Best-selling author James Patterson is giving away $1 million of his own money to independent bookstores.

Last Wednesday, Patterson announced the first round of 55 stores to receive over $267,000 in funds. The remaining $750,000 will be given out in stages throughout the year.

Patterson’s publisher, Hachette Book Group, released a statement saying the author feels that bookstores are vital to communities and that they leave a lasting love of reading in children and adults.

The bookstores can do whatever they want with the grants, which range from $2,000 to $15,000.

Patterson’s books have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide, making him among the world’s most prolific and popular writers.

Famed Montreal-born writer Mavis Gallant dies

TORONTO (AP) — Mavis Gallant, the Montreal-born writer who carved out an international reputation as a master short-story author while living in Paris for decades, died last Tuesday at age 91, her publisher said.

The bilingual Quebecois started out as a journalist and went on to publish well over 100 short stories in her lauded career, many of them in The New Yorker magazine and in collections such as The Other Paris, Across the Bridge and In Transit.

Although she lived abroad, Gallant received several high-profile honours in Canada, including a Companion of the Order of Canada and a Governor General’s Literary Award for her story collection, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories.

Random House in Canada confirmed the death, saying she died in her Paris apartment last Tuesday morning.

Although at least 120 of her pieces appeared in The New Yorker, her following in the United States remained small. Many of her books remain out of print, short stories tend not to be best-sellers and as a Canadian living in Paris she often wrote about foreign cultures.

American author Joyce Carol Oates compared Gallant to another Canadian short story master, Alice Munro, who captured the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature.

“Mavis Gallant enormous influence on Alice Munro,” Oates wrote on Twitter. “Perhaps the Nobel Prize should have been shared at no loss to two great Canadian writers.”

Munro herself said: “Mavis Gallant was a marvellous short story writer and a constant hopeful influence on my life.”

Another Canadian literary luminary, Margaret Atwood, tweeted: “Very sad to hear that MavisGallant has died… wonderful, scrappy person, wonderful writer, fascinating life.”

Born Mavis Leslie Young in Montreal in 1922, Gallant was an only child in an English-speaking Protestant family that splintered: her father died when she was young and her mother remarried. Starting from age four, she was dispatched to numerous boarding schools in Canada and the US. Many were French-speaking and she was usually the only English speaker.

After graduation, Gallant returned to Montreal and landed an entry-level stint at the National Film Board and then a job as a reporter for the Montreal Standard.

Gallant married Winnipeg musician John Gallant in 1942, but they divorced five years later. In 1950, she kept a promise she had made to herself to quit journalism by age 30 – she was 28. She began travelling Europe, subsisting on her fees from The New Yorker and by giving English lessons.

“I live on bread, wine, and mortadella,” she wrote in her diary while in Madrid in 1952, as published by The New Yorker. “Europe for me is governed by the price of mortadella.”

She gave herself two years to succeed. She did, beginning a 25-year collaboration with her famous New Yorker editor, author William Maxwell.

Though Montreal’s literary scene was thriving then – with writers like Mordecai Richler – Gallant told literary magazine Paris Review in a 1999 interview that she moved to Europe when “Canada in the early fifties was an intellectual desert”.

“I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free,” she said. “I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.”

Gallant felt at home in Europe, gaining acceptance as a writer that she felt she never would have back in Canada, she told a 2006 Bravo! television documentary, Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant.

“I found for the first time in my life a society where you could say you’re a writer and not be asked for three months’ rent in advance,” she said.

Gallant didn’t often write about herself, but she wrote often of people who like her lived in exile. Some of her early life is revealed in a series of stories in the collection Home Truths.

In a series of stories, she invents a young Canadian woman, Linnet Muir, who lived in New York for a while and then was hired by a Montreal newspaper during World War II. Like Muir, Gallant remembers hearing her boss say the only reason they hired her is because so many men were off at war.

