Zoetrope All-Story

I am delighted to have my short story Listen! I Can Repair You and All Will Be Possible published in Zoetrope All-Story. Founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997, Zoetrope: All-Story is a quarterly print magazine of short fiction, one-act plays, and essays on film.

This special edition is beautifully guest designed by Tunde Adebimpe a musician, actor, director, and visual artist based in Los Angeles.

The magazine contains work from one of my favourite writer’s Yiyun Li, and two other writers, who I am less familiar with T. C. Boyle, David Means Every writer loves to discover new-to-them writers! It’s really a very beautiful edition with great writing and paintings in it. Treat your brain 🧠 today, purchase here and support literary ventures!

Enormous thanks to editor Michael Ray for being so collaborative and patient.

BINA, BINA, BINA is on her way to you

I am happy to report that my third novel BINA – A Novel in Warnings (Bina is pronounced BYE-NA not BEE-NA”)  will be published in Spring 2019.

I look forward to seeing many of you on the road and introducing you to Our Bina. Bina is a novel about a woman who has had eeenough!

I am very grateful for your continued readership and support.

Thanks/Merci/GRMA

Martin John en Québec

VLB éditeur have published MARTIN JOHN in French in Quèbec! The extraordinary translation was executed by genius Marie Frankland. Merci mille fois à Marie et Annie Goulet (editor) for their passion for language, exquisite attention to detail therein and for the massive amount of hours they put in. It was delightful and inspiring to collaborate with them. Merci aussi a Marie-Josée Martel (relationniste) for her hard work publicising the translation. I really love the cover of this edition. It is a very 1970’s orange.

I did several interviews in the francophone media. Deep gratitude to Manon Dumais of Le Devoir who interviewed me in Montreal and Valérie Lessard of Le Droit for this interview and piece which was published in Le Droit (Ottawa) and Le Soleil (Québec City) last month. I appreciated how thoughtful both journalists were and how they engaged in discussions about the form of the novel when considering the work.

« Le roman est entièrement conçu comme une boucle. Dans la maladie mentale comme dans les cas d’agressions sexuelles, les gens sont pris dans des cycles ; les prédateurs sexuels sont des récidivistes qui cèdent à l’urgence de leurs pulsions. C’était nécessaire que la forme corresponde aux difficiles questions philosophiques que je pose et auxquelles je ne veux pas répondre. Je veux amener le lecteur à affronter sur la page ce qu’il ne veut pas affronter dans la réalité »,

Merci aussi à Mille et un livres for your reading and writing of this piece. Much appreciated.

Updates, reviews, weather

I reviewed Chris Kraus’s Torpor for the Irish Times last week. The novel, her third, published in North America in 2006, has just been published in the UK. I admire Kraus’s body of work and humour and it must be strange to have previously published work reviewed anew. One point that was cut, due to space constraints, related to a reference to Romanian power cuts, which I found fascinating towards the end of the novel. Also, a handy metaphor for the long overdue power cut required in the marriage featured throughout Torpor.  My review is found here

Earlier in the year and last October 2016, I wrote two pieces for the LRB on the fentanyl crisis here in Vancouver. I probably should write another one to update the situation, which needless to say, has not abated and will not abate until we decriminalize drugs. The most obvious and urgently needed response is immediate funding and infrastructure to expand the script heroin program at Crosstown Clinic. Safe injection sites need to open across the country and all possible harm reduction measures immediately implemented. This is a National Health Crisis and our federal government have refused to declare it such because then they’d be legally obliged to save lives. My pieces are here and here

The Goldsmith Prize evening and reading event was great fun. The sausages they served made my Twitter Top 10 Snacks of the Year List. I cannot recall the number that sausage came in at. It’s really a hell of a lot of work to organize that prize and the events, so fair play to those we don’t see who make it happen. And to the jury because reading time is precious and lots of writers serve on juries and must inevitably have to read books (including mine) they’d rather not.  They also must meet and discuss and likewise this takes them from their own writing practice.

