Posts

The Bibliophile: Like working a piece of clay

/in , /by

Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

***

An interview with Robyn Sarah, author of We’re Somewhere Else Now

Robyn Sarah has been a household name among Canadian poets since before I started reading poetry, and it’s been a privilege to work (even in my small way) on her latest collection—her first book of new poems since 2015’s Governor General’s Award-winning My Shoes Are Killing Me (maybe one of my favourite titles of the century).

We’re Somewhere Else Now: Poems 2016–2024 by Robyn Sarah. Cover designed by Vanessa Stauffer.

We’re Somewhere Else Now compiles poems written between 2016 and 2024, documenting the pandemic years with a quiet, lyric attentiveness. The poems are full of lovely—alternately foreboding and humour-tinged—imagery. One of my favourite images describes a high-rise apartment in the midst of lockdown: “balconies / stacked skyward like open bureau drawers.”

Another highlight of this book is the extended sequence poem, “In the Wilderness,” a poem that combines various forms and voices, a meditative yet playful unmooring of faith and “jam session with Doubt.”

I had the immense pleasure of asking Robyn a few questions about her work.

Thank you for reading,

Dominique
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator

A Biblioasis Interview with Robyn Sarah

It’s been ten years since your last poetry collection was published. In this time, your selected poems came out, and you wrote a music memoir. I wonder what you see as having changed (intentionally or not) in your poetry since My Shoes Are Killing Me? Have the experiences of writing a prose memoir and compiling a book of selected poems also altered your more recent poetic preoccupations?

I wouldn’t say that compiling a second selected in 2017 (the first was The Touchstone in 1992) altered anything in my poetic practice or preoccupations. Nor did working for close to a decade on an extended prose work—except in the sense that its completion freed me to write poems again, something I felt good and ready to do! The memoir was extremely demanding, and from 2016 until 2020 it took the place of poetry-writing almost entirely (though around 2018 I did begin scratching out fragments towards what would become the long mixed-genre poem in the new collection). I’ve always written both prose and poetry (first stories at the age of six, first poems at nine) and have also sometimes mixed them (there are prose poems in every collection I’ve published). Many reviewers have observed that my poetic practice and preoccupations have been remarkably consistent from one collection to the next (“stubbornly so,” as one put it).

Montreal is a consistent backdrop in We’re Somewhere Else Now. Early on in the book, the speaker is “buying a potted narcissus / at the Atwater Market,” and later on in the poems we get glimpses of intersections: Hutchison and Villeneuve, Parc and Villeneuve. I wonder how important a place—and specifically Montreal—is to your work?

Some writers find visiting new places indispensable to their creativity. I am not one. Travel is stimulating, but I find it very stressful and disruptive, so I minimize time away from home; I need stability in order to do creative work. I’ve lived in Montreal almost continuously since the age of four—that’s a lifespan—and have rarely left it for longer than a few weeks at a time. I watched the city grow and change as I grew and changed. If you live in a city for long enough, you don’t have to go somewhere else to find yourself in a new place: you see it become one again and again—for better or worse. The same with a street or neighbourhood, like the Mile-End block where I’ve lived (in four different flats) for more than forty years. The current view out my window overlays memories that go back forty years—not to mention memories passed on by immigrant grandparents who lived within blocks of here in the 1920s. I love this city and neighbourhood. You mention Villeneuve (referenced in poems set in 1981 and 2021). Villeneuve was the name we gave to a small press I co-founded in 1976—based at home, in a third-floor walkup on that street, and then in two successive flats around the corner on Hutchison. My kids grew up on this block—a two-minute walk to Mount Royal Park, a half-hour walk downtown along Avenue du Parc. Literary forbears also lived here: the poet A. M. Klein raised his family in the block above ours; Mordecai Richler apparently lived briefly on ours as a college student.

Photo (L to R): My Shoes Are Killing Me: Poems; Music, Late and Soon: A Memoir; and Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems 1975–2015 by Robyn Sarah.

Your poetry collections are usually varied on a formal level, and this one is no exception. I’m curious to know how you approach form: does it happen intuitively, or do you set goals for yourself? Is there a form you’d like to attempt that you haven’t yet?

Hard to answer, because what begins intuitively can later become more goal-directed. (I’m almost entirely an intuitive writer, but at a certain point in the process, unconscious intentions become conscious and begin to direct my choices.) I don’t go about looking for new forms to attempt, like learning a new trick—it’s more like one day I become aware of the formal pattern of a poem I may have known and loved for years without noticing it was in a form, and I become intrigued by the form and am inspired to imitate it in a poem of my own. (I wrote my first villanelle without knowing that the form I was imitating had a name.) I rarely begin a poem with a form in mind, but my training as a classical musician has always had an influence on how I write: I like my poems to have a shape or pattern, even if they’re free verse. I start a poem usually with a few lines that come into my head from nowhere, lines I like the sound of, and I let the poem grow from there, shaping as I go along. It’s more like working a piece of clay than like trying to impose a template on the words: you could say I invent new forms, some looser and some more obviously formal. But really it’s like I let each poem find its own form—either it begins to fall into a particular traditional pattern or it evolves into a shape I create just for that poem.

