Bella’s Bookshelves Reviews TRT

The average shelf-life for a book (even a bestseller) is a year, so it was awesome to find this review of This Ramshackle Tabernacle almost 2 years after its publication in June 2010.

Steph VanderMeulen, over at Bella’s Bookshelves had this to say about TRT:

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“This is a powerful book. It deserves much more attention than it’s had, though it’s not been ignored, either, having reaped positive reviews and also been a finalist for both the 2010 Winterset Award and the 2011 ReLit Award for Short Fiction.

“The book’s certainly had much attention from me. As I did with This Cake is for the Party, I got intimate with it: I brushed my teeth in front of it, I sweated on the treadmill with it, I ate cottage cheese and tomato and crackers and peanut butter with it; I spattered pickle juice on it. I dogeared the pages, I folded them backwards over the spine as I read. I flattened the spine, I shoved the book in my bag every morning and after every time I’d sneaked a few minutes with it at work. I slept with it by my side. I loved this book, for so many reasons, but mainly because while I was reading it I was deeply moved, so much so that sometimes I had to put it down after a story, only for a minute or two, to digest what I’d just read and quietly admire (er, and resent!) Martin’s skills. In Salty Ink, Chad Pelley, fellow East Coaster and author of Away from Everywhere [...], wrote of This Ramshackle Tabernacle: ‘A compelling [collection]. It is emotionally engaging and impressively written. [This] book will rattle you.’

“For once an endorsement is absolutely true. (Actually, they all are in this case.) The book did rattle me. I was disturbed and uncomfortable reading some of it, but it was a good kind of disturbed, the kind that makes you admire the writer’s ability and skill, that compels you to keep reading.”

Read the whole review here.

Fogo Island Writer Residency

Dear Reader,

It has been a while since you have heard from me but I’ve been pretty busy getting my first novel A Blessed Snarl edited and off to press. It should be coming out, hopefully, in February or March of 2012. But if you want a sneak peek at what it’s about you can read two chapters that have been published as the short stories “Creosote Madonna” in Riddle Fence (Issue 10) and “Running the Whale’s Back” in Image (issue 72, forthcoming).

In the meantime, I just received news that I will be one of the first writers-in-residence at the Bridge Studio in Deep Bay, Fogo Island (off the north coast of Newfoundland). The residency is from April to June of 2012 and I will be working on a new novel project entitled Oden’s Eyes.

This novel will see the revival of one of the characters from This Ramshackle Tabernacle  and it will deal, in some way, with Norwegian Death Metal, drug-running, old Norse Sagas, and life in contemporary Newfoundland. Sorry, I can’t say much more. But if you are interested in an extreme vacation, the studio is open to the public one day a week. So you can visit Fogo Island, see one of the four corners of the world (according to the Flat Earth Society), and drop by to ask me what I’m up to.

Adieu,

Sam

“Heart Like Feathers”: Robert Deeble’s New Album

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Seattle-based musician Robert Deeble’s new album “Heart Like Feathers” is coming soon and here is a taste of the musical feast to come: a video recording of the song “Eucharist.”

The album is worth the price just for this song, in my opinion. Bare-bones music, whispering vocals, and confessional lyrics make this one of those rare songs that is honest, deep, moving, and “catchy.” It begs to be replayed and replayed so that it echoes in life’s silent spaces – where words fail:

We get so close, we get estranged. We get so close…

The song speaks of estrangement, yes, but also closeness: human and spiritual. The accompanying vocals faintly echoing and harmonizing with Deeble’s make that closeness reverberate: feel more full and real. As if someone is answering the song’s prayer:

Bless me, Father, I’m a mess…

The answer is faint but it thrums beyond the song’s final cut, which returns you to your silence… but with new words to sing.

If you like what you hear and you want to know more about the album (and how you can be involved), click here.

What Short Stories Are You Reading?

I first heard that Sarah Selecky and fellow short story writers Matthew J. Trafford and Jessica Westhead had named 2011 The Year Of The Short Story through Chad Pelley over at  On The Line Magazine, where Pelley is pledging to read 10 new short story collections this year, including Julie Booker’s Up, Up, Up that has received great praise already from The Walrus and Quill & Quire.

