Notes in Winter 2024

In writing about writing, I’ve reviewed Elise Levine’s Say This for The /tƐmz/ Review.

In reading about writing, I have been enjoying the witty and accomplished Fay Weldon’s Why Will No-One Publish My Novel?.

In reading about reading, I’m revisiting Lorna Sage’s essays about women writers; on my first reading, I was relatively unfamiliar with the books she discusses but this time nearly all of them are books I’ve read and admired.

And, in writing about reading, I’m working on a piece about some of the pivotal books I read when I was young, books written for older children, in what would quickly become the oh-so-profitable YA market.

March is a dreary month in our part of the world, with its blackened snow and random melts.
Carol Shields, Unless

Craft in the Real World (Matthew Salesses)

Clearly stating his intention from the start, Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World is an invitation to discuss the foundational ideas and practices that define writers and their work.

“This book is intended to begin further conversation—it should never be taken as an exhaustive or definitive resource,” he says. And, because “craft is in fact nothing more or less than a set of expectations”, that conversation may range widely.

[And, speaking of conversations, I’d heard about this book, but it wasn’t until I saw Rebecca Upjohn‘s recommendation, her describing how it had impacted her thinking and reading, that I decided to purchase a copy myself.]

Up for discussion are not only the stories that have been analysed, lauded and celebrated, but also the stories that have been neglected, misunderstood, and overlooked:

“Craft is the history of which kind of stories have typically held power—and for whom—so it also is the history of which stories have typically been omitted.”

He references other writers and thinkers who value and prioritise difference and views himself as part of a community that aims to broaden the understanding of stories told as well as the power dynamics simmering beneath the decisions at work in their telling, in their reception, and in their proliferation.

Like many others, he quotes Audre Lorde: “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean.” Because I’ve been rereading Lorde’s essays of late, and had recently finished Alexis De Veaux’s biography of her, I felt like I was contributing to this discussion. But with his reference to Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (Chinweizu et al.) and the four conventions identified therein about the tradition of incorporating the fantastic into everyday life, I felt like a student, reaching into my reading experience to locate stories that fit with these conventions.

(Curious what they are? First, the spirit beings have a non-human trait that gives them away—like floating—and second, a human’s visit to the spiritland involves a dangerous border-crossing, and third, spirits not only have agency but can possess humans and, finally, spirits aren’t subject to human concepts of space/time. If I had understood this when I read Ben Okri’s The Famished Road after it won the Booker Prize, I wouldn’t have had quite so many questions!)

In imagining myself in conversation with these essays, there were times where I disagreed, but although he presents his ideas with certainty and authority, there is something about his tone which suggests that he might enjoy the process of broadening the conversation to include disagreement. Having read Ursula K. Le Guin’s essays about writing the Earthsea stories for instance (not only the original trilogy, but the volumes and stories that followed), I believe her intentions are slightly different than he understood them to be, in the context of their original publication, and I think that would be a rewarding conversation to explore, particularly in the context of how some of the later stories differ from the early ones. I don’t think this is the kind of discussion that has a resolution…the merit is in having the discussion.

Despite the volume’s compactness, Salesses is committed to nuance. Despite his spare prose, he’s prepared to get gritty. (“Diversity,” he writes, for examples, “in the parlance of our times, should not be tokenism.” Not everyone is prepared to acknowledge a distinction.)

He’s also prepared to admit that needing to have certain conversations doesn’t mean that we are prepared to do so. He writes: “It’s impossible to trace an entire tradition, including its experiments, in a single essay—this is the point. Writers must read much more widely and much more deeply, if we are to know enough craft to start to critique other writers fairly and to write truly for ourselves.”

There are plenty of references for readers who are just beginning to explore literature, just beginning to broaden their understanding of it, but Salesses admits that the work required to change conventional understanding of craft resides outside the scope of any single book, including his own.

One of my favourite passages in the books is this: “I believe in workshop as a shared act of imagination, in the ability of many minds to foster the growth of one by one by one through conversation. I believe in the vulnerability of process and the process of vulnerability.”

At first, maybe it sounds like all the most commercial parts of workshop culture, heavy on trendy words and light on meaning but, on closer examination there’s a profound idea there that I’ve longed to articulate myself. It’s harder to be vulnerable by engaging in a process these days, to reflect on it and adjust as necessary, than it is to adopt a position of certainty (or conform to someone else’s) and defend it loudly.

There’s a lot of theoretical material here, but Salesses gets practical too. I’m particularly fond of this bit of advice to writers who are evaluating another writer’s work: “Be specific and precise, and ask questions you don’t know how to answer, and give suggestions that come from reading the story for what the author wants it to be, not what you want it to be.”  (He’s speaking about the workshop environment, but the underlying concept is also valid for reviewers.)