Gallant wrote only two novels, Green Water, Green Sky and A Fairly Good Time, as well as the play What is to be Done?

Authors who contributed to Gallant’s collections – either through introductions, afterwords or editing – include Richler, Russell Banks and Michael Ondaatje.

Gallant told Paris Review that writing is like “a love affair: the beginning is the best part.”

“I write every day,” she said. “It is not a burden. It is the way I live.”

PAGE TWO:

Writer credits: Ann-Margaret Lim, Craig Dixon, Earl McKenzie

Bookshelf:

>>>THE SHORTLIST

Latest Releases from Peepal Tree Press

Kei Miller, Writing Down the Vision: Essays & Prophecies

When Kei Miller describes these as essays and prophecies, he shares with the reader a sensibility in which the sacred and the secular, conviction and scepticism, vision and analysis, polemic and reflection engage in profound and lively debate.

Olivier Stephenson, Visions & Voices: Conversations with Fourteen Playwrights

Presenting a compilation of interviews conducted from the late 1970s into the early 1980s, this study spotlights the Caribbean theatre in its most productive and revolutionary period. The book includes interviews with Michael Abbensetts, Lennox Brown, Alwin A. Bully, Stafford Ashani Harrison, Errol Gaston Hill, AR Slade Hopkinson, Errol John, Matura, Trevor Rhone, Dennis Scott, Carmen E Tipling, Derek Walcott, Roderick Walcott and Edgar Nkosi White.

Jane King, Performance Anxiety

“Jane King” is very much present in these poems, though never in obvious autobiographical ways. She is the observant eye taking in the beauties and droughts, climatic and human, she sees in St Lucia and in the semi-public lives of her neighbours.

Roger Robinson, The Butterfly Hotel

In moving, pared-down lyrics, expansive prose poems, witty ballads and even a prayer, Roger Robinson’s poems are marked by an engagement with the sounds and rhythmic resources of language drawn from both Trinidad and Britain.

Desiree Reynolds, Seduce

In this remarkable debut novel, told in prose that is poetic, delicate, vulgar and slyly funny, Desiree Reynolds has powerful things to say about race, class and the struggle between men and women. Desiree Reynolds is an important new Black British voice.

Vahni Capildeo, Utter

The latest collection from one of the most highly regarded and critically acclaimed younger poets in Britain today, Utter displays all the vibrant originality and experimentalism that has come to define Vahni Capildeo’s work.

>>>WHAT’S HAPPENING

Diane Browne for Brown Bookshelf [pic: browne]

Jamaican children’s author Diane Browne (The Ring and the Roaring Water, Island Princess in Brooklyn), who has written over 40 stories and books, is the guest blogger on the website Brown Bookshelf, a space designed to heighten awareness about the writers of colour writing for young readers. Each day of February, the website has featured a different African-American/Black author. Read Diane Browne’s entry at:

thebrownbookshelf.com/2014/02/19/day-19-diane-brown/

==============

Caribbean Writers Headline Lits Month at UWI

On Saturday, March 1, 2014, the Department of Literatures in English will launch its annual celebration of Literatures in English Month with two major events. St Lucian poet and dramatist Kendel Hippolyte will lead a poetry writing workshop at 9:00 am in the Faculty of Humanities and Education. The four-hour session is co-sponsored by Artistic Expressions Limited. There are limited spaces still available for interested persons who wish to participate. The department will accept enquires at litsworkshop@gmail.com or 927-2217 for further details.

At 3:00pm, Trinidadian writer Robert Antoni will launch his latest novel As Flies to Whatless Boys at Bookland in New Kingston. This is Antoni’s fifth novel which follows his previous successes Divina Trace (1991) and Blessed is the Fruit (1998)and My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (2002). The event will be held in association with the Kingston Book Festival and the launch address will be delivered by Head of Department, Dr Michael Bucknor.

