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Media Hits: A WAY TO BE HAPPY, THE EDUCATION OF AUBREY MCKEE, THE NOTEBOOK, and more!

IN THE NEWS!

A WAY TO BE HAPPY

A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson (Sep 10, 2024) has received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews! The starred review will appear in their August print issue, and was published online on July 4. Check it out here.

Kirkus writes,

“Adderson . . . is a deft, masterful storyteller whose literary fiction surely deserves more attention.”

Order A Way to Be Happy here!

HELLO, HORSE

Hello, Horse by Richard Kelly Kemick (Aug 6, 2024) was listed in Reactor‘s “Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for July and August 2024.” The article was posted on July 3, and you can read it here.

Tobias Carroll writes,

“These stories include a number of strange visions of the not-so-distant future—and throw some ghosts into the mix as well. “

Get Hello, Horse here!

THE NOTEBOOK

Roland Allen, author of The Notebook (Sep 3, 2024), was interviewed on Ryan Holiday’s podcast The Daily Stoic. The episode aired on June 26, and is available to listen to here.

Order The Notebook here!

THE HOLLOW BEAST

The Hollow Beast by Christophe Bernard, translated by Lazer Lederhendler (Apr 2, 2024), was reviewed in the Manhattan Book Review. The review was published online for their June issue, and is available to read here.

Reviewer Eric Smith writes,

“Bernard’s hilarious tome is a hundred-proof fever dream of bizarre scenarios and Canada’s most outlandish cast of characters . . . But readers beware. Your technicolor nightmares will be fueled by The Hollow Beast.”

Grab The Hollow Beast here!

AWARD NEWS!

THE EDUCATION OF AUBREY MCKEE

The Education of Aubrey McKee by Alex Pugsley (May 7, 2024) has been longlisted for the 2024 Toronto Book Awards! The longlist was announced on July 4, and you can read it here.

Toronto Public Library has created a special reading list of the 2024 longlisted titles, here. The shortlist for the 2024 Toronto Book Awards will be announced later this summer and a winner will be named in a prize ceremony November 7.

Grab The Education of Aubrey McKee here!

Or, check out the first book, Aubrey McKee, here.

ON WRITING AND FAILURE, TRY NOT TO BE STRANGE, DANTE’S INDIANA: Reviews and Interviews!

IN THE NEWS!

ON WRITING AND FAILURE

On Writing and Failure (February 14, 2023) by Stephen Marche has been reviewed in the Globe and Mail. The review was published online on February 23, 2023. You can read the full review here.

Reviewer Sandra Martin writes,

“While writing starts with one person, an empty page and an urge to say something, it ends with another person reading your words, digesting them and making a judgment. […] That’s why I’m keeping On Writing and Failure on my desk—for encouragement—which I am guessing is Marche’s true purpose in writing the book.”

On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche has been excerpted in The Atlantic. The excerpt was published online on February 21, 2023. You can read the full excerpt here.

Stephen Marche has been interviewed on The Times Literary Supplement podcast and The Commentary podcast. Both aired on February 16, 2023. You can listen to the full TLS podcast episode here, and the full episode of The Commentary here.

Stephen Marche has also been interviewed by Tara Henley in her newsletter Lean Out with Tara Henley. The interview was published online on February 19, 2023. Read the full interview here.

During the interview, Marche says,

“I think what I find very powerful is those feelings of connection that you get across time and space, that really only writing can provide. […] That cosmopolitanism in time and space and that web of connections—to even be a small part of that is very powerful.”

Grab your copy of On Writing and Failure here!

TRY NOT TO BE STRANGE

Try Not to Be Strange by Michael Hingston (September 13, 2022) has been reviewed in Alberta Views. The review appears in the March 2023 print edition.

Megan Clark writes:

Try Not to Be Strange takes on the magnificent feat of writing the history of a persistent and yet barely extant literary kingdom. […] The charm of the book, really, is the earnestness with which Hingston approaches the story.”

Get your copy of Try Not to Be Strange here!

DANTE’S INDIANA

Dante’s Indiana by Randy Boyagoda (September 2021) has been reviewed in America Magazine. The review was published on February 15, 2023. Read the full review here.

Gregory Wolfe writes:

“Using the literary framework of Dante’s three-part epic poem ‘The Divine Comedy’ as a lens through which to cast a sardonic eye on the present moment is hardly a new idea, but it has proven to be a durable one.”

Grab your copy of Dante’s Indiana here!

Check out the first book, Original Prin, here!

J.I. Segal Award: Three Questions with Robyn Sarah

Reposted from the J.I. Segal Award website

Poet Robyn Sarah’s memoir, Music, Late and Soon (Biblioasis, 2021) is one of the five nominees for the2022 J.I. Segal Award for the Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme. Congratulations, Robyn! The prize is accompanied by an award of $5,000. Music, Late and Soon recounts her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In relating this experience, she reflects on her years spent at Le Conservatoire de musique de Québec studying the clarinet where it seemed clear that her career as an orchestral musician was set. But Sarah was already a writer at heart and this fascinating memoir shows a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed.

Congratulations, Robyn, on your work to bring this experience into your writing. It shows us an insight into how creativity is a whole jumble of disciplines, practices, inspirations and experiences. And in order to dive deeper into that question, we asked Robyn the Three Questions and her answers were very thoughtful, detailed and informative.

Three Questions with Robyn Sarah

Question One: What part of the writing process is the most exciting? Starting a project? Finishing it? Editing? Or some other part of the process? Why?

What we call “the writing process” may not divide up into such tidy parts. When exactly does a project start? An idea can germinate at the back of the mind for weeks, months or years before the first sentences get written—and those sentences may prove to be a dead end, or grow into an opening chapter that will ultimately be scrapped. When is a book finished? Months of rewriting (prompted by an editor) can follow delivery of a “final” manuscript that the writer has already put through multiple versions Much of this process is less than exciting. Challenging, yes; compulsively engaging; but also implacably demanding and laborious. Books don’t write themselves; you have to write every word. You are in the grip of something. And all along the way there are self-doubts and misgivings, stalls, wrong turns, detours, patches of fog, impasses.

So where does excitement come in? It, too, can come at any point along the way, but it tends to come in flashes, mini-revelations, moments when something falls magically into place. You are handed a little gift by your subconscious, which has clearly been working on it. Suddenly you see where your story must begin. Suddenly you realize you can connect two images or scenes so each sheds light on the other. Suddenly you hit upon the exact word to describe the expression on somebody’s face, a word you’ve looked for in vain—or you see how to fix an inelegant sentence that has several times defied your efforts to rephrase it to better effect. A seemingly impossible structural problem solves itself when you change the order of a few chapters. Maybe you recognize with a small electric shock that the sentence you’ve just written should be the last sentence in your book—a perfect ending that came to you prematurely. You’re nowhere near the end of the book, but you cut/paste and copy that sentence onto a clean page and save it like treasure. Now you just have to figure out how to get to it.

Question Two: What under-appreciated book or write are you a fan of and why?