His “Syllabus Example” is the first piece I’ve read that made me feel a little less crazy for writing so many notes about my own writing as a means of exploring intentions and results (sometimes a word count that competes with the length of the work itself!). I photocopied three of his 34 Revision Exercises and filed them with a simmering WIP. And I flagged “A List of Craft Questions to Take into Consideration” because it looks useful. (He presents these pieces as beginnings, a foundation for further development.)

A fine resource for writers.

Matthew Salesses. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. NY: Catapult, 2021.

And a Dog Called Fig (Helen Humphreys)

This is a most suitable companion for last autumn’s resource, Miss Chloe, in which A. J. Verdelle considered her relationship with Toni Morrison in the context of Verdelle’s life of letters, as reader and writer. Here, Helen Humphreys considers her life as reader and writer in the context of the relationships she’s had over the years with her dogs—most recently, Fig.

It’s hard to imagine this book without the dogs, and even though I’ve never had a years-long dog friend, I flagged several passages about them. “If all else fails in a conversation,” Humphreys notes, “particularly when writers are forced to socialize with one another at a literary event, I know that if the person I am speaking with has a dog, we will never run out of things to say.”

When she talks about Fig’s fidgeting while trying to prep her for a walk, she discovers an unexpectedly simple solution:

“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before and have been fighting her this whole time when instead I could have just let her hold something in her mouth and made the whole enterprise much easier. Another example of the way a dog tells us what to do with them, and if we’re paying attention and not fixated on having our way, by listening to what they’re trying to communicate, we could get along with them better.”

Organically, from this realisation, this emerges: “This is not dissimilar to writing, where it is more effective to listen to intuition instead of trying to force your will upon a piece of work.”

She seamlessly stitches the two topics together, structurally and granularly: her relationships with dogs and her relationships with creative projects. And just as each dog she has loved is unique in her experience, so each book has been: “Each new novel requires that everything be learned all over again, because no two books are alike, and there are different sets of problems requiring different solutions when creating each one.”

Humphreys also contemplates the relationship between reading and writing: “It was reading that made me want to be a writer. I had cried uncontrollably for an entire day after reading Charlotte’s Web and was so affected by stories—unable to separate them from real life—that I decided the only way to loosen their hold on me would be to create them myself, because then I would know what was coming in the story and wouldn’t get so upset.” As a young reader and burgeoning writer, she could have selected several stories to illustrate her point, but E.B. White’s novel is perfect in the context of her relationships with four-legged and wild creatures.

For those familiar with Humphreys’ work beyond this book, there’s an additional layer of interest as she discloses elements of process for specific projects. About Leaving Earth, for instance, she writes: “I couldn’t figure out how to transition from one scene to the next, so I simply ended a scene and moved on to another one. This made the pace fairly quick, which, luckily for me, suited the story I was telling, so the short scenes don’t betray my lack of ability, and instead seem to be there as a deliberate device.”

And readers familiar with her body of work will not be surprised to find grief a central tenet here: “The natural world became even more important to me than it had before, and the smallest wonder in it was enough to calm my spirit for another day.” Her prose is spare, which affords the opportunity to deep emotion to settle between the sentences and paragraphs: readers coping with a recent or long-ago loss may find additional comfort here, perhaps unexpected in a volume which also contains valuable writing advice.

And A Dog Called Fig is a meditative and tender book about loneliness and companionship, love and grief, based in reflections on a life shared with dogs and shared with story; Helen Humphreys illuminates that the way we build (and lose) relationships is not all that different from how we create (and release) narratives into the world.

An excellent resource for writers.

Helen Humphreys. And a Dog Called Fig: Solitude, Connection, and the Writing Life. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2022

Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison (A. J. Verdelle)

A. J. Verdelle chronicles not only her friendship with a renowned writer, but also her own personal relationship with words—as a reader and as a writer—and the development of this lasting relationship over the years. About three dozen pages into the volume, this quotation reveals how she found her community:

“Eventually, of course, I developed acuity enough and autonomy enough to choose more deliberately, more cautiously. I chose Morrison frequently, and from a thrumming list of others: Maya Angelou Alice Walker, Julia Peterkin, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston. Much later, I read Ann Petry and Nella Larsen. Reading this roster of Black women helped me understand that Morrison was not writing alone.”

So many of these names are familiar to me (but I would have added Terri McMillan, Bebe Moore Campbell, Shay Youngblood, Gloria Naylor, Dorothy West, Marita Golden, and April Sinclair) that I knew I would enjoy this volume, if only for Verdelle’s thoughts on reading. She writes: “If you let a Black girl loose in a library, you may not recognize the woman who emerges.”

Her discussion of the vital importance of other writers’ words—to her personhood and her creative work—is impassioned: “We/I owe so much to books. Books changed my sight lines, my expectations, my sense of the enormity of time and the complexity of humanity.”

