ERNEST HEKKANEN: SOCIAL HISTORIAN and RENAISSANCE MAN

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Ernest Hekkanen is one focussed writer. I was just at an event at the Nelson Municipal Library where he launched not one, but two books: a collection of gritty short stories and story autopsies, All Night Gas Bar; and Wintering Over: Poems Strewn on Snow.

Being of the poetic persuasion myself, I was first drawn to the poems, which I have been dipping into. I am inevitably rewarded with some wonderful lines and images, as from The Surreal Frozen Landscape —


The warming trend continues one degree
at a time, and now arpeggios of snow
cascade with musical precision
from boughs bent severely earthward.

or this, from a poem called Winter Morning, Warm Thoughts —

III

O, to feel the sun's warmth

kiss my skin

one more time.

To feel it infuse

every cell

of my body.

I would give anything

to be caressed

like caramel

against the roof

of God's mouth.

Savored,

just savored

for being me.

Ernest told us that he wrote the poems during the winter when he was dealing with depression, something many of us can relate to when it comes to day after day after soul-sucking day of low-hanging clouds and darkness. I just know that, come about February, unless I've managed to shake off winter in some far-off sunny clime, I will be returning to this book for comfort. Safety in numbers.

The short stories are something else again. In the early seventies, shortly after he arrived in Canada as a war resister like so many other young Americans did, Ernest had a variety of jobs, all of which he credits with providing him with something to write about. For three years he worked graveyards as a gas station attendant in Vancouver's infamous downtown Eastside at Hastings and Semlin. He jotted down notes about his experiences — being held-up was a fairly regular occurrence — and turned them into short stories which he tried to get published with very little success (although in 1976 one of them made it into Prism International). He finally stuffed them into a box, which in the way of writers he kept all these years until he rediscovered them during one of those rigourous clean-outs many of us have from time to time (especially, speaking personally here, since the proliferation of TV shows like Hoarders). Reading them over, he found they took him back to the time they were written, so he typed them into a machine, did a soupçon of editing, and then came up with the "story autopsies" idea, in which he wrote about the writing of the stories and interspersed the results with the stories themselves. It makes for a fascinating look at a time, not that long ago, when life was just a little bit different. Having read his depiction of the hazards of working at a gas station at night, I no longer wonder about the validity of the recent BC law that requires people to pay for their gas before filling their vehicle. All Night Gas Bar is a fascinating look at the Vancouver of yesteryear.

Ernest's partner and muse, Margrith Schraner, looked after the book table. Margrith is a writer herself, notably of the short story, Dream Dig, which was published in The New Orphic Review and subsequently included in 2001's Journey Prize Anthology, and of a biography of Ernest, The Reluctant Author: the life and literature of Ernest Hekkanen, New Orphic Publishers, 2006.

Sales were brisk, and Ernest signed a lot of books.

Both All Night Gas Bar; and Wintering Over: Poems Strewn on Snow are published by New Orphic Publishers, Ernest's publishing imprint. He and Margrith edit The New Orphic Review, a literary magazine that comes out in the spring and the fall (and one in which my own work has appeared).

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CELEBRATE RITA MOIR'S "THE THIRD CROP" AUGUST 21st!!

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Rita in Ymir last fall, hard at work on The Third Crop

Rita Moir has a new book and she's launching it at the Vallican Whole on Sunday, August 21st, at 3:30 PM. 


The Third Crop is the story of the Slocan Valley from the 1800s to the early 1940s. It has over 160 photographs culled from government archives and personal collections, with Rita weaving the stories she discovered into an wonderfully cohesive whole. The Third Crop is Rita's fourth book. It's published by Sono Nis Press. 


The Slocan Valley is an absolutely stunning part of south eastern British Columbia, conveniently located right near where I live in the West Kootenays. I've been going there since I was a kid and to this day it remains, for me, a step back in time. Oh, it's got all the modcons—cell phones, somewhat regrettably, actually work here and there in the valley now and you can get high-speed Internet, but drive the highway or one of the less traveled roads that follow the meandering Slocan River and you'll be bewitched by the beauty of the place in any season. 


I will admit to having a bit of a soft spot for the area because Ted and I got married at the Vallican Whole, where Rita's launch will take place. (One of our guests who was from Toronto went for a walk in the woods at one point and came back rhapsodizing because she'd encountered a deer. There's always some form of wildlife to admire; not always human.) The Whole is celebrating its 40th anniversary this month with a weekend party August 26-28.

MARCH—WHAT TO READ, WHAT TO DO

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Sometimes keeping a blog is just plain onerous. This is one of those times. I watch the visitor numbers go up and think, who? Why? Bloggers like me who don't solicit comments or other nods that someone's reading are often riddled with guilt when they don't post new stuff, and why? It's not like anyone's complaining. Ah, the cyber-age. It's getting to me.