Adele Wiseman was not a prolific writer, but she left a small body of highly original work. These days I rarely hear mention of her novels, The Sacrifice (1956) or Crackpot (1974), though the first won a Governor General’s Award when the author was only 28, and the second was a J.I. Segal award winner. Much less known is a book of hers I’ve placed on the “one-of-a-kind” shelf of my bookcase. Published in 1978, a mere 148 pages, Old Woman at Play defies categorization. Its focus is on Wiseman’s mother Chaika in her late years—in particular, on Chaika’s decades-long passion for making dolls out of scraps of fabric and junk, giving each a name, a bit of a history, even a doll companion.

Part memoir, part dialogue, part meditation on creative process, the book is an intimate portrait of an multigenerational family, told largely through scraps of conversation (both remembered and current) between Wiseman and her Ukrainian Jewish parents, living out their last years under their daughter’s roof in Toronto. Her parents reminisce about their old country childhood in Russian villages, their immigration to North America in the 1920s, the long years working day and night as tailor and dressmaker to feed their family in Winnipeg during the Depression. All the while, amid the daily life of her grown daughter’s household, Chaika Waisman’s hands are busy making dolls, and her writer-daughter, fascinated by the profusion and variety of these playful personae, keeps trying to coax out of her mother some explanation of why she makes them and what the activity means to her.

Why do I value this book? I think it’s because it gets at the heart of human creativity better than anything else I’ve read—honouring it without glorifying or falsifying, recognizing it as something not set apart from the rest of life but intrinsically bound up with it. In her mother’s “naive” art, Wiseman finds confirmation “that art, uncapitalized … is our human birthright, the extraordinary right and privilege to share, both as givers and receivers, in the work of continuous creation.”

Question Three: If you weren’t a writer and could do a totally different creative profession, what would it be and why?

From childhood I’ve had two creative passions, writing and music, and all my life I have practiced both. In my early twenties I felt pulled between them. I did not become a professional musician, and for the most part, I have no regrets about that choice. My memoir, Music, Late and Soonwas my attempt to explain to myself why I turned away from music as a career path—why I stopped studying music at twenty-four, and why I returned to it seriously (for its own sake) at nearly sixty.

If I were not a writer and could have a completely different profession, it might not be a creative one at all. I find the whole idea of being a creative “professional’ a thorny one. But if I had to name a third creative art I could study and practice seriously, it would be visual—painting, drawing, or sculpture. I would love to be able to represent the world in visual terms, working with colours, lines, and shapes, and with physical materials, rather than with words, sentences and paragraphs. Words take us into ourselves, into our heads, because we think in words. One thing I love about music is that it’s non-verbal; it takes me out of myself. I think it would be the same with visual art.

The winner of the prize will be announced on Thursday, December 22 at 10am.

Pick up your copy of Music, Late and Soon here!

ABOUT MUSIC, LATE AND SOON

Shortlisted for the J.I. Segal Awards Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme • Shortlisted for the The Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction

A poet rediscovers the artistic passion of her youth—and pays tribute to the teacher she thought she’d lost.

After thirty-five years as an “on-again, off-again, uncoached closet pianist,” poet and writer Robyn Sarah picked up the phone one day and called her old piano teacher, whom she had last seen in her early twenties. Music, Late and Soon is the story of her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In tandem, she reflects on a previously unexamined musical past: a decade spent at Quebec’s Conservatoire de Musique, studying clarinet—ostensibly headed for a career as an orchestral musician, but already a writer at heart. A meditation on creative process in both music and literary art, this two-tiered musical autobiography interweaves past and present as it tracks the author’s long-ago defection from a musical career path and her late re-embrace of serious practice. At its core is a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed.

ABOUT ROBYN SARAH

Robyn Sarah is the author of eleven collections of poems, two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. In 2017 Biblioasis published a forty-year retrospective, Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems, 1975-2015. Sarah’s poems have been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry and have been broadcast by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. From 2011 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books. She has lived for most of her life in Montréal.

Reviews, Awards, and Interviews: CASE STUDY, ORDINARY WONDER TALES, CONFESSIONS WITH KEITH, and more!

IN THE NEWS!

CASE STUDY

Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet (November 1, 2022) has been reviewed by Christian Lorentzen in the New York Times! The review was published online on November 1, 2022. Read the full NYT review here.

Lorentzen writes,

Case Study has a lot in common with the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Roberto Bolaño, in which invented characters pass through tumultuous episodes of literary history that never quite happened, though it seems as if they should have. … Case Study is a diverting novel, overflowing with clever plays on and inversions of tropes of English intellectual and social life during the postwar decades.”

Case Study has been featured on Lit Hub as one of “18 new books to kick your November reading into gear.” The list was posted on November 1, 2022 and can be read here.

Case Study was reviewed by Jessica Brockmole for The Historical Novel Society. The review was published online on November 1, 2022. Read the full review here.

Brockmole writes,

Case Study is a dizzying dive into British counterculture of the 1960s and the radical anti-psychiatry movement … wildly inventive and slickly written. The notebooks feel so casually and authentically from the period, with ‘Rebecca’s’ word choices and the details she includes saying as much about 1960s British society as they do about her place in it. ‘Rebecca’ is deliciously unreliable as a narrator.”

Graeme Macrae Burnet has been interviewed by Lily Meyer for Crime Reads. The interview was posted online on November 3, 2022 an can be read here.

Meyer writes,

“Burnet propels readers through the novel with his fierce, hilarious intelligence.”

Case Study has also been excerpted in Lit Hub and featured by Vol 1. Brooklyn as part of their “November 2022 Book Preview.” The excerpt, and preview were published online on November 3, 2022. Read the Lit Hub here, and Vol 1. Brooklyn here.

Grab your copy of Case Study here!

ORDINARY WONDER TALES

Emily Urquhart, author of Ordinary Wonder Tales (November 1, 2022), was interviewed by Lisa Godfrey on CBC Ideas! The episode on hauntings aired on October 25, 2022. Emily’s segment begins at 25:00 mins. Listen to the full episode here.

Ordinary Wonder Tales has been reviewed by Kathleen Rooney in LIBER: A Feminist Review. The review will be published in print in their Winter 2022 issue. Read the full review here.

Kathleen writes,

“In Ordinary Wonder Tales, Urquhart stylishly combines her personal experiences with her academic expertise, leading to a reading experience that feels entertaining and casual yet also edifying … It’s a testament to Urquhart’s own formidable storytelling skill that each of her essays inspires a quiet awe.”

Ordinary Wonder Tales was been listed in CBC Books and Toronto Life!

The CBC Books list, “20 Canadian books we can’t wait to read in November” was published on November 2, 2022. You can check it out here.

The Toronto Life list, “Sixteen things to see, do, read and hear in Toronto this November” was published on October 28, 2022. You can read the full list here.

Order your copy of Ordinary Wonder Tales here!

THE AFFIRMATIONS

Luke Hathaway‘s poem “As the part hanteth after the water brooks” from The Affirmations (April 5, 2022), won the Confederation Poets Prize by Arc Poetry. The prize winner was announced on October 27, 2022. You can read the full announcement here.

