Felicia Pride is a writer, consultant, and teacher who made the transition from marketing to publishing a few years ago. She is also the founder of one of my favourite sites, The BackList, a website and blog dedicated to keeping books in style. In addition to her website, Felicia has contributed to Publishers Weekly, Popmatters.com, and Vibe.com. She’s had the pleasure of working with bestselling and award-winning authors, independent presses, and major publishers. She’s also interviewed the likes of Marlon James, Donnell Alexander, Adam Mansbach, and many more. I decided to interview the woman who has made it her mission to “keep books in style,” and pick her brain about teaching, working in publishing, and the crucial advice every new writer needs to know. This is the first of a two-part series: read more…
Before getting into the second part of my interview with Felicia Pride there are several other literary items you should know about. Firstly, Aaron Tucker has replaced our blogger Craig Baird. It seems that Craig is quite swamped with his new job and his debut novel. Aaron will be posting reviews and rants for Black Ink such as the one published yesterday.
You may recall that I wrote about Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angelique previously on BI. Well, the author is one several finalists vying for a Governor General’s Literary Award. In addition to this fabulous news, Cooper also has a new book of poetry out this month calledCopper Woman.
Mother Jones has an interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who, along with Edward P. Jones, recently made an appearance at the IFOA. The fine folks over at Afro Toronto had an opportunity to talk with the Nigerian author as well.
For all you fellow Montrealer’s, Giller and Governor General’s Literary Award finalist Rawi Hage will be discussing his book De Niro’s Game at the Westmount Public Library, however there seems to be a mix up with either the time or day of the event. The schedule reveals he’ll be reading on Friday, October 25, but this impossible, so I’m encouraging you to contact the library through the info on their website to obtain the right date of this reading. And for those of you who don’t believe talent can be found in the slush pile, think again. read more…
so we dream the same
do we dream the same
Physically this book is as intimidating as the butterfly on the cover; the muted greens and tans, along with its small size, give Wide Slumber the impression of being precious. But the pure joy and pleasure of ferocity that rawlings attacks language with inside the tiny covers is enough to marvel even the most seasoned readers.
That’s not to say that the book is a harsh read; it is really anything but. The lines move with a breath grabbing fluidity and the diction (and its subsequent breakdown) is superb, round and brittle like the insects of title. But it is really the sound of these poems that hold the work, and all its intricately tied themes, together. From the opening, it is the aural that is taking precedent: the “a hoosh a ha,” sound of flapping wings starts small, sparse, then intensifies, breaking to a hurried and chaotic climax. This refrain of sound, of a concrete noise and not a description of a noise, enters the reader’s mind, relaxing, almost mimicking careful breathes. The sounds become about rhythm and natural cycles; every time the “a hoosh a ha” comes, there is a loosening in the chest, like a long exhale. read more…
Intellectual, author and activist Lawrence Hill has received all sorts of rave reviews for his latest work. If you enjoyed Aaron’s review of The Book of Negroes, then you will absolutely love the latest interview podcast over at Bookninja Magazine. The wonderful Canadian literary critic Donna Bailey Nurse sits down with the talented Hill at the CBC in Toronto and talks with him about growing up biracial in Don Mills, Ontario, his experience as a young man volunteering in Africa, how he came upon the idea for The Book of Negroes, as well as his non-fiction book The Deserter’s Tale, which has been reviewed previously here on InkNoire.
This is a remarkable interview that highlights the dynamic history of Black slavery in Africa, the US and Canada. You can download/listen to the interview here. While you’re at it, click on the ad to purchase or learn more about the novel. Props to G on this one.
The Book of Negroes is available now in Canadian bookstores. American InkNoire readers will have to wait until November 2007 for the book to be released in the US.
