourists Doug and Shar wreak havoc in the Caribbean. Here, as elsewhere in the collection, the narrator is a roving shifty-eyed third person, binding itself to the story’s dynamic duo while doling ample helpings of snark and discontent. Not only do we dislike Doug and Shar, we have all met them in some incarnation or another. They are the goons who butt in front of us at the supermarket, the lushes who come to parties empty-handed and drink all the good stuff. While Doug heaves himself dramatically on an ice sculpture in an effort to drunkenly protest paying for a bottle of expensive wine, the perspective shifts to his wife Shar. Watching on, she weighs the pros and cons of getting yet another divorce before deciding to stand by her red-faced, steak-craving man. Somehow Perdue convinces us to suspend judgment of her creations, if only for a second. There is nothing left to do but gape at these marvelously complementary specimens in wonder.

Then, there are the protagonists of “Dry Well,” Keith and Heather, hapless first time home-owners desperately trying to stay financially and emotionally afloat. Between the mice, the busted furnace, and Keith’s career-woes, there is not much the pair can do but scratch their heads and hold each other tight. In one memorable scene, they frolic in an inflatable backyard pool until an errant nail deflates their fun. And then the rain comes. Even here, in a ramshackle house that refuses to be fixed, the human spirit endures. The ending, a brilliant recounting of the flawless trajectory of a gummy bear, is well worth the wait and proves that, even at its bleakest, the universe can still serve up grace.

Sally Snow, the main character in CA-NA-DA, is perhaps Purdue’s most striking creation – a whirling dervish of quirk and emotional spasticity. Middle-aged and awash in her own life mistakes, she urges her slacker of a son, Lyle, to get a life. She even offers him a cool grand to take the MENSA membership test with her. But Lyle is content working at the local shooting range, chumming up with illiterate rednecks, and Sally’s attempts to buy him over only widen the gulf between them. The story really comes alive when Sally welcomes Ruth, a Haitian billeting in Canada with her baby, Joe, into her house. It is not giving too much away to say that Ruth becomes vinegar to Sally’s baking soda, her presence being just what the proverbial doctor ordered to bring the story to a climax.

On a technical level, Perdue has commendable writing chops. It takes a special kind of artist to cuss like nobody’s business and still sound smart. Junot Diaz manages it, Mordecai Richler, too. Add Perdue to that list. When she is not crafting sensual metaphors and provocative imagery, Perdue drops F-bombs with aplomb. Moreover, each story is meticulously crafted and well structured. Any one of these tales could light up the big screen with their evocativeness.

If I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore has a flaw, it is Perdue’s occasional lack of sympathy for her characters. They are not the most likable people in the world, and I cannot help but wonder whether a bit more narratorial compassion might go a long way in endearing them to us. But that is a minor irritant in an otherwise splendid work. Manic but never gratuitous, I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore is a brave, sly and touching meditation on sharing an imperfect world. Perdue’s characters learn, like the rest of us inevitably do, that no matter how far we fall, as long as there is company we can at least enjoy the ride.

(Originally published in MTLS)

2011-07-08T12:43:00.001-07:00

Two items of note. First and fore, my review of a pair of novels, Combat Camera and the Evolution of Inanimate Objects, can be found in the current ish of Event. Deets here.

Also, PRISM International has picked up my story, "Krupkee, on a Molecular Level," for a future issue. It's about a Ukrainian punk band on the run from the authorities after the lead singer puts the son of a political high-up into a coma. Other features include mysterious toilet alcohol, a plane crashing into the steeple of a church, and several reference to genitals. At its heart, though, it's about fatherhood and redemption. Seriously.

Will keep you updated, you interwebs you.

Katrina Barton Best: Bird by Bird interview

2011-05-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

My interview with Commonwealth First Book - Canada and the Caribbean Region - Award winner, Katrina Barton Best, is up and atom in the latest issue of The Puritan. Read! Wonder! Enjoy!

Link to the pdf can be found here.

Review: Sarah Court by Craig Davidson

2011-04-30T05:22:00.001-07:00

Originally this was going to be in Broken Pencil. Now I'm not so sure. Anyway, it's a book that deserves to be read, so I'm just posting the review here. Salut.

* * *

Sarah Court
By Craig Davidson
ChiZine Publications
308 pages
$15.95

Reviewed by Andrew MacDonald

Populated by a surprisingly endearing rogues gallery of boxers, drifters, sex addicts, basketball dads, dog fighters, and repo men, Craig Davidson's debut collection, Rust and Bone, was a stiff knee to the groin. Painful to read but, in some bizarre way, utterly mind-bending. When I heard Davidson's new collection, Sarah Court, had just been released from estimable publisher ChiZine, I stocked up on some frozen peas, bought a bottle of cheap rye, and sat down for what I hoped would be a visceral, testicle-swelling experience.

Sarah Court follows five families living on a single squirrel-saturated block a stone's throw from Niagara. You have daredevil Colin, dead set on going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. A few doors down neighbours Saberhagen and Fletch Burger throw their children into a boxing ring and call for blood. Meanwhile shoplifting Patience, her basement famously destroyed by a local pyromaniac, discovers a toilet-bobbing infant in the local department store's loo. And there's a box that might contain a demon, too.

Heady stuff? Yes ma'am. Good writing? You bet your ass.

Present are all of Davidson's pet themes: failing fathers and flailing sons, the relentless clawing to absolution, an utter disregard for the frailties of the human body. Short of Barbara Gowdy, nobody else in Canada writes about the down and out with Davidson's signature blend of tenderness and tough love.

If I could venture a single whisper of criticism, it would be that too often characters blur together. Maybe it's because they all speak a uniquely Davidson dialect: terse half-sentences followed by insanely rich, almost imagistic figurative observations. It's no knock on the stories themselves, each of which stands tall in its own right. As an interwebbed collection, though, they gel a bit too much, if you get my drift.

I refuse to end with criticism of any flavor, though. Sarah Court is just that good. Canada needs more Davidson. Help facilitate more Davidson by buying this book, reading it on the subway, and showing it to people who like to read. Or people who don't like to read. Like Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, and Charles Bukowski, writers to whom Davidson is often compared, he possesses the unique ability to make readers out of high school drop outs and grease-spattered fry cookers. And while Sarah Court will inevitably deliver a few dodgy uppercuts to your kidneys and gut, the organ it will expertly, lovingly abuse is your my heart.

Reportage

2011-04-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

Not much to report these days, re: the writing. Have stories in submission land, am working on an interview with Katrina Best, in the middle of reviewing Matthew Trafford's short story collection "The Divinity Gene," and I'm going to an 80s theme party tomorrow night. Then there's that whole novel thing. That too.

Hope you're swell. Go to your local bookstore and pick up a copy of The Pinch while you're there. Something I wrote is in there.

FCOL2

2011-03-21T18:28:00.000-07:00

FOR CRYING OUT LOUD II and DEMONS Launch Party and Readings

The Supermarket
268 Augusta Ave, Kensington Market

Thursday March 24th, 2011 @ 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

FOR CRYING OUT LOUD II will be on sale for $12. DEMONS will be on sale for $7. Other back-list titles will be available as well.

There is no cover. This is a fully licensed event. Contributors to each publication will be reading to celebrate this unique release. It will be hosted by Ferno House staff.

Eh. I'll probably be reading.

First lines are sexy.

2011-03-20T08:02:00.001-07:00

Find the first line of a story I wrote at the sexy first line (and short-short story) website, 50 to 1. The story's actually about a girl who falls for a boy who falls for her best friend, who's a guy, and how they make it work. I don't think it'll ever be published. But you can read the opener!

Here are some other first lines that are cool and so on . . .

Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. —David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

and from my mentor, the estimable Larry Garber, from his first novel Tales from the Quarter:

There are some women who are terribly narcissistic; they keep kissing their own shadows and getting their lips dirty.

You should really track this book down and read it. Probably at the biblio, since it's out of print.

Shhh. Quiet.

2011-03-14T07:38:00.000-07:00

I don't really enter contests, or haven't in the past. Mostly because I'm miserly and don't like paying for anything. But I'm starting to enter more contests, including the Dzanc Book International Literary Award. You should know right out that I didn't win. But I was named a finalist, which I think is worth celebrating. Deets below . . .

Dzanc Books and Guernica are pleased to announce the winner of the International Literature Award—affiliated with the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal (June 19-July 2, 2011)—who receives airfare, accommodations, and tuition to this summer’s program and publication in Guernica.

Out of just under 200 entries, Final Judge Chris Abani selected a group of poems by Jacob Shores-Arguello as the winner:

Jacob Shores-Arguello grew up in Costa Rica and the United States. He studied poetry and translation at the MFA program at the University of Arkansas where he was the Walton Fellow. He is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Ukraine and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship in Provincetown.

Finalists include:

Kevin Kaiser’s “Little Parrots” (fiction)
Angie Lee’s “Shuffle Master of the Universe” (nonfiction)
Andrew MacDonald’s “Krupkee” (fiction) - this is me!
Shivani Manghnani’s “Tsunami” (nonfiction)
Ottessa Moshfegh’s “The Chaperone” (fiction)
Brian Sousa’s “Away from the Mountains and Towards the Sea” (fiction)
Eleanor Stanford’s “A Story of Brazil in Three Fruits” (nonfiction)

With 200 submissions, making the final eight is pretty happy-making. Methinks it's time to start shopping the piece!

xo -a

Silk Road / Katrina Best's Bird Eat Bird

2011-03-12T05:31:00.000-08:00

The latest ish of Oregon-based literary journal Silk Road is out, and included between its pages is a short story I wrote about a kid who's dad went mental in a supermarket and said kid's relationship with the Ukrainian exchange student he bullies. Doubt this one will ooze over the Canadian border, so if you really, reeeeally need to read, you'll have to either go to the states or order via their website.

Also, I want everyone to go out and buy Katrina Best's debut collection, Bird Eat Bird, which recently won the Commonwealth First Book Award for the Canada / Caribbean Region. Before Katrina hit it big time, I reviewed her book here. But as much as I'd like to take credit for 100% of the book's success, I'm willing to concede that Katrina might have played a role in it, too.

(winky emoticon face)

New Puritan

2011-02-16T20:58:00.000-08:00

Dear Puritan Friends,

Out twelfth issue -- Winter 2011 -- is up and running. Head on over to our site (www.puritan-magazine.com) and ogle the new writing!

There you will find:

Fiction by Daniel Scott Tysdal, Christine Fadden, Sharon Erby, and Joel McConvey.

Poetry by Mat Laporte, E Martin Nolan, George Moore, Kristine Ong Muslim, Martin Balgach, Bardia Sinaee, Mark DeCarteret, William Doreski, and Richard Kostelanetz.

An interview with John Lavery by rob mclennan!
An interview with Catherine Owen by Darryl Salach!
An interview with Daniel Scott Tysdal by E Martin Nolan!

And a review of Margaret Christakos`Welling by E Martin Nolan.

We are currently accepting submissions for our 13th issue, Spring 2011 up until March 31st. Head over to our site and use our BRAND NEW submissions manager to send us your work.

We still pay respectable bounties for new fiction, poetry, non-fiction, interviews, and reviews! Hope to see your stuff come tumbling in.

Thanks!

Spencer Gordon
Andrew MacDonald
Tyler Willis

The Puritan : Frontiers of New English
puritan-magazine.com
puritanmagazine@gmail.com
http://twitter.com/#!/thepuritan

Pinching.

2011-02-08T08:03:00.000-08:00

Next week or so, swanky Memphis lit journal The Pinch will be releasing their latest issue, which includes a personal essay I wrote about possessing male genitals. This may or may not be something you want to read. I hope it's the former, but I'll understand if it's the latter.

I reference foreskin rejuvenation treatments, though! And marijuana![!!]

The cover will look like this and the entire issue will be available in places like Chapters on either the 15th or 16th. Can't remember. Golly!

The picture to the left is the first google image that comes up when you search 'the pinch.' I like it.

Reviews

2011-02-01T10:15:00.000-08:00

Heads up - two reviews are out and about. First, in Matrix, my review of Giller/GG/Writer's Trust Award-shortlister Kathleen Winter's novel Annabel. I may or may not reference trousers.

Also presented for you perusal: a review of Anne Perdue's charmingly-titled collection, I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore. Read it here at MTLS.