This year’s judge, Brecken Hancock, had this to say about the winning poem:

“In 12 incredibly short lines, Luke Hathaway has captured how we survive and thrive by chance, by lucky accident. These spare lines take the reader on a profound journey with the speaker who has gone “uphill to the well / where I went, as I thought // for my water” only to find an utterly new form of thirst and its remedy waiting there instead. A previously unrecognized, but life-threatening, form of dehydration is alleviated (in what feels like the nick of time) by the startling discovery of a source to quench it. Rather than dwell on what had previously been missing, a sorrowful lack, the poem ends in affirmation—communicating a resonant relief, and, beyond that, the joy and ecstasy that can finally be embodied and expressed when our deepest needs are recognized and met.”

Get your copy of The Affirmations here!

CONFESSIONS WITH KEITH

Confessions with Keith by Pauline Holdstock (October 25, 2022), has been reviewed at Focus on Victoria on October 31, 2022. Read the whole review here.

Reviewer Amy Reiswig writes,

Confessions with Keith reminds us that life is a raw, radiant, and ridiculous story unfolding moment by moment for everyone in their separate subjectivities. It deserves laughter. It deserves tears. It is made more bearable by books like this, the literary equivalent of uncensored midnight conversation over cups of tea or glasses—plural—of wine. What Vita observes of festival street performers could well be said of reading Holdstock’s newest creation: ‘It was a shared experience of human life, a little bit of eternity together.'”

Confessions With Keith has also been reviewed at the BC Review. Read the whole review here.

Reviewer Candace Fertile writes,

“Things going wrong on many levels is the focus of the novel, but Vita’s ability to plough through the problems and often see the humour even when exhausted is refreshing … Confessions with Keith deals with real life issues in a frenetic and funny manner.”

Get your copy of Confessions with Keith here!

THIS TIME, THAT PLACE

This Time, That Place: Selected Stories by Clark Blaise (October 18, 2022) has been excerpted at Open Book. The excerpt is from the story “Translation” and was published Nov 1, 2022. You can read it here.

This Time, That Place also received a starred review at Quill & Quire. The review was published on November 2, 2022. Check out the whole review here.

Reviewer Steven W. Beattie writes,

“Blaise is … almost preternaturally adept at noticing things … sublime technique and linguistic finesse [are] showcased in these inestimable short works.”

Pick up your copy of This Time, That Place here!

TRY NOT TO BE STRANGE

Michael Hingston, author of Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda (September 13, 2022), has been reviewed by MA Orthofer in The Complete Review. The article was published on October 30, 2022. You can read the full review here.

Orthofer writes,

Try Not to be Strange is an enjoyable account of a bizarre not-quite-real place, with a rich cast of characters—not least Hingston himself, who amusingly tracks his own obsessiveness.”

Michael Hingston has also been interviewed on Across the Pond podcast and New & Used podcast! Both episodes were published on November 1, 2022. You can listen to Across the Pond here, and New & Used here.

Get your copy of Try Not to Be Strange here!

Spotlight On: THE PARTY WALL by CATHERINE LEROUX

Summer is ending, and autumn is nearly here! For the month of September, our featured pick for the Biblioasis Spotlight Series highlights award-winning Quebec author Catherine Leroux with her English-language debut, The Party Wall (translated by Lazer Lederhendler). Read on for a deeply insightful note from Catherine, and be sure to keep an eye out later this month for an excerpt in our newsletter!

THE PARTY WALL

Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation • Shortlisted for the 2016 Giller Prize • Selected for Indies Introduce Summer/Fall 2016 • Winner of the Prestigious France-Quebec Prize • Nominated for the Quebec Bookseller’s Prize

Catherine Leroux’s The Party Wall shifts between and ties together stories about pairs joined in surprising ways. A woman learns that she may not be the biological mother of her own son despite having given birth to him; a brother and sister unite, as their mother dies, to search for their long-lost father; two young sisters take a detour home, unaware of the tragedy that awaits; and a political couple—when the husband accedes to power in a post-apocalyptic future state—is shaken by the revelation of their own shared, if equally unknown, history.

Lyrical, intelligent, and profound, The Party Wall is luminously human, a surreally unforgettable journey through the barriers that can both separate us and bring us together.

“…an intoxicating blend of the familiar and the uncanny, brilliantly executed … The Party Wall has the narrative force of a Hollywood film, while also offering richly executed portraits of the characters’ interior lives.”—Montreal Review of Books

“… superbly crafted … Leroux skillfully reveals the inner worlds of her achingly human characters and the intricate bonds that connect them to each other. Images from this beautiful and moving book will haunt readers.”—Publishers Weekly

Catherine Leroux was born in 1979 in the Northern suburbs of Montreal. Her first novel, Marche en forêt, was published in 2011 by Éditions Alto. The Party Wall, her English-language debut published with Biblioasis in 2016, was selected for Indies Introduce for Summer/Fall, shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and won the Governor General’s Award for Translation. Her subsequent novels, Madame Victoria and L’avenir were shortlisted and won various awards. Catherine lives in Montreal where she devotes her time between writing, translation and editorial work.

Get your copy of The Party Wall here!

Check out Catherine’s third book, Madame Victoria, here!

 

Photo Credit: Audrée Wilhemy

A WORD FROM CATHERINE LEROUX

Canaries in the Coal Mine

I started writing The Party Wall in 2011. At the time, the book felt slightly hyperbolic, especially the chapters situated in the near future: Canada recovering from years of right-wing, divisive, autocratic government; the Prairies’ soil gone sterile due to droughts; the coasts flooded by torrential rains. Political and racist violence permeating every sphere of life.

More than a decade later, it doesn’t quite seem like an exaggeration anymore. Back then, the effects of climate change were akin to the first subtle, almost unreal symptoms of an illness, while today, they are unescapable in their devastating potency. The turbulence of the world in which Ariel and Marie evolved now seems tame compared to the schizophrenic landscape created by social and political leaders, both abroad and at home.

What are we to make of these stories, that could have been read a decade ago as anticipatory literary attempts to define still-hazy outlines on the horizon, now that these shapes have materialized into our new reality? I believe it’s a matter of shifting one’s perspective. Through the crises, the characters still love and fight and dream and fail. They still come to life regardless of the time in which they are read. Because of that, they remain capable of opening spaces in our minds where we can think and feel our present, where we may hold hope.

I’ve always liked the idea of novelists as canaries in the coal mine. I did wonder what they might do once the gas has filled the tunnel. For now, against all odds, they are still singing.

 

QUERELLE OF ROBERVAL, THE BARRØY CHRONICLES, A FACTOTUM IN THE BOOK TRADE, CONFESSIONS WITH KEITH, SHIMMER: Reviews and Features!

IN THE NEWS

QUERELLE OF ROBERVAL

Querelle of Roberval (August 2, 2022) by Kevin Lambert, trans. by Donald Winkler has been reviewed in the Toronto Star! The review was posted online on July 28, 2022. You can read the full review here.

Reviewer Bret Josef Grubisic writes,

“Febrile, postmodern to the bone and unexpectedly affecting, the novel is a startling, mile-a-minute performance.”

Get your copy of Querelle of Roberval here!

