Month: December 2020

Bookninja favourite Nalo Hopkinson is being been made a Grandmaster of the Science Fiction Fantasy Writers Association. This is a lifetime achievement Oscar but for us nerds. Big stuff and proper recognition for a brilliant writer. I sat on a jury with Hopkinson many years ago and hopefully hid from her how nervous I was to be in her presence, having read and loved her books. She turned out to be super nice and friendly and normal. Lovely. There are few authors I feel nervous around, but she, and another fantasy fellow who I know reads this blog daily because he PMs me on Twitter when he disagrees with me (I won’t name him but his initials are Guy Gavriel Kay), make me a bit weak in the knees with teenaged hero worship.

So, over the years I’ve taught, and lectured on, poetry at a handful universities Canada and the US, including UofT and the MFA program at UBC, and so this year, at a time of deep strain on the job market out here, I’ve decided to strike out on my own and offer some courses for new and emerging poets. I firmly believe that everyone has “poetic thoughts”, or moments of connection that resemble poetic thoughts, and that the main difference between someone like myself and the average plumber/doctor/clerk/site supervisor/etc/etc. is that I have spent the last 25 years of my life learning to recognize those thoughts when they happen and training myself to write them down in interesting ways. The thoughts happen to everyone, but the skills needed to craft them into poems are like the skills needed to build a bookshelf: you can learn them. So I’m going to start by offering a couple courses in skills-building for poets. They’ll be a combination 8 weeks of asynchronous online learning and optional synchronous meet-ups and workshopping. One starts in January, one in March. Great gifts for the person in your life who needs a bit of structure and a group for motivation. Everyone from beginners to emerging poets are ideal for the first course in January. Listen, you’re going to be stuck at home anyway, why not learn some new tricks and skills while you’re there?

• Biggest news of the day: Goodbye BookExpo and BookCon;
• Desmond Cole wins Toronto Book Award;
• Writers Trust gives out some cash to deserving career writers, including favourite Dennis Lee;
• Mary Trump is riding the bomb like Kong, all the way down;
• Hook your kid on mysteries for their own good;
• Surprise, surprise: John Banville is a turd;
• UK translation prize shortlist;
• I wish someone would do a Steve Gutenburg Bible… You know, with commandments for what to do when a buxom cop pulls you over, or when you find your dick in a hotdog bun for some reason… Until then, I guess we have the boring old original;
• Listicle: are these “the 20 best book adaptations of all time“?;

“Pandemic” has been chosen by both Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com as their Word of the Year. It seems to cover all bases, really. “Bubble” is still our house’s Word of the Year. That and “Unemployment”. But I digress. “Comfort in the knowing…” Lol. The curse of the educated.

Similarly, at Merriam-Webster.com, searches for pandemic on March 11 were 115,806 per cent higher than spikes experienced on the same date last year, Sokolowski said.

Pandemic, with roots in Latin and Greek, is a combination of “pan,” for all, and “demos,” for people or population, he said. The latter is the same root of “democracy,” Sokolowski said. The word pandemic dates to the mid-1600s, used broadly for “universal” and more specifically to disease in a medical text in the 1660s, he said.

That was after the plagues of the Middle Ages, Sokolowski said.

He attributes the lookup traffic for pandemic not entirely to searchers who didn’t know what it meant but also to those on the hunt for more detail, or for inspiration or comfort in the knowing.

Holy-Shit-It’s-December Edition. QUICKLY! GET THE DOLLY PARTON CHRISTMAS ALBUM GOING!

• BookRiot’s Literary Advent Calendar;
• New Trans anthology geared at kids market is being developed at Annick;
• Left hanging: on ambiguous endings in crime fiction;
• Thomas King becomes Canadian equivalent of a Knight… Real world promotion, chessboard demotion;
• Verso does unionizing right – a model for publishing;
• RIP: Ben Bova, science fiction legend, dead at 88;
• Bookshops are reopening overseas and people are taking stock;
• Do you give donations instead of gifts at Xmas? Here are some US based NFP literacy charities you might want to consider… Anyone have any Canadian corollaries they want to share?;
• Guardian lists its picks of best SFF books from 2020;
• Love letters from Kurt Vonnegut;
• Not everyone is happy about PRH acquiring S&S… you think?;
• Help ElectricLit pick the best book cover of 2020 – I am always fascinated by the patterns you see when looking at a year’s covers all together;
• Save those old diaries, people… there might be a novel in them;
• Are you a fan of Chuck Tingle’s outlandish literary porno stunts? Then you might be surprised by the depth of this animation he made about ghosts and depression… I mean, don’t worry, it’s still weird as fuck, but there’s something in there;