It was my privilege earlier this year to act as a judge in the Bronwen Wallace Awards. The idea of poet Carolyn Smart of Queens University, the prize was established sixteen years ago to honor Bronwen Wallace, a Kingston-born writer who died too young. Every year the prize, under the umbrella of The Writer’s Trust, goes to either a poet or fiction writer under the age of 35 who has not yet published a book. The 132 submissions I read as one of three judges set a remarkably high standard, which made for hard judging toil, and the stories from the three finalists — Kilby Smith-McGregor, Shashi S. Bhat and Claire Tacon — were all memorable works of art.

As most visitors to AuthorsAloud know, one of the requirements for inclusion here is to have published a book of poetry or literary fiction. That’s a firm rule and I stand by it. But what good is a rule if you can’t hold its head under water once in a while? So for the first time, AuthorsAloud now features a reading from a writer whose first book is still to come: the winner of the 2009 Bronwen Wallace Award, Kilby Smith-McGregor. She reads an excerpt from her astonishingly assured winning story, “The Bird in Hand,” here. And I’m proud to welcome Kilby as the 100th author on AuthorsAloud.
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British Columbia’s Susan McCaslin has been an important voice on the Canadian poetry landscape for decades now, having produced fourteen volumes of poetry and influenced the work of students at Douglas College in New Westminster for more than twenty years. She works with the heady subject matter of spirituality and mysticism, but still she often manages to pin those ephemeral clouds down and connect them to the lives we lead. As poet and author John Terpstra put it, McCaslin, “sings from the still centre of being human and conscious on a glorious, defiled, everyday earth of love and pollution, dogs, moths and God.” Listen to Susan’s reading here.
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The latest addition to AuthorsAloud comes from poet Fiona Tinwei Lam, who reads from two collections including her latest, Enter the Chrysanthemum. Lam’s work here is quiet and sensual, and immediately engaging. She also provides a thoughtful insight into her work. I encourage you to sequester yourself in a hushed room and give it a listen. You’ll find Lam’s poetry and insight here.
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Seth Godin is a noted thinker and blogger on marketing issues. He had something pertinent to say today about the future of the publishing industry and I thought I’d share it.

By the way, there are two new poetry readings in the pipe for you the AuthorsAloud faithful. So stay tuned.

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The news couldn’t be sadder for the people who loved Paul the man, Paul the writer and Paul the performer. He was a personal idol of mine, someone I regarded as both a friend and an exemplar. His GG-winning book Whale Music, its voice, its great empathy and its gentle humour, inspired me more than any book ever has.

For visitors to AuthorsAloud, it’s worth remembering that Paul did a reading for us a couple of years ago, from his Giller-shortlisted book Galveston. If you’d like to spend a few minutes listening to Paul’s voice and remembering what he contributed to our lives, visit here.

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I love that we’re fleshing out the poetry library here at AuthorsAloud. And we’re touching an increasingly broad range of talents. While our last couple of poetry additions have come from exciting new emerging artists, the latest comes from a well established name. Sandy Shreve has been producing fine poetry, and getting award recognition for it, for many years. She’s also been an innovator, finding new ways to bring poetry to readers, such as the Poetry in Transit project, which has been displaying poems in public transit vehicles throughout British Columbia since the mid-1990s. For AuthorsAloud she presents work from her collection Suddenly, So Much, not only reading her poems but providing insights into the creation of each along the way. Go listen.
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Try not to be too depressed about the McNally Robinson bankruptcy. Yes, it’s a blow to lose a couple of great book stores that did their best to promote Canadian authors and give them a place to read in public. But suburban Toronto and even Polo Park in Winnipeg (I lived there, I know) never felt like the right fit for what McNally Robinson does so well. Here’s hoping they’ll regroup with their two remaining stores and live to fight the good (bloody) fight for authors for many more days.

To pick up your spirits, take a few minutes to listen to the work of poet Melanie Janisse, just added to AuthorsAloud. Written over a five year period, the poems of Janisse’s collection Orioles in the Oranges have been lauded for their honesty, their compassion and their power. Stores die. The word lives.

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The latest contribution to AuthorsAloud is one of the best. Cordelia Strube has been writing acerbic satire for years — fifteen, as she explains in her reading — and her newest novel, the appropriately titled Lemon, is hitting some nerves. It features a smart, sardonic sixteen-year-old with a particularly bleak view of the world (a view that by now we should be calling "Strubian"). Strube has been touring with it across the country, getting some nice reviews, and in its December issue, Chatelaine magazine called it the "sleeper Can-lit hit."

