November 20, 2012
Long-left leaves
I apologize for the interruption or hiatus in postings. I have some catching up to do because I’ve been on the road so much this season.
The past two days have seen quite a weather event. I’ll call it a single event because there was very little interruption. Rain, relentless, plunging rain — there was a small river running down the back alley this morning. And wind. 16,000 people had their power knocked out by the high wind in spots like Steveston, Southern Vancouver Island, Sunshine Coast etc.
This evening though, the rain took a pause and there was a hint of fog out there when I went for a wander. It was almost a blue fog. I have decided it was a Christmas fog since there was only a hint of it and since we’re technically no where near Christmas.
The leaves are drowned to a mush, they look like long-left breakfast cereal.
If you are feeling down during the winter season please check out the In Our Time BBC Radio 4 episode I posted below and convene with Mr Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy for company and comfort. I also recommend hot water bottle, perhaps some oolong tea and the softest blanket you can find to curl up with.
November 20, 2012
Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Robert Burton’s masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy.
In 1621 the priest and scholar Robert Burton published a book quite unlike any other. The Anatomy of Melancholy brings together almost two thousand years of scholarship, from Ancient Greek philosophy to seventeenth-century medicine. Melancholy, a condition believed to be caused by an imbalance of the body’s four humours, was characterised by despondency, depression and inactivity. Burton himself suffered from it, and resolved to compile an authoritative work of scholarship on the malady, drawing on all relevant sources.
October 30, 2012
Malarky tour 2012 and major weather events
I have been on the road with Malarky on and off since Sept. 23 when I began at the Brooklyn Book Festival followed by Ontario (Trent, Peterborough), THIN AIR Winnipeg International Writers Festival, Victoria Writers Festival, Wordstock Portland Writers Festival, Vancouver Writers Fest and I am just returned from the marvellous experience that is IFOA in Toronto.
Thank you to all those festivals who invited me, to the audiences and many readers I met, writers I read with and the staff and volunteers who work so hard at these festivals and my publisher Biblioasis for their stellar efforts on behalf of Malarky. I also thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Writers Union and the BC Arts Council for support.
Obviously I have been greviously remiss with my weather reports and must take a big inhale and apologize for this. It is not that I haven’t been observing for I have, just have not quite managed to nail it onto the screen.
Yesterday’s weather events in New Jersey and New York give great pause. The ferocity. The build and how the weather pattern increased its speed on approach, thus making the predication even more challenging. One of the descriptions that has stayed with me from relatives in the middle of it was of the windows bending. The windows being bent (inwards I assume) from the power of the wind. And how fire and water co-existed throughout. Houses on fire in the Rockaways that were surrounded by water on all sides was another description I caught.
I send good thoughts and courage to those involved in recovery efforts and getting the lights turned back on. I am always impressed by the spirit of New Yorkers and was doubly impressed by noting friends who woke this morning there and immediately turned their thoughts and attention to how they might join volunteer efforts today in that city.
Over the next weeks I will catch up on some postings and thoughts about my experience on the road.
Stay warm and safe and thank you again.
October 12, 2012
Joe Biden endorses Malarky!
Tonight in the Vice Presidential debate we heard Joe Biden indicate the influence of my novel Malarky on him.
Behind every Vice-President is an episodic novel.
Buy the novel that inspired American politics ….
October 7, 2012
Toronto Review of Books interview
Kelli Deeth interviewed me for the Toronto Review of Books and I can say it’s one of my favourite interviews. Her questions on Malarky were carefully thought out and it’s clear arose from a very close reading of the novel. I was also grateful for her examination of who is absent from the novel … i.e. the daughters it’s the first time perhaps I’ve been asked about this. It reminds me again and again of how powerful a careful reading and excavation on any book can be and why, in my opinion, there’s often more power in being a reader than a writer. I wish there was as much competition and desire to be a reader as there is to be a writer these days. Imagine if all job interviews commenced with the inquiry: so tell me what you are reading or what you have read?
I digress. Here’s a clip from Kelli Deeth’s interview and a link to the whole text.
9. I read that you spent ten years writing this book. What kept you going?
…Reading kept me going. It is what matters most. A single moment in publishing does not galvanize me as much as considering the interrelationship between many moments and how they speak to each other.
Finally I have an insatiable appetite for completely redundant information, so that keeps me very occupied and sustained – kinda like constant mental porridge.
Read Kelli Deeth’s Interview with Anakana Schofield here
October 3, 2012
Newsday note Malarky reading event in NY as a “must see”
Thanks to Wendy Smith and Newsday who cited my event with Amy Sohn and Joshua Henkin at the Brooklyn Book Festival in their list of 5 Must Sees at the 7th Annual Event in this recent article
That made for a lovely, warm welcome to Brooklyn last weekend. Photos and full report of extraordinary festival to follow shortly. Certainly a highlight of my year! Such admiration for Johnny Temple and the team of staff and volunteers who pull off this amazing festival. I wish every city could enjoy such a celebration of literature.
