Harlan Ellison on Writing, with Occasionial Rants
February 9, 2010
Stephen Harper Poetry Anthology
February 6, 2010
Very proud that my poem “O Stephen Harper” will appear in Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament out soon from Mansfield Press. You can click this link to see the cover.
True Facts
February 6, 2010
Two things you may not know about me:
1. My picture was once published in Rolling Stone.
2. My glasses were held hostage inside the pants of Kevin McDonald (from Kids in the Hall). Twice.
95 Books round-up
February 5, 2010
Over at the 95 Books site, I’ve made it up to book 11. Here’s the round-up:
11. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
10. Adaptation (Charlie Kaufman)
9. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Salman Rushdie)
8. The Age of Spiritual Machines (Ray Kurzweil)
7. The Book of Tea (Kakuzo Okakura)
6. Child of God (Cormac McCarthy)
5. On Love and Death (Patrick Suskind)
4. Unpublished Manuscript [In Calamity's Wake] (Natalee Caple)
3. This Way Out (Carmine Starnino)
1. Odd and the Frost Giants (Neil Gaiman)
Interview: Dennis Cooley
January 27, 2010
I interviewed Canadian poet Dennis Cooley shortly before the release of his 13th collection of poetry, Seeing Red (Turnstone Press). This interview took place in person in April 2003.
You’re a founding editor of Turnstone Press. Can you talk a little about how you got involved in the creation of this press?
Turnstone started here in the mid-70s. Robert Enright was the most important figure, really, in getting that press started and in its operations for several years. We were the three official founding editors—contrary to a story that’s taken on such proportions that everyone now believes it, Arnason was not a founding editor of Turnstone Press—he didn’t even join until about five or six years later. It started mainly because of Enright’s passion—he wanted to do an anthology of Manitoba poets, but the then-chair of the Manitoba Arts Council, Ken Hughes, said: “Well, maybe that’s a little premature; why don’t you publish a bunch of books and then do an anthology?” So on the basis of his urging and his hint that MAC might put up the money to help support some titles, some of us thought there might be some value in starting a press. It went through various kinds of configurations but it ended up being Turnstone through a desperate need suddenly to have a name (a name we thought was available wasn’t available).
The very first book published by Turnstone was In the Gutting Shed by W. D. Valgardson, which originally had some kind of maudlin title, Purple Lilies or something like that. For the first several years we had that press, writers would sometimes bring in kind of “tough” poems and then want sweetly sentimental titles, and we managed to bully almost every one of them out of it. That one had some unbelievably melodramatic and sickly-sweet title that became In the Gutting Shed. It sold like crazy, because he sold it—he was a mad seller of books, he would go out to Gimli in the summer and set up tables and just sell books. So he was this fierce promoter, but also the people in Gimli are fierce book-buyers, so it was a good match, he sold hundreds and hundreds of that book and others. That was the very first one. One of the first was Patrick Friesen’s the lands i am.
How did you get your start as a writer?
It was a combination of things: I had written a dissertation on a poet, Robert Duncan, and was teaching poetry, studying poetry in classes, writing about it, and had been editing Turnstone for a couple of years. So the combination just sort of came together of the interest and the opportunity and the skill. It was also a very heady time, the mid- to late-70s; people were just doing things all the time. Many of the things that have become institutions in Manitoba were started then—within a matter of a couple of years the Manitoba Writers’ Guild started, and Turnstone started, Border Crossings was then Arts Manitoba and ran out of that office right there [pointing at the office across the hall from his own office in St. John's College]—Turnstone was in that office too, though they weren’t in there at the very same time. Dorothy Livesay was next door with CV2, Arnason was over here with Journal of Canadian Fiction for, well, I don’t know how long he had it when he came here, but for several years, so it was just a wild and heady time.
Did you write at all before then?
Oh a little bit, but not really. I didn’t have the sense of myself as a writer. When I was in public school I had a teacher who was very influential and I liked writing and that probably had a lot to do with it ultimately, but when I was in high school or university I certainly didn’t think of myself as a writer.
Most, if not all, of your collections are organized around a theme, concept, or semi-narrative, though you delight in diverting yourself from this loose “topic.” What is it that you find attractive about these conceptual threads, and why do you indulge yourself in digressing to such a great degree in the published work?
