| Stephen Henighan gave Canadian lit-crit a healthy jolt with his critical volume When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing. The book received a Governor General’s Award nomination in 2002. Reviewers who liked it enjoyed Henighan’s attack on the rootless, globalized blandness (I’m trying to encapsulate here) of Canadian writing in the 1990s. Reviewers who didn’t like it said, among other things, that the book should be re-titled "Why I Hate Toronto." (Sounds like a multi-volume work to me.)
Henighan arrives in Calgary this week with a new book – fiction this time – and it’s not about Toronto, it’s about city life in Montreal. That’s where Henighan did his master of arts degree while working as a mailbox assembly guy for Canada Post, an ESL teacher and a steel-cutter. He reads from The Streets of Winter at Pages on Wednesday, April 7 at 7:30 p.m.
The U.S. poet and critic Charles Bernstein doesn’t like the fact that April is Poetry Month. He says it’s really just about bland, rootless, globalized institutions promoting "safe poetry" for the masses. (To be honest, he really didn’t say globalized. Or masses. His rant is at www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html.) But in Calgary, poetry month is in the hands of poets and readers, not institutions. At least this is true at McNally Robinson on Tuesday, April 6 at 7 p.m., when poet Frances Kruk will host an open mic night. You, the colourful, rooted, local individual, are invited to read your work. Or even the work of your favourite poet.
Speaking of local, it’s Calgary’s turn to host the Alberta Book Awards this year. Winners in all 16 categories will be named on April 17 at the Palliser Hotel. Edmonton’s Tim Bowling distinguishes himself with nominations in two categories: along with Susan Ouriou’s Damselfish and Fred Stenson’s Lightning, his book The Paperboy’s Winter is up for the Georges Bugnet Award for Novel. Then, with Calgarian Jill Hartman’s A Painted Elephant and Robert Hilles’s Wrapped Within Again, his collection The Witness Ghost is nominated for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. In short fiction the nominees are A Hard Witching by Jacqueline Baker, Jumping Off by Laura Cutler and Knucklehead by W. Mark Giles.
This publication’s own Martin Morrow is among the non-fiction nominees, for Wild Theatre: The History of One Yellow Rabbit. Audrey Whitson’s Teaching Places and Anthony J. Hall’s The American Empire and the Fourth World are the other contenders in that category. Edmonton dramatists Marty Chan (for The Forbidden Phoenix), Mieko Ouchi (for The Red Priest) and Vern Thiessen (for the Governor General’s Award-winning Einstein’s Gift) are up for the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama.
The entire Alberta Book Awards event – the cocktails, the dinner and the awards presentations, MCd by CKUA’s Chris Allen – is presented by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta, the Writers Guild of Alberta and Alberta Community Development. Tickets are $50 each and can be ordered by calling the Writers Guild at 1-800-665-5354. For more details see www.writersguild.ab.ca. |
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