To Ottawa, to Small Press Book Fair

Off to Ottawa today, to catch Michael Dennis and others read the night before the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair. And then the fair itself, on Saturday: always a good time, if sparsely attended. I'll be doing a Proper Tales Press table, with honkin' new HARDSCRABBLEs featured. And Leigh Nash (who'll be there with her Emergency Response Unit) and I will also tend a Mansfield Press table, with the new titles by Tom Walmsley, Bob Stewart and Jim Smith, plus a nice spread of the backlist.

Gonna be fun. The fair takes place at the Jack Purcell Community Centre, off Elgin Street. No address listed (rob, fer gawd's sake!) on the Facebook page. Goes from noon till five. Looking forward to seeing my dear Ottawa friends. Maybe making some new ones.

In other Mansfield news, I'm just beginning to catch my breath after an onslaught of large and small editing jobs. Most exciting for me are the Mansfield titles I'm working on: a first book of poetry by Peter Norman, of Halifax, formally of Calgary, Ottawa, and Vancouver. The book is called At the Gates of the Theme Park, and it's this incredible mixture of strange formalism and crazy anarchy. I'm thrilled to have nabbed this manuscript, and the book is due out in March. Also for March, a fantastic family memoir by Marianne Apostilides, The Lucky Child. I remember seeing some much earlier version of this when I was sitting on an OAC jury years ago, and I was deeply impressed then, at the time not knowing who the book was by.

Meanwhile, the Toronto launch for the three 2009 Mansfield books I acquired and edited — Tom Walmsley's Dog Eat Rat, Jim Smith's Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems, and Robert Earl Stewart's Something Burned Along the Southern Border — takes place on December 9, 7:30 pm, at the Monarch Tavern, on Clinton just south of College. Also launching is Pier Giorgio Di Cicco's Early Works, and there'll be guest readings by Corrado Paina and my hero, Mr. David W. McFadden, whose Be Calm, Honey (Mansfield, 2008), was a finalist for this year's GG.

Over and out.