Posts

Spotlight On: ALL THE VOICES CRY by ALICE PETERSEN

/in , /by

Summer is here and so is another title in our Biblioasis Spotlight Series! Biblioasis is proud to be the first home to several outstanding authors, so for the month of July, we wanted to celebrate the beauty of the debut with Alice Petersen‘s short story collection, All the Voices Cry (May 15, 2012). Don’t miss a brief note from the author below!

ALL THE VOICES CRY

Winner of the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize (2012)

An academic’s wife, struggling to keep up with her husband’s quest to find a long-dead author’s Tahitian love-garden, realizes that her own idea of paradise no longer includes her husband. An architect dreams of slender redheads, Champlain’s astrolabe, and a brush with mortality—and finds at least the latter at Danseuses 7 Jours. An elderly man boards a trans-Pacific flight in an attempt to elude the prediction of a psychic, only to understand too late how the prophecy has shaped his actions.

In All the Voices Cry, modern life collides with all the old pushes and pulls: city and country, the global and the local, the ideal and the real. Petersen’s characters chase the mirage of escape, and are brought up hard by reality. This is a book rooted in landscape, tangled in the brambles of personal history, and it introduces in Alice Petersen a wondrous new voice that is yours to discover.

“Finely crafted and pared down to their bare essentials … These are stories that work on multiple levels, and continue to divulge their secrets after several rereadings.”—Quill & Quire

“Alice Petersen’s All the Voices Cry is masterful and potent—incredibly satisfying for a reader.”
—Kathleen Winter, author of Annabel

New Zealander-Canadian Alice Petersen was the 2009 winner of the David Adams Richards Award, offered by the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick. Her stories have variously been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, the Writers’ Union of Canada competition, the CBC Literary awards, and the Metcalf Rooke Award. All the Voices Cry (Biblioasis, 2012) won the University of Concordia QWF First Book Prize. A second collection of stories, Worldly Goods, was published by Biblioasis in 2016. Petersen lives in Quebec with her husband and two daughters.

A NOTE FROM ALICE PETERSEN

The stories in All the Voices Cry were written between 2002 and 2010. During that time, we built and spent most weekends in a small log cabin on the shores of a lake just outside the Parc de la Mauricie in Quebec. I would walk the trails in the Parc, learning about the woods of Eastern Canada. Edible mushrooms, lichen cups, purple lightening weed with matching flower spiders, mosses and bog plants, the changing states of water and ice—all of these things were there to be read and understood as intrinsic parts of Quebec. As a new immigrant I hoped that the process of memorizing this landscape and noting down the details would make that place more familiar, so it all got mulched up and made into stories.

But writing the stories in All the Voices Cry did not make that place mon coin. Although we had that cabin for over a decade, I was still just visiting, even at the end. Perhaps I will always feel this way about living in Canada. I do not know. Other stories in the book span the globe, ending up back on the East Coast of New Zealand’s South Island, where I grew up. Having dual nationality is a kind of emotional waterskiing—I feel lucky to have a foot in two countries, although there also is a precarious, teetering quality to the whole arrangement. The stories are lightly interlinked.

I have always liked the book cover that Gordon Robertson designed for Biblioasis. The image shows young man launching himself off the dock into a chilly looking lake. There is snow on the dock. Looking at the picture, you want to say don’t jump! It’s so cold! But that’s life. We each have to jump, don’t we? We have to, because the lake is there and because swimming is necessary.

Get your copy of All the Voices Cry here!

Check out Alice’s other collection, Worldy Goods, here!

Spotlight On: PENINSULA SINKING by DAVID HUEBERT

/in , /by

Welcome back to our Biblioasis Spotlight Series! For the month of June, we’re featuring David Huebert‘s vibrant and unflinchingly intimate debut collection of stories, Peninsula Sinking (Oct 24, 2017). Don’t miss a brief note from the author below!

