Wallace House Writers’ Guild Book Launch
The Wallace House Writers’ Guild, many of whom have joined WEN, are launching their first anthology titled “Through the Brown Door.” You are welcome to attend the launch on Saturday, April 16th from 1 to 4 PM at the historic Wallace House located at 137 Woodbridge Ave in Woodbridge.
They also plan to attend the WEN meeting in May to present their anthology.
There is something singularly attractive about Isobel Raven’s short stories. I have just reread A Flower for Allie after a two-year gap, and lost none of my enthusiasm.
Ten of the stories are set in rural southwestern Ontario, 1930-50, and six in Toronto, 1990-2000. The author draws us quickly into her chosen times and places. Each story moves fast but without haste. Every word contributes to plot, character, or atmosphere; there is no waste. The seemingly effortless style is direct and clear, fresh, invigorating, good-natured, and insightful (one senses decades of careful observation).
Isobel Raven reminds us how ordinary stories about ordinary people become extraordinary in the hands of extraordinary writers. While providing discreet details that build a vivid and convincing picture, she does not tell too much – leaving us to imagine how matters might develop in the rest of the story, and beyond.
Though her voice is her own, Isobel Raven reminds me pleasingly of Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, and Stephen Leacock. Indeed, Munro, the book’s dedicatee, wrote to her, “I am delighted with the stories, which seem to me to have a unique tone and a special, keen vision.” I share that delight.
This book stands firmly, fittingly, right up there in my Canadiana shelves.
Barry Clegg
The Writers Community of Simcoe County have contacted WEN to announce that they are having a short-story contest. Deadline is March 31, 2016. Please go to their website for more details.
Our annual Holiday Party and Member’s Readings will be held on December 10 th at Canadiana. A special breakfast menu will be served and there will be music, balloons, door prizes and and a fifty-fifty draw. Come out and support fellow WEN members who will be reading their latest creations. It promises to be an entertaining meeting.
Antanas Sileika (Antanas Šileika) is a Canadian novelist and critic.
He was born in Weston, Ontario – the son of Lithuanian-born parents.
After completing an English degree at the University of Toronto, he moved to Paris for two years and there married his wife, Snaige Sileika (nee Valiunas), an art student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. While in Paris, he studied French, taught English in Versailles, and worked as part of the editorial collective of the expatriate literary journal, Paris Voices, run from the upstairs room of the bookstore, Shakespeare and Company.
Upon his return to Canada in 1979, Antanas began teaching at Humber College and working as a co-editor of the Canadian literary journal, Descant, where he remained until 1988.
After writing for newspapers and magazines, Antanas published his first novel, Dinner at the End of the World (1994), a speculative story set in the aftermath of global warming.
His second book, a collection of linked short stories, Buying On Time (1997), was nominated for both the City of Toronto Book Award and the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, and was serialized on CBC Radio’s Between the Covers. The book traces the lives of a family of immigrants to a Canadian suburb between the fifties and seventies. Some of these stories were anthologized in Dreaming Home, Canadian Short Stories, and the Penguin Anthology of Canadian Humour. In 2015, the book was long listed for Canada Reads and the Lithuanian translation was nominated for Book of the Year.
Antanas Sileika has worked frequently as a reviewer of books for radio, television, and print.
His third book, Woman in Bronze (2004), compared the seasonal life of a young man in Czarist Lithuania with his subsequent attempts to succeed as a prominent sculptor in Paris in the twenties. The novel was a Globe Best Book of that year.
He is the director for the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, and is a past winner of a National Magazine Award.
His most recent novel, Underground, appeared from Thomas Allen in 2011. The story is set in the underground resistance to the Soviet Union in the late 1940’s. It was named as one of the Globe and Mail’s 100 Best Books of 2011.
Debby de Groot
Debby de Groot started her working life in the classified section of The Star in Johannesburg, and then moved on to publishing in 1982 with a seven-year stint at Harper Collins, and a small business representing publishers in outlying areas and sub-Saharan Africa. She also spent four years with Southern Book Publishers, as Sales and Marketing Director, before immigrating to Canada in 1997, and working on contract with Key Porter Books as Publicity Manager. After leaving Penguin Group (Canada) in 2006, where she was Director, Publicity and Marketing, she formed her own book pr consultancy, ddg Publicity and Marketing. Together with Meisner Publicity and Promotion, the company re-formed as Meisner, de Groot & Associates early in 2008.
Travis Belanger is the founder and owner of MKTG 101, a budgeted marketing solutions firm for individuals and smaller businesses. After graduating from high school with his first business, and the valedictorian, director, and entrepreneurship awards; he enrolled in the Business Administration program at Brock University. His university career culminated in numerous, invaluable marketing experiences. In his third year, he planned a strategic partnership that resulted in him being placed in charge of a major marketing initiative for a week-long conference in Las Vegas. As graduation approached Travis saw the societal gap in the employment of new, talented graduates. He saw creative, hard-working students who would graduate and be unable to secure meaningful employment. Travis created MKTG 101 with the intention of building the experience of these talented students so they would be able to excel in the workforce after graduation. On the opposite side, individuals and businesses without a large marketing budget are provided an affordable option. Since the inception of MKTG 101, Travis has been involved in every project taken. His experience with finding cost effective solutions for any project has helped numerous clients in a range of industries including: bridal, construction, music, energy, education, events, and literary.
