The Porcupine's Quill
 

News and Events



 
For more information about any of these events, please e-mail the Porcupine's Quill.


  John Metcalf PQL editor John Metcalf has entered the ring this season with two new books of his own: a memoir, An Aesthetic Underground (published by Thomas Allen), and a novella, Forde Abroad (published by the Porcupine's Quill). Metcalf will be reading at the 15th annual Eden Mills Writers' Festival on September 7th, 2003.

`John Metcalf often comes as close to the baffling, painful comedy of human experience as a writer can get.' - Alice Munro


  Lorna Jackson
  Photo by Tom Henry
Also at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival, watch for Lorna Jackson, who will be launching her debut novel, A Game to Play on the Tracks. The novel follows the story of booze-loose and too-smart singer Arden, and her failed return to the life of country music and the British Columbia bar scene. She has a new baby, some unhealed hurts, and a husband, Nichol, who is stuck in boyhood and thinks and talks in bad poems. Arden doesn't survive the road, and the story belongs then to Nichol and Roy the Boy, those left behind to search the west coast for a good home, a good life, a meaningful history. Without Arden, Nichol tries a series of goofed-up love affairs and real estate blunders, and Roy grows up questioning a fallen pastoral world that isn't always kind to children, haunted by his long-gone mother and her big-city tunes.

  Anne Denoon
  Photo by Richard Magder
Anne Denoon will be reading from Back Flip: A Novel, at the Toronto Reference Library on Tuesday, September 9th, as part of the `Swingin' Yorkville' author series. Back Flip is set in Toronto in 1967. It zooms in on a jittery, tempestuous little group of artists, dealers, collectors and critics whose lives intersect professionally and romantically. In a review in The Toronto Star, Barbara Carey writes: 'The ensemble cast of this first novel ... is ... constantly on the make - for sex, social advantage, financial gain or some combination thereof. In other words, they're exceedingly entertaining.... The moral of the story is that there isn't any - and that's part of the wicked charm of this satirical romp, which mixes insights on the politics of influence and of intimacy with a gossipy, buoyant insouciance.' The reading will start at 7:30 pm. Denoon will be sharing the stage with Ray Robertson, author of Moody Food.

  Mary-Lou Zeitoun
 
Mary-Lou Zeitoun will be appearing alongside Rachel Guido deVries, as part of the Pagitica Reading Series, on Tuesday, September 9. The reading will be held at the Jersey Giant Pub and Restaurant, 71 Front Street East, Toronto, and will begin at 8 pm. Admission is free.

Zeitoun's novel, 13, was named one of the top ten books of 2002 by Now Magazine. Now reviewer Susan G. Cole wrote, `Zeitoun gets right into the head of a teenager growing up in 1980 in this kick-ass comic novel....'


  Margaret Avison
  Photo by Joan Eichner
On Thursday, October 2nd, at the University of Western Ontario, Margaret Avison will be launching volume one of Always Now, her collected poems (Porcupine's Quill, 2003). Avison will read in the Arts Faculty Lounge at 1 pm; a reception will follow. For more information, please contact Manina Jones at UWO.

Margaret Avison was the recipient of this year's Griffin Poetry Prize. The judges referred to her as a `national treasure', saying, `For many decades she has forged a way to write, against the grain, some of the most humane, sweet and profound poetry of our time.'


  Judith McCormack
  Photo by Edie Steiner
In a recent Globe and Mail review of The Rule of Last Clear Chance, Jim Bartley wrote: `... any writer with the impulse to put burnt sugar and the Highway Traffic Act in an opening sentence is a rare bird. Judith McCormack emerges as a skilled storyteller unlike any I've encountered.'

McCormack will be reading at the Pagitica Reading Series at the Jersey Giant Pub and Restaurant (71 Front Street East, Toronto), on October 14, 2003. McCormack will also appear as part of the LitLive reading series in Hamilton on November 2.



 

Awards and Nominations

Congratulations to the following PQL authors:



  P. K. Page
  Photo by Barbara Pedrick

Planet Earth, Selected Poems by P. K. Page, was shortlisted for this year's Griffin Poetry Prize. The book was published by the Porcupine's Quill in the fall of 2002, and edited by PQL Poetry Editor Eric Ormsby. In his introduction to the volume, Ormsby writes, `It has become customary in Canada to describe P. K. Page as ``distinguished'', but that epithet betrays her. P. K. Page is simply too vivacious, too cunning, too elusive, to be monumentalized. She is in fact the supreme escape artist of our literature.... One of the finest and most distinctive Canadian poets, P. K. Page is no provincial. She is a citizen not merely of the world, but of the earth.'


  Ian McGillis
  Photo by Terry Byrnes
Congratulations to Ian McGillis, author of A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry, which was shortlisted for this year's Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.

`If J.D. Salinger or Mark Twain had lived in Edmonton, they might have written A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry. Prepare to slip into the mind of a nine-year-old. Prepare for a trip like Huckleberry Finn's, except here it is not a river that is travelled but a single day in the life of little Neil McDonald. Prepare for a story that is simple, deep, psychologically dead-on, minutely observed yet worldly - and very funny.'
    - Yann Martel, winner of the Booker Prize


  Mary Swan
  Photo by Alex Porter
Mary Swan won America's most prestigious award for short fiction, the O. Henry Award (2001), for her story `The Deep', first published in The Malahat Review. The story attracted the attention of Random House USA, Simon & Schuster and Little Brown. The Porcupine's Quill published The Deep as a stand-alone novella and released it in Canada in September, 2002, at the fourteenth annual Eden Mills Writers' Festival. The book was then shortlisted for the Canada-Caribbean Region of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (2003), `Best First Book' category. We congratulate Swan on this string of successes! Watch for a new collection of stories by Swan, to be published by the Porcupine's Quill in the fall of 2003.


  Norm Sibum
  Photo by Mary Harman
Norm Sibum is the recipient of this year's A. M. Klein Award for Poetry from the Quebec Writers' Federation, for his collection Girls and Handsome Dogs.

`A world is glimpsed from the corner of his eye, a multiplicity of voices is briefly overheard. From these Sibum has made a rough, durable fabric; he is a Browning for our times while at the same time having developed a voice that is completely his own.'
    - Marius Kociejowski


  Stephen Henighan
  Henighan at the Miller's Tale
Stephen Henighan's collection of essays When Words Deny the World was nominated for the 2002 Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. The nomination was a fitting culmination of the months of media attention garnered by Henighan's take on Canadian literary culture:

`One this year's jury did get right is When Words Deny the World, by Stephen Henighan, a novelist, critic and University of Guelph professor. His essays on Canadian writing are thought-provoking and irritating almost in equal measure, especially in Toronto literary circles. Some of the response has been absurdly excessive.... That only serves to prove the author's argument that the `TorLit' establishment ... is as insecure as it is commercially driven and lacking in good taste.'
    - Brian Bethune, Maclean's


  Tim Inkster
  Photo by John Haney
At the 14th annual Eden Mills Writers' Festival, PQL publisher Tim Inkster was awarded the Janice E. Handford Small Press Award, presented by the Organization of Book Publishers of Ontario:

`Since founding the Porcupine's Quill in the small town of Erin, Ontario in 1974, Tim Inkster has become a key figure in Canada's small-press movement. A rare amalgam of publisher, designer and printer, he has combined an adventurous editorial instinct with a passion for imaginative design and fine, uncompromising book-making.'
    - O. B. P. O.


 

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Contents © 2002 The Porcupine's Quill, Inc. - Updated: 29 July 2003 by Amanda Jernigan
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