For me, it’s a way of generating texts. It gives me a site to research, to see what the possibilities are; there’s a kind of focus in thinking about a terrain, saying, “what can be done in this area.” I find it really generative, and because it works so well for me I always recommend it to others. Find a site, and then play off it to see what the possibilities of it might be. If you write a balloon poem, well, maybe you’re interested in doing a series, and maybe this extends into a notion of flying things, or rubber things, or symbols of innocence, or whatever—you often find all sorts of things by accident.
I got into the Dracula poems because I was writing a series of fairy tale poems, some of which became Goldfinger, and as I was reading and working there I thought, okay, well, what else might I write? and I thought of Dracula and how he was sort of a fantasy figure, and I wrote a Dracula poem, which I don’t think is in the collection now because I willfully pulled it, because there’s just so much stuff to draw from. So I wrote that and I found myself writing a bunch of Dracula pieces, they just went on and on and on, I started about 1989 I think. [Cooley put a few of these poems out in 1992 as the chapbook burglar of blood.]
You’re known for constantly working on your manuscript up until the last minute. When do you decide to begin the editing process with the publisher, and when do you decide that enough is enough and that’s the book?
When you run out of time! When the publisher says, “Okay, that’s it, we’re taking the manuscript.” I bring it to the publisher when I think it’s quite well-developed, but I never have the sense that something’s finished—there it is—and I can’t change anything or shouldn’t change anything.
How heavily did you edit Bloody Jack for the University of Alberta Press reissue?
There are hundreds of little changes and a batch of new things, and I pulled a couple pages, and I rearranged some things.
Was there something you felt was lacking in the original text that you wanted to add or bring to the fore, or was there another reason for the extensive changes?
One of the main reasons was because of the opportunity; when you get a second edition you can do that, and it’s rare that one gets such a chance, especially with poetry, given the sales there are—poetry almost never reappears. But it also was the nature of the book in the first place—Bloody Jack perhaps even more so than some of the books I do—there is no obvious boundary to it, it is plastic and omnivorous, I could swallow things and throw them up or out. In the meantime over the years I had kept a bunch of notes, I had a huge pile of notes for “cunning linguist”—I must have had about 80 pages of notes for that poem.
I read somewhere that it was over 800 pages at one point.
That’s a legend, it was never that big! There were some things that I was working on back in the 1980s, that I had been developing but that didn’t appear—why I can’t remember, probably because it was too late—and I slipped some of those things in. Near the end I began leaning more towards cinematic entries and I slipped some of that in.
Bloody Jack contains a number of meta-fictional pieces—a review of the book, an angry letter concerning the book, characters interacting with the author—are these examples of you consciously drawing attention to your re/writing of history or some other, less political, move?
I can’t decide how you read the book, nor should or can my sense of it determine or decide what people do with it—though certainly the book has those possibilities, I hope. In my view the book has a lot to do with power, a sense of “who gets to do what to whom,” to use that phrase that Atwood keeps using when she talks about politics—I think it’s a little insufficient, but certainly that’s a good part of this. Also the authority of the reader, the authority of the critic, the authority of the author, what sense of jurisdiction may be there.
You see these sorts of things happening internally in the text, they may be about law or criminality, transgression, propriety and impropriety. In all kinds of ways the book addresses that, but also the constructed-ness of it, the verbal options which seem trivial to people who work up notions of large and fixed truths, but which probably have a whole lot to do with power itself. What are the options? What forms of language do you have so that you might understand things? What is it to apprehend the world in a certain way?
What about this bad review of the book, contained within Bloody Jack?
That’s certainly a pretty unfriendly review, isn’t it? Well, there it is! There’s a text in there, L. A. Wynne-Smith writes his criticism. There’s the interview, think what you will. Why would you assume I wrote it?
Well, to what extent then does it matter to you how involved the reader gets in thinking about such things, and engaging in the text in this manner—is it important to you whether or not the reader does the crossword puzzle in the book, or plays the sheet music on their piano?
Well, that’s up to them. Often, if some of those things appeal to the person, it may be because they enjoy this departure from the discourse. It’s hard to think of those things as ruptures, because the book doesn’t have much continuity to begin with, but certainly they are departures from what you might expect to find in a literary text, a voice speaking in a sort of non-literary discourse, saying: “What is this?” I would hope that readers would respond with some sort of surprise or delight, or maybe puzzlement. The danger of course in doing this is that you might make people mad, and people do get mad.
Why is that? Do they just want something easier, something that makes more sense?
