Governor General’s Award winner Gloria Sawai dies at 78

Quillblog was saddened to learn of the death of Gloria Sawai last Wednesday. The Alberta writer, whose single book, the short-story collection A Song for Nettie Johnson, beat out Carol Shields’ Unless and Wayne Johnston’s The Navigator of New York to win the 2002 Governor General’s Literary Award, was 78 years old. Sawai was born in the United States, but spent most of her life in Alberta.

The CBC quotes Carol Holmes, executive director of the Writers Guild of Alberta, who called Sawai a “trailblazer.”

Fellow Edmonton writer Todd Babiak published a heartfelt tribute to Sawai in the Edmonton Journal, focusing on her 1975 short story, “The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts,” frequently anthologized and included in Nettie Johnson. Babiak writes that several people have told him “The Day I Sat with Jesus” is “the best short story they have read.”

Also of note in Babiak’s piece is Noah Richler’s reaction to Sawai while he was travelling the country researching his non-fiction work, This Is My Canada, What’s Yours? Babiak says Richler found the Alberta writer “suspicious”:

They met in the Edmonton Public Library, where Sawai did much of her work after quitting her teaching job at Grant MacEwan in the late 1990s to be a full-time writer.

“Everything I write comes out of the land,” Sawai told Richler. “Well, my childhood memories are prairie. They’re dust, they’re wind, they’re odd people in little towns. They’re just kind of desolate, actually, partly because of the religious nature of my upbringing and partly because of the communities that I lived in.”

About the story that made Sawai part of the Canadian literary canon (a story that is, ironically, set not in Alberta but Saskatchewan), Babiak has this to say:

When Jesus visits the hero of Sawai’s most successful short story on a Monday morning in September 1972, they drink a glass of wine, spill some tea, talk about breasts. Jesus calls the Prairies “nice,” which astounds Gloria. Then they laugh, her and Jesus, uncontrollably, and she has no idea why.

Then, his time is up. “‘Goodbye, Gloria Johnson,’ he said, rising from his chair. ‘Thanks for the hospitality.’” Then Jesus kisses her, and not just as friends. Gloria goes back to the laundry, “dry and sour in the living room.” Sawai made smelly laundry and everything else, strange and beautiful. “That’s what happened to me in Moose Jaw in 1972,” she wrote. “It was the main thing that happened to me that year.”

Canadian cookbooks mix it up at the Gourmand Awards

From March 3-6, booksellers, publishers, chefs, and other foodie types descended on the City of Lights for the annual Paris Cookbook Fair, the largest event of its kind in the world.

The culinary weekend kicked off with the 2010 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. Entries representing 154 countries competed in 64 cookbook categories and in 28 wine and drinks categories.

In total, Canada received recognition in 16 categories, including a first-place Best Drinks Literary Book win for Entre les Vignes, by Jacques Orhon (Éditions de L’Homme). Surreal Chef Bob Blumer beat out domestic diva Nigella Lawson, taking second place in the TV Celebrity Chef category for his book Glutton for Pleasure (Whitecap). Vikram Vij and Meeru Dhalwala’s Vij’s at Home (Douglas & McIntyre) also received a second-place score in the India category.

For a complete list of winners visit the Gourmand Awards website.

Daily book biz round-up, May 17

Your Monday links round-up:

• Scholastic issues statement of support for Robert Munsch after he admits to struggles with addiction
• Mount Allison profs continue to protest honorary degree for Indigo’s Heather Reisman
• Cursor admits it will be selling those gorgeous worthwhile dead-tree books after all
• U.K. publishers told they must be “in control” of agreements made with Apple
• Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn offers his Bookcamp 2010 summer wine picks

Bookmarks: sex scandals, meth rings, and Lemony Snicket

Some book-related links:

• The catalogue pages for disgraced U.S. Governor Mark “Appalachia by way of Argentina” Sanford’s (cancelled) book
• Meth ring uses rare comic books to launder drug money (I knew there was something wrong with adults reading comic books…)
• Indian politician’s sympathetic book about Pakistan’s founder gets him booted from party, starts a firestorm
• Lemony Snicket working on new quadrilogy
• Wanna buy a million-dollar wine book?
• Dissertations as haiku

Widget allows book clubs to occur anywhere on the Web

The Book Oven blog has brought to our attention a unique social networking site called BookGlutton that seeks to provide users with a new way to read online. According to the website, the application allows users to “build an experience that is simultaneously a book group, a computer, and a book” by using a free, Web-based e-book reader called the Unbound Reader that features shared and private annotations and contextual instant messaging.

