Descant would like to acknowledge the passing of a magnificent Canadian poet. Yesterday, P.K. Page passed away in Victoria, BC at the age of 93.
Since her birth in 1916, Patricia Kathleen Page has amassed numerous awards and honours for her work both within Canada and abroad. In 1954, she received The Governor General’s Award in Poetry, and The Lieut. Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2004. In 2000, her poem, “Planet Earth,” was chosen by the United Nations for its reading series, Dialogue Among Civilizations Through Poetry. Her latest poetry collection, Cullen, and a collection of fables, The Sky Tree, were published in November 2009.
Her short narrative, “Those Years,” was recently published in Descant #145: Private Worlds, Public Exigencies (Summer 2009).
We offer our condolences to her family and are honoured to have been a part of her distinguished publishing career.
(information taken from the CBC article and Page’s official site)
Saturday, December 12, 2009 / 10am-5pm
The Gladstone Hotel
1214 Queen St. W., ph: 416.531.4635
DESCANT invites you to segue into mid-December with us while supporting The Toronto Small Press Group – a non-profit arts organization dedicated to showcasing the good work of small and medium-sized presses in this city and the surrounding area.
Join us at the Gladstone Hotel to help celebrate the second (and final) Small Press Book Fair of 2009. Stock up on chapbooks, zines, graphic novels and more from your favourite small presses and chat with the folks behind the scenes.
We will adorn the DESCANT table with special holiday packages. Supplement the reading list of your favourite travelers and animal lovers with our gift-wrapped bundles featuring themed issues on Venice (#128 and #129), and our popular CATS and DOGS issues (#143 and #144). A special surprise gift will be included!
DESCANT recommends this recently published memoir by Globe and Mail journalist (and past DESCANT contributor), Ian Brown.
In The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for his Disabled Son, Brown chronicles the challenges of parenting a child with the rare, severely disabling condition, Cardiofaciocutaneous Syndrome (CFC). Reviewers celebrate this work for its artistry and its honesty — the raw, nuanced quality of Brown’s writing that ensures his readers “come away with a deeper, richer understanding of what it means to be human” (Dave Morris, from Eye Weekly).
More comments from reviewers:
“…your only excuse for avoiding this book is a phobia about brilliant writing.”
Dave Morris, from Eye Weekly
“Brown slices through ignorance and trite consolation, leaving the eviscerated skins of relationships, social policy and medical expertise flapping in the wind.”
Paula Todd, from The Globe and Mail Books
Sunday, November 1, 2009 / 1-7pm
The Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen St. W., ph: 416.531.4635)
$5.00 admission, including Broken Pencil’s Olympic Issue
On November 1, 2009, the Gladstone Hotel will play host to Canada’s largest Zine Fair and Festival of Alternative Culture! Though DESCANT will not be present at the festival, we recommend you spend this Sunday perusing work from more than 150 indie print and online publishers from across the country. In keeping with this year’s Olympic theme, interactive events will abound along with new “Can’tLit” readings!
Visit Canzine 2009 and Broken Pencil online for details.
If you’re not a poet, and you’re feeling left out from the Winston Collins poetry contest, don’t worry — the Writers’ Trust of Canada is accepting submissions for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. This year, the prize is for the fiction category. Entrants must be under 35 years of age, Canadian citizens or permanent residents, and unpublished in book form. One winner will be awarded $5000, and two honourable mentions will be awarded $1000.
The Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers alternates annually between poetry and short fiction entries. Some previous winners include: Michael Crummey, Stephanie Bolster, Sonnet L’Abbe, Gillian Best, and Jeramy Dodds.
A number of Descant‘s former contributors are continuing to make a splash in the arts world.
Arnaud Maggs, who provided the cover image and a portfolio of images of Paris hotel signs for Descant 142: Hotels, has a number of photographs from the same project on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) as part of the “Beautiful Fictions: Photography” collection. His work will be on display until January 17th, 2010.
In addition, Balint Zsako, who provided the cover image and a portfolio of artwork for Descant 136: A Trompe L’Oeil Calendar, has a new exhibition called Old Master Paintings on at the Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects gallery (1082 Queen Street West). The exhibition, which is a series of collages assembled from reproductions of old master paintings, is showing until October 18th, 2009.
One of Descant‘s contributing editors, Mark Kingwell, is releasing a new book, Glenn Gould, with Penguin Group Canada as part of their Extraordinary Canadians series. Kingwell discusses Gould, one of Canada’s most talent artists and renowned classical musicians of the 20th Century, from the perspective of a philosopher.
Descant will be present in full force at two prominent book fairs on the next two Sundays — the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival and Toronto’s Word On The Street festival. The Eden Mills Writer’s Festival is this weekend on September 20th, from noon to 6 p.m., and the Word On The Street festival is the following Sunday, September the 27th, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Descant will be present at the publisher’s way at Eden Mills and the exhibitor marketplace at Word On The Street.
While you’re there, check out the amazing authors participating in Eden Mills and Word On The Street. We hope to see you there.
On Wednesday, September 16th This Ain’t The Rosedale Library, Toronto’s bastion of indie bookselling (voted one of the top ten independent bookstores in the world by the Guardian), is celebrating three decades of peddling poetry and prose and everyone’s invited!
From 7:30-9:00 p.m. at the York Quay Centre: Brigantine Room (235 Queens Quay West) they will be celebrating this milestone anniversary with readings by bill bissett, Lee Ann Brown, Eileen Myles, Stuart Ross; the Six String Nation guitar will be on display with Jowi Taylor; and all this will be followed by an after party at Supermarket (268 Augusta Avenue) in the store’s new home neighbourhood of Kensington Market.
Tickets to this fantastic event are $8, and can be purchased through the box office (call 416.973.4000 or visit the website).
For more information about the event and the readers, visit This Ain’t The Rosedale Library’s website, and we’ll see you there!
Descant will be one of the many presses, publishers, and magazines participating in the Publishers’ Way at this year’s Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. Issues of Descant — including the new Fall 2009 edition, #146, Immanence/Transcendence — will be available for purchase from noon – 6 pm on Sunday, September 20th. This is the same time a variety of authors will be reading their work.
The Eden Mills Writers’ Festival was founded in 1989, and has been an annual event since then. The first installment was created by Governor-General Award Winner and former Descant contributor Leon Rooke.
We hope to see you there.
Pages Books & Magazines, an independent Toronto bookstore established in 1979, closed its doors for the final time yesterday. The Queen Street West store spent 30 years as a major participant in Toronto’s cultural and arts communities, and as a big supporter of small press literature.
Although Pages is now shut down, one of its offspring, This Is Not A Reading Series, will continue to run. Please check their website for updates.
Everyone here at Descant wishes Pages a fond farewell.