October 3, 2012
The book that ruined my life: Anakana Schofield
The Georgia Straight recently asked me the following question in relation to my appearence on Sunday Sept 29th at The Word on the Street 2012 : Which book changed your life?
Below was my response, published on their website and now here.
Since March 15, when I published a novel, I have been asked multiple times in interviews: which book changed your life?
If honest, I have not had a Pentecostal-change-of-my-life moment as a result of reading any book.
Ever.
The things that changed my life were my father dying one night in 1977, my son being born in 1999, getting a council flat or its equivalent in Vancouver, and a diagnosis of reflux in my left kidney.
It occurs to me that I have not considered the original question in broad enough terms. Which book has ruined my life?
BBC Radio 4 provides the answer. Last Thursday, not long after the above inquiry yet again ding-donged into my email (“Tell us about the book or author that changed your life”), I came upon a serialization of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, Episode 5 of which was streaming live.
Rogue Male was a novel I studied and the only novel I have any memory of studying (do I need to check into a clinic?) for O-level English 25 years ago. It was a profound experience. We had to read it aloud. I was never ever asked to read aloud because I desperately wanted to read aloud. I had to suffer the most awful rendition of this novel aloud, which I duly tackled by reading the entire novel ahead silently. Chapters ahead, I’d read the whole book at my desk, while everyone else was still plodding through early chapters aloud. It was a racehorse reading of Rogue Male.
Mr. Household’s novel was a visceral experience. I read a novel about a man who lived under the ground like a mole. Just because. It didn’t matter why he lived under there. I was only captivated by the idea that people could live underground and therefore, obviously, did live underground. Right now. All around me. And because there was an authoritative male voice telling me. I too could go there.
With hindsight, perhaps the central heating wasn’t very good in our house because I can’t understand why I wanted, in the words of the Jam, to be Going Underground. I was an overly imaginative adolescent likely damaged by enforced listening to BBC Radio 2.
In anticipation of going back underground with Radio 4 last week, I searched up the novel online and felt a retroactive kick to the kidney to learn the book was a spy thriller! A classic spy thriller! Episode 5 delivered itself along with a sentence describing a man holding sight of another man in a crossfire.
There was no man killing any other man in the novel I read at that school desk. There was no spy on the run. There was just a man who wanted to live underground for a reason that made no impression on me, because I was too impressed by the concept you could live down there. Beneath Clarks Shoes. I was impaled on that image. Household could say whatever he wanted after that. I was gone. Underground.
Twenty-five years after the fact I learn that my most visceral literary influence may explain why I have never been able to imagine owning a home and flunked science.
September 12, 2012
Direction & NW review in National Post
Saturday gone I reviewed Zadie Smith’s new novel NW in the National Post.
You can read my review here. I have plenty more to say on this book, but the review is a start.
I noticed in Adam Mars-Jones Observer review of NW how he reads the novel backwards out from, against and back to the modernists. Whilst he offers other insights early in his review worth heeding and considering this reading the book backwards seems odd to me. Why didn’t he consider what the book might be writing toward? What and where it might be writing into? I really do not understand reviewers who apply such rigid reasonings to literature. I am all for examining the continuum, but one doesn’t have to chronically only look over the shoulder you can also look left and right, step off the kerb and sail through the present traffic lights .. unanchored.
September 12, 2012
The Three Rs: Anakana Schofield
Slightly Bookist blogger and literary critic JC Sutcliffe interviewed me for her fun and contemplative Three R’s feature.
Here’s a snip with the link to the full interview questions below.
“I think of literature on a continuum, a line, I want to add to it, to reread, to dart here and there. I can appreciate a book for a single paragraph if I contemplate where that paragraph led from or leads too in another parallel work or where else it might lead me. I am not always reading for the “whole”.”
September 12, 2012
Edmonton Journal: Another big shout out for Malarky
In a column called Let’s Celebrate Great Writing in Saturday’s Edmonton Journal Michael Hingston, the paper’s new book columnist, gave this uplifting and generous shout out to Malarky:
“The annual season of CanLit second-guessing spoke to an urge that’s near and dear to my heart: the urge to make fun of dumb things. But then I started thinking about the best Canadian novel I’ve read this year, Anakana Schofield’s Malarky — and which, if left to some inattentive marketing person, could’ve easily been lost in a pile of books marked drab and introspective. What a mistake that would’ve been.”