Oct 132016
 

As if we needed more evidence of the quality of writing that appears here and of the prescience of our editors, Cordelia Strube has just won the $10,000 Toronto Book Award for her novel On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light. You will all no doubt recall that in our March issue last year we ran an excerpt from the novel along with an interview with the author by our eminent contributing editor Ann Ireland.

Now we would like to heartily congratulate Cordelia for her amazing achievement.

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Cordelia Strube has won the 2016 Toronto Book Award for her novel On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light (ECW Press). Strube, a playwright and the author of nine other novels, including Alex & Zee, Teaching Pigs to Sing and Lemon, is a past winner of a Toronto Arts Foundation Award, a nominee for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Book Award, and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Source: Cordelia Strube wins 2016 Toronto Book Award | Toronto Star

Oct 122016
 

Douglas Glover, Theatre Passe Muraille

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I have an essay in the new issue (July/August — just out though) of American Book Review. It’s called “The Literature of Extinction” and in something like 1,500 words covers the entire history of experimental literature to the present. One of the fascinating things about writing this essay was the insight I derived from Germán Sierra’s essay “Deep Media Fiction,” which we published here in the magazine in January. I keep going back and rereading that essay. It has driven a good deal of my current reading.

American Book Review is a print publication. You’ll have to buy a copy or find it in your library or download, if you can, from Muse. But here is a short passage.

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We see the world more clearly now (we think). It’s very small, dirty, crowded with people, and heating up. The Anthropocene is the new name given to the period of time (roughly beginning with the Neolithic) human beings have had a significant impact on the environment. Now we know there is no free lunch, and the hubris of our assumption that the earth was an infinite, free resource specially catered for us by the gods is beginning to look like a monumental gaffe.

Nor are we essentially different from the other orders of being (say, trees, rocks, newts); consciousness may be a neural anomaly, or as the A.I. researchers like to say, an emergent property, that is, a side effect of our neural interaction with whatever we are interacting with (just as the colour of an object is not a property of the object but a side effect of the wavelengths of light interacting with eye neurons). Not a self, a soul, a ghost in the machine, but a whisp of smoke, dream-like and temporary.

from Douglas Glover “The Literature of Extinction” American Book Review, Juy/August 2016.

Oct 042016
 

capture

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captureThe GG Poetry Finalists for 2016 (Click on the image to go to the announcement page.)

A nice bit of news. Two of our authors have been shortlisted for this year’s Governor-General’s Award in Poetry, Steven Heighton and Garry Thomas Morse. (Click on their names to see what they published here.)  Steven, of course, has appeared several times in the magazine, aphorisms, fiction, and translation as well as poetry. He started with us very early in the magazine’s career.

But, ahem, just another proof of the quality at NC.

Sep 282016
 

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Yes, yes, yes, yes, the neighbours are complaining about the constant racket, the raucous cheers, the freeflowing Talisker, dogs and revelers staggering in the public road outside the NC Bunker. There has been altogether too much celebration lately, and now Melissa Beck has arrived to take up a position as production editor and the NC Pipe Band & Glee Club lost count during the 87-gun salute (I believe this is Fernando’s fault) and had to do it twice over.

We are so pleased, despite the confusion at the Bunker, to have Melissa join us. Early indications are that her duties here will extend beyond production. She has already taken dg to school on certain matters regarding classical authors. She also writes book reviews, specializing in books in translation, and conducts interviews. She’ll be a wonderful addition once we settle down.

Two things are worth mentioning. 1) There are still more jobs open. Check the page under the ABOUT button in the nav bar at the top of the page. 2) When you look at our vast and growing masthead, remember that we don’t normally take submissions. The magazine is generated from within. Many people on the masthead write regularly for the magazine — reviews, occasional essays, interviews. They also curate, edit, and package work we’ve invited from outside. And they have to produce an issue 12 times a year. It’s amazing we do it with so few people.

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Melissa Beck has a B.A. and an M.A. in Classics. She also completed most of a Ph.D. in Classics for which her specialty was Seneca, Stoicism and Roman Tragedy. But she stopped writing her dissertation after the first chapter so she could live the life of wealth and prestige by teaching Latin and Ancient Greek to students at Woodstock Academy in Northeastern Connecticut. She now uses the copious amounts of money that she has earned as a teacher over the course of the past eighteen years to buy books for which she writes reviews on her website The Book Binder’s Daughter. Her reviews have also appeared in World Literature Today and The Portland Book Review. She has an essay on the nature of the soul forthcoming in the 2017 Seagull Books catalog and has contributed an essay about Epicureanism to the anthology Rush and Philosophy.