On Sunday, March 2, the premier event of the month, “Love Affair with Literature,” will see both celebrated Caribbean writers reading from their work. This event, also a part of the Kingston Book Festival, will be held in the Neville Hall Lecture Theatre, N1 at 11:00 am. The programme will also include Jamaican writers: Commonwealth Writers Prize Winner Dr Erna Brodber (writer-in-residence), Small Axe poetry first-prize winner Monica (Winsome) Minott and Caribbean Music Expo Talent Search winner Richard ‘Dingo’ Dingwall.

PAGE THREE:

Review:

Baugh’s newest: read the poems – claim the gift

Black Sand: New & Selected Poems by Edward Baugh, Peepal Tree Press, 2013, 134 pages

PULL QUOTE: Black Sand is indeed a collector’s item – the best of Baugh in one book.

Professor Emeritus Edward Baugh, otherwise known as Eddie Baugh, has a new book of poems out. It’s called Black Sand: New & Selected Poems. And like its title and the title poem, the book is an exquisite collection of fine particles you’d want running through your fingers over and over again.

The experience with the book starts from the cover. At first, you may wonder at the rendering of the hue of the black sand. Why so black? It’s not real; beach-sand black is not that black, you may deliberate. But oh the contrast with the white foam and the sea and sky blues – it’s beautiful! Sometimes a little tweak, a little magic here and there, makes it perfect. The perfect book cover conjures great expectations. And since Baugh’s book is called Black Sand: New & Selected Poems, the bar is set very high. You see, this is the man who gave us such treasures as “The Carpenter’s Complaint”, “Sometimes in the Middle of the Story”, “Nigger Sweat”, “It was the Singing”, “A Tale from the Rainforest”, “Lignum Vitae”, and many others, so a book of his new and selected poems cannot but be a collector’s item.

And Black Sand is indeed a collector’s item – the best of Baugh in one book. I do have one issue with it, however. In the selection process, Baugh and his editors left out “Lunchtime With Linda” – a beautiful poem that describes raven-haired Linda switching lanes on the Los Angeles freeway, juggling the steering wheel, an apple, a can of beer and puffing a joint for lunch “then back in the office with her earphones plugged in to what you thought was a Dictaphone in her desk drawer, but was really Dexter Gordon on his sax”. Despite this omission, however, Baugh manages to reach a wide cross-section who will read or listen to his poems.

The frustrated Jamaican looking for something better in the immigration line will not only hear the sentiments behind “Nigger Sweat”, but know it; the atavistic memory in each of us will rise to “Sometimes in the Middle of the Story”, as Baugh moves from the thing outside the house that moves, which could be the wind, but is not the wind, but could be Touissant or a drowned African “turning on his sleep on the ocean floor”. In this classic poem, Baugh asserts that “their souls shuttle still the forest paths of ocean/connecting us still the current unbroken.”

The poet will totally get “Getting There”, and quite interestingly enough, many of the new poems, too. You see, a good number of Baugh’s new poems are about poetry. In his first two collections there are just a few with poetry as the main subject. These are “Cold Comfort” — in which he asks the questions poets in developing countries always ask themselves, about the relevance of poetry in a hard country, and comes to the conclusion that we all come to: poetry is our sustenance, our refuge, our comfort; “The House of Poems”, “Getting There” (mentioned earlier), and Travelling Man – a beautiful poem capturing his speechless pride in seeing Derek Walcott now “master/ mariner, manoeuvring ‘his’ craft/ that had encompassed the world.”

Compare four poems on poetry over two collections to nine poems on poetry in one collection. In the title poem “Black Sand”, Baugh compares poetry to the black sand beach:

If the poem could open itself and be wide

as this beach of black sand, could absorb

like black sand the sun’s heat, and respond

to bright sunlight with refractions of tone…

if the poem could be patient and wide as the evening,

this beach of black sand expecting the night

without fear, the moon lifting over the sea…

Baugh in this collection does what many younger poets wish they could do, but have been warned by editors and older poets not to – write poems on poetry. And I see why the caution. It seems that the poet with the longer relationship with poetry is better equipped to produce poems on poetry that are not sappy. And these poems that capture our love affair with poetry are some of the main reasons I love Baugh’s new collection.

