2016 CNF Contest: August 1 Deadline for $1,000 & Books
Writers of creative nonfiction are encouraged to enter our annual CNF contest (deadline August 1) for a chance at $1,000 and book prizes of Canadian nonfiction! Contest judge Lee Maracle will choose the winning entry. We're looking for submissions of 2,000 to 3,000 words that blend nonfiction with narration, dialogue, and characterization. Most importantly, make your piece stand out from the crowd!
Entry fees vary by location. All entrants will receive a one-year subscription to The Malahat Review.
Full contest guidelines available on the Malahat website.
CNF Prize Interview with Lee Maracle, Contest Judge
Jane Eaton Hamilton recently spoke with Lee Maracle, contest judge for the 2016 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize. Maracle is a published writer and poet who teaches at the University of Toronto. In this interview, she discusses the importance of writers following their beliefs, thoughts, and dreams.
JEH: What are you looking for in a creative nonfiction manuscript? What characteristics strike you and make you know this particular manuscript is a winning text?
LM: I still believe that the demands of writing in whatever genre are very similar: nonfiction must capture the imagination in a pragmatic and future oriented way. What is different is of course what the reader does with what they imagine and what they imagine becomes knowledge upon reading nonfiction.
Read the rest of this interview on the Malahat website.
Indigenous Perspectives Issue Interview: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Creative Nonfiction Editor
Troy Sebastian, a writer from the Ktunaxa community of ?aq̓am, recently spoke with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson about her role as creative nonfiction editor for the Malahat's upcoming Indigenous Perspectives issue. Alongside Philip Kevin Paul (poetry editor) and Richard Van Camp (fiction editor), Simpson will read all CNF submissions for consideration.
TS: What does The Malahat Review mean to you?
LBS: It represents a prominent Canadian literary review—very few of which have published my work, although I have submitted throughout my career. So in some ways, it represents the unattainable for me—a writing community that I exist outside of. This issue of The Malahat Review has a more profound meaning because they have supported us, in representing ourselves and our community of writers to their audience, on our own terms. That's a powerful act.
Read the rest of this interview on the Malahat website.
Summer Issue Interview: George Elliott Clarke's "Othello..."
To provide Malahat readers with a context in which to read and more deeply appreciate George Elliott Clarke's "Othello: By Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade," a bravura long poem appearing in the magazine's Summer 2016 issue, Paul Watkins explores with the poet his ambitions and intent he enacts in the writing of such a profoundly engaging and provocative work.
PW: I really admire your unique ability to signify, to riff, to echo, to mimic, to use ironic compromise, to bolster, and engage with multiple canons and writers, often within a single poem. In the poem, we have Othello as if written by Marquis de Sade. Marquis de Sade and Othello (and Shakespeare) appear in other poems of yours, and so I'm curious how this poem fits in your larger body of work, particularly the upcoming collection Canticles.
GEC: I've always been intrigued by "extreme" works and/or writers, and the Marquis de Sade ranks as one of the most repugnant—and yet influential—of the Occidental canon. Not only that, his scatological and sacrilegious writings do unfurl a coherent philosophy—republican, libertine, libertarian. To me, Sade is the logical extension of Ayn Rand: their utopias are palimpsests of each other, only that Sade is truly radical, allowing for Crime—theft, robbery, rape, murder—as corrective tactics that the intelligent poor can and should wield against the debauched plutocracy. So, it's easy to imagine him—Sade—reading Othello as the tale of a rapacious and mercenary Desdemona, who can bed her gullible Moor—Othello and others, with happy impunity, because she is rich. She could be a version of Sade's Juliette.
Read the rest of this interview on the Malahat website.
