What's All the Fuss?: Shotgun Review of Fifty Shades of Grey



Fifty Shades of Grey is the first of a trilogy that tells the story of a twenty-something virgin who ends up falling for a gorgeous, older billionaire who has a secret past and an interest in sexual subcultures. Just a tad unrealistic with Ana Steele going from being a virgin, and a pretty naïve one at that, to signing a BDSM contract within a couple weeks, the book is not that bad if you accept it for what it is. There’s lots of hair pulling, hitching breaths, and lip biting. Yes, there’s a love story and a handful of minor characters who add a little spunk to the plot but it’s all about sexual tension, S & M, and the politics of power in a fringe relationship. It’s a fun read that critics are calling everything from Mommy Porn to poorly written. I call it Clit Lit. All bookshelves could use a book or two like this.

Posted on Thursday, May 17, 2012

Why We Need Mad Hope: Writing Recipes with Heather Birrell

While reading Mad Hope with its intricate stories and sometimes alarming subject matter, one realizes that Birrell respects her readers. She peels back the layers of a moment, a thing, a person to reveal the essence of what's beneath. She has the skill of a seasoned writer and the voice of a modern one, the literary love child of Margaret Laurence and Douglas Coupland. 

Book Fridge and Coach House Books want you to enjoy Mad Hope too.  We are giving away a copy to a lucky Book Fridger reader.  Enter to win by commenting on this article: retweet, comment or "like" on Facebook, send me an email (kerri@bookfridge.com), whatever works.



There are a few stories in the collection about motherhood: one in particular, "Forum: Second Trimester" is hilarious and sad and true to what we find online in such forums (except with better grammar).  Have you been involved in such forums and what do you find fascinating or interesting about them?

I have never been a very steady contributor to these sorts of forums, but I readily admit to being a late night lurker.  Especially when I was pregnant with my first child, then later in those shocking first six months of motherhood -- she was what they dub a ‘wakeful’ baby -- I spent a lot of time looking for *the answer*.  And I did find a lot of ‘experts’ willing to sell me their perfect solutions, but I also found a lot of mothers just like me sharing their experiences -- their woes and wonderings.  I quickly became frustrated with the experts, but always found some solace in the thoughts posted by my peers.  These posts are not always eloquent (and sometimes they are maddeningly twee) but they are heartfelt, and so diverse that a person is bound to find a kindred spirit if they look for long enough.  

Why is it important for one to have "mad hope"?

Well, it’s important to have hope in general.  But “mad hope” is necessary because sometimes the world is crummy and people are unkind, cruel even, and terrible things happen for no reason (and for extremely stupid reasons), and the divorce rate is high and cancer and genocide exist, etc, etc...  So sometimes we need to hope in a way that feels irrational, over-the-top, crazy just to make it out of bed in the morning...   

Taisie says, "Just living... it can be an accomplishment."  Although simple it makes a point about the way we go about our daily lives wishing or hoping or worrying.  What's your take on that idea?

Yes.  Taisie makes that remark regarding our tendency to applaud the very old just for making it as far as they have -- something she didn’t understand in the past.  I think it is hard sometimes to recognize survival as being enough.  To have lived through hard times, or even just made it through the daily grind is underappreciated.  We live in a culture that celebrates youth (or at least looking youthful), big successes and milestones, and sensationalizes failures -- and tends to overlook the quieter moments that collectively make up a life.

You do a good job of showing what it means to have a connection to people or places like putting a piece of someone in your pocket or having their voice saved on your iPod for future.  Is that something you aimed to do or did it evolve with the stories?

I guess it evolved with the stories.  We all have a yearning for connections with others, whether it be those closest to us or -- at times -- relative strangers.  Those connections are often thwarted however, by circumstance, by our own obtuseness, by time -- which is ironic, I suppose, considering the many means we have now to ‘connect‘ via technology and travel.  So it is cause for some celebration when those moments do occur, or even when we recognize the potential for them to occur -- it can be quite magical in fact.  And I think the short story showcases these instances of ragged connection very well.  

What is a day in the life of Heather Birrell like?

I have a full-time day job as a high school teacher which is pretty demanding, but I am on maternity leave with my second child right now.  Mothering is also incredibly demanding, but I find its rhythms less hectic and am really enjoying being at home with my children.  Part of the reason I do enjoy it so much is that my husband also works from home and does his fair share of the parenting, and we share a house with my mother, who also gets in on the childcare action.  So I have time to read/write!  A Tuesday looks like this:

6 am: Baby up.  HB up.
7 am:  3-year-old up.
7:30 am:  Porridge.
9 am:  HB walks 3-year-old to nursery school.  Baby stays home with dad, Charles.
9:30 am:  HB orders lactose-free latte at local coffee shop and joins hordes of earnest laptop wielding folk.  Some facebook and middle distance staring occurs.  Some writing in notebook happens.
11:30 am:  HB picks up 3-year-old from nursery school.
12 pm:  Lunch of alphabet soup/macaroni and cheese/salmon sandwich.
1pm HB tries to lie on couch or attempts to do dishes or plays dress up with 3-year-old.
3pm Park?  Playdate?  More couch lying?
5:30 pm Charles cooks and serves dinner (he does this every day, not just Tuesdays) -- we love Charles.
7:30 pm Baby in bed.
7:45pm  3-year-old in bed.
8:00 pm 3-year-old out of bed.
8:30 pm 3-year-old back to bed.
9:00 pm 3-year-old out of bed.  HB in bed with 3-year-old.
9:15 pm HB up.
9:30 pm  HB asleep in front of BBC’s Sherlock Holmes and half finished glass of wine.
10:30 pm HB in own bed.
3:30 am Baby up.  HB up.
3:45 am Baby asleep.  HB checking e-mail.
4:00 am 3-year-old out of bed.
4:15 am HB in bed with 3-year-old.

And so it goes...

What are you reading now? What's in your to-read pile?

I’m reading a book in translation called Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villaloblos and also Tamara Faith Berger’s Maidenhead.

To read (in no particular order):  the latest issues of The New Quarterly and Brain, Child, Sweet Devilry by Yi-Mei Tsiang, Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick, Outside the Box by Maria Meindl, Malarky by Anakana Schofield, Stuart Ross’ You Exist.  Details follow., AS Byatt’s Ragnarok. And I’m re-reading two of my favourite recent short story collections: Don’t Cry by Mary Gaitskill and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander.

Check out Heather Birrell's site and her blog tour in celebration of Mad Hope.
 
kerri@bookfridge.com

Posted on Friday, May 4, 2012

FRIDGE CLUB DISCUSSION - April 2012

Disclaimer: The Fridge Club is an online book club designed for the busy reader who doesn’t have the time or the interest to attend monthly book club meetings. While I try not to give away too much in these discussions, like any book club chat, they are designed for people who have read the book.

A Mature Perspective: A Discussion on Linden MacIntyre's Why Men Lie


Why Men Lie, by Linden MacIntyre, Random House, 368 pages, $32 (hardcover)

Why Men Lie by Linden MacIntyre is a love story about the complexity of memory, the vulnerability of men, and the various trajectories and transitions in life. Effie is a strong, confident woman whose career in academia has brought her a deserved life of autonomy in which she has encountered many men who have caused her pain. It’s not only Effie that has been bruised by the men around her: most of the few women in the novel have suffered in similar ways. Like many women, Effie takes the blame for much of this as she asks what it is about her that “draws the damaged and doomed”, the disloyal, and the secretive.