This theme continues through her account of the years that Toni Morrison herself spent in editorial work. Questions she poses from Morrison’s point-of-view remain valid today: “Why shouldn’t we stand on shelves in the libraries? Why shouldn’t our spines be straight? Why shouldn’t she change which books were published?”

Verdelle celebrates the act of reading generally, but also reading Toni Morrison specifically. Close rereadings of Morrison’s work lead to incisive commentary about individual narratives and characters, Morrison’s oeuvre, and her overarching intent and underlying preoccupations:

“Morrison’s novels are full of teenage girls showcasing or dramatizing the discoveries, the misdirections, and the assaults that implode and plague their lives. Even as the decades pass for the characters, and they mature into parents and grandparents and exhausted observers, still, the novels spotlight teenager girls.”

For those who explore Verdelle’s memoir with the experience of only one or two of Morrison’s novels, there are plenty of passages to tempt further exploration:

“If you look, you will find specific reflections on complex and straightforward human endeavors, including handling atonement and forgiveness (complex) or cooking soft-boiled eggs (straightforward). You can find full treatises on slavery, naming, Reconstruction, and the Jazz Age. You can find secondary treatises on the Korean War, Black posterity, Black women’s friendships, mothering. You can also find ribbons, and red velvet rose petals, and a clearing in the woods where a woman can preach.”

Inextricably intertwined with her love and respect for reading is Verdelle’s desire to write. “Writing had been what I’d wanted to do,” she explains, since “well, since learning that somebody wrote everything I was reading.” Many of us who are compelled to write can recall the moment at which we realized that someone—a person—wrote the words inside of books. Verdelle’s tone—so direct and clear—includes her readers in this conversation. It feels, as we absorb her relatable prose, as though she has already included us in her circle.

This circle includes everyone who has influenced her work, including James Baldwin who, Verdelle writes, “famously said that writers have eighty million decisions to make. (So get busy.) The number is not an exaggeration.” (This immediately becomes one of my favourite observations about writing life!) Sometimes she carries on to make specific suggestions, following another writer’s advice, as in this instance: “So, those of us who intend to write need to build our decision-making skills. And we need to make all those decisions against our human backdrop—the ticking clock we know as mortality.” Her natural inclination to twin commentary on both art and life ensures that readers are attuned to the universal elements at work, so I suspect creatives of all sorts (not only writers) would find value here.

Verdelle returns, consistently, to Morrison, however. And because she has the experience of a long-time friendship with the writer, there are additional layers to reflect upon, in comparison with another writer who could only glean wisdom from Morrison’s own writing or lectures about the craft of writing. For instance: “From writing, we learn the power of the pause; from Morrison, I learned about power in pause in person. I am neither afraid nor made uncomfortable by pause, by silence, by moments where thoughts make their connections, rendezvous in sit. Some pauses are pregnant and worth the wait.” (And, if you’re wondering, their friendship had its challenges.)

Most often the advice is Morrison’s, or is rooted directly in a consideration of her work. For instance: “Morrison expected that writers would take on the task of independently teaching themselves. Regulating their own lives, their own writing practice, their own schedules.” The importance of initiative and self-regulation, especially for freelancers, cannot be overstated.

Verdelle is not dismissing more formal education, though she doesn’t overlook its limitations: “Imagination can only be nurtured; technique can be taught, identified, explained.” And, because she is herself an accomplished writer (her debut novel, The Good Negress was a critic’s darling in 1995), she has her own advice to share. Consider: “Characters blister their feet on the roads in their environment, their era. We writers have to recognize, and sometimes set aside, the lens of now.”

Though particularly rewarding for me, combining elements of a bibliomemoir with a chronicle of a literary friendship which includes one of my personal favourite writers, A.J. Verdelle’s Miss Chloe is rich and thought-provoking enough that readers with only one of these inclinations will find it a rewarding read.

Great stuff for writers.

A. J. Verdelle. Miss Chloe. NY: HC-Amistad, 2022.

What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul (Oriah Mountain Dreamer)

Simply by reading the title and author’s name, you will have an inkling of whether or not there’s a match to be made between you and this book. There’s the prominence of the word ‘soul’ for one thing, and the fact that the author adopted this name based on a message she received in a dream for another. And if you are the kind of person for whom an inkling matters, you are in good company and, if you count Natalie Goldberg among your favourite authors of books about writing and you have completed (or dreamed of completing) Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, you will feel like you’ve found your circle.

The emphasis on spirituality and personal growth did not suit my current frame of mind (and, further, I was craving a book on creativity in general, not about writing specifically) but I was encouraged to read on by this passage: “We have to let go of our ideas about ideal conditions for beginning if we are going to start.” With my work routine disrupted by a recent move—and compounded by a protracted illness—I struggled to focus; this simple concept (familiar, but freshly present, and in print) snapped my resolve into place.

