There’s an internet debate a’brewin’ over the merits of that perennial high school syllabus placeholder The Catcher in the Rye. Over at Good Magazine, Anne Trubek makes an impassioned plea to replace it with something newer and fresher:

J.D. Salinger’s novel was edgy and controversial when teachers first put it on their syllabi. But that was 50 years ago. Today, Salinger’s novel lacks the currency or shock value it once had, and has lost some of its critical cachet. But it is still ubiquitously taught even though many newer novels of adolescence are available.

Meanwhile, the scribes at Gawker have responded with an equally impassioned WTF? directed at Trubek:

My initial reaction to this would be that we read Catcher in The Rye because everyone on some level at some point loves Catcher in The Rye, and we are fast running out of things we can say that about.

Brendan Jones, the Ontario high school student who was threatened with expulsion after writing a violent-themed story as part of a test, has posted a comment on the original Quillblog post about this story to give us an update:

As of right now, i’m still sitting at home, with no school to go to tomorrow. They told me that it’s not in my, nor the school’s best interest to have me ever return to Heart Lake. They told us that i’m neither suspended or expelled, but merely “excluded” for a time frame that i’m unaware of.

Remember the good old days when you walked to school uphill, both ways, and even read books for free?

Hoping to lower school dropout rates, the mayor of a small town in Spain has suggested paying students one euro for each hour they spend reading.

The town’s council will vote on the idea in March. The jury is still out on whether this will foster a love of reading or love of money.

From the Calgary Herald:

After a hiatus from library shelves, a controversial novel is being welcomed back into Calgary Catholic School District schools.

The Golden Compass, a decade-old novel by Philip Pullman, was pulled from local Catholic schools two months ago as a film adaptation of the story was released in theatres.

Following a review of the book – the first installment in Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy – school board officials have decided to use the novel’s counter-religious themes as a teaching opportunity for Catholic students.

“There is no doubt that the text is harsh in terms of its language about organized religion and that it presents a consistently negative view of church, clergy and faith-based institutions; however, there are glimpses of light with opportunities for positive reflection,” the review stated.

Interesting that the ban is reversed only after everyone has pretty much decided the movie version’s a dud.

Perhaps in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of blogging, Guy Gavriel Kay has a piece in this past weekend’s Globe and Mail Books section about the perils facing authors in the digital age.

Gavriel Kay has a strong Web following himself and has been known to write blog-like diaries in conjunction with book tours, but that doesn’t mean he likes any of it. Overall, he believes the proliferation of chatter online has led to a decline in privacy.

For some of us, no context is “limited” any longer. That is the point I’m offering for consideration. And “some of us” can be pretty extensive. This isn’t about Brad Pitt or Amy Winehouse. Ask any high school student whose pratfall is recorded by a classmate’s camera phone and posted to YouTube. Or the microcelebrity (a nice term I first saw in Wired magazine) snapped while at a party looking less-than-sober, with the photo online immediately, to derision-inducing effect.

We are, in other words, always “on” now, at least potentially, always in a wider public than might appear to be the case, and it compels adjustments, and some regret.

Here, for example, is how he reacted when approached by four Yale students “with questions about other writers and their books”:

And I looked at them and “saw” four blogs, with links to a plenitude of others. Given the ease of searching blogs now - for my name, or those of the queried writers - it was suddenly impossible to treat this as a quiet exchange of thoughtful literary opinion. I was as careful as a politician in a scrum, all of us with teacups in hand in a beautiful room.

Now, Gavriel Kay may have a general point about the erosion of privacy in the wired world. But it’s difficult to understand his timid reaction given the students’ benign and unpersonal line of questioning. After all, a writer’s “thoughful literary opinion” is unlikely to come back to haunt him, even if it is circulated online. As Martin Amis pointed out in a recent essay, “What you say about something is never your last word on any subject.” Fear of being overheard certainly hasn’t kept Amis from running his mouth.

