Gary Taxali and Graham Roumieu get graphic

Quillblog is living vicariously through the Toronto Life team, which recently got cozy in a Toronto neighbourhood watering hole to eavesdrop on a conversation between author-illustrators Gary Taxali and Graham Roumieu.

Taxali just released two collections of his retro-inspired artwork, I Love You, OK? and Mono Taxali. Roumieu recently collaborated with Douglas Coupland on Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People (Random House of Canada).

The two artists discussed crappy jobs and the art of the illustration business. Click here for the highlights of their conversation.

Fall preview 2011: Canadian fiction

In the July/August issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the fall season’s biggest books.

NOVELS

One of the most anticipated releases of the fall season is surely the new novel from internationally acclaimed author Michael Ondaatje, his first since 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award winner Divisadero. Set in the early 1950s, The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart, $32 cl., Sept.) tells the story of an 11-year-old boy crossing the Indian Ocean on a liner bound for England, and the mysterious prisoner shackled on board. • Also from M&S is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s first novel in eight years. Set in the late 19th-century Canadian and American West, A Good Man ($32.99 cl., Sept.) is the third book in a loose trilogy that also includes The Last Crossing (2003) and The Englishman’s Boy, which won the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award. • A third GG winner has a new novel out this season: David Gilmour, who won in 2005 for his previous novel, A Perfect Night to Go to China. Gilmour returns with The Perfect Order of Things (Thomas Allen Publishers, $26.95 cl., Sept.), the story of a man who revisits traumatic and life-changing incidents from his past.

Marina Endicott follows up her Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted 2008 novel Good to a Fault with The Little Shadows (Doubleday Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), about three sisters who become vaudeville singers following the death of their father. • Acclaimed novelist Helen Humphreys returns with an historical novel set in France during the Napoleonic period. The Reinvention of Love (HarperCollins Canada, $29.99 cl., Sept.) is about a French journalist whose affair with Victor Hugo’s wife causes a scandal (as it might be expected to do).

Brian Francis’s debut novel, Fruit, was a runner-up in the 2009 edition of CBC’s battle of the books, Canada Reads. His second novel, Natural Order (Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cl., Aug.), tells the story of a mother who is forced to confront the secrets she has kept about her son when her carefully constructed life is overturned by a startling revelation. • Kevin Chong returns to fiction with his first novel in a decade. Beauty Plus Pity (Arsenal Pulp Press, $17.95 pa., Sept.) follows an Asian-Canadian slacker in Vancouver whose incipient modelling career is derailed by the death of his father and the sudden departure of his fiancée.

Requiem (HarperCollins Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), the third novel from Frances Itani, is about a Japanese-Canadian who embarks upon a cross-country journey of discovery following the death of his wife. • Anita Rau Badami follows her best-selling novels Tamarind Mem and The Hero’s Walk with Tell It to the Trees (Knopf Canada, $32 cl., Sept.), about the Dharma family – the authoritarian Vikram, the gourmand Suman, and the old storyteller Akka. When the Dharmas’ tenant, Anu, turns up dead on their doorstep, the family’s long-buried secrets begin to boil over. • Gayla Reid returns with her first novel since 2002’s Closer Apart. Set during the Spanish Civil War, Come from Afar (Cormorant Books, $32 cl., Aug.) tells the story of an Australian nurse who falls into a relationship with a Canadian soldier from the International Brigade.

Haitian expat Dany Laferrière is back with his third novel in translation in three years. The Return (Douglas & McIntyre, $22.95 pa., Aug.) tells the story of a 23-year-old Haitian named Dany who flees Baby Doc Duvalier’s repressive regime and relocates to Montreal. Thirty-three years later, Dany learns of his father’s death in New York City, and plots a return to his native country. David Homel translates. • Another Montreal resident, poet Sina Queyras, has a novel out this fall, the author’s first. Autobiography of Childhood (Coach House Books, $20.95 pa., Oct.) is about one day in the lives of five siblings haunted by the death of a brother years before. • Infrared (McArthur & Company, $29.95 cl., Sept.), the new novel by Nancy Huston, is about a photographer who travels to Tuscany with her father and stepmother. Employing internal dialogues with the photographer’s mental doppelgänger, Huston opens up her hero for exposure and provides an intimate picture of her interior life.

