Numéro Cinq started January 11, 2010, as a reading, discussion and resource site for Douglas Glover‘s current Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing students who are also authors on the blog. It seems to have expanded (be expanding) into something else. Visitors are welcome. Already they form a large part of the community.
August Readings, Book Signings and other events… including Joan Thomas at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, Sechelt, BC. Canada’s longest running summer gathering of Canadian writers and readers.
Sometime during the middle part of June the Netfirms e-mail account I had been using for Branta business first swallowed all but a handful of letters then followed that trick up by kicking me out completely. So I apologize if you sent in queries or submissions or anything over that last couple of months, but that stuff appears to be in the world wide dead letter office of the web.
There are two appearances by Roger Burrows who will be discussing his new book Birding in New Brunswick, including a headline spot at the 10th annual Sandpiper Festival in Dorchester, NB.
By way of explaining the two-week work stoppage.
I spoke with Sharon McCartney about her recently published collection of poetry For and Against. She read three poems from the book, we discussed the duality of the title and listened to her tea carafe serenade us in the kitchen. Click through to find the podcast.
The warm weather is here… the beginning of summer? Perhaps. In any case the vacation mind is surely awakening for some of us. If your getaway time is still well off perhaps a few brief virtual escapes might hold you over until you can set foot in some faraway land. Here are some interactive views of The Sistine Chapel, British Histories courtesy of the BBC and The Smithsonian’s current exhibits.
So let’s be clear: the primary motivation for this self-exposé is neither ego nor the desire for absolution for some wrongdoing about to be discovered. I have not sinned against y’all. Purely and simply I don’t have a Feature Post to go to right now. Since early May is a transitional time for many lit types, what with finishing school terms or the commitments that go along with new books, spring deadlines and the like, tossing together something for Branta is no one’s top priority. Except for mine, of course. Although that’s not entirely true for reasons to be revealed.
I thought of the word “boil”, of how it suggests agitation, of how the very word intimates lack of control, and I thought of the word “abscess,” derived from the Latin abscedere, “ab” for “away” and “cedere” for “to go” which suggests the humours leaving the body through the portal of the abscess, and how boil is the better name, how poetry is an assertion of mastery on unruly elements, and how this abscess, this boil, will take weeks to heal.
The research for this book was painstaking. I spent months in libraries, in newspaper archives, in idling cars, preparing to write this book. The novel, as many of you know, concerns a group of intellectuals, all at the top of their respective fields, who are selected as the judges of the Nobel Prize in Literature. As they prepare to carry out their duties, strange occurrences take place, and it becomes apparent that a mysterious writer has targeted them and intends to destroy their lives, in horrible ways, unless he is awarded the Nobel Prize.
