It looks like I may be doing a semi-regular feature on books at Co-op Radio’s Arts Rational: Thursdays, 9-10 p.m. on CFRO 102.7. (Who better to talk books with visiting writers than a sleep-deprived new mom?) Once a month or so, if all goes accordingly, I’ll drop in to the show and review a book or interview an author.

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).

Jenny Sampirisi (13:25 min)
Aaron Peck (9:20 min)

Tonight, tune into Coop Radio (102.7 fm) to hear Aaron Peck and (from Toronto, via phone) Jenny Sampirisi, talking about their new novels (sometime between 9 & 10). I’ll be interviewing Aaron on The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis, and Megan Turnbull will be talking to Jenny Sampirisi about her debut, Is/Was. 

Hope you can make it to the upcoming Vancouver launch of Is/Was by Jenny Sampirisi, who’ll be reading alongside Aaron Peck (from his recent debut, the Bewilderments of Bernard Willis.) 

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.

If you are in the Toronto area, you’ll want to attend the launch of Jenny Sampirisi’s debut novel, is/was (Insomniac Press, 2008).

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.

Emerge 2008: the Sneak Preview Wednesday Sept. 17th

Discover why The Writer’s Studio at SFU consistently produces some of Canada’s most promising new writers when you hear the diverse voices from the Class of 2008 perform original works from the soon-to-be-launched Emerge, an anthology of new writing by participants from The Writer’s Studio.

Special Guest Reader: Anne Stone, Fiction Mentor for 2009.

When: Wednesday Sept. 17, 2008.
Time: Doors open 7:00 p.m. Reading starts at 7:30 p.m.
Where : Chivana Restaurant Bar Lounge 2340 West 4th Avenue, Vancouver (at West 4th Avenue and Vine St, 2nd floor, above the New Apple produce store)
www.chivana.com

Come early so you can have a drink, mingle and chill.

Inspired by Distroboto in Montreal and Outsider-art-in-a-box more locally, Capilano now has its own art- and chapbook-vending machine. The machine (which rests under a rather large and sombre-looking clown’s head) will make a brief sojourn off campus next week, stopping in briefly at Cafe Montmartre for a launch. Thereafter, the clown’s head vending machine will reside at Capilano (Fir 402) where it will be open to your works (whether you are a Capilano student, whether you have only known one, or whether even briefly, for the purposes of inclusion, you wish you had…). I’ll post a link to the specs as soon as they’re available online… 

The launch, next week, will feature readings by first year Capilano creative writing students and there will be a series of chapbooks available for a nickle a piece. Come out and show your support.

Launch of the Capilano Art-Vending Machine
Wednesday August 20th
6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Café Montmartre
4362 Main Street (at 28th)

Okay, I’m inspired by this (by way of Bookninja). When I was a kid, I read the Websters from a to zed, and now, on my Mat leave, along with working on the next novel, editing Charles Demer’s brilliant debut, and … oh, yeah, having a baby … I’m going to read the OED from cover to cover. The two-volume version, the one that comes with the magnifying glass in a little drawer. Yep. That’s a plan. Now, off to Abebooks to find me a lovely boxed set.

The Relit Awards longlist is out and Delible is there, along with a lot — uh, a lot — of other great independent works. And I felt the first kick today (from W’s & my little one). An awesome day. 

Matrix Presents

Issue 80: The Gallows Humour Issue

Matrix magazine is now accepting submissions for its Gallows Humour dossier. We are looking for your darkest, most absurd and sardonic, witty, acerbic, ironic and sarcastic unpublished writing. Edited by Mike Spry. Poetry: (3-5 poems). Fiction: (3500 words max.).

Deadline: April 11th, 2008.

Electronic Submissions Preferred: spry@matrixmagazine.org

On Gallows Humour:

“The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”
– Sigmund Freud,“Humour (Der Humor)”

“When Oscar Wilde allegedly gestured at the garish wallpaper in his cheap Parisian hotel room and announced with his dying breath, “Either it goes or I go,” he was exhibiting something beyond an irrepressibly brilliant wit. Freud, you see, wasn’t whistling “Edelweiss” when he wrote that gallows humour is indicative of “a greatness of soul.” The quips of the condemned prisoner or dying patient tower dramatically above, say, sallies on TV sitcoms by reason of their gloriously inappropriate refusal, even at life’s most acute moment, to surrender to despair.”
–Tom Robbins, “In Defiance of Gravity”

If you’re viewing this page spectrally and lack an email account, but still want to submit, send your hardcopy to:

Matrix Magazine
The Gallows Humour Issue
1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W., LB-658
Montreal, QC
H3G 1M8

The latest Matrix is at press now, with poems by Stuart Ross, fiction by Sarah Steinberg, and a special section, the New Underground, with writing by some of the best emerging writers (glad to see an excerpt of Jenny Sampirisi’s forthcoming novel, Iswas, included there). In this issue, there’s also my piece on writing spaces (looking at the studio writing practice of Betsy Warland, but dipping into the public writing practices of a few others as well). Check it out here.