CanLit mainstay David Helwig returns with a novella, his first since 2007’s Smuggling Donkeys. Killing McGee (Oberon, $38.95 cl., $18.95 pa., Oct.) tells the story of a professor’s dual obsessions with the assassination of D’Arcy McGee and the disappearance of one of his students. • Toronto-based poet Dani Couture returns with her first novel, a surreal and iconoclastic take on that perennial CanLit staple: the family drama. Algoma (Invisible Publishing, $19.95 pa., Oct.) tells the story of a family attempting to cope with the aftermath of a young child falling through the ice and drowning. • Shari Lapeña also has a novel about a perennial CanLit concern: raising money to allow one time to write poetry. Happiness Economics (Brindle & Glass, $19.95 pa., Sept.) tells the story of a stalled poet who takes a job writing advertising copy to start a poetry foundation.

Jamaican-born novelist, poet, and non-fiction author Olive Senior returns to long-form fiction with Dancing Lessons (Cormorant, $22 pa., Aug.), about a woman looking back on her life after a hurricane destroys her home. • Memoirist Frances Greenslade (A Pilgrim in Ireland, By the Secret Ladder) has a debut novel out this August. Shelter (Random House Canada, $29.95 cl.) is a coming of age story about two sisters searching for their mother, who abandoned them after their father was killed in a logging accident.

Not one, but two novels this season extend the burgeoning CanLit focus on towns that have been/are about to be flooded (after Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault, and Michael V. Smith’s Progress). Tristan Hughes’s Eye Lake (Coach House, $19.95 pa., Oct.) is about the town of Crooked River, Ontario. Named for a river that was diverted to make way for a mine, the town harbours secrets that surface when the river reclaims its original course. • And in September, Goose Lane Editions will publish Riel Nason’s The Town that Drowned ($19.95 pa.), about the suspicions, secrets, and emotions that flare up when the township of Haverton is scheduled to be flooded to allow for the construction of a massive dam.

Edward Riche follows up his Thomas Head Raddall Award winner The Nine Planets with Easy to Like (House of Anansi Press, $29.95 cl., Sept.), a satire about a screenwriter and oenophile who dreams of travelling to Paris, but is trapped in Canada by an expired passport and a growing Hollywood scandal. Relocating to Toronto, he bluffs his way into the upper echelons of the CBC. • Former president and CEO of Penguin Canada, David Davidar was forced out of his position under a cloud of scandal after accusations of sexual harassment. Davidar’s new novel, Ithaca (M&S, $29.99 cl., Oct.), is, perhaps not coincidentally, about the rise and fall of a publishing star.

Canadian literary icon Michel Tremblay returns with a new novel, the first in a trilogy. Set in 1913, Crossing the Continent (Talonbooks, $18.95 pa., Oct.) takes the author’s characters out of Quebec for the first time, to tell the backstory of the people who populate his Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal series. Long-time Tremblay collaborator Sheila Fischman translates.

A resident of St. John’s, Newfoundland, lately one of the most fertile spots for Canadian writing, Michelle Butler Hallett crafts genre-busting stories and novels that frequently experiment with gender and perspective. Her new novel, Deluded Your Sailors (Creative Book Publishing, $21.95 pa., Sept.), focuses on the culture industry from the perspective of Nichole Wright, who makes a discovery that puts a government-funded tourism project in jeopardy, and a shape-shifting minister named Elias Winslow. • Another Newfoundland native, Kate Story, has a novel out with Creative this season. The follow-up to 2008’s Blasted, Wrecked Upon This Shore ($21.95 pa., Sept.) tells the story of Pearl Lewis, an emotionally damaged, charismatic woman who is seen at different stages in her life.