The Baugh we’ve come to know through his poetry is indeed multifaceted. We know his more West Indian-themed-work that easily fit into the CXC curriculum, works such as “Nigger Sweat”, “The Carpenter’s Complaint”, “Sometimes in the Middle of the Story”, “It was the Singing”, etc. We know his wry humour in “The Poet Bemused, An Open Letter to Feelings of Insecurity”. We know Baugh, the boy whose diligent eyes experienced life with immense pleasure, stored it and distilled it for us in “Responsibility”, “Sunday Afternoon Walks With My Father”, “The Town that had Known Better Days”, and “The Warner Woman”, etc. We know Baugh, the lover and man of deep desire as in “Capricon” and others. And we certainly know Baugh the thinker; the ‘muser’ – which his new poems certainly reflect.

In his new poems, we see the same Baugh from before, but even more himself now, more distilled, more potent, more from the gut. In his new work, we see a poet who can write such a universally appealing poem as “Hurrying Across Hill Country” – a poem that so eloquently and easily captures the moment it seems we all experience driving on a hill when we see the horizon and think “…there was no reason/ we shouldn’t shoot straight ahead /lose ourselves without trace to tell/of our transcendence.

The Baugh we see now is thankfully free from all the angst of having to prove himself a relevant writer. This collection proves it. Read the poems, claim the gift.

-Ann-Margaret Lim

Jonah

By Craig Dixon

If I had been Jonah

I would have taken a few items

into the belly of the big fish.

Imagine all the dishes he could have cooked

in three days and three nights

had he taken a list

of rainforest-approved recipes,

some utensils and condiments,

a Singer stove with an oven

and a thirty-pound Petcom cookie gas.

If I were in Nineveh

Jonah couldn’t preach to me

and waste such good food.

FOOTSTEPS

By Earl McKenzie

From my hospital bed

I listen to footsteps on the corridor.

Elegant feminine stilettos,

Plodding masculine bravados.

Purposeful strides of professionals,

Tentative, apprehensive steps of the admitted,

The delightful clatter of the discharged.

Walking feet saying more than words.

PAGE FOUR:

Bookends serial:

Love Wounds [pic: love wounds]

Chapter 6

My mother hadn’t expected to lose another husband in her lifetime. Granted, this one was by actual death, while our father had really only been by divorce. That was moot, though, because my mother considered our father dead to her. My brothers and sisters and I knew she would need as much fortification as possible, which was why we all made the trip to Amsterdam, some of us at greater personal financial expense than others, of course. Not to mention the emotional fallout – because of the cost, my siblings’ families were unable to tag along. They would be abandoned, as it were, during the one time of year they most wanted to be together. (It was Christmastime.) But it was worth it (we hoped) to provide a united show of support for her since she was prone to emotional valleys.

After the burial there were difficult questions to be sorted; for example, what would become of her now that Arnoud was gone? None of us wanted to contemplate becoming nursemaids to her again, but it didn’t seem likely she would remain in the Netherlands. She’d moved there with Arnoud because he’d felt it necessary to relocate in the wake of Christiaan’s death. With Arnoud gone, wasn’t living there pointless now? Had he made any provisions for her in a will? We were hazy about Dutch marital law, but would his daughter-in-law perhaps want to lay claim to the house? We gleaned that the daughter-in-law, much like Arnoud’s son, was a low achiever who imagined Arnoud, who’d been a neglectful father while his children were growing up, owed her a debt. Why else hadn’t she since picked up the pieces of her life and moved out?