Finally, you should read Matthew R Loney's story, "That Savage Water," in the same issue. Not only is the story really swell, but Matt is a handsome gentleman who looks like this:

David Mitchell: On Writing

2011-01-12T07:23:00.001-08:00

You've probably heard of David Mitchell. He wrote, among other things, Cloud Atlas and, most recently, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Brilliant writer and, it turns out, smashing fella. Take, zum beispiel, the following interview:

http://www.youtube.com/v/kdKk29Sv4Uk?fs=1&hl=en_US

I especially like the part where he talks about seeing yourself as a writer, how it's gradual. Also how you have to leave the sociopathic bitch that is your next project alone until you finish your current.

Daniel Scott Tysdal Mourner's Book of Albums / Indie Writers Death Match

2011-01-04T21:19:00.000-08:00

Waterhouse Review

2011-01-04T20:56:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year one and all. If you're in the mood for reading words on the internets to celebrate surviving another year, consider the current issue of Scotland's The Waterhouse Review. And because this blog is generally, mostly, lovingly self-serving, you could even read my story, "Vanishing Point," in said issue. Golly!

Because the story is about a really, really skinny person, I've included a picture of a sumo wrestler. Tricky, no?

TNSR

2010-12-23T20:37:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas to me! The Fledgling Nova Scotia Review, an annual print journal from out east, has picked up my story "Blindspots," a tragicomic tale of faulty testicles, driving instruction, and a dead octogenarian redhead.

Looks like it'll be out in early summer, 2011. Will keep you posted. Since this is the inaugural issue, there is no image of the magazine for me to use in this post. So I'm posting a picture of Nova Scotia. See? Good!

Merry Christmas / Bad Writing / Dan Tysdal

2010-12-22T08:02:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas, you people. Here is your present - a trailer from a movie I want to see. I think you might want to see it too.

What else? Oh! If you're thinking of buying a book for a loved one this Christmas, consider the following:

Description:

An unconventional and profound mixed-media poetry collection that blends traditional and avant garde forms to explore remembrance, grief, and mourning.

Daniel Scott Tysdal follows up his first award-winning collection of poetry with The Mourner’s Book of Albums, an emotionally striking and formally ambitious exploration of the elegiac tradition and the twenty-first-century attitude to remembrance and grief. Encountering a wide range of arresting events—from a best friend’s suicide to the war in Afghanistan, from improvised memorials to the plastinated corpses of Body Worlds—these innovative poems survey the forces and forms that shape what and how we mourn. The sonically lively lines, the vivid images, and the richly textured voices of the The Mourner’s Book of Albums are composed in a variety of traditional and unconventional forms—the lyric, the ballad, the graphic poem, and the fabricated document, to name a few—as a means of grappling with the many acts and practices that link the living and the dead. Tysdal compiles the albums, however fluid and fragile, that hold them together.

Dan is really good and funny and this collection is good and funny too. I know the title of this post suggests that Dan is a bad writer. This is not true. Just FYI.

Silky Smoove.

2010-11-18T18:35:00.000-08:00

'Tis the season to be jolly. And I'm jolly. Why? Well, for starters I won signed copies of this year's Giller shortlist, including (drum roll?) an elusive first edition, first printing, of Giller-winner The Sentimentalists. Guys, only 800 of this suckers were printed. This one's signed. I'll probably put it up on eBay or Abebooks and auction it off, along with the other titles (I own most of them already). If you're interested in one or all of them, shoot me an email, message, homing pigeon, whatever.

Also. Also! Just got word that my story, "Something Comes Next," has been scooped up for publication by a journal south of the border called Silk Road. Which is pretty cool for reasons triplicate. One, anytime anyone who wants to read your work is cause for celebration. Number second, the story, lengthy demented bastard that it is, been trying to find a home for awhile. Plus it includes the following gem:

Q: Why did the girl fall of the swingset?
A: She had no arms!

(ha. . . ha . . . ?)

So it isn't really funny, but the line makes sense in-context. Trust me.

And reason C why this makes me happy: I've been having the crappiest week. Seriously. Too much negative stuff and one of my cats has suspicious marks on her belly. She'll be alright I think, but what kind of overprotective cat-dad would I be if I didn't have nightmares about it?

Anyway. Here is what the journal looks like:

Vanishing.

2010-11-02T08:17:00.000-07:00

A story I wrote about a skinny person who's slowly disappearing will appear online at Scotland's The Waterhouse Review and in FCOL 2, a forthcoming print anthology from Ferno House Press.

It's funny, because the Ferno House logo is a house that's on fire, and the Waterhouse Review has an undeniable link to soaking wet buildings. You can almost see some kind of cosmic narrative at play here.

Re: Giller

2010-10-30T20:14:00.001-07:00

I came across this piece on the Biblioasis blog and found it really informative re: some of the things I was thinking about a few weeks back. Namely, what this year's Giller shortlist means. Since I'm by no means in the know about anything, really, it was nice having a lot of the tangible publishing and sales questions I had answered.

I recommend it with heartiness and good cheer.

Read the post.

An aside.

2010-10-28T21:25:00.000-07:00

Looking over my freelance assignments, I think I take on way too many extra-curricular stuff. But I love free books. And writing about free books. And about authors. And whatnot. The books don't even need to be free for me to write about them. For example, I'm reading Michelle Berry's newest novel, This Book Will Not Save Your Life, which I paid for and which I want to write about.

However, I'm already writing about too many books. And no editors have asked me to write about this book for them.

Still.

Bird Eat Bird by Katrina Best, etc.

2010-10-28T21:07:00.000-07:00

Do you like funny things that are also secretly serious? And stories? And stories that are funny and secretly serious? I do. Which is why I gave Katrina Best's Bird Eat Bird such a positive review in the latest issue of Broken Pencil! Follow this link to read the review. It includes words like 'indelible' and 'panache.'

Speaking of Best, I'm also doing a profile on Katrina, which is very past deadline. I'll have it done eventually, and when I do I'll post some of it, all of it, or a summary of it on here. Katrina Best is a cool person. Trust me. And funny.

On the subject of funny books, I also reviewed two books that aren't really funny for past issues of Broken Pencil. The reviews are below.

You should still read those books, too. Not everything has to be funny.

---

Isobel and Emile

In the opening pages of Isobel and Emile, poet Alan Reed's debut novel, the eponymous characters wake up, get dressed and go to the train station. While Emile hops on a train, Isobel stays behind, assuming squatter's rights over her now ex-lover's apartment and the menial grocery store job he left behind. After arriving in Montreal Emile reconnects with Nicholas, an old friend who silently offers Emile a place to stay, and Agathe, a sultry scenester who arranges to have Emile's short documentary film about marionettes debuted at a local cinema.

Readers accustomed to narrative dynamism will be disappointed by what they find in Isobel and Emile, a short novel where something as simple as the unloading of cabbages can span several pages. Consider this, one of many scenes in which an aimless Isobel feels trapped in Emile's old apartment: "Her dress is on the floor by the bed. She walks over to where her dress is. She bends down. She picks it up. She puts it on the bed. She looks at her dress lying on the bed." Here, as elsewhere, Reed strives to make the subtle act grand, training his lens on the mundane in an effort to capture it from every angle. While Reed's militant commitment to the subject-verb-object sentence construction can get tiresome, Isobel and Emile manages to accomplish something quite impressive, pairing a story of two estranged lovers stuck in a rut with a strangely hypnotic, and ultimately complimentary, writing style. That combination means you'll either find Isobel and Emile tedious, repetitive and unimaginative, or the rarest of things: a thoughtful, poetic synchronicity between content and form.

Pitched as "a story of what happens after a love story," Reed's elegiac debut novel is for contemplative readers who don't mind walking in circles, provided the view is nice. (Andrew MacDonald)

by Alan Reed, $18.95, 165 pgs, Coach House Books, chbooks.com

[published in BP, issue 48]

---

Front Porch Mannequins

Rebekkah Adams' debut novel Front Porch Mannequins centers on the bleak, bruised lives of Nan, Alice and Lily, three women living in small town Ontario. The novel begins promisingly when Nan hatches a plan to improve Lily's marriage to her abusive husband by mowing him down with a car. The scene is grotesquely brilliant and, perhaps more impressive, utterly realistic -- a testament both to Adams' skillful world-building and her mastery of her characters. At the movies we'd call this kind of thing the inciting incident -- an event of such gravitas that it can't help but bring about epic narrative change. Instead of propelling the narrative forward, however, Nan's plan ends with a disappointing fizzle. Too often Adams takes extended dips into the uniformly troubled pasts of her characters: lengthy interludes that leave their present incarnations stuck, like Delane the mannequin, in the purgatory of Alice's front porch. I kept waiting for something to jolt the trio out of their communal stupor until finally, in the last 30 pages or so, the discovery of a severed hand precipitates the solving of a mystery I didn't even know existed.

A capable writer with an eye for finding hope in the places we least expect, Adams handles the novel's final pages effectively, serving up a credible, redemptive ending with grace and panache. Expanded, these moments would make for even finer narrative fodder. As it stands, they are too little, too late, making Front Porch Mannequins a commendable, though flawed, debut. (Andrew MacDonald)

by Rebekkah Adams, $16.95 176 pgs, Signature Editions PO Box 206, RPO Corydon, Winnipeg MB, R3M 3S7, signature-editions.com

[published in BP, issue 47]

Pinched.

2010-10-22T06:07:00.001-07:00

Rumor has it some creative non-fiction I wrote will appear in an upcoming issue of The Pinch. What is The Pinch? Glad you asked.

The Pinch, formerly called River City, is one of the oldest literary journals in the country. It publishes fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, art, and photography. Sponsored by the University of Memphis and The Hohenberg Foundation, The Pinch appears semi-annually and has published people like Robert Bly, Philip Levine, Mary Oliver, Robert Penn Warren, and Margaret Atwood.

Am, as the title of this post suggests, 'pinched.' Har har. The issue is due out in Canada around February 16th. So, you know, mark your calenders and stuff.

On Canadian Journals and US Journals

2010-10-22T05:13:00.000-07:00

I guess this might be as good a time as any to meditate on the difference between Canadian journals and journals in the United States. Though recently I've set my sights on writing for, and about, my homeland, this isn't the first time I've published down south. And something happens every single time I publish work outside of Canada - I feel obligated to change my contributor bio, the 50-some-word description thingy that appears at the back of the book, magazine, etc. Part of me really wants to erase the selected list of places I've been published and say something like: ANDREW HAS BEEN PUBLISHED IN CANADA, SURE. BUT ALSO IN THE STATES! IN YOUR COUNTRY! TRUST HIM, HE HAS!

Is that unpatriotic? I feel like it might be. Maybe it's only natural to feel like America's sad little brother when it comes to the international publishing scene. We don't have a long, star-spangled literary history; people from Britain make fun of us (see Glendenning, Victoria); most of the time we don't even know where 'here' is, ontologically, and spend way too much time prancing around trying to figure it out (thank you, Margaret Atwood, for establishing Canada as a nebulous blank bereft of identity).

I think there are real, tangible differences between the journal / magazine scenes here and in the US, and anyone who's written a story and wants to publish it and wonders if maybe they should expand their horizons beyond Canada's border will probably have to confront these differences eventually.

Many are the advantages to publishing locally, in your own country. It means that I can walk to the bookstore and find something I've written there. People I know can, and often will, read my stories, essays, or whatever. Plus it sort of builds a base for you in the place where you're most likely to seek publication for a book later on in your career. You're also eligible for Canadian awards, which is good (because there's a smaller pool of published writers to draw from, you have a better shot at getting an award nod) and bad (because, well, there aren't many awards in the first place).

On the other hand, we just don't have that many venues for writers, especially now that the Federal Government seems hell bent on snuffing out artist grants (which, I should probably mention, is another reason why I'm happy to be a writer living in Canada; where else can artists in the early stages of their careers get funding to help them develop?). It's a handful. Before sending a story out I pull out my handy dandy list of places in Canada I'd like to publish. Beside every name is a tally of how many times I've submitted to them in the past.

And I have submitted to each and every one, at least once.