Through Effie’s mature perspective, MacIntyre introduces JC who is silently aggressive, has the ability to suppress, and who engages in careful flirtation, but later we see a new side to this typical male, one that causes Effie to let go of some of her generalizations and smugness regarding male behavior. 

One thing MacIntyre has done very well is describe the life and the insecurities of the aging woman—seeing older men with younger and younger women, the fear of being invisible or worthless. Also noteworthy is his poignant portrayal of the passing of time and its complex effect on memory: "And now, as she drove to her office in a city she had mastered in the last trimester of a life that finally seemed to have a shape and content of her own designing, it seemed so odd that she’d forgotten such a moment, and so many moments like it" (88).

A strong female character at its centre with a barrage of troubled men to contend with, Why Men Lie is a novel that explores what it means to find security in solitude and to understand the very reasons why men lie. Not free of violence it shows the slow unraveling of a secret, the acknowledgement of guilt and recovery, and the “cautious management of expectations.”  The result is a complex story that meditates on marriage, aging, and disappointment that is told with a distinguished command of language and a remarkable degree of eloquence. 

Questions:

What did you think of JC's relationship with Tammy? 

Effie comes to realize that “one must never assume that she knows anybody.”  What do you think of that statement? 

Sextus and Ray have relationships with much younger women.  Effie thinks about this but ultimately accepts it with grace.  With this in mind what do you think MacIntyre is saying about the nature of romantic relationships?

Ray uses the word “rationale” when discussing marriage.  Some may think that's a detached, cold way to think about marriage.  Others might accept that it's practical and speaks to the nature of long-term relationships.  What are your thoughts on this?

Were you surprised by the turn of events at the end of the novel or did you see it coming? 

May's Fridge Club selection is The Tiger by John Vaillant. Order it now from Amazon or Chapters.

kerri@bookfridge.com

Posted on Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Change of Address

One reason why I've been slack with the fridge lately is because I'm moving into a new place on top of travelling for work and correcting exams.  Once I get settled I will be back to updating and blogging on a regular basis.  In the meantime I've posted some pics on Facebook from the Lawnya Vawnya Fest in St. John's as well as some other events.  A discussion on Linden MacIntyre's Why Men Lie, an interview with Heather Birrell, and a list of summer reads to add to your pile are coming soon. New address:

P.O. Box 401
Wabush, NL
A0R1B0

Posted on Tuesday, May 1, 2012. 

"What can be done?": Stephanie McKenzie on Grace Must Wander

When I sat down to read Stephanie McKenzie’s latest book of poetry, I knew it was going to be a great collection, as I thoroughly enjoyed Cutting My Mother's Hair (2006). Grace Must Wander was even better. These poems demanded to be read aloud. I couldn’t cuddle up on the couch with some hot chocolate or coffee and slowly read through each poem. I had to stand up, walk around the house, use hand gestures and movements to do the lines justice. About our relationships with place and land as well as women who have been silenced by patriarchal cultures, it is bWhen I sat down to read Stephanie McKenzie’s latest book of poetry, I knew it was going to be a great collection, as I thoroughly enjoyed (2006).  was even better. These poems demanded to be read aloud. I couldn’t cuddle up on the couch with some hot chocolate or coffee and slowly read through each poem. I had to stand up, walk around the house, use hand gestures and movements to do the lines justice. About our relationships with place and land as well as women who have been silenced by patriarchal cultures, it is by far one of the best collections I’ve read in a while.

Bio: Stephanie McKenzie's next book of poetry, Saviours in This Little Space for Now: Poems for Emily Carr and Vincent van Gogh, is forthcoming with Salmon Poetry in September, 2012. She has published two other collections of poetry with Salmon, Cutting My Mother's Hair (2006) and Grace Must Wander (2009), and a book of literary criticism, Before the Country: Native Renaissance, Canadian Mythology, with the University of Toronto Press (2007). McKenzie has published poems in the following journals--World Literature Today, The Antigonish Review, Cv2, Prairie Fire, Prism, Room, Other Voices, The Nashwaak Review and The Malahat Review--and has work forthcoming in Rampike. She also co-edited An Island in the Sky: Selected Poetry of Al Pittman (with Martin Ware). She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Toronto. McKenzie was born and raised in British Columbia but lives on the opposite Canadian coast now in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. She teaches in the English Program at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University, where she is an Associate Professor.

What inspired you to write about "women who can no longer speak for themselves"?

I think there are a lot of women in history (and perhaps I'm thinking here from my area of speciality as a professor of literature) or women in literary history, more specifically, whose voices have disappeared in or been subsumed by patriarchal traditions--literary canons and the traditions they are based upon, for example. And there are those cases of women who have been driven to the edge by patriarchy in general, by society, and whose voices have been cut off. Take Sylvia Plath. Sure, she's famous. Her poetry and name will live on, but if she had lived longer she really would have had so much more to say. Often, her death is glamorized, and people fail to note that she could have produced so much more. And I think sometimes about what she might have produced from a mature perspective. Her poetry is stellar, but most poets write their best material in later age, and readers, poetry lovers, the world, really, missed out on something with her early death.

What drives me nuts is that Ted Hughes, who drove her to the brink of desperation and despair, compiled and edited her posthumously published Collected Poems (1981) and that he is associated with the Pulitzer Prize that the book received. There's something very wrong with that. And his involvement with that book is a most un-feminist comment on the state of the world. But what can be done, I think, or what I have done (loving the absolute mastery of Plath's poetic techniques, as well as her voice and ideas) is to write back to her, to her verse, person and traditions--to somehow keep alive part of a feminist web that is produced by women. There's also another poem in Grace Must Wander--I think one of the book's weakest poems, unfortunately, entitled "Letters to Women Now Deceased." It writes back to Emily Dickinson and a character in Alexander Pope's mock heroic poem "The Rape of the Lock," Arabella Fermor. I don't say things in such straightforward terms in the book (as I'm writing verse), but, basically, the poem acknowledges that Dickinson was cooped up in her room for a very good reason. Yes, she was ill for a large part of her life, suffering from a serious kidney disease, but she also lived in an impossibly male world. She showed her poems for the first time to a male editor who didn't get them and thought they were weird. And there was no way the world would ever recognize her brilliance or make room for her. So I wrote of recognizing the condition she must have been in--she must have been losing it. I also ended that poem with the following lines:

            At nights, she writes to females now deceased.

            You were hiding something. To be sure. The rape. The

            rape of the lock. Was that it, Arabella? Were you raped?

This is a reference to Pope's poem and the "rape" or cutting of Arabella's lock of hair. Of course, in the eighteenth century, to be raped was to be taken away by force--sort of kidnapped--and it didn't mean what it does today. But I hoped those lines would simply expose some of the obvious things we overlook when we're looking at "great" literary traditions or the obvious things that are right in front of our faces and that the world ignores (like woman's secondary role in this world).

I think I'm writing back to women, then, who can no longer speak for themselves because, as a female writer, I somehow want to engage with them and their words as closely as possible (and, for me, that happens by writing poetry), and I also hope that more and more women will realize the importance of adding to a corpus of female literature.

The collection is divided into sections. "Suite for Winter" from the section "The Disciples of Winter" is probably one of my favorites. The speaker says, "I would keep winter away" and later, "take winter away." Can you speak a little about the connection you're making between relationships and winter, isolation and landscape?