Well, yeah, or maybe they just want the illusion, I think that’s a powerful appeal to readers—you want the illusory world, and when that illusion is broken often you feel disappointed and angry about it, like something has been taken away from you, I think that this is not an uncommon feeling, and also I think a not surprising response. It’s understandable, I think, that readers might be angry or disappointed.
Seeing Red is a collection of poems based on Dracula—what is it about that attracted you to contribute to the Dracula mythology, and what do you feel your book adds to the in many ways saturated field of Dracula literature?
I have no idea. I’m not a student of this, I don’t read such things generally, not because I am offended or bored by them but because there are just so many things to read that I haven’t gotten around to reading. I don’t know what’s out there really, I could make some guesses—my guy is whimsical and self-mocking, sometimes frightening, sometimes tender—I kind of like my figure of Dracula, who in some ways resembles my figure of Krafchenko, I think. This figure is especially bawdy, even more so than the Krafchenko figure.
Why do you think Dracula is such an enduring figure, enjoying immense popularity over so many years?
A part of it is that the figure has gotten to be safe, in some ways. The figure has become domesticated—if you show up on cereal boxes, you’re not a very frightening figure. Also, there is a distance from the character, historically and personally. In a way it’s much tougher to write about things that are closer to you and more personal. When I write a text that is very personal—if I write a poem about my mother, I’m not going to screw around with it much, there is a sense of a kind of loyalty to a certain moment or figure, a certain narrative, whereas Dracula is kind of public property, to which almost no one has any sort of ties to “the” story or “the” figure.
Have you thought of getting more involved in the musical aspect of poetry? You seem very interested in orality—when you are writing, how much do you think in terms of how the words will sound when read aloud?
I am strongly guided by the sounds of things, it is an enormous force for me when I write—so much so that sometimes I think that I probably get too caught up in it, I rhyme like crazy, for example, and begin words off their sounds to a great extent. I have been pleasantly surprised to find that musicians are often very interested in what I do, and quite a few of my pieces have been set by musicians, so there is something there that I guess catches their ears. I have planned for many years to do a musical version of Bloody Jack and still hope to do it over the next few years. But also, visually, I use the page—I have always thought of the page as a space in which you put ink.
Canadian Journals are Dead
January 27, 2010
It’s official. Canadian journal publishing is dead. At least, I think so. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that in the wake of the Harper government’s new policies, there is no way for small journals to survive. Not as print journals anyway.
Well, having a healthy literary print culture was nice while it lasted.
Interview: Chris Rutkowski
January 25, 2010
I don’t remember where this was originally published, or when. Before 2005 sometime.
Chris Rutkowski is a leading authority on UFO phenomenon and, along with Geoff Dittman, publishes the annual Canadian UFO Survey. He is the author of a number of books including Visitations? (1989), Unnatural History (1993), and Abductions & Aliens – What’s Really Going On? (1999). I got a chance to talk to him a few weeks before an episode of the documentary series Magnificent Obsessions following Rutkowski’s investigations aired.
How did you become interested in UFOs?
My background is that I have a Bachelor’s degree in Astronomy and a Master’s degree in Science Education, specializing in Astronomy. I was always interested in offbeat things, and in the mid-70s we were just at the end of the great “space race” and I had watched the moon landings and it was a hot topic back then.
In 1975, there was a rash of UFO sightings in Manitoba and I began investigating them, I went out with friends and one day I started writing up what I had heard from some of the people that had seen things. I had the article published and soon I was getting requests for more articles and more comments and to give lectures, and pretty soon I was the great UFO expert.
How has the face of UFOlogy changed since the mid-70s?
There are a lot of things that are different about it. For one thing, abduction phenomena has really taken over in terms of UFOs, many people claim to have been abducted. The first classic abduction case took place in 1961, some have found a few others before then but it was generally determined to be the 1960s [when abductions began to be reported], but it never took off until the late 1980s or so, and then it really surpassed and supplanted a lot of other stuff.
The other interesting thing is that crop circles have become commonplace, and people say “well, that was caused by aliens” or whatever. They were unheard of before the late 80s. I had actually been investigating many rings of grain and grass left behind, supposedly, by the UFOs into the early 70s, but now those types of cases where a person sees a UFO land and take off and something’s left behind, those have almost completely disappeared, and we’re left with these crop circles which may or may not have anything to do with UFOs.