Let's be honest: America has hundreds of journals. Aside from the biggies (New Yorker, here I come!), I can't keep track of them all. And again, this is good AND bad. It's good because it affords more opportunities to be seen by more editors; it's bad because a lot of great, great publications get lost in the mix simply because the mix is too, like, mixed. There are reasons why that's the case. Population size could be one; more people means more readers means more demand for reading material. Legacy could be another. And the number of academic institutions willing to foot the bill for a quality magazine or journal is exponentially higher in the US than in Canada.

For the record: I am happy, boundlessly so, to be a Canadian writer. Even though I like her biographies of other people, I really do think Glendinning is wrong about us. There are a wealth of Canadian writers producing exceptional, and exceptionally risky, work, and I think our smaller publications - our New Quarterlies and our Fiddleheads, our EVENTs and our Prisms and our Geists and our . . . - are every bit as good as journals published down south.

Is it harder for younger writers to get published here? I don't know. Canada has fewer journals to choose from, which makes competition stiff. But I think good writing is good writing and will, with some elbow grease, always find the home and readership it deserves.

JPS22 Review

2010-10-18T11:36:00.000-07:00

Kerry Clare, the reader-reviewer-writer behind Pickle Me This, recently reviewed The Journey Prize Stories 22. Interested parties can amble on over and giver a read.

Final Fist.

2010-10-16T15:52:00.001-07:00

Votes are in: "Eat Fist!" won the Western Magazine Award for Fiction. Hearty thanks to Rick, Ian, and Elizabeth at Event for support, faith, and overall greatness. It's flattering to even be nominated.

Link: http://www.westernmagazineawards.ca

How am I going to celebrate?

Portishead

+

Vintage Punch Out!

Can the Giller screw you?

2010-10-07T19:01:00.000-07:00

So the shortlists for two of the three biggies in Canadian literature have been announced. Even though crowd favourite Michael Winter is nominated for the Writers' Trust Award, the Giller Prize shortlist is by the far the more interesting of the two. The Giller shortlist:

The Matter with Morris, David Bergen (HarperCollins)

Light Lifting, Alex MacLeod (Biblioasis)

This Cake is For the Party, Sarah Selecky (Thomas Allen)

The Sentimentalists, Johanna Skibsrud (Gaspereau)

Annabel, Kathleen Winter (Anansi)

Anyway, this year's selections have caused something of a minor bruhaha. For the first time in, like, ever, it's a battle of the little guys. That's right: no Random House, no M&S, no Penguin, Knopf, etc. etc. HarperCollins has a single title on the list - David Bergen's latest - and Anansi has a title, too, though I don't think you can fairly call them one of the big boys / girls.

Past titles shortlisted for the award have benefited the so-called 'Giller Effect,' a substantial boost in sales, media attention, etc. With few [quote / quote] names on this year's list, there's some speculation as to whether or not the GE will happen. Which kind points to the shady subject of practicality.

I don't know if you know this, but Gaspereau (to use the most glaring example) prints their own books. And apparently The Sentimentalists, their Giller-shortlisted title, is almost out of print. If you were a bigger press, that would mean putting in an order for a second print run, complete with nifty Giller stickers embossing the covers. But what if you print high quality books in low numbers? What if you manually print each and every book (with love) and in order to fill out requests for your Giller shortlisted title you have to push back your Fall publishing schedule to have another run printed? And, God forbid, what happens if the Giller Effect DOESN'T quite work with titles from smaller, less known presses without the marketing and PR budget to paint the town red for their titles?

I mean, seriously. What happens if a smaller publisher sells out its original print run but doesn't sell enough copies of print run two (2) to make it fiscally prudent? Having stacks of book at the front of bookstores costs money. So does having them displayed face out on the shelves. Snazzy promotional materials cost money, too. You bet your ass that David Bergen's book will benefit from such things, because HarperCollins has the infrastructure to take an award nomination and spin gold from it.

But where does that leave Gaspereau? Or Biblioasis, for that matter? For the former, in the worst case scenario, potentially delaying their catalogue to print a book that SHOULD sell but doesn't for all the wrong reasons - lack of promotional budget, high production costs, an infrastructure that can't handle the kind of demand that the Giller nod will probably get them.

To be clear: all of that is speculation. Maybe I'm underestimating the resources (and resourcefulness) of the presses nominated this year. In which case, I can stop talking. I really can. It's just, man. How screwy is it that getting shortlisted for the Giller might actually lose a publisher money?

All of which is not to say that I think we should be nominating the so-called 'major presses' and say peace out to the rest. I'm happy that smaller independent presses are getting their due. It seems like in recent years award nods have been the great equalizer that makes smaller publishers more attractive than they might have been in the past. And kudos to the (tellingly, mostly international) trio of judges for choosing the titles that appeal to them based on content, not some misguided notion of who SHOULD be on the list.

I'm just really, truly curious to see how it plays out this year. As for who I think will take it, I'd put my money on Kathleen Winter, and not just because I'm reviewing her novel Annabel for the next issue of Matrix Magazine in Montreal. It's a good book, plain and simple

JPS22

2010-10-04T18:44:00.000-07:00

This year's incarnation of the Journey Prize Stories is out and can be purchased here. Do imbibe - there are some fantastic stories in here. Recommended reading: the story by Krista Foss. Great stuff.

What follows is an interview thingy I did for the National Post. You can find the original here.

---

The Journey Prize is one of the country’s most prestigious awards for young and emerging authors. The prize, which was endowed by the American author James A. Michener, who donated the royalties from the Canadian edition of his 1989 novel Journey, honours the best short story published in a Canadian literary journal each year. The award has served as a launching pad: past winners include Yann Martel, Alissa York, and Timothy Taylor.

Each year, the finalists are collected in The Journey Prize Stories. This year’s anthology, #22, was chosen by judges Pasha Malla, Joan Thomas, and Alissa York. While the three finalists for the $10,000 Journey Prize will be named on Wednesday, when the nominees for the Writers’ Trust Awards are revealed, we asked all of this year’s authors to answer a few questions about their craft.

Here’s Andrew MacDonald, whose story Eat Fist! was first published in Event.

What’s your story called?

Eat Fist!

When did you write it? How long did it take?

I wrote the story in parts three years ago. With editing, the process took about five months.

What inspired it?

Eat Fist! grew out of three disparate, terribly flawed short stories. The first was a ten page narrative documenting my inability to master Ukrainian, the language of my forebears, and how incredibly depressing it feels to fall short of familial expectations. An old workout partner inspired the second story, which featured a lesbian bodybuilder and her attempts to whip a spindly-armed kid into shape. Finally, I always wanted to write something about comic books, so I worked on this whimsical story about a guy who falls in love with Wonder Woman and, predictably, has his heart broken.

While none of them were particularly good, they somehow joined forces to form the the story included in this year’s anthology.

Was it rejected by another literary journal before finding a home?

Event, the story’s eventual home, was the first (and only) literary journal I sent it to. I am grateful to Rick Maddocks and the Event team for their faith and guidance, and to Larry Garber for support.

What’s your favourite Journey Prize-winning story? Why?

My Husband’s Jump by Jessica Grant, a weird, wonderful account an Olympic skier who hits a jump and never lands. I’ve read the story a half-dozen times, trying to figure out how Grant takes an idea so ostensibly silly and transforms it into an affecting meditation on faith and the grandness of life’s mysteries. Saleema Nawaz’s My Three Girls is a close second.

The prize was made possible by James A. Michener; have you read his novel, Journey?

I have. Nothing beats a well-spun klondike yarn.

All of these stories were originally published in literary journals, most of which recently had their funding slashed. Why are these magazines vital to young writers?

Literary journals offer hope, professional editorial feedback, and – most importantly – a much audience for emerging writers. Moreover, I’d wager that the majority of Canada’s internationally-recognized literary writers cut their teeth by publishing in smaller magazines. For example, every single Canadian to win the Booker Prize published in literary journals before hitting it big, and early work by both of Canada’s Booker-nominees this year appeared in journals like The Fiddlehead and Event. More than half of the finalists for the Giller Prize have resumes that include publication in literary journals, too. Journals are, in short, a vital resource for writers, readers, and purveyors of Canadian culture.

William Faulkner prioritized writing forms thusly: “Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.” Do you agree or disagree, and why?

I hate to disagree with Big Bill, but I think elevating one form over another is silly. As someone who has tried, and failed, at all three, I can tell you that there’s nothing intrinsically more demanding about one than the other. You might enjoy working in a particular form, depending on temperament and taste, but each is, in my opinion, equally masochistic.

Give us an example of a perfect short story.

To me, it doesn’t get much better than Neil Smith’s Bang Crunch. The story follows Eepie Carpetrod, an eight year old girl with Fred Hoyle syndrome, as she ages a month daily until she’s so old she can barely walk. From there, the process reverses itself. I think the best stories contain the world in all its befuddling complexity, and Smith manages, in less than 12 pages, to say more about love, laughter, and loss than most novels.

Interview: National Post

2010-09-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

To celebrate the upcoming relase of The Journey Prize Stories 22 (in stores Tuesday!), The National Post will be interviewing each of the finalists, three at a time, over the next week.

I have no idea when my interview will be printed, but I'll include a transcript of it here after it goes to print.

Cloverfield Festival of Authors

2010-09-10T14:47:00.000-07:00

Next month I'll be reading at the Cloverfield Festival of Authors. Details? Details . . .

Cloverfield Festival of Authors (CLFA) will be held on Tuesday 26 October 2010 at The Ossington in Toronto. It is sponsored by Broken Pencil Magazine, The Puritan, The Ossington, and an as yet unannounced fourth party.

Halloween costumes are very much encouraged.

Terrifying readers for the evening include:

Evie "Stone Cold" Christie
Christine "Eerie" Estima
Jessica "The Werewolf" Westhead
Lindsay "Traumatizing" Tipping
Spencer "Ghoulish" Gordon
David "Bubonic" Brock
Mat "The Viper" Laporte
Andrew "The Minotaur" MacDonald (that's me!)
Nathaniel "Gorgeous" G. Moore
Angela "Haunted" Hibbs
A.G. "The Poltergeist" Pasquella

... and more to be announced and added in suspenseful, pre-Halloween drama!

The Ossington
61 Ossington Avenue
8pm-10pm

Then a dj will play music
and we will dance and our
born / yet unborn
children will dance !
SCAAAARY!

Indie Death Match!

2010-09-08T19:59:00.000-07:00

Look for the editors of The Puritan to have an alienating and mean-spirited role in dolling out criticism for this year's Indie Writers Deathmatch. More to come!

Broken Pencil Magazine Presents: Indie Writers Deathmatch IV

The world's only battle royale short story contest is coming. Enter your best story (1500-3000 words) by December 31, 2010. Be one of 8 finalists and prepare for battle as your story goes head-to-head with other contestants in an elimination "death match" tournament where the public's vote is cut throat and final! Grand prize includes publication in the Spring 2011 issue, $300 cash money, a BP prizepack worth $300, and, most importantly, bragging rights forever more. Two runners-up will also receive publication in Broken Pencil and paid standard publication rates. Entrace fee: 20 dollars (includes a 1 year subscription to Broken Pencil).

For a peak at last year's carnage, visit http://www.brokenpencil.com/deathmatch

ReLit Awards

2010-09-02T08:07:00.001-07:00

The shortlist for this year's ReLit Award crop is up!

A lot of familiar names there, but one in particular stands out: Nathaniel G. Moore's new novel Wrong Bar, out from Tightrope Books. I don't know if reader input means anything for the award. It probably doesn't. You can still buy the book, though. You should do that. For serious.

Ondaatje overrated?

2010-08-25T10:17:00.000-07:00

According to this ditty from the National Post, Michael Ondaatje, Joseph Boyden, and David Adams Richards are three of the most overrated authors in Canada.

Lynn Coady, Douglas Glover, and Caroline Adderson are three of the most underrated.

Q'uelle controversial!

20-somethingers

2010-08-19T06:57:00.000-07:00

Normally I'd only post stuff related to writing, but I feel compelled to share the following. Really, this article sums up pretty much everyone I know in their 20s.