In 1972, Christina Parr returns to her hometown of Parr’s Landing, a place she fled years earlier. The dirty secret of Parr’s Landing? A 300-year-old vampire resides in the caves of the remote mining town. Christina learns why she should have stayed away in Michael Rowe’s Enter, Night (ChiZine Publications, $17.95 pa., Oct.). • English literature professor Janey Erlickson struggles to make headway in her academic career while caring for a tyrannical toddler in Sue Sorensen’s comic novel A Large Harmonium (Coteau Books, $21 pa., Sept.). • Paul Brenner, a Vancouver lawyer, dines with his son, Daniel, one Friday evening. The next day, Brenner receives word that his son has been murdered. Hold Me Now (Freehand Books, $21.95 pa., Oct.), the first novel from Stephen Gauer, examines a father’s grief and a lawyer’s faith in the legal system.

SHORT FICTION

Anyone who has ever wondered what might transpire if the author of Bigfoot’s autobiography were to illustrate a story collection by Canada’s reigning postmodern ironist can stop wondering. October sees the publication of Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People (Random House Canada, $24 cl.), the first collaboration between author Douglas Coupland and well-known illustrator Graham Roumieu.

D.W. Wilson currently lives in London, England, but is a native of B.C.’s Kootenay Valley. The winner of the inaugural Man Booker Prize Scholarship from the University of East Anglia, Wilson’s debut collection, Once You Break a Knuckle (Hamish Hamilton Canada, $32 cl., Sept.), is a suite of stories about good people doing bad things.

Novelist Anne DeGrace has her first collection of short stories on tap for September. Flying with Amelia (McArthur & Company, $29.95 cl.) spans the 20th century and crosses vast swathes of territory. Wireless telegraphy, German POWs in Manitoba, the Great Depression, and the FLQ crisis all crop up in her stories. • David Whitton’s story “Twilight of the Gods” was included in the 2010 sci-fi anthology Darwin’s Bastards. The story also appears in Whitton’s first solo collection, The Reverse Cowgirl (Freehand, $21.95 pa., Oct.), which sports the most sexually suggestive title for a collection of CanLit stories since Pasha Malla’s The Withdrawal Method.

Toronto writer Rebecca Rosenblum follows up her Metcalf-Rooke Award–winning debut collection Once (a Q&Q book of the year for 2009) with The Big Dream (Biblioasis, $19.95 pa., Sept.), a collection of linked stories about the lives of workers at Dream, Inc., a lifestyle-magazine publisher. • The Maladjusted (Thistledown Press, $18.95 pa., Sept.), Toronto writer Derek Hayes’ debut collection, focuses on people who run afoul of the dictates of polite society. • Also from Thistledown, Britt Holmström’s Leaving Berlin ($18.95 pa., Sept.) examines contemporary women in both Canadian and European settings.

The fine print: Q&Q’s fall preview covers books published between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2011. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have appeared in previous previews do not appear here.

Finalists announced for B.C. Book Prizes

CanLit heavy-hitters and a few breakthrough newcomers mix it up as finalists for this year’s B.C. Book Prizes. The nominees across seven categories include Douglas Coupland, George Bowering, John Vaillant, and Maggie de Vries, as well as emerging writers such as CBC Radio 3’s Grant Lawrence and graphic novelist Sarah Leavitt.

The $2,000 prizes will be handed out April 21 at the Lieutenant Governor’s B.C. Book Prize Gala, where the winner of the $5,000 Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence will also be announced.

Established in 1985, the awards recognize the best of B.C. writers and publishers and are organized by the non-profit West Coast Book Prize Society.

Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (best fiction book)

• Rifet Bahtijaragic, Chernovs’ Toil and Peace
• Gurjinder Basran, Everything Was Good-Bye
• Jack Hodgins, The Master of Happy Endings
• Meredith Quartermain, Recipes from the Red Planet
• Jack Whyte, The Forest Laird

Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize (best B.C.-based book)

• Bruce Grenville and Scott Steedman, Visions of BC: A Landscape Manual
• Aldona Jonaitis and Aaron Glass, The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History
• Grant Lawrence, Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound
• Sylvia Olsen, Working with Wool
• Dan Savard, Images from the Likeness House

Hubert Evans Non-fiction Prize (best non-fiction book)

• Morris Bates and Jim Brown, Morris as Elvis: Take a Chance on Life
• Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan
• Sarah Leavitt, Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me
• Derek Lundy, Borderlands: Riding the Edge of America
• John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.

Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (best work of poetry)

• Ken Belford, Decompositions
• George Bowering, My Darling Nellie Gray
• Stephen Collis, On the Material
• Jen Currin, The Inquisition Yours
• Eve Joseph, The Secret Signature of Things

Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize

• Maggie de Vries and Renné Benoit (illus.), Fraser Bear: A Cub’s Life
• Julie Flett, Owls See Clearly at Night (Lii Yiiboo Nayaapiwak lii Swer): A Michif Alphabet (L’alfabet di Michif)
• Seiji Hiroe, The Cowboy Fisherman
• Deborah Hodge and Brian Harris (illus.), Up We Grow! A Year in the Life of a Small, Local Farm
• Ian McAllister and Nicholas Read, The Salmon Bears: Giants of the Great Bear Rainforest

Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize (best non-illustrated children’s book)

• Maggie de Vries, Hunger Journeys
• Polly Horvath, Northward to the Moon
• Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, Fatty Legs
• Gina McMurchy-Barber, Free as a Bird
• Susin Nielsen, Dear George Clooney, Please Marry My Mom

Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award

• Robert Budd, Voices of British Columbia: Stories from Our Frontier
• Zsuzsi Gartner (ed.), Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow
• Gary Kent and Kim La Fave (illus.), Fishing with Gubby
• Ross King, Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven
• Grant Lawrence, Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound

Douglas Coupland wins monumental commission

Douglas Coupland is having a banner year. Not only did he use the occasion of this year’s Massey Lectures to deliver the manuscript of a new novel, he has also designed a clothing line for Roots. Now, the novelist-cum-artist (or is it artist-cum-novelist?) has won a national design competition for a monument honouring Canada’s fallen firefighters.

Coupland submitted the winning concept, which will be erected in Ottawa’s LeBreton Flats neighbourhood, with Toronto architect Mary Tremain. According to the CBC, it will feature “a giant fire hall pole that acts as a lightning rod, protecting a tree and monument underneath, with a bronze statue of a firefighter pointing to the names on the monument.” From the official press release:

“I wanted the monument to convey deep emotion and simple dignity,” said artist Douglas Coupland. “I want people to eat their lunch there, read, play with their kids — and each time they do so, a small part of themselves will reflect on firefighters and what they do every day when they go to work.”

First look at Douglas Coupland’s fashion line for Roots

Author and visual artist Douglas Coupland announced via Twitter today that he is teaming up with Canadian clothing and leather goods company Roots to design a limited-edition clothing and accessories line. On the video promo for said collaboration, Coupland expounds on his thoughts about Canadian culture and identity, a theme he has explored in visual art and non-fiction books for over a decade.

The Roots press release names Coupland’s collection Canada Goes Electric. A visual example:

Irony alert: no word yet on if this clothing line celebrating the meaning of Canada will actually be manufactured in Canada. The Roots website is dodgy on the physical locations of its factories abroad, though goes to great pains to feign being down with ethical labour practices.

Q&A with Douglas Coupland about his upcoming Massey Lectures title

Q&Q attempted to speak with Douglas Coupland for our April 16th article about his unorthodox 2010 Massey Lectures title, which will take the form of a novel entitled Player One: What is to Become of Us? Coupland wasn’t able to meet our deadline, but he sent an apologetic e-mail a week later explaining that a new prescription drug had waylaid him. (“Today is the first day where my head feels like my head in a week. Avoid Dexedrine. It is an evil drug, but it did allow me to remember pi to 70 decimal places,” he wrote.)

