By Maurice Mierau
My year-in-review column comes a couple of weeks later than last year’s, and covers a year that had several big landmarks for this magazine. In addition to publishing more than 80 reviews of Canadian books, many of them coming from small presses, we once again covered independent Winnipeg theatre, and published interviews with working writers across the country, including YA authors. In addition we continued to publish new poems and essays, and had a special focus on poetry in our fall issue.
In July we published Spencer Gordon’s essay “Goodbye to All That,” his wry, disturbing, funny, prolix adieu to his career as a creative writing instructor. It was by far the longest piece to appear in TWR, and also the most popular, logging over 4,500 unique visitors who presumably devoured this wonderful piece. I’m glad to see that length doesn’t scare our readers. If that essay is all you know of Gordon, you should drop everything RIGHT NOW and buy his terrific book of short stories, Cosmo (Coach House Books).
Then way back in January, TWR featured Pasha Malla’s 27 numbered paragraphs, where he reflected wisely, profanely, and eloquently on the Canada Council’s National Forum on the Literary Arts. This essay also attracted many readers and comments from across the country.
The brilliant Jeff Bursey continued to write insightful and expansive columns on experimental fiction from all over the world, like this one on Larry Fondation from last spring.
Anita Daher, well-known Winnipeg YA writer, succeeded Marsha Skrypuch as our new YA columnist. Here she is in sparkling conversation with Maggie DeVries.
Michelle Palansky became our new Winnipeg theatre critic, with a discerning eye and a quick pen (especially at deadline time!). Read her here on Shakespeare in the Ruins’ summer 2015 production of Antony and Cleopatra.
Shawn Syms, who is now one of four new associate editors at Winnipeg review, did a memorable interview with Vancouver short story writer Chelsea Rooney.
And also back in the summer, Barbara Romanik, fiction writer and urban observer extraordinaire, wrote a column on the ghosts of the Nutty Club candy factories in Winnipeg. You can also find her in our current issue writing about under-noticed Winnipeg modernist buildings.
As always I’m proud of the poetry that we publish at TWR, and this year we were lucky enough to feature, among others, poems by the very talented Nyla Matuk and John Wall Barger.
In the fall I posted this editorial introducing both our co-issue published with CV2 magazine, where we ran ten reviews of contemporary Canadian poetry, and TWR’s succession plan.
Shane Neilson’s review essay on Michael Lista’s The Scarborough was exactly the kind of review critics like Jason Guriel have called for (see The Pigheaded Soul): the piece assumes you can write a negative review of a book of poems the same way you can write one about a Hollywood film. Neither has to be an act of animal cruelty; instead the critic assumes that in any art form created for the public, regardless of that audience’s size, one can have an open and honest discussion of a work’s merits.
Jeffery Donaldson wrote a remarkable essay on John Thompson’s collected poems. Other reviews I’d single out would include Stevie Howell on Liz Howard, and Michael Prior on John Wall Barger.
Alison Gillmore continues to write some of the best reviews of Canadian fiction for us that you can read anywhere; here’s her review of Martin John, and she also wrote on Mark Anthony Jarman‘s latest.
I hope that Josh Rioux can write for us again, because his piece on Lynn Crosbie’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night was the kind of review that makes you sprint for the bookstore (or the iPad).
And speaking of young writers, Carlyn Schellenberg managed to say more about Joan Thomas’s bravura comic novel The Opening Sky than any of the Toronto critics. Carlyn is also part of our new editorial team.
***
One of the occupational hazards of running a book review forum is feeling jaded about the ephemeral nature of so many new books (yes, that includes so-called literary offerings!). Three books crossed my desk in the last month that made me feel like an idealist again, and they should all get more attention.
The first is Barbara Nickel’s new children’s picture book, A Boy Asked the Wind, with illustrations by Gillian Newland (Red Deer Press). In case you don’t know, Barbara Nickel is that rarest of writers, a contemporary poet who is also a virtuoso at rhyme, which in English (a rhyme-poor language) means you have to come up with a lot of partial or slant rhyming. Here’s the opening stanzas of A Boy Asked the Wind as an example:
A boy asked the wind, “Where do you live?”
And the wind up high in the flag shivered,
the wind down low in the grass rivered
over his toes to scatter the leaves.