The first paragraph:

This question pops up everywhere, underlying concerns about “failure to launch” and “boomerang kids.” Two new sitcoms feature grown children moving back in with their parents — “$#*! My Dad Says,” starring William Shatner as a divorced curmudgeon whose 20-something son can’t make it on his own as a blogger, and “Big Lake,” in which a financial whiz kid loses his Wall Street job and moves back home to rural Pennsylvania. A cover of The New Yorker last spring picked up on the zeitgeist: a young man hangs up his new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry, annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1]

Review: The Reinvention of the Human Hand

2010-08-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

New review of Paul Vermeersch's The Reinvention of the Human Hand up at MTLS.

It features this MySpace-stylized author photo!

Also, my review of Arthur Reed's debut novel Isobel and Emil appears the latest issue of Broken Pencil.

Review Madness!

Rejection Letters

2010-08-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

Originally appeared on The New Quarterly's Literary Type blog.

The Tao of Form Rejection Letters

In his forward to The Workshop, an anthology of writing dedicated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Thomas Grimes argues that, popular perception aside, the creative writing workshop doesn’t really teach you what to do. He says, “[the workshop] has offered no prescription for ‘fixing’ stories, no formulas for creating characters . . . Everything it teaches, essentially, is a form of No.”

One could argue that the form rejection letter’s doing something similar. In twenty words or less, it forces us to contend with nothingness, the capital-N- No.

My first rejection letter was of such potent nothingness that it didn’t exist. I saw a call for submissions, raided my desk for the best story I had, sealed it in an envelope and bid the little fella godspeed. Four months later the next issue was out. No sign of my short story in the table of contents but, lo, a surprise on page six: a few lines of my cover letter, published verbatim, as a letter to the editor.

Ouch.

I’ve treasured rejection letters ever since, even the generic ones that spell my name wrong and appear in my mailbox a year late.

Not many people like form rejection letters. Feelings are hurt? The form letter doesn’t care. Thanks but no thanks, it says, with a brevity that would make Hemingway proud.

I would argue, however, that the form rejection letter’s worth rests not simply in its ability to make you mad. It’s what it doesn’t say ‘s important. Counterintuitive? Could be. After all, wouldn’t it be easier for editors to just tell us what the hell we’re doing wrong and save everyone the grief?

Easier, maybe, but not necessarily more effective. In an interview appended to his
latest collection of stories, Last Notes, Tamas Dobozy asks us to treasure our rejection letters, particularly the generic ones:

“There was something in that flat ‘No’ you received that was amazingly enlightening – because it told you your writing wasn’t working but didn’t tell you how to fix it. You were forced to improve only on the strength of your own resources, and so there was an organic process at play . . . It was that step into uncharted territory that forced me to develop my instincts.”

Dobozy’s right: you don’t know what you’re looking for, only that whatever it is exists and makes a manuscript once believed to be pristine ugly and flawed. Innocents may die as you question every sentence’s right to life. But somewhere amidst the carnage you find what you’re looking for. The form rejection letter’s boon won’t be the pitch-perfect ending your story needed or the hidden gun you just now figured out how to bring back into play. Its lessons are less transient, more universal.

When all is said and done, the form rejection letter hasn’t taught you where to look – the terrain’s going to change with every story you write – but how.

WMA Redux

2010-08-06T10:01:00.000-07:00

My poor little blog. So neglected. Well, I'm here, and I have some good news for you. "Eat Fist!", previously nominated for a Western Magazine Award, has made the shortlist alongside four other deserving stories.

The list:

Andrew MacDonald, Eat Fist!, Event

Ben Lof, When in the Field with Her at His Back, The Malahat Review

Bill Gaston, Petterick, The Malahat Review

Stephen Gauer, Hold Me Now, Prairie Fire

Laura Boudreau, The Dead Dad Game, Prism International

[http://www.westernmagazineawards.ca/]

Two of those names I'm familiar with - Bill Gaston, amazing author of (among other things) Gargoyles, and Laura Boudreau, who followed pretty much the same path I did, through Larry Garber's creative writing class at UWO, into the program at U of T, where she also worked with Michael Winter. Only she did it before me, so technically I'm following in her footsteps.

Either way, good company to be in. The winner will be announced in October. Will keep you informed.

New Puritan

2010-06-20T15:46:00.001-07:00

The 1010 Issue has launched!

Go to www.puritan-magazine.com and check out Issue 10, Spring 2010, featuring ...

fiction by Marko Fong and Brian Allen Carr ...

poetry by Zachariah Wells, Carey Toane, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Leigh Nash, Robert Swereda, Catherine Graham, and Dave Margoshes ...

and a review of Dionne Brand's Ossuaries by E Martin Nolan.

We're now looking for submissions of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, interviews, and reviews for Issue 11, Summer 2010.

Send all questions and submissions to puritanmagazine@gmail.com.

Western Magazine Award for Fiction

2010-05-29T21:03:00.000-07:00

A pleasant surprise in the old inbox today. In addition to previously nominating my story, "Eat Fist!" for the Journey Prize, the kind folks at Event have also nominated me for a Western Magazine Award in the Fiction category. Previous finalists (and winners) include Annabel Lyon, Bill Gaston, Lee Henderson, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Elizabeth Hay, Craig Davidson, and Bronwen Wallace. All of which is super and unexpected. If I'm named a finalist I'll find out in July.

Oh, my little story that could. Keep on trucking.

The Kinkiest Characters in Literature

2010-05-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

THE TOP FIVE:

5. Satan (Paradise Lost, Milton): Nobody can out-charm Milton’s Lord of Darkness. Much-lauded for his ability to transform himself into a giant slithering phallus.

4. Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller): A brothel-hopping whirling dervish of libertine jouissance and syphilis, Henry’s never met a sexual encounter (or an STI) he didn’t like.

3. O (The Story of O, Pauline Reage): Submissive and sexy, playful O enjoys slow, painful degradation at the hands of faceless men who strip her of any sense of selfhood.

2. Patrick Batemen (American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis): When he’s not doing pushups to keep his bodyfat under four percent or scoping out the latest fashions, Patrick can be found slaughtering hookers with chainsaws and trying to stuff cats into bank machines.

1. Simone (Story of the Eye, Georges Bataille): From bloodletting to golden showers, necrophilia to eye socket sex, Simone’s interests are sure to please even the most demanding lover. Especially fond of the rodeo – where else can you find riper bull testicles for vaginal insertion?

THE REST:

6. Madame de St. Ainge (Philosophy of the Bedroom, Marquis de Sade)

7. Lolita (Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov)

8. Bear (Bear, by Marian Engel)
"If I had a tumor, I'd name it Marla"

"If I had a tumor, I'd name it Marla"

9. Marla Singer (Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk)

10. Alex (A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess)

11. Vaughan (Crash, JG Ballard)

12. Lord Byron

13. Sarah (Sarah, JT LeRoy)

14. Fevvers (Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter)

15. Humbert Humbert (Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov)

16. Anaïs Nin (Diaries of Anaïs Nin)

17. Q_ (Zombie, Joyce Carol Oates)

18. The Dog Woman (Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson)

19.Belle de Jour (Belle de Jour, Joseph Kessel)

20. Nan Astley (Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters)

HONOURABLE MENTIONS:

Ipy and Ella (Geek Love, Katherine Dunn)

Orlando (Orlando, Virgina Woolf)

The Wife of Bath (The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer)

Molly Bloom (Ulysses, James Joyce)

The Dark Lady (Sonnets, Shakespeare)

Randle McMurphy (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey)

Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler)

Portnoy (Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth)

Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë)

[Originally appeared in Blackheart Magazine ]

Mordecai Gives Back

2010-05-17T21:47:00.000-07:00

Mordecai Richler: Improving literacy, one cat at a time.

The Grono

2010-05-17T15:19:00.000-07:00

The other day I was sitting on my partner's bed with her computer on my lap. The bed is pressed up against the corner, underneath a nifty little window ledge about six feet off the ground. Atop the window ledge are an assortment of things: a wooden artist doll with a name I don't remember anymore; a black and white photograph my partner took; and this:

According to the IKEA website, the Grono is made of mouth-blown glass and as such each Grono is unique. The Grono provides soft mood lighting. It also tries to kill me.

Somehow the Grono's power cord got caught on my arm, so when I sat up off the bed I pulled the Grono off the ledge and onto my head. Then the Grono shattered.

There's no real reason for me to be sharing this story. Maybe to warn you about Gronos. But then I had to go buy a new Grono and I liked it so much I bought one for myself, so maybe that's not the case either.

Excerpt: MSN conversation.

2010-05-09T19:22:00.000-07:00

shmu: i just want to get into my pjs and be comfortable and cozy. tantrumlegs.
me: tantrumlegs!
shmu: 'tarantrum-legs'!!!!!!
me: thats so amazing, because i can picture you doing this motion you do, like youre swimming or massaging the asses of a thousand communist women

30 Second Review: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

2010-05-09T07:50:00.000-07:00

I like Elizabeth McCracken. I like her novel, Giant's House, and I really like her collection, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry?. Not surprisingly, I also like her new Oprah-endorsed - and wonderfully titled - memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination. Or maybe surprisingly. The memoir is all about McCracken's first ill-fated pregnancy, and about its more successful sequel. There isn't much of a story here, in any traditional sense. McCracken and her husband temporarily christen their baby-in-waiting Pudding. Late in the pregnancy Pudding dies, so late that McCracken still needs to give birth. A year later she's pregnant again. It's not the kind of thing I'm usually interested in. Somehow, though, I fell in love - as I always do - with McCracken's wisdom. Did I say wisdom? I did. Know that I furrow my brows whenever someone describes an author or a piece of writing as 'wise.' But I can say without any kind of doubt that this book is wise. And funny. And sad. It seems to breathe life. I like that kind of thing. Here's a passage that eviscerated my cockles:

I put my hand on top of my stomach and felt what I thought of as Pudding's rolling-over-in-bed move. 'God, I feel better," I said. I exhaled. "All right. Well done, Pudding."

Later I found out that this was a Braxton Hicks contraction, my uterus puttering around, maybe getting ready for labor, maybe not. I found out, you see, because I continued to have them even after he was irrefutably dead.

Book: http://www.amazon.ca/Exact-Replica-Figment-My-Imagination/dp/0316027677

More McCracken: http://www.elizabethmccracken.com/

Gaea Girls: Caught w/ String does the movies!

2010-05-09T07:09:00.001-07:00

It seems to me that I should start making posts about something other than what I'm up to writing-wise, so here goes. Yesterday I went with Ms. Brooke, whose postcard story "Dogs Fall in Love at First Sight, You Know", is a finalist for the Geist postcard fiction contest, to my first Hot Docs movie ever (which makes me a terrible terrible Torontonian for not taking advantage of the city's abundance of cultural events). Brooke rightly intuited my interest in all things off-beat and athletic and took me out to see Gaea Girls, a documentary about female Japanese pro-wrestlers.

It was fantastic - I shit you not. The training these women go through blows my mind. It was interesting to see how different pro-wrestling is in Japan than in America. It seems to be less scripted there, more overtly violent. The fans are just as rabid, though, and the events just as spectacular (as the entrance music for the Gaea wrestlers puts it, 'WE ARE FREAK-OUT!'). The director did a little G&A afterwards and the things she said changed how I viewed the film - little details that I missed about the dynamics between wrestlers, and what happened after.

Here's a clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyOJXLY2Dxk

New Review

2010-05-05T11:37:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Broken Pencil, my review of Rebekkah Adams' debut novel, Front Porch Mannequins, is out in the current issue. Indubitably.

I also encourage you to pick up a copy of Darwin's Bastards, a collection of apocalyptic mostly-Canadian fiction. You should especially read Neil Smith's excerpt from his novel-in-progress and Anosh Irani's bizarre fetus story. George the Cat says you should, so you should.

Review: Playing Basra

2010-05-02T21:45:00.000-07:00

Book review:

Playing Basra

With its sparse, brutal prose and trashy cast of latchkey kids, Playing Basra, Edward Brown's debut collection of short stories, almost lives up to its billing as the booze-soaked love child of Hemingway and The Trailer Park Boys. And like the lovable losers who call Sunnyvale Trailer Park home, Brown's characters can break your heart. In "Radio Dispatched," Mike, the collection's adolescent narrator, relates his father's unexpected death and the family's subsequent spiral into destitution, while the Journey Prize-nominated "Beer Bottles and Bowling Balls" grimly covers everything from molestation to abandoned babies.

