Summer Hiatus

If you have been reading this blog at all in the last few months, you have probably noticed that we haven’t been posting as frequently as we would like. Well, we’re on a bit of a summer hiatus and have been busy working on our own creative projects as well as going to work five days a week.

Thankfully, we have a little help on the way. We expect to be back in action with THREE bloggers contributing to InkNoire on a weekly basis. We also hope we can deliver on author interviews and book reviews previously mentioned.

It is true that our posts will be sparse for another couple months; however, we’ll try and give you a few doses of literary content now and again until we get into full swing this September.

In the meantime, if you find yourself unable to cope without a regular InkNoire fix, please visit some of our preferred reads elsewhere in the blogosphere. Note that not all are literary sites:

The Genealogy of Taste
Texting
Bookninja
The BackList
Maud Newton
Niggerati Manor
SlushPile
Marlon James
Oh Word!
Lexiphanic
Other Clutter
Ill Doctrine

For more entertaining reads from other bloggers, consult our blogroll.

In between work, writing and maintaining my summer glow, I still answer email. So, reach out some time via inknoire [at] g mail [dot] com if you want to know what I’m up to, if you’d like to add me on Facebook, and anything else that floats your boat. :)

Joyland - Emily Schultz

It seems everyone thumbs their noses at the 80s. Most will pretend it was a ridiculous decade, one based on fear and extreme consumption, all backdropped by big haired, synthed-out pop music. But that is an adult point of view, the sight that understands the world as larger than four blocks and a few hundred people. For those of us that grew up in the 80s there is an uneasy nostalgia there and Joyland occupies that pocket of remembering perfectly. This is a novel of florescent memories and chunky pixelated landscapes, all set within the confines of being young in a small town. This is a novel about being bored constantly and the fantasies of what goes on just beyond the train tracks leading out of town. Yet, beneath all this supposed innocence is a bubbling unease, the world large and looming, waiting just behind adolescence.

Joyland avoids the easy trap of relying too heavily on the decade’s pop culture. Accented by Nate Powell’s striking black and white drawings, the book instead uses the video games and TV shows are used more as sign posts to the era, as reminders of the types of media invading the youth. Shultz has done an impressive job of depicting the 80s children, not as the originators of multi-media culture, but the first that were born completely indoctrinated by it. This was the first generation where the bombardment of multi-media culture was not only normal, but expected and craved for.

More Screaming

As you can tell, I’ve been pretty wound up in the Scream  lately and the posts have dropped off. There is a review coming very shortly but in the meantime in-between time I wanted to let everyone know that tickets for the book length reading of Christopher Dewdney’s The Natural History are now on sale at the Scream Store. Tickets are $35 and include the surefire amazing reading plus a three course vegetarian dinner with an option for a fish dish. For more info check out the store!

Also, we have the rough event listings up on the events page so have a look over there and, as always, our facebook page is alive and we.

 Enough shameless promoting. More content coming soon!

Scream Mainstage Set

As inknoire goes into a slight summer lull, the Scream Literary Festival kicks into high gear. We’ve just released the names of those participating in the 15th annual Scream in High Park:

Elizabeth Bachinsky
Sean Dixon
Shane Koyczan
Naila Keleta Mae
David McGimpsey
Roy Miki
Al Moritz
Steven Price
Priscila Uppal
Zoe Whittall
Rachel Zolf

I’ve seen Koyczan preform when I lived in Vernon and he’s a bundle of energy and passion. I just finished reading Uppal’s Griffin nominated Ontological Necessities and it was quite engaging. Rachel Zolf, fresh off the release of her new book Human Resources, is always a spectacular reader. And Roy freaking Miki. This is quite a powerhouse lineup and I really hope to see everyone that is in Toronto on July 9th there.

But there’s more! Scream in High Park is the closing party; there are lots of other readers and events starting on July 3rd. Keep checking the Scream website for more info or email me to get on our mailing list and get a sweet newsletter every month or so.

Nerve Squall – Sylvia Legris

Air bubbles orbit your coffee cup. Wind forever blowing the outside in: pollen, pesticide, exhaust. The weatherman, either indecisive or comtemptuous (take your pick), holds out rain in the one hand and migraine in the other. O blustering succotash! O mother of lightening!

Initially a reader might mistake Nerve Squall, winner of last year’s Griffin Prize, as a overly active semantic playground, a text concerned most heavily with the twisting of clichés, of shifting ordinary language slightly off center. But the text is a much deeper exploration than that, addressing altered perception and the many ways of viewing the world.

Legris centers the text around the subject and sensations of the migraine, a nerve storm in the head. Yet, at no point does that main focus hinder the progression of the text: this is not a book that simply explains what it is like to have a migraine or attempts to translate the pain of the suffering through direct adjectives. Instead, the migraine becomes a doorway to re-imagine sight and speech. Through the first section the work rotates around the theme of fish and the underwater: the vocabulary used drenches the reader in a slowness, as if the poems, the movements described, are underwater as well. The reader is given a pathway to the dull edges of consciousness that accompany a migraine, stumbling or swimming through the world.