Sep 262016
 

Riiki Ducornet

Rikki Ducornet burst onto the Numéro Cinq scene in July, a scant two months ago, with CRAZY HAPPY: Painted Scrolls by Rikki Ducornet & Sculpture by Margie McDonald. Then she sent a poem, then we published a novel excerpt, then she sent an essay (forthcoming), then she introduced me to the delights of artists Dave Kennedy (see the current issue) and Anne Hirondelle (forthcoming). She has entered the spirit of the place. She’s made herself at home (and made the home a better place, which is the way it’s supposed to work around here). She brings an inestimable panache, a resplendent joy in the protean excesses of art. It’s an immense pleasure to welcome her to the masthead as a Contributing Editor.

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The author of nine novels, three collections of short fiction, two books of essays and five books of poetry, Rikki Ducornet has received both a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award For Fiction. She has received the Bard College Arts and Letters award and, in 2008, an Academy Award in Literature. Her work is widely published abroad. Recent exhibitions of her paintings include the solo show Desirous at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2007, and the group shows: O Reverso Do Olhar in Coimbra, Portugal, in 2008, and El Umbral Secreto at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Santiago, Chile, in 2009. She has illustrated books by Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover, Forest Gander, Kate Bernheimer, Joanna Howard and Anne Waldman among others. Her collected papers including prints and drawings are in the permanent collection of the Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago Chile, The McMaster University Museum, Ontario, Canada, and The Biblioteque Nationale, Paris.

Sep 232016
 

susan-gillis-photo-by-alexandra-pasian

Things are very hot in the poetry department at NC. We have already announced that Susan Aizenberg is our poetry editor, but now we’ve brought on Susan Gillis as well. Susan Aizenberg will handle the American poetry scene, and Susan Gillis (inevitably, they will be the Two Susans) will handle the Canadian side. (There are other sides and scenes, of course, poetry in translation, for example, and God, Ben Woodard, Dylan Brennan, and dg will be handling them.) We are extremely pleased to have Susan join us. The only downside is she expressly forbade me not to mention the human sacrifices during the new hire celebrations. So I won’t. Let me just say there will be vivid  scenes at the NC Bunker tonight.

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Susan Gillis has published three books of poetry, most recently The Rapids (Brick Books, 2012), and several chapbooks, including The Sky These Days (Thee Hellbox Press, 2015) and Twenty Views of the Lachine Rapids (Gaspereau Press, 2012). Volta (Signature Editions, 2002) won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. She is a member of the collaborative poetry group Yoko’s Dogs, whose work appears regularly in print and online, and is collected in Rhinoceros (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and Whisk (Pedlar Press, 2013). Susan divides her time between Montreal and rural Ontario.

Sep 222016
 

antique-store

I recently relocated to the St. Johns neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, and have been trying to get my bearings. “Gritty” St. Johns, as Portlanders say, or “up-and-coming” St. Johns, as Realtors tell us, was once an independent city built on its port and a few industries. It was incorporated into Portland a century ago. The other day I walked by a display, pictured above, in the windows of a store that had just closed. Free verse, public art—Sharon Helgerson tells her story and St. Johns’. Age 79, she is third generation St. Johns and a former Longshoreman, once a member of ILWU Local 8.

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Nolan Calisch and Nina Montenegro joined to put her words up, part of People’s Homes, a collaborative art project. The store is across the street from James John Grade School, where Sharon began attendance in 1942.

The other morning I searched online to see what I else I could find about Sharon and ran across this casual picture she took in 1968:

bobby-kennedy-st-johnsVia the St. Johns Heritage Association.

Bobby Kennedy, campaigning in Portland, made an appearance in St. Johns after their May parade, just a block away from the school, the store with the sign, and the place where I now live. Ethel and John Glenn were there as well. Two weeks later Bobby was shot.

The coming elections are in mind, and I’ve been thinking about ways to repair the break in time and the rent in our social fabric, as well as imagine what words I might put in a public window some day, without success.

Gary Garvin

Sep 212016
 

This has been a long time coming. No drumroll, just the satisfaction of a circle closing, a sense of rightness. Gary Garvin has been part of the magazine’s history since the February, 2010, issue. He helped design the site. He went away for a while, his wandering in the wilderness years, then came back and has been working prodigiously on his essays and fiction for us ever since. Now he has agreed to come out publicly as a Numéro Cinq co-religionist and join the masthead as a special correspondent. You can check out his many contributions if you click on his name below. But there will be more.

