PRISM 51.3: The Creative Non-fiction Issue

Posted on April 22, 2013 by

big thumbnail 513What do Tokyo, Tampa, Namibia and a horse camp have in common? They’re all locations from pieces in PRISM‘s Spring issue!

Come, travel the world with us, take in the sights and the sounds. Our creative non-fiction winner, JonArno Lawson brings us to summer camp, while runners-up Carolyn White and Jean McNeil describe stories in San Francisco and Namibia, and contest judge Andreas Schroeder issues CNF writers a challenge: will you take it on?

Explore Japan, small town Canada, and the mysterious ‘L—, Ontario’ in fiction by Jonathan Mendelsohn, Joel McCarthy, and Pasha Malla.  Join our poets, Jessie Jones, Tammy Armstrong, David Clink, Julia Herperger, Jeff Musgrave, Elena E. Johnson, Jim Johnstone, Caroline Wong, Michael Patrick Jessome, and matt robinson in far-flung corners of the world: from Tribeca to New Mexico to Redberry Lake.

But we know what you’re really thinking: is that doll-like kid on the cover for real? She’s very real and kind of a big deal in Japan: ‘Miraichan,’ photographed by Kotori Kawashima.

Check out all this and so much more. Get your issue here, while supplies last!

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Matt Haig on Writing

Posted on May 23, 2013 by

Writing is soul support. Most things in life that we are surrounded by are about external things, material things, superficial things. Books are about the opposite. “Read a book and you are giving yourself an inner life,” says Jeanette Winterson. “Reading is a rendezvous with your soul.”

Writer Matt Haig shares twenty-nine other thoughts on writing over at the Waterstones blog. Meanwhile, on his own blog he recently listed the ten writing rules he likes to break, which include using adverbs and self-promoting. (To help him with the latter, Haig’s latest novel, The Humans, is out now.)

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An Interview with Théodora Armstrong

Posted on May 21, 2013 by

By Jane Campbell

Théodora ArmstrongThéodora Armstrong is a Vancouver-based fiction writer, poet, and photographer. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines including Event, Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead, Descant, The New Quarterly, and Contemporary Verse 2. Her début short story collection, Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility, was recently released by House of Anansi Press.

Jane Campbell: Could you talk a little bit about how you decided to become a writer? I think a lot of people want to be writers, but not very many make the leap to try to do it as a career, which is not that easy.

Théodora Armstrong: No, it’s not easy. Do you want me to start from the very beginning? I think there was always something there for me ever since I was a kid. I loved telling stories when I was little. I went to an all-French school. At the time it was the only all-French school in BC, so they’d bus the kids from all around the lower mainland. I had these 45-minute bus rides to school, and I would tell stories on the bus to older kids.  I really liked when people laughed. I used to want to be a comedian for some reason, which is so funny to me now because I don’t have that kind of personality at all. When I was about 9, shyness set in and everything became more interior, and that’s when I began writing stories down.

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Review: “Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility” by Théodora Armstrong

Posted on May 14, 2013 by

9781770891029_HRClear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility by Théodora Armstrong
House of Anansi Press (2013)

Review by Jane Campbell

In Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility, Théodora Armstrong’s vivid and engrossing debut short story collection, the breathtaking and otherworldly landscapes of British Columbia serve as backdrop for an array of human dramas that feel no less fresh and startling for being eminently relatable. A harried father makes clumsy attempts to bond with his moody teenage daughters on a weekend trip to the Gulf Islands. A young woman escapes the stress of her impending wedding to visit her aimless younger sister in the Okanagan valley. In the verdant canyons of North Vancouver, a teenage girl pines for her childhood best friend as her own innocence slips away bit by bit.

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An interview with Billie Livingston

Posted on May 9, 2013 by
Photo by Braden Haggerty

Photo by Braden Haggerty

By Kim McCullough

One Good Hustle, your latest novel, burst out of the gates and blew away the barriers between genres; it was long-listed for the Giller, as well as short-listed for the prestigious CLA award for Young Adult Book of the Year. What do you think it is about One Good Hustle that has such a cross-generational appeal?

These nods from juries have been a big surprise for me. I don’t gravitate toward the sort of “Big Themes” that juries tend to enjoy. The wars I write about take place in the living room. They involve people close to home because that’s where I find my sense of immediacy.

Telling this story in a 16-year-old’s voice was something of a leap of faith. It felt natural and visceral, but I wondered if somehow that voice would place the whole thing in a kind of neither/nor place and find no readers whatsoever. It’s surprising to me that teenagers are interested. The YA books I hear about usually involve witches and vampires —or at least a dystopian future.

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Let’s Talk about Sex (Scenes)

Posted on May 9, 2013 by

(W)e wouldn’t have many books at all, would we, if writers stopped every time they asked themselves that question. Who’s going to listen to me? Who’s going to care? I face that question every day when I sit down at my computer, and still the words come. Slowly. Still I find myself writing dark things, magical things, and sometimes even sexy things. At some point, who’s going to listen to me gets answered with I want to tell this story anyway.

At The National Post this week, writer Amanda Leduc talks about the difficulty of writing about sex in the era of Fifty Shades of Grey. Her first novel, The Miracles of Ordinary Men, is out now from ECW Press. Read the full article here.

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Review: “One Good Hustle” by Billie Livingston

Posted on May 6, 2013 by

One Good Hustle, by Billie LivingstonOne Good Hustle
Random House Canada (2012)

Review by Kim McCullough

Sixteen-year-old Sammie is a street-smart, take-no-crap young woman. Her parents are con-artists; her father lit out for the east a long time ago, leaving Sammie and her mom on their own. Lately, Sammie’s alcoholic mother, Marlene, has slipped into a suicidal depression, leaving Sammie to try and hold the edges of their tattered home life together.

Unable to take any more of her mother’s suicidal meltdowns, Sammie leaves the chaos at home and goes to stay with her friend Jill’s family. Sammie’s judgments about Jill, and Jill’s more traditional parents, Ruby and Leo, are at once harsh and hilariously honest. It soon becomes obvious that no one can escape Sammie’s skewering wit: not her teachers, not her friends, and certainly not Drew, the boy she likes. But before long, Sammie’s carefully constructed tough-girl facade starts to crack, and the reader catches glimpses of a lost girl in need of direction.

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