Written in a series of poems separated only by white space, Liar tears at the heart of a messy break-up. Blatantly autobiographical, the work tramples through the many landscapes of emotion: there is anger of being cheated on, the wounds of being left, the self reliance and strength that emerges, and, always, the underlying current of loss. It would have been easy to write a book bemoaning the lost love, crying victim at every turn: instead Liar approaches the subject with searing honesty, unflappable in her ability to face the hardest scenes and voice the painfully frustrating admissions. read more…
I fear that being against the Iraq War is now trendy. This thought came about when Ricky Martin made a “political statement” by making an obscene gesture in regards to President Bush at a recent concert. It seems now that public opinion has swayed, not because of a moral uprising, but because the War itself has gone on too long and finally celebrities are able to speak out without experiencing a backlash; if celebrities support something, chances are chunks of the public will begin too as well. In short, opposition to the Iraq War has become a little like a tiny dog accessory. This reaction takes the public further away from the actual events of the War, the people, civilians and soldier on both sides, that are directly involved and glamorizes it, transforming it into A Cause. Luckily, there is The Deserter’s Tale. read more…
Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led towards water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary…there, right underneath, lies a bottomless pit of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have a sense of gliding over the unburied.
It is rare to see an author attack a subject with the same scope and breadth that Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes does. Hill creates a web of interlocking histories, a series of overlappings through personal narrative that span from Africa to Nova Scotia and back. Set in the 18th century, the work follows the slave trade, focusing on Hill’s intensely strong protagonist, Aminata Diallo. Anchored by quick dialogue and abrupt story telling, the work compels the reader towards the margins of his/her own histories, to find the small and mistreated bodies, far from any home, that lay there unburied or forgotten.
As large as the novel is, it is always firmly rooted in the personal. Hill creates Aminata as a resilient woman, a self-taught literate, who uses her intelligence and perseverance to create a path of bare survival for herself. As the novel ducks back and forth between the end of Aminiata’s life, where she resides in England helping the abolitionist cause, and the beginning, first in Africa then across the ocean as she’s sold to an owner in North Carolina, the reader is constantly reminded of the vastness of each slave’s travels, the extreme distances put upon each and every one. read more…
There are only our shapes in motion.
You fold and unfold my body at the knees as if opening and closing a music box to make it play from the beginning again.
There is always anxiety in the dark, whether it’s in the black envelope of a movie theatre or the pitch of a passionate embrace. Part of this nervousness comes from the constant disconnect from sight: in the dark the eye only catches half images, half visions that spiral into excessive thoughts and doubts. This is the space songs for the dancing chicken occupies, collecting disparate scenes and lines into beautifully wrought and detailed maps that explore the shadowed and antsy corners of city existence and personal narrative.
Cut into six different sections, the poetry here is firmly rooted in the specific. Schultz is especially effective at grasping the small pivot within a poem, a lit window or curled ribbon, and reacting to this tiny turn by exposing the inner voice of its narrator. In this way, the emotional core and the sensual physical experience are always closely tied together, always apparent and thrust forward. These are poems about feeling the teeth of a key or seeing an exposed body and having the mind cut those experiences into pieces until they are small enough to carry as constantly compacted memories. read more…
“Because,” I fervently declared. “I’ve loved you you since…forever, that’s why.”
Forever was twelve years.
I said: “The zodiac has twelve signs, a year twelve months. The Book of Revelation says Mark wore a crown of twelve stars. There were tweleve tribes of Israel, twleve labours of Heracles, and twelve apostles for Jesus. The human body has twelve ribs, and the minute hand of a clock turns twelve times faster than the hour hand.”
We are the wikipedia generation, a group blessed to have strings of facts and stats mere seconds away. A generation who pours information into and over the sensational news stories and along the cracks of our personal narratives. It is easy to be well informed now, to be saturated in knowledge. We are the generation obsessed with breaking everything down, decomposing our language into ad space, our TV shows into reality and our experiences into smaller and smaller, more manageable, more explainable chunks. We are a generation of filters. It is within this constant compartmentalizing that The Tablecloth Trick lodges itself, endeavors to create a sense of one life narrative through a web of research that, instead of distilling into a form of understanding, webs outward into ever increasing interconnected particulars. These are photos, quotes, an infinite coil of information.
read more…
Welcome to the new home of InkNoire 5.0, formerly InkNoire.WordPress.com, and formerly Black Ink. :)
July 17, 2008 – Toronto – Canada’s Festival of Queer Literary Arts returns to the streets of Toronto on Sunday August 24th, after the incredible success of the 2007 inaugural event. This all day festival features an array of activities for everyone, including panel discussions, an open mic stage, a poetry slam, children’s area, and exclusive readings by all confirmed authors.
