FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Great writing, chatty gossip from The Porcupine's Quill
The Porcupine's Quill Reader, edited by Tim Inkster and John Metcalf.
Porcupine's Quill, 224 pages. $16.95.
Review by Harry VandervlistThe Porcupine's Quill Reader celebrates and promotes the work of a small publishing house in the village of Eden Mills, Ontario. The fact that authors published here have had four Governor General Award nominations in four years suggest that editor John Metcalf and publisher Tim Inkster must be doing something right. The Reader contains 20 short stories and assorted gossipy anecdotes and photographs of the authors giving readings and socializing. (And yes, this creates a feeling of being the voyeur at the family picnic, and yes, you might wonder why you would want to be a voyeur there of all places.) Inkster has long been known for quality book design and treats readers to brief arcane chats about typeface selection and paper size. Interesting if you like knowing why some books look and feel so much better than others, easy to skip if you don't.
The tribe of writers represented here never lacks for invention or style. Inbred tales of painful insight and poverty (among, guess who, struggling writers) are mercifully absent. Instead, there are well-crafted stories about things that happen or could happen, and what it's like when they do. In Terry Griggs's story "The Man With the Axe," a dog called Hooligan comes home with someone's wooden leg in his mouth. "What's it look like, is there anything on it?" asks a character. "You mean, like a sock?" replies Hooligan's owner. "No, no, marks, scratches, a bear might have, well, you know."
In Steven Heighton's "The Beautiful Tennesee Waltz," a Canadian teaching English in Japan forlornly seeks a culture bombed into history and replaced with a bar called The American Dream. Gradually he and his Japanese friends lose their mutual infatuations. "At first we had seen each other as spiritual guides to remote Promised Lands, then discovered our maps were obsolete, our purposes at odds." Heighton's character has no more luck learning about The Emperor than he has persuading his hosts that he's not really American.
Russell Smith's "The Janni Bolo Show," an excerpt from his sharp satirical novel How Insensitive, reckons the depth and breadth of Toronto talk-show vacuousness. Meanwhile, a spike-haired bulimic daughter of soul-dead yuppie parents vomits rage and bile in Leon Rooke's story "Muffins." (Rooke is the only author who has also released a genuine vinyl 45 rpm recording of his story.) Come to think of it, the photos and anecdotes in the book are a lot like the copious liner notes and tour photos that came with good old, big old LPs: self-indulgent, but no doubt fantasy fodder for some wannabe writers. Is there such a thing as "air typing?"
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