The latest salvos in the Amis/Eagleton polemic come from the increasingly rancorous novelist himself, who penned an earnest rebuttal in Saturday’s Guardian – “No, I am not a racist,” pleads the headline – and then glibly ran his mouth at a debate on Monday night. At the talk at Manchester University, where Amis and Eagleton both teach, Amis revisted the incendiary subject that got him into hot water in the first place – namely, the discovery of an alleged Islamist plot against the U.K. in August 2006.

At a debate at Manchester University, where the novelist is head of creative writing, he told a packed auditorium that only a machine would not have experienced “retaliatory urges” upon learning in August last year of the alleged plot to bomb transatlantic aircraft, in which, Amis said, 3,000 people could have died.

“There should be from every corner of the west a permanent factory siren of disgust for these actions,” he told students, staff and members of the public, including Afzal Khan, the first Muslim to be lord mayor of Manchester. He acknowledged Muslim efforts “to put their house in order” were made more difficult by the jihadis’ “monopoly on intimidation”.

Upon closer inspection, Amis seems to apologize in advance for the outburst in the Saturday piece, where he advises readers never to take a novelist at his word. Sort-of quoting Nabokov, he writes, “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished man of letters, I talk like an idiot.”

So we’re likely to hear from Amis again, in considered prose, given that he continues to speak like an idiot.

But there was less assent when he went on to speak of a “distorted sympathy” towards Palestine. “I have sympathy for Israel. It’s not nothing to have six million of your number murdered in central Europe in the last century. Don’t you think that this has had a psychological effect on this race or religion, or whatever you want to call the Jews?

“Palestinians have never suffered anything as remotely terrible as that. There is an inexplicable numbness about Israel.”

According to a release from Sono Nis Press, author Nikki Tate was relieved to learn that Elizabeth School in Kindersley, Saskatchewan, which had previously banned her children’s book Trouble on Tarragon Island, has reversed its decision and “un-banned” it after a new school principal re-evaluated the content.

Sono Nis told Q&Q Omni this summer that the book had been deemed a problem because it contains a scene of bullying and because the bullying includes words that may be offensive to women.

Tate’s book, the third in her Tarragon Island series about protagonist Heather Blake, depicts a battle in Blake’s B.C. community over clear-cut logging. Blake’s grandmother joins an anti-logging activist group, and poses naked with them for a calendar, embarrassing her granddaughter. At the beginning of the book’s first chapter, several boys in Blake’s school taunt her about her grandmother’s breasts, calling them “bazoongas” and cupping melon-shaped areas around their chests.

The scene, Tate told Q&Q Omni, “sets up the central conflict of the book, which is asking the question, ‘when you step outside the rules of society … what is the impact on your community and on your family?’” Tate said the description shows the pain experienced by Heather as a result of the bullying. “It’s pretty obvious these kids aren’t being held up as an example of fine behaviour,” she said.

Elizabeth School administrators now seem to have come around to seeing it that way too.

Trouble on Tarragon Island has been nominated for a Diamond Willow Award in Saskatchewan, and Tate is participating in a TD Canadian Children’s Book Week tour in the province this month. As a part of the tour, she had planned to give away copies of her book to elementary students in Kindersley, and she says she will still go ahead with the give-away now that the ban has been reversed. She will sign copies of the book and chat with students at an informal event at the Kindersley Mall on Nov. 19.

English writer Philip Pullman kicked off the Particles of Narrative children’s literature symposium on Friday by speaking to an audience of about 400 in the University of Toronto’s Earth Sciences auditorium. The audience was a lively cross-section of all ages, including children’s authors, teachers, librarians, university students and professors, Trinity alumni, and a few keen teens. After his talk on the symposium’s theme of examining the elemental particles of story, Pullman patiently signed books for a long line of fans that stretched out of the auditorium and seemed to include half the audience.

The next day, about 175 people gathered in the George Ignatieff Theatre to hear six speakers, among them Kenneth Oppel, Sarah Ellis, Tim Wynne-Jones, and American author Megan Whalen Turner. At the day’s end, Pullman joined the six on a panel that took thoughtful questions from both the audience and from one another. In response to a question from an audience member, Pullman said he’d always thought Lord of the Rings was “trivial” because “no one changes,” but that C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series was, on the other hand, a “serious work” because “it grapples with moral issues” but in a narrow Christian way that he dislikes intensely – a view that drew applause from some in the crowd.

