Border Lines

" [...] Ford wants us to imagine, we live at the mercy of larger forces, forces outside ourselves, forces that determine who we are. And yet, he insists by phone from his home in East Boothbay, Maine, that's not the case — or not exactly, anyway. 'Growing up in Mississippi,' he recalls, 'and being told that this defined me, set me on a path away from place as generative. When I started writing, I took the Toulouse-Lautrec attitude that place is background scenery. I didn't want the place I came from to be responsible for me.'
     What Ford is getting at is a dual set of burdens: that of Southern history — '[W]e lived in an absurd racist society,' he told the Paris Review in 1996 — and of the Southern literary tradition, which, encompassing William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers, left him feeling 'there was no place here for me.' With his new novel, Canada (Ecco: 420 pp., $27.99), however, he has come to acknowledge that the issue of place is perhaps less clear-cut, more deterministic, than he may have thought. [...]
     The book, which takes place primarily in Montana and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, is a return, of sorts; set in summer and fall 1960, it is narrated by 15-year-old Dell Parsons, who must learn to fend for himself after his parents are arrested for robbing a bank."
— David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
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"No haircuts just before traveling. No talking about living authors."

Mavis Gallant (from: Granta)

"I have never read or heard about anything to do with the writing of fiction that fits, exactly, my own experience, and I now believe it must be difficult. If fiction grows out of the layers of time, memory, imagination and invention, it ought to be possible to dig into the foundation and analyze each element, down to the bedrock. But the truth is that it resists analysis, all but the most shallow and humdrum, and cannot be tested or measured or, really, classified and contained.
     Once, it must have been at about 1992, when I happened to be working all day, every day, on a story set in the Paris of 1953, I was stunned and bewildered to step outside and discover the shape of the cars, the casual clothing and clean facades of the 1990s. This shock – a true shock, for it brought me to a standstill – lasted no more than a couple of seconds. Had it gone on I might have believed that part of my mind had been severed and sent adrift. As it was, I accepted it as a fragment of the power of memory to influence time."
— Mavis Gallant, Granta
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"[...] It was 1994, and I was in my second year at Washington College. Located in Chestertown, Maryland, the school is well-known for its Rose O’Neill Literary House, which has hosted hundreds of authors and poets over the past thirty years. Robert Day, founder and former director of the Literary House Press, loves to talk about the college’s literary pedigree. His story of how Allen Ginsberg once tried to levitate Bunting Hall is rivaled only by the legend of James Dickey’s drunken, angry, naked streak up and down Washington Avenue. Indeed, Lit House mythology and the lure of the Sophie Kerr Prize were the primary reasons I attended Washington College.
     During my sophomore year, the college invited Mavis Gallant to Sophie Kerr Weekend, an event where prospective students participate in a weekend writing workshop with a famous author. At the time, I was taking a class with Bob Day in which we read Gallant’s Across the Bridge. I loved the book, and so when Day asked for a volunteer to pick the author up at the airport, I jumped at the chance.
     Unfortunately, I didn’t have a car—the single requirement for the job. The only one I could think to borrow belonged to Steve Kim, an extremely tall Asian kid who’d driven down to the Eastern Shore all the way from Alaska. Steve’s half-painted boat of a Buick (or maybe it was a Pontiac Grand Prix) was the QE2 of beat-up pieces of shit—but it would have to do."
— B. E. Hopkins, Translated from the Gibberish
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Get all of Mavis Gallant's books here...

"Here's my baby... now tear it apart. Please."

The first page of George Orwells's Nineteen Eighty-Four (from: Wikipedia)