To its credit, the collection isn't uniformly bleak. In "Quiet as India," Mike completes his sexual awakening by tenderly locking lips with his crush in the womb-like depths of the neighbourhood swimming pool. When they finally surface, Mike boldly declares, in parlance familiar to young lovers everywhere, "We'd never come apart." It's a touchingly humane, and welcome, reprieve; unfortunately, it's the only chance Brown gives us to catch our breath.

Indeed, there are times when the gritty, beer-drenched territory Brown charts is both too much and too familiar. In "Chip Dip," for example, Donny finds the notion of Mike's brother Ray marrying a nursing student absurd: "girls like her don't marry people like us. Now shut your mouth, I'm tryin' to eat." The sentiment recalls S.E. Hinton's classic novel The Outsiders, where a band of greasers wage war with the sons and daughters of the town's privileged elite. While Hinton urges disaffected youth to "stay gold" in the face of the traumas of adolescence, Brown offers precious little in the way of hope. For better or worse, in the world according to Playing Basra, those who are gold don't stay that way for long. (Andrew MacDonald)

by Edward Brown $21.95, 194 pgs. Exile Editions 134 Eastbourne Ave Toronto, ON, M5P 2G6

Review published in Broken Pencil 46.

Journey Prize

2010-04-16T14:29:00.000-07:00

Good news came via email today. My story, "Eat Fist!" has been named a finalist for the Journey Prize and will be included in this year's anthology. Getting into the anthology has been a dream of mine since I started writing. The number of writers I respect and love and sometimes stalk lovingly over the internets who have appeared in past anthologies is mind blowing.

I snagged this from the McClelland & Stewart website:

The $10,000 Journey Prize, now known as The Writers' Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, is awarded annually to an emerging and developing writer of distinction for a short story published in a Canadian literary publication. This award is made possible by James A. Michener's generous donation of his Canadian royalties earnings from his novel Journey, published by McClelland & Stewart in 1988. The Journey Prize itself is the most significant monetary award given in Canada to a developing writer for a short story or excerpt from a fiction work-in-progress.

The winner of the Journey Prize is selected from among the stories that appear in the current volume of The Journey Prize Stories, published annually in the fall by McClelland & Stewart.

For over a decade The Journey Prize Stories has established itself as one of the most prestigious anthologies in the country, introducing readers to the finest emerging Canadian writers from coast to coast. It has become a who's who of up-and-coming writers, and many of the authors whose early work has appeared in the anthology have gone on to distinguish themselves with acclaimed collections of stories or novels, and have won many of Canada's most prestigious literary awards, including the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Award, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and The Giller Prize.

The anthology sets itself apart from others in that it comprises a selection of stories that editors of literary publications from across the country have chosen as what, in their view, is the most exciting writing in English that they have published in the previous year. In recognition of the vital role literary publications play in discovering and promoting new writers, McClelland & Stewart gives its own award of $2,000 to the literary publication that originally published and submitted the winning entry.

McClelland & Stewart acknowledges the continuing enthusiastic support of writers, literary publication editors, and the public in the common celebration of the emergence of new voices in Canadian fiction.

So yeah. Anything now is just gravy.

In addition to finding that out, I also scored a copy of John Birmingham's cult classic (and book made into film recently) He Died with a Felafel in His Hand for a scant fifty cents at the local book pusher. I've spent years looking for it. Now I have it. Good day.

Strong Words Reading

2010-03-25T21:02:00.000-07:00

I'm reading again somehow. Details below.

- - -

Strong Words No. 59

Featuring Catriona Wright, Andrew MacDonald and
Simon Patrick Rogers

Thursday, 8 April 2010 at 8:00 PM
The Free Times Cafe
320 College Street, Toronto
PWYC - 19+

Our fifty-ninth reading, and our fourth at our new home, will also be the second reading brought to you by our new curators Gillian Savigny and Malcolm Sutton. Join us for appearances by Catriona Wright, Andrew MacDonald and Simon Patrick Rogers. The reading will be "pay what you can" as always, and donations of new and used books in resale condition will be collected on behalf of the Book Ends program at the Toronto Public Library. Don't miss it!

April Reader Bios

Catriona Wright is completing an MA in the field of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. Her writing has appeared in various publications, such as the Puritan, Contemporary Verse 2, echolocation, and For Crying Out Loud (chapbook, Ferno House Press). Currently, she is working on a collection of short stories under the mentorship of Barbara Gowdy.

Andrew MacDonald is from Edmonton and lives in Toronto, where he's a graduate student in the University of Toronto's Creative Writing program. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in places like Event, The Fiddlehead, Broken Pencil, Existere, Qwerty, Feathertale, and some others. He's also nominated for the Journey Prize. He likes his tuxedo cats and is working on a novel.

Simon Patrick Rogers is a Toronto-based wordworker with his hand in a little bit of everything from leprechauns to institutional archival records. His word creations have appeared in a variety of tangible printed publications and elsewhere in more ephemeral electric spaces. He is currently writing a series of linked reverse fables that begin with a moral and end in a story. He remains cautiously optimistic of their fruition.

Hart House Review

2010-03-24T21:43:00.000-07:00

I co-won this year's Hart House Review literary contest, so if you're free and able and willing, come to the launch, because this year's issue of the journal is also free and able and willing and available gratis that night. My story "Vanishing Point," about a skinny guy who gets laid, is in it, and so is a brilliant(ine) novel excerpt from the exceptional Alex Grigorescu, whose magnum opus might very well be gracing the shelves of a megastore book peddler near you. Go get her autograph, before someone makes you pay for it.

I won't be reading, because I'm a hoser, but Jim Johnstone and Sheila Heti will be. Cha!

---

2010 Hart House Review Launch

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
Doors open at 7:30
Address & Readings 8pm

2010 Features:
Sheila Heti
Jim Johnstone
Lee Henderson
Jesse Harris

Readings:
Sheila Heti
Jim Johnstone
Featured Contributors

Art Exhibition:
Jesse Harris

HART HOUSE, Library, Music and Board Room
7 Hart House Circle, 2nd floor
University of Toronto

http://www.harthousereview.com

Taste of Penny

2010-03-18T21:05:00.001-07:00

I think you should read this book. It's really good. And PW liked it (see review below).

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/449902-Fiction_Book_Reviews_2_22_2010.php

The Taste of Penny: Stories Jeff Parker. Dzanc (Consortium, dist.), $16.95 paper (144p) ISBN 978-0-9825204-4-4

Ten dark, suspenseful, and tightly wound stories teeter on the edge of catastrophe and the surreal piecing-back-together of life afterwards. Parker (Ovenman) tosses his characters into some form of peril, whether physical—like the narrator of “Our Cause,” who loses the tip of his tongue—or emotional, like the jingoistic American in “The Boy and the Colgante,” who erects a giant illuminated American flag in front of his house in the heart of “French redneck” Quebec. Parker's characters are disfigured or pitiable—one weathers guilt and emotional torture while paralyzed in a wheelchair, one gnaws at his fingers and attempts to excrete a swallowed penny, one stands in line outside the house where his ex-girlfriend is interviewing potential new boyfriends. Parker's prose is concise and quirky, packed with unexpected turns (“It's like yak butter or meat jelly,” says one character. “You don't know exactly what it is but you know it's there”), and aside from the few moments when Parker gets too clever for his own good (as with the unnecessarily obscure “The Briefcase of the Pregnant Spylady”), these stories are haunting and constantly surprising. (Apr.)

High Five.

2010-03-05T06:02:00.001-08:00

I've only started doing readings. They make me feel awkward. The reading last night didn't make me feel awkward. I think that's because there were so many great, nice, snazzy people there. If you were one of those said great, nice, snazzy people, accept my thanks and gratitude. Some of that also goes out to the friends and family of Adam Penn Gilders, who made the night possible and were kind enough to bestow upon me an award in Adam's honour.

So, here again: thanks everyone who came. I hope my reading on April 8th, at Free Times Cafe, is populated by a similarly amazing crowd of peoples.

Reading: Thursday, March 4, 2010

2010-02-25T20:05:00.000-08:00

Event date: Thursday, March 04, 2010, from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM
Location: Where: Room 100, Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street

The Graduate Studies Creative Writing Mentorship Program and the Department of English presents the Annual University of Toronto Creative Writing Showcase.

An evening of readings and discussion with our Graduate students from the Creative Writing Program and their Program Mentors. Free and open to the public. There will be refreshments and a cash bar.

Readers include program alumni Brooke Lockyer and her mentor Catherine Bush and this year's Adam Penn Gilders Scholarship Winner Andrew MacDonald and his mentor Michael Winter.

Please RSVP Camilla Eckbo at creative.writing@utoronto.ca or the Department of English offices at english@chass.utoronto.ca . You may leave a message at 416-978-6039 or 416-946-3026.

More information on the readers:

Catherine Bush is the author of three novels. Claire's Head (M&S, 2004), shortlisted for the Trillium Award, and chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail. The Rules of Engagement (HarperCollins, 2000), a national bestseller, was published internationally, shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award, and chosen as a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by the LA Times and the Globe and Mail. Minus Time (HarperCollins,1993), her first novel, was also published in the U.S. and the U.K., and shortlisted for the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the City of Toronto Book Award. Bush has a degree in Comparative Literature from Yale University, has taught Creative Writing at universities including Concordia, the University of Florida, and the University of Guelph. She is Coordinator of the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Guelph, and is an adjunct professor in University of British Columbia's on-line MFA programme. A native of Toronto, she has been Writer-in-Residence at McMaster University, the University of New Brunswick, the University of Alberta, and the University of Guelph. Her nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications including the Globe and Mail and The New York Times Magazine. She is working on a new novel, The Thief.

Brooke Lockyer won the Hart House Review Literary Contest, the Peter S. Prescott Prize, and the Lenore Marshall Barnard Prize while pursuing degrees in literature and creative writing at Columbia University and U of T. Her short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in various magazines, including the Hart House Review, Helicon, Toronto Life, Toro, and Spacing. She graduated from the MA in English in the Field of Creative Writing Program at the U of T in 2009.

Andrew MacDonald was born in Edmonton and lives in Toronto. His fiction and non-fiction have been published in places like The Fiddlehead, Event, Existere, and Broken Pencil. He is currently a student in the MA in English in the Field of Creative Writing Program at the U of T and the winner of this year's Adam Penn Gilders Scholarship selected by Michael Redhill.

Michael Winter has published five works of fiction. The Big Why won the Drummer General's Award and was nominated for Ontario's Trillium Book Award and the Atlantic Book Awards Thomas Head Raddall Fiction Prize. This All Happened won the Winterset Award and was nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. He was named the first winner of the Writers' Trust of Canada's new Notable Author Award in 2008. His most recent novel is The Architects Are Here. His line drawings illustrate Noah Richler's This is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada, and he divides his time between Toronto and Newfoundland.

New Puritan Sighting

2010-02-23T16:42:00.000-08:00

HEY!

Our new issue has arrived!

Go to www.puritan-magazine.com and check out Issue 9, Winter 2010, featuring ...

fiction by Matthew Barbehenn, Emily Schultz, and Christopher McIlroy ...

poetry by Jim Smith, Marcus McCann, Jenn Blair, Sachiko Murakami, Ben Nardolilli, Jenny Sampirisi, Sean Moreland, Jamie Bradley, Kathryn Mockler, and Robin Richardson ...

and a review of Black Bile Press' One-Off Chapbook Series #3, featuring the authors Tony O'Neill, Julie McArthur, and Nathaniel G. Moore!

With the launch of our Winter issue, we're now looking for submissions of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, interviews, and reviews for Issue X: Spring 2010 (it's only taken us three years to get to the X issue ...).

Send all questions and submissions to puritanmagazine@gmail.com (but be sure to read the guidelines on our site before ya do).

Ohhhhhh yeeeeaaaahhhhh .....

Love,
Spencer Gordon
Andrew MacDonald (that's me!)
Tyler Willis

Dating Novelists

2010-02-20T08:07:00.000-08:00

According to this, novelists make the cut as one of the top professions to date into. According to the article, the novelist is a

creative, expressive and passionate man, he's also sensitive and curious and typically makes his own hours, which leaves plenty of time for you.

I think someone's been snorting the pixie dust again. Other top professionals include psychiatrists, teachers, engineers and dentists. Dentists? Aren't they known for high suicide rates? Worst professions: musicians, lawyers, bankers, police officers, pediatricians, bartenders.