U of T children’s literature professor and frequent Q&Q reviewer Deirdre Baker, herself the author of the YA novel Becca at Sea, organized the conference.

Students at Highfield Junior School in Toronto won Scholastic Canada’s Kids Are Authors competition with their book Counting on Zero. The prize is normally worth $1,000, but for the tenth anniversary of the competition the prize was enriched to a $10,000 Scholastic gift certificate. (Photos courtesy of Scholastic Canada)

Students in Grades 1, 3, and 4 at Highfield Junior School in Toronto collaboratively wrote and illustrated their winning book, Counting on Zero.

Linda Gosnell, co-president of Scholastic Canada (right) presents principal Rita Russo with a $10,000 Scholastic gift certificate.

Ontario Lieutenant-Governor David Onley speaks to Highfield students and principal Rita Russo.

Heather Reisman can take a bow today. The Indigo CEO appears to have shamed Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty into promising a major funding boost for the province’s cash-starved school library system.

As The Globe and Mail reports, Reisman has commissioned a short documentary on the crisis in school libraries, and after a press screening of the film this week, McGuinty appeared at a Toronto Indigo store and promised $120-million for Ontario school systems: $80-million to buy books, and $40-million to hire new librarians. The Globe story also notes that Indigo will be supplying the books at cost.

No word on where the documentary might be seen online, but according to the story,

The documentary, which profiles Ms. Reisman’s foundation and the trials of two Ontario schools that applied for grants, includes shots of battered books with broken spines and children forced to share aging texts.

There are interviews with students and children’s author Robert Munsch and tearful scenes with school principals describing the need for more and newer reading materials for their students.

Globe columnist Margaret Wente also writes about the issue in today’s paper. And here are some related stories from the Q&Q archives.

• “Indigo directs another $1.5-million to schools” (May 2007)
• “Ontario lieutenant-governor begins a new book drive for First Nations kids” (January 2007)
• “Indigo commits $250,000 for school literacy program” (December 2004)
• “Scenes from a school library” (February 2004)
• “Library coalition takes fight to provinces” (February 2004)
• “The crisis in school libraries” (February 2002)
• “Industry group fights for school libraries” (April 2002)

Of all the traditional complaints about e-books – that they are hard to read, can’t be read in the bathtub, don’t actually resemble books, etc. – there is one that has never before been addressed, perhaps because most people assumed it was a point in favour of e-books: the fact that they don’t smell. Specifically, that they don’t smell like old books.

As it turns out, for a whole lot of students – the most lucrative potential market for e-texts – the smell of a book matters. And the older the better.

This is the very failing to be remedied by online e-book provider Café Scribe. According to a press release on its web site, the company will soon be providing e-book users with scratch-and-sniff stickers that give off the odour of a musty, old tome.

Though the target market is students for now, we see these stickers being an in-demand item for ex-used bookstore owners and librarians who are having difficulty adjusting to civilian life. It would be like a nicotine patch for recovering bibliophiles.

MtvU, a branch of MTV that broadcasts on 750 U.S. college campuses, announced this week that it has chosen its first poet laureate, The New York Times reports. And while names such as Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen spring to mind as poets already in the music world, mtvU chose John Ashbery, a celebrated 80-year-old poet who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and continues to publish prolifically.

Excerpts of Ashbery’s poems will be shown in 18 promotional spots on the channel and its website (which will also have the full text of the poems).

Mr. Ashbery, who was the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, was immediately receptive. “It seemed like it would be a chance to broaden the audience for poetry,” he said.

The poems used in the campaign span his career, and the spots are simple: on a white background, black text floats in to a sound like a crashing wave, appears on the screen for a minute, then floats away. From “Retro” (2005): “It’s really quite a thrill/When the moon rises over the hill/and you’ve gotten over someone/salty and mercurial, the only person you’ve ever loved.” From “Soonest Mended” (2000): “Barely tolerated, living on the margin/In our technological society, we are always having to be rescued.”

The station is also sponsoring a poetry contest for students. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa will select a winner, who will have a book published next year by HarperCollins as part of its national poetry series.