I think the connection here is more between relationships and landscape. The sequence starts off speaking about lovers--the "I" of the poem, anyway, seems to be speaking of an individual at first, but by the time we get to movement viii, the speaker admits he/she is really talking about a place: "You'd think I'd cut a lover's brow perplexed / but it is an island's contours . . ." Sometimes relationships are more difficult with places than people--more passionate, more intricate. There's a whole realm of things that happens in relationships with places. We love and hate people. We have great joy. We fight and make up. We're indifferent. We betray and help people. Those intricacies sometimes lead to more passion than that which is found simply between two individuals. And the mind, the body is triggered by geography. Sometimes all it takes is a song with a certain sunset to realize you miss a whole bunch of people, or sometimes you see a mountain or even a crack in the pavement, and there's a longing, or the realization that somehow you're not home. So, in many ways, I think this sequence is saying something about the relationship between landscape or place and belonging. And love. The connection between isolation and winter is also an interesting reflection you've made. I guess to someone who hasn't spent a lot of time in winter, the isolation that comes with winter can seem really depressing. But for those of us who live in winter places, winter, I think, produces these really neat social agreements that people don't talk about or really spend time defining. Sure, there are lots of social interactions and dinners in houses, and there are winter sports, for example. But what's really interesting to me is the way that winter can provide a kind of asylum. People spend a lot of time indoors, and we don't expect to see each other at every twist and turn on the street. It's a great time of year for a writer, I think. Especially in smaller communities. We know we have to live with one another, but it's almost an agreed upon sort of time when people, if they choose, can hibernate.  It's certainly a time of reflection for me and very conducive to writing (if I had more time during these months to do so, I think winter would be a much more ideal time to write than the summer, for example). I don't know whether these poems do praise winter and isolation or whether this is an idea that exists outside these poems, and it certainly isn't pure praise (there are dark moments associated with winter, of course), but I would hope that the depiction of winter in this book might be read as quite varied and not static at all. Winter has a richness (though I'm sick of it now in April) that is especially rich for artists, I think.

In "The Disciples of Winter" you write of scars that are "storied and sure." So true. Our scars, both physical and emotional, always have stories. Why did you decide to explore the scars of some of your subjects in these poems?

I like scars, actually. They're like maps. They let us know where we've been. I think this idea might come out in the poem "The Disciples of Winter" (in the section "Lonely Dazed"). As for the emotional and psychological scars that are written about in this book, I don't know . . . It's quite a dark book, and I'm actually writing lighter material these days. But I think life can be quite dark sometimes and that life does deliver scars. Why not write about them? Why not story them? I think one of the things the collection might address is the manner in which psychological scars need to be storied. They're not seen, unlike physical scars. And often they are more dangerous--or they speak of the potential of greater danger. An examination of depression and more is at the heart of the book, and I think it would sometimes be much easier to deal with a large cut somewhere. Take Van Gogh, for example. It would have been much easier for him to show his doctor a laceration and get some ointment rather than trying to explain what he was suffering from. I think that when we're able to put a narrative--as clear a narrative as possible--to the source of suffering, that healing is much more possible.

You've edited quite a few anthologies, published your first poetry collection in 2006, and then GMW in 2009. What are some of the differences between editing anthologies and editing your own work for publication?

Oh, there are huge differences. There's really no comparison. Every author needs an editor. When you're selecting work for an anthology, you're using your critical skills. When you're writing your own material, you're using your creative skills (the critical act is creative, too, but I'm just using words to distinguish here), and you quite simply can't separate the creative act from the critical. I learned a lot about poetry by reading so much verse for the various anthologies, and I've applied what I've learned in various ways in my writing. But you can't be as ruthless or as forgiving when you're producing your own work.

In regards to form, do you write with a form in a mind, or do the poems seem to shape themselves as they go?

No. I don't typically write with a form in mind, though I practice with different forms if I'm doing exercises, so to speak. These rarely find their way into printed form. But I think forms do emerge as a result of simply having exposed myself to a significant amount of poetry. For example, "Suite for Winter" is a sonnet sequence, of course, but I didn't start off writing sonnets. I simply found that I was writing an extended love poem, of sorts, in different succinct parts, and, then, I noticed that the poems were almost all about fourteen lines long and, even more so, that they embodied some of the response between octave and sestet that you find in the Petrarchan form and/or the final couplet in the Shakespearean. I went back after I noticed this and started re-shaping and sculpting them into clearer sonnets. I spent a lot of time making them into sonnets or near sonnets after the fact. But what really started off this sequence was a very loose response to the villanelle. I like how the villanelle repeats lines at very strict points in its poetic pattern (I've written a couple of terrible villanelles as exercises!), and I started to use the last line of each poem as the first line of the next. This is not what the villanelle does--it repeats different lines.  But I think it worked. The variation of this form, that is. It helped to create momentum, perhaps, and to tie the poems together. And I think that's what I like about the villanelle--that it creates this cohesiveness and strange kind of erratic behaviour all at once within itself.

Do you ever see yourself exploring fiction? Why or why not?

Yes. I have written fiction, and there's a story I've been writing and putting away for about five years now, but I haven't published anything. I'd say my first love is poetry, and maybe that's why I've stuck with poetry thus far. I also think it might have something to do with time. It seems possible to write a number of poems throughout the academic year and a greater number during the summer, but fiction seems to take longer to shape, and I think I'd need a significant while--a lot of free time--to devote to serious fiction writing. I spent a recent sabbatical writing another book of poetry (one I'd been working on for over a year before I began the sabbatical), but perhaps the next opportunity I have like that I'll try my hand at prose.

List one book that you've read recently, something you're reading now, and something from your to-read pile.

I have to mention two here. I recently read Derek Walcott's latest book of poetry, White Egrets, and it is a lovely portrait of one growing older. Written with a mature strength and absolute technical wizardry, it is a must read. I have also just read Tanya Shirley's She Who Sleeps with Bones. Shirley is a newly emerged author from Jamaica, and I really like her work (she has another book coming out in the next while, again with Peepal Tree Press). Presently, I'm reading Robin Durnford's A Lovely Gutting and am thinking she's the next John Steffler. My to-read pile is large, but first on it is Adrienne Rich's Telephone Ringing in the Labryinth (2007). Given her recent passing, I'm going to begin with her latest poetry collection and read all of her poetry again over the next while.

kerri@bookfridge.com

Posted on Friday, April 20, 2012

Poetry Kitty: A Chat with Kitty Lewis of Brick Books

For over 20 years Kitty Lewis has been the general manager of Brick Books (1975), a literary press that publishes poetry by new and established authors. In the interest of National Poetry Month, BF asked her a few questions about poetry, some career highlights, and a recent project that’s taking poetry to new places. 



Why poetry? 

Stan Dragland wrote in an interview: "The focus on poetry was, at first, partly practical. In the first years, Stan and Don did almost everything. Stan typeset Ten Letters, though it was printed offset. Same with Peggy Dragisic's From the Medley. After that, we had the typesetting done for us but still did paste-up. We couldn't see doing all that hands-on through a novel. Later, it just seemed that poetry really needed the support."

What are some professional highlights?

I enjoy working with all the authors and setting up promotion tours for them. I would have to say that there were 2 highlights for me:

The cross-Canada tour that I organized for Lorri Neilsen Glenn, then poet laureate of Halifax, and Agnes Walsh, then inaugural poet laureate of St. John's, Newfoundland - they travelled to Edmonton, Yellowknife, Whitehorse, Salt Spring Island, Victoria, Regina, Saskatoon, Toronto and Ottawa and participated in readings with current and past poets laureate Alice Major, Ted Blodgett, Carla Funk, Glen Sorestad, Louise Halfe, Robert Currie, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Liz Zetlin and John B. Lee. I was able to accompany them to Edmonton, Yellowknife and Whitehorse.

