Dixon seeks remedy for heartbreak in Verona

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/12/2016 (3576 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Valentine’s Day is two months off, but Calgary writer/globetrotter Glenn Dixon has the perfect book for the season.

His third non-fiction book, touted by publisher Simon & Schuster as a male Eat, Pray, Love meets Under the Tuscan Sun, finds Dixon in Verona, Italy, recovering from romantic disappointment by volunteering to answer letters written to Shakespeare’s Juliet. (Some 10,000 lovelorn letters a year are written to the fictional Veronese teenager, and volunteers in the city respond.)

While there, he researches the story behind the play, gains new insights into love and returns to Calgary, where he leads high school English classes studying Romeo and Juliet. Juliet’s Answer: One Man’s Search for Love and the Elusive Cure for Heartbreak is published internationally Jan. 3.

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If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to write a book, you may be interested in an afternoon workshop Feb. 12 called Book Publishing 101.

The session, co-hosted by the Manitoba Writers’ Guild and Chi-Series Winnipeg, features S.M. Beiko, co-publisher of fantasy imprint ChiZine Publications. Beiko will talk about preparing a query, publishers and agents, and will offer participants a free critique of a one- to three-page query.

The event, to be held at the Guild’s Artspace office, costs $50. Call 204-944-8013 for details or to register.

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Based in the city with the largest indigenous writing community in Canada, Winnipeg-based literary magazine Prairie Fire is looking for works of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction or experimental writing for a special indigenous issue to be published in spring 2017.

The magazine published an earlier indigenous issue in 2001, edited by Thomas King, entitled First Voices, First Words. Submissions for the upcoming issue are open until Jan. 16. Submission guidelines are available at prairiefire.ca.

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Fans of Joan Didion’s essays and reporting on the apocalyptic mood of 1960s and ’70s America — chronicled in books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album — will rejoice at the prospect of the 81-year-old’s new book, due next March.

South and West: From a Notebook will contain two extended excerpts from her previously unseen notebooks, one covering a road trip in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana in 1970 and the other her trip to San Francisco in 1976 to cover the Patty Hearst trial.

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The annual TD Canadian Children’s Book Week will bring two prolific authors of books for young people to Manitoba schools and libraries next May, and teachers and librarians have until Jan. 15 to apply to host a visit.

In the 40th anniversary year of the program, Governor General’s Award-winning author/illustrator Marianne Dubuc, a Montreal-based author whose work has been translated into 20 languages, will read to early years audiences. Saskatchewan-based University of Winnipeg graduate Beth Goobie, who has written 18 books for young adult readers, will read to middle years and teenage audiences.

Each spring, the program sponsors more than 400 readings in schools, libraries, community centres and bookstores from coast to coast. For details, see bookweek.ca.

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Donald Trump said he’d stimulate the economy; before taking office he’s already stimulated one American industry.

Mind you, he’s stimulated the publishing industry to put out books with titles like The Trump Survival Guide and What Do We Do Now: Standing Up For Your Values in Trump’s America. The latter contains essays by 28 well-known progressives including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Gloria Steinem and Paul Krugman.

Those books, from Dey Street and Melville House presses, respectively, will be in bookstores in early January, Publishers Weekly reports. A similar title, Radical Hope, from Vintage Books, will be out shortly after Trump opens the seventh seal and takes the oath of office Jan. 20.

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