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Gary Garvin lives in Portland, Oregon, where he writes and reflects on a thirty-year career teaching English. His short stories and essays have appeared in TriQuarterly, Web ConjunctionsFourth Genre, Numéro Cinq, the minnesota reviewNew Novel ReviewConfrontationThe New ReviewThe Santa Clara ReviewThe South Carolina Review, The Berkeley Graduate, and The Crescent Review. He is currently at work on a collection of essays and a novel. His architectural models can be found at Under Construction. A catalog of his writing can be found at Fictions.

Sep 202016
 

Laura Michele Diener author photo

We would have the usual 91-gun salute, but the NC Drum & Bugle Corps ran out of ammunition skeet shooting on the weekend. Nonetheless we are celebratory, we are raising our glasses, we are being rowdy. Laura Michele (who has already appeared twice on these pages) will be contributing essays, book reviews and blog posts in an ongoing effort to make us a better place. What makes the moment all the more auspicious is that Laura Michele just learned that she has an essay in the Notable Essays list in the 2016 Best American Essays (edited by Jonathan Franzen).

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Laura Michele Diener teaches medieval history and women’s studies at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. She received her PhD in history from The Ohio State University and has studied at Vassar College, Newnham College, Cambridge, and most recently, Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her creative writing has appeared in The Catholic Worker, Lake Effect, Appalachian Heritage,and Cargo Literary Magazine, and she is a regular contributor to Yes! Magazine.

Sep 192016
 

Author's Photo color

Time for the usual 97-gun salute by the NC Regimental Battery, three cheers, toasts in fluted glasses to be smashed against the andirons of the clubhouse fireplace, plus the (now de rigeur on such occasions) human sacrifice for luck*. We’ve never had a poetry editor before. Now Susan Aizenberg has chosen to fill that deficit. We are gratified and optimistic. The mood in the bunker has risen. We’ve found the key to the Talisker locker. In truth, we are very, very pleased.

For those who need a introduction, Susan has poems in the current (September) issue.

*Um, we don’t actually do the human sacrifice thing anymore, not lately anyway. There were complaints.

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Susan Aizenberg is the author of three poetry collections: Quiet City (BkMk Press 2015); Muse (Crab Orchard Poetry Series 2002); and Peru in Take Three: 2/AGNI New Poets Series (Graywolf Press 1997) and co-editor with Erin Belieu of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press 2001). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, among them The North American Review, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Connotation Press, Spillway, The Journal, Midwest Quarterly Review, Hunger Mountain, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the Philadelphia Inquirer and have been reprinted and are forthcoming in several anthologies, including Ley Lines (Wilfrid Laurier UP) and Wild and Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation (Etruscan). Her awards include a Crab Orchard Poetry Series Award, the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Levis Prize for Muse, a Distinguished Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council, the Mari Sandoz Award from the Nebraska Library Association, and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner award. She can be reached through her website, susanaizenberg.com.

Sep 172016
 

Douglas Glover photo

Left the NC Bunker today to check out the Tunbridge Fair. Was persuaded against better judgement to go on rides. First took pictures of this thing, which I think of as The Claw, and then rode on it. Feel much better now. But cannot write complete sentences yet.

Douglas Glover photo

Then I went on another very fast whirling gyroscopic orgasmomegatron ride (which I did not photograph) and with four tickets left got onto the Zero Gravity machine with Matt Monk (dg dressed in dark clothing, Matt in white). I recall Matt saying, as we entered the big kids’ ride enclosure, “Now the shit gets real!” Needless to say someone else took these pictures.

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What you see here are the faces of men who have faced Death in the Zero Gravity ride (along with 12 small children).

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Sep 152016
 

mary-brindley

It took Mary Brindley seven minutes to email me about the editorial assistant job when I posted it the other day. It seems like a perfect fit, and God knows I need an assistant, someone as smart, genial, and meticulous as Mary is. She’ll be taking over some of the day to day correspondence for me as well as doing some background maintenance on the site and many other things, which I haven’t thought of yet. Coincidentally, she has an essay coming out in our next issue (October). Watch for it!

