fwd; call for submissions; Matrix magazine's LitPop Awards!

Incredible prizes for incredible writing:

The POP Montreal International Music Festival and Matrix Magazine have joined forces to melt your face and scare your parents with Canada’s most innovative and exciting literary competition. We are looking for writing that makes ears ring and throats hoarse. So if you can bring the rock heat with poetry and/or short fiction, it’s time to break some hearts and/or scare some parents. If you have what it takes, you will get your work published in Matrix, and get free travel to POP Montreal for a night in your honour.

The winners, one from each category, will receive a round-trip ticket to POP Montreal from September 19-23, 2012, a VIP pass to the Pop Montreal Festival, free accommodation at a bed and breakfast, fall publication in Matrix Magazine with full honorarium, and presentation at a special Matrix Litpop event during the festival.

The deadline for all submissions is July 1, 2012. Winners will be notified in August. Poets are asked to send no more than 5 poems; fiction and non-fiction writers should send stories of no more than 3000 words. Each entry is 25$ and entries and entry fees should be mailed to Matrix Publications, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W., LB 658, Montreal QC, H3G 1M8. Please include your email address. Cheques or money orders should be made out to "Matrix Publications." PayPal is also available. Multiple entries are welcome. Entries can also be emailed to litpop2012@gmail.com and will be considered valid once payment is verified. Full contest rules and regulations can be found at www.popmontreal.com and www.matrixmagazine.org/litpop.

The POETRY judge is Ken Babstock the author of Methodist Hatchet (Anansi 2011) and Airstream Land Yacht (Anansi, 2006) winner of The Trillium Prize for Poetry, finalist for the Governor General's Award, The Griffin Prize for Poetry, and The Winterset Award. Earlier collections include Mean, winner of The Atlantic Poetry Prize and The Milton Acorn Award, and Days into Flatspin, winner of a K.M. Hunter Award and finalist for the Winterset Prize. All three books were listed in The Globe and Mail's Books of the Year. His poems have won Gold at the National Magazine Awards, appeared widely in anthologies in Canada, The US, and Ireland, and have been translated into French, German, Dutch, Serbo-Croatian and Czech.

The FICTION judge is Melanie Little. Her debut book, the story collection Confidence, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award and named one of the Globe and Mail's Top 100 books of 2003. Her writing has appeared in the anthologies Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops, Outskirts: Women Writing from Small Places, Certain Things About My Mother, and Nerves Out Loud, as well as in magazines including The Malahat Review, sub-TERRAIN, Prairie Fire, Event, The Fiddlehead, and Books in Canada. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, Georgia Straight, Vancouver Sun, and National Post. She is a past winner of the Writers' Union of Canada Short Prose Competition and the Periodical Writers' Association of Canada Journalism Award. Little holds a Masters of Arts in English Literature from the University of Toronto and is a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of British Columbia, where she served as an editor of PRISM International. She is now the Senior Editor with Anansi Press.

Pathologies: A Life in Essays, by Susan Olding

My father is a pathologist. The origin of the word contains clues to our riddled relationship. Pathos, meaning pity, desolation, suffering. Logos, meaning reason. The word.

Once, when I was fifteen, I asked him to describe his work. My friends had started to wonder what he did for a living. "Tell them a pathologist is a guy who uses big words and pisses in the sink," he said.

Part of the first season of Calgary's new Freehand Books, an imprint of Broadview Press edited by Melanie Little [see my interview with her on such here] is Kingston author Susan Olding's first book, Pathologies: A Life in Essays (2008). A series of personal essays working through various aspects of the author's life, from her relationship with her father, her sister's cancer and her own work as a counsellor and teacher, her essays move through her own infertility and finally adopting her daughter Maia from an orphanage in China. Olding's essays display a clear warmth and intelligence, and she can tell a story and work through the personal essay in such a way that the personal doesn’t turn into either sentiment, or matter-of-fact emotional dismissals. How does she manage to write pieces with such force, talking about the small essential moments with her daughter, wrapped up in the politic and social aspects of adopting a daughter, let alone a daughter that doesn’t look like her? The piece "At Lingyin Si," where she writes about where her daughter was born, begins:

At Lingyin Si in the city of Hangzhou, women come to pray for fertility. Although the name, translated variously as "Palace of the Hidden Immortals," "Temple of Inner Seclusion," and "Temple of the Soul's Retreat," suggests an oasis of tranquility and calm, the place is wildly popular with Chinese and Westerners alike, and all day long its crimson halls echo with the snap, gaggle, and stomp of tourists. Zen monks remain in residence, but the clink of cash registers louder than the chime of prayer bells.

That does not deter the hopeful. On a hot September morning, I stood inside the temple gates with a friend and our newly adopted infant daughters. Together we watched as one young woman paid her respects to Guanhin, Goddess of Mercy. Dropping coins into a wrought iron urn, she gathered sticks of incense and laid them, smoking, at the altar. There they lay against a hill of fruit, flowers, and two- and
ten-yuan notes deposited by other supplicants. The girl's sharp-edged haircut, fashionable clothes, and vivid makeup announced a modern sensibility, but the look on her face expressed reverence and fervent desire. Ignoring the pushing crowds, ignoring our prying eyes, she bowed and whispered her prayers.

Part of what appeals in her pieces is the play of structure, such as the interplay of sections in the essay "Mama's Voices," back and forth from "play," "stop" and "rewind," writing out her daughter's Fisher-Price tape recorder. Still, one of many of the fragments that strike comes out of a piece called "The Easy Way" (in that other mothers have said, because she adopted, she had her daughter "the easy way"), that writes:

I ask Mark for his perspective. He's lived with me a long time; he ought to know. How has becoming a mother changed me? "You're more patient," he says. "And less. More patient with Maia. And less patient with the world."

[Susan Olding reads from Pathologies as part of a four-author Freehand Books launch in Ottawa on September 18]

some photos from a party at Clare Latremouille's house in Ottawaon December 18, 2004, including Priscilla Uppal, Suzannah Showler, Tom Fowler, Christopher Doda, Sean Wilson, Clare Latremouile, Jennifer Mulligan, Wanda O'Connor, Bryan McDonell, Melanie Little, Peter Norman, Stephen Brockwell etc.

aren't you sorry you missed it?