Working with Randall Maggs to spread the word about his book Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems as far and wide as we possibly could. Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems is a hockey saga, wrapping the game's story in the "intense, moody, contradictory" character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies. Randall launched the book at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto in 2008 where he had done a vast amount of research for this book that took him 10 years to write.  We held a small press conference before the launch and received coverage in many sports sections in newspapers all across Canada including poems!! and many blog items followed for the next 2-1/2 years. Randall travelled all across Canada during that time. I wanted to have Randall read in the 5 cities where Terry Sawchuk played - Detroit, Toronto, Boston, New York and Los Angeles - and was able to do this [except New York]. I also arranged a northern trip to Edmonton, Yellowknife, and Whitehorse, finishing that trip in Vancouver and was able to accompany Randall. He also presented this book all across Canada - Victoria, This book won many awards, including the 2008 Winterset Award, the 2009 E.J. Pratt Poetry Prize and the Kobzar Literary Award in 2010 - the Kobzar Award recognizes a Canadian writer who most effectively presents a Ukrainian Canadian theme through poetry, drama, fiction, non-fiction or young people’s literature. I didn't know much about hockey when we started but I did learn a few things along the way... It was a very interesting book to work on because it's poetry about hockey and those two areas don't often intersect. ** These two projects were made possible by support from the OMDC Book Fund through the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Poetry is a hard sell.  What's Brick's secret?

Well, we just keep on doing it. Stan and Don had a vision in the early days and we just continue.

Tell me a little about the poetry podcast archive: how it came to be and where you see it going.

We hired Julie Wilson, a social media expert, to give us some advice on increasing our profile; she came up with the idea of these podcasts and we were able to launch the project during our 35th anniversary year in 2011. Julie wrote in the press release, "Brick Books has set out to create the largest publisher-focused poetry performance archive in Canada and abroad." Our podcasts now number 527 - a total of 607 poems and more coming all the time... Books represented include Lependu by Don McKay (1978) right up to A Walker in the City by Méira Cook (2011) and I have poems from another 10 books recorded and ready to upload. We have recorded about half of our authors so far and hope to record our full library; the remaining poets are spread across the country so the arrangements are a little tricky. So far there have been over 2,000 views on our YouTube channel - that's very gratifying. I have been spreading the word to poets, poetry readers, students and their professors.

Subscribe to the AudioBoo channel

Brick Books has a YouTube Channel

Check out Brick Books

kerri@bookfridge.com

Posted on Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Poetry Potluck

Book Fridge has been neglected these past few weeks as I've been marking and doing exams. To keep you satiated, here's some stuff that's going on in the world of poetry.   

The 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist has been announced.  No surprises here.

The prolific George Murray is offering a poetry course through the University of Toronto.

Essayist and poet Adrienne Rich died on March 27 leaving behind 40+ books of poetry and prose as well as a lifetime of activism.  

David McGimpsey from Concorida debunks some common myths about poets. 

If you're just getting into poetry or want to get poetry updates on a regular basis, subscribe to the poetry daily newsletter from Poetry Daily.

Peruse what's out there by Canadian poets on the 49th Shelf. 
 
Posted on Wednesday, April 11, 2012 

FRIDGE CLUB DISCUSSION - March 2012

Disclaimer: The Fridge Club is an online book club designed for the busy reader who doesn’t have the time or the interest to attend monthly book club meetings. While I try not to give away too much in these discussions, like any book club chat, they are designed for people who have read the book.

"Occupying the Same Space": A Discussion on Nicole Lundrigan's Glass Boys


Glass Boys, by Nicole Lundrigan, Douglas & McIntyre, 304 pages, $22.95

In Glass Boys brothers Roy and Lewis Trench get mixed up with Eli Fagan when they come upon him disposing of a secret and Roy ends up dead.  Although judged as an accident in the courts, guilt swarms the remaining characters and it affects the way their lives unfold.

Lewis goes on to have two boys, Toby and Melvin, which brings back memories of his childhood with Roy. At the same time, Eli marries and becomes stepfather to Garrett Glass, who Eli deems “as unnatural as a beast with two assholes.” Garrett is awkward, self-conscious and worn. He never manages to fit in and gets bullied often by the kids at school and Eli alike. Eli is downright cruel to Garrett and imagines “squeezing the boy’s head, his thumbs bursting through the tight skin, sinking into the yellow filth.” 

Garrett grows up with a hatred for himself.  He has sexual thoughts about other boys and on feeling guilty wants to mutilate himself, sometimes contemplates suicide. He finds it hard quenching “the thirsty current” within him and asks “Is I full of sin, God?”  As the story progresses, Garrett gets mixed up with Toby and Melvin, and the past comes back to haunt all of them in surprising ways.   

Glass Boys by Nicole Lundrigan is about a group of men whose lives intertwine in various unsettling ways and the result is a story of regret, abuse, rebirth and freedom that is undoubtedly Lundrigan’s best book to date.

Questions to ponder:

How does this compare to Lundrigan's other books?  Do you see any similarities in theme?

The path that Melvin's life takes is sad and unexpected. It speaks to the complex nature of coming of age and how traumatic events can change the course of someone's life. How did this part of the book resonate with you? 

Eli is a wholly unlikeable character until we learn about his life at the end of the novel.  What does this teach us about the nature of understanding and forgiveness?

I will never forget some of the images and situations Lundrigan creates in this novel.  What sections left their mark on you and why?

kerri@bookfridge.com

April's Fridge Club pick: Linden MacIntyre's Why Men Lie

Posted on Sunday, April 1, 2012 

Shotgun Review

The Shogun Review is a quick review on whatever I'm reading.  These titles aren't necessarily newly released titles, just whatever I find on my bookshelf. This title showed up in my mailbox last month from Marilee Pittman. Check back soon for an interview with the author.

Planting Dandelions by Kyran Pittman



Al Pittman (Dancing in Limbo, West Moon) would sit at the end of the bar at Casual Jack’s Roadhouse in Corner Brook incessantly smoking Matinee’s and drinking a double Newfie Screech and Coke watching the people around him like he was studying routes on a map. While tending bar I had the chance to get to know Al and we shared jokes, stories and poetry. Oftentimes these stories would be about his family so I was delighted to find his oldest daughter's first book waiting in my mailbox one day last month.

Planting Dandelions by Kyran Pittman is a memoir of one woman’s coming of domesticity. As she leaves one relationship to enter a new life with someone else and as quickly as it takes to say, “If we were ever going to make a baby, now would be the time,” she gets pregnant. What follows is a collection of essays that tells a story of dirty diapers, breastfeeding, themed parties, living with four men, and being a Newfoundlander in America, but Pittman also expresses her thoughts on the supermom syndrome, the hardships of motherhood and wifery, how having a feminist mother and a poet father effected her, how having children changed her relationship with her own mother, and how sometimes you just need to build a fort or host the party at your own house.

Pittman appeals to the hectic daily life of women with this honest collection that reads like a story that is full of wit and wisdom. I look forward to her next publication and am secretly hoping it's a novel. She certainly has the chops for it.   