The biggest change is the fact that here we are, more than 50 years after the beginning of the flying saucer era, and we still don’t appear to have many more answers, and there’s still rampant speculation going on. To me, that’s a significant observation. 50 years, later—more than 50 years later, 55, 56 years later—it appears that science is no closer to understanding why people are so attracted to this phenomenon.
One of the things you mention in the show is that some of the stigma attached to UFO contact has started to fall away, in the sense that people seem to be more willing, because so many people seem to be reporting these sorts of things, to report their own cases. [Roughly 10% of Canadians claim to have seen a UFO of some sort.] As some of that stigma falls away, what kind of changes do you expect to see?
Well, we’re certainly receiving more and more reports from the past. Just today I received a report from the Northwest Territories, from 2001. People read a little about UFOs or they see something in the newspaper (although media reporting of UFOs has really declined, to the point where it’s certainly not news anymore in many situations). We’ve already been pummelled with X-Files and numerous other TV shows, like Spielberg’s Taken, and we all have this influence of media-type UFOs and aliens in our minds, and I think because of all this people are more willing to talk about experiences they’ve had, because it seems to be more accepted by society. Whether it’s real or not seems to have been put aside, and it’s just accepted by society that people may have had experiences of one form or another and that it is acceptable for people to talk about them.
What is the biggest challenge facing professional recognition of UFO research?
I think the biggest challenge facing professional recognition of this kind of research is the lack of recognized professionals.
What’s the strangest or most compelling case that you’ve come across, personally, in your research?
The most compelling case for me remains the Falcon Lake case of Stefan Michalak, back from 1967. That case had everything you would want: there was evidence found at the site, there was radioactive debris, there was physical and physiological effects on the witness, there was intense government investigation from the United States as well as Canada, and we still are completely out in the cold as to what may have happened.
Michalak died just a few years ago, and maintained until he died that what he saw was what he claimed to have seen. He never said it was an alien spacecraft, he never talked in those terms, he just said “this is my experience, I don’t know what it was.” The rest was left to speculation. The U.S. Air Force simply left it as unexplained in their official report on the case.
So it’s certainly, not only the best case in Canada in terms of evidence and documentation, but probably one of the better cases in the world. We can point to Roswell, for example, if you want to look at a case there, but here’s an eyewitness to something that was seen and touched and felt and heard and drawn and evidence was left behind, and we have all the documents from all those various agencies, and so it’s a very fascinating case and I think the jury’s still out on it.
I’ve got two more of the more standard questions that you might hear—
No, I’ve never seen anything myself.
What are your personal beliefs on the matter? Are there aliens visiting us, in your opinion?
With my astronomical background, I know there’s likely extraterrestrial life out there somewhere. I would find it odd that anyone would not think that there would be life out there. Whether they’re visiting here, I know all too well the distances involved, so I would find it absolutely remarkable if anybody was coming here. At the same time, there’s no reason why, given an advanced technology, they wouldn’t find a way of getting here, given we were all that interesting.
Why would an alien invader, who would be beyond reproach by virtue of possessing such an advanced technology, require secrecy?
I wouldn’t phrase it in those terms, which I think is where the confusion comes from. I would say, rather than look at it in militaristic terms, I would consider the aliens anthropologists. By reason of the argument, they would be more advanced than we are, and I guess in a sort of version of the Star Trek prime directive, the point is not to really influence the culture or get involved in the culture.
In fact, there’s a great argument to be made that aliens don’t really need to land on Earth at all, because (and this is one of the great arguments against crop circles) why would you need to land, when you could simply monitor TV signals and observe from space? You really don’t need to land on the planet and sample the planet and people at all.
Especially with reality TV shows.
[Laughs] Yeah.
Do you have any comments on the Mysterious Obsessions episode itself?
I’ve been involved in a number of TV projects—I was on Unsolved Mysteries, I was on Sightings, I was on A&E’s Unexplained, and on a host of lesser productions—and certainly Magnificent Obsessions focuses on a specific aspect of UFOs, on investigation, and the case reports, and what do you do with the case reports and how investigators do carry it out.
I would say it’s easily one of the best (if not the best) projects of this kind, and particularly because it’s Canadian they’ve done a really good job of capturing what’s behind the UFO phenomenon in terms of sightings and the people involved.
It was done very straight and level-headed, without interjecting any sardonic or satirical editorializing, which is what a lot of news show will do. The people who they chose to include, Stanton Friedman, Brian Vike, Errol Bruce-Knapp, and myself, we take the subject very seriously, and the program treated us with respect, which is something not often found on this subject.