This got me thinking about short stories and sent me over to the YOSS website (where you can find their MANIFESTO on short stories), and that sent me over to The YOSS Machine on Facebook where I began reading up on recommended short story reads.

All of that got me thinking about short story collections I’ve read, ones I’ve been meaning to read, and a few I’m frantic to get my hands on. It also got me mulling on stories I’ve read published in online lit. mags., authors I’ve read stories by in anthologies but whose book-length collections I have not yet read. And I decided, to get in on the epic conversation YOSS has sparked, beginning with:

Story Collections That Have Influenced Me As A Writer

First would definitely have to be Flesh and Blood by Michael Crummey. I came across Crummey’s stories (the first edition) in my undergrad and the story “After Image” has haunted me ever since I first read it in my dorm during a blizzard. Since then I’ve had the great pleasure of reading more of Crummey’s work, his poetry and novels, but the stories in this collection have never let go of me. They’re the stories that  first made me want to be a writer.

Highlights from Flesh and Blood: “After Image”; “Skin”; and “Serendipity”.

Next up is One Last Good Look by Michael Winter, a collection that literally shocks me every time I come back to it. I’ve read and re-read it, taught it, and am in awe of it. I first met the main character (and sometime narrator) Gabriel English in Winter’s novel The Architects Are Here but this collection of stories, following Gabriel’s years of growing up between Cornerbrook and St. John’s, brought that character to full-blooded life. The stories are by turns subtle, engrossing, brutal, tender, explicit, and very sexy. As a writer, Winter made me conscious of language’s verve and thrum.

Highly recommended in this collection: “The Pallbearer’s Gloves”; “Second Heart”; and “Let’s Shake Hands Like the French.”

Third up would have to be Leslie Vryenhoek’s debut collection Scrabble Lessons. As I’ve said of the wonderful collection elsewhere on this site: “This book will make a lover out of you. You won’t want to let it go and it will cling to you when you get up to re-enter the world. Some authors show you well-rounded lives in their stories; Leslie Vryenhoek takes you inside the skin.” Each of the stories is it’s own world and each is indelible in the impression it will leave. This collection makes me want to write stories that will tatoo themselves on a reader’s skin, leave that kind of mark.

Favourites include: “Early Girl, Pacific Avenue”; “View Plane”; and “Cycle” (which is also available here as an EarLit audio short from Rattling Books, narrated by Joel Thomas Hynes).

These three great books then got me thinking of classic short fiction and I came up with two “collected works” by two authors who I consider to be masters of the form.

My Short Story Masters

Anyone who has cracked a decent anthology of short fiction will most likely have read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” or Alistair MacLeod’s “The Boat.”

To add to those “greats” I would also recommend O’Connor’s “Revelation” and MacLeod’s “Island”. These are both anthologies of two authors’ lifetime work in this form: they are tomes, yes, but they are treasures.

Hotly Anticipated New Short Story Collection

To round things off here I’ll confess I can’t wait to crack open Gerard Collins’ new collection Moonlight Sketches.  I was at his launch the other night and if the story he read, “Fish of the Damned” is any indicator, this is going to be a work that lives up to the high praise it has already received.

 Award-winning short story writer and novelist Jessica Grant (of Come, Thou Tortoise fame) has said: “Here is outport Newfoundland like you’ve never seen it – or heard it: musical, broken-toothed, full of pathos and sly humour. Collins’ characters fall from innocence and land on their feet, with their fists up. You will admire them. You will fear them. You will find you care most about those you fear. Moonlight Sketches is a work of extraordinary imagination and empathy.”

Buy it. Read it. Find Gerard on Facebook. 

So, there’s a few of the goodies from my short story bag. Since it is The Year Of The Short Story, tell me what you’re reading or have read. Send me your favourites: the ones you can’t wait to read, the ones that are hot-of-the-press, the classics you wish you could get to if only you had the time.

And Last But Not Least: Some Online Goodies

Just to show not all short stories have to be bookish, here are some of my recent favourites, all published in online journals. Enjoy!

“Monkfish” by Laura Boudreau in Joyland.

“Sleep, Hold” by Joseph William Frank in The Hell Gate Review.