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Mary Brindley is a Vermont-born copywriter living in Boston. A recent graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, she writes creative nonfiction, performs improv, and is about to move to London.
Sep 132016
 

Numero Cinco

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Numéro Cinq is always trying to extend its malign tentacles (er, I mean benign antennae) into the far corners of the world on the general biological that genetic diversity is good. For a while we had a French-Canadian component but lost the person who was editing that. For a couple of years now we’ve had a monthly Irish feature called Uimhir a Cúig, which is Number Five in Irish. For ages, I’ve wanted to incorporate the vast and ancient land to the south, Mexico, historically glorious and immensely productive of writers and artists (I know Donald Trump disagrees with us on this). Now we’ve managed to get enough contacts and curatorial help (from Dylan Brennan, Brendan Riley and our own Ben Woodard) to feel safe in saying we’ll have something new from Mexico (almost) every issue from now on.

There is a navigation button to the Numéro Cinq archive page in the right hand column now. And here is a link to the Numero Cinq archive index page.

Numero Cinco

Aug 302016
 

Mishler Photo

Peter Mishler has just won the $2000-Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry (which also includes a book contract with Sarabande Books). Two of the poems we published at Numéro Cinq are included in the prize-winning collection.

Might I just, you know, mention NC’s immensely good taste and our ability to spot talent long before it gets its due?

Mishler appeared twice in our pages. First, there are the poems, which were published in our January, 2013, issue:

Haruspex: Poems — Peter Mishler

You are evading me.
You are just beyond me.
You are the length
of the hood of a car
away from me—
and thinner
than I remember,
dressed as if undressed

And then there is a wise and wonderful interview he did with David Ferry, winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry, which appeared in May, 2013:

The Connoisseurship of the Word | Interview with David Ferry — Peter Mishler

Aug 022016
 

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Douglas Glover, Theatre Passe MurailleShelagh1

 

 

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Click the link below to listen to the spectacular Shelagh Shapiro interviewing the irrepressible (irrendentist, irresponsible…) Douglas Glover, editor at NC, about the magazine and various and sundry topics guaranteed to trigger his loquacious streak.

Douglas Glover/Numéro Cinq – Interview #410: A conversation with Douglas Glover, founder, publisher and editor of the online magazine Numéro Cinq.

Link: Write The Book » Douglas Glover/Numéro Cinq – Interview #410 (7/25/16)

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Jul 252016
 

CaptureMark Rothko’s 1953 “Untitled: Purple, White, and Red.”

It’s almost August, summer is on the wane, the sun is setting toward the south, the great thunder clouds have been parking over Elmore to the northwest of an evening putting on a show of fireworks unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and now, you know, another issue is coming out, something chimerical in this one, a non-conformist issue forged around fiction by Curtis White and major essays on the great Catholic activist Dorothy Day and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s iconic “Self-Reliance” (which I read for the first time when I was 13 in the bathroom at the farm in Waterford because my mother made me). And more!

Who else brings you such strangeness?

Curtis White is an essayist, social critic and fiction writer out of the school of Laurence Sterne and Rabelais, that is, his style is unorthodox, playful, witty and knowing  but not necessarily a pomo faddist. In the piece we have for August, he riffs on the American-Mexican western, jumping off Cormac McCarthy’s diving board, into, well, something different. Think: cowboys likening the ur-American landscape to a Mark Rothko painting. Think Blood Meridian and Joseph Cornell.

Chimerical/non-conforming.

So, tired but dogged, they saddled the horses and cut the girl loose from her stake. She rubbed at the raw welts on her wrist but climbed quickly on to her horse without complaint. She was in withdrawal from one or more opioids, and so was starting to think that the best thing for her was to arrive somewhere, anywhere. She was a hard girl after the long months in the criminal camp on the desert floor, and she’d seen her share of addicts piled on the ground their bones clattering like castanets. She was a girl who paid attention and learned, Jake gave her that, but he also knew he’d have to treat her without pity. Pity was something he didn’t have time for. So what if she had some bloody welts from the leather cords. Let her keep still then. —Curtis White

Curtis WhiteCurtis White

1968Dorothy Day

Laura Michele Diener returns to these pages with a mega-essay on Catholic-feminist-moral icon Dorothy Day who hitched her traditional theological loyaties to just about every advanced 20th century social movement.

She fought on the cusp of practically every crucial social movement of the twentieth century—against the war in Vietnam, against the Atom Bomb, on behalf of Civil Rights, labor, and suffrage. She didn’t just live as a Catholic, she lived according to Gospels, stripping herself of her possessions because Christ had commanded it, loving the poor—truly loving them, which was an act of will, because the poor, up close, can be horrifying. —Laura Michele Diener

Laura Michele Diener author photoLaura Michele Diener

Self-Reliance cover 500pxCover image for The Domino Project’s edition of “Self-Reliance,” 2011.