Of particular interest is the site’s newly released widget, officially called the “Book Launcher,” but jokingly referred to as the “Punk Rock Widget” in the BookGlutton office (due to its total hardcore awesomeness, not its resemblance to Sid Vicious). With the help of this free application, BookGlutton users can embed the book they’re reading, as well as the community of users reading along with them, directly into their own site. A recent post on the BookGlutton blog includes a YouTube video demonstrating the widget in action.

While the idea of an easily accessible, “in-the-moment” book club does seem well-suited to the immediacy of today’s online world, this Quillblogger wonders if online book clubs really are the way of the future. After all, how can you drink wine and eat cupcakes on the Internet?

Bookmarks: learning to read at the Bush Library, borrowing people instead of books, and picking the right beer for the book

Some book-related links:

• Bush Library to be base for literacy and education, says Laura Bush* (The Dallas Morning News)
• A library where you can borrow people instead of books (InfoSpeak.org)
• We’ve picked the right wine for a book, but what about the right beer? (Omnivoracious)
• Are comic books good for you? (Popmatters)
• Bonus Tween Content: Miley Cyrus to write memoir (Stuff)

* she then said: “What? What’s so funny?”

Bookmarks (snobbery edition): judging someone by their books, picking the right reading wine, and more

Some book-related links:

• Judging a mate by his/her books (The New York Times)
• What wine goes with that book? (Stuff)
• Will Internet book piracy cause authors to stop writing? (Times Online)
• Settlement in sight for Greater Victoria Public Library (Times-Colonist)
• California librarian fired for alerting police to child-porn-watching patron (Los Angeles Times)
• Fiction’s famous fools (Brandenton Herald)

The Internet, and other modern horrors

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.

Random authorial musings

Over at the Insider’s Blog on the Random House Canada BookLounge website, Todd Babiak uses an author guest post to talk about book clubs – or, more specifically, his awkwardness at book club meetings. Since publishing The Garneau Block, he’s been invited to appear at several gatherings, he says, and he always overdoes it when it comes to tie-wearing, boob-staring, and hummus-eating.

I always wear a suit, which is always too much. The host invites me in and I sit down in a comfortable chesterfield and smile. As we introduce ourselves, I investigate, by the tone and tenor of their voices, whether any of them disliked the novel. Women in book clubs always seem to be attractive and intelligent, so I worry about being caught checking them out (after two glasses of wine, my gaze tends to linger). And, of course, I worry about eating too much hummus and horrifying these lovely readers with my garlic breath.

Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) has also blogged at the Random House site, and his entries range from the morbidly amusing (increasingly violent sketches he has drawn to accompany his signature in books, and the follow-up entry about how Brits and Canadians respond to his sense of humour versus how Americans respond) to the annoyingly whiny (publicity is hard and journalists are manipulative hacks).

Black darkens doorstep at launch

On Thursday night in Toronto, reporters swarmed a party (hosted by none other than former Ontario Premier Mike Harris) for a new book published by John Wiley & Sons Canada, Rescuing Canada’s Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution by Adam Daifallah and Tasha Kheiriddin. I suppose this is what happens when you invite a recently indicted press baron to your book launch.

Conrad Black showed up for a glass of white wine and the company of some like-minded individuals. The real fun began when Black left the party at the Albany Club and found that his driver hadn’t arrived with his car. I suppose the hired help tend to slack off when it starts to look like the boss could be going away for a while.

Left with only reporters to talk to until his car arrived, Black held forth on his predicament. “This has been one massive smear job from A to Z and it will have a surprise ending — a complete vindication of the defendants and the exposure of their persecutors,” he said. “This isn’t Enron. This isn’t WorldCom. This was a magnificent company that the people who seized it used as a platform in which to persecute and defame the people who built it. [They] have torn it apart and destroyed it at the expense of the shareholders…. Those are my thoughts for the evening.”

Related links:
Click here for the story from the National Post
Click here for the CBC story, which has the delightful video