The second half of We’re Somewhere Else Now comprises a long sequence poem, “In the Wilderness.” I’m interested to know about the evolution of this one: did you set out to write a long poem, or did the various pieces eventually come together? Although thematically cohesive, I was struck by the variations in form and tone throughout (for instance, the playful, shorter lines at the beginning of “The Fiddler” are enticingly opposed to other, almost prose-like sections).

The title poem in My Shoes Are Killing Me, which I called “a poem in nine movements,” was not a suite of individual poems but an extended single work, meant to be read continuously as one, even though its nine sections have individual titles. At eleven pages, it was the longest single poem I had ever written, and it gave me the idea I might consider doing something similar, perhaps even chapbook or book length, on a single theme that had begun to preoccupy me: the irony that in a world where a glut of information on any topic was available at the click of a mouse, the effect seemed to be not to advance us in knowledge but increasingly to cast all knowledge into doubt. I had in mind, vaguely, an extended text that would be philosophical in impulse, but not theoretical—not a treatise on doubt, but an inquiry with a human face, in layman’s language. How does the human being anchor itself at times when truths that have been our common ground for understanding the world begin to break down? The poem evolved very slowly; for two years there was no poem at all, just an accumulating body of disjointed fragments (ranging from a few lines to the equivalent of a paragraph or two, sometimes prose, sometimes free verse) scribbled by hand and eventually filling the equivalent of a Hilroy notebook, mixed in with other jottings and failed poem starts. This was not at all how “My Shoes Are Killing Me” had begun. I had no clear sense of what I was doing or how to work with this material, and no confidence that it would ever amount to anything. But I had to start somewhere, so at some point I began transcribing the “doubt” fragments onto the computer in a single long document, in the order in which they were written, separated by asterisks. Each time I reopened the file to enter the next batch, I would find myself beginning to “ work” one or more of the fragments already entered—letting them grow in stages, sometimes to merge with other fragments, sometimes to incorporate and dialogue with quotations from literature, scripture, prayer, popular song, film, and other sources. Sometimes I moved them around as I saw sub-themes begin to emerge. I wanted the segments, in the voice of a lone speaker, cumulatively to enact the sometimes chaotic thought processes of humanity cast adrift from its moorings as technology pulls familiar ground out from under the world we once knew, erasing landmarks and disrupting our belief systems. I wanted this text to sound and feel improvisatory, like “thinking aloud” in real time—a sort of ad-lib soliloquy with starts and stops and rough edges—not like polished poetry. Hence the variability—moving back and forth between prose and verse, sometimes within the same segment; different line lengths and stanza patterns, different vocal registers and tonal shifts.

Three poems featured in the collection were nominated for a 2025 National Magazine Award in Poetry!

Your book is filled with questions. These often seem to point out, or dismantle, the absurdity of human logic: “Why put a name on a day? / How can it matter what a day is called? / The cat doesn’t know it’s Tuesday.” What do questions mean to your work? What do you think they contribute to a poem that a statement might lack?

Many readers have remarked that my memoir, too, is filled with questions. I’m not necessarily looking for answers. I think questions are my “way in” to something I wonder about and would like to explore. I’m a wonderer. Even when I don’t voice them in so many words, I think the impulse to poetry comes to me as a question. It can be directed to the poem’s subject or addressee, or it can be a question I ask myself. It may be a “question arising” from the poem or implied by it, left to linger unanswered. Questions invite a reader’s involvement. A question opens the way to thinking about something, where an answer or a statement tends to close it.

As a final question, I’m curious to know who your great poetry loves are. While writing this book, but also more generally—who are the poets who’ve guided you in your own work over the years? I might guess Gerard Manley Hopkins, for one, from the appearance of some of his lines in this collection . . .

Single poems encountered at the right moment, by poets I might not otherwise consider “great poetry loves,” have inspired many of my poems. Different “loved poets” have guided or influenced me at different times, and there have been so many. Generally, in my early high school years the poets I loved were A. E. Housman, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman; in my late teens and early twenties it was primarily T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, but also Emily Dickinson, Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, Conrad Aiken, Wilfred Owen, more ambivalently William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore . . . . Well, I could go on. Donne and Herbert and Hopkins. Philip Larkin was a later discovery, I don’t know how I missed him before. Of contemporary Canadian poets, I have especially loved the poems of George Johnston, Margaret Avison, and Don Coles. Along the way I’ve also read poetry in translation and have been inspired by poems originally written in French, Latin, modern Greek, modern Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Polish, Swedish, and Chinese.

