Ursula Pflug's Blog - Posts Tagged "book-launch"
Update on The Alphabet Stones, my new novel
My new novel, The Alphabet Stones will be released in September by Coburg micropress Blue Denim. I’ve received really amazing cover blurbs from Tim Wynne-Jones, Mathew Cheney, Jan Thornhill, Leanne Simpson, Charles de Lint, Bruce Kauffman and Candas Jane Dorsey, among others. I’m grateful to my esteemed friends and acquaintances for their kindness and generosity. Thank you all so much! Herewith is Candas’s blurb, and I’ll share some of the others closer to the publication date.
"A new Ursula Pflug book is a rare and welcome event, and The Alphabet Stones does not disappoint. Delivered in Pflug’s trademark edgy prose style, the novel is filled with a beautiful and terrible nostalgia for the magic that is seen and coveted, sought and never reclaimed…"
–Candas Jane Dorsey
I will be reading in Coburg at Northumberland County’s Word On The Street, at Cat Sass in Norwood, and in Toronto at SFContario among other locations; I’ll post details on each launch later in the summer.
I’m super excited as this book has been part of me for almost half my life! I brought an early draft to a workshop facilitated by Judith Merril at Trent University’s Peter Robinson College in 1986. Based on some expansions and revisions I subsequently made, I submitted it to the inaugural (and only–as it turned out) Descant Novella Contest, where it was shortlisted.
When Kate Story and I shared a table at The Toronto Small Press Fair a few years ago, Descant editor Karen Mulhallen stopped by and described how I had brought hard copy of my entry to her house on Admiral Road, barefoot, with a baby on my hip. I must have been house-sitting for my father; I can’t imagine how I’d have gotten from our apartment on Queen West to her house with baby Edward on my hip. Maybe Karen was embroidering when she added the part about me being barefoot!
In 1987 we moved to the country near Peterborough and I applied for an Ontario Arts Council Works-In-Progress grant to turn the novella into a novel. I overwrote when I revised and it turned into the classic four hundred pounder unpublishable first novel, and eventually I got tired of the rejections and put it away. Our beautiful daughter was born. I grew vegetables and hung laundry; I wrote and published all kinds of short stories in Canada, the US and the UK, in wonderful venues including BBR, Leviathan, Tesseracts, On Spec, Transversions, The Nine Muses, LCRW and Strange Horizons; four plays I wrote or co-wrote were produced; I went back to writing reviews, this time of books instead of art; and I got a draft or two closer to the final of my novel Green Music.
The new millennium seemed like a good time to get The Alphabet Stones back out, or Drastic Travels, as it was by then called. When I did, I understood that the original kernel was just as wonderful as Karen and Candas and Judith had said it was, and that what I needed to do was get back to that. I needed to cut away everything I’d added, everything except the core story of the three families and the alphabet stones themselves.
The original inspiration had been a dream I’d had the year before my son was born, a dream so resonant it demanded to be written, in one form or another. The form it eventually took was this novel, but the dream itself is also in the book, only slightly revised. The novel takes place near Perth, where I spent a lot of time as a teenager. The stony fields and cedar swamps of Eastern Ontario are so much a part of me by now that it’s as if they seeped out of my pores onto the pages of this book, a book I don’t think I could have written had we not moved back to the land.
I remember how when I told Karen I was close to the end but it had taken me twenty-five years she said, “Everyone’s got a book like that.”
"A new Ursula Pflug book is a rare and welcome event, and The Alphabet Stones does not disappoint. Delivered in Pflug’s trademark edgy prose style, the novel is filled with a beautiful and terrible nostalgia for the magic that is seen and coveted, sought and never reclaimed…"
–Candas Jane Dorsey
I will be reading in Coburg at Northumberland County’s Word On The Street, at Cat Sass in Norwood, and in Toronto at SFContario among other locations; I’ll post details on each launch later in the summer.
I’m super excited as this book has been part of me for almost half my life! I brought an early draft to a workshop facilitated by Judith Merril at Trent University’s Peter Robinson College in 1986. Based on some expansions and revisions I subsequently made, I submitted it to the inaugural (and only–as it turned out) Descant Novella Contest, where it was shortlisted.
When Kate Story and I shared a table at The Toronto Small Press Fair a few years ago, Descant editor Karen Mulhallen stopped by and described how I had brought hard copy of my entry to her house on Admiral Road, barefoot, with a baby on my hip. I must have been house-sitting for my father; I can’t imagine how I’d have gotten from our apartment on Queen West to her house with baby Edward on my hip. Maybe Karen was embroidering when she added the part about me being barefoot!