“The Poem” by Daniel Scott Tysdal in The Puritan.

P.S. If you’re interested in any of my shorts but don’t have the cash or inclination to buy This Ramshackle Tabernacle (don’t worry, I won’t judge) check out “Resettlement”, a short that will be in my next book, Ash and Hoarfrost.

NEW Readings from the 2010 BMO Winterset Finalists

This past week was great and gut-wrenching experience for me. The great part was being nominated for the Winterset award and getting to hang out with fellow nominees Craig Francis Power and Russell Wangersky: two excellent writers shortlisted for their debut novels. It was awesome (and humbling) to be able to share the stage with them, hear them read and talk candidly about their work, and “pretend” with them that we all knew what we were doing at Government House in St. John’s.

I don’t know of any of Russell’s flubs in protocol but Craig forgot his tie and I accidentally skipped the receiving line and crassly called the lieutenant-governor “John” instead of “your honour.” But we muddled through the ceremonies, tried not to embarrass ourselves, and enjoyed the fancy food and drink.

Those were the great aspects. The gut-wrenching part was not waiting to hear who won: not for me anyway. My attention was focused on not letting food poisoning from the day before get the better of me. I would much rather have been nervous than worried that I was going to harf smoked salmon in the middle of John Crosbie’s speech to us writers whose “creative lying” and “nefarious ways” he is glad to support!

It was truly an honour to be grouped with writers like Russell and Craig, to get a nod from writers like Kenneth J. Harvey, Libby Creelman, and Randall Maggs, the judges of this year’s award.

If you haven’t had a chance to read Russell’s or Craig’s novels, you should put them on your summer readings lists. You won’t be disappointed. They are two astonishingly original voices with unique prose styles and fresh fictive visions of the world (St. John’s in particular). And they are both wickedly funny!

The Toronto Star had this to say about Russell Wangersky: “It’s as if the wickedly observant Alice Munrow and the bawdy Al Purdy had produced a love child, by way of a gritty newsroom.” And Newfoundland poet Patrick Warner has said of Craig Francis Power’s debut novel Blood Relatives that it “brings Newfoundland to light in all her dark comic glory.”

So, a cyber toast to my fellow nominees and an especially hearty e-congrats to Russell, this years BMO Winterset Award Winner!

If you’re interested in hearing any of us read just click on our names below. (These readings were originally aired on Sat. March 26th on CBC’s Weekend Arts Magazine with Angela Antel).

Cheers!

Russell Wangersky, reading from his BMO Winterset award-winning novel The Glass Harmonica.

Craig Francis Power reading from him award-winning novel Blood Relatives.

Samuel Thomas Martin reading from his short story collection This Ramshackle Tabernacle.

“This Ramshackle Tabernacle” Shortlisted for 2010 BMO Winterset Award

 

Finalists Announced For 2010 BMO Winterset Award

March 2, 2011 St. John’s, NL – The Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council (NLAC) is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2010 BMO Winterset Award are Samuel Thomas Martin, Craig Francis Power, Russell Wangersky. The award celebrates excellence in Newfoundland and Labrador writing. The winner will be announced at Government House on Thursday, March 24^th.

The three finalists are: 

 ·         Samuel Thomas Martin, This Ramshackle Tabernacle, Breakwater Books, St. John’s, NL 

·         Craig Francis Power, Blood Relatives, Pedlar Press, Toronto, ON

·         Russell Wangersky, The Glass Harmonica, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, ON

The winner will receive a prize of $10,000 and the two finalists will each receive $2,000.

Books in any genre published in 2010 were eligible for the award. A total of 37 works by Newfoundland and Labrador authors (either native-born or resident) were submitted by publishers from across the country. The jury consisted of authors Libby Creelman (St. John’s), Kenneth J. Harvey (Cupids), and Randall Maggs (Corner Brook).

The Winterset Award honours the memory of Sandra Fraser Gwyn, St. John’s-born social historian, prize-winning author, and passionate promoter of Newfoundland and Labrador arts. Her husband, journalist and author Richard Gwyn established the award in 2000. It is named after the historic house on Winter Avenue in St. John’s where Sandra grew up.

