Stuart Ross's Blog, page 25

One star is golden! I'll win the Griffin!

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew earned one out of five stars on someone's review blog. She says she was unable to write her own "synapsis" of the book, which she found to be a "mis-mash of scenes" ("Some of which don't even make any sense on their own, let alone taken as a whole with the others.")

This might be the best review I'll get — she gave five stars out of five to Stieg Larsson, Robert Sawyer and John Grisham, so obviously I'm doing everything right!

Incidentally, the nominees for the 2011 Griffin Prize were released today. I must reveal that I wrote all of the nominated books, under various pen names. I will accept the award not for myself, but for the employees of Burma-Shave.

Over and out.

Jonathan Ball on SDJ

First daily-newspaper review of Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. And it's Jonathan Ball in the Winnipeg Free Press. Very interesting take on the novel's narrative perspective.

Compelling, but not as good as it should have been
Reviewed by: Jonathan Ball

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew
By Stuart Ross
ECW, 168 pages, $20

THIS tiny literary novel, the first for Ontarian Stuart Ross, explores how the historical trauma of the Holocaust has destroyed the normal processes of cultural memory.
It is tame compared to Ross's previous book, the 2009 short story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. That's not to suggest that Ross, a well-known small-press editor and the author of several books (mostly poetry), hasn't produced a moving and funny novel.

It's just that he's not extending his talents to their limit.

The protagonist and narrator is a Toronto Jewish performance artist now entering his 40s. While reflecting on his life, Ben snags on a childhood memory, his terminally ill mother's assassination of a neo-Nazi leader.

As Ben circles this memory, attempting to square it with other memories of his mother and life, Ross presents his narrative in short, fragmentary chapters that often read like mini-stories, whose interconnections are more thematic than plot-based.

The assassination itself opens the novel. Unlike other poets-turned-novelists, Ross understands the power of both poetry and clear prose. The first sentence is a good example: "To its surprise, the bullet sailed out of the gun my mother clutched unsteadily in both hands, and a moment later the big man's yellow hard hat leapt from his thick head, into the air."

It's the bullet that's surprised, the hard hat that leaps — the objects themselves, the whole world of the memory, taking on life. The child's perspective is tilted in, rather than poured, with "the big man" — Ross resists the temptation to revel in the child's perspective through clunky, condescending stream-of-consciousness, the bane of lesser authors.

When Ross does inhabit the child's voice more fully, he manages it well. Pontificating upon a catfish, the child Ben notes its silent swishes through an ice-cream container: "That's what made it like a cat — the silence and the whiskers."

At stake in Ross's story is not solving the mystery of whether or why Ben's mother killed the neo-Nazi, but how the trauma of the Holocaust is played out in the lives of those with generational ties to the tragedy.

Often, Ben returns to a memory not his own, but his mother's — having snowballs hurled at her as a child because she was Jewish. "What were those snowballs thinking as they flew towards her little curly-haired Jewish head? Was this why their flakes had floated down from the sky like ashes?"

Ross's writing compels, but his story doesn't cohere or build, because the novel lacks shape. Its formal approach — a story told in disjointed fragments of memory and dream — is unmotivated.

Ben has a brother, Jake, who is unable to hold onto or summon his memories due to a medical condition. Instead, they surface with seeming randomness.

Why isn't Jake the main character, the one circling these memories and suffering their impositions, from his inability to truly recall, manage or lose them?

This shift would give Ross's structure more meaning and allow him to pace the novel to the rhythms of Jake's condition.

Jonathan Ball teaches English at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of two poetry collections, the second, Clockfire, recently shortlisted for Manitoba's Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for poetry.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 2, 2011 J9

Over and out.

gnat poe moe

A person said it's National Poetry Month.

I said, "Go read Bill Berkson. Go read Bill Kushner. Go read bill bissett. Go read 'Buffalo Bill' by E.E. Cummings."

Plus write some stupid poem and title it "Stupid Poem."

Over and out.

CloClo

I wrote a story featuring this guy. I wrote it a year or two ago. I am obsessed by him. I will write more stories that feature him.



Over and out.

Another review for SDJ

My novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew has received a second review from an American trade journal. This time it's Booklist. I'm especially happy because the reviewer also liked Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop's Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, translated by my friend Anne McLean.

Ross, Stuart (Author) Apr 2011. 168 p. ECW, paperback, $17.95. (9781770410138).

Poet and avant-garde short-story writer Ross turns to the novel to explore, among other things, notions of Jewish identity and the loss of one's parents. At first glance, this is a mystery of sorts. Ben, the narrator, is trying to figure out whether the memory he has of his late mother shooting a neo-Nazi in the head is real or imagined. Though he "couldn't imagine his mother actually pulling the trigger of a gun, or even knowing how," when he remembers her doing it, then he can imagine it. But Ben is not just a middle-aged Canadian Jew reflecting on his childhood. He is also a performance artist whose professional activities have included eating a thousand donuts, building a sacred stone man out of egg rolls, and sitting in a giant tub of ketchup while people pull his hair until he screams. And so Ross' novel, which is consistently minimalist and nostalgic but also variously touching, hilarious, and sad, frequently challenges (and perhaps distracts) the reader by venturing into the surreal.

— Brendan Driscoll

Over and out.

Ross and Lavery read on Wednesday!

John Lavery and Stuart Ross
An unusual night of fiction (and song)

23 February · 7:30 pm

LeVack Block
88 Ossington Avenue

This is not your typical evening of fiction. I'm telling you.

