Year: 2020

This pandemic has got me so bored, I actually sent an unsolicited submission to a journal, which is not something I usually do. This article advocates for Aussie journals, but the issues at hand track across national boundaries. My first publications were in Canadian journals. The first time I submitted, I had no idea what I was doing and stupidly sent out the same five poems to five different journals. It was only after I’d sent them and told my mentor that I learned that was a no-no. He said not to worry, though, because it was unlikely any would even get accepted. I was super lucky that all five got accepted, but at different magazines. I’m not going to lie, I sort of swaggered into his office six months later with the letters. The first acceptance to come in was from The Antigonish Review, but my second acceptance (from Event) ended up appearing first. So, yes, they do help emerging writers. In my case, it was unearned arrogance, but still, it did help. Please make sure they survive!

Uncertainty, instability and fragility are perhaps the defining characteristics of small magazines.

The decisions to not fund literary magazines not only have a significant impact on the individual publications, but also to Australian cultural discourse.

What gets published within the pages of these magazines can entertain us, it can inspire us to critically examine the world around us, and can help us understand culture that moves us.

Vibrant discussion about culture, society and the arts does not happen by accident. It must be carefully nurtured and requires financial support.

The revolution is still happening. More power to you, folks. (Glad to see EW running something like this.)

I grew up in Nigeria in the ‘90s, and we were under military dictatorship for most of that. So we had a lot of military curfews. We had a lot of violence happening, and that was oddly what I was using to calm myself down. I was like, “You know what this is like. You know what it’s like to have a curfew. You know what it’s like to not be able to go outside.” [Laughs] Which is a really messed up way of reassurance. It’s been so much worse in your lifetime. But at the same time, the one thing that I have learned in, I think, trauma and grief, and when there’s a lot of loss, and it’s really loud in the world, is that the world actually doesn’t stop. People are saying a lot that, “Oh, this thing has stopped the world.” And I’m like, “It hasn’t, because people are still doing things.” And I think for anyone who’s suffered a loss, it’s something that we know intimately, is that even if your world has stopped, the rest of the world doesn’t. And that’s one of the most heartbreaking things about grief, is that everything just keeps moving on.

The kids who need queer books still need them. They probably need them actually more than they did before. And so that I think gave me a little bit of permission to be like, “Okay, this is still important.” I think in any revolution, I suppose everyone has a particular role. And I think there’s often a lot of guilt about not being more on the front lines, or being safe or all these different things. But I think as storytellers, one of the things that I try to keep in mind is, I can just find my pocket, and I can fight from that pocket, and do my job that I’m here to do.

I don’t like Mondays. I hate waking up to find out things went to shit over the weekend. So much wasted potential. Every week you hope, but every week it’s the same garbage. A strange new world out there every day, it seems, but especially on Mondays. Photos from Toronto this weekend show thousands of people crowding our old haunt of Trinity-Bellwoods park, and today the same scene is all over CNN with Americans flooding vacation hot spots as the country tries reopen (cue 2nd wave death train!) I don’t know why, but I was surprised about Toronto in a way I wasn’t about the USA. I often forget that Toronto is Canada’s most American city (yes, even over Calgary). I mean, they not only voted in a crackhead mayor, they then voted in his drug-dealer older brother as premier of the province. The real Toronto, for me, is no longer the city itself, but the people I glommed onto as a friend group within it. It’s not the place I remember anymore. It’s become a caricature of its own inferiority complex/wannabe hopeful about America. Sigh.

• Ellis Awards handed out, including to Michael Christie;
• Comics going mobile for the future;
• Instagram model/feminist is working on a book of essays;
• Essential services creative writing group;
• English landmarks that inspired Tolkien’s Middle Earth locations;
• I have read every Tolkien book out there, including the dictionaries, encyclopedia’s, the atlas (have read The Silmarillion three times), as well as having tried a raft of anti-depressants over the years, and I still had a hard time with this quiz (h/t LitHub): Tolkien name or an antidepressant?;
• Asian Heritage Month book suggestions from CBC;
• It’s time to talk about Isaac Asimov’s problematic history;
• Philip Roth fairs better on a deep dive into his private life;
• …and to round out the 3old white guys: let’s look at Larkin’s love life;
• Can’t get to the galleries? That’s what those coffee table books are for;
• Dalkey Lit Award shortlists;

Noted author and TERF supporter JK Rowling is popping a lot of Harry Potter mythology bubbles. Not the stuff in the books, but the cottage industry of tourism and speculation that’s grown up around her fabled writing of the books.

For years, fans of the beloved “Harry Potter” franchise have flocked to Edinburgh, Scotland, to visit the sites where author J.K. Rowling had reportedly started writing the series.But now, Rowling has revealed Edinburgh is actually not where the writing of the boy who lived began.”I was renting a room in a flat over what was then a sports shop,” Rowling said on Twitter, with an image of where she resided at the time of writing the first book. “The first bricks of Hogwarts were laid in a flat in Clapham Junction.”

Gang war. Will it ever end? Will we see, in our lifetime, a cessation of the senseless romance-writer-on-romance-writer violence? Will we know the peace of a torn dress pressed against a bare chest that looks like it’s been soaking in coconut butter during a heatwave? Will the bodices ever get back to being ripped open by grim pirates with 39 synonyms for their pendulous genitalia? Or will we be forced to continue watching a bunch of middle aged woman with hairdos from a 1996 New Jersey Statewide battle-of-the-bands duke it out for a piece of the lucrative organizational pie? Can the RWA be saved? Not so long as there is breath in the heaving bosom of one curb-stomping hairspray addict out there still unsure of who owns actually owns the leash attached to Fabio’s studded collar. Oh, sure, the names may change (“Rita” becomes “Vivian”, “the majestic tip of his prodigious sex” becomes “the business end of his love shiv”), but the battle will continue. Mark my words. These people have chosen a hard life on the mean streets of literature, right in the middle of the district with the highest death rate: at the corner of Rough-but-Gentle Hands Alley and Throbbing Member Way.

