Reflecting on Fall, Looking Forward to Winter
I am so pleased that our evening with Rod Carly was so well received by everyone who attended. Rod was kind enough to share some pictures from the event. I look forward to reading his book, Grin Reaping, which I have added to my “to read” pile. I look forward to what is next from Rod. When asked what might be next, “The character I want to feature in my next novel is Shuttlecock — an origin tail, er tale, of how he became a medieval animal lawyer and his strange and varied cases (alluded to in RUFF) that eventually lead him to defending the rats of London in a plague lawsuit.” If you haven’t finished the book, I won’t reveal all, but watch for those characters in disguise. As a favour to Rod, reviews of RUFF would be appreciated on platforms you participate in such as www.goodreads.com.
What’s Next?
An Evening with Connie Gault
February 24th, 6pm at Public Kitchen
Connie Gault has written for stage and radio and film. The Rasmussen Papers, short-listed for the Toronto Book Award, is her third novel. Her first, Euphoria, was short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize for Best Novel of Canada and the Caribbean. A Beauty—the 2016 Saskatchewan Book of the Year—was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. A former prose editor of grain magazine, Connie has also edited books of fiction and has taught many creative writing classes and mentored emerging writers. After spending most of her life in Saskatchewan, she now lives in London, Ontario.
The Ramussen Papers’ unnamed narrator is so obsessed with the desire to write the biography of her literary hero, the late poet Marianne Rasmussen, that she assumes a false name and talks her way into the house of Rasmussen’s former lover, Aubrey Ash. The Rasmussen Papers is a brilliant reply to Henry James’ The Aspern Papers. Connie Gault flips James’ story on its head and slides it into contemporary Toronto’s Cabbagetown, among the marginalized and dispossessed, people the narrator studies as intently as she studies everyone she meets—until she is forced to reconsider the limits of what you can know of another’s story, and how hidden we all are, especially from ourselves.