Review: Coming Attractions 08 (Oberon)

2010-02-11T22:09:00.001-08:00

Coming Attractions 08, Oberon Press (2009)

Edited by Mark Anthony Jarman
Featuring: Rebecca Rosenblum, Daniel Griffin, Alice Petersen
Reviewed by Andrew MacDonald

Publishing early work by the likes of Rohinton Mistry and France Itani, the Coming Attractions series from Oberon Press has a barometer's knack for predicting the soon-to-be hot in Canada's literary climate. This year's edition, selected by short story mogul Mark Anthony Jarman, promises to be no different, featuring nine stories by three young writers on the up and up.

With deceptively simple prose, Rebecca Rosenblum does the impossible, crafting characters in flux who are in one way or another stuck in life's amber. From a lowly tech support jobber secretly in love with a bisexual co-worker to an improvised urban family of university students who listen to domestic abuse next door, Rosenblum's motley crew of aimless young adults teeter on the precipice of personal growth. Frustratingly, they too often refuse to take the plunge.

While Rosenblum's stories focus on missed connections and bungled opportunities, Daniel Griffin's narratives explore what happens when the bonds that bind pull at the seams. In "X," a young father-to-be's shaky personal life and the raccoon terrorizing his mother's garden are deftly twined, while "Promise" features two brothers at odds and culminates in an explosive seven word sentence that hits you straight in the gut. Griffin's at his best between the lines, in the unutterable language of his troubled men as they butt heads.

In my mind, Alice Petersen's evocative stories are the anthology's strongest. Her best, "Among the Trees," opens with the death of an artist whose passion and pansexuality enlivened and frustrated the woman who loved him most. Like all of Petersen's work, it's a sensory delight, the makeshift artist colony the couple creates so real and spongy you can taste the mossy dew. Petersen's characters wear their hearts on their sleeves, a gambit that pays off and makes for affective reading.

Like a fine martini, Coming Attractions 08 is what all good anthologies should be: a potent libation concocted from disparate parts.

[Originally published in Broken Pencil]

Cat-lit

2010-02-09T07:52:00.000-08:00

Beaker, posing to the right with her maladjusted pet human, spends Sunday afternoons sitting back with the latest issue of Event.

Meanwhile, George, left, is functionally illiterate and wishes he could read like his sister.

[Read "Eat Fist!," a story I wrote, in the latest issue of Event]

Old Interview

2010-02-08T05:40:00.000-08:00

This little number appeared on a Xenith last year. I was really flattered, since I'm not really all that published whatsoever, but the thought was nice and the questions fun and so here it is, in all its . . . whatever it has.

--

Given the numerous magazines in which this particular gentleman has been published, Xenith readers may have already stumbled across Andrew MacDonald’s short fiction. At 24, Andrew is working on his masters in creative writing and has been published in The Fiddlehead, Blackheart Magazine, Existere, qwerty, Feathertale, echolocation, and many other magazines. He also maintains a blog at caughtwithstring.blogspot.com. In this interview, he touches on the writing and revision process as well as his experience with publishing in the small press.

Interview by Patrick Nathan

As someone who has primarily published fiction, you’ve developed an undeniable skill for it. When you contrast your writing now versus your writing from when you first started out, what is the most marked difference? What, if anything, has remained the same?

That’s a good question. When I first started out, I didn’t pay much attention to plot logistics. I focused a lot more on style, mostly of the high fallutin’ kind. Lots of big words, lengthy descriptions, tons of exposition. Nowadays I’m more interested in crafting stories, not sentences. An old mentor once told me that writers tend to be stylists or storytellers. I used to classify myself as the former; now, not so much.

The more I write, the more I realize that language will always service the idea. That sounds complicated, but it’s not. Your goal is to entertain, or otherwise engage, your reader. An alienating text is rarely successful. Or at least I avoid them like the plague. Everyone denigrates the Dan Browns, the JK Rowlings, the Grishams. Not me. I admire their mastery of storytelling craft. We like to think that writing is all about beautiful words. Maybe that’s part of it, and certainly it’s one of the first things I worked on when I started. But the art of crafting a plot is a huge part of writing fiction, and lately that’s the part of the game I’ve been focusing on. Someone like John Irving is a good example of a, quote, literary writer, who pays attention to plot, makes things happen, and doesn’t have a really graceful style. I think of Dickens too, or Graham Greene (though some people might disagree about him).

Other than that, developing discipline and shedding the title of weekend writer. You have to take your writing seriously if you want other people to.

Almost everyone has some definable method of organizing thoughts and ideas in preparation for writing. What is the typical series of events that takes place between the initial spark of your short story and writing the first sentence?

I like to have a vague idea of where I’m going, but I’m open to change. Usually something hits me, a sentence, an idea, some weird event, and I’ll try to work through the possibilities. Once I have something, anything, I’ll write a few sentences. Most of the time they’re not in any kind of coherent order, at least on the page, but in my brain they fit like jigsaw pieces in a bigger picture. The less time I spend being anal and planning the better. The less restraint, the better. The less time I spend analyzing what goes into that first draft, the better.

So when you tell someone that you’re working on a story, and they ask you what it’s about, it’s pretty safe to assume that you aren’t sure yet? In that vein, when someone asks the same question on a finished story, are you able to answer?

Sure. For me, the summary is really about isolating the story’s conflict. You hear agents throw around this piece of advice all the time for novels, and I think it applies to fiction of all flavors: if you can’t summarize your story in a sentence or less, you might need to do some thinking. Going into a story I’ll probably have a good idea about what it’s going to be a about. At least generally. It could change as circumstance dictates.

How would you describe your revision process? What do your first drafts generally look like in comparison to the copy that goes to the publisher?

Revision’s more fun that writing the first draft. Still painful, though. Sometimes my first drafts are pretty solid, but mostly they’re awful, putrid, stenchy.

Let’s throw in a quote by Charles de Gaulle: “Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.” What lambs have you digested? Who shows up in what way?

That was eloquently phrased. Well done, Chuck. Immediate influences? Salman Rushdie, Mordecai Richler, John Irving, Zadie Smith. Recent digestifs include Shalom Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament, Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, Bechdel’s amazing graphic novel Fun Home, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.

Conversely, what lambs have given you indigestion?

This will get me chirps from both ends of the litgeek spectrum, but Chuck Palahniuk and Jane Austen. I think Chuck’s got a good marketing team and a bagful of gimmicks he employs every book. I enjoyed Fight Club. Anything after that . . . he just gets worse and worse. Sigh. Plain Jane’s got skills I respect, she’s just not my thing.

There’s no getting around the fact that you have an impressive list of publication credits. What is your usual process for submitting a piece of writing? Do you let it sit for a few months, awaiting revisions, or do you submit immediately after finishing? Do you submit to several magazines at once or just pick what you think would be a good fit? Do you write pieces and think, “Hey this would be a good fit for Fred’s Magazine” or do you come to that decision much later?

I used to be impatient, sending everything out the second I lifted my fingers off the keyboard. Which meant I’d have ten pieces floating in submission land, and ten rejections coming a few months later. While that didn’t yield particularly stunning results, it was an important step: send your stuff out there. Be too big for your britches. Grow thick skin and get used to the process.

Getting work out there, published in journals, is rough: the pay is crap, the wait is long, and most people don’t care. On the other hand, it’s a good way to build your CV and your confidence. And who knows who might be reading? An agent caught the story a friend of mine wrote in a nationally distributed literary journal and asked if he had representation yet. I don’t send stories out anymore unless I’m confident in them, and even then I expect a rejection letter. What used to be a week of editing a story has turned into months. Having one really sharp story is probably worth more than a handful of clunky ones. I’ve done some small-time journal editing and know from experience that editors are looking for reasons to trash your stuff.

I tend to avoid writing for specific markets, partly because I get caught up in writing what I want to, for better or for worse, and partly because I just plain suck when I try. Most of the places I submit to frown upon simultaneous submissions, so it makes for long waits. Duotrope is a fantastic resource and I use it every time I submit to a publication.

What would you say is cardinal advice for authors looking to start submitting their work?

Cardinal advice? Just do it. Follow the guidelines and get work out there.

If you could boil it down to something specific, what is the most important lesson you have learned in the years you’ve spent improving your craft?

Keep going when everyone else quits.

07/06/09

New Review

2010-02-08T05:20:00.000-08:00

Pick up the latest ish of Broken Pencil and peep my review of Playing Basra, Edward Brown's collection of interwoven short stories about people and things pertaining to the lower middle class. I compare it to Trailer Park Boys! Gazooks!

Cyrus

2010-02-06T09:10:00.000-08:00

Discerning readers would be well advised to read the latest from the Heartbreak Kid, Spencer Gordon, up at Joyland this week. It's a short story about Miley Cyrus and should be read in a Southern accent for maximum a/effect.

Journey Prize

2010-01-19T13:33:00.001-08:00

Just got the good word that my story, "Eat Fist!," due out in Event next month or so, has been nominated for the Journey Prize. Time for celebratory something or other.

If something comes of this, I'll let you know.

Dinosaur Porn Launch

2010-01-08T10:35:00.001-08:00

Attend on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2240060756#/event.php?eid=234790465901&ref=mf

Thursday January 28th, 2010
7:30 - 10:30 PM
The Supermarket (268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto, ON)
No Cover

A LAUNCH PARTY SIXTY-FIVE MILLION YEARS IN THE MAKING.

Well, more like six months, but hey - thanks for your patience.

DINOSAUR PORN has been lovingly edited and designed by the DIY dream team combination of Ferno House and The Emergency Response Unit. This is a limited-edition, lovingly handcrafted, and perfect bound collection of poetry and fiction.

DINOSAUR PORN features the prehistoric poetry and/or fleshy fiction of Louise Bak, Gary Barwin, David Brock, Andrew Faulkner, Warren Dean Fulton, Spencer Gordon, Corrigan Hammond, Joe Hickey, Penn Kemp, Henry Lee, Christine McNair, Dave Miller, Nathaniel G. Moore, James Nadel, Leigh Nash, Kenneth Pobo, Shannon Rayne, Carey Toane, Jordan Trethewey, and Sarah Wilson.

So join us for a night of merryment, and come pick up this weighty tome for a mere $15. Other chapbooks released by Ferno House and The Emergency Response Unit will be availble for sale, as well.

To help us hatch this behemoth, we've invited some contributors to come and read their work. Come see readings by:Louise Bak, Gary Barwin, David Brock, David Miller, Nathaniel G. Moore, Christine McNair, and Carey Toane.

Louise Bak is the author of Tulpa, Gingko Kitchen and emeighty. She’s gained widespread attention as the co-host of Sex City, Toronto's only radio show focused on intersections between sexuality and culture on ciut 89.5 fm. She is a sexual, cultural columnist with toro. Her performance work has appeared in numerous galleries, festivals and video collaborations, including Broadcast, Partial Selves, and Crimes of the Heart. She also hosts a salon series called The Box, which encourages communication across creative borders. She wrote a feature called The Ache, which is currently in development. She is also working on another collection of poems.

Gary Barwin is responsible for such body part innovations as fur, feathers, claws, differentiated teeth, water-impervious skin, water-impervious eggs, and the penis. Stress fractures in some of Barwin’s vertebrae may have been caused by the weight load of copulation. Barwin once was reconstructed so that his head was placed at the end of his tail instead of its rightful place on his neck. The largest of Barwin’s eggs ever discovered had a liquid capacity of almost 6 litres. He has the longest skull of any land-living poet—it is 9 feet long. Barwin’s vertebrae suggest that he may be 120 feet long. Gary Barwin always walks on his toes (for more see serrifofnottingham.blogspot.com).

David Brock is a playwright with a zoology degree. Recent work has appeared in Event, Eye Weekly, Poetry is Dead, and Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine. He is currently writing a Spring/Summer line of fashion poetry for a literary collaboration with Vancouver-writer Sean Horlor, libretti for two new operas, and a collection of Saved by the Bell essays. A chapbook of poetry is forthcoming from The Emergency Response Unit in the fall of 2009.

Christine McNair has been published in The Antigonish Review, Misunderstandings, fireweed, Prairie Fire, ottawater, the Bywords Quarterly Journal and a few other places. She's akin to wives-in-watercolours and badlands field jackets. She works as a book doctor in Ottawa.