“We hope that we’ll help discover the next great poet that we’ll be talking about for years to come,” said Stephen K. Friedman, the general manager of mtvU….

Quillblog suggests keeping quiet about the fact that there is significantly less bling involved in being a poetry star than a rock star.

Monday was the deadline for former students of native residential schools to opt out of a $2-billion compensation package offered by the federal government for abuses they suffered while attending the schools. (Accepting compensation means they agree not to sue the government or the churches that ran the schools.) The Tyee provides some related reading with a review of two books: Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast by Jan Hare and Jean Barman (UBC Press) and The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary-Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast, edited by Mary-Ellen Kelm (University of Calgary).

Tyee reviewer Crawford Kilian says the books provide some insight into what those schools were like, the mindset of the people running them, and ways that the students suffered even when they weren’t subjected to the worst types of physical and sexual abuse that have been documented.

Apart from chronicling an almost forgotten era in B.C. history, these books introduce us to two remarkable women. Both were highly intelligent, immensely competent, and profoundly toxic to the people they were trying to save.
…
For modern readers, however, it’s striking to see that Emma expressed zero interest in the people the Crosbys were trying to convert. She never discusses the Tsimshians’ culture or history. (One photograph, from 1876, shows Thomas Crosby in Tsimshian regalia; he looks painfully embarrassed.) She refers in passing to the dirt and disease of the natives, but doesn’t even mention the catastrophic smallpox pandemic that a decade earlier had killed a third of the native population on the B.C. coast.

Margaret Butcher made similar remarks: “They are a slow, indolent, dirty people,” she writes, “bound very strongly by custom and superstition.” But Kilian makes particular note of her attitudes toward the Kitamaat people’s language.

“I suppose in a few years time Kitamaat speech will be extinct for the young folks learn to speak Eng. in the schools & one of our senior girls told me they cannot understand all the Kitamaat of the old folk.”

Butcher clearly considered this progress.

It’s very difficult to compensate for this kind of suffering and loss in dollars, but the costs to native people across the country are clearly evident and profound.

The most recent edition of The Times Literary Supplement contains a review of a book/essay entitled (in French) “How to discuss books one hasn’t read.” Written by French literature professor and practising psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard, the book tackles what must surely be a common problem: having to fake one’s way through conversations or writing about great lit one hasn’t read. Don’t feel guilty, Bayard says – you aren’t alone, and society shouldn’t be pressuring you like that anyway.

During a discussion of “literary embarrassment,” Bayard himself confesses to referencing Joyce repeatedly in his teaching, though he hasn’t read Ulysses, and he isn’t alone in his chutzpah, the review says:

Bayard focuses on a scene in Lodge’s novel Changing Places, in which the English academic Philip Swallow initiates his students and fellow academics into a “game of Humiliation,” according to whose rules players have to give the names of great works they have not read: the head of the English department who hasn’t read Paradise Regained is bested by the American academic, Howard Ringbaum, who, in a moment of professional recklessness, confesses to not having read Hamlet. Ringbaum’s mistake, according to Bayard, was to have made this unambiguous confession, for Hamlet is part of what Bayard terms our “virtual” library – works we cannot help but be familiar with. There was simply no need for Ringbaum to be so rash.

As discussed in the review, Bayard focuses on the question of reviewing without reading the works in question:

The most enjoyable chapter is on Balzac’s novel Illusions perdues … in which the hero, Lucien de Rubempré, who has come to Paris to find literary fame and fortune, receives a brisk lesson in the cynical conventions of Parisian literary journalism.… Rubempré, who is full of foolish notions about “la sainte critique,” learns from his more worldly friends that … to read a volume for review would be considered humiliating – it’s a task best left to one’s mistress: the reviewer’s job is to express general opinions about the author in question, opinions that comply with the wishes of one’s editor. Bayard would see this approach to literary journalism as “transgressive”: all opinions, no matter how ill-founded, are valid, and the book has ceased to have importance, “has ceased to exist.” Balzac’s chancers are free to construct their own virtual libraries.

