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Vol. 9, No.9, September 2012 | CONTEST EDITION

Read interviews with the judges of our 2013 Open Season Awards

"I'm Listening ": Linda Rogers interviews the judge of our 2013 Open Season Award in Poetry, Rachel Rose.

"Until I Get There": Cody Klippenstein interviews the judge of our 2013 Open Season Award in Fiction, Helen Humphreys .

"A Way to Start, Not a 'Win' or 'Lose' Game": Vanessa Herman interviews the judge of our Open Season Award in creative nonfiction, Susan Olding .

Malahat Summer issue launch

Monday, September 17th
Doors: 7:00 p.m.
Readings: 7:30 p.m.
The Fernwood Inn (art room) 1302 Gladstone Ave.
Admission FREE
All ages welcome

Eat, drink, and be literary! Join us as we launch our Summer issue.

The evening will begin with a UVic Student Open Mic, hosted by Benjamin Willems

Then we'll launch our Summer issue with readings by:
Dorothy Field
Danielle Janess
George Sipos
Laura Trunkey
Patricia Young
Terence Young

All Friends of The Malahat in attendance can choose one free book from our stash.

UVic Students: Please join us on Monday, September 10th in the Fine Arts building, 10 a.m. until 2 p.m.. We'll have information about submitting, contests, etc. as well as books and magazines for sale for $1 and a sign up sheet for the Open Mic at our launch on Sept. 17th.

More info on our website

Upcoming Malahat Contests

2013 Open Season Awards

Deadline: November 1, 2012 (postmarked)
Prize: $1000 CAD in each of three categories
Entry fee:
$35 CAD for Canadian entries
$40 USD for entries from the USA
$45 USD for entries from elsewhere
(entry fee includes a one-year subscription to The Malahat Review)

Enter up to three poems; one piece of short fiction (2500 words max.); OR one piece of creative nonfiction (2500 words max.)

Read full guidelines on our website.


Catch up with the winners of our 2012 Open Season Awards: J. Mark Smith (poetry), Erin Frances Fisher (fiction), and Tik Maynard (cnf)

I Find Poetry very Tough: Stephen Leckie in Conversation with J. Mark Smith

Stephen Leckie: In your 2007 collection Notes For A Rescue Narrative, “place” figures prominently in your experiences as a poet. How is "Landscape with petroleum plant and sewage treatment facility" similar or different from some of your favourite poems in that collection?

J. Mark Smith: "Place" is a kettle of fish, isn't it? I have several thoughts about it. One is that to write with competence at this moment in time means you've learned at least some of the technique that was hard won by poets from the late eighteenth century onwards. That goes along with a philosophical and aesthetic inheritance too. I'm following on the coat-tails, then, of two centuries of thinking about the subjective experience of place and about the cultural significance of places.

Also, I might add that I was given a Wordsworthian sort of psyche by my early experiences (my father was a mountaineer who was killed in the Rockies when I was six). That is, certain Wordsworth poems, when I came upon them in my eighteenth year and later, helped me to decipher and become aware of my own blank spaces. But writing in the Wordsworthian vein is not a ticket to literary success in the early 21st century.

Read the rest of this interview on our website.

And You Keep Going: Vanessa Herman in Conversation with Erin Frances Fisher

Vanessa Herman: How has winning the 2012 Open Season Award in Short Fiction affected your writing?  Has it given you more confidence when you are trying something new or different from your usual character/plot/tone?

Erin Frances Fisher: It’s always nice to win a contest, and it’s always nice to get accepted because we get many more rejections than acceptances. It’s just that little bit of inspiration that keeps one writing and trying to get published.  But I don’t think winning the Open Season Award has changed my writing.  For me it’s a matter of doing the same: writing every morning, rewriting, and rewriting some more.  When it gets published then I have to write something else.  As for confidence winning a contest just makes you feel a little more secure, and you keep going.

Read the rest of this interview on our website.

We all Need a Little Encouragement: Julia Kochuk in Conversation with Tik Maynard.

Julia Kochuk: What have you been up to since you won the 2012 Open Season Award in creative nonfiction? Have you been writing a lot?

Tik Maynard: I haven’t really been writing much at all. I’ve been riding horses a lot and competing. My girlfriend and I became engaged. She’s in England right now; she’s an alternate for the U. S. Olympics team, and she’s trying to get on the team right now. It’s a big deal to move a horse around the world. A flight for a person costs $1,000, but a flight for a horse costs, like, $5,000 to $10,000. Other than that, really not much. I’m reading a lot.

Read the rest of this interview on our website.

Not a poetic one-hit wonder: Danielle Janess in conversation with 2012 Far Horizons Award for Poetry winner, Kayla Czaga

Kayla Czaga 's poem, "gertrude stein loves a girl " won our 2012 Far Horizons Award for Poetry and will appear in our Winter 2012 issue (#181)

Danielle Janess :You’ve been winning a few awards lately (The Malahat's 2012 Far Horizons Award for Poetry and two Editor's Choice Awards in Arc's 2012 Poem of the Year Contest). And you’ve only recently graduated from your undergrad in writing, at the University of Victoria. Does gaining this swift attention have any effect on your writing process?

Kayla Czaga : Not really.  The attention sort of freaks me out.  I got an e-mail from Barry Dempster the other day.  Success is a lot of pressure.  Some days I worry the poems that have won contests are just flukes, that I’m not actually a very good poet, or I’ll turn into a poetic one-hit wonder. 

Read the rest of this interview on our website.

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