Dave Miller has had work published in several places including The Malahat Review and The Fiddlehead. He's gone to a few universities including the University of Guelph where he's finishing his MFA. He's lived here and there and a few places in between, and is currently enjoying Toronto. He previously had very little experience with either porn or dinosaurs.

Nathaniel G. Moore is the author of Pastels Are Pretty Much The Polar Opposite of Chalk and other books like Bowlbrawl. He is an editor at Broken Pencil and a fan of Bam-Bam.

Carey Toane is a Toronto-based journalist, poet and host of the reading series Pivot at the Press Club. In 2009 she was grants coordinator of the Scream Literary Festival. Her poems have been published in CV2, This Magazine and Peter O' Toole, while her chapbook Ministry of the Environment was released in 2008 on Bench Press. Current projects include editing her grandmother's journals and investigating the social histories of domesticated plants and animals. Her favourite apple is the Westfield Seek-No-Further.

Hosted by the editors, Spencer Gordon, Leigh Nash, Andrew Faulkner, and Arnaud Brassard. Hope to see you there! No cover! 7:30 PM!

http://theemergencyresponseunit.wordpress.com/
http://www.fernohouse.com/

The Puritan Returns.

2010-01-02T11:00:00.001-08:00

Back by marginal demand! The Puritan returns!

After sixteen months of dormancy, The Puritan is back with a brand-spanking new, twenty-first century online format, now publishing poetry, reviews, interviews, recipes, as well as prose.

Thank you to all our friends and supporters for sticking with us throughout our prolonged hiatus. Even if you haven’t been thinking of us in sixteen months, we’ve certainly been thinking of you.

Our new online issue – #8, Fall 2009 – features work by Angela Hibbs, Nathaniel G. Moore, Andrew Faulkner, Catriona Wright, Mike Spry, Pearl Pirie, Monty Reid, John Goldbach, Eva Moran, Michael Bryson, John Lavery, Sarah Dearing, Michael Blouin, Rebecca Rosenblum, and never-before-seen interviews with Sheila Heti and Jan Zwicky.

In typical fashion, we plan to release our next issue at the end of the season it claims to represent. So, we’re opening our pod-bay doors to submissions of fiction, poetry, reviews, recipes, and interviews. Check out our website’s submission guidelines for more information. The address is the same as it ever was – www.puritan-magazine.com.

Also, we’re open to the idea of considering your artwork for upcoming covers. Potential covers should reflect the general visual theme of our current issue’s cover and our wonderful website.

To help us pay down our monstrous debt, we’re opening our archives to you. That’s right – we’re selling our back issues at rock bottom prices. E-mail us for more details at puritanmagazine@gmail.com. Veteran and senior discounts available.

We won’t bore you any longer. Our new site hopefully says it all. Please visit often, as changes will be frequent and intriguing.

With love,

The Editors
Spencer Gordon
Tyler Willis

Publicity
Andrew MacDonald

Web Crew
Derek McCrone
Jamie Weir

www.puritan-magazine.com

puritanmagazine@gmail.com

Where am I?

2009-12-08T11:36:00.000-08:00

If you're wondering why I'm quiet, seldom-updated blog, it's because I'm working on my thesis. A novel. About dying. That's all I'm going to say.

Love,

Andrew

Review: Sometimes We're Always Real Same-Same

2009-11-13T13:39:00.001-08:00

My review of Mattox Roesch's debut novel, Sometimes We're Always Real Same-Same, is now up, operational, and viewable at LipStik Indie. Checker.

Review: Coming Attractions

2009-11-03T06:28:00.000-08:00

Speaking of Broken Pencil, the current ish (lovingly displayed to the left) also contains my review of the latest Coming Attractions anthology, featuring Rebecca Rosenblum, Daniel Griffin (up for the Journey Prize this year) and Alice Petersen. The review is not as exciting as the anthology, but it's certainly more exciting than used q-tips or bent bicycle spokes, so check it out.

For Crying Out Loud! reviewed

2009-10-29T21:11:00.000-07:00

Guys and ghouls, peep this review of For Crying Out Loud!, a chapbook published by those crazy chaps at crazy micropress Ferno House. The story I have in the chapbook is called 'happily-perverse,' which might be better than 'perversely-happy,' but I'm not sure. The review appears in the latest edition of Broken Pencil. Word on the street is that copies of For Crying Out Loud! are still floating around at The Women's Bookstore and various other places in the city. If you can't find a copy and won't be able to sleep at night without holding it near, head over to the Ferno House website, or send me an email and I'll hook you up.

Anyway, here's the review:

Hand-made chapbooks typically vacillate between the shoddy and the over-ornate – in other words, either photocopied booklets of staple-stitched construction paper or precious little darlings laced with gold thread and pasted feathers. Arnaud Brassard, designer and printer of the new Toronto micro-press Ferno House, manages to avoid either extreme with resounding panache, producing with For Crying Out Loud (Ferno House’s premiere release) a surprisingly beautiful, perfect-bound masterstroke of hand-crafted restraint.

For Crying Out Loud is a collection of poetry and fiction by the students and instructors enrolled in the Masters degree in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. It boasts a poem fragment by seasoned veteran George Elliott Clarke, written in his audaciously lyrical, overtly musical hand, and a short story by American-born fiction writer Jeff Parker – a pitch-perfect, hilarious send-up of both presumptuous American ex-patriots holidaying in Canada and a somewhat lesser known, home-grown entity – the French Redneck. The rest of the book is divided between the program’s aspiring writers and students. In terms of poetry, one finds the subtle linguistic play and adventurousness of Catriona Wright; the spare, Biblically-inspired verse of Wendy Prieto; the meditative and sickly sensual lines of Alex Grigorescu, and the morbid, keen-eyed histories of Laura Clarke. As for fiction, Jonathan Simpson writes out the affecting, fragmented history of a father’s love; Andrew MacDonald provides a cheeky, happily-perverse look at voyeurism and crime; and Spencer Gordon (the editor of Ferno House) writes a dark reflection on cigarettes, death, and literary ambition, which takes an apt turn for the surreal. If what’s included in this collection is any indication of promise, then we should expect some remarkable work from these bourgeoning, Toronto-based writers.

According to the Ferno House website, the book might still be found at choice locations around the city of Toronto for a reasonable $15. I say go pick it up – it’s a damn fine combination of DIY, entrepreneurial ‘zine-culture, sophisticated and meticulous design craft, and ambitious literary writing.

by Eddie Leslie

From Broken Pencil 45

Daily Goodness Update

2009-10-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

The Daily XY, referenced in the previous entry, took home Best Online-Only publication in the Canadian Online Publishing Awards. Props.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/the-tyee-website-wins-big-at-online-awards/article1341204/

Daily Literary Goodness

2009-10-20T21:07:00.001-07:00

A short little ditty I wrote for the Daily XY about three of my favourite weekly literary reading event thingies is up. Go here:

http://www.dailyxy.com/daily-xy/arts-culture/read-on-literary-events-in-toronto/

It has a picture of my face on it that I took in my bedroom. One of my cats was there. She likes peanut butter. Is that normal?

Reconnection

2009-10-09T07:05:00.001-07:00

I'm sorry I've been neglecting you, little blog. Things have been very busy.

Soon we will reconnect. Soon soon.

Until then, you should go to this launch of The New Quarterly at the end(ish) of the month. Here are the details:

Join The New Quarterly for a celebration of remarkable writing, on Thursday, October 22 at Art|Bar (in Kitchener, Ontario).
Have a drink with your favourite editors, meet some of our noteworthy writers, and hear a preview of our fall issue, Travellers in a Strange Land. View the Facebook Event to invite your friends.

Doors open @ 7pm, readings beginning @ 8. Pay what you can.

We’ve recruited our feature writer from the issue, Carrie Snyder, to talk about her work and read a selection. We’ve also partnered with Biblioasis Press, to bring you two rising stars from our previous issues: Amy Jones (Issue 111) and Rebecca Rosenblum (Issue 107, 110) to read from their newest collections.

Featuring the music of Alexander James.

Here is a link: http://theliterarytype.ca/?p=626#more-626

On Rejection

2009-09-03T13:37:00.000-07:00

The folks over at The Literary Type, the official blog of The New Quarterly, asked me to do a guest blog on rejection letters. Here's my contribution: Tao of Form Rejection Letters.

You should read it. I mention the time a magazine rejected me by not rejecting me. The story only goes downhill from there.

Completely unrelated, but if you haven't read Skim, you should probably do so.

Lately.

2009-08-28T15:12:00.001-07:00

It's been awhile. My apologies. What's new with me?

- A triad of reviews in LipStik Indie.

- Packing for my move to the Annex on Tuesday.

- Quitting my job to get set for the thesis year of my creative writing masters.

- An internship at a literary agency, starting in the next couple of weeks (swoon).

- An acceptance letter from Event Magazine. The story's called Eat Fist! and it's a lesbian coming out story about a geeky high school math whiz who falls in love with her giant bodybuilding Ukrainian tutor. Huh? Yeah, you heard me right.

Golding

2009-08-18T07:07:00.000-07:00

It seems that William Golding, author of Simspons-parodied and general literary classic The Lord of the Flies, admits to setting children against each other during his stint as a teacher at Bishop's. More shocking is his attempted rape of a 15 year old girl during his teen years. Here's a bit from The Guardian:

The attempted rape involved a Marlborough girl, named Dora, who had taken piano lessons with Golding. It happened when he was 18 and on holiday during his first year at Oxford.

Carey quotes the memoir as partially excusing the attempted rape on the grounds that Dora was "depraved by nature" and, at 14, was "already sexy as an ape".

It reveals that Golding told his wife he had been sure the girl "wanted heavy sex". She fought him off and ran away as he stood there shouting: "I'm not going to hurt you," the memoir said.

Two years later, the pair met again and had sex in a field, with Golding again introducing crudity by quoting the girl's foreplay remark: "Should I have all that rammed up my guts?"

The author was convinced her approach to his father was a deliberate attempt to discredit him and his older brother who, coincidentally, was having sex with his girlfriend in the same field.

The biography detailing all of Golding's exploits is forthcoming. I'm a total gossip-monger, so I'll clearly be buying it.

Apartment

2009-08-13T16:51:00.000-07:00

I just signed a lease for a fantastic apartment in the Annex. Little to do with writing, other than the fact that I'll be writing in it a lot come September.

There you go.

Shit.

2009-08-09T15:46:00.000-07:00

[the following comes from the estimable blog of the inestimable Spencer Gordon.]

The Conservative government has decided to cut literary publications out of Canadian Periodical Funding.

Here's the source, from Quill and Quire. I think it's something you should read.

But rest assured, gentle reader - important cultural publications like Elle, Fashion Magazine, Flare, and Style at Home (which no doubt absolutely require the 600 to 900 thousand dollars they receive from the government per annum, due to their tiny, marginal audiences and thought-provoking, status-quo challenging content) will still be on the Conservative payroll.

So, if you like to read new writing, by poor or struggling or burgeoning writers, or like to see a viable outlet for anything even remotely avant-garde or 'challenging', please do your country a favour and support the arts.

Here's how:

1) Subscribe to a lit mag (or ten), if you haven't done so already.
2) Repeat step one.
3) Stop voting Conservative, if you haven't done so already for some strange and scary reason that I'm sure wasn't your fault (probably bad parenting or abuse or that accident on the see-saw when you were four that made your forehead look kind of 'funny'). And if you don't vote, please start actively voting against the Conservatives, as this is all mostly your fault, you apathetic loser.

Anyways. Goodnight, sweet magazines. We'll miss you in the fast food concrete suburbs of Harper's happy planet.

PostScriptUno

2009-08-03T16:15:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah, almost forgot. My first review for LipStik Indie is up. It's, like, okay. The next one will be better.

Loving Beth C.

2009-08-03T16:03:00.001-07:00

I'm supposed to be doing preliminary work on my thesis, a novel about crazy people. Instead I'm reading some pretty cool Larry Doyle articles. If you haven't heard of Larry Doyle or you're too lazy to click the link, he wrote I Love You Beth Cooper, which I read and found comical. Evidently others did also; it won the James Thurber humor award. He also wrote for The Simpsons. And for places like Esquire and The New Yorker.

