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Between the Acts by Megan Findlay

The pageant was at an interval and hands were already reaching out to brush the flies from the cake tray when a ripple of alarm passed through the barn—one might see from the rafters, with the swallows, an urgent pushing, Mrs. Swithin’s elbow knocked where she stood by the tea; the group by the cake table staggering apart; Colonel Mayhew losing sight of Mrs. Mayhew for a moment when a brown head rushed between them.

This pushing for the door was the nurse, and everyone knew in the same moment: George was missing.

The guests took up the search from where they each stood in the barn, their words nosing through the air, sniffing, watching and whispering loudly as the nurse spun about in alarm: “A day-dreamer…Did you know she came from London only last week?  And already charged with the boy… Belongs in the kitchen… He’s queer, that boy… Never got on with my William, though only ten months the junior…Likely asleep under a tree, they don’t feed those children properly, always wanting sleep…”

Giles stood in the center of the room, caressing his teacup.  There was, he guessed, a problem, and in his mind he saw the dimpled surface of the lily pond, and below it the pink face of a boy, his hair waving gently in the imprecise murk—Giles stopped when Bartholomew’s hand landed suddenly, jarringly on his shoulder. “Your boy,” said his father, “Is a cry-baby.  They’ll hear him from his crying.”

Isa appeared before them, her face flushed, her hands tearing a program into tiny pieces that spiraled to the floor with the dust and the voices.

“Our son is missing,” she said.  Then, her eyes traveling downwards: “There’s blood on your shoe.”

The little boy, as it happened, was not missing at all.  He knew exactly where he was: in the bushes, beside the stage, pausing on his hands and knees and holding his breath to better hear the strange, rasping voice that invited him forward, as though the trees themselves were whispering: chuff-chuff-chuff…

George had temporarily forgotten his nurse.  He had forgotten his grandfather, and the Afghan hound, and the blob of foam on the hound’s nostril: he had, in truth, suddenly forgotten everything that had been occupying his mind until that very moment.  He remembered only the sound when there was no sound, and he saw the bushes in front of him, and the movement behind them, and he smiled without realizing it and crawled forward on his knees.

And suddenly, just as he was reaching out to part the beckoning leaves, George was seized round the middle by two rough hands and the ground was gone from under his legs and the bushes swung away from him.  He was transported through the air.  The empty seats streamed past him, his legs dangling, his feet knocking against the chairs. 

George opened his mouth to the wind and howled.

From the barn came all the bodies, all the arms held out stiff in front, all the fingers wagging, and from Albert the Idiot’s grip traveled George, catapulting, somersaulting, until the arms closed around him and he heard his Grandfather’s voice, and his mother’s, and a thousand other voices:  “There he is!  Crying again… Oh, he is found…Albert, Albert, thank you, have some tea… Have some cake… Oh, the poor darling…”  

Then the music played.  The crowd pressed forward.  George was found; the audience took their seats.  “Such excitement,” they whispered.  “Such drama.  We will never be done by midnight!”

2010 02 21 Fiction Permalink

Drinking Game by Kasper Hartman

Our friend and aspiring poet Kasper Hartman gave a reading recently at a Montreal pub. Kasper’s readings are always interesting. He insists on reciting his poems from memory while fixing the audience with an intense and unnerving glare. We asked how the reading went.

I popped my P’s, but other than that I think it went well. My new drinking game poem was a resounding hit. Here’s a recap:

Kasper takes the stage after a warm introduction. He looks nervous, drunk, grips a beer in one hand and takes hold of the mic in the other.

“Does everyone have a beer?” he asks. “You’re all going to need beers for this…”

He waits stubbornly while someone orders a beer.

After about forty seconds of awkward silence, he begins:

“Drinking Game.”

“Never have I ever cursed the goddamn weather.”

He drinks. People in the audience drink too. Someone in the back says, “This could get expensive.”

“Never have I ever kissed who I shouldn’t have,

wanted who I couldn’t have,

nor slept where I wouldn’t have had the night not grown so dim”.

He drinks. A few people think about it, then drink as well.

“Never have I ever been a bit too clever for my own damn good.”

He drinks a lot.

“When we were schoolboys, we tried many different things — the times we hunted kittens, or tested cardboard wings — but never did I ever let a boy named Trevor take his knife and sever a pimple from my cheek.”

Kasper pauses, then drinks. The audience laughs.

“Never did it bleed all week.”

He drinks, they laugh, and he sets up for the big Dostoevskian finale:

“Never has it been easier to mask than confess,

to begin but then digress,

to stand up and say “I am guilty!”

only when there is proof

and nothing less.”