Emerson_engraving_1878_cropped3Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pat Keane returns to his beloved Emerson whose controversial essay “Self-Reliance” let loose the demons and angels of our contemporary idolatry of the self, from hippies to self-help libraries. But what was he really saying?

Stylistically, Emerson is so committed to polarity that his powerful yet ambiguous texts are full of overstatements and qualifications, swerves and counter-swerves. In the second half of many lectures and essays, he takes away with the left hand what he has just given with the right. As he notoriously proclaimed in our main text, “Self-Reliance,” a “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (E&L 265). His disciple Walt Whitman was never more Emersonian than when (in “Song of Myself” §51) he asked a rhetorical question and responded audaciously: “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well, then, I contradict myself./ (I am large. I contain multitudes)”—to which Emerson’s German disciple, Friedrich Nietzsche, responded: “It is precisely such ‘contradictions’ that seduce one to existence.” —Patrick J. Keane

Patrick J Keane 2Patrick Keane

Evan Levander-SmithEvan Lavender-Smith

Also in fiction in August, we have a witty, insistent (those insistent, obsessive parallels), off-the-wall (in the best possible sense) short story from Evan Lavender-Smith.

I have a question.

—Shoot.

—Why do you say always shoot when I say I have a question?

—Shoot. It means go ahead and ask your question. Shoot, fire away, lay it on me. Ask your question.

—It does?

—Yes. What did you think it meant?

—That you were tired of me asking you so many questions. Like, oh no, here we go again. Like, you know, shoot.

—Evan Lavender-Smith

RilkeRainer Maria Rilke

Allan Cooper, who last graced these pages extolling the poems of Frank Stanford, returns with brand new translations from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

But because being truly alive is difficult: because the fleeting
things of the world need us, and in a strange way
call out to us. And we’re the most fleeting of all.
Each living thing is here once, that’s it. And we
live once. But to have been here
once, completely alive here–
to have been a part of this world–nothing can take that away.

—Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Allan Cooper

allan cooperAllan Cooper

Zazil by Mari H. Res+®ndizZazil Alaíde Collins

From Mexican we have poems from the dazzling young writer Zazil Alaíde Collins with an interview by Dylan Brennan. The original Spanish translated by Cody Copeland.

Words are crabs
Buried in the deep.

Shipwrecks speak
in seashells.

The wind sings its syllables
of whispered names.

—Zazil Alaíde Collins translated by Cody Copeland

Susan Gillis

From Canada, Susan Gillis graces our pages for the first time with a gorgeous, powerful paean to a city, the poem formed around a central image, a towering construction crane seen from the poet’s window.

Boom, traveller, plumb, hook, cab – I will miss the yellow crane when the building is finished.

The crane has just lifted a load of steel I-beams and lowered them to a point I can’t see, though I can see the figures of people walking along the roof.

Days close in on a wasp’s nest of days.

Is there a procedure for emptying myself?

As when the sky suddenly empties and resurges toward a storm.

—Susan Gillis

Carolyn Ogburn pens here a review of Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry.

We might not have initially considered the comparison, but Lerner introduces it: “why not speak of it — fucking and getting fucked up was part of it, is, the way sex and substances can liquefy the particulars of perception into an experience of form. The way a person’s stutter can be liquefied by song.” Like sex, like speech itself, poetry is forever seeking purchase in the real, yet exists only in “the glimmer of virtual possibility.”

—Carolyn Ogburn

Carollyn OgburnCarolyn Ogburn

Cynthia photo Shawnigan lakeCynthia Flood

And one of our favourite fiction writers Cynthia Flood recounts a horrible true-life experience with amnesia.

Each August, my family rents a lakeside cottage at Shawnigan. Swim to the island and explore, row to the island for a picnic, canoe there with the dog anxiously aboard — everyday activities.

With my teenage grand-daughters, one afternoon I stepped into the refreshing lake-water, all sparkly in the sun, and began to swim.

Next: I am lying flat, wearing a blue hospital gown. A voice says, “We’ll take her up to the ward now.”

—Cynthia Flood

Daniel Lawless 2Daniel Lawless

Daniel Lawless contributes whimsical, heart-felt poems, contemporary and vibrant with personality.