In good publicity news:

  • The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton) was reviewed in Kirkus Reviews: “‘Some books are essential, others diversions,’ the boy thinks to himself. This book belongs in the former category.”
  • Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio appeared on CBC Books’ Fall Book Preview: “Di Cintio investigates . . . and questions whether a system that relies on the vulnerability of its most marginalized can ever be made more just.”
  • Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide was reviewed in several outlets recently, including:
    • Asymptote: “As long as these powerful voices continue to speak to us, we—and anyone with the power to stop this ongoing genocide—will repay them with our listening.”
    • Arab Lit Quarterly: “Their words go beyond the frame . . . [and] requires of the reader an emotional strength to see Gaza in depth, to follow day by day—or for as long the genocide allows them to write—the thoughts of Batool, Sondos, Nahil and Ala’a.”
    • The New Arab: “The artistry and creativity displayed by these four remarkable women both astonish and humble readers . . . Instead of cold numbers and abstract political jargon, these pages offer irrefutable proof of lives lived and spirits tired, but unbroken.”
  • Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was mentioned in the Guardian’s and the Globe and Mail’s articles on Alberta book bans.
  • Elise Levine, author of Big of You, was interviewed about her short story collection in The Ex-Puritan.
  • Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet was featured in Publishers Weekly’s article on Big Indie Books of Fall 2025.

J.I. Segal Award: Three Questions with Robyn Sarah

/in /by

Reposted from the J.I. Segal Award website

Poet Robyn Sarah’s memoir, Music, Late and Soon (Biblioasis, 2021) is one of the five nominees for the2022 J.I. Segal Award for the Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme. Congratulations, Robyn! The prize is accompanied by an award of $5,000. Music, Late and Soon recounts her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In relating this experience, she reflects on her years spent at Le Conservatoire de musique de Québec studying the clarinet where it seemed clear that her career as an orchestral musician was set. But Sarah was already a writer at heart and this fascinating memoir shows a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed.

Congratulations, Robyn, on your work to bring this experience into your writing. It shows us an insight into how creativity is a whole jumble of disciplines, practices, inspirations and experiences. And in order to dive deeper into that question, we asked Robyn the Three Questions and her answers were very thoughtful, detailed and informative.

Three Questions with Robyn Sarah

Question One: What part of the writing process is the most exciting? Starting a project? Finishing it? Editing? Or some other part of the process? Why?

What we call “the writing process” may not divide up into such tidy parts. When exactly does a project start? An idea can germinate at the back of the mind for weeks, months or years before the first sentences get written—and those sentences may prove to be a dead end, or grow into an opening chapter that will ultimately be scrapped. When is a book finished? Months of rewriting (prompted by an editor) can follow delivery of a “final” manuscript that the writer has already put through multiple versions Much of this process is less than exciting. Challenging, yes; compulsively engaging; but also implacably demanding and laborious. Books don’t write themselves; you have to write every word. You are in the grip of something. And all along the way there are self-doubts and misgivings, stalls, wrong turns, detours, patches of fog, impasses.

So where does excitement come in? It, too, can come at any point along the way, but it tends to come in flashes, mini-revelations, moments when something falls magically into place. You are handed a little gift by your subconscious, which has clearly been working on it. Suddenly you see where your story must begin. Suddenly you realize you can connect two images or scenes so each sheds light on the other. Suddenly you hit upon the exact word to describe the expression on somebody’s face, a word you’ve looked for in vain—or you see how to fix an inelegant sentence that has several times defied your efforts to rephrase it to better effect. A seemingly impossible structural problem solves itself when you change the order of a few chapters. Maybe you recognize with a small electric shock that the sentence you’ve just written should be the last sentence in your book—a perfect ending that came to you prematurely. You’re nowhere near the end of the book, but you cut/paste and copy that sentence onto a clean page and save it like treasure. Now you just have to figure out how to get to it.

Question Two: What under-appreciated book or write are you a fan of and why?

Adele Wiseman was not a prolific writer, but she left a small body of highly original work. These days I rarely hear mention of her novels, The Sacrifice (1956) or Crackpot (1974), though the first won a Governor General’s Award when the author was only 28, and the second was a J.I. Segal award winner. Much less known is a book of hers I’ve placed on the “one-of-a-kind” shelf of my bookcase. Published in 1978, a mere 148 pages, Old Woman at Play defies categorization. Its focus is on Wiseman’s mother Chaika in her late years—in particular, on Chaika’s decades-long passion for making dolls out of scraps of fabric and junk, giving each a name, a bit of a history, even a doll companion.

Part memoir, part dialogue, part meditation on creative process, the book is an intimate portrait of an multigenerational family, told largely through scraps of conversation (both remembered and current) between Wiseman and her Ukrainian Jewish parents, living out their last years under their daughter’s roof in Toronto. Her parents reminisce about their old country childhood in Russian villages, their immigration to North America in the 1920s, the long years working day and night as tailor and dressmaker to feed their family in Winnipeg during the Depression. All the while, amid the daily life of her grown daughter’s household, Chaika Waisman’s hands are busy making dolls, and her writer-daughter, fascinated by the profusion and variety of these playful personae, keeps trying to coax out of her mother some explanation of why she makes them and what the activity means to her.

Why do I value this book? I think it’s because it gets at the heart of human creativity better than anything else I’ve read—honouring it without glorifying or falsifying, recognizing it as something not set apart from the rest of life but intrinsically bound up with it. In her mother’s “naive” art, Wiseman finds confirmation “that art, uncapitalized … is our human birthright, the extraordinary right and privilege to share, both as givers and receivers, in the work of continuous creation.”

Question Three: If you weren’t a writer and could do a totally different creative profession, what would it be and why?

