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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

Listen to the interview in your web browser.

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

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.

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.

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.