Murmuration

I’m pleased to report I’ve received complaints about the weather in four cities this week! Of course complaints are a good thing since that means people are attending to the weather and examining it, which is to be encouraged…

The talk in other parts of the province here is flood warnings and rivers rising. Closer to home it’s really been exceptionally shite, drowned onion weather. But today on the radio they were saying it is normal for it to be cold in June so what do we know? Apparently nothing.

What I do know is I caved in and turned the heating on again today, how and ever when I went for the switch it was already on. Unbeknownst. I must have turned it back on weeks ago in despair.

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This evening I was at a Vancouver Writers Festival event, where the line up for this year’s festival was unveiled.  I am delighted to be appearing at the festival with Malarky this year. I’m equally delighted to have been invited to a number of other festivals from Winnipeg to IFOA (Harbourfront) to Brooklyn and beyond. Thank you to them all for supporting Malarky.

It was very heartening to meet three people tonight who recalled Helen Potrebenko’s novel Taxi! And one man who told me he’d even been at the VPL event I organized for Taxi! a few years ago. Even more exciting was the news this week that Taxi! is now going to be taught by one ace history Professor at SFU. I think if I remember rightly we met the particular professor during the performance art intervention Lori W and I did at Not Sent Letters. I love these ripples and how they roll out from one moment and create a new one. Fantastic! Glory be for the brave readers who pick up a book and engage!

Flare Magazine select Malarky as one of their 5 Summer Hot Picks

Thank you so much to Flare Magazine who selected Malarky as one of their 5 Summer Hot Picks.

You’ll note they selected it alongside 50 Shades of Six Million Copies. I am fairly confident that my dubious sex in Malarky is far more satisfying for women readers and I welcome all 6 Million of them to read Malarky as soon as possible and then dispute this assertion in the comments section below. I shall happily atone once the millions report back.

On the road with Malarky: Malarky roadie

I have been away on the road with Malarky, so apologies for the interrupted weather forecasts and meanderings. Thank you so much to everyone who came out to Bolen Books in Victoria, Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle and Village Books in Bellingham.

The highlight for me was at the Seattle launch when 10-yr-old Willie Bays, on his flute, played traditional Irish music (trad) with his mother Susan on fiddle. A mighty player and together they played a mighty set. Go raibh mile to them both.

Also, am enormously grateful for the enthusiasm and warmth of booksellers Robert, Casey and Claire (in store order respectively). Most impressed with the woodwork in many of these shops and the array of jigsaw puzzles that surrounded the reading area at Bolen Books. (including one of a teapot)

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What about the weather event at Union Station in Toronto yesterday? A bathtub rainfall event! We were grim on this coast around the same time, but I had to shift my overcast sulking when I saw what had been dealt to the floor at Union. A spot I stood but two weeks ago and imagined doing a cozy waltz around (if I could manage such a thing).

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In gardening news I am a disgrace. Officially flagged a green one. Some mysterious objecter has plunged a bamboo pole into my plot with green masking tape on it to alert … I am not sure whom. Not the Mason Bees who were happily mining in my strawberry patch today. Thank you to the gardeners who offered help for my beleagured plot and added soil to it in my absence.

The Flowerman has the most magnificent Pink Poppies. They have to be capitalized they are such stunners. He also generously added some manure to my plot and consequently the purple geranium has gone nuclear in size and I think has made for happy bees.

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Profuse thanks to all who have read/are reading Malarky and have tweeted or written about it. Lovely to hear of this happening. A book is nothing without readers. I have great faith in readers and it grows deeper by the day.

Quill & Quire June 2012

Irish Voice & Irish Central review Malarky as “most distinctive novel of its kind in a decade.”

Schofield’s richest gift is for spirited dialogue which crackles with humor and energy in this blackly funny, half mad tale. Portraits of working class Irish female eccentrics are pretty thin on the ground, and for that reason alone this divertingly brilliant book is entirely worth your time. 

 

This is the most distinctive novel of its kind I’ve read in a decade. 

Anakana Schofield: Sledging Sentences

Today over at the Afterword (National Post Book Blog) is my final post as Guest Editor. Click on the extract below to read the whole piece.

I have recently commenced learning to play sledge hockey and am curious to see whether this additional sport in my sporting arsenal will influence my prose.

Several writers come to mind for whom sport plays or played a significant part in their lives: Angie Abdou about to run from Montreal to New York, Michael Collins and his arctic marathon running, Haruki Murakami and what he knows about running, Albert Camus and his goalkeeping, George Bowering and baseball, Helen Potrebenko and her gold medal win at the Senior Games for softball, Lori Emerson e-lit expert and competitive amateur cyclist. (Expand this list by all means in the comments section.)