What kept me reading was the author’s reference to one of my favourite writers (“reading the book The Stone Angel by author Margaret Laurence…made me want to write”) and to a writer whose work I have admired in general, whose work felt particularly pertinent with Russia’s war on Ukraine, the ongoing war in Ethiopia, unrest in Lebanon and continued conflict in Syria:

“Susan Griffin’s books Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her and A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War are two that repeatedly reinspire me to remember the mysterious process whereby writing or any other creative endeavor, can reveal the wholeness of life and the meaning embedded in interwoven colors and sounds and stories.”

I was reassured to discover this truism on these pages: “Sometimes it just takes a shift in perspective to help us see the world a little differently, to spark the imagination in new ways.” And I, too, took comfort in the works of others, while I felt unable to do my own work: “Getting in the mood to do our own creative work may mean deliberately cultivating our connection to a particular expression of someone else’s work.” At times, I marvelled at the room in these new surroundings (both indoors and outdoors) and thought that this might be true for some—“Too often we have little sense of spaciousness in our lives”—but, for me, broader spaces felt disorienting and strange.

At the end of each chapter, there are things to think about, sometimes things to write about. Mostly, the text seems to speak directly to a single reader, but occasionally it’s clear that the audience is a group or class, working through the book methodically and collegially.

In the “Doing the Work” chapter, readers are invited to complete the following phrases:
“I am committed to…
I find it difficult to persevere at…
I am patient with…
I am impatient with….”
Although likely most useful for those who write primarily for personal growth, What We Ache For contains some solid advice.

Fair stuff for writers, good stuff for journallers.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer. What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.

An Avid Reviewer’s Reading Copies: Autumn 2022

Some of the pitches I’ve made-to review or discuss these new and forthcoming works-will likely land after I publish this, but I would be pleased to review all of these books, which are roughly listed in publication order.

If we’ve worked together previously, let me know your time-frame, and if you’re interested in working together for the first time, please share your rate information and specifics about your revision schedule. (This is only the third time I’ve posted a list like this: it worked well, but I’m not considering it a regular feature here yet.)

Sophia Lambton published this novel under her auspices at the crepuscular press. Her pitch revealed that she’d taken a peek at my reading preferences and she tailored the email in such a way that I was drawn into her passion for the story quickly.
ANY EDITOR SEEKING COVERAGE, please reach out.

Manuel Astur’s Of Saints and Miracles from New Vessel Press is “a sensual portrayal of an outcast’s struggle to survive in a chaotic world of both tragedy and magical splendor” in translation by Claire Wadie.
REVIEW SPACE SECURED.

Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter from Coach House Books has already been listed for the Giller Prize. As I’m familiar with her backlist, I’m particularly keen to cover this novel in the context of her body of work.
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Ramona Emerson’s Shutter is a debut mystery from Soho Press, which also recently released the third novel in Marcie Rendon’s Cash Blackbear series; these Indigenous mystery novels would fit perfectly on the shelf next to Thomas King’s mystery series featuring Thumps DreadfulWater. Entertaining but quietly informative too.
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REVIEW SPACE TENTATIVELY SECURED.

Randall Kenan’s Black Folk Could Fly is likely to end up on my list of favourite reads for this year. Discovering his work a few years ago, I pitched to review If I Had Two Wings, and then took the opportunity to read through his backlist, which is fantastic. W.W. Norton.
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Eric Dupont’s earlier fiction has impressed me and made me laugh out loud. I pitched to review Rosa’s Very Own Personal Revolution, in translation by Peter McCambridge, before I even read it, and it did not disappoint. The latest in QC Fiction‘s voice-driven and expectation-shattering line.
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Paul Sunga’s new novel from Goose Lane is Because of Nothing at All, which Sharon Bala describes as a “thoroughly absorbing read: a deep dive into capitalism and foreign aid that lays bare the limits of the latter, in the face of the former, and the absurdities of both.”
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Michelle Sinclair’s Almost Visible is a debut novel that explores “cultural and personal memory…[and] reflects on what can happen when a lonely person intervenes in another person’s life.” An epigraph from Simone Weil suggests this will be an interesting read from Baraka Books.
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Nicholas Herring’s Some Hellish from Goose Lane has already appeared on a literary prizelist. With a comparison to David Adams Richards on the cover, this is likely to veer towards the melancholic, but just leafing through the vivid writing and detail looks to balance that out.
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Also from Goose Lane, Gary Saunders’ Earthkeeping fits with the climate crisis and nature reading I’ve done in recent years. Because he has published many volumes in this sector, I’m keen to experience Saunders’ latest.
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Tomson Highway’s Laughing with the Trickster would have landed on my stack even without a reason. I’ve grown to love trickster stories, Highway is one of my MustReadEverything authors, and I’ve listened to so many of the Massey Lectures that I’m starting to think I should make a project of reading through the gaps. Anansi.
REVIEW SPACE SECURED.

