Open Season Awards:
Last Chance to Win $4,500

We've extended the deadline to this year's contest until November 6! Spend the weekend polishing your best poetry, fiction, and/or creative nonfiction, and send it to us for a chance at the $4,500 prize. Remember, everyone who submits to the contest will be automatically entered into a book-prize draw courtesy of Canadian publishers.

Full contest information on the Malahat website.

 

Immortality is not easy to come by, but if anyone has attained it, it would be Victoria poet P. K. Page.

On Wednesday, November 23rd, a group of writers and friends will gather to read from her works and to pay tribute to the life and accomplishments of one of Canada's most celebrated writers on what would have been her one hundredth birthday.

Featured readers include John Barton, Lucy Bashford, Lorna Crozier, Sandra Djwa, Patrick Friesen, Eve Joseph, Patrick Lane, Carol Matthews, Jay Ruzesky, Rachel Wyatt, Derk Wynand, Patricia Young, and Terence Young. The reading, emceed by Yvonne Blomer, will be followed by a panel discussion, moderated by Nicholas Bradley.

Full event details available on the Malahat website.

 

Malahat poetry board member David Eso and Calgary poet Weyman Chan discuss experimental poetry, the Calgary writing scene, and Chan's poem, "Here I Am," published in the Malahat's new Autumn issue.

Eso: I'm keen to hear about the influences at work in your current writerly practice. Can you talk about the genises of your poem "Here I Am," or at least about your recent influences? Like your poem asks, "who do [you] stand on"?

Chan: If there is a traceable motif or tendency that's kept me going from book to book, it's this sense of never being able to say things accurately or aptly, so I have to keep tweaking the language and contorting my mind around these viscous and vapid ideas in an effort to fix this notion of representation in place. To that end, I've been playing with the shifting ground of that metaphysical and graphic mirror that text pretends is us.

Read the rest of this interview on the Malahat website.

 

In "Down Burned Road," Jacqueline Baker tells the story of Carrie and Yurig's first years of marriage, which they live against a backdrop of rugged mountains, bears, and cougars in a house not easy to find if you don’t know where you’re going. Interview conducted by Malahat editor John Barton.

Barton: The atmosphere in "Down Burned Road" is not only a product of the "remote" location of Carrie and Yurig's house, but of the "writerly" resonances I also catch. I know of your interest in H. P. Lovecraft and the story's mention of the Black Forest makes me think of the Brothers Grimm. Can you talk about how genre fiction and folk tales may have influenced you in the composition of this story?

Baker: You know, I can't escape them even when I try. Even when I'm writing "realism." They just creep in, or something in the story turns, sending me back there. I guess Grimm's fairy tales were the earliest stories I knew. Not from books, of which we had few, but retold to me by my mother. Fairy tales, folktales, Biblical stories. That's what I cut my teeth on. All dark, mysterious. We carry those first stories with us, I suppose, no matter the geography we physically in habit.

Read the rest of this interview on the Malahat website.