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Africville
Shauntay Grant, illustrates by Eva Campbell
Groundwood Books
(Ages 4 to 7)

“Take me to the end of the ocean…”

So begins this paean to the once-thriving Nova Scotian community of Africville. Located along Halifax’s Bedford Basin, it was home to a close-knit Black community that, throughout its more than 150 year history, was consistently under-served, mistreated and ultimately razed.

This book recalls the spirit of Africville and its people: the colourful houses nestled along the water’s edge and the sun coming up over the water; children picking berries, playing football and rafting at Tibby’s Pond; catching codfish and gathering round a bonfire at the end of the day at Kildare’s Field.

As the protagonist attends a modern-day festival that honours Africville, she envisions it as its former residents remember it, and she savours her own personal connection to this place when she finds her great-grandmother’s name inscribed on a memorial sundial.

In her latest picture book, Haligonian Shauntay Grant once again captures a place and its people. A

fricville will touch the hearts of adults as surely as it will its intended audience. Grant’s perfectly-paced free verse poetry has a gentle, hypnotic quality that flows through the narrative and invites the reader to savour each word and the myriad images the words evoke. Eva Campbell’s illustrations are bold, bright and filled with energy and motion. In some cases, the faces are expressive and filled with emotion. On other pages they are blurred and indistinct, letting the bodies tell the story. Each page is richly textured and visually depicts the warmth, the intimacy of this community as well as the natural beauty of the landscape.

Together, the text and illustrations create a vivid portrait of what Africville once was. Young readers may be inspired to not only read the information included at the back of the book but to also check out the suggestions for further information.

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Last week, the Canadian Museums Association (CMA) honours the achievements of museum professionals at its 2018 national conference in Vancouver, BC. A total of 22 awards were presented during a special awards ceremony, held at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre Hotel, on Thursday April 12. Among the award recipients in the Outstanding Achievement category was Heather Igloliorte’s SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut, jointly published by Goose Lane Editions and the Rooms Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador, winning the award in the education category. SakKijâjuk is available in English, French, and Inuktitut.

Chaired by David Silcox, these awards recognize exceptional museum projects. This year, 12 Awards of Outstanding Achievement were presented.

The Canadian Museums Association is the national organization for the advancement of Canada’s museum community. The CMA works for the recognition, growth and stability of the sector. Canada’s 2,600 museums and related institutions preserve our collective memory, shape our national identity and promote tolerance and understanding.

For countless generations, the artists and craftspeople of Nunatsiavut, an Inuit region of Labrador, have produced work that is distinctive within the world of Canadian and circumpolar Inuit art. Yet for decades, the Labrador Inuit were excluded from this canon. SakKijâjuk—”to be visible” in the Nunatsiavut dialect of Inuktitut—is the first major publication on the distinctive and innovative work of the contemporary artists and craftspeople of this region.

The coastal people of Nunatsiavut have always lived above and below the tree line. As a result, Inuit artists and craftspeople of the region have had access to a diverse range of Arctic and Subarctic flora and fauna from which they have produced a stunningly diverse range of work.

In this magnificent book and the accompanying exhibition, writer-curator Heather Igloliorte seeks to cast a light on the artistic practice of Nunatsiavut, bringing together for the first time the work of 47 Nunatsiavummiut artists and artisans. Igloliorte (Inuit, Nunatsiavut Territory of Labrador) is an assistant professor and Research Chair in Indigenous Art History and Community Engagement at Concordia University in Montreal. Her research interests centre on Inuit and other Native North American visual and material culture, circumpolar art studies, performance and media art, the global exhibition of Indigenous arts and culture, and issues of colonization, sovereignty, resistance and resilience. In this collection, innovative drawings, paintings, photographs and sculpture are presented beside more traditional work employing wood, fur, hide, stone and seagrass. The work of Elders and artistic forerunners is presented beside that of a new generation of artists.

Published to coincide with the first-ever national touring exhibition of Inuit art from Nunatsiavut, organized by The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery of St. John’s and scheduled to be shown at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, SakKijâjuk examines the long history of artistic production in Nunatsiavut. Focusing on the post-Confederation era and highlighting many new critical forms of contemporary art and craft production, the volume is divided into four major sections (Elders, Trailblazers, Fire Keepers and the Next Generation), spanning four generations of artistic practice. Featuring more than 80 large-scale reproductions, the book features work from major public and private collections, as well as a number of exciting new works never before seen in print.