The following is a transcript of our exchange:

Q&Q: Why did you decide to write the lecture as a novel?

DC: A narrative seemed like the most efficient and accessible way of putting forth a large number of propositions about life in the year 2010.  I’ve never done traditional lectures… I think that would have felt dutiful and homeworky.

Q&Q: What’s the novel about?

DC: It presents a wide array of modes to view the mind, the soul, the body, the future, eternity, technology, and media.

Q&Q: Where and when is it set?

DC: In a B-list Toronto airport hotel’s cocktail lounge in August of 2010.

Q&Q: Will it be a departure in terms of style, in order to accommodate the lecture 
format?

DC: I’ve only ever seen Margaret [Atwood]‘s and Wade [Davis]‘s lectures, so I don’t know for sure.

Q&Q: When you were first asked to give a Massey lecture, what was your reaction?

DC: From what I’ve learned, everybody freaks out when asked. It’s five highly scrutinized hours that are, in some way, a crystallization of your deepest soul. On the other hand, what a great challenge.

Q&Q: Did you say yes right away?

DC: I fudged, but never said no. I said no and yes and no and yes several times for the McLuhan bio for Penguin, but for this one I had some really wonderful, serene discussions with Bernie Lucht and John Fraser, and they got me past the difficulty curve.

Q&Q: Have you been a fan of previous lectures/books in the series?

DC: I’ve only seen the two, both of which I loved.

A new twist on the Canada Reads spin-off trend

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the CBC must be feeling pretty good right now. Just in case you can’t get enough of the various spin-offs of the CBC’s Canada Reads competition – including the National Post’s Canada Also Reads and literary blog Pickle Me This’ Canada Reads Independently – the Keepin’ It Real Book Club has just announced their very own adaptation, called Civilians Read.

However, instead of offering yet another new booklist for readers to take on, Civilians Read uses the original CBC Canada Reads list, with lesser-known book lovers defending each title. The “civilian” panelists include:

• Erin Balser, senior editor for Books@Torontoist, defending Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony
• Nic Boshart, digital projects co-ordinator for the Association of Canadian Publishers, defending Nicholas Dickner’s Nikolski
• Sarah Labrie, project co-ordinator for the Association of Canadian Publishers, defending Marina Endicott’s Good to a Fault
• Ashleigh Gardner, manager of digital development for Dundurn Press, defending Douglas Coupland’s Generation X
• Natalie St. Pierre, freelance editor and assistant to a literary agent, defending Ann-Marie Macdonald’s Fall On Your Knees

From the Keepin’ It Real Book Club:

We don’t have any training on the radio. We don’t have professional equipment. It’s going to be a little rough and tumble — it’ll likely lack finesse, basic courtesy, and a catchy theme song. But hopefully we’ll also say some smart things, spark some interesting discussion, and determine how weighty the panelist-X factor is.

All discussions will be hosted by Jen Knoch, associate editor at ECW Press and the main blogger at the KIRBC website. The Civilians Read panelists will release one podcast per day starting March 1, leading up to the official Canada Reads debate itself, which runs March 8-12.

Douglas Coupland really does like the Canada Council

Douglas Coupland has called himself the world’s worst worrier, and apparently the thing he’s been fretting about lately is an inaccuracy that appeared in the National Post. In the article in question, crime novelist William Deverell draws on a recent op-ed penned by Coupland to bolster his argument that Canadian readers suffer from what he describes as a “national snobbery disorder.” From Deverell’s article:

The New York Times recently ran Douglas Coupland’s scathing critique of Canadian literary pretentiousness: “There is a grimness about CanLit,” he wrote, in which typically authors are supported by the government “to write about small towns and/or the immigrant experience.” Coupland refuses to accept Canada Council money.