The other two books I’ll mention are both ghost stories published in charming miniature paperbacks (10 x 15 cm) with illustrations by Seth. They come from Biblioasis, a small Canadian press with an increasingly big reputation for Giller-listed fiction, but what I love about these books is their whimsy. No jury at a granting body is likely to bless publisher Dan Wells with bonus points for a new edition of a Charles Dickens ghost story, or for a reprint of the more obscure A.M. Burrage, whose ghost story One Who Saw first saw print in 1931. But the fact is these make fabulous gifts—they fit in a shirt pocket, look elegant, have a typeface that’s easy on the eyes, sell for about seven dollars, and are really fun stories. Birthday, anyone?
2015 Redux with Some Random Notes on Publishing
Columns
By Maurice Mierau
My year-in-review column comes a couple of weeks later than last year’s, and covers a year that had several big landmarks for this magazine. In addition to publishing more than 80 reviews of Canadian books, many of them coming from small presses, we once again covered independent Winnipeg theatre, and published interviews with working writers across the country, including YA authors. In addition we continued to publish new poems and essays, and had a special focus on poetry in our fall issue.
In July we published Spencer Gordon’s essay “Goodbye to All That,” his wry, disturbing, funny, prolix adieu to his career as a creative writing instructor. It was by far the longest piece to appear in TWR, and also the most popular, logging over 4,500 unique visitors who presumably devoured this wonderful piece. I’m glad to see that length doesn’t scare our readers. If that essay is all you know of Gordon, you should drop everything RIGHT NOW and buy his terrific book of short stories, Cosmo (Coach House Books).
Then way back in January, TWR featured Pasha Malla’s 27 numbered paragraphs, where he reflected wisely, profanely, and eloquently on the Canada Council’s National Forum on the Literary Arts. This essay also attracted many readers and comments from across the country.
The brilliant Jeff Bursey continued to write insightful and expansive columns on experimental fiction from all over the world, like this one on Larry Fondation from last spring.
Anita Daher, well-known Winnipeg YA writer, succeeded Marsha Skrypuch as our new YA columnist. Here she is in sparkling conversation with Maggie DeVries.
Michelle Palansky became our new Winnipeg theatre critic, with a discerning eye and a quick pen (especially at deadline time!). Read her here on Shakespeare in the Ruins’ summer 2015 production of Antony and Cleopatra.
Shawn Syms, who is now one of four new associate editors at Winnipeg review, did a memorable interview with Vancouver short story writer Chelsea Rooney.
And also back in the summer, Barbara Romanik, fiction writer and urban observer extraordinaire, wrote a column on the ghosts of the Nutty Club candy factories in Winnipeg. You can also find her in our current issue writing about under-noticed Winnipeg modernist buildings.
As always I’m proud of the poetry that we publish at TWR, and this year we were lucky enough to feature, among others, poems by the very talented Nyla Matuk and John Wall Barger.
In the fall I posted this editorial introducing both our co-issue published with CV2 magazine, where we ran ten reviews of contemporary Canadian poetry, and TWR’s succession plan.
Shane Neilson’s review essay on Michael Lista’s The Scarborough was exactly the kind of review critics like Jason Guriel have called for (see The Pigheaded Soul): the piece assumes you can write a negative review of a book of poems the same way you can write one about a Hollywood film. Neither has to be an act of animal cruelty; instead the critic assumes that in any art form created for the public, regardless of that audience’s size, one can have an open and honest discussion of a work’s merits.
Jeffery Donaldson wrote a remarkable essay on John Thompson’s collected poems. Other reviews I’d single out would include Stevie Howell on Liz Howard, and Michael Prior on John Wall Barger.
Alison Gillmore continues to write some of the best reviews of Canadian fiction for us that you can read anywhere; here’s her review of Martin John, and she also wrote on Mark Anthony Jarman‘s latest.
I hope that Josh Rioux can write for us again, because his piece on Lynn Crosbie’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night was the kind of review that makes you sprint for the bookstore (or the iPad).
And speaking of young writers, Carlyn Schellenberg managed to say more about Joan Thomas’s bravura comic novel The Opening Sky than any of the Toronto critics. Carlyn is also part of our new editorial team.
***
One of the occupational hazards of running a book review forum is feeling jaded about the ephemeral nature of so many new books (yes, that includes so-called literary offerings!). Three books crossed my desk in the last month that made me feel like an idealist again, and they should all get more attention.
A boy asked the wind, “Where do you live?”
And the wind up high in the flag shivered,
the wind down low in the grass rivered
over his toes to scatter the leaves.