Still a McNally Robinson Bestseller
January 23, 2010
To my surprise, Ex Machina continues to hold #4 on the Winnipeg McNally Robinson paperback fiction bestseller list. Last week it had the benefit of my book launch — you don’t have to sell too many books to be on the local bestseller list. But this week, there was no book launch to help sales, and I’m shocked that it didn’t at least slip to 5 (while other books disappeared from the list altogether).
Not bad for experimental poetry! Thanks to everybody who’s actually buying the book.
Interview: Frank Black
January 22, 2010
Originally published in Stylus 13. 5 (2002)
Frank Black is one of the most influential rock artists of all time. The mastermind behind The Pixies, who paved the way for the alt-rock explosion of the early 1990s, he can count Kurt Cobain and David Bowie among the many fans he has inspired. At the time of this interview, Black had recently released two new albums with his band the Catholics, Black Letter Days and Devil’s Workshop, as well as the original Pixies demos (known to fans as The Purple Tape) as The Pixies.
You have a history of avoiding the press, and once claimed you’d never do another interview. So how come you’re talking to a loser like myself?
I do interviews all the time. I may not have done interviews on a particular record years ago, but I usually do interviews.
What turned you around?
I guess it’s just the nature of the business. You have to let your customers know you’ve got a record out, and the best way to do that is to talk to a journalist. Also, hopefully, it’s an opportunity to, you know, be misunderstood.
Why did you decide to release two separate albums? Are they meant to be companion pieces or are they supposed to stand alone?
Either/or, I guess. You can buy one, you can buy both. I made two records this year, so I’m releasing two records. If I made three records I probably would have—well, I probably wouldn’t have gotten away with three records, I would have gotten too much resistance from the powers that be. Seems that they can handle two records.
What I’m wondering is why not a double album.
Why? Oh, well, it’s two different sections, two different lineups, two different producers. So it’s sort of out of deference to some of the people involved. I didn’t mix and match, I just kind of left them separate.
On the two new albums the American West dominates both the lyrical and the musical content. Why is there that focus?
I guess it’s just the whole idea of going west. The first time I went west I was a baby, so I don’t have any memory of it, but subsequently I ended up moving back east, and then back west again, back east and back west again . . . I’ve done that a lot in my life, growing up, and of course I travel around as a musician, so I’m still very much in touch with that experience of heading west across the continent. And of course I live in L.A., so even though I haven’t moved for quite some time now I’m always coming back here from somewhere, most often moving in a westerly direction from other parts of the U.S.A. or from Europe. Or Canada.
Black Letter Days is bookended with two covers of the same Tom Waits song, “The Black Rider.” Why did you choose this song to cover in such a prominent fashion?
We started to play that at our show about a year and a half ago. We tried a couple of different covers when we were recording, but that was the one that we did the best. Even then, I wasn’t happy with the way we were doing it . . . so we started to fool around with it a bit and have some fun, and the result was one reel of tape with probably seven different versions of “The Black Rider,” one devolving into the next and getting sillier, so what you hear is the first take and the last take. It wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, we’re just doing the song because we like it. Lyrically, the song is, on the one hand, really kind of dark and ghoulish, but on the other hand it’s very cabaret. It’s like, “Welcome everybody, to the night club. Let me sing you a song about the Devil.” It’s got this show biz-y kind of vibe.
Do you know if Tom Waits has heard the song?
No idea. He’s a busy guy, I’m sure he’s got other things to do than sit around with the new Frank Black record.
I understand that you recorded these albums in a portable studio of some sort.
Yeah, we’ve got a real vintage analog pile of gear, it’s all in flight cases. We move it around to different spaces and set it up and hopefully get a good sound going. We’ve set it up in three or four spaces now, all in L.A., but we have hopes of moving it to other cities and setting it up in other warehouses.
Were you still recording live to two tracks?
Yeah. Or one track. Some of those songs are in mono. There are mono recordings on both albums actually. We have a mono machine and a stereo machine.
What is it about this method of recording that appeals to you?
I just like the challenge. It’s fun to have that parameter. We’re a band, so let’s all play together as a band. We’ll either pull it off together or fail, and we’ll put all our successes on an album and hopefully eliminate the failures. It’s very simple, instead of constructing this facsimile of a performance.
It’s interesting, because the trend now is towards overproduction. Every song you hear on the radio is, as you say, a construction.
