CKUA aired an interview with Alice about the new collection, in conversation with Ken Davis on its Bookmark program.  To hear the interview at the CKUA site, choose “Bookmark” from the “select a program” menu at the bottom, then ‘archived programs’ (April 11, 2010). The interview with Alice starts a little after the 13-minute mark.

It’s a bit odd, really, being a poet with a sister who writes novels. (“Are there any more writers in your family?” asked one magazine editor nervously after the publication had accepted pieces from me, my father and Carol.) I guess I have to admit that I felt apprehensive when she first took up writing a few years back, as though she was treading on my turf. After all, she had been the vivacious, popular one with great hair. And right away she was writing better dialogue than I did.

I figured I had two things insulating me from competition. One, that’s she’s down in Australia and so would be sending her work into quite a different market. The other was that I had a fifteen-year head start on her in terms of publishing books while she had been bringing up a family.

I didn’t realize that I had another publishing advantage – that I was writing poetry instead of novels. Poets whine a lot about the difficulty of finding a publisher. I had to start a publishing company with friends to bring out my own first book. However, though poetry may be marginal in terms of readership, it is paradoxically a little easier to publish it. Nobody expects a book of poetry to sell more than a few hundred copies, so nobody has big expectations. My early books could be published by tiny optimistic presses from Victoria to Fredricton, until I was taken in by the University of Alberta Press.

But novels – they’re fatter, financially more demanding to print and market. Printing five hundred copies doesn’t seem to be an option. The stakes are higher, the expectations steeper. Carol’s novel was taken up promptly by a leading agent in Australia and shopped around to the big publishing houses. But it didn’t quite fit anyone’s season, anyone’s niche. “We’re not sure how to market it,” she was told. They didn’t think they could sell the fifty thousand copies that would make it worth their while.

And yet, when I opened that box last week, I sat down and read the whole story all over again, absorbed in its characters and lyric description. It’s the story of a woman coming to terms with the fact that she gave a child up for adoption. Carol has caught that cusp of time in the early 70s when a tectonic shift in social attitudes took place. A whole institutional system had existed to find babies for nice families and coerced girls into giving up those babies in order to be ‘good’ and self-sacrificing. Then suddenly, the card house of social attitudes collapsed.  Carol makes this story real and vital.

I’m over the sibling rivalry. I would even cheerfully give up my head-start; I wish my sister had been able to write much sooner. She has been caught in a different tectonic shift: the massive financial upheaval of the book-publishing industry in the early 21st century, which feels it can’t afford to gamble (even if every new title is inherently a gamble.) So we end up with the winner-take-all fractal phenomenon described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in which one book will account for a massive percentage of sales.

We need more than the literature of best-sellers, and perhaps the technological upheaval in electronic book publishing will allow that to happen. I’m moderately hopeful that, just as my indie musician friends are connecting with audiences in different ways, novelists will be able to do that too. Then readers will be able to find the wonderful other books like Carol’s. But for now – get your university library to order in a copy of “Closed Adoption Policy in the 1960s.” Don’t tell them it’s a novel. Sneak down and read it over lunch.

The Lifetime Achievement Award is given each year to an individual artist who has made such a contribution over an extended period of time. It is sponsored by ATCO Gas.  A brief video about Alice was screened at the awards evening in the Winspear Centre.

I like messing around with traditional forms like the sonnet. For my Valentine envoy, I imagined my poem as one of those small Voyager spacecraft, travelling out beyond the boundaries of the solar system. An alien intelligence, finding one of them, would surely realize right away that it was an artefact made with purpose.

And, of course, the poem is for my dear Valentine, David.

Valentine Envoi

 Go, little poem, into the space between

planets, across the unbounded page

inscribed by stars. A tiny, ticking machine

of levers and polished surfaces –

clear evidence of intent, design.

 

Let the aliens who intercept it

learn the virtues of this love of mine,

his kindly constellation. Let them share

my wonder at the dense relationship

of soul and smile, within the dear,

dear boundaries of skin. Go little ship

of space beyond the gravity of time,

and — beating always — prove

that there is, indeed, a god

of love.

 

 

The Society hosts five luncheons a year in the ballroom of Edmonton’s historic Macdonald Hotel. The Enbridge Famous Five luncheon series features speakers from the business, academic and not-for-profit worlds — and at least one poet.

The series theme is “Celebrating Women in Leadership: Past, Present and Future.” Poets may not often be thought of as ‘leaders,’ but Alice will speak about her mother (who inspired her book, Memory’s Daughter) — a woman who never took an active part herself in political life but had a vision of education for her daughters, and made them realize that engagement (and opinions) matter.

Time: 11:30 am reception, lunch starting at 12 noon.

It must be here, somewhere,
under the remnants of wrappings,
bows, December’s red-and-green frenzy.

The cat thinks it’s hiding in the needles
of the Christmas tree, can be poked into motion
like a tremulous ornament.

The dog thinks it must be in the food cupboard -
has sniffed its ginger tail, caught a whiff
of soft cinnamon paws.

But none of us can find this little, still creature.
Perhaps if I looked outside, in the trees’ woven basket,
looped with the moon’s silver ribbons?

But no, I keep fumbling through the frantic shine
of credit cards and hunting in my handbags.
Oh, where have I put it this time?

by Alice Major, who hopes you can find
the Christmas spirit

The anthology was released in Waterford, Ireland, in mid-March as part of the new Sean Dunne International Festival of Arts and Culture. On April 23 (UNESCO World Book Day) the anthology was launched at the Canadian Embassy in Dublin by Canada’s ambassador to Ireland, and another launch took place at Cuirt, the biggest of the Irish international literary festivals.

Anthology review

The award was established in memory of Pat Lowther, a young B. C. poet who died tragically just before she was to become the League’s first female president.  Previous winners have included distinguished poets such as Gwendolyn MacEwan, Lorna Crozier and Dionne Brandt.

Alice’s book Some Bones and a Story was previously shortlisted for the same award.

The jury said, “The award goes to a landmark volume that offers a wealth of superlative writing, humour and sharp social commentary. ”

The shorlist for the award included Alice and also Marina Endicott for her acclaimed novel, Good to a Fault.

The Lowther jurors say:

“Pandora’s box is open, and out come tales spun by Sherry. The Office Tower Tales is about the vivacity of life and living. It expertly weaves the mundane things of life into a tapestry of priceless collectables. The tales paint life with a new brush, post-modern paint, and extraordinary strokes. They are mythical, classical, and iconoclastic. Not since Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales have we seen the frame narrative, now a mock epic for a contemporary audience. This is an epic work, huge in scope; an examination of the minutia of the ordinary lives of recognizable people, using the tropes of mythology as its metaphoric base.”

 The City of Edmonton Book Prize will be announced on April 6, during the Mayor’s Evening for the Arts at the Winspear Centre in Edmonton. The Lowther award winner will be announced during the League of Canadian Poets’ annual conference on June 13 in Vancouver.