Thank you so much to the Republic of Consciousness Prize and all who supported it. I was delighted to be awarded the runner up prize for fiction for MARTIN JOHN. Congratulations to the winner John Keene and the other runner up Mike McCormack and Paul Stanbridge. I greatly admire Neil Griffiths, who set it up, and of course the various small press publishers it’s designed to acknowledge and financially reward for their underfunded, valiant efforts to bring our books to readers who, if it were only left to the mainstream, would never see them. This prize especially draws attention to the shifts in UK publishing. Larger Independent presses are actually conservative in the UK compared to here in Canada. Thus the word “Independent” needs careful deliberation before one draws overly cosy conclusions that it automatically means ambition.  Pas exactement! Naturally readers are our most powerful ally and influence in all these economic matters, because if you buy truly ambitious literary work it means we, as writers, can continue to write it by maybe eating the occasional boiled egg.

I was also blessed to visit Brown University and Fordham University in the US for events. The students were lively minded and had very engaging, probing questions. We ran out of time! I am so sorry not to have had more time to interact with the students and hear about their work and what they are reading.

*

And now to the weather…. We had the strangest weather event last night. All day the sun shone strong. By evening a wind storm developed, which blew me off my bicycle as I rode into it! That said it doesn’t take much to bounce me off my bike.  The storm involved a great amount of leaf whipping and the redistribution of massive amounts of building site dust since the entire city is still under the condo development juggernaut! All night long the gusts kept up. It’s rare to experience a summer weather wind storm.

Our winter was savagely long this past year. Today I ran into V on the street, a very charming neighbour, I haven’t seen for a long time. “If you wanted to come outside you had to do the flipper walk” she declared of this winter. Now though the city is laced in cyclists (many of whom were probably on the bike all winter because there are stoic cyclists in this city) and it’s a lovely experience to cycle about on the cycle lanes, even if you have few gears and if the wind rises you’ll be hopped asunder! I have loved the bike rides I’ve taken. They are temporarily exhilarating, no matter what the weather is doing. Especially because Vancouver is becoming such a challenging city financially for the poor to live in. It’s quite hideous the growing disparity and moon-bound rents. The bicycle, however, can transport.

*

UK/IRELAND events

I am presently doing events in the UK:

Tomorrow  30 May: I’ll be reading with Yuri Herrera at Burley Fisher Books,400 Kingsland Road, E8 4AA, London at 7pm.

1 June: Waterstones, Cork, Ireland. 6.30pm I am reading with Lisa McInerney & Pat Cotter.

3 June: Listowel Writers’ Week, Listowel, Ireland with Patrick deWitt 7.30pm.

*

Would like to sincerely thank Eimear McBride who very generously interviewed me last Thursday at The Book Hive in Norwich. It was one of my favourite events and discussions ever about MARTIN JOHN. Also, thanks to the Greenwich Book Festival this weekend, at which I did a splendid event with Alex Pheby and Andrew Harkinson, moderated by the excellent Susanna Rustin. The tour kicked off in Dublin at the International Literature Festival last Tuesday with a great event with Lucy Caldwell.  Thanks indeed to Selina Guinness, our moderator, for her very close & considered readings of both books. Much gratitude to these festivals & bookshops for inviting me & especially to the engaged and responsive audiences at all these events.

Martin John has landed in Holyhead and Dublin + That ankle + Bernhard’s lungs

Three matters upon which to rapidly tap here.

1) This is the finest deployment of a narrative ankle I’ve ever read. No surprise it’s Eileen Myles ankle in her first person piece “On the Excruciating Pain of Waiting for Love.”

“My natural state was so out of control that it had to be medicated almost to death and since I didn’t want to die I had nothing but this, running and sex. I would twist my ankle again and again.”

This ankle captures something so precisely. It captures how the brain does its own thing and how the body attempts to speak back to it or how we push the body to do so. It captures how a person might try to say, no fuck you brain you will not sink me because I am running away from you or is it toward you? Anyway it’s marvellous how that twisted ankle and running and rerunning on it manages to speak to and of humanity and how it is that humanity never entirely recovers from its own ankles.