Visit Kyran's blog.

kerri@bookfridge.com

Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2012

A "fierce shit-disturber": Michelle Butler Hallett on deluded your sailors

As soon as you read any of Michelle Butler Hallett's work you realize that she respects her reader. She expects a lot out of you and gives you even more in return in the form of multiple narratives, complex characters, and fistfuls of fury. I had a chance to chat with her about her latest book deluded your sailors. 

One of Canada’s most courageous and original literary voices, Michelle Butler Hallett is the author of the story collection The shadow side of grace, and the novels Double-blind, Sky Waves, and deluded your sailors. Her work, at once striking, memorable and difficult to categorize, has been praised by Books in Canada for “economy and power,” while The Globe and Mail notes that “demons are at work – the kind that lurk in the subconscious and surface, depending on the individual, as either despairing visions or acts of outright brutality.” Sky Waves has been praised as “both raucously funny and deeply troubling” and “a dynamic and shape-shifting work that redefines the project of storytelling.”  Her first novel, Double-blind, was shortlisted for the 2008 Sunburst Award. Butler Hallett in St. John’s. 


Photo by David Hallett

Nichole Wright is a recurring character in your work.  Is it fair to say that she is some version of you, her creator?  In what ways are you alike? 

I never expected Nichole to play a major role. Like a lot of my characters, she’s surprised me. I initially wanted someone who looked a bit like me, at my worst, in 2000s radio scenes in Sky Waves, simultaneously to deflect and have a conversation with flip ideas of simplified allegory and parody. I worked for several years at VOCM and NewCap, and I am related to the Butlers who got VOCM on the go, but my fictional VOIC is not a just transcription of VOCM. Nichole’s voice got louder and louder, and soon she was narrating chunks of Sky Waves. After a while, with narrative and characters, I lose any illusion of choice and just surrender. So I sat back and turned Nichole loose. What she had to say in both Sky Waves and deluded your sailors matters greatly to the novels’ themes, so it all fit. 

Nichole is not me, not some autobiographical stand-in. I think Claire Furey in Sky Waves veers closer to me than Nichole does. Nichole’s much more interesting than Michelle, certainly braver. There’s not much phonetic or lettering difference between ‘Michelle’ and ‘Nichole,’ two French names relatively popular for girls in the early 1970s, but that’s one of the reasons I settled on ‘Nichole’ for her name, to spark questions of what makes a story, that and ‘Nichole’ meaning ‘victory’.

How are Nichole and I alike? We’re both fierce shit-disturbers, and we can both be a bit dense, a bit slow to pick up on things. Neither of us compromises on a vision, and we pay heavily for that. We’re troubled by personal and historical pasts and feel a sharp obligation to recognize and acknowledge pasts as part of trying to face the future and live a meaningful life. We crave love, justice, and peace. We love pretty hard and struggle to trust, often then being too trusting and getting hurt all over again, but the alternative, bitterness and despair, is worse.

Quill and Quire recently said DYS was a "challenging" read.  And it's no secret that your work is hard to classify.  To me, it's very Modernist and that work was considered difficult and elite.  Are you influenced by any Modernist writers?  If so, which ones?  How? 

I don’t set out to be difficult or challenging. I do think the form a story takes matters, matters very much. In my work, form serves and amplifies meaning. 

Modernist, huh? 

George Orwell is someone I’ve studied for a long time. I admire the precision of his prose and his honesty in portraying human behaviour. His novels before Animal Farm and 1984 are a bit shaky – though Coming Up for Air is beautiful – but his essays are brilliant. I also like how he worked relentlessly, despite chronic illness.

For a long time, I resented TS Eliot and the way he used intertext. It still irks me, needing footnotes to get through ‘The Wasteland’. Yet here I am, come spinning out of an oral culture where old songs and stories practically float like fog in the air and can even function as a shorthand, weaving those songs and stories in shamelessly, and sometimes old poetry, too, wrapping it round the deep structure. We don’t experience life in a silent vacuum; I don’t want to write as though we do. When I use allusion, I want it to add meaning, but I don’t want to make my story incomprehensible if the allusion, or conversation with another work or idea, is missed. Connections. I’m on about connections.

American novelist William Gaddis is an influence, particularly in how I use dialogue. 

English novelist Anthony Powell with his twelve-volume cycle A Dance to the Music of Time is increasingly an influence, especially as I interconnect more and more storylines and characters.

Both Flannery O’Connor and her concerns with moral failures, especially those of “nice” people, and sudden, often terrifying, grace, and Franz Kafka and his exploring the grotesque and the frightening and apparently fantastic as a deeper reality, and perhaps deeper realism, have left their marks.   

DYS takes place in different times and places. How did you create this world in the 1700s?  What research did you do, etc?

I had the eighteenth-century storyline of deluded your sailors in my head for a long time, and I read a fair bit of history. I’m sure there’s stuff I got wrong. The precise date of when those living on the Isles of Scilly began to burn seaweed is up for debate, for example, and it’s unclear how the early European inhabitants of Newfoundland survived the winters – did they stay on the coasts, or did they all go inland a bit, of what?  I crewed on a tall ship in 1996, which was a tremendous help for understanding just how small a ship is … and how big the ocean is. But all these details, while important, are texture. What matters to me was how the characters behave. Whatever the calendar reads, the characters need to be recognizably human, concerned with love, survival and power, not necessarily in that order.

I tackled the eighteenth-century storyline from different narrative standpoints. For a while, John Cannard told the whole thing, but that strained plausibility, despite how the characters are connected. I avoided letting Finn speak for a long time but finally had to face a truth: if that story is going to work at all, we need to hear her. In many different ways, I had to write Sky Waves – and get thinking about who speaks when, and why –first. 

The level of structural complexity in this novel is heavier than in your previous work.  The layering of stories within stories through various settings must have taken a ton of organization on your part while writing and editing.  Can you talk about that process and how you do it?

Funny, I thought deluded your sailors would look a little more inviting than Sky Waves. At least deluded your sailors is relatively linear, if layered. I like layered work that unfolds in my head over time with repeated reading, viewing or listening. Once I figured out how to frame deluded your sailors, various echoes and conversations between Nichole’s story and the eighteenth-century story became clearer. I tried working on each part separately and would then get ideas for how to sketch in an echo elsewhere, mesh it all together. I needed eight hands. I was sick, too – fatigue, fevers, disturbed mobility, pain – things got hot and weird. 

Once a reader’s finished deluded your sailors, he can see that ‘Acts of Fever’, the eighteenth-century storyline, is actually Nichole’s novel. With that knowledge, I’m hoping a reader can then see a story working, see how life and fiction can interest and wildly differ, see how Nichole takes her research and her own experiences and tries to do what Gabriel Furey asks her to: reach down inside her and haul out something beautiful. To do so is an act of faith, and that’s one of the reasons I call part three ‘Acts of Faith’. While this choice fits the themes – including that the past matters and might need another look – I’ve taken a big risk here. Deluded your sailors might make more overall sense, feel more organic and whole, once it’s read it a second time. Not everyone is willing to read a book more than once, and not everyone is going to be sufficiently interested in mine to do so.

For someone who hasn't read any of your work, how would you describe it? What are the similarities and differences among publications?