The practice of reviewing a book without having read it inevitably brings Oscar Wilde into the discussion: Wilde (the patron saint of non-readers) recommended six minutes as the proper time to spend reading a book for review, and advocated reviewing as a good way of talking about oneself.

Quillblog should state, for the record, that Q&Q’s reviewers never try this at home.

Ed Carson, who stepped down from his position as president of Penguin Group Canada in May, is starting a new job as chief business and associate director at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. His department has been charged with the task of doubling enrollment, and Carson will be “running the business and professional portfolio and looking at the overall business model,” he said.

Attending BEC as a guest of Penguin, Carson told Q&Q the job is in some ways bringing his career full circle, because he began his work-life studying at the University of Toronto to be a professor of English literature. But he said it is not such a dramatic step away from publishing – respectively comparing lectures, books, and students in his new role to authors, books, and audiences in his former one. It is, in a way, “a branding exercise,” he said, noting that the university wants students to consider U of T for the kind of after-degree training they might often look for in a school like Ryerson.

Our BookExpo Canada preview, from the June issue of Q&Q.

Tentative optimism seems to be the general mood going into BookExpo Canada this year. After some exhibitor grumbling last year about high costs and low returns associated with the annual trade show, Reed Exhibitions is adding BOOKED!, a consumer book festival running alongside the convention. Hopes are high that the move will reinvigorate BookExpo, but as of late April (Q&Q’s press time), few details about the consumer event had been made public, leaving some publishers anxious to solidify plans.

BOOKED will run from June 7 through 9 (the BookExpo trade show will follow on June 10 and 11), and is being overseen by Geoffrey Taylor, director of International Readings at Harbourfront. The festival will be made up of two dozen events, half of them free and the others ranging in ticket price from $10 to $25, in locations across Toronto. BookExpo attendees will have to pay just like everyone else. Taylor says the aim is to have the festival pay for itself through ticket sales, and he was planning to put out a call for volunteers in May. “The whole thing’s supposed to be revenue-neutral,” says Taylor. “There are people out trying to find corporate partners, but from a planning point of view we’re trying to make it pay for itself.”

As for the lineup, Taylor says exhibiting publishers put forth 250 author names, which a selection committee (made up of reps from publishing and bookselling associations, as well as Taylor and BookExpo event director Dahlia de Rushe) has narrowed to around 50 for the inaugural year. But while publishers have been informed which of their authors made the cut – the list reportedly includes Naomi Klein, Jeannette Walls, David Bezmozgis, and Michael Redhill – no one has yet seen a detailed program. “You’re sort of presenting your authors blind,” says Lindsey Lowy, marketing manager for HarperCollins Canada. “You don’t really know what they’re getting into…. It’s difficult to put forth your best authors.” Still, Lowy has Richard B. Wright, Barbara Haworth-Attard, Susan Juby, and Kenneth Oppel all attending BOOKED.

And Taylor now says some BOOKED events will spill over the June 7-9 parameters. For example, H.B. Fenn and Company is bringing author James Patterson to both BOOKED and BookExpo, as part of his first Canadian tour in many years. Patterson’s BOOKED event is to take place on June 10, the first day of the trade show, but publicity manager Janis Ackroyd says she still doesn’t have a specific time, and the delays are holding back Fenn’s plans for the trade show as well: “We want to have Patterson in our booth, but we can’t determine the time of his booth appearance until we know all the details for BOOKED, which throws off the whole schedule because other authors don’t know their time,” says Ackroyd.

Taylor, for his part, concedes that the BOOKED committee is behind on the original schedule, but not, he says, “dangerously behind.” One major event has been booked for the John Bassett Theatre, while a children’s program has been scheduled for Fort York on the Friday. Taylor says most paid events have locations lined up, with only the free events still unsecured. And as part of an agreement with Toronto’s Luminato arts festival, also in its first year and running over the first week of June, the two festivals will share a space in a Luminato tent for at least one event.

BOOKED aside, it also remains to be seen how this year’s BookExpo convention and trade show will shake out. Last year’s trade show actually saw a noticeable increase in attendance, with 6,013 people attending, up 33% from the previous year. Bookseller numbers also rebounded, with a 15% increase, as 2,517 booksellers attended the show. But that still came against a backdrop of publisher concerns about high costs and few on-site orders. For years, BookExpo has been more of a networking event than a sales-generating one, but last year there was a renewed questioning of the status quo.