THE BARRØY CHRONICLES

A piece was published in the Globe and Mail about Roy Jacobsen and the books in The Barrøy Chronicles (The Unseen, White Shadowand Eyes of the Rigel). The piece was published online on July 23, 2022, and was included in the print edition of the weekend paper. You can read the full piece here.
Jacobsen spoke on the importance of history:
“Without history, without memory, people probably will make the wrong choices in the future, that is the philosophical background of the whole series … But the most important part is that, of course, my obligation to where I come from, my parents, and to think about how important memory or history is for present-day life. I have a saying: Every historical novel is a contemporary novel in disguise.”
Translator Don Bartlett said this, on the writing in the next book in the series, Only A Mother:
“In one sentence you can have a question, an answer, a statement, the authorial voice and more, all separated by commas and extending over a paragraph. I haven’t translated any other author who writes like this.”
Start the series with The Unseen here!
Get your copy of White Shadow here!
Get your copy of Eyes of the Rigel here!

A FACTOTUM IN THE BOOK TRADE

A Factotum in the Book Trade by Marius Kociejowski (April 26, 2022) has been featured by Zoomer Magazine as one of their “8 New Titles for Book Lovers.” The list was published online on July 20, 2022.

Read the full list here.

Get your copy of A Factotum in the Book Trade here!

CONFESSIONS WITH KEITH

Pauline Holdstock‘s forthcoming novel, Confessions With Keith (September 6, 2022) was included in the 49th Shelf Fall Fiction Preview! The list was published online on July 11, 2022.

You can see the full list here.

Preorder your copy of Confessions with Keith here!

SHIMMER

Alex Pugsley, author of Shimmer (May 17, 2022), put together a reading list for 49th Shelf highlighting books that helped shape him as a reader and writer, and that hold significance in his life. The list was published online on July 21, 2022.

You can see the full list here.

Pick up your copy of Shimmer here!

CHEMICAL VALLEY, SHIMMER, EYES OF THE RIGEL: Reviews and Interviews!

IN THE NEWS

CHEMICAL VALLEY

Chemical Valley cover

David Huebert, author of Chemical Valley (October 19, 2021), has been interviewed by Jeffrey Dupuis in the The Quarantine Review! The interview was published in their print edition on July 20, 2022. You can read the full interview on pg. 30 here.

In the interview, David says,

“Environmental subjects are polarizing and tend to get reduced through the discourses of climate martyrdom and sensationalism. […] I try not to reduce things to Good and Evil; I seek to focus instead on mess, entanglement, convolution, and complication. I think that’s a truer approach, and it’s one that suits the leaky metaphorics of oils and swamps, what I think of, sometimes, as the dank.”

Order your copy of Chemical Valley here!

SHIMMER

Shimmer (May 17, 2022) by Alex Pugsley was featured on The Quarantine Review‘s ‘Summertime Reading Hotlist’! Check out the list here.

The Quarantine Review on Shimmer:
There is something very intimate, very personal about these stories that remind us of the power held by a good collection of stories. We not only see the author’s growth as a stylist, but also witness the growth and transformation, or failure to grow, of the characters. Pugsley gives us windows into lives that are both familiar and yet distant, exploring them within the limits of the form. Shimmer is a great collection for fans of short stories looking for a summer read that will stick with them through the changing seasons.”
Get your copy of Shimmer here!

EYES OF THE RIGEL

Eyes of the Rigel (April 5, 2022) by Roy Jacobsen also appeared on The Quarantine Review‘s ‘Summertime Reading Hotlist’! Check out the list here.

The Quarantine Review on Eyes of the Rigel:

“Jacobsen’s novel, both epic and intimate, takes us on a journey through a world in the process of rebuilding, a world of uncertainty that has a familiar feeling to many of us as we emerge from the pandemic. This translation by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw has beautiful rhythms and reads like an elegy. It is a great read for someone looking to be transported to another time and place and feel like they experienced it.”

Get your copy of Eyes of the Rigel here!

Check out the first two books in the series here!

A Biblioasis Interview with Patrick McCabe

A Biblioasis Interview with Patrick McCabe

Tell me a bit about yourself.

Well, I suppose I have been a full-time writer for twenty years now. I used to do other jobs, but they are not of any interest to either me or your public. I suppose I have written a lot about contemporary Ireland, the ancient world, and the interplay between them.

How does the ancient world—folklore, myth—influence your work?

I was brought up on the Catholic Gaelic tradition, you know, which is filled with all sorts of contemplations of alternate worlds and alternative realities and that is always really appealing to a child. In my case, it became comingled with what we call the “culture of the degraded image.” Popular culture like horror movies, comic fiction, TV, all sorts of things. The various manifestations and expressions of the inexplicable in the modern world and the ancient world became one for me. That is very true of Poguemahone. It is ancient folklore and contemporary folklore performing a progressive music dance.

There is also an element of hilarity and self-parody as well. I suppose what I like to do in fiction is to do battle with the English language. There is a sympathetic understanding between the two languages—that is to say Gaelic and the English language—in the book but also a kind of mischievous duet. It has been said that the characters speak in English but feel in Irish. Feel in Gaelic, in the Catholic Gaelic tradition, but speak in the Anglo-Saxon, more pragmatic, straight-talking tradition. There is a lot of that kind of dancing going on. Language dancing around itself, as it were.

It is evident on the page and, well, in moments where characters don’t realize they have slipped into Gaelic. Those moments are very poignant.

Well, it is a serious book and, poignant is what I was looking for. It is ultimately about the greatest horror I’ve ever experienced, which is Alzheimer’s. I haven’t experienced this personally, but I have been very close to it. If in the ancient world people said a spell had been cast either on a person, or a town, it might seem to the rational or contemporary mind to be a ludicrous superstition. But, when you are close to Alzheimer’s, it is as good an explanation as any. Because that is what it looks like.

In the age of TikTok and in the age of the information superhighway, we know everything and we know nothing more than the ancients really. A simple plague can knock everything out. If this had been a bubonic plague, none of these things would have counted for anything. They would have just been toys. It might happen yet.

Yes, it might happen yet. I mean, it is obviously a raucous book. But I found it to be quite serious throughout.

It’s meant to be deadly serious—it is the most serious book I’ve ever written. The overlay of hilarity, self-mockery, and parody is just that: an overlay. The subterranean river running through it is one of dread.

My next question is about your narrator—

I’ve been married for a long time, 40 or 50 years now. I’ve got 2.5 grandchildren, there is one coming in May. I’m sort of a traditional anarchist, as it were. Imaginatively anarchistic, socially traditional. I like order. It is very easy to be anarchic in your imagination if you are ordered in your life. If you are disordered in your life, all hell breaks loose on both fronts. I like steadiness.

When I was reading, I couldn’t help but think of Joyce, Nabokov, especially when thinking about Dan, and the role he plays as the narrator—

As a young man I was very influenced by both of those writers. I suppose who you encounter first leaves a lasting mark. I read all of Nabokov’s work, some of it I liked more than others. I mean I found Ada impenetrable. But the other ones are linguistically very exciting. It is all about language in a way for me in the end. If you get the beat and the rhythm and timbre of a language right, the novel usually emerges through the language, through the cracks between the words. I don’t start off with a story, I never have an idea of where it is going to go. I just follow the language.