From childhood I’ve had two creative passions, writing and music, and all my life I have practiced both. In my early twenties I felt pulled between them. I did not become a professional musician, and for the most part, I have no regrets about that choice. My memoir, Music, Late and Soon, was my attempt to explain to myself why I turned away from music as a career path—why I stopped studying music at twenty-four, and why I returned to it seriously (for its own sake) at nearly sixty.

If I were not a writer and could have a completely different profession, it might not be a creative one at all. I find the whole idea of being a creative “professional’ a thorny one. But if I had to name a third creative art I could study and practice seriously, it would be visual—painting, drawing, or sculpture. I would love to be able to represent the world in visual terms, working with colours, lines, and shapes, and with physical materials, rather than with words, sentences and paragraphs. Words take us into ourselves, into our heads, because we think in words. One thing I love about music is that it’s non-verbal; it takes me out of myself. I think it would be the same with visual art.

The winner of the prize will be announced on Thursday, December 22 at 10am.

Pick up your copy of Music, Late and Soon here!

ABOUT MUSIC, LATE AND SOON

Shortlisted for the J.I. Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme • Shortlisted for the The Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction

A poet rediscovers the artistic passion of her youth—and pays tribute to the teacher she thought she’d lost.

After thirty-five years as an “on-again, off-again, uncoached closet pianist,” poet and writer Robyn Sarah picked up the phone one day and called her old piano teacher, whom she had last seen in her early twenties. Music, Late and Soon is the story of her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In tandem, she reflects on a previously unexamined musical past: a decade spent at Quebec’s Conservatoire de Musique, studying clarinet—ostensibly headed for a career as an orchestral musician, but already a writer at heart. A meditation on creative process in both music and literary art, this two-tiered musical autobiography interweaves past and present as it tracks the author’s long-ago defection from a musical career path and her late re-embrace of serious practice. At its core is a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed.

ABOUT ROBYN SARAH

Robyn Sarah is the author of eleven collections of poems, two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. In 2017 Biblioasis published a forty-year retrospective, Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems, 1975-2015. Sarah’s poems have been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry and have been broadcast by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. From 2011 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books. She has lived for most of her life in Montréal.

MUSIC, LATE AND SOON shortlisted for the 2022 J.I. Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme!

/in /by

coverWe’re thrilled to share that Music, Late and Soon by Robyn Sarah (August 24, 2022) has been shortlisted for the 2022 J.I. Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme! The shortlist was announced on September 21, 2022. Check out the full list here.

“We are thrilled to be able to include five outstanding titles by well-known writers in our short-list,” said Université de Montréal Professor and Awards Committee Chair Robert Schwartzwald in response to the jury’s announcement. “With books in both English and French and from a variety of genres, there is much to celebrate as we prepare to reward the best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme!”

For over half a century, the Jacob Isaac Segal Awards have been an important community recognition of Jewish-based literature. Since 2020, the Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme award also honours the contribution of Jewish culture to a richly diverse contemporary Quebec.

The 2022 J.I. Segal Award for the Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme is accompanied by a $5,000 cash prize. The winner will be announced on November 10th, 2022.

Grab your copy of Music, Late and Soon here!

ABOUT MUSIC, LATE AND SOON

Shortlisted for the J.I Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme • Shortlisted for the The Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction

A poet rediscovers the artistic passion of her youth—and pays tribute to the teacher she thought she’d lost.

After thirty-five years as an “on-again, off-again, uncoached closet pianist,” poet and writer Robyn Sarah picked up the phone one day and called her old piano teacher, whom she had last seen in her early twenties. Music, Late and Soon is the story of her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In tandem, she reflects on a previously unexamined musical past: a decade spent at Quebec’s Conservatoire de Musique, studying clarinet—ostensibly headed for a career as an orchestral musician, but already a writer at heart. A meditation on creative process in both music and literary art, this two-tiered musical autobiography interweaves past and present as it tracks the author’s long-ago defection from a musical career path and her late re-embrace of serious practice. At its core is a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed.

Credit: Stephen Brockwell

ABOUT ROBYN SARAH

Robyn Sarah is the author of eleven collections of poems, two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. In 2017 Biblioasis published a forty-year retrospective, Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems, 1975-2015. Sarah’s poems have been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry and have been broadcast by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. From 2011 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books. She has lived for most of her life in Montréal.

Spotlight On: WHEREVER WE MEAN TO BE by ROBYN SARAH

/in , /by

Ring in the new year with another fantastic title from Biblioasis’ Spotlight series! For January, we’re featuring a collection of poetry from Robyn Sarah, the arresting and beautifully sensory Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems 1975–2015 (November 14, 2017).

This month we’re also including a special reading of several poems from this collection by Robyn herself! Listen in below.

 

WHEREVER WE MEAN TO BE

A four-decade retrospective from the winner of the 2015 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry.

Spanning forty years and ten previously published collections, Wherever We Mean to Be is the first substantial selection of Robyn Sarah’s poems since 1992. Chosen by the author, the 97 poems in this new volume highlight the versatility of a poet who moves easily between free verse, traditional forms, and prose poems. Familiar favourites are here, along with lesser-known poems that collectively round out a retrospective of the themes and concerns that have characterized this poet’s work from the start.