Kasper drains his beer, kicks the mic off the stage, and walks out into the cold, rainy night.

2010 02 02 Poetry Permalink

Aerialists by Richard Outram

Encore Literary Magazine is extremely proud to have permission from the executors of the estate of the late Richard Outram to present work by one of Canada’s great poets. In the months to come, poems by Outram will be periodically featured here, thus helping to keep alive the singular voice of, in the words of Alberto Manguel, “one of the finest poets in the English language.”

 

Aerialists 

Nothing, of course, from the first, but weighed against

Such parlous folly: family; friends; and the appeal,

Not lightly to be discounted, of common sense;

And last but not least, vertigo, dreadfully real.

 

High in tumultuous oaks, through the wind-threshed tops,

Squirrels play frenzied touch-tag at dizzying speed,

Flinging contortions, black synapse across bright gaps,

One after the other; driven, if not by our need.

 

With a heavy deadening shudder a helicopter

Batters above us: by instinct made much afraid

One freezes against the trunk from the vast raptor,

Like a hide nailed to bark, flattened and splayed.

 

Another is lounged on a bough to reveal of a rear

Foot the long, delicate sole: and I did not think

Strangely to be disturbed, to discover it, bare,

Unexpectedly intimate; a naked, vaginal pink.

 

O lately we leaned free from the buoyant crown

Of the poised radiant Tree and forbidden flew

One void to another and Everything did Abound

Held in our perfect error perfectly true.

2010 01 25 Poetry Permalink

End of the Decade

terry griggs

We at Encore Literary Magazine have glanced at a few of these CanLit Best of the Decade  lists floating around the “blogosphere” lately and while the appearance of certain titles causes us to roll our eyes, we choose for the moment to restrain our snarkier selves to instead offer up a pair of Canadian novels which, if there were any justice, should have found their way onto at least one or two of said lists but, as far as we can see, somehow, someway, have not.

First, Rogues’ Wedding by the prodigiously talented and always inventive Terry Griggs. Published in 2002 and nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, Griggs’ second novel is a wild linguistic romp set in 19th century Ontario, a riotous ride affording her cunning and slightly demented imagination free rein. The story follows one Griffith Smolders who, having abandoned the eager Avice Smolders without so much as a kiss on their wedding night, finds himself running for his very life from a very angry young bride. The pursuit moves northward from London, Ontario to Manitoulin Island and culminates in one of the most bizarre and blistering climactic scenes in recent Canadian fiction. To quote from Shaun Smith’s starred review in Quill & Quire:

“For Griggs, every strange world is a portal into another equally strange one. With astonishing talent and control, she smashes apart Victorian society (and modern society by extension) and rebuilds it as a Swiftian fantasy, as raucous as Huckleberry Finn and as bizarre as Alice in Wonderland. This is a rich mixture, intensely intoxicating and bestowing delicious feelings of hallucination. Farce and satire elevate to a kind of surrealism or Dadaism. Bugs mysteriously emerge from people’s mouths; pretty girls vanish through doorways never to be seen again; a crow dons a baby’s bonnet; a woman wears a trout on a ribbon around her neck.”

Similarly bracing and original imagery is also on display in Griggs’ latest work, Thought You Were Dead, a gleeful send-up of both murder mystery novels and the Canadian literary scene which has been described as “Agatha Christie on crack.” 

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Second, Muriella Pent by Russell Smith, a brilliant satire of the Toronto arts scene that spares nothing and no one while at the same time offering readers two of the most successfully realized and believable characters in all of CanLit. The story concerns the City Arts Board Action Council’s decision to sponsor a visit to Canada by Marcus Royston, a world-weary West Indian poet. However, Royston proves to be less interested in the “real issues” on the Action Council’s agenda than in publicly offending as many people as possible with his opinions on art and culture, while openly pursuing every attractive woman he meets and drinking copious amounts of alcohol. Muriella Pent, an affluent member of the Action Council, provides lodging to Royston in her Annex mansion and her time with him releases her from the restraints of upper-class, WASPish Canadian life, allowing her to become something altogether different from who she thought she was.

Nominated for the 2004 Impac Dublin Fiction Prize, Muriella Pent was acclaimed by André Alexis as the best novel of that year. The Ottawa Citizen declared it rivalled the satires of  Mordecai Richler, while Books in Canada raved that it was “funny, poignant, ambitious … and the boldest work yet,” in Smith’s oeuvre. All of us here at Encore Literary Magazine eagerly look forward to Girl Crazy.

