The winner of the second annual Man Asian Literary Prize has a Canadian connection – the 31-year-old Filipino author lives in Montreal, where he works as a copy-editor at The Gazette.

Miguel Syjuco, who received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, picked up the $10,000 (U.S.) prize yesterday in Hong Kong for his debut novel Ilustrado, which tells the story of fictional man-of-letters Crispin Salvador. The novel was written in English but has yet to find a North American publisher. (The Man Asian is awarded to books that are unpublished in English.)

The judges’ panel was presided over by the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, who praised the book for its stylistically daring premise:

Ilustrado seems to us to possess formal ambition, linguistic inventiveness and sociopolitical insight in the most satisfying measure. Brilliantly conceived, and stylishly executed, it covers a large and tumultuous historical period with seemingly effortless skill. It is also ceaselessly entertaining, frequently raunchy, and effervescent with humour.

Some sad news from over the weekend: Constance Rooke, editor, critic, and former president of PEN Canada, succumbed to ovarian cancer at age 65 on Saturday. Rooke, the wife of novelist Leon Rooke, was a professor at the University of Victoria for twenty years, and she was the founding chair of the Women’s Studies department there. She was also the founding director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Guelph University.

As a writer, Rooke authored several critical works, including Fear of the Open Heart: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Writing. She also edited several anthologies for PEN Canada, most recently 2006’s Writing Life.

Sandra Martin has a brief obituary in today’s Globe and Mail:

Born in New York City on Nov. 14, 1942, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Smith College in 1964, a master’s degree from Tulane University two years later and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1973. By then, she had met and married short story writer and novelist Leon Rooke.

Together, they went to the University of Victoria in B.C. There she edited The Malahat Review and began her illustrious career as a literary critic and a champion of Canadian literature.

There will be a public celebration of Rooke’s life at a future date, yet to be determined.

A new collection of David Sedaris essays – entitled When You Are Engulfed in Flames – comes out next week, and Entertainment Weekly has used the opportunity to check in with the humorist and to find out how he survived all those accusations of “reportorial inaccuracy” that dogged James Frey and Augusten Burroughs, et al.

If you ask Sedaris, the Frey backlash, culminating in a public shaming by Oprah Winfrey, was overblown. ”His punishment outweighed his crime,” says Sedaris. ”I don’t recall Oprah Winfrey calling George Bush a liar when he was on her show. And those lies cost thousands of people their lives.”

So to get back to that question he always gets from the crowd: As he’s strip-mined his own North Carolina upbringing and subsequent adulthood, how much has Sedaris himself made up? Plenty, he has frequently and cheerfully confessed. But it doesn’t matter because he’s a humorist, right? The New Republic begged to differ last spring. In an article titled ”This American Lie” by Alex Heard, TNR accused Sedaris of doing more than just stretching the truth. ”With some of his stories, especially the early ones, like in Naked,” says Heard, ”he’s taken every liberty a fiction writer [does]. It makes the story very funny, but also makes it something you shouldn’t call nonfiction.” Responds Sedaris: ”I’ve said a thousand times I exaggerate. Why is it news when somebody else says it?”

Some of the sleuthing Heard did seems solid, including, for example, getting Sedaris to confirm that he invented details of encounters with mental patients in 1970. But many a bizarre situation checked out true, and Heard’s contention that Sedaris’ work amounts to a mean-spirited exploitation of his family and others seems, well, grossly exaggerated. Sedaris’ Little, Brown publisher, Michael Pietsch, shrugs off Heard’s piece as ”a ludicrous exercise” that ”ignores a great American literary vein of essays in which great writers take liberties with their personal experiences.”

But the more pressing question is: how much longer will Sedaris be able to mine his personal life for stories? As the EW article points out:

[...] fame and scrutiny change things, including audience perceptions, and Sedaris worries that success may be dulling his outsider-loser edge. Maybe nibbling at his credibility, too. The withering assessments of his own lunacies haven’t diminished, but the events are tamer and backdrops fancier: swanky hotels, the first-class section of an airplane. ”I don’t know if I’ll get away with it,” says Sedaris. ”I’m trying to write about what’s happening to me now. So there I am sitting in first class, right? I don’t know if people will say, ‘F— you, I never get to sit in first class!”’

The National Book Critics Circle handed out its annual book awards on Thursday, and among those honoured was Junot Diaz for his debut novel, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – a tragicomic family saga that New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani compellingly described as “Mario Vargas Llosa meets ‘Star Trek’ meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West.” The other winners were Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat for her memoir Brother, I’m Dying; New Yorker music critic Alex Ross for The Rest Is Noise; poet Mary Jo Bang for Elegy; Tim Jeal for his biography Stanley, the Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer; and Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid.