Warm, direct, and intimate, accessible even at their most enigmatic, seemingly effortless in their musicality, the poems are a meditation on the passage of time, transience, and mortality. Natural and seasonal cycles are a backdrop to human hopes and longings, to the mystery and grace to be found in ordinary moments, and the pleasures, sorrows, and puzzlements of being human in the world.

Robyn Sarah is the author of eleven collections of poems, two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. From 2011 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books. She has lived for most of her life in Montréal.

 

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

Special Reading of Seven Poems

Wherever We Mean to Be is the first selection of my poems since The Touchstone in 1992. A forty-year retrospective of my work as a poet, it is again my own selection, a new winnowing of my first five collections and of four published since. I chose the title because, in revisiting where I’ve been, it struck me that this phrase—the last line of a poem called “Station”—seems to embody something that runs through all of my poetry.

In “Station”, a couple—”two travellers, refugees/ of our own pasts”—contemplate a space ship on the lawn of the science museum. They have not come to visit the museum; they are just passing, here for the day on business. They don’t know why they feel compelled to stop; something inarticulate attends this moment as, hand in hand, they gaze blankly at the “mute ship poised for flight/ it will not take.” The poem ends:

… The thought
that beats, propeller-like
above our heads
is that we’re here—
wherever we were before,
wherever we mean to be.

We’re here.

“Here” is where we are now—a moment in time, a position on the globe. But the present moment is nearly always infused with some awareness of past and future: memory and imagination are part of it. I think this is how humans live: with one foot in the past and one directed towards a future or an elsewhere made of promise and intention. Unlike animals, we live in a present that embodies consciousness of where we’ve been, and hopes/fears/schemes/dreams of where we one day may be.

We are where we are, and it isn’t necessarily where we mean to be. It’s this ambivalence, integral to the human moment, that fascinates me as a poet: the tug between immediate particulars and a mind that can project backward or forward in time. Those same particulars can make time stand still if we’re paying close attention to where we are now. Yet stresses that thwart or divert intention can give a moment its aliveness.

A walk along a beach at dusk leads to a scramble up a cliff face to escape the incoming tide. The search for “something perfect” comes up against the demands of domesticity. A man on a scaffold and a woman below give up trying to have a conversation that way. A woman at the top of a staircase contemplates stairs that “end in mid-air, halfway down” after the man at the bottom has cut off a section he wants to reconfigure. In the mirror on a bureau that once belonged to the father she lost in childhood, a woman sees how her own face has come to resemble his mother’s as she remembers it from when she was a child…

“We are where we are”—for now. In the accompanying sampler of poems I’ve recorded as audio, these are a few living moments caught on the fly.

 

Get your copy of Wherever We Mean to Be here!

Order her latest work Music, Late and Soon here!

Have a look at Robyn Sarah’s other fantastic titles here!

 

MUSIC, LATE AND SOON a finalist for THE MAVIS GALLANT PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION

/in /by

coverWe’re thrilled to share that on Friday, October 15, Music, Late and Soon (August 24, 2021) by Robyn Sarah was announced as a finalist for the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction, presented by the Quebec Writers’ Foundation! The winner will be announced during a live-streamed gala event hosted by Giller prize-winning author Sean Michaels on November 24 at 7PM.

Since 1988, the QWF Literary Awards have celebrated the best books and plays published or performed by English-language writers and translators in Quebec, as well as those translating English works from Quebec into French. Each award comes with a purse of $3,000.

The other finalists for the Mavis Gallant Prize include: Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt’s Peacekeeper’s Daughter: A Middle-East Memoir (Thistledown Press), Karen Messing’s Bent Out of Shape (Between the Lines), André Picard’s Neglected No More: The Urgent Need to Improve the Lives of Canada’s Elders in the Wake of a Pandemic (Random House Canada), and Samir Shaheen-Hussain’s Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism Against Indigenous Children in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press).

The winner will be announced during a live-streamed gala event hosted by Giller prize-winning author Sean Michaels on November 24 at 7PM.

 

ABOUT MUSIC, LATE AND SOON

A poet rediscovers the artistic passion of her youth—and pays tribute to the teacher she thought she’d lost.

After thirty-five years as an “on-again, off-again, uncoached closet pianist,” poet and writer Robyn Sarah picked up the phone one day and called her old piano teacher, whom she had last seen in her early twenties. Music, Late and Soon is the story of her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In tandem, she reflects on a previously unexamined musical past: a decade spent at Quebec’s Conservatoire de Musique, studying clarinet—ostensibly headed for a career as an orchestral musician, but already a writer at heart. A meditation on creative process in both music and literary art, this two-tiered musical autobiography interweaves past and present as it tracks the author’s long-ago defection from a musical career path and her late re-embrace of serious practice. At its core is a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed.

ABOUT ROBYN SARAH

Robyn Sarah is the author of eleven collections of poems, two collections of short stories, and a book of essays on poetry. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 2015.  In 2017 Biblioasis published a forty-year retrospective, Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems, 1975-2015. Sarah’s writing has appeared widely in Canada, the United States, and the U.K.  Her poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry, 15 Canadian Poets x 2 and x 3, The Bedford Anthology of Literature, and The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and a dozen of them were broadcast by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. From 2011 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books. She has lived for most of her life in Montréal.