In 1987 we moved to the country near Peterborough and I applied for an Ontario Arts Council Works-In-Progress grant to turn the novella into a novel. I overwrote when I revised and it turned into the classic four hundred pounder unpublishable first novel, and eventually I got tired of the rejections and put it away. Our beautiful daughter was born. I grew vegetables and hung laundry; I wrote and published all kinds of short stories in Canada, the US and the UK, in wonderful venues including BBR, Leviathan, Tesseracts, On Spec, Transversions, The Nine Muses, LCRW and Strange Horizons; four plays I wrote or co-wrote were produced; I went back to writing reviews, this time of books instead of art; and I got a draft or two closer to the final of my novel Green Music.
The new millennium seemed like a good time to get The Alphabet Stones back out, or Drastic Travels, as it was by then called. When I did, I understood that the original kernel was just as wonderful as Karen and Candas and Judith had said it was, and that what I needed to do was get back to that. I needed to cut away everything I’d added, everything except the core story of the three families and the alphabet stones themselves.
The original inspiration had been a dream I’d had the year before my son was born, a dream so resonant it demanded to be written, in one form or another. The form it eventually took was this novel, but the dream itself is also in the book, only slightly revised. The novel takes place near Perth, where I spent a lot of time as a teenager. The stony fields and cedar swamps of Eastern Ontario are so much a part of me by now that it’s as if they seeped out of my pores onto the pages of this book, a book I don’t think I could have written had we not moved back to the land.
I remember how when I told Karen I was close to the end but it had taken me twenty-five years she said, “Everyone’s got a book like that.”
The Alphabet Stones Launch at When Words Collide in Calgary on August 10
Here is my schedule at When Words Collide in Calgary on Saturday! It's going to be amazing.The books (hot off the press) will be available at the launch but also at Edge Publishing in the Dealers' Room.
Saturday 11 AM – Suite 1062
More Fantastic Readings
Dave Duncan, Amber Hayward, Ursula Pflug
Saturday 5 PM – Lincolnshire 1
The Alphabet Stones
Ursula Pflug
Saturday 7 PM – Surrey
Editor For Hire
Robert Runte, Jodi McIssac, Nina Munteanu, Brian Hades, Ursula Pflug
Saturday 8 PM – Clarence-Phaeton
Autograph Session (2 Hours)
Saturday 11 AM – Suite 1062
More Fantastic Readings
Dave Duncan, Amber Hayward, Ursula Pflug
Saturday 5 PM – Lincolnshire 1
The Alphabet Stones
Ursula Pflug
Saturday 7 PM – Surrey
Editor For Hire
Robert Runte, Jodi McIssac, Nina Munteanu, Brian Hades, Ursula Pflug
Saturday 8 PM – Clarence-Phaeton
Autograph Session (2 Hours)
TOC for They Have To Take You In
Great news!
Hidden Brook Press
publisher/editor Richard "Tai" Grove is home from his annual Canada Cuba Literary Alliance trip to Cuba. As we speak, he is working on production for the fundraiser anthology, They Have To Take You In.
Gord Langill of the CMHA has promised us an introduction--with his background in mental health as well as literature I think we can look forward to something special.
I'm excited!
We'll do an event in Peterborough, probably at The Barbeside, as well as possible launches in Toronto at Zoinks and at Cat Sass Norwood, if it's still extant by the time we go to press.
Not sure of the dates yet as they depend entirely on Tai's schedule--so please don't ask me!
Happy spring! I think we can believe it now. Except there's snow in Norwood. New snow...falling on the lake our little Ouse River has lately become...
They Have To Take You In
Fiction and Memoir
Life Skills by Jan Thornhill
The Doppelgängers by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Orange and Amber by Tapanga Koe
Murky Pinks by Georgia Fisher
Winterstorm by Barbara Ponomareff
Just Like Rain by Michelle Berry
Giiwedinong by Leanne Simpson
Foxford by Sandra Kasturi
The Missing Elephant by Robert Runté
Up, Away, Here, Gone by Andrew McDonald
A Better Closet by Mela Brown
Zhezhi by Michael Matheson
Witness by Ruth Clarke
Arnold Pepper Doesn’t Care by Joe Davies
The Corner of Crack and Ho' by P.J. Thomas
Belvedere by Margaret Slavin Dyment
Leadfoot Sally: An Excerpt from Uranium City Return by Tim Becket
Anna’s Story by Dana Tkachenko
Poetry:
About The Creation of Life On Earth by Robert Priest
McLoneliness by Ron Chase
Paper Stairs by Linda Rogers
100 Percent Acrylic by Debbie Oakun Hill
Family Tree by Colleen Anderson
Metro West by Ariel David Skelly Langen
On the Road by Daryl Salach
ode'min giizis (heart berry moon) at Couchiching First Nation by Gord Bruyere
Lethe by Donna Langevin
Hidden Brook Press
publisher/editor Richard "Tai" Grove is home from his annual Canada Cuba Literary Alliance trip to Cuba. As we speak, he is working on production for the fundraiser anthology, They Have To Take You In.
