This past Thursday, host Megan Turnbull and I interviewed Jenny Sampirisi and Aaron Peck about their debut novels. (I got fancy and, after downloading and parsing the archive, pasted together some freeware sound effects, creating a little sound-scape introduction for such episodes — ahh, the things one can accomplish when baby sleeps).

Date: Sunday, March 22, 2009
Time: 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Location: Cafe Montmartre – 4362 Main Street (at 28th)

About the authors:

Jenny Sampirisi is a Toronto writer and editor. She is the managing editor for the poetry publisher, BookThug, and the online vispo journal, Other Cl/utter. She is also an executive member of the Scream Literary Festival. Is/was is her first novel. The Globe and Mail praised Is/Was as “remarkable for its layered insights and depth of observing…. Where the book really shines and lingers in memory is in the parsing of the family’s internal dynamic.”

Aaron Peck was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and now lives in Vancouver BC. He is an editor at both the on-line Doppelganger Magazine and the literary press, Greenboathouse Books, which publishes beautiful handmade books in limited edition. The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis is his first novel.

Sampirisi is the second writer I’ve edited for the Wayside/Serotonin imprint (shared with JP Fiorentino). This is a tight, dense, and complex work, lovely in its use of language, and frightening in its implications. Read this book. The launch will feature Sampirisi reading from her novel, as well as an interview conducted by Jude MacDonald (the author of Grey: Stories and Jane — another highly recommended book).

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Set in the media-saturated 1980s, when images of missing children first occupied the public imagination, is/was explores one town’s complex emotional reaction to the brutal rape and murder of a child within its bounds.

It is October 1983 and eight-year-old Abigail Wren has gone missing from a tiny Ontario town. In the crosscuts and fragments of each day’s news, word of the abduction filters into the troubled Fitch family household. Roland Fitch becomes unhinged by long kept secrets, while his wife Eva, turns inwards, tracing the aftermath of her own surgically precise loss. In the days and weeks following Abigail Wren’s death, the Fitch children, Andrew and Isabel, are increasingly left to parent themselves. As the already tenuous boundaries between family members are slowly effaced, once solid definitions – of the child, the adult, and the body – come unmoored.

At its core, is/was is an unflinching meditation set at the very edge of human limits. Boundaries of language, media, and the body itself transform to hold the complex currents of lust and absence. This investigative first novel is never reductive, but with subtlety and nuance, unfolds the terrible trajectory of loss.

PRAISE FOR IS/WAS

is/was is a shattering portrait of the psychological effects on one family of sudden and inexplicable violence. Jenny Sampirisi evokes dissociated states of mind and blocked communication with impressive precision. Tuned in to the body and its almost alternate life, this narrative pulls the reader into the gradually unfolding suspense of suspended knowing.
— Daphne Marlatt, author of Taken and Ana Historic

is/was explores loss in its immensity, but it rivets us, always, to its world of details. To the micro-rituals of conduct during periods of duress. To the concreteness of words on the page and the capillary routes of the sentence. Jenny Sampirisi is at once a marvelously fearless and disciplined writer.
– David Chariandy, author of Soucouyant

In the Canadian experimental lineage of Atom Egoyan’s film Exotica, Lynn Crosbie’s poetry Missing Children and Gail Scott’s novel Main Brides, this searing story of a bereft family at its core searches to reunite pain’s palimpsest with its fleshed healing. Sampirisi keenly makes us ache for a renewed stab at what was and can be.
– Margaret Christakos, author of Excessive Love Prosthesis and What Stirs

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenny Sampirisi is a poet, prose writer and editor. She is the managing editor for BookThug and facilitates the online vispo journal, Other Cl/utter. She teaches English at Ryerson University where she runs the Ryerson Reading Series. She is also an executive member of the Scream Literary Festival. Her first novel, is/was (Insomniac Press 2008) explores the flexible boundaries of language, media, and the body.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Jude MacDonald is the author of Jane (1999) and Grey: Stories for Grown-Ups (2001) and the editor of section15.ca.

“I was born with a fever, but it seemed to subside for sixteen years. High school, I was a good girl. I was pretty, I smiled, I fit in fine. And then as I turned sixteen and stopped smiling, the fever returned, though my skin stayed pale and sure, showing no sign of the heat inside me.” 
    —Rebecca Godfrey. The Torn Skirt: a novel. (Harper Collins, 2001).

“The summer I was eight years old, five hours disappeared from my life. I can’t explain. I remember this: first, sitting on the bench during my Little League team’s 7 P.M. game, and second, waking in the crawl space of my house near midnight. Whatever happened during that empty expanse of time remains a blur.”
     —Scott Heim, Mysterious Skin: A novel. (Harper, 1995). 