 

Get your copy of Music, Late and Soon here!

 

A Biblioasis Interview with Robyn Sarah

/in /by

A decade and a lifetime in the making, Robyn Sarah’s Music, Late and Soon will be available to readers August 24, 2021. A memoir of a young woman’s career in music, which she leaves (for a variety of reasons) for writing, and returns to much later in life. An enticing ‘what-if’ story for the many people who abandon music in their youth and contemplate a return, but feel it’s too late. Sarah has spent the past decade with her first love, the piano, and has spent much of this time re-connecting and learning through celebrated teacher Phil Cohen. As a well regarded and award-winning poet, Sarah explores the relationship between the verbal and non-verbal arts, and verbal and non-verbal learning. A memoir of artistic vocation, it will be intriguing to music and poetry readers alike.

Q1: Can you provide a brief introduction to those readers who are not familiar with your work?

A1: Writing has been a constant in my life for as long as I can remember. I had it in my head from the age of six or seven that I was going to be a writer when I grew up, and that remained a lodestar for me through a lot of digressions – notably ten years in music school, when I thought I was headed for a career as an orchestral musician. I graduated from the Quebec Conservatory in the early 70s with a diploma in performance on clarinet, but abandoned music as a career path soon after, and eventually became the writer I always meant to be. Like many of my fellow writers in Montreal, I taught English in Quebec’s junior college system for many years, but since the mid-1990s I’ve worked as a freelance writer and literary editor, most recently serving ten years as poetry editor for Cormorant Books. Poetry is my primary genre. Though I’ve also published essays and stories, I think my poet’s perspective leaves its stamp on everything I write.

Q2: Music, Late and Soon chronicles another decade-long – to use your word – digression, a return to the serious study of music after more than three decades. “I was late for my piano lesson,” your memoir begins. “Thirty-five years late, to be exact.” Can you tell us a bit about why, at such a stage in your life, you returned to music, and perhaps a bit about the genesis of this book?

A2: Who can say with certainty why we do anything we do, and why at a particular moment? Human motivation is so layered. We have conscious motives, we have unconscious motives, we have intentions and impulses. We have game-changing encounters with chance. When we say, “It was just something I had to do at that moment”, we may not even know what tipped the balance. But when we make such a statement, we’re on our way to telling ourselves a story. This book is the story I told myself to explain why, at nearly sixty, I had to take piano lessons again – something I had thought about doing many times before without acting on it.

Robyn Sarah, age 8

– Which leads to your question about the genesis of the book. On this particular occasion, the thought came simultaneously with the idea of writing a book about it. And somehow, it was the book – the untold, unlived story I sensed there – that made it possible for me to do what I hadn’t been able to do before. I felt propelled into simultaneously living the story and writing it. At first I thought it would be a much shorter book – a story about a year of late-life piano lessons, leading to a small recital. I didn’t know it would take me back to my years in music school. I didn’t know it would demand that I finally make some sense of my abandoning a career as a clarinetist just as it was getting off the ground. It was only in the bringing together of both processes – my literary process and a return to serious musical practice on my first instrument – that the living and the writing overflowed those initial parameters.

Q3: You’ve explained how writing about your return to music took you back to your musical past. Can you say a little about where that return has taken you as you’ve moved forward?

A3: Well, it wasn’t very long before I realized this was no caprice. It wasn’t even a “project” – not in the sense of something I could finish and walk away from. I realized I was back at the piano for the long haul. I had dropped any expectations; I was open to wherever it wanted to take me. The second part of the book describes some of the places it initially took me – among them, playing piano in local cafes and a retirement home; playing a small private recital beset with unexpected challenges; attending a three-week summer piano intensive where I was the oldest participant by – you guessed it – thirty-five years. It also brought me new friends, new repertoire, new perspectives, and a sense of ongoing adventure as I entered my sixties.

Q4: Your memoir chronicles more than a return to and relationship with an instrument (or many instruments, several pianos and clarinets both!); it also tells the story of a special relationship with a very special teacher. Can you tell us a little about this?

A4: Philip Cohen’s legacy – very much his own, but at only one remove from celebrated pianist Alfred Cortot, who taught his teacher – lives on in the teaching of his students in Montreal, New York, Chicago, L.A. and overseas, all of whom acknowledge his extraordinary qualities. I began studying with Phil at eleven, stopped at seventeen, and returned briefly in my early twenties. When I came back to him at 59, I never imagined I would end up studying with him again for nearly nine years – the same length of time as I did earlier in life. My adult years as mother, teacher, and writer were book-ended by those two periods of intense musical mentorship. This “late and soon” aspect of our relationship was one thing that made it special. But everyone who studied with Phil Cohen had a special relationship with him, and everyone’s was different. His approach to teaching was based entirely on his appreciation of the individual human being: you felt he understood you better than you understood yourself, that you had his full attention, and that he cared. Not only were his musical insights endlessly inspiring, but regardless of age, background, or personality, he was able to reach people on a soul level.

coverQ5: The initial goal of this project was to return to piano for a year, to ready yourself for the possibility of performance, and to write a short book about the experience. Both book and the experience it chronicles became much more than this, and I think Music, Late and Soon is, among other things, one of the best books on artistic dedication and vocation I’ve read. Can you highlight a few of the things you learned along the way?