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The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) has announced the shortlists for the 2017 East Coast Literary Awards (ECLAs). Publishers submitted a record number of 79 titles by writers who reside in Atlantic Canada’s four provinces. And after months of reading and deliberation, peer juries of professional writers agreed on shortlists for each award in fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

The ECLAs are headlined by the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. The Raddall Award’s $25,000 prize for the winning title makes it the most valuable literary award in Atlantic Canada. The JM Abraham Poetry Award and the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award round out the program with a $2,000 prize for each award.

Winners of the three awards will be announced at a special presentation on May 31, 6:30 pm at the Halifax Central Library.

The shortlisted titles are as follows:

The Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award:

Advocate by Darren Greer

The Witches of New York by Ami McKay

The Fortunate Brother by Donna Morrissey

The JM Abraham Poetry Award:

The Back Channels by Jennifer Houle

The Unlit Path Behind the House by Margo Wheaton

You Can’t Bury Them All by Patrick Woodcock

The Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award:

Burnley “Rocky” Jones: Revolutionary by Burnley “Rocky” Jones & James W St G Walker

Redemption Songs by Jon Tattrie

Notes from a Feminist Killjoy by Erin Wunker

The ECLAs strive to highlight the best in Atlantic Canadian fiction, poetry and non-fiction through three annual literary awards. Titles eligible for the ECLAs must be the work of writers who are engaged in our region’s cultural life and creative economy as fulltime residents of Atlantic Canada. A peer assessment process conducted by professional writers from throughout the region determines shortlists and winners. The WFNS is the steward of the three awards, all of which have been in existence for many years and were founded by several endowments, including significant support from the families of Thomas Head Raddall and JM Abraham.

Established in 1976, the WFNS works to provide advice and assistance to writers at all stages of their careers, to encourage greater public recognition of writers and their achievements and to enhance the literary arts in our regional and national culture.

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The book trailer for Into the Current by Jared Young has won the Jury Award for Excellence in Title Design at South by Southwest (SXSW), the world’s premiere convergence of the interactive, film and music industries.

The trailer, a collaboration with award-winning motion designer Chris Moberg, was the first book trailer to be screened at SXSW in the history of the festival. Moberg is an award-winning motion designer with McMillan. His work has appeared in music videos for Drake and Zeds Dead, and has won numerous BET, Juno, and Canadian Screen Awards.

 

Also nominated in the Best Title Design category were Westworld, Jessica Jones, The Crown, Doctor Strange, The Shannara Chronicles, Stranger Things, Voyages des Cleauvard, LOCA, El Rey Tuerto (The One Eyed King), OFF CDMX, PANICROOM 13, Golden Life, De 16, Animal Kingdom, Style Frames Design Conference, St. Nickel, Into the Badlands, Dogma, New York City Blues, OFFF by Night 2016, Of Kings and Prophets, Barbie Beach, IRA (Wrath) and Preacher.

Jared Young is the author of the novel Into the Current. He is also the co-founder of the film website Dear Cast and Crew, and a creative director at McMillan. His stories and essays have appeared in magazines and newspapers across the world and have been anthologized by McSweeney’s.

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Lisa Moore Caught

Newfoundland author Lisa Moore can trace her interest in storytelling back to about ten years old, when she took a public art class through Memorial University’s Extension Service.

“It was really through those early art classes that I began to think about being a creator,” says Moore. “That, coupled with reading is, I think, what brought me to becoming a writer.”

Artist Ray Mackie taught the class, and there are a couple of significant projects from that art class that have stuck with Moore over the years. The first exercise was intended to illustrate the concept of sculpture. Mackie gave the students balls of yarn and asked them to string them around the class. Each student had a different colour to work with. The end result was a giant 3-D sculpture made of intersecting lines. Moore says it looked like a “cat’s cradle.”

“We could see our own marks in that space, because of the different colours, but we could also see how our lines integrated with the other lines people had made,” says Moore. “And I think that’s a really good metaphor for the making of literature, because we really do draw our stories from all of the stories that came before. And all of those stories, the stories we’ve read, the stories our contemporaries are writing, they’re interconnected, and they inform whatever stories we happen to be telling.”