Meanwhile, my mother still thought of Texas as her home – the Dutch people, who were less contentious than Americans, would nevertheless always seem to her to be mysterious alien life forms. She enjoyed cultural aspects of living in northern Europe, of course, like visiting museums and trying to discover the secret heart of the old Flemish masters’ paintings, a pastime Arnoud nurtured in her since he was retired and had devoted the rest of his life to expanding his horizons. The simple fact was this, however: she had no real family there in that strange land. None of us kids was there. Not that she’d needed us to be around her when she’d uprooted her life and moved there four years ago. She had done what she did whenever she became involved with a man: immersed herself wholly in him. Arnoud, because he’d lived away from Amsterdam for so long, on his return there, found that he no longer had as many friends there as he’d imagined. Now that he’d passed, the handful of his friends who’d adopted her simply because she was his wife no longer needed to keep cultivating her. But if she returned to Texas, what would she do? She was, after all, still a young 69.

We children conference-called each other before we went and everybody was clear on one thing: our lives couldn’t accommodate our mother and her many emotional and mental dramas. We loved her dearly, but we were all trying to forge ahead in our own lives. Looking back it seemed shameful, when I confided in Dr Miller, how lacking in compassion we’d been, completely unmindful (to be more truthful, uncaring) of the cruel permanence of loss that Arnoud’s death would obviously bring her. But we were all selfish; a family, not unlike any other unhappy family, and, wasn’t it Tolstoy who once remarked, “unhappy in our own way”.

Our big brother Roland was very strident in his defence of recommending she stay put there. “I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t time to be worrying about Mother. Why can’t she stay with Femke and that mess of kids? How much of them are there, anyway? They’ve become good friends now, haven’t they?” he said. Roland was a literature professor in Iowa and was married to white dreadlocked American woman who had hated my mother ever since she’d accidentally overheard Mummy call her a whore, and prevented her from seeing her little mocha-coloured dreadlocked grandbabies at every turn.

Opal snorted. “Yeah, Rolie, we know Mom can’t stay with you, hon.”

“No, seriously, you guys, what’s going to happen to her?” I was frantic. As the only child who was still single – well, Stewart was too, but it was generally accepted that he lived the life of a degenerate, a tag we would have assigned even if he wasn’t gay, or bi-curious or whatever the hell he called himself; he would definitely have been an inveterate skirt-chaser, like our father – I was worried the responsibility would fall to me to take in my mother.

Passive-aggressive Dixie, who famously did not get along with our mother, refusing to call her ‘Mummy’ like the rest of us. Her voice was testy when she cut in, “You guys, I think you’re getting ahead of yourselves. Betty isn’t some feeble, helpless old woman, you know. Why do y’all handle her like she’ll break? Like she’ll s**t herself if you take your eyes off her for a minute?” Dixie herself had been divorced three times and was now a single mother with two children and living in LA. “I mean, what are we doing here? Why can’t she go on living by herself? Wherever she decides she wants to live! Jesus!”

That was Dixie for you. Always kept it real, always brought us back to Jesus, who always seemed to feature amid dysfunction.

But back to my own family’s particular brand of dysfunction.

We converged on Amsterdam, jetlagged and already sick of each other from the tiresome flight. It was extremely cold. I’d never been there before – in fact had never been somewhere so cold that I could literally see my breath in the air in front of me – and the camel’s hair coat Stewart brought for me from New York was not nearly adequate enough. Still, my first impressions of the place were wonderful. Lights winking on the canal bridges, people bundled up with scarves whose edges were flying in the brittle wind, the sounds of bicycle tyres on cobblestoned streets as rosy-cheeked people pedalled furiously.

I was still pissed off with Chester and what he’d said about me finding a new man while I was away. Number one: I was only there for a week. Did he think I was that big a slut that I’d pick up a man so quickly? And, more importantly, number two: was he trying to send me a subtle message that he wanted to get rid of me? He’d admitted to me that I wasn’t his only mistress. That he’d had an on-again-off-again affair with some woman who was older than both me and Carlene. But I thought – Christ, ego, I guess – that after me, Chester would no longer feel the need to be with anybody else…

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK