Monday, December 17, 2012

The Malahat Review's East Coast issue Reviewed

Over at The Review Review, Jenelle Hayward enthusiastically reviews The Malahat's Essential East Coast issue.

She says,
I have always been a fan of Canadian writers but this issue of The Malahat Review reminded me just how much I enjoy them. The writing was stunning and surprising with every turn of the page.
We here at The Fiddlehead wholeheartedly agree!

***********************************************************************************

And more great news to start the new year! The Malahat no. 180 gets reviewed over at New Pages! Here's part of what reviewer John Palen has to say:
For me, the collaboration between the two magazines helps to clarify the distinction between a literature limited by its regionalism and one brought alive by its sense of place. This issue of Malahat is definitely alive.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

The Malahat & The Fiddlehead Featured on CBC Radio

CBC British Columbia recently featured The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review on their weekday afternoon radio program All Points West.

State of the Arts columnist Jennifer Chrumka examined both the West Coast and East Coast issues, and she talks about the collaboration.


On the podcast, you'll also hear Ross Leckie, editor of The Fiddlehead, speak about Atlantic literature, and The Malahat's editor John Barton and University of Victoria professor Nicholas Bradley discuss West coast literature.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Occupy Prose: Will Johnson in conversation with Linda Svendsen

Linda Svendsen's story, "Restoration," was published in The Fiddlehead's Essential West Coast Poetry and Fiction issue, #253. One of her UBC Master's in Creative Writing students, Will Johnson, interviewed her for our blog.


Linda Svendsen
"Restoration" is the story of a refugee from Burundi who is struggling to adjust to Canadian culture after surviving some horrific experiences in her home country. What inspired you to tackle this subject, and what sort of research did you have to do?

A decade ago, my husband and I co-produced and co-wrote a 6-hour miniseries for CBC called Human Cargo. It’s a drama, not a documentary. We’d spent a few years researching the Immigration and Refugee Board in Canada, attending hearings, and had also traveled to Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa. We’d also done a fair amount of reading/interviewing of people who have survived torture, extreme loss, and exile.

You've developed a very distinctive voice for your main character. Did you find it hard, as a Canadian, to imagine an inner life for this character? Did you find it challenging to see things from her perspective?

Monday, December 3, 2012

A Successful East Coast/West Coast Halifax Launch!


Back row, left to right: Chris Donahoe, Warren Heiti, Matt Cornfield,
Peter Sanger, E. Alex Pierce, Carole Glasser Langille.
Front row, left to right: Heather Jessup, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Brian Bartlett.
On Thursday, October 29, 2012, the University of King's College in Halifax hosted a launch for Halifax-area contributors to The Malahat Review's East Coast issue. Authors read their work from The Malahat and selected a piece from The Fiddlehead's West Coast issue to share with the audience. Our Halifax correspondant Brian Bartlett sent us a photograph and reports that it was a "fine, lively occasion."


Monday, November 26, 2012

Witnessing Both the Ugliness and the Beauty: Will Johnson in Conversation with Chris Donahoe

Chris Donahoe, photo by Will Johnson
Chris Donahoe's creative nonfiction story, "Test," appears in The Malahat Review's Essential East Coast Writing issue, Fall 2012 #180. Will Johnson recently graduated from UVic's creative writing program and is now finishing an MFA at UBC. His first major publication was "Sea to Sky," in The Fiddlehead. He now lives in Halifax, NS.

Your story "Test" (Fall, 2012, issue #180) is about your time working in Alberta’s oil industry right after graduating from high school. What drew you to this story?

In my class with Wayne Grady last year, we tried to look a little deeper at the stories we tell over and over throughout our lives. You know, the stories we tell over beers, or as ice-breakers, or to girls/guys we want to sleep with. These stories become our go-to material in certain situations when we want to impress someone or give them a sense of who we are. And, each time we tell a particular story, it becomes something more fixed and polished, something that comes to define who we think we are and where we think we came from. As a creative nonfiction writer, it’s interesting, and important, to step back sometimes and think about why we tell those stories when we do, and to try to uncover any patterns or bits that link them all. This process can be incredibly revealing and scary, depending on the content. The final event in my story is, quite literally, awesome, a thing that I think anybody would turn into a story to tell over a beer. It’s been bubbling inside me for a long time. But when I put it next to the other stories I tell, it takes on another life and I see that there were other things compelling me to tell and write this story other than the incredible nature of the event itself. The story’s about unexpectedly finding amazing, beautiful things when everything looks most wrong and ugly. That’s a trend for me, not only in my stories, but in my life in general.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Podcast: Steve Noyes and John Threlfall

On Tuesday, November 6th, Steve Noyes and John Threlfall appeared on UVic's campus radio station, CFUV. Steve read from and discussed his poems in The Fiddlehead's Essential West Coast Writing issue, and John talked about his upcoming Malahat-sponsored workshop: Writing the Arts Listen to the podcast here

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Jamie Dopp reviews Russell Wangersky's Whirl Away

Russell Wangersky, Whirl Away (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2012). Paperbound, 207pp., $21.95.

Russell Wangersky’s Whirl Away offers twelve stories about characters whose lives are spinning out of control. The stories depict the disorder and grief that results from this and the attempts by the various characters to cope. A number of stories deal with failing marriages. In “Sharp Corner,” we meet John and Mary, a childless couple who live at a sharp bend in a road at which there are a series of car accidents. The story hints early on that there are problems between them. Instead of dealing with these, John becomes progressively more obsessed with the accidents. Talking about them garners him attention at social events and becomes his way of coping with feelings of emptiness. Mary, meanwhile, is revolted. Near the end of the story she says, “I don’t think I can do this anymore,” and it is clear that she is referring to both John’s obsession and to the marriage.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Susan Walker reviews Robin Durnford and Monica Kidd

Robin Durnford, A Lovely Gutting (Montreal: McGill-Queen's, 2012). Paperbound, 88pp., $16.95.

Monica Kidd, Handfuls of Bone (Kentville: Gaspereau, 2012). Paperbound, 79pp., $19.95.

There has to be a poet, novelist, singer/songwriter, playwright, actor, fiddler, or storyteller for every postal code in Newfoundland and Labrador. Good ones too. According to prevailing theory, the long bitter winters and the isolation of the outports force creativity. You have to make your own entertainment. Robin Durnford and Monica Kidd, residents respectively of Stephenville and St. John’s, are no exceptions to the literary bounty of their homeland. In both cases, the language seems to arise from the bedrock, the imagery found in the landscape and harsh physical realities (and not infrequent joys) of life on the far-eastern coast of Canada.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Rachel Rose Reviews Kate Story's Wrecked Upon This Shore

Kate Story, Wrecked Upon This Shore (St. John's: Killick, 2011). Paperbound, 198pp., $19.95.

“I don’t believe this,” I say, as I read Kate Story’s second novel, Wrecked Upon This Shore. “What are the odds?” Friends with whom I share the coincidence shake their heads in sympathetic astonishment. The odds are slim, and yet, it’s happened: I’ve been asked to write a review, the first in years, of a novel that explores abuse, lesbian love, and motherhood, infused by Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And I’m writing my first novel, and it’s also a novel exploring abuse, lesbian love, and motherhood, infused with the spirit of The Tempest. I’m shaken, in the way eerie coincidences can make the ground under one’s feet feel unsteady.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Dobozy Writes a Doozy

Siege 13, Tamas Dobozy (Thomas Allen)

Siege 13 is a stupendous book, a surprising book, thirteen artful and exciting stories united by the events and fallout of the bloody siege of Budapest in 1944, where Hungarians were caught between the Nazis who occupied Budapest and the Soviet behemoth Red Army which soon conquered the city (what a cheery choice: Adolf or Uncle Joe). This battle is not as well-known as Stalingrad or Berlin: the specific settings and accompanying icons — machine guns, tracers, rockets, and bodies heaped in cellars — are both familiar and unfamiliar, a puzzling, devastating cauldron of a conflict that leaves Siege 13’s characters and families haunted and driven by violence, memory, disillusionment, traps, and dreams of escape. The war ends, the Iron Curtain goes up, and the horrors and arguments resonate for decades in kitchens and lecture halls and émigré cafes.

The book’s tone resonates with Eastern European influences, perhaps more akin to Kafka or Bruno Schulz than W.O. Mitchell. The moving betrayals and disappointments remind me of the classic Stalin-era novel, Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler (Koestler was born in Budapest), yet some of the cranky characters and muttering uncles in social clubs would not be out of place in the shadowed hallways of Ben Katchor’s NYC graphic novels, grainy milieus that are both aged and contemporary.

Monday, November 12, 2012

East Coast Meets West Coast Launch in Victoria tonight!

Tonight in Victoria we'll launch The Fiddlehead's Essential West Coast Poetry & Fiction issue and The Malahat Review's Essential East Coast Writing issue.

Monday, November 12th
Doors: 7 p.m.
Readings: 7:30 p.m.
The Fernwood Inn (art room)
1302 Gladstone Ave.
Free Admission

Lorna Crozier, Patrick Lane, Tim Lilburn, Patrick Friesen, Bill Gaston, Catherine Greenwood, Steve Noyes, and Jamie Dopp will read.

Copies of both issues will be for sale.

More info on our website

Friday, November 9, 2012

David Leach reviews David Adams Richards' Facing the Hunter

David Adams Richards, Facing the Hunter: Reflections on a Misunderstood Pursuit(Toronto: Doubleday, 2011). Hardcover, 214pp., $30.

I am, I fear, the kind of guy that David Adams Richards would hate: an urban-dwelling university professor, a self-proclaimed “progressive” (“such a damnable word,” laments Richards, in the opening salvo of his new work of nonfiction), whose greener-than-thou conscience starts at the Greenpeace pledge and stops at the recycling bin, whose outdoor know-how rests on the clay foundation of field guides, nature documentaries, and the occasional wilderness jaunt in the Gore-Texed guise of an “eco-tourist”—a word that likely infuriates Richards even more. My only consolation? At least I’m not the Chardonnay-sipping “neophyte poet” whose pontifications, at a party in Edmonton, about “how deplorable it was for men to work in the oil patch, to hunt with weapons, to kill the ecology we all must share” ignite, on page two, the fire that burns throughout Richards’ Facing the Hunter: Reflections on a Misunderstood Way of Life. The result is a sometimes angry, often nostalgic, and mostly engrossing defense of the working-class men (for they are almost all men) with whom the author once hunted and the wisdom they shared walking the forests of the Canadian Maritimes.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

From the Inside

Yasuko Thanh. Photo by Will Johnson
Floating Like the Dead, Yasuko Thanh. McClelland and Stewart, 2012.
People who love to read know what’s in it for them: entry into a word-filled universe that is blissfully empty of self. But what’s in it for the author? The manipulation of words and imagery? Of course, that’s a pleasure an author can also share with the reader. But sometimes I wonder if the primary motivation to write fiction isn’t sheer curiosity. Sometimes the curiosity is of a prurient nature, or invasive, or not far off gossip; it would be tasteless if the people were real. Maybe what fiction does for us, author and reader alike, is to solve the philosophical problem of other minds. We know other people must be out there, when their depiction can be so varied and so convincing.

Floating Like the Dead by Yasuko Thanh is a collection of short stories that exhibits this kind of virtuosic inquisitiveness. What is it like to be a criminal on death row waiting for his execution, what is it like to be in flight from bank robbery, to attempt escape from a leper colony, to keep a suicide pact, to be a nursemaid with a Vietnamese boyfriend in rural post-War Germany, to die of AIDS?

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Donna Kane Reviews Riel Nason's The Town That Drowned

Riel Nason, The Town That Drowned (Fredericton: Goose Lane, 2011). Paperbound, 280pp., $19.95.
“The beginning I remember is this.” Not “This is the beginning I remember.” The difference in word order in the opening line of Riel Nason’s The Town That Drowned might seem inconsequential, but it illustrates from the get-go one of the greatest strengths of this book— its careful use of language. The subtle shift in syntax in this first line changes the emphasis of the subject, lessens the certainty of memory. Throughout Nason’s debut novel, the masterful construction gives the book an energy that elevates our engagement with the characters.

Monday, November 5, 2012

The Fiddlehead's Interview with Joan Clark

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with acclaimed Canadian author and current University of New Brunswick writer-in-residence Joan Clark. Our discussion moved from her early career in Alberta up to her novel-in-progress (which is set in Sussex, NB) and the state of Canadian publishing.

Joan Clark is a Member of the Order of Canada and the author of two short story collections, four novels, six novels for younger readers, and three picture books. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

- Kyle Connelly, Editorial Assistant


(Right Click or Control Click on the above link to download mp3 interview.)

Sunday, November 4, 2012

A Lot of us Leave and Lots of us Come Back: Will Johnson in Conversation with Kris Bertin

Kris Bertin
Kris Bertin's first major publication was "Girl on the Fire Escape" in The Malahat Review (Winter, 2011 #173). His second Malahat publication, "Your #1 Killer & Extra Hands," appears in our Essential East Coast Writing issue, Fall 2012 #180.

Will Johnson recently graduated from UVic's creative writing program and is now finishing an MFA at UBC. His first major publication was "Sea to Sky," in The Fiddlehead. He now lives in the apartment Kris Bertin formerly occupied in Halifax, NS.

Your story was published in The Malahat Review’s Essential East Coast Writing Issue, which is a joint venture between The Malahat Review and The Fiddlehead, celebrating the differences and similarities between the artists from these regions. How much of a role does geography play in your work?

I’d say it plays a huge role. There’s always a decision about where a story takes place, and even if it isn’t explicitly stated, it’s important to know as a writer. “Your #1 Killer and Extra Hands” never tells the reader that it takes place on PEI, but from its conception I always knew it would. Having this story published in this issue is particularly appropriate—[main character] Chris Rose’s story took him from a small town in the Maritimes to Great Big Toronto, then Montreal, and back to PEI. While he didn’t make it all the way to the west coast, it tells us something about being an East Coaster, which is that a lot of us try very hard to get the hell out of here and find work somewhere else.

Friday, November 2, 2012

Where to Buy Magazines in Halifax? Atlantic News!

Malahat volunteer, Heike Lettrari, asked Michele, Owner and Manager of Atlantic News, a proud carrier of The Malahat Review, a few questions about the store.

Michele, Owner of Atlantic News

What's the literary sensibility like in Halifax? Is there openness for other Canadian, American, and International writing, or is there favouritism for local authors, poets, and writing projects?

Halifax loves to read and write. We have the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia, Poet Laureate Tanya Davis, a number of reading series, Word on the Street, and tons of book launches and signings. There are many local writers and poets that get published in a variety of literary journals.

My First Published Short Story was in Canadian Fiction Magazine, by Lisa Moore

Lisa Moore
Lisa Moore's short story, "Guard of What" appears in The Malahat Review's Fall 2012 issue (#180) on East Coast Writing. Here, she shares with us the experience of her very first publication, in Canadian Fiction Magazine.

My sneakers were soaking wet and water squished and oozed onto the floor with every step I took. It had been dark outside, the headlights of passing cars were yellow and lit up the slanting rain. Neon spills of red, green, and hot pink were breaking apart in the slicks of water on the black asphalt outside.  The bookstore was fluorescent bright, blinding and hushed. I was headed toward the magazines. My husband followed behind me.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

The Poetics of Everyday Life

The Collected Poems, Patrick Lane. Harbour, 2011.

Patrick Lane is, of course, one of the most well known names in Canadian poetry, and his Collected Poems affords the opportunity to assess not just his achievement, but his role in the history of our literature. It seems oddly premature to review the career of a poet who is still very much alive and writing poetry, yet he was part of a dominant mode that was particularly Canadian, that emerged in the fifties, and became extremely popular in the sixties and seventies. It was a poetry that was plain spoken, emotionally vulnerable, anecdotal, both sincere and robust in its accounting of human suffering and personal pain, yet able at its best to contain excess in the poise of the ironic turn. This mode of poetry, as it became popular, was practiced in every corner of Canada by a plethora of poets, many of them very good, but the figures of this tradition who will be identified as major poets must include Milton Acorn, Alden Nowlan, Robert Gibbs, Al Purdy, Gary Geddes, Lorna Crozier, and Patrick Lane.
A reader of Lane’s Collected Poems will immediately notice that I am focusing on a signature achievement that features the first half of his oeuvre, and, as new types of poetics developed in the eighties, nineties, and the twenty-first century, so also has Lane’s poetry evolved. He is a remarkably flexible poet. Perhaps it is appropriate that I speak of this earlier Patrick Lane, so familiar to us, in this west coast issue of The Fiddlehead, because the story of this quotidian and conversational form of poetry began in the pages of The Fiddlehead near the beginning of its history in 1945.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

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

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

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



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

Monday, October 29, 2012

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

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

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

East Coast and West Coast Issues Officially Launched on East Coast

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

The Malahat plans a similar launch in Victoria November 12.

Visit our Facebook page to see more photos!

Friday, October 26, 2012

A Poetics of Decolonization

An Interview with Tim Lilburn
By Shane Rhodes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, October 25, 2012

The Fiddlehead's West Coast Issue has Arrived!

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

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

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

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

David Godkin Reviews John Wall Barger


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

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

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

West Coast and East Coast Issues to Launch October 25!

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

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

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

Thanks to our sponsor

Sunday, October 21, 2012

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


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

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

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

Friday, October 19, 2012

Ragged and True

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

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

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

Thursday, October 18, 2012

The View from T/Here: The Expanded Online Introduction

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

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

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

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

The West Coast Issue

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

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

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

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

Ross Leckie
Editor

Friday, October 12, 2012

East Coast Issues Arrive on East Coast!

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

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

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

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