Looking forward to reading in Peterborough on Saturday, March 30th.
Click for the FaceBook event page.
I’ve read in Kingston, Toronto and Ottawa in support of my two recent novellas, Mountain (Inanna 2017) and Down From (Snuggly 2018), but I haven’t read in Peterborough since late 2017. We’re Toronto expats but we’ve been in the Kawarthas so long it feels like my second home town.
Mountain was long-listed for the Sunburst and appeared on Tangent’s rec’d reading list. Both novellas received nice reviews in Canada and the US in cool places including Cascadia Subduction Zone, The Miramichi Reader, The Ottawa Review of Books, The Future Fire, various library publications, Publishers Weekly and elsewhere.
BTW, the Ottawa Review of Books solicits full length reviews. They don’t pay but if you want to try your hand reviewing somewhere other than Amazon or Goodreads they’re a good bet. I recently reviewed Kingston poet Elizabeth Greene’s novel, A Season Among Psychics for them. The book is an account of a course in spiritual development taken by protagonist Judith and is very interesting as such.
Where Greene really shone, I found, was in her descriptions of relationships. Judith meets an artist and single mother in class; they make friends, hanging out on the balcony during breaks to make snarky remarks about the teacher and generally sympathize with one another’s problems. This is one of the most finely drawn pictures of an emerging friendship between women that I have read. As the protagonist and Vivienne begin to feel stronger because they have each other, we feel stronger too, and this seems a larger gift than the ‘System’ itself, both from the women to one another and from Greene to us.
Read the entire review here.
I used to review widely, for The Peterborough Examiner, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, The Link and elsewhere. My focus was on Canadian speculative and literary fiction, although I also wrote about UK and US authors including Iain M. Banks, Suzanna Clarke, Kelly Link and others. Most of my reviews of Canadian SFF books were reprinted in The New York Review of Science Fiction; they also published a feature length essay on Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale For The Time Being. I mostly gave it up when I had several books go to press within the space of a few years and needed to focus on final edits and promotion.
The event is part of a new Local Lit initiative sponsored by the Ontario Book Publishers Organization, Open Book, the Canada Council for the Arts, and Ontario Creates. Looks like a great thing, with events in Kitchener-Waterloo, Prince Edward County and more.
I’m reading with literary author Devon Code at the Garnet, 6-8 pm. He’s the author of Involuntary Bliss, a novel, and In a Mist, a collection of stories.
Happy spring and happy reading and writing (or editing or publishing or all of the above!) It was a cold one but soon there will be baby waterfowl on our creek. – Ursula
