Artist's life beyond the big city explored

A poet and professor originally from Winnipeg reflects in her latest book on the life of artists who live outside the big city.

Tanis MacDonald, who teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University and lives in Waterloo, Ont., will launch Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City (Wolsak & Wynn) on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location, in conversation with Winnipeg-based poet and professor Sharanpal Ruprai.

Out of Line examines society’s perceptions about the life of the artist. MacDonald’s fourth book of poetry, meanwhile, is due in 2019 from Book*hug and earlier this year she co-edited, along with Winnipeggers Ariel Gordon and Rosanna Deerchild, a book of poems and essays inspired by menstruation called Gush: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Time.

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Winnipegger Tom Pearson wrote and published his memoir Please Don’t Forget Me to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s disease and the challenge it poses for caregivers and to pay tribute to his late wife Lynn.

He also used the book, published in 2014, as a fundraiser for the Alzheimer’s Society. This year, he says, he’s finished promoting the book (though it’s still available for order from McNally Robinson and Amazon) and has turned over $1,400 to the society, representing the proceeds from the book and book launch wine bar sales.

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Women swept the major categories in this year’s Hugo Awards, with N.K. Jemisin completing a three-peat by picking up the best novel award for The Stone Sky, the concluding volume of her Broken Earth trilogy.

Jemisin, who won the award in 2016 and 2017 for The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate, respectively, spoke in her acceptance speech about critics in the science fiction world who have said the fan-voted awards have taken on a social justice bias. She called her award "a massive, shining, rocket-shaped finger" aimed in their direction.

Other winners included Martha Wells, who won best novella award for All Systems Red; Suzanne Palmer, who won the best novelette award for The Secret Life of Bots; Rebecca Roanhorse, who won the best short story award for Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience; Lois McMaster Bujold, who won the best series award for her World of the Five Gods series; Nnedi Okorafor, who won best young adult book for Akata Warrior; and the movie Wonder Woman. Roanhorse was also named best new writer.

The awards were announced in August at WorldCon, an annual science fiction gathering, in San Jose, Calif.

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Canada marked the 100th anniversary this summer of the start of the Hundred Days battles that brought the First World War to a close.

Those battles, in which the Canadian Army won a series of decisive victories against Germany, are the backdrop to My Hundred Days of War, by expat author Darrell Duthie. Duthie’s new novel continues the story of an earlier historical novel, Malcolm MacPhail’s Great War, which told the story of Canada’s wartime experience through a Canadian intelligence officer main character.

In the new book, due out in October, Winnipeg’s Cameron Highlanders play a major role. Duthie, formerly from Calgary, began writing novels after a career in finance in the Netherlands.

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In some of his other writing, Kelly Wionzek has explored the history of the Norse settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows, N.L.

His latest book, Yasgur’s Farm, published under the pseudonym Kel D. Orbis, focuses on somewhat more recent history: the 1969 Woodstock festival. Wionzek examines the issues of the Woodstock generation through the story of a 15-year-old rebel who travels to the field in upstate New York made famous by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Who.

He launches the novel on Friday at 7:30 p.m. at McNally Robinson’s Grant Park location.

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