Alex Boyd's Blog, page 18

G8

This isn't the light we wanted, the weather

we're supposed to be having.  But people

never do anything but talk about it.  We

put all our little fingertips in the sky

and changed the climate – those are your

fingerprints on the moon, and mine.  We

made room for these men, appointments

moving like flocks of birds down the calendar.

The police get sweeping new powers to sweep

us away, and we hope this particular

patchwork of men will give a little thought

to the little people, some blank-eyed woman

behind ...

NPR update: Rick Patrick, and other news

Northern Poetry Review takes a tour up north alongside Rick Patrick to promote his new book, The Stonehaven Poems.

This Ain't the Rosedale Library would appreciate your support, as they detail in a message on their site.

Finally, there's something new and Boyd-ish in the Globe. I'm glad to have found a way to encourage people to read one of my favourite writers.

Best Canadian Essays: The Business of Saving the Earth

Best Canadian Essays 2010 is taking shape, but for the moment I'd like to take a look back at Best Canadian Essays 2009. First appearing in The Walrus, "The Business of Saving the Earth," by Chris Wood concerns, among other ideas, ecological economists assigning value to irreplaceable biological factories. Here are the first two paragraphs:

"When I was a boy, our family owned a summer cottage on Georgian Bay. It was a small, glass-fronted box set on a sweep of grey-pink granite scoured smooth ...

Essay: In Defence of Graffiti

There are two types of graffiti: one rambling, obscure, and sometimes offensive, the other more tangible, more political and accessible.  Whatever negative associations people sometimes have of graffiti and whatever steps are taken against it are usually the result of a perception based on the first kind.  But I believe there are often enough examples of the second kind to demonstrate that graffiti deserves more consideration.  If, after all, there is any value to it, then it deserves...

One Question Interview: Michael Bryson

Michael Bryson has published a number of short story collections over the years, most recently The Lizard (2009) and new this year, the self-published How Many Girlfriends?

What made you consider self-publishing your new book?

Alex, I was going to begin with a wind-up about the evils of multinational corporations and the need for a rigid defense of creative individualism, but the truth is much simpler. I had a book-length worth of material on my hard drive, and it pleases me to get it out in...

One Question Interview: Steve McOrmond

Steve McOrmond has written three books of poems, most recently The Good News About Armageddon. The book launches Thursday, Jun 10th at Mitzi's Sister in Toronto, 1554 Queen St W, 7pm.

To what extent is your book inspired by larger trends like climate change, and to what extent is it more personal observation?

The Good News about Armageddon is informed by trends and dire predictions about ecological and socioeconomic collapse, by collective anxieties about the end of the world. In these poems...

Review: How the Blessed Live

Originally published in The Danforth Review, 2002

The first sentence in How the Blessed Live stretches out like a cat: "Beyond a winding ribbon of sand, the water of English Bay supports mammoth bellies of cargo ships." The first novel by Susannah M Smith is a carefully crafted book. Her main difficulty, as is the case with possibly all such novels, is to develop character and plot that stand out and aren't buried somewhere under poetic observation. At this, the book succeeds, though it takes ...

One Question Interview: Rebecca Rosenblum

Rebecca Rosenblum is the author of the acclaimed book of shorts stories Once, and has more recently published Road Trips, with Frog Hollow Press.

What do you think is the enduring appeal of road trip stories?

First the writerly answer — Flannery O'Connor said stories should begin with a knock at the door — sometimes that means a new character coming *in* to start the events of the story, but it can also mean the main characters going *out* to a new place to kick things off. I like having...

Review: When I Was Young and In My Prime

Originally published in The Danforth Review, 2005.

American writer Barry Yourgrau begins his stories as concisely as "I go to sea.  For various reasons, I fall overboard."  His modern fables are sharp and amusing, but suffer a little from a kind of self-conscious cleverness.  Alayna Munce, in writing When I Was Young and In My Prime, demonstrates she's no less interested in being concise and in the scattered, essential moments — the stepping-stones in a life.  It's only fair to say the two...

One Question Interview: Triny Finlay

Triny Finlay was born in Melbourne, Australia and grew up in Toronto. Her most recent poetry collection is called Histories Haunt Us.

The title seems like the love-child of a biography and Poe story.  Do you believe in ghosts, either in the conventional or unconventional sense of the word?

Oh, this is a really complex question. The book is indeed about being haunted by the past, and there are lots of ghosts in there. It started with a story about my great-grandmother, who is long dead. There...