Tag: Canadian

A chat with award-winning Saskatchewan author Dwayne Brenna about his new collection of short fiction, Theories of Everything.

Website
dwaynebrenna.com

Shadowpaw Press link
Theories of Everything

Amazon links
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About Theories of Everything

“I remember thinking to myself, as I said goodbye to my friends and walked home through the dimly lit backstreets, that the past comes back to haunt everybody sooner or later.”

In this finely honed collection of short fiction, Dwayne Brenna creates a series of unforgettable characters, from academics and street people to musicians, movie stars, videogame players and their mothers, cooks, actors, boxers, and even a parrot, and, with compassion and affection (and sometimes laugh-out-loud humour) tests their mettle in a variety of fascinating locations, from Saskatoon to Victoria to Libya to Los Angeles to London to Hawaii and beyond, with familiar and homey details and a fidelity to mood and atmosphere.

Along the way, Brenna tackles a wide selection of conflicts and social ills-good versus evil, scruples and the lack of them, doing or not doing the “right thing,” yielding or not yielding to temptations, and the many other struggles of the human heart-all without being didactic or preachy, but simply by addressing the very human circumstances his characters find themselves in, and how they manage to escape, or not escape, the predicaments arising because of who they are, who they’ve been, and who they could be.

Praise for Theories of Everything

“These fifteen stories vary widely in terms of subject matter, theme, setting, and characters, yet they are unified by the strength of the writing and the narrative voice . . . there is an energy in all of these stories that propels and seduces the reader and piques her interest. And what a variety of characters! Academics, street people, ageing hippies, farmers, music producers, videogame players and their mothers, movie stars, boxers, actors, cooks, and even a parrot. The writer clearly has compassion and affection for the characters he’s created and put through their paces, sometimes with laugh-out-loud humour.” – J. Jill Robinson, author of The Land of Not Knowing

About Dwayne Brenna

Dwayne Brenna is the award-winning author of several books of humour, poetry, and fiction. Coteau Books published his popular series of humorous vignettes entitled Eddie Gustafson’s Guide to Christmas in 2000. His two books of poetry, Stealing Home and Give My Love to Rose, were published by Hagios Press in 2012 and 2015 respectively. Stealing Home, a poetic celebration of the game of baseball, was subsequently shortlisted for several Saskatchewan Book Awards, including the University of Regina Book of the Year Award.

His first novel, New Albion, about a laudanum-addicted playwright struggling to survive in London’s East End during the winter of 1850-51, was published by Coteau Books in autumn 2016. New Albion won the 2017 Muslims for Peace and Justice Fiction Award at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. It was also one of three English-language novels shortlisted for the prestigious MM Bennetts Award for historical fiction. His baseball novel Long Way Home was published by Pocol Press in 2022, and his theatre history text Nights That Shook the Stage (McFarland Books) came out in the spring of 2023.

His short stories and poems have been published in an array of journals, including Grain, Nine, Spitball, The Antigonish Review, Intima, and The Cold Mountain Review.

A chat with award-winning Saskatchewan author David Carpenter about his new collection of short fiction, Hello.

Website
dccarpenter.com

Shadowpaw Press link
Hello

Amazon links
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About Hello

In two novellas and seven shorter stories, award-winning author David Carpenter addresses the theme of human frailties in his distinctively empathetic style.

A disabled widower seeks comfort in memory by getting in touch with his younger self. An old drunk, assisted by his own delusions, lays his ghosts to rest. A young child escapes her oppressive family by ministering to the needs of a monster in distress. A social reject acquires a new look and becomes consumed with the need for revenge against his early tormentors. A former social worker encourages a friendship with a paroled criminal. A cleaning woman in strained circumstances, determined to support herself and her child, feels compelled to make extreme choices.

Some of Carpenter’s characters face the frailties that come with old age, loneliness chief among them. Others become vulnerable to their own compulsions and set in motion moral dilemmas. Many of these loners reach for their phones to send or receive a message that might deliver them from their isolation, but even though they hear “Hello” from the person they reach out to, there is no guarantee of deliverance.

These are tales told by a master of language, an author who uses words with skill, sureness, and grace. While his characters may not find what they’re looking for, readers of these compelling pieces of short fiction surely will.

Praise for Hello

”David Carpenter shows true mastery of the short story and the novella forms. The narratives are graceful and strong, confidently written by someone who the reader can immediately tell has handled language for many years, and the effect is not unlike hearing a pianist who has been playing for decades, whose fingers touch the keys with a skill, sureness, and grace not available to a less-experienced performer.” ― J. Jill Robinson, author of The Land of Not Knowing

About David Carpenter

David Carpenter began his writing vocation as a critic and translator in Winnipeg and Toronto. Inspired by a reading by the Moose Jaw Movement (Gary Hyland, Robert Currie, Lorna Crozier and others) in Saskatoon, he switched to writing his own work, which began to emerge in 1985. He is the author of fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction and one book of poetry. His literary awards and honours include the Saskatchewan Book Awards 2010 Book of the Year for A Hunter’s Confession, the Kloppenburg Prize for Literary Excellence (2015), the Code’s Burt Award (Toronto) for The Education of Augie Merasty (2016), and most recently, the High Plains Creative Nonfiction Award (Billings, Montana) for I Never Met a Rattlesnake I Didn’t Like (2023). As well, as a recognition for his writing, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Saskatchewan (2018). He lives and writes in Saskatoon.

A chat with authorTrevor W. Harrison about his new collection of essays recalling his world travel as a young man in the 1970s and ’80s, Tales This Side of the Elysian Fields.

Website
The Writers’ Union of Canada bio page

Shadowpaw Press link
Tales This Side of the Elysian Fields

Amazon links
Amazon.ca
Amazon.com

About Tales This Side of the Elysian Fields

“Travel takes you to places in yourself you might not otherwise visit . . .”

In this delightful and intriguing collection of essays, Trevor W. Harrison, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge and a well-known contributor to public media, tells sometimes light-hearted and sometimes poignant tales of his life between his late teens and early thirties, a time when, like many other young people of the era, he travelled the world, beginning with hitchhiking or driving across western Canada and the United States in the early 1970s and travelling to Europe and Asia in the mid-1970s and early 1980s.

From working on the railway in a small town to playing a Hittite soldier in a Biblical movie, from life among the hippies on a famous Greek beach to life in a houseboat on India’s Lake Dal, from bullfights in Barcelona to the towering Himalayas, Harrison invites readers to travel with him, to meet the people, see the places, and experience the events he encountered as a young man.

The stories we tell of our lives, Harrison says, are “the offspring of a pleasurable intercourse between fiction and non-fiction, gestated over time.” There is nothing more innately human than the telling of tales.

Enjoy these while you, too, are still this side of the Elysian Fields.

About Trevor W. Harrison

Trevor W. Harrison is a retired Professor of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge. He is best known for his studies in political sociology, political economy, and public policy. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of eleven books, including a book of poetry, as well as numerous journal articles, chapters, and reports. Dr. Harrison is a frequent contributor to public media, including radio and television.