But what's great for AuthorsAloud visitors is that Strube sat down with her voice recorder in a quiet room and really nailed the reading. She's a trained actress and it shows. Then she equaled that with an intimate and off-the-cuff Insight (I always encourage authors doing Insights to wing it, not script it, and Strube shows how well this can work) in which she talks eloquently about writing with humor and writing in general. It's terrific stuff and well worth a listen. Go there now.

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I wanted to alert you to a terrific interview with Cormac McCarthy today in the Wall Street Journal. The quote above comes from this, and it’s well worth a read. I also love his quote about writing novels, but maybe that’s because I write novels.

Find it here.

And by the way, if you haven’t read The Road, please, please do. Just ignore the movie entirely.

—TC

I sat down with poet Darrell Epp a little while ago to record his reading and insight for AuthorsAloud. Darrell’s young, but he’s been working on his art for some time, and getting published widely, and recently Signature Editions collected his work in a volume called Imaginary Maps. As a setting for the reading, Darrell chose the coffee area in the local Fortino’s grocery store. It wasn’t the quietest venue, but it was handy to him, and seemed to suit his utterly guileless and unaffected manner. When you listen to the recordings here, you’ll see what I mean. After the readings, we chatted for a while and Darrell told me something of his recent experiences in South Africa. They’re not for me to share here, but they clearly have stayed with him. I do hope one day we get to hear some of them, filtered through his poems.

Let me take this opportunity as well to alert you to a new reading from Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, here. Kathryn was one of the early believers in AuthorsAloud, and we’re thrilled to be able to feature a reading from her latest novel, Perfecting.
— TC

The newest reading at the revamped AuthorsAloud comes from Julie Paul, who seems to have had an on and off affair with Ontario that now appears on again. Ontario’s happy to have her. For AuthorsAloud she reads from her collection The Jealousy Bone, and the story she chooses — “Boring Baby” — hits me the right way. It involves a somewhat unlikeable character, and I have a fondness for writers who show the courage to take on an unlikeable voice and not flinch. Click on Julie’s face in the featured authors gallery, or, what the heck, here.
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Some of you will recall that last year my computer did the unforgivable and died unexpectedly, taking AuthorsAloud with it. Yes, the site still existed on-line, and visitors were still able to come and listen and enjoy. But the site was static; all the page files that made up the structure of AuthorsAloud were gone and so I wasn’t able to add new readings. What was required was a complete reconstruction from the ground up. And that took much longer than I had anticipated.

But now we’re back, and I believe we’re better than ever.

First of all, we’re relaunching with the benefit of six new readings, bringing our running total to 90 authors! Five of those new authors can be seen in the featured readings section near the top of the page, and the sixth, Christopher Willard, will get his face up there soon. The new readings are a nice mix of prose and poetry. Tricia Dower, Anik See, Jessica Westhead and Christopher Willard offer a readings from their latest and very different works of fiction. While poets Catherine Black and Desi Di Nardo share readings from their latest collections. I’m excited to be able to bring the work of all six of these exciting authors to you. Black, Di Nardo, Dower and Willard have also taken the trouble to record Insights into their work, and they’re fascinating listening.

While we’re here, let me tell you about a couple of new features of AuthorsAloud. Both in their very early stages.

The first is the events section, which means to provide visitors with listings of live author readings all across the country. AuthorsAloud is all about supporting Canadian authors by providing an audience for performances of their work, and I believe that should include live performances as well as recorded ones. There’s nothing more encouraging to an author on tour than seeing people come out to their readings (and nothing more dispiriting than the opposite) and AuthorsAloud would like to contribute to the success of those performances by making visitors aware of where and when authors will be reading at a city nearby.

The success of the listings will depend largely on the participation of authors and publishers. AuthorsAloud doesn’t have the resources to go out and gather these listings; it’s going to be up to authors and their publicists to provide the information in the necessary format so that it can be published easily and quickly. A portal has been provided for that purpose.

The other new feature is the AuthorsAloud Poll. Go and vote!

There are more plans for more improvements to AuthorsAloud. Now that the site is back up and running, it will continue to improve and evolve. I hope you’ll come back often and see what the future brings!

— Trevor Cole