Coupland wants to set the record straight: whatever his feelings about the state of CanLit, he happily supports the Canada Council. Earlier today, he sent out a mass e-mail correcting the misperception. The complete missive is below:

Hi everyone. Sorry for the mass email but it’s important to me. Here’s a letter I wrote to the National Post an hour ago.

Hi Post,

A puzzled friend forwarded to me your September 14 piece on publishing in Canada that I hadn’t read. Glitch! Fact is, I really do support the Canada Council – and have done well by them throughout the years. The Council helps creative people at all phases of their careers and is also critical in helping artists and writers and performers abroad as well as domestically. Could you publish this for me? I’d been wondering why certain people were being weird to me in some situations and now I know the reason. Otherwise all is well, and thank you for your support over the years. And please keep writing about publishing. It’s an interesting moment in its history.

Keep well,

Yours,

Douglas Coupland

That should do it. In case you’re wondering, here is what Coupland actually said about the Canada Council in The New York Times:

I’m a big fan of subsidization of the arts. Without subsidization, CanLit couldn’t exist for 10 minutes. Canada is an extravagantly huge and underpopulated country with no economy of scale. Maintaining an identity is expensive, period — thus the need for money in the arts. And I think the Canadian government ought to be hurling 10 times as much cash at literary arts in general, CanLit as much as anything else.

IFOA news: Geoffrey Taylor to receive honorary degree, Urquhart to read Munro

Geoffrey Taylor, director of Harbourfront’s Reading Series, is to receive an honorary degree from the School of Creative & Performing Arts at the Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. Taylor, who has been with Harboufront Centre for 20 years, is being honoured for his contribution to the promotion of Canadian books and authors.

Over the last five years, Taylor has been responsible for the International Festival of Authors, has served as a jury member for both the Toronto Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Awards, and has been an adviser to the Humber School for Writers. In 2008, Q&Q included him in a list of the most influential people in Canadian publishing.

Taylor will be presented with the degree at a ceremony on Nov. 7.

…

The IFOA has also confirmed the lineup for its second annual presentation of the Rogers Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize shortlist. For the reading on Oct. 28, the following authors will be reading:

• Douglas Coupland will read from Generation A
• Annabel Lyon will read from The Golden Mean
• Andrew Steinmetz will read from Eva’s Threepenny Theatre
• Jacqueline Larson will read from Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood’s English-language translations of Nicole Brossard’s Fences in Breathing
• Jane Urquhart will read from Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness on behalf of Munro, who is unable to attend the event

The winner of the $25,000 award will be announced on Nov. 24 in Toronto.

Coupland borrows an Earth Sandwich

Sometimes writers will stop conversations to have this one:

“Can I use that?”
“What?”
“That joke/anecdote/story/funny phrase.”
“Why?”
“In a story? Can I use it?”

Writers are often collage artists, making stories out of observations, culling dialogue from covert eavesdropping. It makes sense that some might make a habit of asking permission if they’ve ever been called out for stealing ideas.

Last week, Douglas Coupland twittered about ZeFrank,  the blogger who invented the Earth Sandwich idea Coupland uses in his new book Generation A. The Earth Sandwich is, in short, when two people on opposite ends of the earth put a piece of bread down, forming a sandwich, and take a photo. In the book, Coupland describes the Earth Sandwich in detail without giving credit to its creator.

In a promotional video for Generation A, now offline, there is a small credit on the screen, but the blogger claims this is  “still infuriating” and asks, “Do you think I could get away with doing something he did VERBATIM and them putting a tiny credit?”

Coupland’s twitter response said, “@zefrank. I send you warm wishes and much cheer. And thank you for the lovely (and amazing) Earth Sandwich idea. You are brilliant.”

This conversation starts a larger one – when we put ideas into the world, via the Internet or casual conversation at a bar, are they fair game for appropriation? Should we keep our wit to ourselves when Douglas Coupland is within earshot?

Friends of mine know to interject and say, “No, you can’t use that.” Perhaps we should all be wary of the observer with the moleskine. Or, you know, relax a little about our ideas.