Once again Church Street will become a pedestrian-only zone where LGBT readers and writers will join forces to participate in a day-long interactive celebration of queer literary arts. This year provides a completely different roster of over a dozen authors soliciting a summer sensory exploration. As well, after the popularity of last year, there will be an expanded Pink Ink Open Mic series, where anyone can garner their 15 minutes of fame. The three featured authors bring a wealth of creative influx representative of their home towns New York City, San Francisco and Vancouver. read more…
If you have been reading this blog at all in the last few months, you have probably noticed that we haven’t been posting as frequently as we would like. Well, we’re on a bit of a summer hiatus and have been busy working on our own creative projects as well as going to work five days a week.
Thankfully, we have a little help on the way. We expect to be back in action with THREE bloggers contributing to InkNoire on a weekly basis. We also hope we can deliver on author interviews and book reviews previously mentioned.
It is true that our posts will be sparse for another couple months; however, we’ll try and give you a few doses of literary content now and again until we get into full swing this September.
In the meantime, if you find yourself unable to cope without a regular InkNoire fix, please visit some of our preferred reads elsewhere in the blogosphere. Note that not all are literary sites:
The Genealogy of Taste
Texting
Bookninja
The BackList
Maud Newton
Niggerati Manor
SlushPile
Marlon James
Oh Word!
Lexiphanic
Other Clutter
Ill Doctrine
For more entertaining reads from other bloggers, consult our blogroll.
In between work, writing and maintaining my summer glow, I still answer email. So, reach out some time via inknoire [at] g mail [dot] com if you want to know what I’m up to, if you’d like to add me on Facebook, and anything else that floats your boat. :)
It seems everyone thumbs their noses at the 80s. Most will pretend it was a ridiculous decade, one based on fear and extreme consumption, all backdropped by big haired, synthed-out pop music. But that is an adult point of view, the sight that understands the world as larger than four blocks and a few hundred people. For those of us that grew up in the 80s there is an uneasy nostalgia there and Joyland occupies that pocket of remembering perfectly. This is a novel of florescent memories and chunky pixelated landscapes, all set within the confines of being young in a small town. This is a novel about being bored constantly and the fantasies of what goes on just beyond the train tracks leading out of town. Yet, beneath all this supposed innocence is a bubbling unease, the world large and looming, waiting just behind adolescence.
Joyland avoids the easy trap of relying too heavily on the decade’s pop culture. Accented by Nate Powell’s striking black and white drawings, the book instead uses the video games and TV shows are used more as sign posts to the era, as reminders of the types of media invading the youth. Shultz has done an impressive job of depicting the 80s children, not as the originators of multi-media culture, but the first that were born completely indoctrinated by it. This was the first generation where the bombardment of multi-media culture was not only normal, but expected and craved for.
As you can tell, I’ve been pretty wound up in the Scream lately and the posts have dropped off. There is a review coming very shortly but in the meantime in-between time I wanted to let everyone know that tickets for the book length reading of Christopher Dewdney’s The Natural History are now on sale at the Scream Store. Tickets are $35 and include the surefire amazing reading plus a three course vegetarian dinner with an option for a fish dish. For more info check out the store!
Also, we have the rough event listings up on the events page so have a look over there and, as always, our facebook page is alive and we.
Enough shameless promoting. More content coming soon!