"We have witnessed, in the past 15 years, the close of an era of great editors such as Diana Athill, Jenny Uglow, John Blackwell and Charles Monteith; they seem to have been replaced by more modest souls who often spot the literals but dare not open their mouths regarding more substantial matters. Perhaps they are ill-equipped, or lack the gravitas to be heeded when they do?
     But this over-simplifies what actually happens. Writers who fiercely insist that their publishers print exactly what they have submitted will often have subjected their work to the scrutiny of trusted readers, whose judgments they are prepared to accept. I suspect Ian McEwan is not much edited at Cape, but he and Craig Raine read each other's work before its final submission, forensically tweezering cliches as they go. Surely it is better to enlist the opinion of one's most respected peers, than that of a house editor, however much one admires their acuity?
     Most of us, though, do both. After all, one wants to publish the very best version of the text that is possible. If anyone – friend, relative, fellow writer, editor – can improve my work by as little (or as much) as the necessary substitution of a semi-colon for a comma, I am grateful to them. Editing is what we need, and if we have any sense at all, what we want. That's pretty obvious, isn't it?"
— Rick Gekoski, The Guardian
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"The rumblings about editing that have reached me out here in my small seaside village boil down to one thing; time. Editors and agents have less time nowadays to devote to the actual editorial process and the manuscript itself. And because of this, manuscripts need to arrive in pristine form because in many cases, they won’t be thoroughly edited. Editors are looking for complete works rather than partials and they are more critical in their assessments. They want it ready to go. For many, the time is just not there to devote to a brand new writer and their book. This is a sea change from years back. Authors that have been in the business a long time will probably tell you they spend less time than in the past talking with their editor about the quality of the writing. If messing with the book is going to take up time but won’t in the end, contribute to selling more copies, then it isn’t always done. Sales and marketing and publicity plans can be a larger focus for an editor. Editors are encouraged to focus on new acquisitions and how to get the best talent. Who can they lure away? What marketing gimmicks are working? Editors can spend more time in meetings than at their desks. Free time for some only comes late at night."
— Caroline Tolley, Writer Unboxed
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May 27, 2012 — six of the best

Congratulations

The Festival Writing Competition winners who were in attendance at the Elora Writers' Festival on May 27 to receive their prizes—and of course a rousing round of applause. Mary Ellen Sullivan, whose poem From This Place, won first place in Category 1 - Poetry, came all the way from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

For a complete listing of competition results, go here...

Ray Bradbury: August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012

"Ray Bradbury died in Los Angeles, California, on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91, after a 'lengthy illness,' coincidentally during a rare transit of Venus. The New York Times' obituary stated that Bradbury was 'the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream.' The Los Angeles Times credited Bradbury with the ability 'to write lyrically and evocatively of lands an imagination away, worlds he anchored in the here and now with a sense of visual clarity and small-town familiarity.'
     Bradbury's grandson, Danny Karapetian, stated that Bradbury's works had 'influenced so many artists, writers, teachers, scientists, and it's always really touching and comforting to hear their stories.' The Washington Post hallmarked several modern day technologies that Bradbury had envisioned much earlier in his writing, such as the idea of banking ATMs and earbuds and Bluetooth headsets from Fahrenheit 451, and the concepts of artificial intelligence within I Sing the Body Electric!."
— Wikipedia
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"His influence can be seen and felt in the labyrinths of Lost, in back episodes of X-Files — in fact, every time you see a movie or TV show that shades from nostalgia slowly toward terror or wonder, you’re seeing a little bit of Ray Bradbury. For six decades, his name was enough to tip you to the reading experience awaiting you below the byline. When you saw it, you knew you were going to be taken someplace you’d never been, shown things you hadn’t seen, given vision of a future or a past or another world just enough like your own to give a smile of recognition, just different enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. [...]
     In all his fiction, Bradbury’s concerns were with his characters, rather than with whatever science-fictional idea those characters were arrayed against. There’s more mood than melodrama in his work, more filigree than flash. In some ways, his work anticipated the character-driven concerns of Philip K. Dick in the later '50s, or, in the '60s, Harlan Ellison or Ursula K. LeGuin or Robert Silverberg. Stephen King clearly learned Bradbury's lessons, particularly his early stories such as The Body.
     If he is best remembered today as a science fiction writer, it's not only because his sci-fi was among his finest work, but also because he brought to science fiction the gifts and concerns of a mainstream literary writer."
— Keith Ferrell, ReadWriteWeb
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See a related article here...

The Best of a Bad Lot

From: The School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, UBC

"[...] And unlike musicians, authors are not commonly charged for production expenses.
     A recording contract typically requires musicians to sell enough to pay for all the production, publicity, and marketing before they see a penny in royalties. In publishing, the publisher pays these expenses out of its pocket, and the author isn’t expected to pay it back.
     Finally, authors’ advances are (usually) only charged to their current books, or sometimes across a single deal. Unlike musicians, who are often required to pay back shortfalls from their last project before they can start earning on their latest one, authors’ balance sheets are zeroed out with each new book. If your last book tanks, your next book usually doesn’t have to pay back its advance. Publishing doesn’t do debt slavery."
— Cory Doctorow, Publishers Weekly
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