March Notes
The latest news and notes from those inky fellows at Gaspereau Press, with sundry accounts of their authors’ exploits and their books’ reception out in the wide world.
Author News
In February, Sylvia D. Hamilton’s work was featured as poem-of-the-month for Atlantic Books Today.
Lisha Fishman launched her latest collection of short fiction, World Naked Bike Ride, at Book Suey in Detroit on February 25.
Annick MacAskill’s poem “Circumference” was featured on CBC Books.
An excerpt from Michael Goodfellow’s poem “Motifs” was published in Modron, a Welsh journal of ecological writing.
New Catalogue
The 2022 catalogue is now available. To ask for a copy, email info@gaspereau.com. Note: This is not the full reader made available in previous years, but simply a saddle-stapled catalogue profiling 2022 books.
New Releases
Ray Cronin’s Alan Syliboy: Culture is Our Medicine is now available. Mi’kmaw painter and multidisciplinary artist Alan Syliboy’s art career began in the early 1970s when an innovative art education program aimed at Indigenous youth took him to New England and introduced him to other artists, art forms and possibilities. But it was by returning home to Millbrook, Nova Scotia, and wrestling with how to create art in and for his small community that he truly began to find his voice. Drawing on the iconography of Mi’kmaw petroglyphs and stories, Syliboy’s work blurs the lines between traditional and contemporary Native art, reaching backward while also making his viewers aware of “time’s rupture and inevitable distortion.”
Susan R. Fisher’s and Margot Stafford’s Beaver Books for a Dime: A Bibliographic History of the Children's Books of Brunswick Press 1952–1984 is now available. This is the story of how an innovative postwar publishing venture started by Fredericton’s Brunswick Press pioneered Canada’s now vibrant tradition of children’s book publishing. Under the leadership of Michael Wardell, and with the backing of Lord Beaverbrook, Brunswick Press became an early adopter of process-colour offset printing, giving it the production capacity to launch Canada’s first modern children’s picture book series in 1952. The venture was aided by the wave of cultural nationalism that followed the release of the influential Massey Report in 1951, prompting a significant expansion in the cultural and educational infrastructure both in New Brunswick and in the rest of Canada and establishing a market for Canadian-published books.
Upcoming Events
Michael Goodfellow, Luke Hathaway, Kirby, and Lisa McCabe will read poems at LaHave River Books on April 8 at 4 p.m.
Katie Fewster-Yan, Alison Smith, Cory Lavender, and other poets will read poems at the Mahone Bay Centre on April 15 at 2 p.m.
Annick MacAskill, Katie Fewster-Yan, Alison Smith, and Nolan Natasha will read poems at Lunenburg Bound Books on April 28 at 7 p.m.
Recent Press
Coastal Villages, a new radio station in LaHave, Nova Scotia, will air a one-hour interview with Michael Goodfellow on April 1 for the show Words and Music, broadcasting online at 1 p.m. Atlantic Time (12 p.m. ET).
Shelagh Rogers interviewed Sylvia D. Hamilton for The Next Chapter about Hamilton’s latest collection of poems, Tender.
Mainstreet on CBC Halifax interviewed Sue Goyette about forestry in Nova Scotia.