As inknoire goes into a slight summer lull, the Scream Literary Festival kicks into high gear. We’ve just released the names of those participating in the 15th annual Scream in High Park:
Elizabeth Bachinsky
Sean Dixon
Shane Koyczan
Naila Keleta Mae
David McGimpsey
Roy Miki
Al Moritz
Steven Price
Priscila Uppal
Zoe Whittall
Rachel Zolf
I’ve seen Koyczan preform when I lived in Vernon and he’s a bundle of energy and passion. I just finished reading Uppal’s Griffin nominated Ontological Necessities and it was quite engaging. Rachel Zolf, fresh off the release of her new book Human Resources, is always a spectacular reader. And Roy freaking Miki. This is quite a powerhouse lineup and I really hope to see everyone that is in Toronto on July 9th there.
But there’s more! Scream in High Park is the closing party; there are lots of other readers and events starting on July 3rd. Keep checking the Scream website for more info or email me to get on our mailing list and get a sweet newsletter every month or so.
Air bubbles orbit your coffee cup. Wind forever blowing the outside in: pollen, pesticide, exhaust. The weatherman, either indecisive or comtemptuous (take your pick), holds out rain in the one hand and migraine in the other. O blustering succotash! O mother of lightening!
Initially a reader might mistake Nerve Squall, winner of last year’s Griffin Prize, as a overly active semantic playground, a text concerned most heavily with the twisting of clichés, of shifting ordinary language slightly off center. But the text is a much deeper exploration than that, addressing altered perception and the many ways of viewing the world.
Legris centers the text around the subject and sensations of the migraine, a nerve storm in the head. Yet, at no point does that main focus hinder the progression of the text: this is not a book that simply explains what it is like to have a migraine or attempts to translate the pain of the suffering through direct adjectives. Instead, the migraine becomes a doorway to re-imagine sight and speech. Through the first section the work rotates around the theme of fish and the underwater: the vocabulary used drenches the reader in a slowness, as if the poems, the movements described, are underwater as well. The reader is given a pathway to the dull edges of consciousness that accompany a migraine, stumbling or swimming through the world. read more…
After noticing a few technical errors with our previous blog theme, we decided to change it. Change is good. Even if it involves altering an interface for the fifth time. We’re quite liking this new look. And to give this blog a genuine InkNoire feel, we decided to use Montreal’s skyline as our blog header. We hope you like it. :)
Skeletal absolutes, certainties of the flesh. Imagination is the sixth sense, a faculty like love that keeps us alive. Like a cat under the bedclothes it moves among the words and causes the light to change, the patterns ceaselessly to compose and decay
It is the long knotted lines of prose poetry that first draw a reader into Invisible, each concise and purposeful, strangely foreign. There is a very strict focus paid to the currency of language, to the wealth of meticulous and seldom used words, as the poems are carried by a very opulent and varied vocabulary. It is this richness in combination with the form that makes Invisible a jumbled and sometimes rewarding text.
Constructed as fragments of a novel, Whiteman develops the continuity of the work by consistently playing off the realms of the private and public world. As such, most of this concern manifests itself in the main themes of sex and language. read more…
We are walking backwards into our lives. Our cities are
incensed. They fester on our thighs. And we lick at them in
garish immoderate delight.When colour comes we run. We have no idea why.
It is fitting that Stephen’s book opens with the looping and layered string quartet of Gorecki’s “Already It is Dusk” as Touch to Affliction applies the same sonic qualities, the repetition of notes, staffs, phrases, words, woven on top of and into each other. The poetry here is a music stripped of the ideal of the pop chorus as the anchor of a song. Instead the text uses an alluring and hypnotic reoccurrence of pace and landscape, a long and beautifully drawn out cycle of reiteration stretching with a dream-like haziness that echoes as easily as any orchestral piece.
The integration of music with poetry is especially important when considering Stephens as one of the last bilingual poets in Canada, an identity that bleeds its way into the text. She expertly blends the two tongues together, interjecting them between each other and puddles them like the reoccurring water images throughout. Both languages grapple with each other, neither surfacing as dominate but only existing as parasites of each other. read more…