My other weekly sporting indulgence is adult gymnastics (I should admit to a stagnant level of progress over the past two years and a great deal of chatting). I had not practised gymnastics for 25 years when I recommenced the sport on a Wednesday night several years ago. But as a child it was the single most important thing I did.

I returned to it because I considered that within it lay the foundations of my beginnings as a writer. The repetition, the lines, the discipline, the pain and despair. I think I returned because I couldn’t find that same satisfaction in any other form of exercise and was equally frustrated and dwindling on the page.

Anakana Schofield: Mobile Reading

My third blog as guest editor this week of the Afterword, the National Post books blog. (Click on text to read the entire piece)

Many of us visit places in literature that we may never set foot in. I have a strange habit of visiting literature as I set my foot down. Walking and reading. Initially I had some problems with my inner ear and was advised to repeatedly do the things that made me dizzy in order to retrain my brain.

I was an occasional walker and reader, however with this inner ear problem it now made me dizzy, thus I took up long walks with a book in hand and copious amounts of vacuuming (which also made me dizzy).

Once my inner ear generously righted itself, I found another handy employment for the combined art of walking and reading. I did not own a car and had a small child to move around. The bus routes did not always suit us, nor did the shelling out for transit. He loved stories and I knew I could easily walk him five or ten or thirty blocks without protest if I read to him. Hence we crossed Vancouver neighbourhoods to the dulcet tones of six of Arthur Ransome’s sailing novels and hiked up and down to the park reading every volume of Le Petit Nicolas.

Anakana Schofield: Reading Out

Here is my second blog  as guest editor of Afterword the National Post books blog. (Click the extract to read the whole piece)

 

I’ve been thinking an awful lot about reading lately and specifically about the ways in which we can read and the forms of reading that newer technology affords us.

We are living at a time when access to and the variety of literature has never been so immediate for many of us. (To gain an understanding of what it is like not to have access to literature see Doris Lessing’s 2007 Nobel lecture, “On Not Winning the Nobel Prize.”)

I have long possessed an innate and unpredictable curiosity which has resulted in either a peripatetic or patchy approach (depending on your point of view) to reading. Increasingly I see reading (when a text engages me) as a collage that includes not just the current book itself but what comes through this work from previous readings of other books and where may I read out from this work, or back to this work.

The access facilitated by technology allows us a wider immediacy in our reading. We can read books beside each other or between each other. We can read them for a paragraph or we can read them for the long exhale. This affords us much more of a sense of a continuum with and of our literature, and this is especially important when considering a local or a national literature.

What came before, what’s coming now and what has yet to come, and how all of these things sit beside each other or whether they do or not, is (for me) a salient thinking and departure point.

Guest Editor National Post Afterword: Feeling Tired

All this week I have been guest editing Afterword the National Post book blog.

My first piece published on Monday was titled Feeling Tired: (click on the extract to read the entire piece)

When I re-read my novel Malarky I see that for all the sex and sadness in it, it really is a personal plea to be better at baking and to feel less tired.

The main character in Malarky — “Our Woman” — does not feel as tired as I do. She is a great deal perkier. If I try to think of a novel with a character as tired as I feel, I draw a blank. The best I can come up with is Laura Hillenbrand’s incredible New Yorker essay depicting her life with chronic fatigue.

Tiredness is a strange old mist. So is sleep deprivation. Even more puzzling is insomnia, given it strikes when you are, well, already tired.

Malarky lands in Ontario

Biblioasis launched Malarky in Toronto at the Dora Keogh on Tuesday night. It was a great turn out and a lively, welcoming audience. Thank you to everyone who joined us and to Ben McNally and John Maxwell for hosting us at the Dora. It was lovely to meet you all.

Yesterday I had a splendid time doing two readings and different branches of the Toronto Public Library as part of their Eh Reading Series. I enjoyed the exchanges with both audiences and am grateful to librarians Valentina at Northern District library and Muriel at North York library for hosting my readings and providing such great support to me during them. Also thanks to Sheila the bookseller who attended both events so enthusiastically.

I am en route to Windsor where I’ll launch Malarky tonight at the Phog Lounge and will be live on the CBC Windsor for a radio interview early this evening.

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The weather in Ontario was suitably varied and surprising since I know nothing about the weather there. It was very warm and yesterday there was an interlude of brief rapid rain, while last night it was nippy and I had to bundle up a tad.  I had visions of it still being winter in Toronto and am glad that my partner told me not to pack my arctic parka!

I loved the city of Toronto, the brief parts I saw of it and am looking forward to my return in the fall and hope for more opportunites to explore the city. In the meantime I shall hunt for local literature and learn more about it.