“When I thought about my childhood, one of the things I thought of was the measure of childish violence in it, and I’d always wanted to pick it out from the map of my early days. To know more about it, I reckoned, was to know more about the little difficulties of the past, not only my past, but the past of my family, and the past of those places where my family had settled. The dark tint we might have left behind in the city were with us all right in our new abode, they were more than with us, they were in us.”
     —Andrew O’Hagan. The Missing: a literary meditation (New Press, 1995). 

“Every new kid who showed up at the foster home had a few personal things that they were clinging on to. One boy used to have a little piece of felt that he would rub against his cheek. New kids always wanted to watch the TV shows they had watched at home. The change in TV shows made a lot of kids cry. When you are a kid, if you watch The Jeffersons with your family at seven o’clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting.”
    —Heather O’Neill. Lullabies for Little Criminals: a novel. (Harper Collins, 2006).

 ”Some people left for the bar, while the rest of us finished the beers we’d brought to church. In the meantime, Anthony took off his artificial leg, and sat on a chair looking at it. It was a pretty grotesque-looking fake leg. A steel pipe, basically, with some plastic foam around it, shaped into the same contours as his real leg. The foam had been slashed several times, with blood-red paint covering the slashes, making the leg look like some kind of war casualty. At the bottom, just over the foot, was a baby doll’s head with grotesquely bloodshot eyes. Anthony said he’d seen children run from it, and I could see why. As he walked, the doll’s eyes would open and close, her wild hair flaring outwards from his shin.”
     —Louis Rastelli. A Fine Ending: a novel. (Insomniac Press, 2007). 

“Lucy drove fast, grim with the task of moving my body over one thousand miles, across the inland sea of parched grass and shimmering heat. But she looked smart, in an orange cotton shift with black marks like paw prints; it was Finnish. At night, she rinsed it out in a motel sink. By morning, it was dry as a bone and hung stiffly over her tanned & slender knees.”
     —Camille Roy. Swarm. (Black Star, 1998).

 “Isabel is standing beside Andrew’s crouched frame with her hand on his shoulder. They’re both looking at the exposed back and buttocks of the doll. Andrew waits for Isabel to pick it up. He doesn’t want to look at it anymore. The time he’s spent outside suddenly feels too long and dry. He wants his attention to be elsewhere, but he can’t look at Isabel. He doesn’t want to know what her face looks like right now, pointed downwards at the plastic body. Her palm presses his shoulder. He feels the heat and sweat of it through his shirt, mingling with his own until the shirt has soaked through and begun to spread and darken outwards from beneath Isabel’s hand.”
     —Jenny Sampirisi. Is/Was: a novel. (Insomniac Press, 2008). 

Please join us for the launch of …

West Coast Line 53
Representations of
Murdered and Missing Women

Edited by Anne Stone and Amber Dean

With presentations or readings by
Reg Johanson, Larissa Lai, Sachiko Murakami, Lora McElhinney, Renee Rodin, and others…

Tuesday, October 23rd at 7pm
Spartacus Books
319 West Hastings, 2nd Floor
Free! All welcome.

For more information write to westline@telus.net

Stuck around for a few hours with Dan, manning the Insomniac Press table. Am really happy to know Insomniac publishes Marian Engel, Jane Rule, Gwendolyn MacEwen. Picked up a couple of newer Insomniac titles: Whatever Happens by Tim Conley and The Grammar Architect by Chris Eaton and Julian the Magician by Gwendolyn MacEwen.

And now, for a hot bath…

There have been a few new reviews this month: Now Magazine calls Delible “inventive and lushly rendered,” January Magazine likes the title, and Canadian Literature reviews Delible alongside Shani Mootoo’s He Drown She in the Sea.

Word on the Street is next weekend. I’ll going to be there all day (hanging out at the Insomniac Press book table, if you want to come by). Here’s to hoping that Louis Rastelli’s more-than-fine debut, A Fine Ending, is back from the printer in time for WOTS!

The video captures part of a really great interview Amy Logan Holmes conducted with me at Book Expo. I can see this being really useful as an intro at readings, and also, to offer anyone who picks up the book a sense of the thinking behind the novel, which is very cool. Judith Keenan, who creates these Bookshorts, did an amazing job.

The song they used is haunting and beautiful and, the way it’s cut in, couldn’t fit better if it was written for the short. (Thank you to Pangaea music and the lovely vocal stylings of Jessica Rhaye).

(Click here to play the fuller sized version).