2) MARTIN JOHN has arrived in Dublin via Holyhead.

John Self very thoughtfully reviewed Martin John in The Guardian. I appreciated his point about trolls and more besides.

The Sunday Telegraph had things to say about him too: Including cinq étoiles.

There’s very little that silences me but Eileen Battersby’s review of Martin John in The Irish Times has managed it. I am quite stunned by this review. My constant refrain inside my rust-inclined brain is that I just need smart readers. I don’t need big prize cheques, just smart, curious readers who engage with literature. I also need time to read and write. Time will come if the smart readers come and buy my books.  The exciting thing about this review * is it might bring some readers. It might bring readers because  … well read it and decide.

(* I realize the role of a critical review is to be an engaging piece of writing in its own right. Its role is not a sales pitch. That’s catalogue and back cover copy. But writers are equally nothing without readers and readers find writers sometimes through reading criticism. I certainly do)

3) To celebrate these reviews I am now going to read Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew. I only recently discovered Bernhard when my friend visual artist/writer Marina Roy (Sign after the X) told me about him and gave me a copy of Extinction. Wittgenstein’s Nephew has to be the greatest literary vehicle ever for a set of lungs. A pulmonary classic!

Bernhard is so funny and grimly particular about the happiness in unhappiness and in this book, the disregarded literary potential in the thoracic. I read some lines in this novel, and even at this early stage of our reading relationship, think ONLY Bernhard could have written this.

“Like Paul, I woke up in a hospital bed on the Wilhelminenberg, almost totally destroyed through overrating myself and the world”

“..or at any rate I would certainly not be the person I am today, so mad and so unhappy, yet at the same time happy”

New Yorker review Martin John!

Merci Mille Fois New Yorker for this Briefly Noted. (Click to enlarge)

Books of the Year lists amid Madame Bovary weather

Above

Overhead we’ve been in a Madame Bovary weather cycle for 4 days: We began with dreary (gloomy drizzle), we were scheduled for passion (high winds), but instead went straight to regret this morning (Heavy rain & filthy sky slumping down on the mountains) so I predict this weekend we will end this cycle with a weather version of passionate regret! (Wind with flying mud and slugs?)

Below

Underneath the weather challenge, some very nifty inclusions of Martin John on Best Books of 2015 lists in newspapers and other medja.

To wit:

Martin John is No. 1 fiction pick in the Toronto Star’s Top 5 Fiction Books of the Year.

“The Toronto Star’s book reviewers read hundreds of books for our pages each year. So when it comes to choosing our top five books, we turn to them first. There was a wide range of books suggested this year — but the ones below are the ones that garnered the most votes each.

Martin John is the No. 3 pick in the National Post’s NP99 The Best Books of the Year (includes a perky orange sketch where I have new eyebrows and a haircut)

3. Martin John, Anakana Schofield (Biblioasis, 282 pp; $20)
Schofield’s breakout second novel puts readers in unpleasant places, like the mind of the title character, a mentally unstable man who is a molester and subway masturbator. The power of the book lies in the author’s trust in the empathy of her readers. The funniest, and possibly darkest novel of the year.

Martin John included in Wall Street Journal’s 2015 “Year’s Best Fiction“.

Thank you to Sam Sacks who wrote “Of course, it’s not length alone that produces indelible reading experiences, and some of the year’s finest books succeeded through the poetic arts of compression and omission.Anakana Schofield brilliantly reproduces the obsessive mental landscape of a sex offender in “Martin John”…”

Martin John included in the Globe & Mail’s “Globe 100“

Vancouver Sun’s Top 20 Books of the Year,

CBC Books Best Books of 2015,

Toronto’s NOW Magazine’s Top 10 Books of 2015,

Edmonton Journal’s 5 Most Memorable Reads of 2015

Largehearted Boy Favourite Novels of 2015.

Thrilled to sit beside these very strong & diverse novels. Also doubly thrilled because Malarky was one of Largehearted Boy’s favourite novels in 2012. Many thanks to David for continuing to read and support my work and maintain his excellent “music notes” platform.

