2008•04•08 ~ Literary news...
Huge snowpack in the mountains! Even with a my little town of Field going through a week of mid-winter PLUS 14 Celsius that burned off 60 per cent of their snow, there’s still a lot of snow in the mountains! Our small family snow-shoed, cross-country skied, and hiked. It was a restful, lovely week. I was surprised by my own skiing abilities after a three-year break. Consuming proportional quantities of red wine helped.
Arrived home to a snow storm and a dump of snow, and the news from the Writers Guild about their annual literary awards. Some familiar faces, friends actually, are among the short lists:
Marty Chan and his The Mystery of the Graffiti Ghoul and Gail Sobat and her A Glass Darkly, (published by my first publisher Great Plains Publications!!!) are duking it out for the R. Ross Annett Award for Children’s Literature.
Our friend Todd Babiak is in the running for the Georges Bugnet Award for Novel because of his brilliant The Book of Stanley.
And finally, Bert Almon (A Ghost in Waterloo Station) and Paulette Dubé (First Mountain) are in competition for the Sephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Both professor Almon and Paulette have appeared at the ROAR Spoken Word Festival.
In other publishing news, Patrick Pilarski (One of the most energetic and enthused people on the planet) is being published in PRISM International – apparently, it’s a piece he wrote in Greece last summer about lizards; and it uses the word "pooping" (which is always good). PRISM International is a prestigious and venerated literary magazine. (Started in 1959, PRISM is the oldest literary magazine in Western Canada. Its archives are a Who's Who of modern and contemporary literature. The magazine has published Margaret Laurence, Alden Nowlan and George Bowering. Since its first volume, PRISM has published Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton, Robert Kroetsch, Jorge Luis Borges, Al Purdy, Evelyn Lau, Jack Hodgins, Daniel David Moses, Michael Ondaatje, Tennessee Williams, Gu Xiong, Leon Rooke, Nobel Prize winners Salvador Quasimodo, Vincente Aleixandre, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Seamus Heaney and many more established and emerging writers from around the world.) Wholly CRAP, Patrick!!!! Congrats! Also, the lovely and gracious Nicole Pakan has two pieces under serious consideration for an upcoming issue of Carousel.
In case you haven’t been there yet, go to Daily Haiku and check out the "Special Features" area for, as Patrick describes it, “a freaking amazing Mary Pinkoski special feature…check it out if you feel like a kick-ass experimental senryu bonanza.”
Contrary to everything that has probably been said about me at Raving Poets for the past two weeks, I am not in Paris, in a novelist hot-tub full of hookers, liquid gold, and expensive chardonnay. Nor am I in Disneyland doing lines of coke with Mickey. I’ll be at Raving Poets (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), this Wednesday and for the duration (The London Book Fair is out…they won't let me into the country because I once wrote that England was a country populated by lovely people with bad teeth and horrible haircuts, and that there wasn't any good food, or coffee in the entire country. I wasn't serious about the coffee).
COLUMBUS AT 4AM is being read by the publishers.
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