A5: When I first approached my teacher with the project of spending a year working to prepare a modest recital program, his response was, “Why would you not just start working again and see where it leads? Playing the piano is like any art form, any creative process – it doesn’t work by deadline.” I think the primary thing I learned as we worked together anew was to respect creative process – to trust it and to recognize the patience it requires. Not just at the piano, and not just in my writing, but in living life. The book became as much a meditation on creative process as it is a personal story. Many of the things I learned were actually things I had learned before but found myself relearning on a deeper level. This itself was one of them: that serious learning is a process of coming back again and again to deepen acquaintance with something we think we know.

You can order a copy of Music, Late and Soon here.

Biblioasis 2017 Media Year in Review

/in /by

2017 was a big year for us here at the Bibliomanse!  We released a ton of great new titles, two new Bibliofolk arrived as Casey Plett and Jonny Flieger joined the team, Biblioasis books made it onto some very prestigious awards lists, and we had a lot of great coverage in the media. Here are just a few highlights of some of the spectacular reviews and coverage our books received this past year:

Trade Paper $19.95
eBook $9.99

Alejandro Saravia’s Red, Yellow, Green had a great review in Montreal Review of Books—“a labyrinthine narrative that lodges like shrapnel—bracing and painful…playfully absurdist, funny, brilliant, and courageous… Saravia’s accomplishment in Red, Yellow, Green is to make you care, and deeply”
Montreal Review of Books: History vs. Oblivion

Trade Paper $19.95
eBook $9.99

Kevin Hardcastle and John Irving spent some time “Bro-ing down” at the International Festival of Authors together. Kevin’s new novel In the Cage has been collecting heaps of praise from places such as Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, Maclean’s, National Post, and Foreword Reviews.
In Conversation: Kevin Hardcastle & John Irving
Maclean’s: Five Must Read Books for October
Toronto Star: Twenty-Five must-read books this fall
National Post: Book Review

Trade Paper $19.95
eBook $9.99

The Vancouver Sun recognized their Vancouver daughter, Cynthia Flood, and her new short story collection What Can You Do, saying it  “…makes for page-turning reading…Flood’s writing is sparse and direct, and tackles the challenging topics unfolding in her stories with welcome clarity.”

Trade Paper $19.95
eBook $9.99

Quill & Quire wrote that David Huebert’s Peninsula Sinking “…establishes Huebert as one of Canada’s most impressive young writers … the stories are far-reaching, but tightly woven, each focused on characters in significant moments of development or change.”
Quill & Quire Review

 

 

Trade Paper $24.95
eBook $13.99

The late Norman Levine’s collected short stories, I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well, took some people by surprise this year. André Forget wrote in The Walrus “If Levine lacks for a Canadian readership, it could be in part because there is no definitive, breakout collection of his stories…that might change with I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well. If great writing has a mark, surely this is it.”
Ian McGillis raised the stakes even higher for Levine, writing in The Montreal Gazette that Levine’s short stories should be compared to Gallant, Munro, and even Chekhov, believing “Norman Levine deserves it and his time has come.”
The Walrus: Will a Posthumous Story Collection Help Canada Forgive Norman Levine?
Montreal Gazette: Neglected story master Norman Levine gets his due in new collection

Trade Paper $19.95
eBook $9.99

 Robyn Sarah’s long-awaited selection of poems, Wherever We Mean to Be, was named one of CBC books’ “Canadian Poetry Collections to Watch For” and Anita Lahey wrote a beautiful profile on Sarah for The Walrus.
CBC: 16 Canadian poetry collections to watch for
The Walrus: Robyn Sarah’s Exquisitely Untrendy Poetry

Trade Paper $18.95
eBook $9.99

The Toronto Star wrote of Molly Peacock’s The Analyst, that “The poems bear witness to loss and change in the lives of two women, but they also offer a remarkable account of the restorative power of creativity… [Peacock’s] poetry’s orderly grace can seem paradoxical when she’s describing intense, chaotic emotions. But that lyrical craft is exactly what makes these poems resonate.”
Toronto Star: Poetry transforms Molly Peacock’s relationship with her analyst

 

Trade Paper $17.95
eBook $9.99

Even celebrities couldn’t keep their hands off of Biblioasis books this year!  Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex in the City fame raved about Carys Davies, saying  “Oh my God! Oh my God! It was so great! The Redemption of Galen Pike. A collection of short stories. I never read short stories. This book is so wonderful. One of the clerks at Three Lives Bookstore convinced me to get that book. It’s fantastic!”
Sarah Jessica Parker & The Redemption of Galen Pike
The Redemption of Galen Pike was also an Indie Next pick and a Women’s National Book Association pick for their National Reading Group Month Great Group Reads 2017 List.
National Reading Group: Great Group Reads
Indiebound List

Trade Paper $19.95
eBook $9.99

The long-form review lives on over at Music and Literature. It’s a disservice to their careful and thoughtful review of Elise Levine’s Blue Field to excerpt such a short quote but needs must. Hannah Leclair writes “Reading the novel is a sensation akin to drifting weightlessly beneath the surface of the text…dazzling, textured, tightly woven.”
Music & Literature Review

The Winnipeg Review agreed, saying “Elise Levine’s new novel takes place in a state of not suspense, but suspension. It is set, tellingly, in the rough space between two deaths in the protagonist’s life—first Marilyn’s parents, back to back, then her best friend. The novel ceaselessly evokes the hanging feeling of being deep underwater: all is muted, slow, and yet sensation is almost unbearably heightened … Levine is, undeniably, an outstanding wordsmith. Her writing style moves in multiple directions, making high stakes out of small movements while turning panic into poetry.”