The shadow side of grace is a collection of stories that looks at physical and spiritual violence and mercy. Some stories are realist, some a little more supernatural. Double-blind is a novel that looks at complicity in evil through Josh Bozeman, an American psychiatrist who works on patients under MK-Ultra protocol – that’s the brainwashing garbage Ewen Cameron and the CIA wanted to explore. My Dr Bozeman does not consider himself a monster. The narrative is first-person and fairly linear, with the realism under some tension as the narrator tries to hang on to what he thinks he knows in the face of other events. Sky Waves, set from 1901-2005 in a Newfoundland that votes Responsible in 1949, is a novel about how we communicate, with one another and with something greater, and how he love, and how we shatter our own voices. Sky Waves is organized as a drew – as 98 meshes in the row of a fishing net – with 98 interconnected chapters that go back and forth in time yet keep the overall story moving forward. The novel has several first-person narrators and a third-person omniscient voice. Deluded your sailors is a novel about acknowledging and recognizing the truths of the past and about who gets to tell what story and when. It’s organized in three sections. Parts one and three, ‘Acts of Folly’ and ‘Acts of Faith’, are set in 2009 in and around St John’s in the same fictional Republic of NL from Sky Waves, while part two, ‘Acts of Fever’, is set from 1719-34, in England, Massachusetts, at sea, and in Newfoundland. Deluded your sailors is linear, in that its time flows forward, but the two storylines are thematically intertwined. Various narrators tell the stories.

Check out MBH's blog.

Buy deluded your sailors.

kerri@bookfridge.com

Posted on Sunday, March 25, 2012

Website Potluck

Fan of the prolific Jodi Picoult?  Get some info on her new book Lone Wolf.

Who says writing doesn't pay?  Steven Millhauser takes 20K for We Others.

The Hunger Games movie is out.  Someone said it's better than Twilight.  Here's hoping.

"And the nominees for The Atlantic Book Awards are"... some BF writers.  Congratulations Gerard Collins, Patrick Warner, Susan M. MacDonald and Michael Murphy!

Just in case you haven't heard: Goodreads is like Facebook for books. You can surf at work without feeling like a total slacker.

Haven't heard of the 49th Shelf? Lists upon lists made up of Canadian titles.  

Posted on Friday, March 23, 2012

kerri@bookfridge.com

Win Soak!

Congratulations to Marilee Pittman who won a copy of Soak just for interacting with Book Fridge!

Posted on Thursday, March 22, 2012

Hare Times

Participating in the March Hare this year was incredible. I read at the Hare over a decade ago as the "new poet" and came back this year as an "established author."  I feel like that needs to be in quotation marks. If you don't know, the March Hare has been going on for about 25 years and originiated in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. It now has events in Toronto, Halifax, Ireland, and all over Newfoundland. I was lucky enough to be a part of this year's events which included three readings, workshops at Corner Brook Regional High (my old high school formally known as Herdman Collegiate), a book launch, and my first book signing.  Here are some pics. I've uploaded an extended version of this album with lots more pics to the BF Facebook page. Comments welcome. 

Soak launch at The Fat Cat, St. John's

 
Reading from Soak & chatting with Chad Pelley (Away from Everywhere) and Gerard Collins (Moonlight Sketches)

The March Hare


Elizabeth Bachinsky (Curio, Home of Sudden Service, etc) at the East Hare in St. John's


Alexander MacLeod (Light Lifting) and I at the Rocky Hare in Rocky Harbour



Jessica Grant (Come, Thou Tortoise) at the Rocky Hare


Karl Parkinson at the Hare Here in Corner Brook


Adrian Fowler at the Hare Here in Corner Brook


Leslie Vryenhoek (Gulf, Scrabble Lessons) at the High School Hare in Corner Brook


Nuala Kennedy Trio at the Sunday Soiree in Corner Brook

kerri@bookfridge.com   

Posted on Wednesday, March 14, 2012

FRIDGE CLUB DISCUSSION - February 2012

Disclaimer: The Fridge Club is an online book club designed for the busy reader who doesn’t have the time or the interest to attend monthly book club meetings. While I try not to give away too much in these discussions, like any book club chat, they are designed for people who have read the book.

First Comes Love... Sometimes: A Discussion on Catherine McKenzie's Arranged 


Arranged, by Catherine McKenzie, HarperCollins, 390 pages, $19.99

February is the perfect month for a Fridge Club pick such as Arranged by Catherine McKenzie. It’s all about love: finding it, hating it, loving it, missing it, wanting it, and everything in between. This is a super fun read that follows Anne Blythe as she tries to find love by way of a secret arranged marriage firm. Anne picks all the wrong guys—the hot, mouth watering ones that end up treating her like garbage. Fed up with being 30-something and still single, with her perfect brother all settled with a gorgeous family, and her best friend just engaged, she accepts a sign that leads to an arranged marriage firm. But she doesn’t meet The One right away. There are some twists and outbursts and drunks that are hilarious and realistic.  The result is a romantic, light-hearted story about pursuing love, finding friendship and all the gorgeous messiness that comes with it. 

An Interview with Catherine McKenzie

Catherine McKenzie was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. A graduate of McGill University and McGill Law School, McKenzie practices law in Montreal. Her novels SPIN and ARRANGED are International Bestsellers. They, along with her third novel, FORGOTTEN, will all be published in the US by William Morrow in 2012. SPIN has also been published in French (Ivresse) and German (Sternhagelverliebt), and ARRANGED will be published in French in June, 2012.

Where did you get the idea for a book like this?

I know a couple of people who had arranged marriages actually (traditional ones) and I was kind of fascinated to meet their wives. And when I did I was even more fascinated to learn that they hadn't necessarily had traditional upbringings, so I had the idea floating around in my head about why someone would do that in this day and age. And of course shows like the Bachelor also got me asking that question. One day, the idea of a north american woman using an arranged marriage service just popped into my head and I couldn't get it out.

This novel takes online dating to the next level.  Do these types of arranged marriage firms actually exist?  Do you think finding love this way is possible?

I don't know if they exist like they do in the book. There are certainly traditional arranged marriage brokers who work with people from certain cultural backgrounds, but - as far as I know - no eharmanoy style ones. I think finding a certain kind of love this way is possible - love based on friendship, love that builds over time. And I'm sure in some cases there's that love-at-first-sight feeling too.

How has your writing process changed since Spin?

I actually wrote Arranged before I wrote Spin, but my writing process has changed in subtle ways over the years. I certainly have a better idea of how to incorporate editorial suggestions, and with the book I'm writing now, I've actually tried using an outline (which I haven't done before). Need to work on my outlining skills though!

While reading Arranged, I kept thinking about how this book could be adapted into film.  What actors would you want for each role?

It's funny but it is so hard for me to answer that question! I generally don't have a clear mental image of what the characters look like, I just know what they don't look like, if that makes any sense. That being said, Jack does resemble fellow Canadian James Tupper (Men in Trees, Revenge). In my head, anyway.

First there was Spin. Then there was Arranged.  What's next?

Forgotten is coming in May in Canada and September in the US. It's about a woman who goes to Africa for what's supposed to be a short trip, but gets stuck there after a natural disaster hits. When she returns home, she learns that everyone thought she was dead and her whole life is turned upside down.

Visit Catherine's website.

Posted on Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Not for the Meek: Writing and Blogging from Labrador


Mid-December view of the sunset from my workplace

After working in radio for a few years, I decided I needed a change. Not only was I not using my education but I wasn’t making nearly enough money to pay off my student loans and buy a house and do all the rest of those adult things that people do. So I accepted a teaching job at a college in Labrador. My spouse and I have been here for over two years and while we love the people and our jobs, the isolated vastness of the place has been a little hard to handle. 