Yes, The Life of Pi won the Booker Prize and is being made into an Ang Lee film. Yes, The Book of Negroes has sold a gazillion copies. Yes, Lullabies for Little Criminals somehow convinced tens of thousands of Canadian women in the plausibility of an amazingly articulate and unjaded 13-year-old prostitute. But Ten Best of the Decade? We respectfully disagree.  Our riposte? Rogues’ Wedding and Muriella Pent. For the time being at least, they will suffice.

2010 01 20 Fiction
Reviews Permalink

P.K. Page: 1916-2010

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P. K. Page … is, in brief, a phenomenon; a force majeur in Canadian literary and artistic life; a National Treasure. Her work, sprung from the praiseworthy ambition of the lavishly gifted, bestows upon us rich decades of protean accomplishment, of widespread honour and renown.   – Richard Outram

P.K. Page is a visionary, a descendant of Blake and the alchemist writers.   – Kenneth Sherman

Elegant, rigorous, fresh, P.K. Page’s work sings with a voice of independent character and maenad conjecture. It is a creature that lives on its own terms and terrain. It is startling, authoritative, and anti-sentimental, able to bear cool as well as passionate gazing at our own species. Her poems are always thinking – each line is thinking, while its six senses remain impeccably alert. Her poems live by wit, wisdom, sass, suspense and a muscular lissome synapse and diction.    – The Griffin Prize Judges’ Citation, 2003

2010 01 15 Poetry Permalink

Meat Lasagna by Joyce Randall

This happened a long time ago, back when I was married.

One afternoon I sat at my desk writing a letter to a company that manufactures frozen food products. I was writing to let them know I was disappointed with their meat lasagna. At one time it had been really good, this meat lasagna, quite delicious, but the last few times we had it for dinner we noticed it wasn’t quite the same. After some consideration, I realized they were cutting down on the meat and using more noodles. This pissed me off. So while I worked on this letter, writing to let them know we weren’t happy with the meat-to-noodle ratio in their lasagna, it began to register in my brain that I was hearing, from somewhere, the singular sound, faint and infrequent, but still insistent and unmistakeable, of a woman in sexual bliss.

At that time we lived on the top floor of our building, a four storey walk-up, in a corner apartment, so after pausing to listen for a minute, I got off my chair and lay down and put my ear to the floor. At first all I could hear were vibrations, the noise of pipes, the hum of electric currents, but then, much more clearly, the voice of a woman, crying out rhythmically, fading away then returning, sometimes accompanied by low grunts, presumably of a man, presumably of our downstairs neighbour. I lay there on the floor for some time, listening. Jenn was in the living room getting ready to leave for work. She must have noticed me lying on the floor by then but she didn’t say anything. I wondered for a second if she thought I’d collapsed, had a seizure or something. I lay there on the floor, looking at the clumps of dust under the radiator, listening, transixed. Jenn didn’t say a word. 

This woman downstairs was enjoying herself very much. In fact, she was so vocal and expressive, I was starting to wonder if perhaps there wasn’t any actual sex going on downstairs but instead I was listening to someone watch a porn video. At one point the woman moaned, sort of laughed and said Bad boy, in a playful manner. That gave me the shivers. The man was grunting again. It went on. Jenn had to have seen me but she said nothing. The activity downstairs seemed to be reaching a climax. It was louder. The woman’s exclamations were prolonged, high-pitched, like she was crying. I was enjoying myself, lying there, listening. I was excited. This was definitely not a movie; the voices were right there underneath me. Then they stopped. They were done. I could hear them talking.

I stood up, feeling slightly self-conscious, embarrassed. Jenn had finished packing her bag and was putting on her coat. I went out and told her I thought Norman, the fellow who lives downstairs, was having an affair. She didn’t know what I was talking about. But I was having trouble equating the plump boyish looking woman who I knew lived with Norman with the sounds I’d just heard, those cries, that voice. Norman gives guitar lessons in his apartment. It was sometimes an inconvenience for us when we had to listen to guitars tuning and scales being played over and over. I wondered if he’d met some young woman who wanted to learn how to strum chords to her favourite Miley Cyrus songs and had some original ideas about how to pay for the lessons. I saw a tanned, petite go-go dancer type with long black hair and a waist the size of a pop bottle.

My imagination started working on this and I became certain that this woman I’d listened to could not be Norm’s live-in. It wasn’t possible. This conviction became even firmer when I went down to the end of the hallway to see Jenn off. We often did this. She’d go down and get into her taxi and I’d stand at the window on the top floor and look down and wave to her as the cab pulled away.  Directly in front of the building was a shiny black Volkswagen, its parking lights flashing, and I immediately decided this car had something to do with what I’d been listening to. Norman had hired a prostitute who’d parked her car in front of the building and ran in for a $200 afternoon quickie. Soon she would be out, all cleaned up and ready to go, dressed, I imagined, in a tight halter top, a very short black skirt and thigh-high leather boots. I waved to Jenn as she got into the taxi but she didn’t look or wave back and the taxi pulled away and was gone. The Volkswagen sat there, lights blinking, waiting. And I waited too, waited to get a glimpse of Norm’s whore, waited to see her come out and drive away.