Member’s Readings
Leonard Rosmarin is Professor Emeritus of French literature and former Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Brock University in the Niagara Region of Ontario, Canada. He received his Doctorate from Yale University where he began his teaching career in 1964, then was appointed Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University, also in Connecticut.
He returned to Canada in 1969 to take up a position as Associate, then Full Professor at Brock, which, at that time, was only five years old. Leonard felt it would be an exciting challenge to create programs and traditions at a place that was just beginning its existence.
Before reincarnating himself as a novelist, Leonard has been an internationally recognized scholar and published nine books that have taken him all over the map of literary scholarship, from the 17th century to the 21st.
He has been decorated twice by the Government of France for distinguished service in the cause of French letters. From 1992 till 2002 he was Visiting Professor at the School for Doctoral studies at the University of Perpignan in Perpignan, France.
A self-confessed opera addict, he has written a study on the relationship between literature and lyric drama titled When Literature Becomes Opera. He is especially proud of the essays he has devoted to the works of some of the great Franco-Jewish writers of the 20th century: the novelist Albert Cohen, the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, the dramatist Liliane Atlan and the Nobel Prize winner, Elie Wiesel.
His English adaptation of Mme Atlan’s finest play, Les Mers Rouges, was mounted by the very popular Toronto Fringe Festival in 2005 and will eventually be made into a film for television.His essay on the novels of Elie Wiesel has been enthusiastically endorsed by the great man himself. Leonard is fully fluent in both French and English, and navigates effortlessly between the two languages and cultures.
Leonard has become a novelist rather late in life, at the ripe old age of 70! Why did it take so long? Here is how he relates his unusual trajectory: “For literally decades I had wanted to immortalize my over-the-top, larger-than-life Jewish family. They were refreshingly un-hypocritical. In fact, they were always brutally frank. They would never stab you in the back; it was always in the chest. So at least you knew where the blows were coming from. They were absolutely transparent. What you see was what you got.
“But whenever I felt inclined to sit down and actually write about them, I would begin to worry about what would happen to my academic career. As of the late 70s, Canadian, just like American universities, were becoming afflicted with the neurosis of ‘Publish or Perish.’ In order to rise through the ranks, I simply had to concentrate on my scholarship and leave novel writing on the back burner.
“Once I retired, however, I had no more excuses. My immediate family and friends got after me to finally put down in writing all the tantalizing, scandalous stories I had been relating to them for years about the extended family of my childhood. So I sat down and started working on the novel in earnest.
“I had written a few chapters way back in 1982, twenty-six years earlier. At that time, all I intended to do was to make fun of my relatives and throw in some sex into the story for good measure. When I returned to them so many years later, my attitude had, by then, changed radically. I felt a deep empathy towards them. I could no longer mock them. Instead of making my readers laugh at them, I wanted my readers to laugh with them. I still wanted my novel to be hilarious, but I wanted it to have poignancy, too. Hence the title, Getting Enough.
“It’s the story of a group of individuals from the same family who are desperate for emotional and spiritual fulfilment but go about seeking it the wrong way. They get short-circuited by their erotic cravings. Rubbing epidermises is not the same thing as being in love with another human being.
“The two main characters, at least, come out stronger and better people. Once they stop typecasting one another, they can move towards a loving reconciliation after 26 years of an acrimonious, hate-ridden marriage.
“Now that I have written my first work of fiction, I would love to continue. When you create a novel, you experience the thrill of roaming, untrammelled, within your imagination. The sense of freedom is boundless. You are absolute master of the world you are building. And what is so wonderful is that by creating imaginary destinies you can see more clearly into yourself and our whole human condition.”
Sean E. Livingston is a Naval Reserve officer with the CAF, as well as a teacher and Sea Cadet instructor. For over a decade, he has researched and promoted the history of HMCS Oakville, keeping its memory and story alive. His book Oakville’s Flower has just released and it is a must read!
Sean: Oakville’s Flower: The History of HMCS Oakville tells the story of a Second World War Corvette that was christened in, and named after, the town of Oakville. Despite its exciting naval career, and the valour displayed by its crew during the war, memory of the ship and its heroic deeds was all but forgotten. The book reveals the deep connection the people of Oakville had with their namesake warship, a unique bond that stirred deep feelings of patriotism, loyalty, and love. Oakville’s Flower not only brings to light the story of this ship and the community that supported her, but also reveals how its memory is being kept alive in the community from which it is named. It is more than just a history of a ship – it is a revelation of how Canadians, both at sea and at home, did their part when the world was in crisis. Although the book will naturally be a pleasure for fans of naval history, it is a story anyone can read and appreciate. I hope people enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.