#Congress2015

Yesterday, attempting the #Congress2015 book fair at the University of Ottawa with Rose the Intern; it meant running by many booths and speaking to no-one for more than a minute; but at least we saw a number of our Chaudiere Books titles available at the Literary Press Group of Canada table, including books by Monty Reid, Amanda Earl (right in front!) and Roland Prevost.

All Lit Up Fall Preview: rob mclennan on Stan Dragland,

As part of the All Lit Up Fall Preview (week two), I did a short write-up ("publisher's picks") anticipating Stan Dragland's The Bricoleur & His Sentences (Pedlar Press, 2014), a book I've since received and am nearly half-way through reviewing [see the original post, along with other recommendations, here]. And did I mention that all of our Chaudiere Books titles can now be ordered online through All Lit Up? You should totally start doing that. My little write-up reads:

rob mclennan, publisher at Chaudiere Books, picks …

The Bricoleur & His Sentences by Stan Dragland (Pedlar Press, available now)
One of the fall titles I’m excited to get my hands on is Stan Dragland’s The Bricoleur & His Sentences (Pedlar Press, 2014). I’ve always envied Dragland’s ease with literary criticism; how he articulates the interconnectivity of reading, thinking, literature and living in the world in terms deceptively simple, deeply complex, and incredibly broad. I’ve envied his sentences, and even attempted, unsuccessfully, to replicate them. For years, one of my favourite books has been his Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages (Brick Books, 1984), a title I’ve probably read at least half a dozen times, even taking to travelling with it on extended tours. According to Wikipedia, “bricolage (French for ‘tinkering’) is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process.” I can’t imagine a better description for the literary criticism of Stan Dragland, a deeply committed reader, thinker and critic. According to the press for this new title, he explores the work of writers such as Walter Benjamin, Margaret Avison, Michael Ondaatje, Phil Hall, Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Colleen Thibaudeau, and readers familiar with Dragland’s work will recognize more than a couple of names from earlier works. I look forward to it.

Association of Canadian Publishers' meeting, 2014

We were fortunate enough to attend the Association of Canadian Publishers' 2014 mid-winter meeting in Toronto recently. Conjoined with a meeting of the Literary Press Group (of which we are a member), we were able to take turns attending sessions throughout the weekend (as Rose the Intern allowed).

One of the highlights was a session on book reviewing [photo, left], with panelists Jared Bland from the Globe and Mail, Stuart Woods from Quill and Quire and Mark Medley from The National Post, lovingly moderated by ECW Press' own Jack David.

We were able to interact with LPG staff (all of whom are wonderful), and members of both organizations, including Karen Green from Anvil Press, Brian Henderson of Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Kitty Lewis of Brick Books, Linda Cameron of the University of Alberta Press [who snapped and posted this mid-conference photo of us on facebook], Alana Wilcox of Coach House Books, Silas White of Nightwood Editions, Michael Mirolla of Guernica Editions, Hazel and Jay MillAr of BookThug, and plenty of others.

We learned many things, had plenty good fun and managed to interact with friends old and new alike, including many who were amazed that we were able to attend a conference at all with a two-month-old (which would have been far more difficult had we not been staying in the same hotel where the conference was being held). Now if we could only get her to help fill out grant applications.

literary press group: remembering john newlove

The Literary Press Group posted part of a lecture by John Newlove, along with "God Bless the Bear," a poem from A Long Continual Argument (Chaudiere Books) as day nine of their "30-day coast-to-coast poetry project." 

As they write: 

Canadian lyric poet John Newlove (1938–2003) has been called a "powerfully influential presence" in the Canadian poetry scene, and is respected for the "scrupulous honestly of his bare-bones poetics." And although Newlove lived in BC and Ontario for much of his life, he was always considered a Saskatchewan poet.

A Long Continual Argument: the Selected Poems of John Newlove was published by Chaudiere Books in 2008, five years after Newlove's death. Steve Noyes says that the collection is "probably the best summation of John Newlove’s inimitable poems that we are likely to get."

This hefty book of poems spans Newlove's career: 256 pages contain all the poems Newlove self-selected for a previous edition of selected poems, his later poetry, critically acclaimed works, and many of the cynically lyric poems that established his early reputation as a "black romantic." Scroll down to read an excerpt from a talk he gave in 1988.