FFWD Weekly
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Bookends by Harry Vandervlist Spring: it's powerful, dangerous, exhilarating. All those seeds that waited for so long in the frozen ground – boom! – popping up through the thawing earth like explosions. Floods. Storms. Mating. It really is a formidable force that, as Dylan Thomas so memorably put it, through the green fuse drives the flower. And in this first week of spring some forceful human imaginations are flying in, like heavily charged cloud formations, to settle over this unsuspecting little prairie settlement. Watch out, you early-bird golfers. Underground, that's where the blossoms start bulbing their way toward the sun. Probably Hal Niedzviecki wouldn't be excited to hear himself likened to a bulb, but then his embrace of the "underground" culture idea is ambiguous, too. (See last week's profile in these very pages.) So maybe the bulb image doesn't apply. Anyway, he's here on Friday, March 24 at 7:30 p.m. at Pages on Kensington. He edits Broken Pencil magazine, and if you don't know what that is, you really had better show up for this event to get your alt.underground.lit credibility back. He also wrote Smell It, a book of short fiction, and Lurvy, which retells – what else? – Charlotte's Web. Mr. Niedzvecki will be appropriately accompanied by Sheri-D Wilson, author of Swerve, Girl's Guide to Giving Head, and The Sweet Taste of Lightning. Those sweet summer storms, they're coming our way. If you want more storytelling bursting with life and sadness and laughs, acclaimed novelist and playwright Tomson Highway, author of Kiss of the Fur Queen, is at the University of Calgary for a reading this Thursday, March 23, at 8:30 p.m. (Education Building, room 179 – that's the building just east of the bus stops at the south campus entrance). Popular fantasist Guy Gavriel Kay reads from his new novel The Sarantine Mosaic, all about 6th century power struggles, at Pages on Wednesday, March 29 at 7:30 p.m. And if you're wondering what former Calgary Herald columnist Robert Bragg has to say about "Continuity and Change in Journalism," come listen to him address the Aperion Society at the Scandinavian Centre (739 - 20th Avenue N.W.) on Tuesday, March 29 at 7 p.m. (That's not the Danish Canadian Club in the S.W., by the way.) As promised, here are local nominees for the novel, children’s literature, non-fiction and poetry categories of the Alberta Literary Awards. Ken McGoogan's Chasing Safiya, George Wing's Hector's War, Sarah Murphy's Lilac in Leather, Catherine Simmons-Niven's A Fine Daughter and Peter Oliva's City of Yes are all contenders for the Georges Bugnet Award, sponsored by the U of A bookstore. Dave Duncan and Bragg Creek author Jacqueline Guest are up for the R. Ross Annett Award, sponsored by Dr. C.F. & H.E. Forestell and B. Macabee's Booksellers. There are too many non-fiction nominees to list! But they include Audrey Andrews, Anne Belliveau, David Bercuson, Djuff Ray, George Melnyk and Shirlee Smith Matheson. Finally, the Stephan G. Stephansson Award may well go to one of the following Calgary poets: Susan Holbrook, Robert Hilles, Allan Serafino or Christopher Wiseman. The Edmonton Journal sponsors that award. The sponsors get mentioned because they make a big contribution to the awards, which in turn can make a big contribution to a writer's career, in turn helping that writer to make big contributions to the imaginative and cultural life of our city and our world. Finalists will be announced in April.

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