Besides their Caribbean origin, Danticat and the Dominican-born Díaz share some striking similarities. Both authors are young (Danicat, at 39, is a year younger than Díaz), and both got their start after completing creative writing MFAs at New York universities (at Brown and Cornell, respectively). Less superficially, both books address the themes of immigration, murky family lineages, and the recent, brutal histories of their respective home countries. And, evidently, they’re friends – or at least friendly colleagues. Here’s Danticat and Díaz in conversation in Bomb, the literary quarterly; here they share the stage at a Lannan Foundation reading in California; and here’s Danticat discussing Díaz’s short story, “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie),” for a New Yorker podcast.

From The Globe and Mail:

A 17-year-old student has been expelled from his Brampton, Ont., high school for a fictional essay he submitted in a creative writing class about a disgruntled student who murders one of her teachers.

Brendan Jones, a Grade 12 student at Heart Lake Secondary School northwest of Toronto, was expelled last week, leaving him facing an uncertain future. Brendan is just three credits shy of graduating from high school and was hoping to study criminology at university next fall. But it is not at all clear whether he will be able to transfer to another high school in the province.

[...]
The five-page, handwritten essay, entitled “School’s Out,” is narrated by an unnamed Grade 10 student who stresses that she likes all of her teachers with the notable exception of Mr. Adams, who teaches science and has an “intoxicating odor.” The controversial part of the story happens near the end when the student manages to trap the teacher in the basement of her house, picks up a bat and gives him “some final words.” It ends ominously with: “Sorry, Mr. Adams, but schools [sic] out!”

Brendan said in an interview that he never imagined the essay would provoke such a reaction. He said there is nothing gory in it and the characters are fictitious. He has also written a letter of apology to both the school and the Peel Board of Education.

As if this weren’t strange enough, here’s the kicker:

The essay is sprinkled with comments from the creative writing teacher, including “show, don’t tell,” and “cliché.” But by the time the teacher got to the end of the essay, alarm bells appear to have gone off. She scrawled “inappropriate subject matter!” but she also tells him to work on his sentence structure and dialogue. There is no grade on the essay.

[Emphasis added.]

From United Press International:

Several people sidelined by the Hollywood writers strike said they are penning children’s tales to pass the time while they wait to go back to work.

“It’s kind of a nice way to do something creative at a time when we’re having a hard time doing our bread-and-butter work,” David N. Weiss, a Rugrats writer and WGA official, who recently turned in a first draft of the children’s book Carl the Frog, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The UPI piece goes on to name two other upcoming kids’ books by writers for That’s So Raven and Comedy Central’s The Root of All Evil, but since all three books are being published by the same company – Worthwhile Books, a new imprint of the ultra-corporate entertainment company IDT/IDW – it’s maybe a bit misleading to imply that this is a widespread new trend.

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.”

When lost books by well-known authors are found, it is usually an occasion for celebration. Not in the case of a non-fiction book about oil exploration written by Wallace Stegner, an award-winning novelist and creative writing professor who taught, among many others, people like Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurty, Raymond Carver, and Gordon Lish.

From the International Herald Tribune:

The owner of Selwa Press, Timothy Barger, is the son of the former president of a U.S. company that hired Stegner in 1956 to pen a promotional piece about its history. Stegner, who is known as the literary laureate of the American West, was treated to two weeks in Saudi Arabia and paid about $16,000 for his effort.

For reasons that now are a subject of dispute between Barger and the late author’s son, however, an edited version of Stegner’s manuscript was not published in the Arabian American Oil Co.’s in-house magazine until 1967. It was not available to the public until Vista, Calif.-based Selwa put out a trade edition of “Discovery!” in September without permission from Stegner’s estate.

“His particular version of the manuscript was one that was cut up by one of their PR people. It was never put up for sale,” said Carl Brandt, Stegner’s longtime literary agent. “If Wally had wanted to publish that edition, he would have been on the phone with me saying, ‘Let’s go, and get Viking to do it.’”

Barger has said that he secured the rights to the company-approved version from ARAMCO’s Saudi-run successor and that he did not need consent from Stegner’s heirs. Selwa’s edition was serialized in the company’s magazine in 1967 and later published in Beirut as a freebie paperback for employees.

Freebie paperbacks – now there’s a job perk we’d like to see come back into fashion.

Q&Q is doing some informal research on the best day jobs for authors. What jobs provide the most flexible schedules to accommodate creative writing? What jobs provide the best raw material or inspiration for fiction?

So, this is a call-out to authors: please comment and tell us about your best day job ever, then stay tuned for our report.

On the Dooney’s Cafe site, John Harris offers a survey of the career of Canadian author Robert Harlow, who was also the head of UBC’s creative writing program. The piece argues that too much exposure to academia can be bad for your artistic health:

It’s an ongoing experiment that might not be working out. With creative writing – with the New Criticism, even – we writer-profs may have gone too far. To me, Harlow’s career points at the dangers – prolonged artistic adolescence, permanent apprenticeship, and fascination with technique instead of with meaningful subject matter and messages. The result: AirBooks. But Harlow himself is a living illustration that the smart and brave can survive creative writing.