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!

Letting it out

I've been posting my little brains out lately, which is strange, because I can't remember having ever been as busy with non-writing things as I am right now. Maybe all those inspirational speakers are right that you can function better when swamped than when relaxed (regardless, I look forward to things slowing down after the holidays).

That being said, this is primarily a blog about my writing and my experience as a newbie in the literary scene. So I would be remiss not to post and mention that I dropped off my manuscript to my agent the other day (or rather, another agent at the agency since my own, very lovely agent is on maternity leave currently).

It was a funny feeling. The manuscript seemed to shrink between the print shop (huge!) and the agency (kind of puny). How does that happen?

In terms of hard stats, I clocked in at about 275 pages, 75,000 words. Pretty average, I think. I'm sure it will change down the road. I kind of want a baseball-style card now that I've written 'stats'.

So now I need to cool my heels for a few weeks while people read the mss. and see what, if anything, can be done with it (Edit it? Rewrite it? Sell it? Toss it?). While part of me wants to know now now now, I'm actually glad to have a bit of a mental vacation. I might even be able to get back to short fiction for a little bit, which would be great as this is contest season.

This is probably all I will say about the novel for a while, since after this it is in the agents' hands and I don't want to step on their toes. The next time I post about this will hopefully be with good news, but if that is the case, it won't be for some time. So just cross your fingers for me for the next few months. This is all new to me!

Where the scaredy cats are

I thought I'd post a link to a little debate in one of my favourite papers (The Guardian) about one of my favourite books, Where the Wild Things Are. It was sent to me by our program director and I thought it was highly entertaining.

My oldest sister had a baby shower this weekend and one of the books I gave her was Where the Wild Things Are; we all loved it when we were little and I love the idea of her reading it to her little girl sometime down the road.

Anyway, Sendak has some choice words for parents who think the new movie adaptation (and/or the book, presumably) is too scary: read it here.

Great Non-Book Event

Hello lovelies. I have some non-book news to post. I might not have mentioned that I am a wobbly but avid cyclist, and I have great admiration for the Toronto Cyclists' Union, a group that represents the needs and safety of Toronto Cyclists' to the city council (among doing many other cool things; check out their website).

They are a terrific group, and they have a fundraising party coming up very soon (click for details). It looks like a fantastic event, so I thought I would post the ad here for any cycling-minded book lovers. I highly recommend both the event and the Union -- if you bike in Toronto, you should definitely make yourself aware of the Union and what they are doing (if you're not already).

Things I did today

1. Worked a long but interesting day at the office, mostly consisting of writing and reading seventy trillion emails
2. Bought a six pack of Mill Street Organic and a 26er of Tanqueray gin
3. Got disoriented in the PATH system
4. Successfully found bike parking in the financial district
5. Ate ice cream out of my London tube map mug, with sprinkles
6. Failed to notice wax spilling all over my coffee table and carpet until it was something of a problem
7. Trimmed my bangs
8. Posted two recommendations for two terrific books
9. Tried to find a sweater to purchase like the one in the photo
10. FINISHED THE VERY ROUGH BUT BLOODY WELL ACTUAL REAL COMPLETE FIRST DRAFT OF MY NOVEL

I'm utterly overcooked right now. My brain has been scrubbed clean. There is a lot of rewriting in my future, but I'm not letting myself think about that until tomorrow (although, technically, it is tomorrow and has been for more than two hours).

This sort of feels like falling in love, or a really good drunk. I need a massage.

PS I also need a title.

Recommended: Quarter Life Crisis Vol. 1 by Evan Munday

Two graphic novels in one day! This is a surprise, but a very worthwhile one. When I was writing about Stitches below, I thought I should share this recommendation for a very different but equally awesome graphic novel.

Without further ado, allow me to recommend the first installment of Quarter Life Crisis, a new graphic novel series that postulates what might happen after a mysterious plague kills everyone in Toronto - except the twenty-five year olds. Check out author and artist Evan Munday's page for more details. You can also see what Torontoist had to say about Quarter Life Crisis here.

Copies are available at the Silver Snail on Queen Street and at the Beguiling on Markham Street in Mirvish Village, just around the corner from Bloor and Bathurst.

Or just email Munday and ask him to sell you a copy, I hear he is very accommodating. It's worth it to see his fantastic drawings of the various gangs that arise from the ashes of post-Apocolyptic Toronto: the be-suited Bay Street thugs, the tough but lovable Koreans with their Dance Dance Revolution death matches, and the scary paramilitary Rogers, the new ruling group who are ensconced in the esrtwhile SkyDome.