While there is a solid, thriving theatre scene, and the arts centre tries to promote all types of art, there is virtually no visible writing community here in Lab West. I haven’t heard of one visiting writer and I can count only one book event in the last couple years. Although disappointing it’s not surprising. We’re very isolated and it costs about $900 return from Newfoundland. If you prefer to drive, you’re looking at a couple days of bumpy travel over a partially paved dirt road, and finding lodging once you get here is no less than a pain in the ass.

One of the things I’ve learned that is essential to Labrador life is keeping yourself occupied, and if you’re not into snowmobiling or being outside in sub-sub-sub zero temps, most of those mind-occupying things relegate you to your home. One thing I use to spend my time is Book Fridge, and I’ve managed to showcase over 200 books, interview a bunch of successful writers, and give away many books and other prizes. Although Book Fridge isn’t exactly what I want it to be yet, it is getting there. Finding the time to do exactly what I want with it is another matter.   

An instructor by day, I spend my nights and weekends doing bookish things. Right now I’m reading three books that I plan to feature on Book Fridge, reading two textbooks for three education courses that I’m currently doing in order to get a B.Ed. (a third
degree that I’m hoping to finish this summer), trying to write, promote my own book, move into a new house, have somewhat of a social life, reach other private goals, and be engaged in my personal relationships.  

Book Fridge is something I do for interest only. I do not get paid for it. I do it as a hobby and all the costs to send books and prizes and purchase gift cards come out of pocket.  In fact, I buy about 50% of the book prizes. I do, though, get things in return like promotional copies from publishers, random emails from like-minded book people, and I've been able to promote my own book. So while Labrador life is not for the meek it does have its benefits. I have made some lasting friendships, have met so many fantastic people who I am proud to call my friends and coworkers, and I've had one of the best professional experiences of my life. At the very least Labrador has provided lots of time. Where else would I have found the hours to host a self-indulgent, masturbatory website like Book Fridge?

Although I have the website and other things to keep me company, I do miss the literary events and bookstores of a bigger place. Maybe I should open a bookstore or organize a book event of some sort. Or maybe I should spend my time writing and stop being a baby. Maybe I should just wait it out and hope to get a good job somewhere a little less isolated where there are bookstores, signings, and regular readings. Until then, I'll try to appreciate all that Labrador has to offer including the people, my job, and my books.     

Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant defended by Chad Pelley



This past month, five opinionated, successful artists graced the (web)pages of Book Fridge to participate in the first ever Newfoundland and Labrador Reads competition. Inspired by CBC's Canada Reads, they each chose a book they thought each Newfoundlander and Labradorian should read, and the discussion that followed showcased a fine portion of the large, brilliant writership we have in the province. Check out the entire discussion here.

The five books were This All Happened by Michael Winter (Darcy Fitzpatrick), The Wreckage by Michael Crummey (Jamie Fitzpatrick), February by Lisa Moore (Ruth Lawrence), Hold Fast by Kevin Major (Joel Thomas Hynes), and Come, Thou Tortoise  by Jessica Grant (Chad Pelley). After four weeks of debating, cursing, loving, and defending, Grant's novel took the title.  

Here's what Chad had to say about the win: "Of course the tortoise won the race. It's just how the fable goes, right? Jessica wrote a gem and I put a lot of thought into my answers. The other four books were fantastic hares, stallions and stalwarts, as were the arguments they were propped up on. Honestly, I write because Winter's book stirred me into it. The other four writers are icons and influences beyond what you can imagine, I mean that: it's not about "best and better" here, it's about the fact that Jessica's book is simply and admirably untouchable in a way that's a pleasure to read. Picture fireworks: some burst tomato-red and others Christmas-green and some do a crackling machine gun noise you weren't expecting. Every book has merit in the same way every firework packs its own punch, but Jessica Grant's Come, Thou Tortoise is the whole show, start to finish. It's every colour, pop, and bang."

Thank you to Darcy, Jamie, Ruth, Joel, and Chad for participating, and making Book Fridge's first Newfoundland and Labrador Reads a success.  

Buy Come, Thou Tortoise

Check out CBC's Canada Reads

Posted on Thursday, February 2, 2012 

FRIDGE CLUB DISCUSSION - January 2012

A World Elsewhere is like a typical Johnston novel that could never disappoint with a beautiful father-son relationship at its core. The characters are armed with Johnston’s effortless wordplay and his acute understanding of human nature. His stories wrap their arms around you. They swaddle you with perfect plots, unforgettable characters (need I mention Bobby O’Malley, Sheilagh Fielding and Draper Ryan?) and layers of seemingly effortless, robust language that tells a story that is both beautiful and frightening. 

Comment privately: kerri@bookfridge.com

Posted on Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Writers' Shelf with NICOLE LUNDRIGAN

Nicole is the author of four novels: UNRAVELING ARVA, THAW, THE SEARY LINE, and GLASS BOYS. Her literary fiction has been selected as a Top Ten pick by the Globe and Mail, Top 100 Books by Amazon.ca, was long-listed for the Relit Award, and given honourable mention for the Sunburst Award. She resides in Ontario with her husband and three children.



Reading now: Stories about Storytellers, by Douglas Gibson

Next on your shelf: The Homecoming of Samuel Lake, by Jenny Wingfield

Everyone should read: Not read, really, but everyone should experience The Arrival, by Shaun Tan.

Three books you’d want with you on a desert island: A Children’s Book Treasury, Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and the Bible

A character you’d like in your life: The son from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We’d get a bunk bed, and make some room for him.

Guilty Pleasure: Reading Geronimo Stilton to my children, and getting a kick out of the stories.

Shameless Plug: I’m looking forward to A Matter of Life or Death or Something by Ben Stephenson.

A book that reminds you of home: Down by Jim Long’s Stage, by Al Pittman. There’s magic in that book.

A book that got left behind: February by Lisa Moore

One you wish you’d written: So many, but House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III, comes to mind at this moment.

Visit Nicole Lundrigan's website.

Buy her books.

Posted on Sunday, January 15, 2012

FRIDGE CLUB DISCUSSION - DECEMBER 2011

Disclaimer: The Fridge Club is an online book club designed for the busy reader who doesn’t have the time or the interest to attend monthly book club meetings. While I try not to give away too much in these discussions, like any book club chat, they are designed for people who have read the book.

The Intimacy of Stories: A Discussion on Sarah Selecky's This Cake Is for the Party 


This Cake Is for the Party, by Sarah Selecky, Thomas Allen Publishers, 229 pages, $22.95

This Fridge Club selection was a bit different in that it’s the first short story collection we’ve done. The fantastic thing about shorts is that they are like the perfect chocolate truffle. You can suck on them for as long as you want, let them melt over your tongue, you can savour them or gobble them up depending on the craving. And this was the perfect Fridge Club book to end 2011: robust, evocative and delicious.

Sarah Selecky’s name sounds like the name of an author whose work you want to read.  You can’t help but feel sexy saying that name. I think I’m love with her name. I’m also in love with cake, This Cake and all others. Her stories in This Cake Is for the Party tell of characters whose lives are unraveling in some way. They deal with loss, decipher the way they feel about their partners, cheat, lose someone. We see them grapple with their everyday lives, sip wine, have sex, touch a cat, create art, contemplate parenthood, kiss. 

The thing that makes Selecky so great is that her writing is so intimate. While reading her words, you think, this has been written just for me. It’s like she’s whispering the story in your ear.

And, I think one of these stories is the home of the best first paragraph I’ve ever read. No joke. It’s the opening paragraph of Where Are You Coming From, Sweetheart?, my favorite from this collection. After I finished the last sentence I exhaled deeply and let out a sigh that is made up of longing for more story yet is one of completeness from a story well told. There are only a few writers who do that to me, and now Sarah Selecky is added to that list. 

