Sachiko Murakami My quandary now is how to be a writer in 42 • 1 recovery, now that my survival isn’t so fundamentally attached to writing. There is a part of me that wants the edge back,eleven thatdollars insistent,ninetyfive delirious,poetry desperate and tumble prose through language as though my life depended on it. Billeh Nickerson I’m at the CBC Studios in Toronto being inter- viewed for Shelagh Rogers’s The Next Chapter. I read a few poems about fast food and then somehow Shelagh’s phrasing makes it seem as if she has just called me a slut on national radio. ‘Shelagh,’ I say, ‘my mom could be listening.’ Ayelet Tsabari How could one set of rules be right for all stories? For all fiction writers everywhere? Perhaps my writing had stood out as different because I was different.... My heritage, my background, had shaped my personality, which in turn informed my writing, not just in terms of content, but style as well. Visit eventmags.com Notes on Writing Issue The Douglas College Review u Poetry and Prose Bringing You the Best Contemporary Fiction in Canada 2012 & 2011 Gold Winner National Magazine Award for Fiction 2012 & 2011 Silver Winner National Magazine Award for Fiction 2012 & 2010 Winner Western Magazine Award for Fiction ... and a whole lot more. EVENT is published three times a year by Douglas College, PO Box 2503, New Westminster, BC, V3L 5B2, Canada. EVENT is a member of Magazines Canada and the Magazine Association of B.C., and is indexed in Canadian Magazine Index, Canadian Literary Periodicals Index, Humanities International Complete and Index of American Periodical Verse. ISSN 0315-3770 Manuscripts should be submitted to the above address and must be accompanied by a S.A.E. with sufficient Canadian postage or international reply coupons. We do not read manuscripts in January, July, August and December. We reply in one to six months, depending on the time of year. 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We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia, the British Columbia Arts Council and the Government of Canada toward our editorial and produc- tion costs. 42 • 1 Editor Elizabeth Bachinsky Managing Editor Ian Cockfield Fiction Christine Dewar Poetry Gillian Jerome Reviews Susan Wasserman Proofreader Rob Hughes Reading Service Ian Cockfield/Gillian Harding-Russell Web Editor Jenn Farrell Fiction Board Elizabeth Bachinsky Christine Dewar Ian Cockfield Susan Wasserman First Readers Kimberley Alcock Lorna McCallum Sheryda Warrener Editorial Assistants Elena E. Johnson Bryce Tarling Advisory Board Amber Dawn Meg Stainsby Susan McCaslin Hal Wake Hazel Postma Calvin Wharton Renee Sarojini Saklikar Contents copyright © 2013 EVENT for the authors. Printed in Canada by The DATA Group. Subscription rates: one-year $29.95; two-year $54.95; sample copy $9. Prices include applicable taxes and shipping. U.S. subscribers: one-year US$39.95; two-year US$64.95; sample copy US$12. Overseas: one-year $49.95; two-year $74.95; sample copy $15. Institutions: one-year $40; two-year $70; sample copy $15. Publications Mail Agreement Number 40064616 Spring/Summer 2013 HELP WANTED? If you are a new writer, or a writer with a troublesome manuscript, EVENT’s Reading Service for Writers may be just what you need. Manuscripts will be edited by one of EVENT’s editors and receive an assessment of 700-1000 words, focusing on such aspects of craft as voice, structure, rhythm and point of view. Visit eventmagazine.ca today Contents Notes on Writing Anne Fleming Novels Are for Children 7 Chris Hutchinson What Remains in the Kingdom 13 of the Afterlife (Etc., and So On) Sachiko Murakami The Central Fact 23 Billeh Nickerson Shelagh Rogers Called Me a Slut 28 and Other True Stories Ayelet Tsabari How to Make a Cream Sauce 33 Poetry Darren Bifford Birthday Letter 38 Clint Burnham TWO POEMS 43 Louise Carson Christmas 1964 48 Margaret Christakos Banish 49 Mark Horosky From ‘Interiors’ 58 Armand Garnet Ruffo From ‘The Thunderbird Poems’ 62 Gillian Wigmore TWO POEMS 70 Changming Yuan Y: An Alphabetic Autobiography 72 Fiction Rachel Marston A Feeling of Home 73 Scott Randall And to Say Hello 81 Colin Snowsell Mann from Mars 94 Reviews Fiction Vanessa Blakeslee 102 Brenna Clarke Gray 105 Carol Matthews 108 Poetry Christopher Levenson 112 BOOKS RECEIVED 116 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 117 DONORS’ PAGE 119 COVER: ‘FIREWEED’ BY MARK MUSHET 2012. Smitten by a microforest of fireweed jettisoning tufts of silky, fibre-cloaked seeds in the air, I spent some time by the roadside near UBC last year to enjoy the scene on an overcast summer afternoon. It isn’t clear whether the image is warm or cold, of cotton or snow. It is a colonizing species, fond of open spaces and disturbed earth where there is little competition. Fitting on many levels. —M.M.