In Review: The Week of October 29th

On the Blog

~ We’re not done reading and sharing work by Indigenous authors, but our October #ReadIndigenous celebration ended this week with four incredible reads: Jules Arita Koostachin’s Unearthing Secrets, Gathering Truths (Kegedonce Press); David Groulx’s A Difficult Beauty (Wolsak and Wynn); Jenny Ferguson’s Border Markers (NeWest Press); and Lee Maracle’s My Conversations With Canadians (Book*hug). ~ In her essay “This long road to literary recognition,” Sto:lo author Lee Maracle talks about the importance of Indigenous stories and literary recognition for Canada’s Indigenous authors: It has taken almost 50 years for Canada to accept our storytelling and poetry as valid, as literature.”~ We spooked things up on All Lit Up with a top 10 list of books that go bump in the night. ~ We sat down with poet Bill Stenson about writing rituals and why he doesn’t believe in writer’s block: “If a carpenter stops building houses people don’t say: ‘Oh, poor fella. He’s suffering from builder’s block.’” ~ Our #fridayreads was The Shining Fragments by debut author Robin Blackburn McBride (Guernica Editions), a page-turning mix of In the Skin of a Lion and Angela’s Ashes. 

Around the Web 

~ Calgary’s gorgeous new central library is so rad Chris Hadfield landed to help with the big launch. ~ Thanks to Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler tool it’s now easy to scroll through the centuries (as far back as the 12th century!) to see which words were recorded for the very first time. ~ The winners of this year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards included lots of indies, including The Red Word by Sarah Henstra (ECW Press); Wayside Sang by Cecily Nicholson (Talonbooks), Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom by Jordan Tannahill (Playwrights Canada Press); and Descent into Night, translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott (Mawenzi House).  

What Else We’re Reading 

Christen enjoyed Sean Howard’s Ghost Estates (Gaspereau Press) for its “lively poems, inspired by notes scrawled during a sabbatical presentation by Dr. Jan Curtis on ‘Orpheus in Ireland, Seamus Heaney and the Poet’s Task, and Other Matters.’”