Or are you still thinking about that half-dressed dancing girl
With her scorched toddler-mind, how childishly beautiful she was
Making jewelry out of a snake,
The aroma of her pale breasts and the illicit thought
Of kissing them, taking them topped with Lychee Love Sauce
Into your mouth?

—Daniel Lawless

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERALawrence Sutin

Lawrence Sutin sent in an essay on that perennial question “What is Reality?” and, of course, as you would expect, his answer is pure Sutin-esque whimsy.

We are not constructed to agree. The uniqueness that we claim we each possess, the distinctive consciousness we feel to be within ourselves and not within others, is very real in its billions upon billions of subtly human variations. Whether a meal is well-cooked or sadly dry, whether a city street is a triumph of order or a stream of chaos, these are questions that become unanswerable when asked of a human array of tasters and observers. And most of us have experienced being on both sides of the same question. The street we found charming one day becomes a biting snake the next. The person we thought we would love forever becomes a thought that we cannot imagine we ever thought, not really.

—Lawrence Sutin

Margaret NowaczykMargaret Nowaczyk

Margaret Nowaczyk is a writing student with Caroline Adderson. She wrote this story based on the exercise I give in the short story structure essay in Attack of the Copula Spiders. The result was so astonishing, Caroline straight away shot off an email to me.

The first time he saw Adèle she was dancing on a chair at their med school orientation party. She wore autographed boxer shorts from an upper classman, the prize token for the scavenger hunt; a wide grin – all teeth – split her face, thick brown hair parted in a bob on the right. As she shook it off her face her eyes met Bentley’s and she winked at him, her face an invitation. Bentley felt his face grow hot.

They were sleeping together a month later. Bentley, virginal, realized right away that Adèle was much more experienced than he would allow himself to imagine. Her lipstick on his penis – kissing it, biting it, sucking it she smeared the crimson on the pearly pink of his shaft and foreskin. He pushed aside thoughts of the unnamed men, their greedy hands, their probing tongues and dicks that knew Adèle better than he did.

He realized then that he would never let go of her.

—Margaret Nowaczyk

moya_nina_subinHoracio Castellanis Moya

Ben Woodard reviews Horacio Castellanis Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador.

A blistering novella that satisfies the darkness clouding the cynical side of our souls.

— Benjamin Woodard

Revulsion

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERATed Deppe

And Ted Deppe contributes lovely poems.

Start off singing a madrigal, return
with words a girl wrote on a wall
of a concentration camp, set to music
by Górecki. I didn’t learn he’d died
until the next day, but lingering
beneath such sadness, I didn’t need
to know. The music
stopped, I walked on,
and the lights in the valley
were candles in a starless church.

………………………………………………………—Ted Deppe

Though there is more, as always. NC at the Movies. Jason DeYoung reviewing the latest by Rikki Ducornet. Check out the issue when it starts to appear August 1st.

Chimerical/non-conformist.

 

Jul 082016
 

Bursey book

Our special correspondent Jeff Bursey, reviewer & fictionist, has a new book out, a selection of his book reviews.

Neglected and obscure writers are at the fore in this incisive collection of critical essays. Centring the Margins is a collection of reviews and essays written between 2001 and 2014 of writers from Canada, the United States, the UK, and Europe. Most are neglected, obscure, or considered difficult, and include Mati Unt, Ornela Vorpsi, S.D. Chrostowska, Blaise Cendrars and Joseph McElroy, among others.

Jeff Bursey

Jeff Bursey is a literary critic and author of the picaresque novel Mirrors on which dust has fallen (Verbivoracious Press, 2015) and the political satire Verbatim: A Novel (Enfield & Wizenty, 2010), both of which take place in the same fictional Canadian province. His forthcoming book, Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews (Zero Books, July 2016), is a collection of literary criticism that appeared in American Book Review, Books in Canada, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Quarterly Conversation, and The Winnipeg Review, among other places. He’s a Contributing Editor at The Winnipeg Review, an Associate Editor at Lee Thompson’s Galleon, and a Special Correspondent for Numéro Cinq. He makes his home on Prince Edward Island in Canada’s Far East.

Jun 052016
 

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The Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver has announced its 2016/17 season, and Elle, the play adapted from dg’s novel by Severn Thompson, will be there.

From Toronto, Theatre Passe Muraille’s Dora Moore Award nominated ELLE, adapted from Douglas Glover’s award-winning novel, tells the story of a French noblewoman abandoned on the Isle of Demons (off the coast of Newfoundland) in 1542.

