WAR OF THE WORDS: Controversy at Edmonton Poetry Festival!
Poets, especially Canadian poets, can be a fractious lot. There have been recent public battles between various prominent Canadian poets, mostly notably between Jan Zwicky and Michael Lista on the relevance of criticism. Heated words like “illiterate” and “incompetent” and “stupid” were deployed in a war waged on the pages of the National Post. Veteran […]
BOOKS: Big message in little sports story for kids
Steven Sandor’s new novel Replay may seem like a nice little story about sports in small town Alberta – but there’s something deeper going on here. Aimed at readers grades 5-8, the story revolves around Warren Chen, a Chinese-Canadian kid living in Sexsmith, Alberta who dreams of joining the local Bantam football team. When he […]
REVIEW: Krall’s sultry show all grace, no pretense
There’s a realness about Diana Krall that can’t be measured. Sure, she’s a multi-platinum-selling, Grammy and Juno award-winning artist who happens to be publicly married to another multi-platinum-selling, Grammy award-winning, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame artist. Despite all that and more, there are no emanations of celebrity from her onstage. Maybe it’s the Canadian […]
CONCERT REVIEW: Derivative Muse bombards the senses
There are plenty of adjectives one can use for Muse’s show at Rexall Place on Super Bowl Sunday: Bombastic, pretentious, overwhelming, dazzling, even stupefying – but in a good way. It was a fierce bombardment of the senses, a visual extravaganza that overloaded your auditory and visual faculties to the point of no return. The […]
WRITER CITY: Marv Machura on Truth/Beauty
Dubbed “Edmonton’s hottest folk rocker” by a local radio station, Marv Machura is also one of the smartest. He’s not only been a working musician for the past 30 years, he’s also a teacher and a public speaker with a fascination for Marshall McLuhan. Machura’s first book of poetry, Wonder, 30 years in the making, […]
Two Edmonton writers score publishing deals on the same day
The date 12/12/12 was supposed to be a day of luck or a day of doom, depending on which numerologists you decided to talk to. For the Edmonton literary community, it was a day of celebration. On that day, two local writers, Michael Hingston and Thea Bowering, were offered publishing deals for their first books. […]
YEAR IN LIT: The bad, the good, and the wickedly sweet
The world is supposed to end in 2012 – and for a moment in late September, the world seemed like it was ending for Edmonton’s literary community. After 30 years of selling books and generously supporting local writers, Greenwood’s Books shut down. It was a devastating loss to the local community from an Edmonton institution […]
Sci-fi-fantasy fans get another kick at the Con at PureSpec
It’s a month after Edmonton Expo and a couple weeks after Halloween -and you still want to get more mileage outta that Commander Shepherd costume you worked on for a year? Fear not, sci-fi-fantasy lover, because Pure Speculation 2012 is coming your way this weekend at the MacEwan Robbins Health Centre (City Centre Campus, 104 […]
BOOKS: Persistence pays off for lawyer-turned-novelist Peggy Blair
The novel written by former Edmontonian Peggy Blair was rejected 156 times before she met bestselling Scottish writer Ian Rankin in a bar. They talked briefly about her predicament and then out of the blue, he told her to use his name to contact his literary agent – a bit of good fortune that resulted […]
REVIEW: Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler turn Rexall into great night at the folk fest
One of the problems with seeing living legends in concert is that they never really live up to the title. They’re usually past their prime, don’t have the chops that they used to have, so they hire a kickass back-up band to cover for them. Or they rely on their artistic credentials to put on […]
