Month: October 2020

Like most people, I go through ups and downs with my ability to engage with reading. Partly this is exacerbated by ADD, but it’s good now and then to remind myself that there are quantifiable physical benefits as well as the more esoteric intellectual ones.

Reading has been proven to aid depression, whether the affected person reads in their head, or whether someone reads aloud. Sufferers report feeling more optimistic after reading or being read to. Where a low level of intervention is the best option for a mental health patient, things like self-help books have a double benefit – the patient benefits from the advice in the book, but they also benefit from the reading itself. Giving someone suffering from a mental health problem, the joy of reading could genuinely save a life, and many patients offered self-help books would not be readers otherwise.

The human brain functions similarly to a muscle in that the more active your brain is, the better. This is especially true in older people, who are at risk of mental decline, memory loss, and Alzheimer’s, but the effects of reading will carry through your whole life. Getting a reading habit as a young adult (or even younger) can decrease your chances of Alzheimer’s later. Regular brain activity, like reading, puzzles, or strategy games can reduce the mental decline by 32%.

Look at that week stretching out before you. So full of possibilities. And inevitabilities. It’s the latter that sucks, let’s be honest.

• Frankfurt bagged nearly 150G attendees…;
• …and seems to have been a largely positive affair;
• New anthology of diverse Canadian writers;
• Pottle’s publisher backs down;
• Remember to check out Beattie’s blog this month for spooky lit coverage;
• Access Copyright and York University at the Supreme Court (shame on York. my alma mater);
• Quebeccers go e-book during pandemic;
• Ninja pal and storyteller supreme Ivan Coyote on how answering old letters filled the void for one performer during Covid;
• On the power of reading outside your comfort zone;
• Mapped guide to Vancouver’s best bookstores;
• Is there such a thing as a “far right literature?” (CW: general hate and douchebaggery that comes with the far right);
• New indie in the Schomburg Centre profiled;
• LitHub covers the week in literary screen news, big and small;
• Martin Ove Amausgaard;
• Latinx bookmobile profiled in Oprah’s magazine;
• Did you know there are people who buy and sell old diaries? It’s sort of morbid and fascinating at the same time;

Hey, welcome back once again to the tiny little campfire of hope in the darkness of a long week. Warm yourself by the fire of your freedom, but just remember to clean up your trash on Monday morning before work.

• Trickles of good news and reviews coming out of Frankfurt;
• An alt CanLit reading list… What would your titles be?;
• Curtis Sittenfeld namechecks fiction guru Alice Munro as inspiration;
• State of the book production industry;
• Note these Irish bookshops for when we’re all allowed to travel again;
• Barnes & Noble hacked;
• Forest of Reading winners will be chosen by the children;
• Silver Birch finalists as well;
• Stephen King’s TV renaissance;
• Canadian Audible originals is source of much hoohah in media;
• Love him or hate him, James Wood is one smart cat;
• The house that inspired Manderley;
• Goldsmith’s Prize shortlist in the UK;
• Is Bill Bryson retiring or Stephen Kinging?;
• Friday nonsense fun: Build a home library and Buzzfeed will tell you your Autumnal Style;

• Locus award winners;
• European SF society award winners;
• The brilliant NK Jemisin introduces a Time feature on the power of fantasy;
• Polygon looks at home SciFi has been reimagined in the last 10 years;
• …And a list of 15 books that shaped the genre;
• Diversity and inclusion issues at the WFC;
• Always ready for more Philip Pullman;
• Barbarella is back?;
• Photos are starting to leak from Wheel of Time set;
• Through the nerd looking glass: fantasy novels paired with RPGs;

Bitch as an interesting essay about the challenges, failures, and questionable authenticity behind some of the movements pushing for diversity in publishing. I’d be interested to hear opinions from various voices working in the Canadian industry.

Publishing has long been in a battle over diversity and inclusion, and after being caught in a moment of coalescing awareness of racism, companies are advertising vague “diversity and inclusion lead” jobs. There’s no indication that these roles will be given the support staff, resources, or institutional backing to carry out their duties, but that hasn’t stopped companies from proclaiming them the solution to corporate racism. Publishers are hastily pulling “problematic” books from store shelves, with no meaningful statements about how these books came to be in the first place. Publishers are still pressuring writers of color to stick to stereotypes or to turn their books into “special learning experiences.” Pay disparities are still vast, highlighted in author L.L. McKinney’s trending #PublishingPaidMe hashtag. The hunger for diverse content is exemplified by the book lists featuring marginalized authors that nearly every publication seems to be pursuing.

But the way we talk about representation and the call to produce books written by people who share their characters’ identities and lived experiences can be simplistic, and even dangerous. There’s increasing pressure for authors to divulge personal information, even if it endangers them or feels too intimate. This was on sharp display in September, when young adult author Becky Albertelli felt pushed to come out after being criticized for writing queer books as a seemingly straight woman. On the surface, wanting to read books written by people who share marginalized identities with their characters is a reasonable expectation, especially considering that marginalized people have been intentionally cut out of publishing for so long. White authors can write all the Black characters they like, for example, but Black authors have to fight for every inch of inclusion. Many Black authors have heard the common refrain that “we already have our Black story this season.”

Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind, is interviewed a the Paris Review and lays out some very reasonable boundaries on what he’s willing to tolerate when it comes to genre snobbery: not much. I feel the same way. As a kid, I spent many years reading garbage, but among the dross were studded moments of brilliance. For every dumbass Dragonlance novel I read, there was a McCaffrey; for every physics-fetishism Niven there was a Le Guin; for every schlocky Batman there was a The Watchmen. And when I stopped reading spec and fantasy, the author names changed, but the ratio of self-indulgent-trash/mediocre-phoned-in-prose to brilliant storytelling did not. Over the years I’ve been advised by several industry professionals and established writers to distance myself from genre and humour (back in 2009 or so, I was in fact told Bookninja was the reason my poems hadn’t been nominated for any national awards thus far: because no one could take that saucy doofus seriously… Or, you know, maybe they just didn’t sit right with the juries?), but I don’t have the stomach for it anymore. I just want to like the stuff I like, and I want to write the stuff I write. My poet’s mind is separate from my reader’s mind, though they do get together for coffee now and then. Get over it, haters!

It’s not a genre I read very much in my current life, but I certainly did when I was young. I read a lot of mysteries, a lot of thrillers—closer to horror than to science fiction. And it made a big impression on me. I really admire the genre. When well practiced, it’s an extremely efficient narrative tool. I guess that’s a dumb thing to say, because the same is true no matter what form you’re talking about. A sonnet or a short story can be incredibly efficient, too, of course. But I think there is a prevailing snobbery about writing horror or thriller, “genre fiction,” that it’s fundamentally less serious. I don’t think that’s true. Because, in the end, it’s really about building a very efficient machine in order to achieve a very specific goal. The author wants to make you quake. He wants to make you shiver. He wants to terrify you. Literary fiction is a genre all it’s own, with its own expectations and conventions, and the aim is less often to elicit that emotional response. It’s more often about doing something compelling on the level of language or style—it’s a different kind of endeavor. But I don’t think that means one is better than the other.

Stay on target…. STAY ON TARGET….!

• ABA’s new anti-Amazon marketing campaign is a go;
• Your local bookstore is struggling… pay attention;
• Protean Nobel Laureate Louise Glück profiled in The Guardian;
• Bernadine Evaristo spells it out clearly: hire more diverse people;
• New fellowship for disabled artists;
• TS Eliot shortlist is looking mighty interesting;
• Ballie Gifford Prize shortlist;
• The CBC win that launched David Bergen;
• Ever wanted to sink your teeth into Gothic Fantasy?;
• I didn’t remember the friction between Lewis and Tolkien;
• Spotlight on Canadian Indigenous literature;
• A first folio sells for $10 million;
• Martha Stewart offers tips for building a home library which, like an Indigo store, seems to be about half-books, half-shit-bought-at-Winners;
• On backing away from book design while at the top of the game;
• Is American literature too provincial?;

News broke yesterday afternoon that an old friend of mine, poet Richard Vaughn, has gone missing in New Brunswick. He’s been known to unplug and just take off for a while (dude has a flip phone, of course), so I hope this is the case. If you have information on his whereabouts, his family and friends are quite worried. Please contact the police in NB or your local authorities, or even me by email, if you know anything.

I’m not a big fan of self-help. I think it’s generally very predatory part of our industry, hanging like a vulture over the vulnerable and disillusioned. Most creative writing books are similar; self-help for the person more interested in being told what to do than writing. But over the years, first as a student and then as a teacher, I have read/assigned the occasional text or essay on craft. I prefer to assign actual poems over writing about poems, but when I do, I mostly try to keep things focused on the tools in the toolbox, not the mindset, yogafication, and “spiritual journey” stuff. I figure people have that down or they don’t, and they’re coming to me for the nitty-gritty files and awls of writing. So, for instance, I would 100% assign Fussell’s Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, but would steer clear of Poet X’s MFA-oriented cash-grab vanity work Finding Your Sacred Self in Each and Every Line You Channel From the Godhead Muse and Loving Yourself While You Do It. In the end, if you’re actually interested in reading someone else’s riffing on writing, my suggestion is you keep it to one or two books max (Guardian has suggestions), because like parenting books, they’ll all tell you something different and you’ll end up spending more time trying to decide which one to follow than you do trying to lead by actually writing.

Writers writing about writing can become a supercilious endeavour; I’m more interested in the process of making work and the writer’s perspectives that substantiate the framework.

There’s no single authority, anything is possible. All that’s required are some words and an idea – which makes the art of writing enticing but also difficult and daunting. The books listed below, diverse in their central arguments and genres, guide us towards more interesting and lateral ways to think about what we want to say, and ultimately, how we choose to say it.

• Canadian spotlight at Frankfurt opens with message from Trudeau;
• Indies launch “Boxed Out” campaign vs Amazon;
• Bookselling in the End Times;
• Winnie-the-Pooh facts, on his birthday;
• Don DeLillo’s editor tried to sneak Covid into his novel, but he caught it… the sneak, that is;
• America’s tax dollars at work;
• Beware the rise of the newsletter;
• Roxanne Gay still being smart all the time;
• Is The Turn of the Screw the scariest ghost story ever?;
• Picture book legend Oliver Jeffers is more punk rock than I imagined;
• RIP: Barbara Ker Wilson, Paddington publisher, dead at 90;
• Digital is keeping the industry’s head above water;
• What are the most-often cited poems for special events? Surprised to NOT find Auden under the funeral category after that fucking movie;