Winnipeg Review

In The New York Times

The Newspaper of Record took notice of a number of Biblioasis books this year. The New York Times featured glowing reviews for Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse, Mark Kingwell’s Fail Better, and Jorge Carrion’s Bookshops.

Trade Paper $19.95
eBook $9.99

Trade Paper $22.95
eBook $9.99

Trade Cloth $32.95
eBook $9.99

The Lighthouse—New York Times’ On the Road in Germany, Accompanied by Troubling Memories
Fail Better—New York Times’ Now Batting: 14 New Baseball Books
Fail Better—New York Times’  How to Throw a Baseball
Bookshops—New York Times’ A Love Affair With Bookstores

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trade Cloth $29.95
Trade Paper $19.95
eBook $9.99

 Biblioasis’ Awards

 

Trade Cloth $29.95
Trade Paper $19.95
eBook $9.99

Author, editor, and Bibliofriend John Metcalf won an Ottawa Book Award for his collection The Museum at the End of the World. Metcalf also edited Biblioasis’ successful relaunch of Best Canadian Stories (Biblioasis authors David Huebert, Paige Cooper, Cynthia Flood, K.D. Miller & Grant Buday are among those included in the anthology!).
2017 Ottawa Book Awards

 

Patricia Young was a finalist for the Victoria Butler Book Prize for her collection of poems Short Takes on the Apocalypse.
Victoria Butler Book Prize

Trade Paper $18.95
eBook $9.99

Boundary, written by Andrée A. Michaud and translated from the French by Donald Winkler, was named to the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. World Literature Today says Boundary is “a haunting novel, rich with the details of the families’ daily lives and brilliant internal monologue, but the translation doesn’t draw attention to itself, a common flaw in translators too conscious of the masterful prose they are rendering. This is particularly appropriate here as Michaud’s remarkable writing seems entirely relaxed, belying what can only be very meticulously composed. Boundary has been recognized by a number of prizes in Canada, including the author’s second Governor General’s Award for Fiction. She deserves to be better known as one of the best writers in North America.”

Trade Paper $19.95
eBook $9.99

Scotia Bank Giller Prize: 2017 Long List Announced
World Literature Today: Book Review

And last but not least, Elaine Dewar was a Governor General’s Literary Award Finalist for her controversial book The Handover: How Bigwigs and Bureaucrats Transferred Canada’s Best Publisher and the Best Part of Our Literary Heritage to a Foreign Multinational. The book is all about the shady backroom deals that went on in order to package McClelland & Stewart off to international megapublisher Random House, robbing Canadians of one of the most definitively Canadian presses in the name of bigger profits and global monopolization.
Read the Maclean’s article on the deal and Dewar’s book here!

Trade Cloth $29.95
eBook $9.99

Phew. All that and we’ve barely skimmed the surface. There’s so much more to discover–all of our authors have been killing it and there’s so much great coverage and great responses to their amazing work out there.  Come down to the shop or stumble around the website here and find out more.  Congratulations to all our amazing Biblioasis authors and thank you so much to all our readers!  See you in the New Year!

Events

We’re Somewhere Else Now: Montreal Launch!

/in , /by

Come celebrate the publication of Robyn Sarah’s new poetry collection We’re Somewhere Else Now! Robyn will be reading from her new collection at Librairie Bertrand Bookstore, where copies will also be for sale and signing.

The launch will take place on Thursday, September 18 at 5PM.

More details here.

Get a copy of We’re Somewhere Else Now here!

ABOUT WE’RE SOMEWHERE ELSE NOW

In her first collection of new poems in a decade, Robyn Sarah chronicles the pandemic years with quiet wisdom and her flair for meshing the familiar with the numinous. 

We’re Somewhere Else Now moves with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, of quiet awe at the human experience. Each poem is a window for the reader to look into, “lit room to lit room,” tracking desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the calls of birds.

Three poems from the collection, originally published in The New Quarterly, were nominated for a 2025 National Magazine Award in Poetry.

ABOUT ROBYN SARAH

Poet, writer, literary editor, and musician, Robyn Sarah has lived in Montreal since early childhood. Her writing began to appear in Canadian literary magazines in the 1970s while she completed studies at McGill University and the Conservatoire de musique du Québec. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. As well, she has published two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon (2021), that interweaves her youth as a professional-track clarinetist with her return at fifty-nine (after a lapse of thirty-five years) to the piano teacher who was her life mentor. From 2010 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books.