Literary Slang

This one's just for fun -- tip me off to any additions you can think of!

Literary Slang

Victim of Wallpaper
An author whose books are returned by Indigo after a display is taken down

Crocodile Cheers
Slipping in and clapping at the end of a reading, implying you were there the whole time

Drowning Kittens
The bookstore worker's task of boxing up books to be returned to the publisher

Sympathygraph
Getting a book signed because no one else is and you feel bad for the author

Double dipper
An author with a lucrative day job

Green grasser
A publisher who constantly poaches from other houses rather than promoting from within

Pandora's soapbox
A review that gets wildly off topic (e.g. those that talk more about "the state of Canadian literature today" than the book in question).

Ramen countdown
The last few months of the period of time after receiving a grant where a writer is ineligible to reapply

Paper handshake
Attending a book launch without buying the book

Empathy Bombs
Angry letters written to a publication following a bad review, from someone other than the author

Indigo Ninjas
Authors who put their own books on the promo tables in Chapters and/or face their own books out on the shelves.

Literary Resolutions 2010

It's not too late to make your literary resolutions for 2010! But what are literary resolutions, you ask?

Well, my dears, the idea is simple: what would you change in the coming year about yourself as a reader, book buyer, and/or writer. Some lovely friends have volunteered their own resolutions below.

Jessica Westhead, fiction writer and editor

1) Give myself more time to read fiction during the day
2) Reserve more books online with the magical Toronto Public Library
3) Write more, but take it easier on myself if I don't write as much as I initially resolved to

Evan Munday, graphic novelist, YA writer, and book publicist

1) Read more short stories
2) Keep my book launch attendance below three events each week
3) Finally do something with that list of CanLit pick up lines I've been compiling (ed. note: I find this one very interesting)

Zoe Whittall, fiction writer, poet, and journalist

1) Finish Infinite Jest or don't finish Infinite Jest. Either way: make up mind.
2) Read some classics
3) Read more or less trash, but stop feeling trash guilt (was anything more pleasurable than Motley Crue's The Dirt? The Mormon child bride memoir? The pulp mystery I read from my mother-in-law's guestroom bookcase when I ran out of books on vacation? Embrace the love!)

All very fine resolutions, and many thanks to my lovely resolution-ers. Please check out their respective and very awesome sites and works.

And if you have literary resolutions, please share them!

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday with lots and lots of food involved. To ring in the New Year, I've recruited some interesting folks to share their "New Year's Literary Resolutions." Full post coming soon!

In the meantime, you can brainstorm your own resolutions and continue the post-holiday recovery (work starts at NINE AM? I don't remember that...are you sure?).

Just for Fun

Margaret Atwood posted a list of her 10 Gifts for Budding Novelists (oh guys, you shouldn't have!) and Lauren Leto's site has a funny list of Stereotyping Readers by Their Favourite Writers (the Hawthorne one made me laugh...the list is a little hyper-gendered-divided, but it's all in good fun).

In the absence of my own creativity, I offer up these fun tidbits for your entertainment.

Now I can go back to grumbling about the Eaton Centre during the holidays.

(Photo of young Margaret Atwood just for kicks... and because I couldn't think of another image... and because she was a fox!)

Holiday reading list

So I have a week off during the holidays and I am incredibly excited (last year I spent both Christmas Eve and Boxing Day selling books, which if you're going to be selling something is pretty fun, but not where I wanted to be during the holidays). If I'm honest, I'll probably spend most of it eating, sleeping, and wearing pajamas pants emblazoned with snowflakes, reindeer, and other Christmasy paraphernalia while doing adorable family things (boozy cider? Yes please). What can I say? It's the holidays.

That being said, I'd like to aspire to something more, so I'm putting together a holiday reading list to take with me on my trek to the suburbs (my home territory). It is only a week, so I'm not reserving a whole suitcase or anything, but I'm pretty excited nonetheless.

So far, I've got:

1. A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore. A friend kindly gave me a copy of this, and I'm looking forward to it. I've heard so many good things about Lorrie Moore that I feel like I'm the last one to join the party.
2. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving. People have been telling me to read this book for literally ten years. They wore me down. It will even be my first Irving (yeah, yeah I live under a rock, I get it).
3. The Big Why, Michael Winter. I bought this at a reading an embarrassingly long time ago and am very excited to read it, having read the rest of Winter's work and enjoyed it.

Also, on a separate note, I am now finished with the in-class portion of my MFA. It has gone by really quickly -- it seems like a few weeks ago I was peddling my bike over to Susan Swan's for my first ever graduate workshop (no, I just have something in my eye).

I've handed in my final paper, a deliciously nerdy discussion of literary Toronto engaging with Amy Lavender Harris' excellent Imagining Toronto project, and I am doing my best to wrap up my poetry portfolio (which I will turn in to the inestimable Dionne Brand on Monday). Both the workshop and academic class have wrapped, and I'm now preparing to chop a path through the wood that is my graduate thesis.

So to everyone I've shared workshops and classes with over the last eighteen months: thanks for a terrific time.