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Jun 042016
 

R W Gray

Rob Gray, intrepid Senior Editor and the man who month in and month our produces those NC at the Movies pieces, has just won the $25,000 Thomas Raddall Fiction Award for his marvellous short story collection Entropic.

Here are the jury notes:

“Each story in R. W. Gray’s edgy, inventive collection is a gem in and of itself, sparkling with its own wit and inner logic. These are stories that render the intangible tangible, taking us over the edge but never hitting bottom. They explore our deepest desires and anxieties and explode them to arrive at unexpected but weirdly connected and coherent conclusions. Gray’s economy of language expands the universe as we travel seamlessly in and out of our inner, chaotic thoughts into the surreal realm of dreams.”

I wrote a cover blurb. It went like this:

“R. W. Gray writes like nobody else; risky, edgy, erotic, subversive, even macabre short stories, very contemporary, coded with solitude, but reaching for myth, always beautiful and astonishing.”

Rich Farrell reviewed the book here. Here’s a bit of what he wrote:

“Gray is deconstructing the weight-bearing walls of the Western canon, subverting its appeal, questioning its meaning. Homer and Joyce and Christ himself are fair game, because in many ways, we remain trapped by these myths. Using an uncanny narrative, Gray reminds us that great stories can never be fully told or defined. We have wandered into the wonderful, swirling stew of entropy, where Gray challenges the very expectation of what a short story can do. He reexamines form, whether taking the conventional love story and twisting it into a macabre meditation on Christ, or turning the Odyssey into a journey with no end. You will walk away shaken, unsteady, but absolutely enthralled.”

Entropic FC

May 232016
 

Capture

Okay, this is one of those, you know, things that come out of the blue. Tom Greene, VCFA’s president, called me from his car this morning to tell me they had launched a new Vermont College of Fine Arts Artists Development Fund based on a $1 million donation from the Martin Foundation. Part of the fund, a fund within the fund for writers, authors, and publishers, is named after me.

Douglas Glover Fund

The announcement just went up on Friday. You can find the relevant VCFA web page here. And you can download Artists Development Fund brochure here.

Naturally, I am nonplussed, amazed, bemused, and touched. I am grateful to the Martin Foundation for singling me out like this. It’s a terrific honour. I hope the fund inspires and supports many, many great writers in the future.

There is, of course, backstory here. But so far the donor wishes to remain anonymous, and I won’t blab.

dg

 

May 152016
 

Capture

Capture

Micheline Lanctôt and Le Rédempteur, image via Radio-Canada

Actress, director, writer, translator Micheline Lanctôt picked my novel as one of the indispensable books last month on French language CBC Radio. The word they used on air and on their website is “incontournable.” The novel in question is my book The Life and Times of Captain N., first published by Knopf in New York where Gordon Lish was my editor. The French version was published under the title Le Rédempteur  (the redeemer, which was its working title most of the time I was writing it, oddly enough). The translator was the redoubtable Daniel Poliquin who went on to be a prolific novelist himself (this was back in the early 1990s).

Micheline knows my work intimately. She translated my book of stories 16 Categories of Desire into French. It was published as Seize Sortes de Désir. She’s a wonderful actress and director. Long before I actually met her, or even thought of meeting her, I knew exactly who she was, having been entranced with her performance on the screen in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), where she played the French-Canadian love interest opposite Richard Dreyfus.

View the complete list of indispensable books @ Ici on lit at Radio-Canada.

dg

May 152016
 

Carollyn Ogburn

It’s a deep pleasure to announce that Carolyn Ogburn is joining the NC masthead as a contributor. It’s long been a fantasy of mine to open up a music wing of the magazine. We’ve had some sporadic pieces now and then, some wonderful in their own right, but never anything continuous or systematic. Now Carolyn has come along to fill the niche. From now on we should have a semi-regular stream of really good music pieces, interviews mostly to begin with. She’s already done two (see below), and they’re terrific, opening up a whole new experience for our readers and giving us an entry into a new art form. Carolyn is my dream hire: competent, dependable, very smart about music, a good writer, and she can handle WordPress!

Music in the Anthropocene: Interview with Composer Nathan Currier — Carolyn Ogburn

Random Walks: Interview with Composer Ivan Seng — Carolyn Ogburn

Carolyn Ogburn lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina where she takes on a variety of worldly topics from the quiet comfort of her porch. Her writing can be found in the Asheville Poetry Review, the Potomac Review, the Indiana Review, and more. A graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and NC School of the Arts, she writes on literature, autism, music, and disability rights. She is completing an MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is at work on her first novel.

