Friday funnies

Some vaguely related-to-publishing links to amuse you:

• The Seething Resentment Reading Series
• An IP lawyer takes on anti-copyright zealots in a blog justifying his counterfeit business
• Writers and their cats
• Author promoting her book gives it her all
• The trend of run-on subtitles

Barbara Gowdy produces PSA for Earth week

Rabble.ca is celebrating Earth week by encouraging readers to go vegan for a week. Barbara Gowdy, who has been vegetarian for 30 years and vegan for 10, has produced public service announcements in support of the cause.

Daily book biz round-up

• Sister of murdered reporter Anna Politkovskaya on her sister’s posthumous memoir  Is Journalism Worth Dying For?
• Authors talk about the reality behind back cover blurbage
• Ex-Bookninja George Murray starts new online poetry magazine Newpoetry.ca
• David Foster Wallace’s editor explains how he put the manuscript for The Pale King together after the author’s death

Russell Wangersky wins Winterset Award

Last week the $10,000 BMO Winterset Award, which celebrates excellence in Newfoundland and Labrador writing, was presented to author Russell Wangersky for his novel The Glass Harmonica (Thomas Allen) at a ceremony in St. John’s. Wangersky beat out  Samuel Thomas Martin for This Ramshackle Tabernacle (Breakwater Books) and Craig Francis Power for Blood Relatives (Pedlar Press).

The award was established to honour the memory of Sandra Fraser Gwyn, a St. John’s-born social historian, prize-winning author, and passionate promoter of Newfoundland and Labrador arts.

Russell Wangersky’s previous book of fiction, a 2006 short story collection The Hour of Bad Decisions was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for first book from Canada and the Caribbean; and was a finalist for the 2006 Winterset Award.

What we’re talking about today: End the suffering of dying literary journals

In addition to the exclamations about the fall of our government, many writers and publishing folk on Twitter are discussing this NaPo blog post by poet Michael Lista, “Why Literary Magazines Should Fold”. Most tweets began with an almost embarrassed admission that they agreed with him.

It turns out a lot of us think that weeding the overgrown garden of literary journals might make the remaining plants grow healthier. With fewer magazines, content would improve, including writing with more eloquent metaphors than those describing overgrown gardens. Lista writes:

The problem with the market for literary journals now is that there’s too much supply for too little demand. The demand is there, to be sure, and isn’t in danger of diminishment should a number of these journals fold; quite the opposite. A culling will improve quality on both sides of the editorial table; the quality of submissions will increase as places to publish become more scarce, as will the calibre of the editors. And if we move from having a couple dozen journals to a handful, the readership that now is so thinly spread will coalesce around the remaining organs. The standard of the whole enterprise will rise. A magazine’s most important asset, let’s keep in mind, is its exclusivity; writers want to be published by magazines that are tough to get into, and readers buy pedigree.

Daily book biz round-up: March 25

Barely related musings on the writing life from around the web:

• Hollywood whitewashes the film version of YA trilogy The Hunger Games
• Poster girl for self-publishing admits it has its limits
• Love Me. Love Me? Love me! Writers and self-promotion
• Paula McLain on the benefits of waiting tables while writing
• Michael Crummey on Melville and selling a book about NFLD to the U.S.
• A.L. Kennedy on starting out as a writer

Atwood on the future of publishing

Margaret Atwood is interviewed by Rosalind Porter for The Globe and Mail’s Time to Lead discussion on the state of Canadian publishing. She puts a lot of big issues into perspective, and reminds readers not to overlook the author. Porter asks Atwood if she thinks that with all the discussion going on about the digital revolution there is a tendency to forget that the author is what keeps the business going. This is her response:

Sure, people sit there putting words on the page, and some of them make a lot of money for their publishers and others create huge losses because the publishers placed their bets wrong. When people say publishing is a business – actually it’s not quite a business. It’s part gambling and part arts and crafts, with a business component. It’s not like any other business, and that’s why when standard businessmen go into publishing and think, “Right, I’m going to clean this up, rationalize it and make it work like a real business,” two years later you find they’re bald because they’ve torn out all their hair. And then you say to them, “It’s not like selling beer. It’s not like selling a case of this and a case of that and doing a campaign that works for all of the beer.” You’re selling one book – not even one author any more. Those days are gone, when you sold, let’s say, “Graham Greene” almost like a brand. You’re selling one book, and each copy of that book has to be bought by one reader and each reading of that book is by one unique individual. It’s very specific.

Daily book biz round-up: March 18

• The Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders’ Arrival City “couldn’t be more timely” according to The New York Times
• How I wish this were an Onion headline
• Novelist Alison Pick proves some authors are still loyal to their publishers in Open Book Toronto’s Questionless Books interview
• Ten Canadians make the LAMBDA Literary Awards shortlist
• Looking at earthquakes through literature
• Margaret Atwood on e-books

Donoghue and Best win Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes

Katrina Best

Emma Donoghue’s Room continues to dominate this awards season, picking up the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book from the Caribbean and Canada. Room also won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Award.

Proving that it may indeed be the year of the debut short fiction collection, Montreal author Katrina Best won the Best First Book award for her collection Bird Eat Bird published by Toronto’s Insomniac Press. Best beat out Giller-shortlisted authors Alexander MacLeod (Light Lifting) and Sarah Selecky (This Cake Is for the Party) as well as winner of the Man Asian Booker Prize, Miguel Syjuco (Ilustrado).

The winners of all Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes will gather at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this May.

Tundra Books founder May Cutler, 1923-2011

Publishing pioneer May Cutler has died at the age of 87 at her home in Montreal. She was the first  Canadian woman to found a children’s publishing company, creating Tundra Books in 1967 from the basement of her home. She ran the press for 28 years, publishing iconic works such as Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater. Cutler was also the first female mayor of Westmount, elected in 1987 and serving four years in office. From Montreal’s The Gazette:

[Cutler] ran Tundra … as she was raising four boys, and managed also to write a novel, The Last Noble Savage (1967). She later wrote two plays, a musical, and a biography, Breaking Free: The Story of William Kurelek.

Cutler was the first to publish high-profile award winners, like [William] Kurelek (They Sought a New World, A Prairie Boy’s Winter) and Stéphane Poulin, who wrote stories about Josephine the cat.

From the Tundra Books blog:

May’s accomplishments were remarkable, and after completing an MA in journalism from Columbia University, she worked for the United Nations, then as a journalist and later taught in the English department at McGill where she set up a three-year extension program in journalism. …

But we will always know her as the founder of Tundra Books, which she ran for almost 30 years. May was a visionary, and her passion for the arts and creating children’s books as works of art was evident in titles by renowned artists such as William Kurelek, Ted Harrison, Arthur Shilling, Song Nan Zhang, and many others. She is also responsible for the discovery of the incomparable Dayal Kaur Khalsa, who admired her publisher so much that she named the heroine of her books May.