This book started off as a traditional, chapter-based book. When I saw what I had, I was in despair, and felt like tearing the whole thing up. I didn’t like it, didn’t think it was original enough, and then a couple of things happened that kind of released the book. It was like an emotional pressure valve that, when released, the book came out. And it came out in an entirely different form than originally anticipated.

And that was very true with this, you know. A lot of it is set in the 70s and to the kind of rhythm of the 70s, like Dylan’s Desolation Row or the poetry of Gregory Corso and William Burroughs. It is at once an homage and a means of acknowledging the rhythms of an age which, for me, release the emotions of an age.

A prospective publisher said to me: “I don’t understand why it is written in this middle of the page kind of poetic style.” I said, “well you know, if it is good enough for Ginsberg, it is good enough for me. If it is good enough for TS Eliot, it is good enough for me. But also, didn’t you know that Irish Leprechauns speak in iambic pentameter?” And he said, “no I didn’t,” and I said, “well they do, and I’ve seen them.” At that point, he terminated the phone call.

Yes, well, I am a reader of poetry first and I think, you know, opening a 600-page book of poetry can be daunting for anyone, at first. But it immediately became viscerally clear why you chose this form.

Yes, well, I completely understand those concerns. If it is difficult to read a 600-page book of poetry, it is equally daunting to write it. I didn’t want to write it unless the story barreled along and was very clear. I am no fan of opaque epics. I love poetry but if something is keeping the reader out, rather than bringing the reader in, particularly now more than in any other age, it is already lost. Because of the proliferation of visceral imagery now, you notice at the theatre or movies, the audience will give [something] ten minutes before glazing over, unless there is something going on that is of interest to them.

So we are in a different time, concentration-wise. I was well-aware of what the challenges would be. But I think once I got the note struck, whoever is going to be interested in this, they are not going to be willfully excluded from anything I have to say.

Yeah, well it is quite stunning, and, in that way, very clear.

That is very important. Nothing maddens me more than a poem that eludes you unnecessarily when you could have been brought into everyone’s advantage, especially the author’s.

When you were thinking about Dan, as the speaker, was it important that he was unstable, unreliable?

If you think about what is happening, it is like a basilisk or a virus (to which we are all accustomed now) has gotten loose. It is the basilisk of vascular dementia, and you don’t know what way that is going to go. You don’t know if what you are being told is the truth, or if it is one time the truth, and next time not the truth. That is the way that affliction works.

It is also an allusion to general apprehensions of reality. The way, say, a Gaelic Catholic sees the world is not the way, say, an Indian Hindu sees the world. Is a tree the same thing to everyone? What is a tree anyway? Who calls it a tree?

These things only become apparent as you get older and you see them collapse. Like the foundation pillars that maybe held a person’s life both intellectually and theologically together crumbling in front of them. What was once very familiar is now terrifying, strange, maybe amusing, but it’s not the thing that was there before. So what is it? So then it’s very important that the narrator had a multistranded view. And the person that he’s representing—or is he representing?—what is her reality now?

It is as big a book as it is because the number of questions it is taking on is quite a lot for me. Normally, the focus is narrower than that. This one, you’ve got two narrators in one, in a way. You’ve got the Spanish/Portuguese element which represents the dreamlike world of the Latin which is very close, I find, to the Catholic Gaelic, one in that rationality moves in and out of itself all of the time. It is colourful. Linguistically it is impish, daring, and challenging in a way that perhaps the Anglo-Saxon Canadian/American anglophile world, shall we say, is not. Not that either is better or worse, they are just different.

You find those differences between Ireland and England. Superficially, they seem the same, until you start listening, and digging a bit, and you see curious gaps. Interesting gaps.

Those are minor explorations though. I suppose really what this story is, is one of exile and heartbreak. You’ve been exiled from yourself, that is the ultimate exile, isn’t it?

That was my next question: exile and the role it plays in your work. I know Fogarty—the last name of your main characters—translates to “exiled” in Gaelic. I’ve read quite a bit of exile literature, rarely from Ireland. A lot of German literature. I know there are many different ways to approach the subject. Exile from the self, the country, what kind of country you are talking about, what the historical conditions of exile are…

I love that tradition of European literature. There is an element there of stark, bony exile feel. But then there is the florid Latin/Gaelic, that is equally trying to lasso the notion of exile but is expressing it in an entirely different way.  But you are still left with the empty room of Kafka in the soul. Had there been anybody there at all? Did you imagine the whole story? Where did the story come from? Fogarty also means outlaw, being on the fringe, on the perimeter of society. But what is society? Is it made up of individuals? Which brings us to Camus. I’ve been interested in L’Étranger—a couple different translations of it.

One translation would open: “Mother died yesterday.” Okay, that is one. Another translation would be: “My mother died yesterday.” Straight away you have two different books, haven’t you? They are both dealing with exile. So, “Mother died yesterday” is the more European, Anglo-Saxon statement of fact. Three words. But then, when you add “my,” it personalizes it, which is the way the Irish mind would approach it. It brings it to the village.

But it doesn’t matter which way you express it, really. The exile is still the same. You are left alone. So, definitely, there is an element of The Waste Land. Who knows anyone? Who knows oneself?

These are such heavy questions. I couldn’t have written them except for in the style in which they emerged, a rainbow river that tumbles and torrents along. It had to come out for me that way, all these other things were buried deep. The form helped them to be released.

Do you think the condition of their being in exile helped you work out other themes that exile compounds? Like madness, alienation, isolation?

If you look at any of my humble offerings. There is always an element of someone being at the center of things, but they’re not. And they know they’re not. In The Butcher Boy, there is the illusion of being happy-go-lucky, but in fact the soul is desolate. You will often find, particularly if you examine Irish history, expressions that there is some terrible loss. Maybe even just in the biblical sense, as simple as banishment from the Garden of Eden. A sense of what is missing. People search for it in good work, love, God. It often eludes them.

It seems to me, having come through a God-centered world and now, in its absence, that the exile may be far deeper than we have begun to realize.

The world as it reconfigures itself and moves at such a speed, there are sometimes in the secular world when people seem to me to speak with enormous authority without any great information. Unbelievable confidence, but when you start to pick at this technological delivery, it doesn’t do a great deal. That’s not to say that I am particularly religious, but I grew up in a world where the psalms were known to very ordinary people, they could quote things, even if they weren’t particularly well-schooled or educated, they had a relationship—however oblique—with the classical world which is now laughable…

Obliterated.

Completely obliterated, annihilated, and in fact scorned. You see politicians who are attempting to impress but are so fool-hearty and ham-fisted in their delivery that it is nothing but an embarrassment. We may come out of this, I don’t know. But I think there is some time left for it to run, before something happens, and the game is up. It certainly does embarrass me. Do you know what I mean by that?

Yes. The denigration of language that was once universal for a community. Exile as a universal, philosophical, or existential condition, yeah…

Ultimately, it doesn’t make any difference if you were here or not.

Yeah, and now you might not have the language to express or even approach expressing those feelings.

Well, that is really worth exploring. Why, it is really good to have a dialogue with younger people because when you get to your mid-20s, these things might start to be of some interest. Because the thin ice that they’re fed, it only lasts through the teens. When real emotions start to come in, the language that has been attacked and obliterated could be of service to them. You can see the difference between people who have now realized that and people that haven’t.

The ones who haven’t would be really fine writers, maybe, and competent. It’s not their fault that they have been tumbled into an age where these things have been derided, particularly in America now. It wouldn’t be the first time. It just seems to have happened at a furious speed to me. But the 50s and the 70s didn’t differ in that respect, so much.

Kind of a shift but, not really. I would love to hear you talk about the role music plays in the text.

The beat of the book is set by the appearance of one particular song, which is an old Irish, Scottish folk song called “The Killiburn Brae.” A brae is a slope or a hill. It is generally sung to the beat of a hand drum. Like a lot of work songs, it is about the war between men and women. A man speaks about sending his wife down to hell. She is so infuriating that the Devil brings her back and dumps her at the doorway of her husband’s house, saying “you can look after her, because I can’t handle her.” The lyrics of this song are not that significant, but what is significant is the rhythm. It is the first song you encounter and is the musical foundation of the book.

As it moves into different areas, you could encounter the cool crooners of the 1950s, it could be Nat King Cole, or scat beats of the 60s. When it goes into the 70s, it moves into the psychedelic, transcendental phase. You have that absorbing period between 1970 and 1974 when all sorts of outlandish experimentations were taking place. In a way, the book is an homage to that as well, insofar as it is a drug-fueled opera. This sort of thing that was very common at that time. It was possible for record companies to form some of the most outlandish projects imaginable before they ran out of road, and punk came in.

But the circular librettos of the 70s certainly inform the book, as does William Burroughs and George Corso and all those … well I don’t like the word experimental, they are all part of the canon now. They might have been seen as experimental against Tennyson but not now. Just look at Bob Dylan, the most experimental of them all has won a Nobel Prize and is regarded along with Shakespeare. Quite rightfully so, I think.

Dylan told someone that in 1972 that he was a sea-faring mariner off the coast of Barbados. It was all a pack of lies, wasn’t it Bob, and it would have turned out to have actually happened to someone like Dave van Ronk. Dylan would’ve stolen the story and convinced himself that he was there. And if he convinced himself, well, maybe he was there.

It is operating on that level. I have always been interested in that multi-layered aspect of Dylan’s imagination. He rang his mother up one time, and he said to her, “I hope you don’t mind me making up all these stories.” She had read somewhere another pack of lies about when he ran away with the carnival. She said “Oh, absolutely no dear, but why are you doing it?” and he said “oh, well, I think it helps my career” and chuckles. And, you know, I like to chuckle.

It helps with the condition of exile. There isn’t that much of Dylan in the book, just a little bit. Because he is too powerful. If you admitted him in, he could take over, then it’s no book of your own, he would scoop the prize again, like he did to Dave van Ronk.

I found it very operatic, in the way that The Wall and Quadrophenia, are.

Those albums, at their best, well, I love their absolute audacity. They really shouldn’t have the nerve to do those things. I thought that with the original 1500-page manuscript of this book, it was quite tame. Little strokes trying to burst, little veins. Then, when I got them all together, it came out in a torrent. But it was a controlled torrent. The original manuscript was solid and not as imaginative. But it provided the foundation. Like what I was saying: you live a relatively straight life so you can let your imagination go where it wants. If you are living a too dangerous life, and your imagination is going where it wants, you may well end up in trouble. And there is plenty of evidence, with the history of writers, to suggest that. It just doesn’t really work. It can be really dangerous. Anyway.

Well, you have addressed this already, in so many ways, but one of my questions is about the departure from prose. Especially as it pertains to dementia and expressing fractured consciousness. Maybe there is more you want to say on that.

I have approached it before, in other books, but I’ve never quite gone full throttle ‘til the end. It has been part of chapters here or there. I suppose, I’ve never been this close to fractured consciousness. At various times in my life, I’ve been semi-fractured myself in my perception or I have been associated with people, specifically in those countercultural days, who willfully courted distorted perception. Jim Morrison would be a great hero of ours. All these people who made it very attractive, especially to the young.

But when you are older, my age, and you are close to fractured consciousness to the extent that it terrifies you and terrifies you. You can only do it justice by writing a book like this, which addresses it head on. It is not funny. It is not a cultural fad. It is a nightmare.

Well, those are all my larger, thematic questions. My final question is what you are reading now?

I’m reading a book called Dead Fashion Girl by Fred Vermorel. It is set in the demi-monde of London’s Soho, late 1950s. I don’t know why I am reading it. There is a nexus of writing of people like Eoin McNamee and David Peace and a number of other English writers, that seem to circle the same world, a blue-lit, tremulous world of secrets and illicit comingling of the upper and lower classes in Britain. But it also affects Northern Ireland. There is a strange, fetishistic nocturnal world there. Post-war Britain, just before the 60s break, that is very, very interesting. I don’t know why, but it is. I don’t know if these writers communicate. There is something going on there.

 

Order your copy of Poguemahone here!

 

DANTE’S INDIANA, CHEMICAL VALLEY, THE UNSEEN: Media Hits!

IN THE NEWS!

DANTE’S INDIANA

Randy Boyagoda, author of Dante’s Indiana (September 7, 2021), was interviewed on the Today Faith Podcast! The interview was posted on February 18, 2022. You can listen to the episode here!

Order Dante’s Indiana here!

CHEMICAL VALLEY

Chemical Valley cover

Chemical Valley by David Huebert (October 19, 2021) has been reviewed in Hamilton Arts & Letters! The review appears in issue 14.2, and was posted online on February 22, 2022. Check out the full review here.

Reviewer Jenn Carson writes,

“[A] masterful exploration of dirty nature writing … Chemical Valley’s stories, for all their dystopian demons, are balanced by Huebert’s insistence on penning his characters with an empathetic hand. His gaze may be harsh, like the reality we inhabit, but his love for his fellow man, and our desperate desire for connection, is unwavering.”

Order Chemical Valley here!

THE UNSEEN

The Unseen (April 7, 2020) by Roy Jacobsen, and translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, was reviewed in the North Bay Nipissing! The review of this first book in the Barrøy Chronicles was posted on February 19, 2022. You can check out the full review here.

Order The Unseen here!

Check out the sequel, White Shadow, here!

Preorder the third book in the series, Eyes of the Rigel here!

 

A Biblioasis Interview with Elaine Dewar

Elaine Dewar’s On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years is not what readers have come to expect from Biblioasis. But it seems to us one of the most important works we’ve been part of at the press. As Phil Marchand pointed out with her last book, Dewar “is justly well-known for her relentless research and we’re fortunate to have her,” and this relentless research is on full display with On the Origin.

What she uncovers is a scientific world of little oversight, questionable motives, greed, deception, and political malfeasance, one open to manipulation and sabotage by outside forces, all of it with deep implications for how we move forward, not just with the COVID-19 pandemic itself but with the systems and structures that allowed for it, and which, if they are not reformed, may result in the same thing happening again. Dewar has uncovered facts about this case and made connections that have not yet been made public, in either our national newspapers or parliamentary debates. Its implications are explosive. She has provided language for what we are all experiencing, and in total this book should be read as a wake-up call to all of us, to demand more accountability and transparency from all, but especially those in positions of power.

Q1: Your new book On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years tackles one of the most troubling and controversial subjects of our age. To start, can you tell us a little bit about the book’s origin?

A1: I started clipping bits and pieces about the pandemic in January of 2020 because the coverage I was reading so reminded me of SARS, up to and including the false assurances from Canadian authorities that Canadians had nothing to fear, that the risk to Canadians was “low.” I was struck by how in those early stories the numbers kept doubling; the sure mark of easy person-to-person transmission of an infectious disease, and clearly a bad disease because the Wuhan hospitals were apparently very crowded. And China’s authorities were playing that down. By the end of January, Canada already had its first cases, yet the federal government kept saying nothing to worry about, we have no direct flights to Wuhan, as if that meant anything. It was obvious there was a great deal to worry about. China had locked down a city of 11 million and was frantically erecting enormous field hospitals. They clearly expected an unprecedented disaster. By then I had already started reading whatever I could find on the pandemic and noticed a story about two researchers in Wuhan who published what is called a preprint claiming that the virus might have leaked from one of two labs in Wuhan that study coronaviruses sampled from bats in the field, and that the researchers don’t take proper precautions. At about that time, someone asked the Minister of Health at a press conference about the possibility that the virus had leaked from a lab in China. She snapped the reporter’s head off and accused him of asking a racist question. By then I had been following the story of the collapse of Canada’s relations with China for some time, and the two stories sort of snapped together in my head. By the time Dan Wells got in touch in May and asked me to do a quick book for a new series he was launching, suggesting something on pandemic profiteers, I was already hooked on the origin story. Where did it come from? Lab or nature? How could I find out with the borders shut and Canada in lockdown?

Q2: Well, how could you find out? And what did you find? How did the research and writing of this book differ from those which preceded it?

A2: How to find out was the big problem. I don’t work for a newspaper: I could not argue that I needed to cross borders to do interviews. And I couldn’t get to people anyway because labs were closed, government offices were shut down with most bureaucrats working from home. So I was reminded of I.F. Stone, the great American journalist who published a weekly out of Washington D.C. He found his most explosive stories by reading published documents and making Freedom of Information applications for documents that were not public. I thought given this was a story about the science of virology, I should start by reading the publications in peer-reviewed journals about the origin of a virus that clearly seemed to have adapted immediately to human beings. And so that’s what I did. And what I found in peer-reviewed journals and in papers published by the scientists at the heart of the story led me into the story of a science that has gone global since SARS with very few regulations and a whole lot of pandemic potential danger attached to it. The more I read, the more the lab leak thesis seemed possible, not the deranged maunderings of racists and tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists as they were by then being described by scientists who were organizing all kinds of publications to knock that theory down. At which point the story expanded from reading the science to following the undeclared interests…

Q3: Yes, undeclared interests. That could have been the title of the book, and it’s one of the main things, I think, that On the Origin untangles. By the end of it I was wondering how we could trust anyone on anything remotely touching on the pandemic. There are too many to list for this interview, but is there any undeclared interest you would like to highlight here?

A3: I think the undeclared interests I found that upset me most, angered me most, were those connected with an article that appeared in the most highly rated science peer-reviewed journal Nature, which purported to show that the genome of SARS-CoV-2 could not have been the result of laboratory manipulation. There were five authors on that peer reviewed paper. The only one who declared a competing interest was an expert from Tulane University who declared he had interests related to a company he’s involved in. Three others on that paper all had serious interest in staying on the good side of China, who used this paper like a shield for the next year to say “You see, serious scientists say it couldn’t have been made in a lab.” Kristian Andersen, the lead author who is at the Scripps, which was in such financial trouble that it entered a relationship with a Chinese entity to keep it out of trouble, also had an application into the NIAID, a grant he later won. The NIAID had funded work done at one of the labs thought to be a possible source of a lab leak in Wuhan, Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And that funding was aimed at the kinds of gain-of-function experiments which had caused fear and concern to critics for years. Another author on that paper, Ian W. Lipkin at Columbia, worked out of an institution that had been paid large sums of money from USAID through a charity called EcoHealth Alliance, which funded one of the labs in Wuhan. He had been honoured by China and has an honorary position there. Nothing was said about his competing interest. The third is E.C. Holmes, whose work is mainly done in China though he has a position at the University of Sydney and also at Fudan University in Shanghai. He had helped his Fudan colleague put up the genome sequence of the virus on a blog run out of Edinburgh because China’s officials were holding off its publication. This article was written shortly after both Holmes and Andersen called Anthony Fauci, head of the NIAID, on January 31, 2020, after Science ran a story in which one expert said a lab leak was a possibility. They told Fauci that their investigation of the genome revealed that a small portion of it might have been engineered in a lab. Holmes did not reveal in the Nature paper that he had done a number of papers with the lead bat /coronavirus researcher in Wuhan who works at the other lab suspected of being the source of the leak, the Wuhan CDC. The very next day, Andersen and Holmes were part of an emergency conference call organized by Fauci, Francis Collins of the NIH, Fauci’s boss, and several others in which this possibility was urgently discussed. Undoubtedly the difficult position of these funding agency directors was that they might be accused of funding the creation of SARS by funding one of those labs. Yet two days after that, Andersen was participating in crafting a letter to send to the White House accusing anyone who said a lab leak was a possible origin of the virus of being conspiracy theorists. He wanted to make the letter tougher than the man writing it, Peter Daszak. Daszak was also the author of a statement in Lancet yelling about a lab origin thesis as a conspiracy theory. Daszak did not declare a competing interest on that statement—specifically that his charity, EcoHealth Alliance, had been acting as a cutout for US funders like the National Science Foundation, the NIAID, and USAID, who all had funded Shi Zhengli’s work at the WIV’s lab. And we’re not talking about a little bit of money, we’re talking millions. Daszak went on to become chair of Lancet’s task force on the origin of the virus, again without declaring his interest in avoiding any investigation of a lab leak at the WIV, and also got himself appointed to the WHO-convened study of the origin of the virus. The WHO did not publish the competing interests of those foreign researchers who participated in that study and had them all sign confidentiality agreements so they couldn’t squeal on each other. The study’s phase one pointedly avoided any kind of investigation of the labs in Wuhan without doing any study on that question at all. It took months for various researchers to put these interests together.

Q4: There is a Canadian thread to your book, one which, though not directly connected to the origin of COVID, nevertheless sheds some light on the issue. Can you tell us a little bit about this?

A4: There was a theory in the early days of the pandemic that the virus might have been shipped from the National Microbiology Laboratory to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the leading coronavirus study group in China. Back in 2019, two researchers had been taken out of the lab, their security clearances revoked: one of them had done papers on both SARS and on ACE2, one of the receptors for SARS-CoV-2 in humans. There was nothing to it: but it got me looking at what had gone on at the lab, about the two suspended researchers who came to Canada in the middle 90s when a whole group of researchers were sent from China to study in western labs, and what I discovered about their connections to China and the Wuhan Institute of Virology shed a lot of light on how biological science has become a globalized operation, and how China has placed its people in very important western institutions and then made use of them. It gave me the framework for the larger story of China’s long term plan to treat biology and biotechnology as a strategic high ground. The NML story took me to a bigger one.

Q5: And what was this bigger story?

A5: The larger story is about China’s long term plan to occupy the strategic high ground with regard to biology, and biotechnology, including apparently both the capacity to wage and defend against bio warfare. In pursuit of that strategy, which dates back to Deng Xiaoping’s time leading China, many very bright young aspiring scientists were sent to the West for their graduate studies. Many of them were high achievers who ended up on leading academic positions as well as in leading pharmaceuticals (like Sanofi in Canada) and also in the main high containment laboratories in the US (like Galveston) and in Canada at the National Microbiology Laboratory (Qiu and Cheng, etc.) Some of these people smuggled out important reagents, hid their connections to China’s military and transferred important data to China.

Q6: As you know, the Trudeau government faced a lot of pressure to release information about why Qiu and Cheng were fired from Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory, and that they went further than perhaps any government before them by suing the Speaker of the House to keep these documents from parliamentarians. This week, and in the middle of an election, as reported in the Globe and Mail, the government quietly withdrew its lawsuit. What is the significance of this? And why should Canadians care about who Qiu and Cheng are, and why they were fired?

A6: The timing of the election was in part to avoid having to produce the documents as per the June resolution of the House of Commons that the President of PHAC deliver unredacted versions of all emails and documents relating to the firing of Qiu and Cheng. The President, Iain Stewart, had claimed he could not provide unredacted documents due to the Privacy Act. The Canada-China committee brought forward a resolution in the minority Parliament which passed it demanding the unredacted documents. When the House voted in favour of the resolution, and PHAC and the Minister of Health still did not comply, the President was admonished at the bar of Parliament, which has not happened to a non-politician since 1910, the Speaker was about to decide whether to send the Sergeant at Arms to PHAC to get the documents when the House rose for the summer break. The Speaker decided to hold off sending the Sergeant at arms until the House resumed in September, but the government by then had decided to call the election. By going to the Governor General and asking for an election, the House was dissolved, the resolution became moot, and so the government withdrew its suit against the Speaker. It would have lost in the Federal Court. The Supreme Court has already ruled that Parliament is supreme, no court can stop it from getting information it asks for from the government of the day. The government was doing its best to cover up what had been going on at the National Microbiology Laboratory for years, which entailed what seem to be really outrageous breaches of national security, including experiments done by Qiu and Cheng along with a major general in the Peoples Liberation Army. If that woman, Chen Wei, did not have access to the NML labs, and I am pretty sure she did, she certainly had access to its data, which also requires a security clearance, long after Qiu and Cheng were suspended and their clearances retracted. Papers were published in 2020 that make that clear. Instead of being transparent about the mistakes made, over which the Minister of Health should have resigned, along with the Minister of Public Safety, the government chose to call an election to avoid the public knowing the exact nature of its amazing failure of oversight.

On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years coverQ7: This book is part of the Field Note pamphlet series, and was signed on as On Blame. But over the course of your research the focus of the book changed and expanded, and blame became a far lesser concern, if only because there was so much to go around. It’s about the origin of this specific pandemic, yes, but it is about much more than this, too, with ramifications for how we move forward. If there were one or two quick takeaways you would like your readers to have on finishing On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years, what would it/they be?

A7: The most important takeaway is that this book demonstrates the real danger is from arrogant and reckless globalized biological science which may have let loose the whirlwind. Globalized science is usually presented as a great boon, the best minds wherever they are working together for the good of humankind and the planet. What this book shows is what just about everyone who studies the practice of science knows: scientists are not sweet and selfless souls just following their curiosity. Like the rest of us, they must compete to achieve. For their work to continue and their prestige to grow, they must capture public resources. She who can do that best acquires power, which will in turn be used to defend those interests. In other words, research science is by definition intensely political, and when it is done across national boundaries by scientists from countries that are competitors, the merely political becomes geopolitical. China sees itself as a rising nation held back by the US. The US and Canada rightly see China as a strategic threat. The US in particular has been very careless about who and what it funded in China, apparently so it could keep a close eye on what China might be doing in the way of biological warfare research. But that meant work was done in China with American support that remained outside the regulatory purview of the US and in conditions that are not acceptable in the US. Canada, under intense economic pressure from China, clearly allowed our top containment lab, which used to do wonderful work, to be captured by China’s operatives acting in China’s interests, which do not coincide with our own. All governments and the scientists involved in this story have done what governments and people often do when they’ve screwed up. They covered up. And it’s up to us, the stakeholders as we are called, who have suffered and died from their mistakes, to hold them to account.

Available August 31 in Canada and September 14 in the USA. You can pre-order a copy here.

Events

Michael Lista at Calgary Wordfest: How to . . . Investigate

Michael Lista, author of poetry collection Barfly (June 6, 2024) will be at the Calgary Wordfest’s Imaginairium Festival’s event, “How to . . . Investigate.” Michael will be interviewed in a 60-minute conversation by friend and fellow long-form award-winner Christina Frangou who will uncover the secrets of how he gets the story. A priceless interview with two unstoppable journalists. Books will be made available for sale and signing by Owl’s Nest Books.

The event is free, and will take place on Sunday, October 20 at 3:30PM.

More details here.

Grab Barfly here!

ABOUT BARFLY

A CBC Books’ Poetry Collection to Watch for in Spring 2024 • A Toronto Star Most Anticipated Spring Title

We’re in love, but we’re still Millennials. / What’s wrong with our hearts is congenital. 

In Barfly, the poet comes back to haunt himself, and us. In this incomparable third collection, his first in a decade, Michael Lista returns to reinvent poetry with humour, pugnacity, and a deeply singular voice. Splicing Byronic rhymes and Auden’s meters with the twenty-first century irreverence of a late-stage Twitter feed, the poems in Barfly are alternatingly aggressive, sweet, deadly, and raw with a break-your-heart vulnerability.

ABOUT MICHAEL LISTA

Michael Lista is an investigative journalist, essayist and poet. He has worked as a book columnist for the National Post and as the poetry editor of The Walrus. He is the author of four books: the poetry volumes Bloom and The ScarboroughStrike Anywhere, a collection of his writing about literature, television and culture; and The Human Scale: Murder, Mischief and Other Selected Mayhems, a book of longform journalism. His essays and investigative stories have appeared in the New YorkerThe AtlanticSlateThe WalrusCanadaland, and Toronto Life. He is a contributing editor at Toronto Life and Maclean’s. He was the 2017 Margaret Laurence Fellow at Trent University and the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Awards for both Investigative Reporting and Long Form Feature Writing. His story “The Sting” is being adapted by Adam Perlman, Robert Downey Jr., and Team Downey into a television series for Apple TV+.