As a sucker for a good love story, my interest in Sarah L. Taggart’s Pacifique was immediate and pressing. I’m expecting this to be somewhat unsettling but clever. Another provocative read from Coach House Books, it seems.
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Reviewing Larissa Lai’s The Lost Century was my first commissioned work. The ARC took longer than expected to arrive, which made me anxious and, then, I could tell within a few pages that I was going to need tiiiiime for this one: every detail counts but the prose seems effortless and the structure organic. Sometimes it’s more challenging to review a novel that I have really loved, but that’s a terrific problem to have. Arsenal Pulp.
REVIEW SPACE SECURED.

When I pitched to review Graeme Macrae Brunet’s Case Study, published by Biblioasis, it was before it had been listed for the Booker and before I’d read any of his other books. On a library browse, now some years in the past, I’d read a chunk of his debut novel (short-listed for the Booker more than five years ago) and loved it…in short, I was looking for an excuse to read his backlist.
REVIEW SPACE SECURED.

Ariane Lessard’s School for Girls (translated by Frances Pope) looks deliciously creepy. A couple of other books from QC Fiction have eerie-ed me out, so this one, which is openly identified as “disturbing” will probably scare the bejeebies out of me.
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Emily Saso’s Nine Dash Line from Freehand Books is a follow-up The Weather Inside, which I liked a lot. Jan Wong calls this both lyrical and mystical and it’ll add a new feather in my reading cap, as I don’t believe I’ve read another novel set in the South China Sea.
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Also from Freehand Books, Barbara Joan Scott’s The Taste of Hunger tells the story of a 15-year-old Ukrainian immigrant trapped in an unhappy marriage in 1920s Saskatchewan. Perhaps because I am in a very different kind of marriage myself, I gravitate towards stories about unhappy ones, so this intrigues me greatly.
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Mikka Jacobsen’s essay collection Modern Fables is blurbed by Suzette Mayr (see above) who calls them wicked. Also from Freehand Books.
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Marie Hélène Poitras’ strange novel Sing, Nightingale (in translation by Rhonda Mullins, whose translations always pull me close) is a loose hair down the back of my shirt. I both want to and dread reading it (partly due to the description of it being like Peter Greenaway meeting Angela Carter, with talk of secrets and revenge). Coach House Books.
REVIEW SPACE SECURED.


An Avid Reviewer’s Reading Copies: Summer 2022

Some of the pitches I’ve made-to review or discuss these new and forthcoming works-will likely land after I publish this, but I would be pleased to review all of these books; if we’ve worked together previously, let me know your time-frame, and if you’re interested in working together for the first time, please share your rate information and specifics about your revision schedule. This is only the second time I’ve posted a list like this: it worked well, but I’m not considering it a regular feature here yet.)

J. D. Kurtness’ Aquariums from Dundurn Press. This 2019 novel, in a fresh translation by Pablo Strauss (whose work with Christiane Vadnais’ Fauna knocked off my proverbial socks), confronts the climate crisis in the context of marine biology. A trusted reading friend has urged me to push this one to the top of my stack.
ANY EDITOR SEEKING COVERAGE, please reach out.

Also from Dundurn (their pocket-sized Rare Machines imprint), Eve Lemieux’s Like Animals (also translated from the French, this time by Cayman Rock) is a debut novel with a Montreal setting, inspired by “people who haven’t learned to love gently”.
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Another novel in translation from the French, this time from QC Fiction, Vincent Brault’s The Ghost of Suzuko (translated by Benjamin Hedley), also considers love and loss in an urban setting, this time Tokyo. There’s a mention of taxidermy, which has great symbolic potential (along with a squirm factor, of course).
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Elise Levine’s Say This, from Biblioasis, has strong appeal because I really enjoyed her debut stories and debut novel, years ago (Driving Men Mad and Requests & Dedications). I’m curious to see how her style and voice have developed since then. Lisa Moore blurbs this volume, two novellas, as “immersive, hyper-vivid and true.”
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Updated September 1/22: Review space secured

