Readings of poetry and shortfiction
Thursday, August, 6th, 2009
8.00 pm onwards
featuring:
michellealfano
John Calabro
Domenic Capilongo
DarleneMadott
Jason Paradiso
Gianna Patriarca
Giovanna Riccio
Come early and enjoy the great food and ambiance at L’Espresso!
Once a month we at Descant have our ‘reading session’ when we try, like a dog and his tail, to catch-up with our submissions. We receive about a thousand envelopes a year, packed with poems, fiction, essays, photographs and lots of hope. Unlike many other literary periodicals, our submission guidelines are barebones. Thus, writers sometimes feel less inhibited with creative and innovative ways to stand out from the pile. Some of the efforts are humorous but off-putting. Though we pride ourselves on being an open-minded bunch, we are only human. Some gimmicks challenge us at the start to remain unbiased even before we have read the submissions. Here our a few missteps that a submitter may wish to avoid.
1)   Size Matters. My personal pet-peeve is when I pick up an envelope and its weight causes me to groan. Many magazines impose a cap on word length for submissions, but at Descant we do not. Once I chanced upon a submission for a ‘short’ story that was fifty-four pages long. While there is a place for longer short fiction, normally periodicals prefer more concise pieces. In the early stages of the writing process there is a phase that I call verbal diarrhea, wherein the writer needs to let out everything he can relating to his story. As the piece is refined in subsequent drafts, details get embedded into the story in more subtle ways and chunks of the early verbiage are edited out. When I see a submission that is generous with its pages, I fear that the writer has sent an early draft. I will read it though, just incase I am wrong. Perhaps it is a very engaging story that does require fifty pages to tell. Though I have yet to see such a brilliant submission.
2)Â Â Â Double-sided submission. While printing on both sides of the paper is environmentally friendly and laudable, it confuses readers. The standard for submission in the publishing world is single-sided only and any departure from that norm risks the reader missing alternative pages.
3)   Fancy Fonts. Poets are sometimes guilty of this. It reeks of desperation and puts the reader on the defensive.
4)   Bold Author’s Name. Occasionally a writer will try to catch our attention by placing his name above everything in a font that is double the size of the main text. It reads like a warning sign: Fragile Author Ego at Work, Beware.
5)Â Â Â Once I opened a submission envelope and a barrage of cut-out stars and glitter hearts fell out across the desk. While it gave me a chuckle, it was an effort to clean up the mess and the text of the submission had to work that much harder to win me back.
6)   Submitting too often. There is a proverb in English that says ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. There is some truth in that. While persistence and tenacity in a writer are admirable, essential even, submitting too often can make the readers apathetic toward the submission. In this internet age many magazines around the world accept online submissions. Take advantage of this globalization, spread your stories upon fresh new fields.
7)   Obvious grammatical; and spelling errorrs. Such as the two here. While work that needs copy-editing is not a deal-breaker, it makes the text difficult to read and interferes with the flow. Always try to send copy with minimal errors. If you are submitting outside of Canada, set your spell-check for the country that you are submitting to. Americans think ‘color’ is correct but the Brits will think you are a sloppy speller.
8)   Stale-dated themed submissions. Descant routinely puts out calls for themed submissions on our website. Pay close attention to the deadline. We sometimes get submissions for themed issues months after the deadline when the text is at the copy-editing stage. We try to be flexible and the one question the editor of the themed issues will always ask is: “Is it brilliant?†In order for her to squeeze in your late submission it would have to be genius to make the editor reshuffle her careful work.
9)   Suspect publishing history. Many readers do not bother with the author’s cover letter, they go straight to the submission. But some readers will read the cover letter knowing that, like all resumes, there will be embellishments. I recall seeing a cover letter once where the author went on for a page and half listing her movie reviews on rottentomatoes.com. Anyone may write in a terse sentence and it will be published (‘This film sucked’). Descant co-editors are savvy enough to know a con. We’ll still read the submission, but with suspicion.
10)Â Â Â A plethora of poems. We have a rule that we cannot publish anymore than a sweep of five poems by the same authors in one issue. Sometimes poets, because the work is so concise, will send us batches of a dozen or more. It is left to us to read them all and decide which five are the best of the bunch. Again, it puts the reader on the defensive.
The best way to get our attention is with fresh, crisp, crackling writing that gets us excited and eager to share our discovery with fellow co-editors.