In that same art class, Moore also had the rare opportunity to use a video camera to tape the Santa Claus Parade. For her the experience of using what was then a very valuable, powerful piece of equipment was “magical.” Not only was it the “machine that made the TV that showed [her] Gilligan’s Island and Bewitched when [she] went home that night,” it also made her realize that a creator can manipulate the way people experience a piece of work.

“I could see that there was way more to the Santa Claus parade than that little 10-second clip I made,” says Moore. “I could see outside the frame.”

Reading Harriet the Spy cemented her understanding of selective storytelling. For those who haven’t read the book (or who read it a very long time ago), it’s the story of an 11-year-old girl who wants to be a writer, so she collects material by writing observations about her friends in a notebook. Of course, when her friends get their hands on her notebook, Harriet’s brutally honest notes devastate them.

“She was only writing down certain things, and they happened to be the things that really hurt her friends,” says Moore. “But if she were to capture everything she felt about them — they were her friends, they were important to her — it would have been a different story when they read the journal.”

Around the same age, Moore began telling stories to the other kids at recess.

“I’d just recount the book,” says Moore, “but for that brief 15 minutes, I was spilling this great ghost story, and probably adding things. I barely remember doing it, but I do remember the thrill. Trying to end at a suspenseful moment for the next recess, and just having people listen to the story, was incredibly thrilling.”

Over the years, she continued to work with story in various forms, and eventually, while taking a creative writing class at Memorial University, she started submitting to literary magazines. After awhile, publications began accepting Moore’s work.

9780887847028_to print.pdfA workshop with Jane Urquhart stands out in her mind as well. It was not long after Moore published her first collection of short stories, Degrees of Nakedness and, after seeing the high quality of work that many of the workshop attendees were producing, Urquhart helped some of them along by writing letters of reference to publishers.

Moore has published much more since those early days, including the short story collection Open, which won the Canadian Authors Association Jubilee Award for Short Stories, and Giller-nominated novels Alligator and Caught. Her most recent lisa moore flannerybook though, is her YA novel, Flannery.

Mayann Francis ABT Proust Questionnaire “Flannery’s sixteen, so she’s older than I was when I was doing those art classes,” says Moore. “But writing that novel was a return to that youthful experience of discovery. Getting back into that mindset of what it was like to be a teenager. It’s an emotionally intense time and it was a thrill to revisit that again.”

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anchorman

On the heels of another spirited literary award season, award-nominated author Bruce Graham tells the tale of a book nomination-turned-humiliation that leaves him a little….well, queasy

We live in the era of prizes and recognition. Every art form has award ceremonies as a way of highlighting its achievements and promoting itself. It’s award overkill but that doesn’t stop the phenomenon because, let’s face it—we all want recognition of some sort. After spending months locked up in a lonely room, maybe writers crave it more than most people.

The first time I was nominated for a writing award I tried to be cool to hide my excitement, heightened because people assured me I would win, that my book was the best of the lot. I didn’t win and those same people told me it was an honour just being nominated. I heard that refrain so many times I really didn’t want to be honoured anymore. You might say it killed that craving for recognition. But I was trapped. It sounded like I was such a poor loser, contradicting soothing condolences by arguing that the real honour was of course, winning! I told myself in the vast scheme of things my loss was no big deal. There will be other books and other awards. It was my second book and my first nomination. I had to devise something to placate my competitiveness besides the honour of just being nominated.

When my third novel, Ivor Johnson’s Neighbours (Pottersfield Press) was published, I was nominated again for that same award. To be chosen as a finalist two books in a row said something; didn’t it? At least in my delusional state it said something to me. I couldn’t escape the thoughts slipping around just beneath my consciousness—dare I say it? Was this not a vindication of the previous award year and rectification for the judges’ unfortunate conclusion? Delusional? Yes, but there had been plenty of historical parallels in the past. It happened at the Academy Awards where the judges blundered badly one year and made up for it the next.

The writing awards aren’t the Academy Awards but they’re getting to be quite fancy affairs. They begin with various speeches on the value of writers in today’s society. The audience includes literary dignitaries and those governmental representatives who hold some cultural responsibility, plus proud family members and friends who nod in unison on the worth of literature while the writers sit stoically wondering why, if their contribution is so great, are so many of them living in poverty.