PENINSULA SINKING

Winner of the 2018 Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction • Runner-Up for the 2017 Danuta Gleed Literary Award • Shortlisted for the 2018 Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction

In Peninsula Sinking, David Huebert brings readers an assortment of Maritimers caught between the places they love and the siren call of elsewhere. From submarine officers to prison guards, oil refinery workers to academics, each character in these stories struggles to find some balance of spiritual and emotional grace in the world increasingly on the precipice of ruin. Peninsula Sinking offers up eight urgent and electric meditations on the mysteries of death and life, of grief and love, and never shies away from the joy and horror of our submerging world.

David Huebert’s writing has won the CBC Short Story Prize, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2020 Journey Prize. David’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. David’s work has been published in magazines such as The Walrus, Maisonneuve, enRoute, and Canadian Notes & Queries, and anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories. David teaches literature and creative writing at The University of New Brunswick.

“A sense of wonderment penetrates the everyday lives of characters from the Maritimes in this well-crafted, compelling collection that displays a mastery of classical short-story structure and technique. Huebert’s vibrant language juxtaposes tough characters with tender preoccupations, creating narratives that are unsettling and mesmerizing, making ordinary moments in relationships thrilling and dangerous.”
—Danuta Gleed Literary Award Jury Statement

 

Photo Credit: Nicola Davison

A NOTE FROM DAVID HUEBERT

Coming Home

When Peninsula Sinking was released, I brought my 3-month-old baby, Rose, on the famous Biblioasis 401 tour, where she attended readings, suckling her mother’s pinkie until it wrinkled and paled and she fell, finally, into stunned sleep. This June Rose turns five, and soon so will Peninsula Sinking, a book that was very much, for me, about my increasingly complex relationship to my home. 

In Peninsula Sinking, I stumbled into ecological writing because it was simply what worked for me. When I wrote about the ocean or an animal—a lonely whale, a stallion sex plane, a beloved dog’s gonadectomy (the euphemism, so appropriately absurd, is “fixed”)—I found that my writing gained a different and new momentum, a lyrical glitter that allowed my prose to rise, raise its hackles, turn around and face me, a strange and sudden creature I scarcely recognized. Eco, the root of ecology and economy comes from the Ancient Greek Oikos, or household. For me, and I think for most, home is very much an environmental concept—home is trees, skies, seas, the particular slump of the mid-morning sun. But I think that home, like the wilderness, is less a place than a psychological state. 

I wrote Peninsula while living in London, Ontario. The stories are mostly set in Nova Scotia, and in some sense I wrote them out of longing for the place where I now sit and write. I live on Chebucto Road, which bears the original name of this place, the Mi’kmaq word Kjipuktuk. Growing up, I never learned that word—a highly tactical obfuscation (I learned plenty about Cartier and Champlain and the Acadian expulsion). From my daughter’s room, I can see the yard of Oxford School, which I attended from primary to grade nine. I regularly walk my daughters past the house I grew up in, just around the corner on Duncan Street. (How strange it is that I can’t go sit in the backyard where I used to pick rhubarb for my mother and let green inch worms swirl through my fingertips). I have come back home, and one might think that I’ve arrived at a resting place. A part of me is deeply soothed by the familiarity of this place I have always loved. In particular, I love the grey, panting days, when it’s not raining but when the air is so salty and dank that an outdoor walk will soak your clothes. I have arrived “back home,” and yet, just as often, I feel ill at ease here. I feel myself a ghost walking through a past life, through the cracked concrete of the school where I wrote my first story (“Big Beard Ben”), where I broke B’s tooth on the wrestling hill and learned about explorers in a transplanted language. 

One layer of my unease, certainly, is an increasing awareness of land theft and genocide and the long, tactical, violent attempt to erase Mi’kmaq culture from this place. But there’s something else too. Something vague and creepy. A malaise. Perhaps it is just a necessary agitation in the feeling of home itself, a longing that refuses to arrive, directed always towards departure or return. I can’t decide, so I suppose I’ll just keep wondering, which is to say wandering, home. 

 

Pick up your copy of Peninsula Sinking here!

Check out David’s latest short story collection, Chemical Valley here!