Here is Descant co-editor Katie Franklin’s short essay, titled “Feeling Hot Hot Hot”, from Descant 145: “Private Worlds, Public Exigencies”, about her experiences as a member of a “feminist erotic book club”.
“Come slowly, Eden!
lips unused to thee,
Bashful, sip thy jasmines,
As the fainting bee,
Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums,
Counts his nectars — enters,
And is lost in balms!”
– Emily Dickinson
I am in a sexy book club, or rather, a feminist erotic book club. I don’t really know if that really requires italics but I just thought they make the words appear more seductive. The modus operandi (there goes those sultry italics again and clearly nothing is sexier than Latin ipso facto) of our club is to pursue the pleasure of the text by analyzing les bon mots erotiques from our feminist crusaders. Of course what I really mean is my girlfriends and I sit around eating baguettes and brie while over indulging in wine — not unlike a Descant meeting — while bemoaning the state of our love lives, in a literary context of course.
Our book club was the brainchild of my dear best friend Lisa who realized that she had not read anything of note — perezhilton.com not withstanding — in a really long time. Summoning the ladies in our group of friends, Lisa sent us an email detailing her proposal for a book club with one caveat. This wasn’t going to be your mother’s average book club or even Oprah’s. This book club was going to have one single focus: sex.
Rather than falling into a Sex and the City cliché where a bunch of girls sit around gossiping while drinking wine spritzers and using the books as coasters, we decided uniformly upon a more Sex and the City Lights Bookstore model, meaning we wanted to create a literary meeting place where we, as women, could freely discuss sex, eroticism and feminism. Much like an updated version of the Symposium but with an all-female cast.
The first book up for discussion was Colette’s The Pure and the Impure. Our host Ioana, imbued with Left Bank sensibilities, recreated the perfect Parisian meal: French onion soup and quiche — magnifique! We chose The Pure and the Impure primarily because its original French title, Ces Plaisirs, guaranteed that there would be an element of sin and seduction. Or so we thought. While Colette is often celebrated for writings on sexuality during a period when it was frowned upon for women to do so, The Pure and the Impure mainly focuses on her friends and their thoughts on relationships and love. Carnal acts are merely hinted at but not really explored.
Admittedly we felt a little cheated. It was almost akin to the episode of The Simpsons where Bart acquires a fake ID and is able to sneak into the film Naked Lunch, only to exit later, despondent and confused, claiming, “I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.†However, little did we realize that this was the perfect book for our inaugural meeting, since Colette remained a constant trope in many of the future texts we read. From The Story of O to most notably Erica Jong’s seminal text Fear of Flying, the grande dame of French letters was often referenced as being a major influence on many of these writers’s works.
While the summer issue of Descant is a miscellany of prose, a certain sense of referentiality exists within its pages. Themes of sexuality follow prose thick with sensuality and wanderlust (often minus the wander). Furthermore, not one but two pieces of fiction cite the great Emily Dickinson, a feminist erotic writer in her own right as anyone who has ever read “Come Slowly, Eden!†or “Wild Nights! Wild Nights!†can attest. Perhaps it’s the summer heat that brings out the naughty narratives. Which reminds me of one of our book club meetings where passions were literally set on fire. As our group was discussing Abby Lee’s Girl with a One-Track Mind (I can assure you it’s not on her finances), I looked over and noticed that Lisa’s napkin had drawn dangerously close to the candles that she had laid out on her coffee table. As I’m not exactly known for my calm cool collectedness I immediately started shrieking while Lisa, confused by my sudden fit, dipped her napkin into the flames. At this point in the evening our sexy book club turned into a Stooges-fest as I leapt behind the couch in a panic and Lisa, wailing, dropped the fiery napkin onto her wooden floor while the other girls tried stamping it out all together. My poor friend Sarah singed her lovely pashmina while trying to suffocate the inferno. Anyone who says that book clubs aren’t cool is definitely right, and given the nature of our book club I would say they can be damn near hot.
In The Pleasure of the Text Roland Barthes insists, “the text is a fetish object, and the fetish desires me†(Barthes 27). As a librarian I see how the public forms relationships with their books. Patrons come in exacerbated if the paperback they’ve put on hold hasn’t come in yet: “What do you mean my book hasn’t come in? I need it now!†Such outbursts of desire, which may seem more natural in the bedroom, are often common expressions at the circulation desk of the library. However, I don’t blame them for their yearnings. Everyone is entitled to some good text.
- Katie Franklin is a part-time librarian and a full-time libertine, as well as one of Descant’s co-editors.