And speaking of shorter forms, Alex Pugsley’s Shimmer is out now from Biblioasis. I’m interested to see how much of his previous book was Aubrey and how much was the author (I reviewed Aubrey McKee for PRISM international a couple of years ago.) It’s a challenge that I particularly enjoy, capturing the flavour and intent of a collection of short stories.
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Dawn Promislow’s Wan is published by Freehand Books and blurbed by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, which immediately piques my interest. “A masterpiece…beautiful, painterly, sublime, and sonically exquisite.” That’s high praise. I’ve read few South African writers, so I am keen to explore Promislow’s writing in that context.
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Bookish memoirs: I love the idea of them. Marius Kociejowski’s A Factotum in the Book Trade, from Biblioasis, is no exception. This is one that I’ve pitched and, if it doesn’t land, I’m determined to try again and find a match. I’ve read widely in this sector and excited to see how this particular memoir fits into the puzzle of antiquarian bookselling narratives.
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From Goose Lane, Margaret Sweatman’s sixth book, The Gunsmith’s Daughter, is a coming-of-age story set in 1970s Manitoba. Based on Mr. Jones, I’m anticipating carefully selected historical details in combination with strong storytelling and emotional heft.
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Because I have followed her career closely, from earliest days, I was immediately interested to hear that Farzana Doctor has published a book of poems, You Still Look the Same, with Freehand Books. Viewed in the broader context of her writing, I’m eager to explore the way that familiar themes and preoccupations surface in a different form; I’m not equipped to analyze or contemplate this work as a volume of verse. That’s for the poets!
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Phew, you can hear the recoil of many of a reviewer in response to the summary of K.S. Covert’s debut novel from Dundurn, The Petting Zoo: all the talk of vaccines and masks, gloves and isolation. But in the context of post-apocalyptic CanLit and post-pandemic lit, there’s much to discuss.
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Len & Cub: A Queer History by Meredith J. Batt and Dusty Green, from Goose Lane, immediately appeals. It’s partly because of the abundance of visual material: there are so many expressive and evocative photographs in this volume. It’s also because the New Brunswick setting caught my eye; as much as I’ve tried to increase the amount of Atlantic Canadian reading in my stacks, New Brunswick’s stories remain in the minority, and here is an historical volume to address that gap.
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Everything about Sharon English’s novel Night in the World, from Freehand, intrigues me. I really loved Uncomfortably Numb back in 2002: authentic and heartfelt, with a particular way of bridging the specific and universal that spoke to me. Just leafing through this volume, I want to start reading right away, as a reader. But my experience with this setting and these themes makes it irresistible as a reviewer.
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Updated September 1/22: Review space secured

Another which excites me tremendously, too, is Andrew Hunter’s It Was Dark There All the Time: Sophia Burthen and the Legacy of Slavery in Canada, from Goose Lane, because last year I read a few dozen books about the legacy of slavery in the U.S. and Canada, none of which took quite the same approach as this volume. The cover blurb from Lawrence Hill increases my interest too: “Thoroughly researched, self-reflexive, soulful.”
ANY EDITOR SEEKING COVERAGE, please reach out.
Updated September 1/22: Review space secured

An Avid Reviewer’s Reading Copies: Winter 2022

Many of the pitches I’ve made-to review or discuss these new and forthcoming works-have landed. I would be pleased to review the other works as well; if we’ve worked together previously, let me know your time-frame, and if you’re interested in working together for the first time, please share your rate and revision schedule.

Murder on the Red River and Girl Gone Missing by Marcie R. Rendon are reissues of her Cash Blackbear mysteries centred on the White Earth Anishinaabe Nation from Soho Press. As with Thomas King’s Dreadfulwater mystery series, the dialogue and scene-work here (at a glance) look very interesting.
ANY EDITOR SEEKING COVERAGE, please reach out.
Updated March 1/22: Review space secured
Updated September 1/22: Feature space secured

Also from Soho, Fuminori Nakamura’s The Thief (translated from the Japanese by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates) to assist in a review of My Annihilation (translated by Sam Bett and just published). This has proven to be a deceptively simple story about a pickpocket that’s slid into character-driven commentary on class and corruption.

Patrick McCabe’s Poguemahone, from Biblioasis. Presumably they needed a hefty tome for the other end of the bookshelf that sports Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newport (they’re her Canadian publisher). I’m new to McCabe and this is an excellent reason to explore his backlist. Am I intimidated? Yup, but I’ll sharpen my pencil. MAY 3, 2022
ANY EDITOR SEEKING COVERAGE, please reach out.

Kristjana Gunnars’ The Scent of Light is a reissue of five of her novella-length works. I’ve already read, and absolutely love, Kazim Ali’s introduction, because when I first read Gunnars (three of the five books only), I did not have the vocabulary to articulate what I admired and warmed to and Ali says it all so astutely, so gracefully. “They are themselves alive. And in them a reader comes to life.” MAY 2022 Coach House
ANY EDITOR SEEKING COVERAGE, please reach out.
Updated March 1/22: Review space tentatively secured.
Updated: March 22/22: Review space secured.

Anne Lardeux’s The Second Substance (translated from the French by Pablo Strauss) is described as “often funny, sometimes raunchy, consistently surprising, never flinching.” It’s also the “debut of a Québec literary firebrand” with a character from an Agnes Varda film and inspired by the writing of Anne Boyer. Due in JUNE 2022 from Coach House. (Review to come.)