Okay, so in poetry-land, what's happening? On Valentine's Day I got word that The Antigonish Review will be publishing one of my poems in a future issue. I'm pretty happy about that, and a shout-out to the editors there; turnaround time from November 23, 2010 to Feb 14, 2011 is just shy of three months. Not bad! I wasn't even starting to look for a response, and nor am I for the other three submissions I sent out that day. Four to six months is kind of the norm. Of course, just to keep me humble, I got rejections from two other places the next week. Now to toss those babies in the shower, clean them up and send them off to somebody else.


February never got a post from me as I was away for two weeks in Mexico where we walked on the five-kilometer beach and ate wonderful food and read books. And drank the odd beer! 

The sunsets were incredible...

Bright colours everywhere at the Friday market...

After we got back several people asked if we felt safe, given all the news of drug-related shootings coming out of there. Well, yes, we did feel perfectly safe. Which is why it was a bit of a shock one day to observe these kids on the beach. Look closely and you'll see that each of the boys is carrying a gun. 'Guns are not toys,' I thought somewhat indignantly, then remembered my son making one out of Lego when he was little. What is the attraction? 

This little guy (he was about 2 inches long) was shedding his skin. When first I spied him on the floor I thought he'd been stepped on, but he was just resting.

Surfacing...

 Egret hanging out at the mangrove swamp...

Me and my guy...

I took some poetry with me: John Steffler's Lookout, plus an anthology of new Canadian poems. After our trip to Newfoundland in 2009 I somehow heard about Steffler's The Grey Islands, a long narrative poem originally published in 1985 that chronicles life on a remote island off the northern peninsula there. Wilderness writing at its finest. I picked up a 2-CD dramatic reading of same last year. I listen to it whenever I have long, solitary drives, and love the way it plants me back in that wild, unruly, beautiful province.


Also on the reading list was The Song Reader, by Lisa Tucker, which I enjoyed, and The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein, which is narrated very effectively (and affectively, come to think of it) by a dog, and The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, which is set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early sixties, so you know what kind of "help" we're talking about here. I love vacation reading. These were three "can't put it down" books, especially The Help which is 450-odd pages and I read it in two days (I'm not a speed reader by any means).


All too soon, it was time to come home. Since being back, I've been reading lots of Dorianne Laux's poetry, and An Autoerotic History of Swings by Patricia Young. In the prose department, I finally finished Stephen King's Under the Dome. I used to read him like crazy, gave up around the time he wrote Gerald's Game, I think it was. This book, which was over 1,000 pages long, reminded me a little of The Stand, the first of his books I ever read and one I loved. Apparently, he's been writing Under the Dome since the 70's, so that may explain my patience with it.


The other day I picked up the mail and there in a plain brown envelope was a chapbook, An Ode to my Nephew, by Kelsey Wiebe. She sent it along because, she wrote, she remembered how intrigued I was by all the obscure chapbooks in her basement in Prince George when Ted and I were up in that part of the province visiting his cousin in Terrace, who also happens to be Kelsey's grandmother. Well yes, I am always intrigued by chapbooks and am always delighted to find them in someone's house. Such a time-honoured way of getting poems out into the world. This collection of poems dedicated to Kelsey's young nephew made me laugh, cry, and I found myself nodding in appreciation at several of her lines. In the way of all good poems, she writes of universal truths but manages to find fresh, new ways to do so. In family photos: take two, for example, she says:


we set you up as a focal point on the yellowed lawn,
pointed your brown shoes perpendicular and waited
for happiness.


How lucky are children who have poems written for/about them!


Over and out for this time. Thanks for stopping by!


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OF CABBAGE PATCH KIDS AND TRIVIAL PURSUIT AND SMALL, ELEGANT PRESSES

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Nov. 25/10 update: Here's a video of how Gaspereau makes books. Now, back to your regular programming!

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In 1982, the board game Trivial Pursuit appeared on the radar of seasonal must-haves. Everybody wanted it, especially if you'd had a chance to play it. I ordered one at Toys-R-Us in Toronto, there was a wait of I forget how long, and the day they arrived I still had to line up outside while guards let a few customers into the store at a time. The next year everyone wanted a Cabbage Patch Kid. When the odd, yet strangely anthropomorphic dolls suddenly became the latest fad, people hoping to get their hands on one lined up at department stores where fights broke out. I remember watching this very clip with a mixture of disbelief and horror. 

But you know what? I suspect everyone who really, really wanted to play Trivial Pursuit and everyone who wanted a Cabbage Patch Kid eventually got one. It's not such a bad thing, anticipation.

I just spent twenty minutes looking for a book of poems. I have a lot of poetry books, as it happens. I'm a bit of a junkie that way. I house them in white IKEA shelving units on the wall behind my desk downstairs. They are in alphabetical order, by author. Which is why I was completely flummoxed just now when I went to get George Elliot Clarke's Execution Poems and it wasn't under the Cs. Well, as it turned out, it was, but as it was snuggled between the attention-getting green of John A. (Jack to his legion of friends) Charters' 1981 chapbook, The Dragon Tree and the black spine of Leonard Cohen's Stranger Music, I missed it the first two times I looked. You can see how this happened.