And that is that. Please share any recommendations for holidays reading. Bonus points for anything Christmas, winter, or otherwise appropriately-themed.

Oh, one last thing: you'll notice a couple of my links are to Wikipedia pages, which is not unusual. In case you haven't heard, Wikipedia is currently asking for donations in order to keep their site going. If you're thinking of a charitable donation, it's not a bad place to have your money end up. I donated a bit -- you can even pick the currency in which you want to donate. So here's the link, and I am now climbing down off my soapbox (dusts off hands). If you need me I'll be the girl on the GO Train in a few weeks with the heavy bag. Happy holidays!

Piping hot self-serving post

This is kind of silly, but I wanted to re-post something that my old school paper wrote about me a little while back. It's a "What Ever Happened To?" sort of piece, which is sort of simultaneously flattering and horrifying, but I was quite excited to be included.

I did my undergrad at Queen's in Kingston, and I have to admit, I have a lot of school spirit. I still have my tam. I can still sing the school song, which is partially in Gaelic. I know we're mostly known for being really spoiled and flipping over cars these days, but I had a great time at Queen's (and still have the student loans to show for it). Kingston is an amazing town, and if I were to ever leave the-centre-of-the-universe-that-is-Toronto, that is probably where I would want to go.

There was (and I would imagine, is) a terrific literary scene at Queen's (including a now-defunct chapbook press run by my ridiculously talented friend Devon Lougheed, with which I loaned a hand in my last couple of years). I ran a poetry reading series called The Open Box Literary Society (yes, that was actually what it was called) and even organized a one-hour poetry contest in a locked-down room in the engineering library one year (several professors kindly donated their time as judges -- the article mistakenly states that it was a competition between professors).

Also, Queen's boasts the Grad Club, arguably the best live music venue in Canada (it almost won the CBC contest for that title! I voted a lot). The Grad Club alone would have made it four fantastic (and boozy) years at Queen's.

Anyway, all this cloudy-eyed nostalgia is basically my very long introduction to this piece that I meant to post back when it was written:

The article about me (and two other people, scroll on down, I'm the last one)

Because I am vain, I was happy to see that they used a photo of me, especially a really old and strategically-shot-from-above one. Hooray! In it, I'm standing on the steps of the now-demolished Queen's Journal House. They knocked it down a few years ago to build a mondo-student-centre that will eventually cover a bazillion city blocks in Kingston. It nearly broke my heart.

This whole post is pretty much just me mooning around clutching old yellowing copies of the Queen's Journal and sighing loudly. I promise real posts are coming soon. In the meantime, check out the article.

**Also enjoy the fact that while having that photo taken in my fourth year, the photographer and I took that one first, and then spent 40 minutes taking a bunch of ambitious but unusable pictures of me in a tree on the lawn. I bruised my inner thighs (ouch) and nearly fell on my head. This is why writers don't climb trees. Life lesson: use the first photo. Profound, yes?

Events!

So the IFOA, the International Festival of Authors, is in full swing at the Harbourfront Centre. This omni-event includes about 70 individual readings, parties, and panels/roundtables with authors from around the world.

I wanted to highlight a couple of great events, specifically the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize shortlist reading this Wednesday evening. You can get all the details here.

The fiction shortlist this year:

-Nicole Brossard (Montreal), for Fences in Breathing. Coach House Books
-Douglas Coupland (Vancouver) for Generation A. Random House Canada
-Annabel Lyon (Vancouver) for The Golden Mean. Random House Canada
-Alice Munro (Clinton, Ontario) for Too Much Happiness. McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
-Andrew Steinmetz (Ottawa) for Eva's Threepenny Theatre. Gaspereau Press

The Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize is one of the three big fiction awards in Canada (along with the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award) and is worth $25,000. Annabel Lyon is in a unique position to pull a hat trick this year, as she is the only author on all three big prize lists, worth a total of $100,000. As far as I know, no author has ever won all three prizes in one year.

This year is also noteworthy for the fact that Douglas Coupland, despite being hugely commercially successful, has always been notably absent from prize lists.

And of course everyone is curious to see whether Alice Munro will win the Rogers and Governor General's prizes, as she voluntarily withdrew from the Giller this year, an unprecedented move (to my knowledge).

Anyway, the reading on Wednesday should be lots of fun. Get your tickets online or by calling the IFOA box office at 416.973.4000 between 1pm and 6pm. Wednesday's shortlist reading starts at 8pm. All the authors will be attending except Munro, who is notoriously media shy. I'm excited to see Coupland, whose Life After God I read so many times in high school that sections of it fell off the glued binding.

The other event I wanted to flog was Friday's roundtable with my literary crush, Lisa Moore, in attendance. The title of the panel is "On Getting it Done" and NOW Magazine has picked the event as one of their recommendations. All the info is here.

I hope to see some of you at one of both events. And while I realize Wednesday's event conflicts with the Cyclists Union's event, the masquerade will be going on well after the reading is over -- so why not going to both? That's my plan, anyway. I'll sleep when I'm dead, right?

Ah, fall. The literary season. Better to have too many book events than not enough!