Recommended: Stitches by David Small

I'm just dropping in to write about a fantastic book that I read recently. I've been running around like a headless chicken lately (apologies to my vegetarian friends for that image) so I haven't been reading too much, but this was so good I had to post something.

Stitches by David Small is a graphic novel. Now, I've only read a handful of graphic novels, so this is a layperson's review, not that of a devote graphic novel fan (although I'm interested in the genre).

That being said, I think the artwork is superb. An expert Children's Lit friend tells me Small is a very well known American illustrator and has won a bucjetful of awards for his artwork. It's harrowing but playful at the same time (that sounds weird I know, but if you check it out you will see what I mean). The novel is a memoir, so the artwork compliments the story very well. During most of the book Small is a young boy or a teen, and the visuals communicate the way his narrator sees the world, with a mixture of terror and magic.

In terms of the narrative, the story centres around the fact that Small underwent an operation as a boy that rendered him nearly mute (one of his vocal chords was removed). Through the why and how of that operation, Small offers an elegant, restrained memoir of his very unusual family. It's angry, sorrowful, baffled -- but not bitter, not petty. There is wit and whimsy; Small has a very, very light touch with subject matter that could easily have been heavy-handed and maudlin.

Whether graphic novels make it into your usual rotation or not, I would definitely recommend Stitches. Small has a site about the book here where you can get more info, and the publisher has some info here (in Canada, Stitches came out with M&S, which is shaking up its list with some very mod offerings lately -- not just Stitches but also Lauren Kirshner's Where We Have to Go, and, a while back, Craig Boyko's Blackouts, all worth checking out).

If anyone reads Stitches, please let me know what you think of it. If you're looking for another graphic novel afterwards, Skim by Mariko Tamaki is also a great choice.

Upcoming Events, Fall 2009

So it's fall and that means the usual chockablock literary event schedule for the next few months. I thought I'd give a shout out to some particularly awesome events coming up in Toronto:

September 8:

Pages Memorial at the Gladstone

This will be both a sad night and a great one. Bookish types are gathering to pay respects to Pages, the Queen Street institution that closed down at the end of August after 30+ years at Queen and John.

7pm, free, Gladstone Hotel

September 20:

Eden Mills Writers' Festival

In a tiny town outside of Guelph, this is always a good event. I read on the Fringe stage in 2007 and as a student rep for the MFA program in 2008 and had lots of fun. Great books and related items are for sale, and good food. Lots of actual authors attend as well, including YA and children's authors. If you have access to a vehicle, the apples alone are worth the trip. Bring rain gear if there's even the suggestion of clouds.

Noon to 6pm, $10 ($5 for students), more info here

September 27:

Word on the Street

This is one of the best events of the literary calendar. Queen's Park Circle is closed off from Wellesley up to Charles. Book and magazine vendors and publishers, tons of awesome writers reading, food vendors AND it's free. If you like magazines, it's a good place to score cheap subscriptions, and many of the books are on sale as well. Now, Eye, the Toronto Public Library and other heavy hitters usually have booths as well. Bonus this year: visit Al Purdy's statue!

11am-5pm, free, Queen's Park, more info here

September 30 seems to be the day of choice, so do your stretches and prepare to sprint around the city:

Zoe Whittall launches Holding Still for as Long as Possible at the Gladstone (TINARS event)
Zoe is a terrific writer and HSFALAP is incredible -- I just finished it a little while ago and anyone who loves Toronto should read that book. City of Toronto Book Award, anyone? Check out Zoe's website, including the awesome book trailer for the new novel.

7.30pm, $5 (free with book purchase), the Gladstone

Moez Surani and Soyara Peerbaye: a joint launch between Wolsak & Wynn and Goose Lane Editions

Moez is launching Reticient Bodies and Soyara is launching Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names. Two great poets reading at the pretty little Ben McNally store on Bay street - a double treat.

6.30pm, free, Ben McNally Books

October 1:

Lisa Moore reading from February

What else do I need to say? It's Lisa Moore! She is also reading at the North York public library on Sept. 30, but since you already have two awesome events to choose from, I figured I would highlight the Oct. 1 reading.

2pm, free, Richard Library, 1806 Islington


Finally, here are some other good resources for events:

NOW Magazine

Coach House Books

House of Anansi

Other great events include the Coach House Fall Launch at Stone's Place (date TBA) and the Writers' Trust Awards Ceremony (I'll post about that shortly).

It's the perfect time to get out and support your local writers!