About the 2010 BMO Winterset Award finalists:

Samuel Thomas Martin is from Gilmour, Ontario but now calls St. John’s home. He received an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto and his short stories and creative nonfiction have been published in both Canada and the U.S. When he’s not researching Norwegian death-metal or the B.C. drug trade for a new novel project, he enjoys hiking the East Coast Trail with his wife Samantha and their dog Vader.

Craig Francis Power’s debut work Blood Relatives was the winner of both the Percy Janes First Novel Award, and the Fresh Fish Award for unpublished fiction manuscripts. Craig lives in St. John’s.

Russell Wangersky’s 2008 book, Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself, won three national awards for non-fiction, including the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Edna Staebler Award, and the Drummer-General’s Award. His 2006 short story collection The Hour of Bad Decisions was long-listed for the Scotiabank/Giller Prize; short-listed for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, first book, Canada and the Caribbean; and was a finalist for the 2006 Winterset Award. Russell lives in St. John’s where he’s a journalist at The Telegram.

The three finalists will read from their works and answer questions from the audience at a public reading and reception: 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 23, at The Rooms (in the Theatre), 9 Bonaventure Avenue in St. John’s.

Media contact:

Janet McDonald (Communications Officer)

Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council

(709) 726-2212

1 (866) 726-2212 (Toll free NL only)

jmcdonald@nf.aibn.com

 www.nlac.nf.ca

 The NLAC is a non-profit Crown agency created in 1980 by The Arts Council Act. Its mission is to foster and promote the creation and enjoyment of the arts for the benefit of all Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. The Council is governed by a volunteer board of 13 appointed by government, reflecting regional representation of the province. This includes 10 professional artists who provide sectoral representation of the arts community; one community representative (with an interest in the arts); one business representative (with an interest in the arts); and one representative of the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation (non-voting). The NLAC receives an annual grant from the Province to support a variety of granting programs, program delivery, office administration, and communications. It also seeks support from the public and private sector. It supports the following artistic disciplines: dance, film, multidiscipline, music, theatre, visual art, and writing. 

SPARKS Haiku Competition!

SPARKS LITERARY FESTIVAL 2011

is featuring a

HAIKU COMPETITION

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This competition is open to all those involved with the festival.

(This includes those attending, book-selling, helping out, etc.) 

For rules , click here, and for haiku composition guidelines, click here.

Deadline for submissions: January 6, 2011.

Visit the SPARKS 2011 website for more information on the Festival, including the list of participating authors that include Jane Urquart, Andy Jones, Stan Dragland, Libby Creelman, and many more!

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This Festival is Sponsored by the Faculty of Arts, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

“Veni Emmanuel” by Robert Deeble

Robert Deeble is the man behind indie folk rock albums such as This Bar Has No One Left, Thirteen Stories, Earthside Down, and Days Like These and this Advent he’s released a cover of the ancient hymn “Veni Emmanuel.”

This particular track comes from Deeble’s studio as a gift to his listeners: a free download. And this gift he titles artistically with a painting by Jen Grabarczyk, ”Again This Place.” The rusts, blues and greys of Grabarczyk’s abstract expressionist painting harmonize well with this low key, earthy, contemplative interpretation of “O Come O Come, Emmanuel.”

However, Deeble’s haunting guitar-work on this cut doesn’t simply cover or riff on an old tune. He uses his arrangement to nuance that old Hebrew word עִמָּנוּאֵל, Emmanuel, “God with us”. The music is gritty and dark yet shot through everywhere with light. In it you hear the tension and horror of Herod hunting down infants to kill the coming King of the Jews – chaos, confusion, feedback – but you also hear the blinding promise of the coming Light, the Wisdom from on high becoming flesh in Christ - the refrain “Rejoice” rising.  

As Deeble notes on his site, the song stems from a 15th Century processional of French Franciscan nuns. And the lyrics he sings, along with Tara Ward’s beautiful accompaniment, are drawn from various antiphons from the 12th century that were translated from Latin in 1851. Deeble writes that he used an Antaries Guitar – an odd no-name French electric given to him in the mid 90′s by Miles Williams, an Anglican priest who gifted the guitar to Deeble for playing his parish. The Antaries guitar is played through a 1965 Vibrolux (no pedals), and layered with a Kimball pump organ, dated 1897, and one Yamaha organ from the 70′s (on vibe setting). The result is a sound that is at once ancient and ultra modern, a sound that rounds well-worn words and rings them anew.