And this year, some exhibitors are slightly shrinking their presence. Simon & Schuster Canada, Random House of Canada, and the Literary Press Group are all reducing the size of their booths. LPG executive director Ronda Kellington says their booth will still feature author events, with an emphasis on first-time authors, but she expects that even fewer publishers than the 22 from last year will be represented. Heidi Winter, vice-president of marketing at H.B. Fenn, says the firm is producing fewer displays for its booth. And Whitecap Books, a perennial best-booth winner, won’t have its own booth at all this year, but will be exhibiting within the booth of its North American distributor, Firefly Books. Vice-president Nick Rundall says Whitecap will still have authors at the booth and blow-ups of the covers, and that the changes are for the ease of the booksellers – “assuming there are any.”

Still, most publishers are both returning and sticking to their booth size. “I remember last year there was that hooha about, ‘Oh, we should cancel BookExpo,’” says McArthur & Company president Kim McArthur. “I was never of the opinion that we should cancel BookExpo Canada.… I really always thought that it was extremely important to retain our own Canadian trade show for our own booksellers and our own authors and own companies.”

BOOKED isn’t the only addition to this year’s fest – Reed has also developed a new program for the trade show floor to spotlight children’s books, in an effort to attract more teachers and librarians. “Our Choice Best Bets” will feature 20 children’s authors and illustrators; each will speak for five minutes about a topic of their choice related to their new title. The Canadian Children’s Book Centre organized the event, which will take place on the presentation stage on both days of the trade show. The artists taking part in the program represent a cross-section of genres and target ages and include author team Jane Drake and Ann Love (whose Sweet! is reviewed on page 47 of this issue), creative non-fiction writer Barbara Greenwood, and author/illustrator Veronika Martenova Charles. But the list is also heavily Ontario-based, with only six participants coming from other provinces, including B.C. author kc dyer, Monique Polak from Quebec, and Nova Scotian illustrator Susan Tooke.

Young adult author Don Aker, one writer on the bill, says the time he gets with the audience will be worth the expense of coming from Nova Scotia. (Aker is mostly covering his own travel expenses, though his publisher, HarperCollins Canada, is footing his hotel bill.) He says his decision to come is spurred by the great reception Ontario teachers and librarians have given him in the past; the Ontario department of education approved his novel First Stone years before Nova Scotia tagged the work for classroom use.

Another addition to the trade show is a mystery event organized by Bloody Words, the annual Canadian mystery-writing conference of the same name. In the same vein as Best Bets, mystery authors will give readings on the presentation stage over the two days of the trade show. Cheryl Freedman, an organizer of the Bloody Words conference, says the final number of authors appearing is still undecided, but there will be fewer than at the Best Bets presentation, to allow the writers more time to read; some authors expected to appear include Linwood Barclay, Lyn Hamilton, Louise Penny, and Mary Jane Maffini.

Susan Dayus, the Canadian Booksellers Association’s executive director, says the author breakfasts and lunches, for both adult and children’s authors, will continue this year, with four in total. At press time the CBA was still contemplating opening up Saturday’s adult fiction lunch ­– which features Elizabeth Hay, Frances Itani, and Richard B. Wright – to the public. (The full breakfast and lunch lineups appear on pages 30-31.)

•••

As usual, the convention will kick off with two full days of professional development programming. Humber College and the Book and Periodical Council organized Friday’s publishing-focused lineup, “Devices and Desires,” while the CBA is running its annual “Super Saturday” programming for booksellers.

Friday’s lineup will address how new technology, especially the Internet, affects the publishing industry, and how publishers can reach online communities of readers. Cynthia Good, director of Humber’s Creative Book Publishing program, says the presentations and seminars look at how the future of book publishing can be seen now. “I believe that it’s no longer talking about a future – what will be the future of the book business and books and writing and bookselling and the whole book world,” says Good. “Everything is happening right now and we need to find a way to both learn and adjust creatively.”