For more hot writing, pick up the Summer 2009 issue of Descant
Posted in Authors, Descant News, Fiction, New Releases, News and Notes
The deadline for our upcoming Writers-in-Prison issue has officially closed. Thank you to all those who sent us your work. We are very much looking forward to the issue’s publication in the Fall of 2010.
For those of you who may have missed the deadline for the Prisons issue, we are glad to announce two new calls for material. We have a new themed call for our issue on Ghosts / The Uncanny, the deadline for which is March 1st, 2010. The issue will be guest edited by Alex Maeve Campbell and Christina Francisco.
In addition, we are now accepting entries for the 2010 Winston Collins / Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem. One winner will be awarded $1000 for their work, and will also be featured in an upcoming issue of Descant. The deadline for submissions is October 10th, 2009. To learn more about the Winston Collins / Descant Prize submission guidelines, click here.
For more information on either call, pick up our latest issue, Descant #145: Private Worlds, Public Exigencies, or visit our website at www.descant.ca.
The first sight anyone sailing into Copenhagen catches is the statue of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy-tale character The Little Mermaid. For visitors from North America, this stone tribute to a fictional character is particularly beguiling. Copenhagen’s main thoroughfare is named after the author and it is clear everywhere in this city that Danish identity is defined by its artists.
Not only in Denmark, but all across Northern Europe, there are monuments and tributes to writers, composers, poets. At the centre of Helsinki is Sibelius Park, with a sculpture of composer Jean Sibelius.
London is full of plaques recording former residences of Novelists and free-thinkers.
Stockholm’s Nobel Museum reminded me that every year Swedes honor six areas of human achievements: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Economics, Peace and Literature. How wonderful to be in place where the output of a pen-pushing poet or dramatist is considered as valuable as say the decoding of the human genome or the discovery of black holes.
Even places with long and rich histories seem to define themselves by their writers. St Petersburg has a suburb called Pushkin Village, named for the 19th century author Alexander Pushkin. This suburb was once known as Tsar’s Village but during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918, the Russian people decided they did not want to define themselves by the deeds of the aristocracy. Nor did they want to align their national character with any religion. And so the Russians decided upon enduring works of literature, music and dance as definitive of the national soul. Although Northern Europe had no such revolution, most of the Scandinavian countries were only Christianized as late as the 12 to 13th centuries. Maybe that is the reason they also chose art as national culture.
Even a historically blessed nation like France has gone to great expense in preserving the garden built and painted by Claude Monet in Giveny. Flowers are meticulously replanted so that garden still resemblances his famous Water Lilies or Les Nympheas murals. Why do the French, who have cathedrals and palaces galore, make this monumental conservation effort? Is it perhaps because art can make visible the inner aesthetic of a nation in a way obvious to everyone?
I returned to Canada just before the Canada Day celebrations in downtown Toronto were cancelled. I realize that in Canada the issue of a national identity crisis is a bit of a cliché but I could not help reflecting on what I had witnessed in Europe. Unlike many parts of the world where cultural identity is intrinsically linked to religion Canada is only nominally a Christian country. Recent polls show that only 28% of Canadians consider religion to be important to them. Nor does Canada owe any debt to blood-thirsty lineages of kings and queens. We have few local politicians of distinction yet our street names pay homage to them: Bloor, Dundas, Yonge, Dufferin, etc. And Canada, particularly Toronto, continues to name cultural institutions after corporations and benefactors, even when the buildings are mainly constructed with public funds. Our symphony hall does not honor Glenn Gould but a fellow named Roy Thomson. And why is it the Walter Carsen Ballet Centre and not the Karen Kain Ballet Centre? I am no jock but even I would prefer to see the A.C.C renamed the Wayne Gretzky Hockey Arena.
The main difference, I suppose, between Europe and Canada is that we are a relatively young country. And like many adolescents we are easily seduced by money. Thus our new opera house is named after a hotel chain. The home of the Blue Jays, the Skydome, is now renamed so that the very venue itself has become a commercial for a broadcasting corporation. Perhaps we just need time to mature as a nation. After all, the works of European artists have endured through time. They are great because successive generations have found universal and timeless messages in the books of Tolstoy, Dickens, and Hugo. Perhaps in another hundred years Toronto may see a statute of Atwood’s Handmaiden at Harbourfront. I hope so.
Posted in Authors, Events, Fiction, General, Industry News, News and Notes, Pradeep Solanki