Below is a video in which I’ve taken Deeble’s incarnation of the song, a prayer for God to be with us, to come to us anew, and I’ve layered in images by Jonathan Castellino and photography by my wife Samantha, taken in our new home of Newfoundland. As Deeble takes an old hymn and gives it flesh in modern music, I want to take that freshly breathed prayer and sing it over this place where I live, from St. John’s to the Bacclieu Trail, Middle Cove to the Bonavista, Grand Falls-Windsor to Cornerbrook and as far north as Lans aux Meadows.

At the heart of the song is a call for Light to come, for Wisdom to walk with us. And since the song came as a gift to me it only seems right to pass it along to you so you can join your voice to a rising chorus: Come, Dayspring, come and chear our spirits by your advent here…

Veni Emmanuel by Robert Deeble

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Makoto Fujimura’s new illuminations

Here is some exciting news near the onset of Advent, that dark season of waiting before the coming light. Internationally acclaimed artist Makoto Fujimura, founder of the International Arts Movement in New York, recently released a short video about his new project, which is composing abstract expressionist illuminations for a special edition of the King James Bible, celebrating its  400th anniversary. Fujimura, a Japanese-born New York artist, is classically trained in Nihonga, a Japanese painting technique dating from the 8th century, but he melds the tradition with modern abstract expressionism and uses this hybrid form to transgress modern art’s historically secular boundaries in order to explore themes of transcendence and faith.

There are many things that set Fujimura’s current project aside from other “illustrated” editions of the Bible, like Barry Moser’s woodcuts illustrating a facsimile of the Pennyroyal Caxton edition of the King James Bible. First, unlike Moser’s woodcuts, Fujimura’s work is more illumination than illustration: instead of Moser’s focus on portraits of key Biblical figures, Fujimura uses non-representational art to visually evoke the movement, beauty, and creative energy of transcendence.

This is not to say that “non-representational” means the artworks are visually unrelated to the Biblical texts being illustrated: the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The illumination of John draws on the metaphysical beginning of that book (“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…”); Mark’s piece is composed of rich reds evoking the fires of sacrifice and judgement in that book, fire that also purifies; and the piece based on Luke is more technical and nuanced, reflecting the more complex structure of that book.

What all these pieces do, as Fujimura’s artwork always does, is astonish and draw the viewer into intense contemplation. Fujimura’s work as an artist and writer has been to create a cultural language that allows for the secular to reawaken the sacred and for traditional forms of faith like Christianity to transfigure the secular. This is a refreshing move in an art world that too often wants nothing to do with organized religion, which it sees as stifling mystery rather than enlivening it.

This particular project, according to a post on Fujimura‘s website, will feature “Five major new works, painted in the artist’s Manhattan studio, [and these] will be the volume’s main images, making this the first such manuscript to feature abstract contemporary art in lieu of traditional representational illustrations. It is this unprecedented marriage of a modern, usually secular art form with ancient scripture that most interests Fujimura, who aims to depict ‘the greater reality that the Bible speaks of… for the pure sake of integrating faith and art in our current pluralistic, multicultural world.’”

Integrating faith and art, however, is a very transgressive move in today’s art world. But Fujimara claims that “Art is always transgressive [but] that we need to trangress in love.” Fujimura goes on to say that ”We  today have a language to celebrate waywardness but we do not have a cultural language to bring people back home.” If this is the light Fujimura seeks in these illuminations, then it is much needed light: a lamp above modern art’s door with enough oil to last the long night.

This whole project brings newfound excitement to Advent for me this year. This dark season that anticipates the coming of light traditionally kindles anticipation and hope. Fujimura’s art has always done this for me and news of this project came as a welcome spark on this dark November night.

Click here to see Fujimura’s video on the making of these paintings.

TRT Reviewed in the Christian Courier

Cathy Smith, a contributing editor with the Christian Courier, penned a fantastic review of This Ramshackle Tabernacle, which appeared in the November 8th edition of the newspaper.