The keynote speaker is Bob Young, founder of the print-on-demand website Lulu.com, who will argue that self-publishing is changing the publishing business. To balance Young’s viewpoint, former CBC Radio personality Mary Lou Finlay will be the responder, speaking for more traditional publishing models and touching on the issue of maintaining quality and standards. Attendees also have a choice of two workshops from a list of six that address new methods in marketing and promotion. Good says seminars are available both for the technologically savvy and for publishers new to online possibilities. (The cost of the day is up slightly to $125, though a reduced fee of $75 is available to students and members of The Writers’ Union of Canada; a full list of the day’s programming appears on pages 30-31.)

On the “Super Saturday” front, the CBA is expanding its members’ forum this year, after a strong response last year. “They kept bringing in chairs,” says Susan Dayus. “We had people up the aisles, up the front, down the back standing.” This year, the forum is being opened up to include non-CBA members – though attendance is still restricted to booksellers – and accordingly, it’s being renamed the Booksellers’ Industry Forum. Booksellers will also have more time to discuss ideas, as the roundtables following the forum are longer.

At the forum, the CBA will also unveil the results of an industry survey commissioned last year to measure Canadian booksellers’ profitability. And in its trade show booth, the association will be selling a manual for training new staff who have no previous experience in the book industry. Various CBA board directors helped write the manual, which will cost just under $20.

As organizers and exhibitors pull together the final details of this year’s show, they do so while facing the usual complaints about BookExpo, such as its seemingly permanent location in Toronto. Somewhat surprisingly, last year’s main complaint – the lack of firm orders – appears almost forgotten in the advent of BOOKED. The LPG’s Ronda Kellington, for example, refers to the expectation of order-taking at the trade show as “old-fashioned.” Says Kellington: “We thought there was good energy in our booth [last year]. We just want to create some energy, we want to get people into the booth, have a lot of traffic … and get LPG and our publishers into their brains for the fall.”

According to Reed’s Dahlia de Rushe, attendees will have an opportunity to express any concerns with the show, as Reed will once again solicit a cross-section of industry representatives for feedback. An advisory board will be set up following the close of this year’s show to “give direction on major strategic changes and major objectives,” says de Rushe.

For now, most publishers say they’re still committed to the trade show and are going in with a positive attitude. “All the publishers big and small have kind of come together to really try and reinvigorate BEC this year,” says Simon & Schuster’s vice-president of marketing and publicity, Rosslyn Junke, who was on BOOKED’s author selection committee. “People have put their best foot forward this year.”

Still, BOOKED may add more pressure for this year’s show to perform well. Random House director of marketing Linda Scott, who is co-chair of the marketing team behind the readers’ festival, is hoping that attendees will not be overly critical of the new venture. “Realistically, with change there are growing pains,” says Scott. “I would hope … people aren’t looking so critically at the initial changes that if it wasn’t perfect they would throw up their hands and say it didn’t work.”

THIS STORY HAS BEEN CORRECTED: A passage mistakenly stating that the McArthur & Company booth will have a new layout this year has been deleted.

In the wake of the massacre at Virginia Tech this week, Salon has posted a fascinating article about what creative writing professors should do when confronted with disturbing works by students. As has been widely reported, the perpetrator of the massacre, Cho Seung-Hui, wrote several scripts for his playwriting class that deeply alarmed the school’s English department faculty. Now, a lot of media pundits are questioning whether faculty could have done more to get Seung-Hui some medical treatment.

But this opens the door to a lot of potential problems, of course, the chief one being that creativity and freedom of speech could be trampled on.

Creative writing teachers have long wrestled with what they should do with students who turn in gruesome stories, as many colleges do not have formal policies about how teachers should respond. Further, there are no set rules for determining whether a story is the product of a febrile artistic imagination or a potentially violent criminal. Or both.

[…]

Creative writing teachers still have to rely on their own imprecise judgment, especially in classes where students may be encouraged to write with intense emotion. What may be one student’s cause for concern may be another’s catharsis, says Michelle Carter, [professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University]. “Sometimes working through rage in that way can be healthy,” she says.