Also from Coach House, launching this week, Kim Fu’s debut story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century. I found her debut novel captivating, so I am eager to explore her short work. Also, her acknowledgements are warm and funny, and I like that,
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Updated March 1/22: Review space secured

A second novel by Victoria Hetherington from Dundurn Press (the Rare Machines imprint), Autonomy. Even though I’ve not read their debut novel, the blurb from Michael Redhill piques my interest. Set in 2035, I’m also curious to see how it fits with some of the speculative fiction I read last year for my feature on writers confronting the climate crisis.
ANY EDITOR SEEKING COVERAGE, please reach out.
Updated: March 22/22: Review space secured.

Already available in the U.K., the American edition of Sarah Moss’ The Fell is due March 1st from Macmillan (FSG). I’ve been steadily reading through Moss for a feature that will consider this new “pandemic novel” in the wider context of her work. At first, I wondered how relevant the early works would be…turns out there are many fascinating connections. (Feature to come.)

Stéfanie Clermont’s The Music Game (translated from the French by J.C. Sutcliffe) is a story of three women in Montréal’s east end in the 2010’s seeking to “define their identities, sexualities and political commitments.” As if that wasn’t enough to intrigue me, it’s also a novel in stories. Launching next week from Biblioasis. (Review to come, May-ish)

S.J. Sindu’s debut novel Marriage of a Thousand Lies was a finalist for the Lambda and her follow-up Blue-Skinned Gods got a lot of buzz and a snazzy cover blurb from Roxane Gay. The content of her stories varies but what remains consistent is her ambition, simmering beneath a focus on identity and relationships. (Review to come.)

This second volume of Marlon James’ Dark Star trilogy is a doorstopper and I had not yet read the first volume from 2019. Technically, that doesn’t matter, for these are companion novels, but James has done so much research and is attending to so many matters, small and large, that I needed that familiarity to appreciate the complexity of his work. (Review to come.)

This is an experiment for me, a way to draw attention to new and forthcoming works that I’m reviewing or would like to review. Sometimes even a successful pitch doesn’t pan out: production schedules change or a publisher’s shipping options don’t satisfy a publication’s needs (e.g. books don’t arrive as originally promised). And books coverage has declined in recent years, so editors can place only a limited number of reviews. Sometimes release dates don’t coincide with a review’s planned issues, for editors who strive to publish in concert with publication dates. Sometimes there’s a pandemic. Things happen!

If this proves useful or interesting, I’ll continue the experiment and share the accumulated works every few weeks.

Toni Morrison: The Last Interview (Nikki Giovanni)

Sometimes I resist endings. Even in these days of binge-watching, I occasionally leave the final episode of a long-running TV series unwatched.


So this series of books, spiralling around the concept of a final interview, isn’t one to which I’ve naturally gravitated.


But because I found the Ursula K. Le Guin volume thoroughly enjoyable, and because she and Toni Morrison are both authors on my MustReadEverything lists, I braced myself for the sense of an ending, and picked up this book.


The collection (for it’s not actually a single, final interview) begins with a 1986 interview with Donald M. Suggs Jr, via River Styx, in 1986. More than thirty years ago, and there is Toni Morrison is saying something that still needs saying today:


“The idea of ideological slaughter of the other is chewing up everybody’s intelligence. People are making the most unbelievable statements about the other based on that kind of insistence that the person who disagrees with you fundamentally can’t exist. These are political statements as well as biological and everything else. The hierarchy being established is what’s problematic.”


Of course, since then, Morrison has written so much about Others and Othering that she is recognized as an authority on the subject. It’s interesting to reflect, however, on her having worked on this theme throughout her career. It’s also inspirational, urging us to revisit, to reconsider, to reevaluate how we manage and navigate disagreement, both on and off the page.


And, in case we needed another reminder of the hard work that being a writer requires, a 1987 interview with Charlayne Hunter-Gault on PBS Newshour offers this: “Serious writers write things that compel them, new challenges, new situations, and a new landscape that they have not been in before.”


She issues this regarding Beloved (“Capturing a Mother’s ‘compulsion’ to Nurture”), which reminds me that I should reread. Here’s a comment from a later essay which nudges me even further towards that reread: “I hadn’t felt that—it must have been a combination of happiness and something else. And it was then that I wrote Beloved. It was all like a flood when I wrote that book.”


Another element which really struck me, given one specific slant of Othering that frequently occurs, is her support of and excitement about the work that younger writers were and would do. In The Salon Interview by Zia Jaffrey for Salon on February 3, 1998, she shares this hopeful view:


“They will write infinitely better than I do. They will write of all sorts of things that no one writer can ever touch. They will be stronger, and they will be delicious to read. But part of that availability and accessibility is because six or seven black women writers, among whom I am one, have already been there and tilled the soil.”


Reminding readers of the reciprocal relations between generations, yes, but simultaneously reminding us that her work was truly pivotal in creating a space for Black women writers in the American literary landscape.


