Personal

I was informed today that I won the UW English Society Creative Writing Award for prose. I submitted the same story for which I won the Tom York award. The awards ceremony is on Monday afternoon.

I should have posted about this on the fourth, when it happened, but I’ve been having difficulty organizing my thoughts. I think everything’s straight in my mind now. I met Guy Gavriel Kay recently when he was guest lecturer for a Forms of Fantasy class here at UW. The lecture was meant to be on the tools of the fantasy writer, and to a certain extent it was, but he spent most of the lecture discussing his book, Tigana. I had not read the book (and I still haven’t finished it), but I did have a question in mind. Since it’s well-known that Kay’s books are thinly veiled historical fictions, I asked him to comment on the ethics of using historical facts as source material for literature. I was rewarded with a long and confident answer. Kay once gave a lecture (later printed in issue 108 of Queen’s Quarterly—you can… Continue Reading →

Author and former editor of Broken Pencil Hal Niedzviecki gave a reading on campus this afternoon. Professor Gary Draper, who organizes the Canada Council-funded readings, had a class to teach, and could not meet Niedzviecki at the front entrance. Since I was loitering about doing not much of anything, Professor Draper asked if I would meet Niedzviecki and show him around/keep him amused for twenty minutes or so before the reading. St. Jerome’s, the associate college where the reading was held, is pretty dull as far as buildings go, so there wasn’t much to see. The three of us (Niedzviecki brought a friend) talked about reading habits, current affairs on campus, and Concrete Forest, the anthology of fiction by young Canadian authors Niedzviecki edited a few years ago. He was very polite, funny, and all around seemed like a really nice guy. He was also an excellent reader and a… Continue Reading →

Last night UW‘s English Society held a Bawdy House at the Walper Pub in Kitchener. It was the first reading I’ve attended in which I’ve actually read rather than simply been read to. I read two poems, “Jessica” and “A Portrait of the Poet’s Birthing-Bed,” and a newly completed short story called “Love in the Age of Insecurity,” which was very much in keeping with the spirit of the Bawdy House, and went over quite well. The audience laughed in all the right places, and gave me a very flattering amount of applause and post-reading kudos. I hope to attend more of these in the future.

Today I received a letter from Saint Paul’s United College informing me that my story, “A Story With No Title Whatever”, won this past year’s Tom York Memorial Short Story Writing Award. I will be given a cash award of $300 at the Scholarship and Awards Community Dinner, on February 26th. As you can well imagine, I am very pleased, and will most likely be insufferably full of myself for the next several days.

I found, quite by chance (I was actually in search of a copy of A Tale of Two Cities, by the illustrious Mr. Dickens) copies of the first three issues of McSweeney’s, which I purchased for a price which I can only define as exorbitant, but which of course I paid, though I can ill afford it. I am confident that I will be repaid by the contents of the magazines. For those of you not familiar with the literary journal, I’m not sure how to describe it. Comically earnest? Sincerely ironic? It defies classification, except in terms of its intended audience, who are generally speaking wealthy white kids just out of college who think they know more than they do. This is why you will find the work of the talented but abnoxious David Foster Wallace creeping about its pages. Despite its best efforst, McSweeney’s is actually quite good,… Continue Reading →

I was going through a box of old books before going to bed last night, and in my copy of the old Book of Common Prayer I found a bookmark that looks older than I am, in fact almost as old as my father. The bookmark, printed for a store in Fort Frances called The Book Stop, expresses a fine holiday sentiment, and I would like to share it with you. Why Books Are Nice Presents They don’t require batteries They don’t give you a hangover Easy to assemble and operate Re-usable over and over No calories Available in a large variety of sizes and colour No messy maintenance Nothing to clean up when you finish They don’t make horrible noises They don’t wilt and die Books are excellent gifts. Every year I receive them with open arms, and every year I give more books as gifts than anything else… Continue Reading →