In particular, I'm enjoying these essays:

Larry Doyle on moving to LA to write for the Simpons.

How Larry Doyle Became a Writer, Part One

How Larry Doyle Became a Writer, Part Two

Pretty good stuff. In characteristically self-deprecating fashion, he claims these puppies contain no helpful advice. Well. I like how much shit he goes through and how he still trucks on. Good on you, Larry Doyle. I also like how he milks his contacts and advises writers to know as many talented people as possible. In my own (VERY LIMITED, TOTALLY AMATEUR WRITER) experience, I've found that to be the case. I know a lot of really talented people who have been kind enough to throw me bones every once in awhile.

Anyway. I should probably put some pants on (my writing pants) and get back to the desk.

New Article Up

2009-07-31T16:32:00.001-07:00

My article on eco-friendly sex toys, Green: In Search of the Eco-Friendly Dildo, is up at Blackheart Magazine. Drop in. Say hi. Leave a comment. Wear a bucket on your head. Whatever.

Bits.

2009-07-29T18:42:00.000-07:00

First review for LipStik Indie sent. Expect it, and a staff profile, up Monday. My dildo article should be up Friday at Blackheart Magazine.

In other news, last night I whipped up a quick piece about the oft-declared death of the novel for one of them pay-per-click sites. The article took me about twenty minutes to write, so it's no skin off my back if this turns out to be an epic bomb. It's an experiment, like.

I'm also probably starting a sister blog to this, if I have the time and inclination, wherein I catalogue, and review, whatever trashy pulp paperbacks come my way. It would be a labor of love.

Finally, I electrocuted myself the other day. Nothing serious, just a weird twitching sensation. I need a new extension cord.

Found

2009-07-27T19:05:00.000-07:00

Book-finding is a pleasure. When something catches your eye for no reason at a used bookstore, or you find a weird volume underneath a park bench, it's easy to feel like whatever you've found was placed there for you. I think we're all closet solipsists like that.

A few months ago I found an old, tattered tome, a musty beast the size of a bible, for less than two bucks outside BMV. Who knows why I noticed it. The cover's the kind of minimalist ugly that people probably liked a century ago. This one has a crude drawing of a hand with a spiderweb of lines charted along the palm. Tell me this title isn't gorgeous: Laws of Scientific Hand Reading. Published in Burma, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, 1962. Sometimes I pick it up and read a few pages. I find it difficult to describe the writing itself, a blend of science and superstition with echoes of some personal narrative in it. The kind of book, in other words, that's made to inspire stories. I hold it dear.

The other day a book of similar portent turned up, an old shorthand workbook, hard cover, for women in the 50s. Someone pasted a little pink sheet with their name on the inside cover. All of the exercises in it had been completed by such an expert hand that I first mistook the cursive for some kind of kooky font.

Someone else saw the book and wanted it.

Breaks your heart when they're prettier than you and beat you to the punch.

Lipstik Indie

2009-07-27T18:02:00.000-07:00

Looks like I'll be doing regular book reviews for Lipstik Indie. From the front page: LipStik Indie Reviews is all about Indie Artists. If you are a singer, band, spoken word artist, comic book creator, writer (from zines to novels), have an ezine or online DIY store, you should be reviewed by us. We’ve all been in your shoes and know it is important for the world to know about you.

Birthday

2009-07-26T09:52:00.001-07:00

I usually get one or two really fantastic cards for my birthday. The one that's held a special place in my heart to this point has a black and white picture of two kids sitting on a dock in their bathing suits, staring out onto a lake. The caption reads, "It's your birthday. Sit back. Relax. Wear a bucket on your head. Whatever."

For me, the card has this really palatable quasi-taoist philosophy behind it, like, chill out buddy, accept your idiosyncrasies (of which I have many). Wear that bucket on your head and don't let anyone make you feel bad about it.

This year the bucket-head card has competition. The card is white, unadorned. No images on the outside, just the following statement, in plain bold helvetica:

A disturbing birthday greeting card that shows a black and white photographic image of a semi-nude elderly lady. She is standing in a non-provocative pose, revealing her breasts.

Inside the card is nothing (except for the card giver's message, which is itself quite glorious and signed 'the Squid').

Interview

2009-07-24T17:39:00.000-07:00

Xenith Interviews Andrew

An interview with me is up at the nifty webzine Xenith. I'm kind of flattered and totally happy with how the whole thing went down. Sometime in the future I'll probably post the whole damn thing on here, but not for awhile.

Fisticuffs

2009-07-23T18:23:00.001-07:00

Waaaah. I should be finishing this article for tomorrow's deadline. Instead I'm rubbing my cat's belly, listening to instrumental jazz and playing Street Fighter EX plus Alpha (Capcom's sad attempt at Tekken style 3D). The entire scene looks like this:

*note: this is a random internet cat culled from google image. I in no way endorse cat boxing or any other forms of unregulated feline pugilism.

Fiddlehead

2009-07-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

The summer issue of The Fiddlehead is out and contains my story, "Customer X." Information below.

Contents, No.240

Editorial

5 Mark Anthony Jarman: Dark Was the Night, Bright Was the Diamond

Fiction

6 Alice Petersen: Among the Trees
13 Rebecca Rosenblum: ContEd
27 Rebecca Rosenblum: Tech Support
41 Richard Cumyn: The Goddess Throws Down
49 Hazel Lyder: Grasping History
56 Jeff Park: A Boat in Still Water
71 Jeff Park: Back to Disney
81 Paul Martone: Homecoming
92 Lori Hahnel: Excerpt from Love Minus Zero
96 Elisabeth de Mariaffi: Ajaccio Belonged to the Genoese
103 J.M. Villaverde: The Spanish Hour
118 Stephanie Austin: "The Sink in Here Is Always Wet"
127 Hugh Graham: Klenau's Advance
137 Andrew MacDonald: "Customer X"
144 Jennifer Stone: Knowing
151 Steven Heighton: Shared Room On Union

Reviews

164 Katia Grubisic: Mating Rituals of Homo Sapiens Newfoundlandsis
The Darren Effect, Libby Creelman
166 Pat Leech: Life's Greatest Questions: The Enigmas of Human Emotion
The Withdrawal Method, Pasha Malla
168 Shane Neilson: Not a Traditional Coming-of-Age Story
Skin Room, Sara Tilley
171 Ian Colford: Movie Magic
Silver Salts, Mark Blagrave
173 Richard Cumyn: The Compleat Male
Quintet, Douglas Arthur Brown
The Order of Good Cheer, Bill Gaston
176 Edward O'Connor: His Debate with Pain
The Push & The Pull, Darryl Whetter

Notes on Contributors
179

Cover
Suzanne Hill:
Markers, 1 of 3

Antique Debauchery Aids

2009-07-20T18:02:00.000-07:00

Doing a bit of research for the eco-friendly sex toy article I'm working on and want to state for the record that dildos have a long, illustrious (and illustrated) history. Like this antique vibrating [pleasure] chair, manufactured by (I shit you not) Kellogg of cereal fame. Well. Have fun eating your Corn Flakes tomorrow morning.

echolocation

2009-07-20T09:30:00.000-07:00

I'm not on staff or anything, but I know they put together a good publication. Submit now.

Link: http://www.echolocation.ca

We are now accepting submissions for Issue 9 of Echolocation! DEADLINE IS SEPTEMBER 30,
2009.

We are accepting:

Fiction, max. 3000 words
Creative Nonfiction, max. 3000 words
Poetry, up to 10 poems
Visual art, submitted in .tif format

We are accepting submissions from students, faculty, or alumni of the University of
Toronto, as well as writers and artists from outside the University.

Please email your submissions in a Word document to:

echolocation.utoronto@gmail.com.

Feel free to contact us regarding any writing that falls outside of the guidelines
stated above. We're willing to be a little flexible if you've got something good.

We can't wait to see your email in our inbox! Look forward to announcements about future
Echolocation events!

Thanks in advance for your consideration,

Catastrophe via Flower Boquet

2009-07-15T09:06:00.000-07:00

Think twice before dropping a bouqet from an airplane at your next wedding.

Be afraid.

2009-07-13T14:55:00.000-07:00

According to this article from the BBC, cats manipulate their human owners into providing food and attention by shifting the pitch and tone of their purrs. The wily little bastards aurally mime the cry of infants, flicking on whatever primordial ma/paternal protect-the-kids switch is programmed into our brains. So when Beaker, my neurotic, corpulent little tuxedo cat wakes me up at four in the morning to get fed, it's that nutso purr that stops me from ignoring it.

Insidious.

Daily XY / Feline

2009-07-13T14:33:00.000-07:00

Just got a contract for a short freelance piece I did for Daily XY: The Magazine for Urban Men. It features my three favourite regular literary readings in the city, The Pivot Reading Series, TINARS, and Art Bar. I'm not sure how I'll spend the cash. Probably on booze. And cat food. Which reminds me - my cats look like this:

George

Beaker K. Beakerton (nee Meredith)

The indignities the cute must suffer. . .

ducks, attractions, montreal.

2009-07-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

It's looking like my review of Oberon's latest edition of Coming Attractions 08 will appear in the next ish of Broken Pencil. Word has it, anyway.

Book details:

Coming Attractions 08 Edited by Mark Anthony Jarman Rebecca

Rosenblum writes offbeat, innovative stories that tend to show up in the Journey Prize anthology. Her characters come from the brittle world of ex-urban strip malls. In one story she features an Edmonton Oilers toque, but there are many other reasons to like her work. Daniel Griffin has also appeared in the Journey Prize anthology. He’s interested in gender roles and writes about fathers and brothers, mothers and sisters. Alice Petersen was a joy to discover. She writes compelling, painterly stories in assured, sophisticated prose. This book is much the richer for her appearance in it.

8.5 by 5.5 by 120 pages, cover from a bestiary, c. 1500 $18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1322 8 $38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1321 1

Next up: some as-yet-unwritten-book-related writing for Matrix Magazine and an article on environmentally friendly sex toys for Blackheart Magazine. Coincidentally, both are Montreal-based.

Finally, this hot piece of comic ass was in the paper today and sums up the ebbs and flows of my writing process to a T:

xo andy

Birds

2009-07-04T03:54:00.000-07:00

You: go read Anne Lamott. Now. She's good. Powell's dot com notes that she "writes cleaner than she lived," one of the snazziest things I've ever heard someone say about a writer. Her memoir Operating Instructions was one of a handful of books from the late 20th century on the Modern Library's 100 Best Nonfiction Books.

It's heartbreaking and hilarious and sort of grimy.

On the chopping block for me: a couple book reviews and pecking at the pile of papers I'm tentatively calling my thesis.

andy

Small Press Book Fair

2009-06-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

I encourage all three of this blog's readers to stop by the Toronto Small Press Book Fair this Saturday at the Toronto Reference Library, between 9am - 5pm. Existere is going to have a booth set up there and I'll be dropping by sometime during the day, so if you want to shiv me in the gullivers, hang around and choose your point of attack wisely. I have a big rib cage.

Back in Black

2009-06-07T16:49:00.001-07:00

Or at least in Toronto. Montreal was gorgeous and fun and the people I met were full of cool. Good work, McGill and co.

Can someone tell my cats to stop keeping me up at night?

On the plate: writing a review of this year's edition of Coming Attractions.

exes and ohs,

andy

Pivot / Montreal

2009-06-04T03:31:00.000-07:00

Attended another Pivot Reading Series event at the Press Club. Good stuff and nice to finally meet this rob mclennan chap the homeboys keep talking about. His blog, in ugly copy/paste font and color: www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

The Pivot's webplace is this: http://pivotreadings.wordpress.com/

There's a good restaurant across the street from the Press Club. M-something or other. My seafood linguine was sex in seafood linguine form. Feed there, if possible. Wait, it's called Musa. Yeah. Good stuff.

It's 6:30 in the AM and I'm about to flee to Montreal to give a paper on female bodybuilding at a conference. My opening riff is about Olivia Newton-John and I'm tempted to wear my lycra singlet from my wrestling days.

I also saw a six year old get hit by a car on Bloor just before Bathurst yesterday. Note to dimwits behind the wheel: if traffic is stopped at a red light and backed up at least a street, don't try to be a ninja and speed by in the other lane.

Be well and speak easy.

andy