Over coffee this morning I was talking to my husband, Ted, about how annoyed I was by some of the snarky remarks I've seen online lately (reader comments on stories posted at the Globe and Mail and National Post and CBC, for example) pitched at Gaspereau Press ever since Johanna Skibsrud won the Giller for her 2009 novel, The Sentimentalists.

Skibsrud had the temerity to get her novel published by Gaspereau Press, a Kentville, Nova Scotia company who announces itself on its very shingle as being "Printers and Publishers". Note the order.

The original print run for The Sentimentalists was ± 800 copies. Gaspereau says it can only make about 1000 copies a week (which, to me, is pretty impressive in and of itself), but thanks to the big win there is suddenly demand, and the Indigos and Chapters of this world are indignant as hell because they can't get copies of the book as fast as they'd like. Which is yesterday. After all, it's all about sell, sell, sell, making hay when the sun shines, books are business, baby, and if you don't believe that, get over it.

People are incensed. They want to read Skibsrud's out-of-the-park home run NOW, but there are no copies to be had, anywhere. As of this writing, Amazon.ca has links to two used copies, one for $685 and one for $1600. ABE has none, although they do have a copy of a Glimmer Train anthology that includes a short story by Skibsrud. "Highly coveted and very hard to find," says the ad for one of the available second-hand copies of The Sentimentalists. No kidding.

I was looking for George Elliott Clarke's book because I wanted to show Ted what by a Gaspereau Press book is about. Come to think of it, I probably shouldn't have "looked" for Execution Poems. I could find Gaspereau Press books, at least the three I own, by touch, in the dark, thanks to their enormously tactile and touch-friendly letterpress jackets. (For an interesting look at how such covers are produced, have a look at Gaspereau Press's own blog on the subject.)

Gaspereau Press books feel different. They have texture, not shine. Open them up and the attention to detail is obvious.

Thomas Wharton's The Logogryph), comes in three parts. There's the book itself, perfect bound with a card stock weight cover, a dust jacket, and a sleeve that fits over both.  This book was responsible for my reading Wharton's blog of the same name until he closed it down last year as he found it was taking a lot of time, as blogs do, if they're done with much thought. I was one of those lurking readers (like a number of you, I expect). Never commented on, but appreciated his posts.

Throughout the book are images of Wesley Bates' exquisite wood engravings. 

In June, 2009, my friend Heather and I were handling a book table at a writers' weekend in Creston. Poet—well, not just a poet; essayist, teacher, mentor, novelist, short story writer—Tom Wayman brought in some of his books, including one little 4.5x7 inch number that caught my eye immediately. Songs Without Price, subtitled The Music of Poetry in a Discordant World, was originally presented by Tom when he was giving the Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet Lecture at Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo, BC, October 2007. Production of the accompanying book was done through the publishing workshop at the College. The series is presented by The Institute for Coastal Research. 

You have to get past the cover to the back page to find where it was printed and bound: Gaspereau Press.

Gaspereau's archive of press releases and list of authors is a who's who of many of our literary greats: Don McKay, Tim Bowling, George Elliot Clarke, Thomas Wharton, Jan Zwicky, Anne Simpson, Ven Begamudré, Patrick Friesen, Wanda Campbell, who recently published Looking for Lucy with BC's own Leaf Press (another of my personal favourites as far as presses are concerned), the list goes on and on. 

What a conundrum it is, this getting published. There are not a whole lot of publishers in Canada. There are a lot of writers looking for publishers. Arts' funding has been cut, cut, cut, everywhere. Out of the hundreds, sometimes thousands of submissions they get, publishers only accept a handful of books every year. Skibsrub herself has two poetry collections with Gaspereau Press: Late Nights With Wild Cowboys (2008) and I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being (2010), in addition to her 2009 award winner that inadvertently prompted this post. Try and find a copy of any of her books right now. 

And while you're wandering around over there at Gaspereau Press's website (and as of this writing I will allow that the link to their books is not working, and I'm not surprised), read their submissions guidelines, something any author who is serious about getting published will have done before they take the time and trouble to send off their work.  Gaspereau Press, say the guidelines, publishes "short-run editions of both literary and regional interest." Short run. As in, they're not equipped for large runs, and nor do they want to be. Any of their authors know this. 

And in spite of the unwritten caveat that in the event of the lottery gods smiling and a mega-prize being won, the press may not be able to keep up with demand which may result in the loss of a few sales, I can't think of any of my writer friends who wouldn't love to be published by Gaspereau Press. 

Hats off.

UPDATE

Nov. 15, 2010  This just in via Quill and Quire: Gaspereau Press has sold the rights to print the book to Douglas and McIntyre. 30,000 copies will ship November 19. Here's the link to D&M's press release. Sounds like a big win all around.

Oh, and Gaspereau Press is still doing what they do, and I'm ordering a copy through them. I don't mind waiting.

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