May 082016
 

MetanoiaClick on the image to go to the publisher’s page.

I am a little slow on this. Putting the magazine out is one thing. But then there is keeping up with the GOOD NEWS.

Sharon McCartney is probably the poet (along with Sydney Lea) we have  published most often in NC. McCartney poems published here were picked for Best Canadian Poetry in both 2012 and 2013. Then in November, 2014, we published a long poetic sequence called Metanoia, which has just now (April) been turned into a gorgeous, small book and published by Biblioasis.

Here’s a teaser from the Biblioasis book description:

T.S. Eliot and Tennessee Ernie Ford, Buddha and Jesus, Jung and Heidegger. Love, solitude, obliteration, the ocean and a sad neighbor who feeds pigeons. Metanoia is an aphoristically narrative poem that engages all of these, a book-length meditation on transformation, enlightenment, on opening one’s eyes. McCartney’s work evinces that journey, the junket into the self.

PRAISE FOR METANOIA

“So much is revealed in so few words … It’s a book that feels light, but its delivery is heavy, and worthy of contemplation … McCartney is merciless in exposing vulnerability, but also builds an intimacy integral to Metanoia’s achievement.”—Quill & Quire, starred review

The book includes a lovely acknowledgement:

Metanoia originally appeared, in a slightly different version, in the November 2014 issue of Numéro Cinq. Sincere thanks to Douglas Glover and everyone at Numéro Cinq.

A couple of informal observations:

  1. This isn’t the first book we’ve published in the magazine. We just did Sam Savage’s Collected Poems last month. We also published a complete novel by Robert Day as a serial. And Pat Keane’s essay (also last month) is essentially a book-length piece.
  2. Sharon McCartney is something else, a poet with a personal vision who, in work after work, digs deeper into the exposed tissue of her own soul.
  3. The best news of all: We have more Sharon McCartney poems coming in the June issue.

dg

Apr 232016
 

Logo large

All good at Numéro Cinq Magazine. We’re still at zero for security issues on the Google Search Console. I have updated the magazine security software and we have a new caching engine.

The new security software delivers email alerts when someone tries to sign into the site, and so I see all the IP addresses for people who don’t have a correct username. It’s a bit chilling sometimes. My username was pretty generic and somehow someone guessed it or found it out. And last night there were over a hundred attempts to log in with that username (now defunct) without the correct password, of course. These attempts came from all over the world (so you know it’s a bot, not likely a real person). They started in Saint Petersburg, Russia, thence to Uruguay, then South Korea. Then they just came up everywhere. I am told that this is what’s called a brute force attack and is part of the background noise of the Internet.

Pretty soon I am going to turn off the email alerts. They are a bit too unnerving to watch. Truth is this has been happening all along and I just never noticed.

The good news is that the security software locks each one of these IP addresses out.

dg

Apr 202016
 

Looks like we might be clear. The site redirect malware is gone. And the Google security alert now reads:

Security Issues

Currently, we haven’t detected any security issues with your site’s content.

I am redoing our internal security setup and that also includes changing the site’s caching software. So please bear with us if the site seems a little slow. We should have everything ironed out by next week.

dg

Apr 172016
 

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The bad news is that NC is still hacked. Google Search security is showing three infected pages; Jonah (our tech team) has found another suspicious file.

My moment of bravado yesterday was misplaced. We found one piece of malicious code, not the whole lot.

It’s detective work. Funding the infected spots in the code and also finding out how they got there.

Jonah is our Hercule Poirot.

On the other hand, we can go nuclear. The good news is that we pay for daily backups. Our latest hunch is that the infections started April 5 when I got horribly efficient and updated three plugins. I could roll the site back to April 1 or so and get rid of all the infections in one fell swoop. We would lose the April issue, but we can reconstruct that.

Apr 152016
 

NC Masthead LogoClick on the image to go to the Masthead.

 

Ever since we started listing all the writers, translators, artists, & musicians who have contributed to NC on the masthead page, I’ve been curious about the numbers. So this morning in an OCD fit, I counted them. I think I miscounted, but it’s something over 625 contributors. A small town! Just take a look at the page. It’s a VERY LONG LIST.

Also take a moment to reflect upon the brilliant collection of brilliant writers who makes up our vast collection of  editors and contributors. Many have their own NC Archive Pages, which list all their contributions to the magazine. Click on their names on the Masthead to see their pages.

The sheer mass, the accumulation, should give you pause. It’s quite amazing.