Her accomplishments did not, however, give her permission to slack. In the National Visionary Leadership Project Video Interview with Camille O Cosby on November 5, 2004, she elaborates on the idea of being a serious writer. “I’m just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it was like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.”


Also of interest, particularly given my recent reading of Lennie Goodings’ memoir about working in the publishing industry, was Morrison’s experience editing. She was a powerful force on that scene, but even there she faced some limitations.


Despite her support of the novelist Leon Forrest’s work, for instance, after she insisted on publishing a few books (three, I believe) that were not commercially successful, she faced censure. “Now that they did not let me keep on publishing—books that weren’t making any money. Although at one time in publishing you could do that…”


One last quotation, which explores how revision intersects with reading and rereading: “I think one of the reasons I’m so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained. Because I’m reading it. I’m there. Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers, too.”


It’s a challenge for me, daily, to keep my focus on writing rather than reading. When I need encouragement, I’ll think about this way of reframing the process. And perhaps I’ll work on another few pages of revision, rather than reading another few pages of someone else’s revisions.

Great stuff for writers.

Toni Morrison. The Last Interview. Ed. Nikki Giovanni. New York: Melville House, 2020.

Who Says? Mastering Point of View in Fiction (Lisa Zeidner)

When it comes to point-of-view work, my enduring favourite is Ursula K. LeGuin’s Steering the Craft, but she takes only a few pages to cover the topic; Lisa Zeidner’s booklength treatment is warranted. As a key aspect of characterization, the questions raised and explored here could vault your creative work from competent to self-assured.

The emphasis is on the exploring, however; Zeidner presents and discusses examples more than she directs. This requires a substantial commitment; readers (writers) must actively participate in her process. It’s not until the very end of the book, for instance, that there are any exercises or instruction sets.

Writers who prefer a checklist approach might be frustrated by this immersion approach, and beginners who have not read widely might be overwhelmed by the number of quotations and references to accomplished writers’ novels and stories. And, like Stephen King’s On Writing, the book concludes with an awesome bibliography, which could serve as a reading list.

Experienced writers, however, might long for some references to genre works (The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Shirley Jackson’s famous story—these are as close as she gets) and more unconventional selections (although it’s refreshing to see Percival Everett and Kevin Kwan and there are some 2019 works, including a New Yorker story—you can probably guess which one).

Zeidner’s clarity and cohesion are remarkable, however. One of her basic premises is that readers can dislike/mistrust the characters but must like/trust their author; with that, the focus shifts to how to build and maintain the trust between reader and author. Content-wise, this is a valid position; Zeidner takes it one step further and chooses illustrative and pertinent extracts to build trust with her readers too.

She also holds that questions of authenticity and appropriation are largely point-of-view questions; it’s a simple and sensible statement that opens up possibilities for problem-solving and revision. She stands at the edge of the culture wars, surveys the battlefield, and encourages readers to explore that concept independently.

It’s useful to understand that many aspects of storytelling which appear to be trends in the present-day can be studied in a historical context. For example, she does discuss Gone Girl’s unreliable narration (a predictable but recognizable example), but she also traces the pattern back to Lawrence Sterne and through Mark Twain, to explain that it’s not new to question a narrator’s objectivity.

Her style feels proper though not formal, and occasionally she slips in a cozier way of talking (like describing an excerpt in the first person as being a pull-up-a-chair style) and she made me laugh with this: “DFW is so famous that his initials alone are enough to identify him, as if he’s an airport. Once you’re that influential as a writer, your tones and trends are just in the air, like the flu.”

Beyond the expected chapter headings, she also considers Childhood and Animal perspectives and there is a chapter on “Thinking Like a Camera” about Point of View in Fiction Versus Film. The content is on-topic but still relevant, so that even if none of those situations applies to your own work, these chapters are still interesting in the broader context of crafting.

When it comes to universal advice—the kind of truisms you expect to find in books about writing—I like the way she expresses herself: “In order to write, you have to believe that no matter how many other books are on your shelf, the story you tell is yours and yours alone.”

When it comes to specific suggestions, with concrete application, I find them sparky and practical: “Each new match the character strikes leaves the character and the reader in a meaningless cloud of smoke.” This is how she describes the sensation of a first-draft or unpolished scene in dialogue, punctuated with gestures that do not relate to the characters, only feel like filler. Later, in the Exercises section, one of the suggestions is as follows: “Find a cliched stage direction in your story—a raised eyebrow or hands on hips—and try to find a gesture that is actually revealing about the character.”

Although not a volume I’d expect to revisit frequently, Zeidner’s Who Says? provides a detailed and informed examination of a topic that deserves more consideration.

Very good stuff for writers.

Lisa Zeidner. Who Says? Mastering Point of View in Fiction. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021.