Questions to think about:

What is your favorite story in this collection and why?

Selecky has been compared to Alice Munro, Canada’s short story master.  If you’ve read Munro, do you notice any similarities or differences?

Every time I read, I highlight little phrases and sentences that really strike me for whatever reason. Maybe it’s a perfect way to describe something, or it explains the essence of a character in a few words. Maybe it’s absolutely hilarious or something to which I personally feel a connection. I laughed out loud when I read that one character’s “latest project is a font that she’s made entirely out of pubic hairs” (7), and adore the image in another when a woman calls out in the night time “like an exotic night bird from the Amazon” (80).  And there’s that perfect way Selecky describes a fleeting moment: “There will never be a night exactly like this ever again, she thinks. One blueberry is already gone” (65). What are some of the phrases or paragraphs that resonated with you, and why? 

Visit Sarah Selecky's website.

Buy This Cake Is for the Party

Comment privately: kerri@bookfridge.com

Posted on Sunday, January 1, 2012

You Could Believe in This Book: Pinch of Salt with Jamie Fitzpatrick

You Could Believe in Nothing by Jamie Fitzpatrick is the quintessential Canadian novel. Using St. John’s, and Canadian Lit’s favorite minor character, hockey, as a backdrop, it tells the story of a middle-aged man who is trying to navigate his past and deal with the disappointments of everyday life as well as the bumps and bruises of personal relationships gone wrong.  Fitzpatrick’s writing is unrelenting and agile, and his characters are somewhat bitter and sometimes hilarious. This is a noteworthy first novel from a valuable new voice.

Jamie Fitzpatrick lives in St. John's.You Could Believe in Nothing (Vagrant Press) is his first novel. He’s also host and producer of The Performance Hour on CBC Radio and an online hockey columnist for the About.com network.



Derek seems to be going through his quarter-life crisis in mid-life. He's having trouble dealing with his parents' past, navigating his own future and finding happiness.  Do you think this is the norm now where "40 is the new 30" or do you think we generally don't have our stuff together despite what we may try to make others think regardless of age?

The sorts of questions Derek is facing don’t get resolved just because you reach a certain age. The popular notion is that today’s young men are reluctant to mature, and Derek could be seen as a prime example – hitting 40, still single and still drinking too much. But were young people really more mature a few generations ago? I’m no sociologist, but I have my doubts. I think Derek’s story could be set in 1975 or 1950, at the same age, with the same issues at stake. But the Derek of an earlier era would display more of the trappings of “settled” adulthood. He’d probably be unhappily married with a couple of kids.

It's evident from the novel that you are a music lover who understands how certain songs weave into the narrative of our lives.  At one point in the novel, Derek hears a song and it occurs to him that "the levers of betrayal" between his parents "must have been in place even then... waiting to be set in motion."  If You Could Believe in Nothing had a soundtrack, what would it consist of?

In the scene you refer to, Derek is responding to an obscure novelty song from the 1960s, when his parents were young. His dad works as a DJ at a classic rock station, so old rock and pop tunes figure prominently in the book as well. But Derek ultimately gives up on these songs as a way of understanding his father. Pop music is too universal to take on specific personal meaning. If you love a song that millions of other people love, what does that tell us about you? Not much, I’d say.

My personal soundtrack for the story would include Crowded House, Decembrists, Aimee Mann, Amelia Curran, maybe Alison Krauss or Emmylou Harris. I doubt those selections would make sense to another reader. It’s just my intuitive play list. It’s music that suits the way the story feels to me.

Can you talk a little about the "brotherhood of hockey players"?

That’s a phrase I heard Don Cherry use on TV years ago, so I resurrected it and gave Don a cameo. Ice hockey can’t be described as a brotherhood anymore, because so many girls and women have taken up the game. But for the men of Derek’s generation it’s still an all-male thing.

Loaded terms like brotherhood and sisterhood are highly suspect. I enjoy hanging with the boys as much as the next guy. But men and women both put too much stock in same-sex camaraderie, the idea that the guys can only truly be themselves when they’re with the guys, and the girls when they’re with the girls. When Derek sits in front of his TV and hears Don Cherry speak of brotherhood, it’s sounds like a lie.

While trying to understand his personal relationships, Derek, along with his friends, has a job understanding his relationship with Newfoundland. Can you speak to how Newfoundland identity has shaped these characters? 

The problem with Newfoundland identity (or any identity) is that some people see it as static and fixed, when in fact it’s fluid and unwieldy and impossible to grasp. There’s no consensus on Newfoundland culture or identity, and that’s a good thing. I‘m not sure what it means to me to be a Newfoundlander, or how the Newfoundland of the imagination can be reconciled with the reality of the place. I think some of us tend to get overworked by such questions, and take it all too seriously. So I had some fun with that in the book, created situations where the characters could puzzle over it and argue and say silly things.

Can you tell us a little about writing this book?

Writing a first novel is challenge enough. So I didn’t want the additional challenge of doing tons of research and writing about stuff I don’t know. I set the story in St. John’s because it’s the only city I know intimately. I wrote about rec hockey and pop music and radio and 40-something men because I’ve been immersed in those worlds. Using settings I was confident in helped free my imagination to focus on character, on inventing people and throwing them together. To me, dynamic and believable characters are the heart of any good novel.

As for the process, I started the book during a stretch when I was unemployed or semi-employed. So that’s my advice for aspiring novelists: try to arrange a time when you have nothing better to do.

I got tremendous advice and funding from the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council, the Writers Alliance, and the Literary Arts Foundation, and valuable input from assorted writers. Without all that, I’d still be slogging away at yet another unrealized draft.

What's the last three books you read?

“The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet” by David Mitchell; “Winter” by Adam Gopnik;
"Out Stealing Horses" by Per Petterson. In different ways, I was slightly disappointed by all of them. So I'm due for a string of very satisfying reads in my next set of picks. I hope.

Do you have any recommedations for Book Fridge readers?

Subscribe to The New Yorker fiction podcast. Short stories by people like Cheever, Nabokov, Gallant, and writers I never knew before, like Isaac Babel and Jean Stafford. All of it read out loud and discussed. It’s great.

Buy Fitzpatrick's book.

Check out his website.

Posted on Monday, December 26, 2011

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Mouse and Pearl's story is one of love but also of friendship and it attests to the wholeness we seek through our relationships.  Likewise, Stephen and Pearl's relationship is so troubled and chaotic and yet they achieve such closeness especially when Stephen understands Pearl's history. With the novel in mind, can you speak to how achieving wholeness sometimes means
breaking off from parts of your life or people in it?

I think that circumstances and history inform this to a large extent.  For Mouse, while she has mixed feelings about her parents and her childhood wasn't perfect, the pain and so on that she feels as an eighteen-year-old are not insupportable.  She is very close to her father, and their mutual love is direct and uncomplicated.  Struggling with coming out (to herself, to the world) as a lesbian is very difficult, and informs her complicated relationship to Pearl; I don't see Mouse as someone who is generally attracted to destructive people and situations.  But by loving Pearl, she learns essential things about herself.  And she needs to separate from Pearl to process all the trauma of that autumn.  I think that the passage as an adolescent where you separate from your parents is very important, if often awkward and painful, and Mouse achieves this.  And then finds a nice, ordinary closeness with her mother as an adult woman. And her connection to Pearl endures.