Prairie Fire celebrates Turnstone milestone

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/02/2017 (2238 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A baker’s dozen of Manitoba writers will help Prairie Fire magazine celebrate the 40th birthday of Manitoba publisher Turnstone Press on Thursday at McNally Robinson Booksellers.

The writers — including Martha Brooks, Méira Cook, Armin Wiebe and Dave Williamson — will read from reminiscences published in the magazine’s winter issue, which is being launched that evening at 7 p.m. Essays in the magazine describe how a group of writers and teachers associated with the University of Manitoba, including Dennis Cooley, Robert Enright and John Beaver, founded Turnstone during the wave of mid-1970s Canadian nationalism.

And since the launch is a birthday party, there’ll be cake.

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Prairie Fire also recently announced the winners of its annual literary competition, and three Winnipeggers were among the writers whose work was selected.

In the fiction category, first prize went to Stephen Henighan, a former Governor General’s Award finalist from Ontario; second place went to Winnipeg teacher-writer Rowan Smith-McCandless; third to Karen Hofman and honorable mention to Rosella Leslie (the latter are both from B.C.).

First prize in poetry went to Natalie Appleton of Vernon, B.C.; Winnipeg poet and teacher Angeline Schellenberg took second; Mollie Coles Tonn of Newmarket, Ont. won third; and Winnipeg’s Kerry Ryan received an honorable mention.

The creative non-fiction category was an Alberta sweep featuring, in first place-to-honourable mention order, Nicole Boyce, Natalie Hervieux, Shelley Bindon and Barbara Wackerle Baker.

Excerpts from the winning entries are featured on the magazine’s website and in a future issue.

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An American publisher with a history of copyright violation has produced illustrated children’s versions of the novels On the Road, The Old Man and the Sea, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and 2001: A Space Odyssey — and in the process incurred the wrath of those books’ copyright holders.

Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster and the estates of (respectively) Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote and Arthur C. Clarke are suing Moppet Books for the unauthorized kids’ versions of the novels.

As reported in Publishers’ Weekly, the lawsuit alleges Moppet Books has attempted to get around copyright by marketing the books as study guides, despite the fact the books aren’t exactly elementary school reading.

Moppet Books owner Frederik Colt was sued in 2011 for an unauthorized sequel to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

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Last fall’s announcement of Bob Dylan as the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature sparked plenty of discussion, pro and con, much of it in the form of 140-character tweets.

English literature and New Testament studies professor Michael Gilmour, from Providence University College, will offer a deeper examination of the subject Feb. 11 at McNally Robinson as part of the college’s public lecture series.

Gilmour, whose books include Gods and Guitars: Seeking the Sacred in Post-1960s Popular Music and The Gospel According to Bob Dylan: The Old, Old Story for Modern Times, will speak starting at 7 p.m.

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Writers with a completed manuscript can pitch their work online to a handful of Canadian publishers and literary agents on Wednesday in a 12-hour Twitter pitch event hosted by an Ontario book marketing agency.

Digiwriting has organized the event, called Canlitpit, and signed up participating publishers including Turnstone Press, ECW, BookThug, Goose Lane, Thistledown and Coteau, plus the Transatlantic Literary Agency, to assess the book pitches.

Full details are available at

http://digiwriting.com/canlitpit/.

booknewsbob@gmail.com

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