Book related writing
Wild Horses is rob mclennan’s 21st book of poetry, written while the incredibly prolific Ottawa author spent 2007 as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. Mclennan is a poet of place, always finding his voice out of the material of his surroundings, the continuity of its existence through history. “It’s an Edmonton book,” he says. READ MORE
Anthony De Sa’s first book aptly illustrates a lot of the things I find frustrating about Canadian literature. When you think about Canlit in broad strokes, you find that a huge swath of it is coloured with the same themes, the same tropes. There is something about the popular fiction in this country which recoils from variety. READ MORE
Readers’ threesome A compatible trio of popular reading series awaits in May and June Dutch sound poet Jap Blonk at the A B Series Lying just beneath the thin crust of this city is a wash of amazing literary events that really seem to belong to a different town than the Ottawa we think of…
A sense of purpose Denise Chong’s Egg on Mao recalls a powerful act of defiance Egg on Mao is the memoir of Lu Decheng, a story so intricately twisted and rich that it almost defies the idea of plot and seems to unfold as the vagaries of life do. A spirited bus mechanic in rural…
An Almighty argument Internationally acclaimed spiritual scholar at Writers Fest discusses the modern world and G-O-D Armstrong: “Any idea we have of god is only an approximate knowledge.” Karen Armstrong is one of the world’s most popular and notable commentators on religious affairs. A sentence like this probably wouldn’t strike many of you, but what…
Dry paper Nothing beats a book in autumn Missing Persons by Rob McLennan (Mercury Press) Autumn is a season that more than any other seems devoted to reading. The crispness of leaves reminds you of the firm dryness of paper, the smell of a book lingers sometimes in your memory like that of firewood. Fortunately,…