Join us for this rare joint reading by John Lavery and Stuart Ross.

John will be reading from his widely acclaimed novel, Sandra Beck, and he'll be performing selections from his forthcoming CD, Dignity. He gives readings such as you have never before witnessed.

I'll be reading from Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, his ReLit Prize-winning story collection, as well as some new works, and possibly a preview from his forthcoming novel, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew.

And it's free, damn it!

JOHN LAVERY is the author of two acclaimed story collections, Very Good Butter and You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off (both from ECW Press), and the novel Sandra Beck (Anansi). Very Good Butter was a finalist for the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and Lavery has twice been a finalist in the annual Prism International fiction contest. His stories have appeared in This Magazine, Canadian Forum, the Ottawa Citizen, and the London Spectator, as well as in the Journey Prize Anthology. He lives in Gatineau, Quebec.

STUART ROSS's most recent books are Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books), Dead Cars in Managua (DC Books), and I Cut My Finger (Anvil Press). Buying Cigarettes for the Dog was a finalist for the Alberta Readers' Choice Award and the Alberta Book Publishers Award, and is the 2010 winner of the ReLit Prize in the short-fiction category. Stuart is Fiction & Poetry Editor at This Magazine, and he has his own imprint through Mansfield Press. After half a century in Toronto, Stuart now lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

Over and out.

First review of SDJ

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew went to the printer this week, I think, and now it has received its first review, in the trade publication Publishers Weekly.

02/14/2011 Fiction

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew
Stuart Ross, ECW, $17.95 trade paper (168p) ISBN 978-1-77041-013-8

Ross's slight first novel is composed of brief, somber, funny tales, and begins in Ontario with the narrator's memory of his mother avenging the gas chamber deaths of her Polish relatives by shooting a prominent neo-Nazi in the head. The fantasy of the victim suddenly empowered--his mother killing Rolf Köber as he steps out of a Jewish-owned hardware store, his hardhat spinning "like a dreidl"--becomes a mournful dirge that runs through these nostalgic and grim coming-of-age anecdotes. Both the narrator, Ben, and his mother have been bullied, she as a girl by Christian children, he by an older boy who forces him to destroy the book he's reading. As Ben destroys Black Like Me he thinks, "Now was the time to fight back," a vengeance fantasy that comforts him. Ben's parents die of cancer and his older brother, Jake, loses his memory, then his mind; Ben turns to performance art, reliving childhood traumas in acts called "Stagger" and "Nerve Endings," and often rehearsing fantasies, such as Jimmy Stewart's bell tower pursuit of Kim Novak in Vertigo. These are sharply composed vignettes with a keen sense of timing and humor. (Apr.)

Over and out.

Another stupid book trailer, plus Snowball, Mansfield, Queen's

OK, so I did some book trailers in the fall. A couple of them ended up on Huffington Post, which was pretty thrilling. In one case, my number of "views" went from about 150 to about 3,700.

Here's my new trailer.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=...



Meanwhile, looking at the final final final pages for Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, due out this spring with ECW Press. Don't know what will happen with this book, but I'm curious to find out.

Also working on the new spring titles for Mansfield, both under my "a stuart ross book" imprint: Campfire Radio Rhapsody, the second poetry collection by Robert Earl Stewart of Windsor, and Mongrel, a first novel by Marko Sijan, also of Windsor, though he now lives in Montreal. The two books create a pretty dark image for Detroit's neighbour. And, although I know I'm biased, they are both brilliant books.

My next task is to convince Mansfield publisher Denis De Klerck to put my imprint logo on the back of the book instead of just the copyright page. Right?

Last week, I sent in the stats on my Queen's residency. I had 85 appointments with about 30 different people; presented seven readings; conducted about eight workshops; produced six publications; gave about six readings. I produced three short stories, about a dozen poems, and one personal essay; did the final edits on my novel, too.

I made a lot of very good friends, too.

Over and out.

THE TENT: My New Year Poem

THE TENT

I waited for the next year
to be invented. I took a number.
I passed the time creating
brief theatrical productions
in my head. My head hurt.
I dreamed I was a popular blue
soft drink, a gangly dog cartoon,
a sneaky "u" in American labour.
I dreamed I lived in a big city.

You wake up and you are
in a small town. A building
rings bells, and the lake
is just three minutes away;
the bits touching shore
are covered in ice. Are those ducks
frozen in the lake? No,
they are rocks that look like ducks.
Phew. The relieved townspeople
cluster by Town Hall, squeeze hard,
and the "s" pops out. They are
townpeople now. It is only
one town. It is in Canada.
Twenty Eleven kicks the "s"
down the street, whistling a song
my father liked.

My father never met Twenty Eleven.
My father liked Nelson Eddy, who he also
never met. The song was "Dardanella."
My father and I build a tent
by the water. The water is solid.
We wait. The year is invented.
He teaches me what it can do.


Stuart Ross
1 January 2011

More HuffPost ... and leaving Kingston!

Oh my gosh, what a day! Been packing to leave Kingston, tying up lose ends....

Then I remembered I had to hand in my response to the copy editor with Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. So I wrestled with the final niggling challenges around sun-up and send that in. Then I remembered that I had to get my Hunkamooga column in to sub-Terrain this morning! So I based that out. Then Michael at ECW sent back the typeset pages of Cigarettes for proofreading. How the hell they do that so fast?

Many other odds and ends. And then I just found out that HuffPost has again put up one of my book trailers! What a day!

Over and out.