Catch up on Atlantic Book Award news here

This particular ceremony went on for some time as there were many individual awards spanning all aspects of the book business from poetry to best publisher. As I waited for the fiction prize to be announced, I ran my hand over my victory speech, concealed in the inside pocket of my coat. It was just a simple thank you to my publisher, my editor and of course my loving spouse. Yet it carried its own comfort as an ethereal assurance of something. Whether I would actually whip it out on stage was not considered as I knew what I would say. But the folded speech offered me some sort of security as though I carried a concealed weapon in my breast pocket. I couldn’t help but run my hand over the folded paper with those words of a humble and gracious acceptance.

Sadly, the victory speech wasn’t necessary. The printed words suddenly felt like old porridge, lumpy in my pocket. Is there anything as useless as a victory speech when there is no victory?

When the speeches and awards were concluded, music began to play. The reception went forward with an impressive array of hor d’oeuvres, wine and other liquid refreshments. A swing quartet played upbeat tunes as guests nibbled, mingled and congratulated each other.

I came into the crowd trying to look nonchalant and as buoyant as possible, like those two rejections for two subsequent books didn’t matter. I walked past a silver platter of elaborately prepared meatballs and speared one with a toothpick. That’s when I really understood that regardless of my exterior sunny expression, my internal organs were not prepared to participate in further defeat.

Maybe the suspense of the event had been more of a strain than I imagined. A tiny particle of the meatball stuck far down in my esophagus and try as I might, I could not dislodge it. My hiatus hernia had been well behaved for months but now put up its’ own rebellion at my loss. Hernia seemed to be saying:

“I was there with you buddy, day and night, slaving over every word. You deserve better.”

In the washroom I tried and tried to dislodge that morsel of meat. I went back to the music and food believing the purge had been successful—only to hurriedly return and try again. Despite repeated and prolonged retching, the little bugger would not go down and would not come up. I should have been signing books, not wallowing around in the washroom, held captive by a speck of half-swallowed cow that refused to follow the natural digestive flow. Wine was being consumed outside and the noise level had already increased noticeably. If I hadn’t been trapped in the washroom, a dozen people would have told me just what an honour it was to be nominated. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad place to hang out after all, but no, I really was anxious to get back to my stack of books and the nice people who didn’t care a whit about the loss; they wanted a signed copy of Ivor Johnson’s Neighbours and I wanted to please them. I waited a minute and the particle seemed to be gone. When I walked back into the throng I could see the expression on my wife’s face. She reported that my face was scarlet from the effort to dislodge the particle and my eyes were watering.

Then I heard a woman behind me whisper, “Poor man. He’s taking it very hard.”

Oh God, not only am I double loser but they think the rejection has brought me to tears! That would have been bad enough except the repeated attempts at dislodging the morsel had sent my stomach into spasms. I should have immediately run back to the washroom but I couldn’t pass that whispering woman and her cronies who stood in a circle staring at the red-faced, teary-eyed loser. I fled to the opposite corner of the reception area where there was another washroom. Oh God! It was the ladies room. That’s all I need—to have pervert added to the growing list of negative adjectives I was collecting by the moment. I stopped at the door, turned my back to the crowd and immediately tossed my cookies into a tiny cocktail napkin.

“Too much wine,” someone with an Australian accent said, not quite quietly enough. I was of two minds at that point, whether to defend my sobriety or snarl that Australians should be the last people to criticize over-indulgence. I did neither, of course. Here I stood; not only a sore loser but a twice rejected, weepy, intoxicated, sore loser.

My wife got me out of there and we went to our hotel, a small rustic place in south-end Halifax where luminaries from the nineteenth century had once stayed. We had been booked into the room where Oscar Wilde had slept during his Halifax visit on his North American tour. There was a large photograph of Wilde on the wall and as I sat on the bed, taking off my spoiled suit coat and shirt he was looking down at me and I saw something in his expression. Some understanding, I thought, and perhaps just a hint of sympathy in his eyes. “Yes,” he was saying, “being a writer carries its own indignities for all of us.”

Yes Oscar—it sure does.

This story was originally published in the holiday 2012 issue of Atlantic Books Today.