— EDITOR’S NOTE: Congratulations to the following EVENT contributors who are finalists in the upcoming 36th annual National Magazine Awards: Craig Davidson’s ‘Friday Night Goon Squad’ (41/2) in the Fiction Category, and Sina Queyras’s ‘The Dead Ones’ (41/3) in the Poetry Category. Keep your fingers crossed! Also, a big shout-out to Libby Zeleke, one of the winners of our Non-Fiction Contest last year, whose entry, ‘We Were Punk Rockers’ (41/3), was voted the winner of the Creative Nonfiction Collective’s 2013 CNFC Readers’ Choice Prize. Visit www.creativenonfictioncollective.com for more details. You can catch all the latest news from EVENT at www.eventmags.com. —Elizabeth Bachinsky Check out our new home. “Simply one “A magazine of of the finest pinnacle quality literary with a wide magazines in and enviable the country.” reputation.” — Lorna Crozier — Timothy Taylor photo by Byron Barrett Byron by photo eventmagazine.ca poetry and prose Use your Enter EVENT Magazine’s ANNUAL NON-FICTION CONTEST $1500 in prizes 5,000 word limit Entry includes 1 year of EVENT Deadline April 15 Visit eventmagazine.ca AnneFleming Novels Are for Children Here’s an essay I started in 2001: A couple of years ago, I was on a plane reading a freshly bought book by an author I liked. I’d waited a year for the paperback. I had a Toronto-to-Vancouver stretch of time and a non-chatty seatmate. Ah. Settle into seat. Crack the spine. Read. Round about Saskatoon, halfway through both flight and book, I let the book drop to my lap and this sentence sounded in my head: Novels are for children. I will say it again: Novels are for children. I have a nephew who loves to read. Actually, I have several nephews who love to read, and a few nieces. But this one nephew is the kind of reading-loving kid who, when he opens a present on Christmas day and finds it is a book, will not be able to help himself opening the front cover and reading the first page. And, as he nears the end of the first page, he will not be able to stop himself fingering its corner and drawing it from right to left in a smooth and almost unconscious mo- 7 tion, revealing, now, page two (which to him is less a new page than a continuation of a stream), which will lead him to page three, and so on, until there are no more pages, or until the book is forcibly tugged from his hand and he is commanded to interact with his relatives. My father, his grandfather, used to give me a hard time about reading too much. What I think my father objected to was more com- plicated than he thought—he thought he was saving me from be- coming anti-social and sluggardly, that a child should have plenty of outdoor play with others as well as short periods of interaction with adults and should not spend all her time lying on a bed or chester- field lost in a world that did not exist when the real world was right there in front of her to live in. What he really objected to, I think, was being shut out. Because when we speak of being lost in a book, of that delicious feeling of being immersed, the people around us are seeing someone lost to them for the time being. We all want to feel that we are interesting and important enough for the people we love to pay attention to, and so, when we walk into a room and our belov- ed son or daughter or lover or friend does not register at all that such a thing has happened, indeed has such a look of union, oneness with what’s happening in their brain as a result of reading marks on a page, that the mere possibility of someone walking into a room with them seems not to exist, we are more than likely hurt, maybe even angry. I never knew this1 until I saw this nephew with the book I gave him for Christmas, opening the cover and flipping past the front matter to page one, and being lost to us for the next three hours until the book was done.