The Romance Writers of America will permanently retire its annual RITA Awards, which it has presented annually since 1982, and introduce a new award, the Vivian, named after RWA founder Vivian Stephens.

The move to retire the RITAs follows a controversy related to issues of diversity at the organization this winter that saw the resignation of its newly-instated president and its entire board of directors, as well as the cancellation of this year’s planned RITA Awards ceremony. In January, the RWA announced that it planned to hold the RITAs again “to celebrate 2019 and 2020 romances” in 2021.

You made it to Friday again, ninjas. You’re in the home stretch. Finish out this rotten week and stare into the abyss of possibility that is your weekend. Look at all that freedom, just there, glistening on the edge of 5pm. It’s calling to you. “Drink meeeeee” it’s saying. “Driiiiiiink meeeeeeee…” Who are you to defy it?

• I never understood bookends… they presuppose free space on bookshelves, no?;
• Bill Clinton and James Patterson teaming up again to write novel no one asked for;
• TPL has 1M books outstanding;
• Faulkner’s wife and daughters were pranksters;
• Learning to love without touching via books (how this article exists without mentioning The Remains of the Day is beyond me)
• Times are tough: indie Hunter Street Books goes to bookstore-within-knickknacks-store-model… I mean, I suppose the Reismann playbook worked for Indigo?;
• Book sales improve, but future is still in question;
• 27 year old debut Irish novelist who looks like every girl you ever had a crush on (in grade 10) gets 6 figure deal;
• Alaska backs down on book bans in schools;
• I understood the word “audiobook”, but all the “ONIX from EDItEUR” part is lost on me;
• Did you know that Brian Brett got Covid? Poor fella. Here’s his story;

I’ve had some doozies, especially as a teacher. The relating of several of these might end in lawsuit, so I’ll just ask for yours instead and point you to this interview with Megan Stielstra, wherein she offers a pretty decent competitor for worst of the worst. And here you thought the douchebro who says he doesn’t read or edit his work because it might influence his writing and ruin how “raw” it is was bad. (As a student, I once had to belt-loop a guy out of the room like a nightclub bouncer because he was freaking out on the instructor. In fairness to Hothead McGee there, the instructor had just told him Bukowski would have been ashamed the fellow had considered him an influence. It was ugly.)

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

A student wrote a story about my death. He was not subtle; the character was named Megan Stielstra. He included a scene of my funeral—the only person who showed up was a character based on himself. He wrote that it was very sad that nobody else loved me.

Well, it’s going to be nice here today. That’s actually news, in and of itself. Sadly, when it is a nice day in Newfoundland, Ms. Ninja kicks into action. She is making me go on one of her patented Death March Hikes™ later, so if I want to get some work done on the novel (just passed 100,000 words yesterday!) I best make this quick.

• Literary fiction with happy endings? Aren’t those books all by the same guy: Anonymous?
• Check in with Irish booksellers to see what’s being read;
• 1-star Amazon reviews of Flannery O’Connor;
• Orwell Prize shortlist looks like Booker Prize shortlist;
• Bloomsbury (like everyone) is hoping digital will offset print sales;
• The reason your wife thinks you don’t do enough is this guy;
• If you’re going to write only one SciFi story in your life, you might as well nail it, like EM Forster did;
• Manitoba book award winners;
• Waterstones launches digital tools for staff in lockdown;

Stunning new article in Popular Science. Man, that is some surprising research right there! Now, now. Let’s not be snobs. I mean, all the time. PopSci is for not for the people like us. It’s for armchair science types who like to join party conversations with “Well, actually…” Hey, wait. I know quite a few literary types like that too. Hmm. Lot’s to think about today….

Science has found that reading is essential for a healthy brain. We already know reading is good for children’s developing noggins: A study of twins at the University of California at Berkeley found that kids who started reading at an earlier age went on to perform better on certain intelligence tests, such as analyses of their vocabulary size.

Other studies show that reading continues to develop the brains of adults. One 2012 Stanford University study, where people read passages of Jane Austen while inside an MRI, indicates that different types of reading exercise different parts of your brain. As you get older, another study suggests, reading might help slow down or even halt cognitive decline.

Did you know The Stranger is organizing silent group reads to feel less lonely? I find this horrifying. I struggle to make sure people I don’t know have very curated access to my life. The last thing I need is a rogues gallery of rejected Hollywood Squares participants watching me nod off in my ratty sweater by the fire. Some things are sacred, even when I’m lonely. Reading time is one of them.

My silent reading party begins the same way every week, promptly at 6 p.m., with the now very familiar initiation of a Zoom call. A piano player’s hands appear in close-up among the gallery of boxes on my screen. His set list, a mix of Eric Satie and Radiohead instrumentals, will be the only sound. Like the windows of a New York City apartment building at night, other boxes soon come to life. People are in their homes, on their couches or in bed, all with a book. A hundred, then two hundred, absorbed in their reading, muted.

There’s a gray-haired woman at her kitchen table, more daydreaming than reading. There are couples, some eating bowls of pasta; a mother and daughter snuggling on a sofa; a woman petting her dog in front of a fireplace; a young man and woman sitting in armchairs dressed in a suit and sequin gown, martinis in their free hands. One week, I counted five cats, nine dogs and 22 glasses of wine. Inside one unforgettable box was a woman lying on her red leather couch, her book resting on her chest and her eyes closed — she’d fallen asleep. This lasts two hours. It’s mesmerizing, found performance art.