Check out the full review below! Or click here to read the review in PDF.

(Reprinted with permission).

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Here’s a word of advice. Don’t read this book while on vacation in Cape Cod, scenic cottage country of the rich and famous. These linked stories by Samuel Thomas Martin kept forcing me to look elsewhere – at the ragged lives of the sexually abused, the drug-addicted, and the throwaways. They haunted me as I cruised Hyannis Harbour and viewed the Kennedy compound through binoculars.

Martin’s characters also come from cottage country, northern Ontario, but they are not rich or famous. Some are Christian, some are not. And some are the outcast, neighbours you see only if you steel yourself not to turn your face away, scabby lepers living banished lives among us.

Doug, a failed camp counsellor, wears his rage openly, but tucks his shame away. Drug addict Harold commits murder. Ben leBou stabs his abusive father. Upon his release from prison, he gets mauled by a grizzly, survives, sort of, and finally, calling out to God, tries to shoot himself in an agony of multiplied pain.

After you blink to reduce the intensity of this magnified focus on the sordid and horrific, you begin to discern that a heart of glory glimmers in the midst of all this darkness. God dwells here. Just as he did in the Old Testament, lodged in a portable temple among a stiff-necked and stubborn people, God has pitched his tent with these tainted characters from the Muskokas. His holiness is a tarp hanging over Doug and Harold and Ben whether they know it or not.

This camouflaged God, “shrouding himself in the tent of darkness, veiling his approach with dark rain clouds,” (Ps. 18:11) has not abandoned his creatures. He is a hunter, tracking and claiming his own. In the guise of perky lifeguard, Krysta, he offers Doug a redemptive gift of hope. God is also cloaked in the matronly neighbour who grandly welcomes a misfit kid with a black eye into her home as “Mr. Harold Witaker.” Years later, no one cares to know his name. On the street he is “guy,” “dude” and “princess.” Moments before he bashes in the head of the only other person who addresses him by his real name, Harold sees a great blue “God’s Eye” stained glass window. Its sad gaze pierces him, but he is finally seen and known once more. The baptism of tenderness he experienced as a child splashing around in the lake with a woman named Vicky has been confirmed.   

The organic wholeness of these stories is shaped by this deft crafting of relationships and imagery. Ben does not suffer alone. God is in the devotionals that he uses to roll smokes. God is in the room: “The unfinished walls warped and sagging like the damp nylon walls of a tent in the rain.” Divine immanence tabernacles with him even in his despair. Such dovetailed details lend a patient hand-rubbed lustre to the book. It is decidedly not, as I heard Angela Antle say in a CBC interview with Martin, a “sort of a lazy man’s novel.”  

In Shekinah, the defiant Ziggy, who crosses himself and gives God the finger in the same gesture, mutters, “Show yourself then.” In The Killing Tree, his nephew Bill had also asked for a sign. They are granted their wish. Ziggy and Bill are visited with a bewildering glimpse of resurrection glory in the powerful prayer of their friend Dan, “the old prophet who dwells in the wrinkled tabernacle of his eighty-five-year old body.”  What’s left is whether they will believe this “lacerating certainty of a miracle.”

Sam Martin’s stories are not for everyone. Although the first and last story bookend the whole with hope, not every reader will recognize the salvific embrace of the structure. The violent conflicts and raw language are intended to be disturbing. The edginess of a story like Becoming Maria, for example, where a sexually confused teen meets Jesus as her lover in a dream, is a risky business that will hinder the acceptance of this book in some Christian circles.

I, too, tend to prefer a safe, inoffensive neighbourhood, my own sanctified Cape Cod, where no one confronts me with abuse, sexual aberration, stark raving loneliness, or naked human need. But God’s heart is bigger. He resides with the fallen. He summons me out into the streets and into the wilderness, to believe with Dan “that not one bird is shot from the sky that God doesn’t know about.” These stories invite me look my neighbour in the eye, and see God looking back at me.          

Cathy Smith is a Contributing Editor with Christian Courier. She lives in Wyoming, Ontario.

Ramshackle Tabernacle review[1]