2010 01 12 Fiction Permalink

A new poem by Zachariah Wells

                              I

               Such a slim barrow into which to stuff

                         a life; such a narrow beam to cross

               and brace the walls. Pollarded and shallow-

                         rooted, it resists the winds, persists

               despite its pruning. Stiff and stolid

                         in its ramrod stance, it stands, but shifts

               and strays when no one’s watching. It sees

                         the road ahead, but is always looking

               back. It asserts and it equivocates.

                         It makes mistakes. It flirts with grief and grace.

                It wears a mask to hide its missing face.

2010 01 03 Poetry Permalink

Regarding the Cage Match of Canadian Poetry

 

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               christian

 

 You can find it here:  http://www.vimeo.com/7963755

“Language poetry, as I understand it, is based on mistrust of such concepts as author, text, and intention; if so, it’s an exaggeration of complexities of which poets have always been aware, and doesn’t justify giving up on the ancient functions of the art and simply diddling. I don’t suppose there’s been a more ‘ludic’ or playful poet than Stevens, who was for a time dismissed as a lightweight ‘dandy’ and who did not appear at all in Bliss Carmen’s hospitable Oxford Book of American Verse back in 1927. But it was Stevens who wrote, ‘How gladly with proper words the soldier dies,’ and who thought of poetry, in a larger sense to which specific poems are tributary, as a culture’s articulate sense of itself. Good poems, I think, release us from inarticulateness, which is a great misery, challenge us to tell the whole truth of ourselves and others, and are taken up into that overarching poetry of which Stevens speaks.”   – Richard Wilbur

2009 12 08 Poetry Permalink

A new poem by Kasper Hartman

              

               Traveller

               We lived in a house near a hostel – sometimes when it was full,

               travellers camped on our lawn. One night it was raining,

               and the tent of a girl (going to Winnipeg)

               was ripped

 

               and leaking. My parents invited her in; they drank borscht,

               and talked about the sun. Finally

               she undressed,

               while I

 

               watched from the kitchen; that night I dreamt of her,

               sneaking across the floor, to open

               the door for her boyfriend,  

               her brothers.

2009 11 29 Poetry Permalink

Combat Camera

Biblioasis has announced the winner of this year’s Metcalf-Rooke Award. The prize, given annually to the best unpublished work of fiction by a new writer, goes to A. J. Somerset for his novel Combat Camera.

Combat Camera … concerns Lucas Zane, a celebrated photographer who has burned out emotionally after covering battles in most of the wars of the late twentieth century. He has come to the end in Toronto, drunk, hallucinatory, all ambition fled. He earns the rent by taking photographs for Richard Barker, an impresario of shoestring-budget pornographic movies. On the set he meets “Melissa” and the novel explores their involvement. Zane tries to make a comeback by constructing a photo-essay about “Melissa’s” life, a stripper and porn-chick utterly lacking a heart of gold. Zane’s reflections on camera angles, available light, film stock and shutter speeds — all the by now obsolete technology of his years of fame — form a hymn to the beauty of art. Though Zane himself would deny that. But the power of the book lies in its voice, a voice that is restless, ceaseless, meandering, tragic, sometimes very funny, a mind and voice that maintain an almost hypnotic grip on the reader.

I’m sure you’d like a nice, pat explanation for my life. Something to tie up all the loose ends: I left it all behind after witnessing unspeakable horrors, etcetera, that left me reduced to a whiskey-soaked shell. You’d like to think you’re in some tale of sin and redemption. I guess we all like to think we’re walking through some grand, redemptive story. Well, we’re all going to be disappointed. Disappointment is one of the two fates that we must all eventually meet.

I ran out of horror a long time ago. You start with conviction, and then you just end up sad. You know you aren’t going to stop anything. You’ll be off to cover another war tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that until you retire, until you just give up and leave the job to the next quixote. You realize that all the things you thought and believed were all bullshit. You just get tired out, and you can’t feel anything anymore but a kind of distant sadness.

God looks down on his children and shakes his head. Free will, he thinks — what was I smoking when I came up with that one? You drop one tab of acid, eight days later you got snakes in the Garden of Eden.

2009 11 24 Fiction Permalink