Waterhouse Review

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

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

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.

'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.

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

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.

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.