Right. There are no rules, I’m not against anybody doing that, it’s just that what people do with that technology is they tend to iron everything out, so everything’s on 10—as loud as it can be, as bright as it can be, as perfect as it can be—and the people who are doing that are the ones who are really trying to be on corporate radio, which is only playing 10 songs or whatever. They’re all trying to fit into a certain super tiny niche because of the rewards available to those that make it into the exclusive club of commercial radio . . . I don’t listen to the radio, the music’s too bland and there’s just too much advertising. It’s just so, so corporate. [Makes disgusted sound.] I have no interest in it at all.
Why did you decide to release The Purple Tape [as The Pixies] at this time?
It’s just the way that it worked out, it’s been talked about for a couple years but we never got all our paperwork together or whatever until now, so it’s just a coincidence it came out in the same summer as the other albums.
What about the decision to re-record “Velvety,” with lyrics?
Well, that’s just some song I wrote in junior high and I never wrote lyrics for. When the Pixies did a version of it as a B-side I called it “Velvety Instrumental Version” as a reference to the Velvet Underground, because I was really into them at the time and I fancied myself able to pull off that kind of sound, which is maybe not that accurate. So I kind of painted myself into a corner, I was like, “Okay, I called it the instrumental version, so now I have to write a song called ‘Velvety.’ ” So that became the lyrical direction of the song, I had to write a song about some woman name Velvety. I like those kinds of random parameters. That’s what songs are a lot of the time, they’re just games that you play, sometimes it’s a language thing, sometimes it’s a meter thing or a rhyming thing, there are all kinds of neurotic little games going on.
It seems that your past success has put you in this position where people demand that you grow as an artist, but then when you do they start condemning you for not sounding like The Pixies.
Right. Thank you for saying that.
Is it frustrating working under the shadow of that band?
Yeah, it’s occasionally depressing, when you read some review that totally pans you or something . . . The only thing that’s would give me revenge would be if I had a hit that somehow overshadowed it. Unless that happens, that’s always going to be the thing hangs over me and, well, that’s okay. People like to talk about successes, frequently a success happens to someone early on in their career and it’s hard to escape that, not just for me but for anyone.
You’ve claimed to have had UFO experiences in the past. Would you care to tell me about them? (I’m a huge UFO fan.)
Well, there was a UFO that hung out over a house I was staying at when I was a baby and I heard about it years later from my family members. I was so surprised to hear this story, that they all saw this thing floating in the sky above the house, called the police and everything. They thought it was the end of the world. I had another experience that I do remember, that my brother and I had involving kind of a missile- or a rocket-shaped craft that passed over us in the morning or afternoon when we were outside playing. It was completely silent and passed slowly over us and we stopped and looked at it. And then we went back to our playing, you know, we were fairly young. We never talked about it to anyone, not even to each other, and it came up in conversation 25 years or so later. We were both surprised that the other one remembered it, we each thought it was our own weird personal memory, and we just found it really surprising that we both had this kind of shared memory of the same thing. I’m not really sure if I believe in UFOs, but I’ve had a couple of odd experiences.
You’ve also talked about a comet making you decide to start a band.
Well, I was down in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and I was getting ready to go on a world trip. I was going to go down to New Zealand to look at Halley’s comet which was passing by that year. It just seemed like a cool thing to do. I had begun to make preparations to drop out of school and to go do that, when I thought, “Wait a minute, what am I doing? I’m going to go to New Zealand and look at a comet? It’s cool, but what is it that I’ve been dreaming about my whole life? It’s to be a rock musician.” So it was kind of interesting how the whole comet thing brought this to the top of my head, like ‘That is not my calling, to wander right now, my calling is to do this.”
2nd Annual Peter Norman Prize for Posting
January 20, 2010
Starting whenever I did, I have given out (that one time) a prize for reading and posting to this blog. Well, I’ve decided to make it an annual event, and name the award in honour of the person who won it whenever I gave it out last/first: Peter Norman (a fine writer you will get to know better over the next few years, as he starts releasing books).
The prize will be some random thing, and will be given out each year to the person who posts the most on this blog during the previous year.
So the 2010 Peter Norman Prize for Posting goes to: Saleema Nawaz, author of the short story collection Mother Superior and winner of the 2008 Journey Prize. I’ll send Saleema her secret mystery prize in the mail whenever I get around to it.
Ironically, the runner-up this year was Peter Norman, who posted exactly one less time than Saleema. Better luck next time, Peteski!