“Anakana Schofield’s second novel Martin John is a profound, innovative, and poignant meditation on identity.”

Quill and Quire Books of the Year 

Pickle Me This Best Books of 2015

Thank you to all the reviewers & editors for so generously including my novel when there are many deserving works and thank you to anyone presently reading Martin John. I’m very grateful for the engagement, given how precious one’s reading time is.

Giller Prize snaps

With wonderful Cameron Bailey who presented Martin John

Samuel Archibald et Genevieve et Ernesto.

With Cúán, Rachel & Jessye. I love this picture, in part because of our footwear!

*

Next post will include the snack report!

In which I contemplate why it might be awkward if I had met or were to meet Beckett & speculate on Rosa Luxemburg and milk

I will soon be appearing at 2 events at IFOA in Toronto. In anticipation of these events and the festival (which is an inspired and wonderful affair that this year features a focus on Catalan writers and poetry) I answered some questions and plumbed some philosophical quandaries and questions of milk consumption.

5 Questions and Answers for IFOA.

IFOA: Your anticipated second novel, Martin John, expands on a character from your first novel, Malarky. Why did you decide to delve deeper into the character of Beirut?

Anakana Schofield: A conflation of circumstances led to this. The first was the cheeky insertion for pure devilment of a single footnote in Malarky that read “See Martin John – a footnote novel” not knowing whether or not I’d ever actually write that novel. I had material that I’d chucked out of Malarky, which initially was a parallel narrative of two mothers and sons.

Then came an urgency to respond to the plethora of reports of clerical sexual abuse during recent years, which I felt left me with no choice but to address some aspect of deviancy, somehow, in fiction.

I guess in both examples “response” was the impetus.

In Malarky, the Beirut/Martin John we met is an endearing man. In Martin John, Martin John has become something other. He departed or reversed (since we met him older in Malarky) very far from where we started with him.

IFOA: In addition to fiction, you also write essays and literary criticism. How are these different forms of writing connected?

Schofield: I’m a reader before I am a writer. My thinking on literature and reading towards what it is I want to write are very much informed by reading and writing criticism. I’m also over interested in very random topics, so essays and the blogs, which I pen for the London Review of Books, help me explore these curiosities. I’m fortunate to have editors who encourage and support my rambles.

IFOA: Your website lists reading, the weather, bird flu and labour history as some of your preoccupations. How do these interests inspire your writing?

Schofield: I suppose they are four quarters of a whole. Basically I have a hearty appetite for what most would consider entirely redundant information. There’s very little that I’m not curious about.

IFOA: If you could meet any author, living or dead, whom would it be?

Schofield: I think Rosa Luxemburg. I would like to discuss her cold baths, high consumption of milk and fury with that printer in Paris described in her letters. Then we’d progress to the spindle statistics in Poland and she could educate me on Marxist matters. But mostly it’s the milk that intrigues me. Nietzsche went heavy on the milk. I haven’t checked, but did they both have bad acne?

I think one should be careful of meeting one’s heroes; they may disappoint and sadly are not the only person who ever understood you. They can be tired, short tempered and bad mannered. Apart from the ones who are lovely. All are best met on the page methinks.

For example, if I met Beckett, we would sit next to each other beside a coal shed on uncomfortable chairs and discuss the weather and possibly sigh a great deal. Essentially I don’t need to meet him because I’m perpetually sighing a great deal and have seen plenty coal sheds. Also he’d smoke, which would make me cough, then he’d offer me whiskey and my left kidney wouldn’t like that. It could be very awkward for us.

IFOA: What is the best compliment a reader can give you about your work?

Schofield: To read it or attempt to read it or to read widely. I’ve a few favourite readers: one wrote me a lovely email that said she was going for a walk to think about Our Woman. Another is Bill in Ohio and he took to Google Maps and did all kinds of additional research to understand Malarky. I also rather enjoy the very angry man who wrote invoking the mafia, hookers and my mother in one line. I’m quite acquainted with some of my readers through social media and they are splendidly intelligent, jovial and patiently answer my random queries on things like bad foot pain and weather reports.