Gord Langill of the CMHA has promised us an introduction--with his background in mental health as well as literature I think we can look forward to something special.
I'm excited!
We'll do an event in Peterborough, probably at The Barbeside, as well as possible launches in Toronto at Zoinks and at Cat Sass Norwood, if it's still extant by the time we go to press.
Not sure of the dates yet as they depend entirely on Tai's schedule--so please don't ask me!
Happy spring! I think we can believe it now. Except there's snow in Norwood. New snow...falling on the lake our little Ouse River has lately become...
They Have To Take You In
Fiction and Memoir
Life Skills by Jan Thornhill
The Doppelgängers by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Orange and Amber by Tapanga Koe
Murky Pinks by Georgia Fisher
Winterstorm by Barbara Ponomareff
Just Like Rain by Michelle Berry
Giiwedinong by Leanne Simpson
Foxford by Sandra Kasturi
The Missing Elephant by Robert Runté
Up, Away, Here, Gone by Andrew McDonald
A Better Closet by Mela Brown
Zhezhi by Michael Matheson
Witness by Ruth Clarke
Arnold Pepper Doesn’t Care by Joe Davies
The Corner of Crack and Ho' by P.J. Thomas
Belvedere by Margaret Slavin Dyment
Leadfoot Sally: An Excerpt from Uranium City Return by Tim Becket
Anna’s Story by Dana Tkachenko
Poetry:
About The Creation of Life On Earth by Robert Priest
McLoneliness by Ron Chase
Paper Stairs by Linda Rogers
100 Percent Acrylic by Debbie Oakun Hill
Family Tree by Colleen Anderson
Metro West by Ariel David Skelly Langen
On the Road by Daryl Salach
ode'min giizis (heart berry moon) at Couchiching First Nation by Gord Bruyere
Lethe by Donna Langevin
Montreal Launch for Motion Sickness
Motion Sickness
will launch on Friday September 5, 2014, at Librairie Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal, together with Phyllis Rudin's novel, Evie, the Baby and the Wife. The event is from 7-9 pm. Please join us!
Publisher's blurb:
Motion Sickness is a flash novel consisting of 55 chapters of exactly 500 words each and accompanied by a wood-cut like, scratchboard illustration that follows one young woman’s humorous and poignant misadventures in the worlds of employment, friendship, dating, birth control and abortion. The illustrations are dark and somewhat whimsical as is the text.
Penelope, the twenty–year old narrator is a guitarist who writes some lyrics, has a good colour sense and a social conscience. She has kicked a drug habit and is now mainly drinking and sometimes jamming in after-hours clubs as well as writing letters of protest. She finds herself alone when her roommate goes to Calgary to be with her mother who has breast cancer. At the same time she is increasingly attracted to Theo, a slightly older bass player who turns out to be married and who shares a similarly poetic take on the world, but who, unlike her, sticks with people and jobs. He finds her employment with him silk screening T-shirts where they develop a more intimate but non- sexual relationship. In between birth control methods she finds herself pregnant after a drugged threesome which involved the very sexy but potentially violent Stan. She has an abortion. Stan becomes a frightening stalker. Theo remains a stable anchor and it becomes increasingly clear to both of them as well as to Theo’s wife that their intimacy is not to be ignored.
This is a smart, engaging, well-written novel that should appeal particularly, but by no means exclusively, to young women dealing with the responsibility of reproductive control, finding their way in the world of creative work and the social life of a young single person. The style is full of humour, poignancy and sadness. Motion Sickness contains subtle magic realist and slipstream elements.
Cover blurb:
A picaresque miniature, Motion Sickness describes a young urban woman’s bewildering adventures on the verge of the real as she learns to trust friendship, and finally, love.This little book is a winner. Each of the facing pages forms a delightful and inextricable unit: a starkly-incised illustration and a 500-word chapter, with titles that read like a poem.Ursula Pflug’s voice is unique, funny and tough, and the dialogue is so exact it can be heard. SK Dyment’s dark and whimsical illustrations play with and enhance the tersely visual prose.
-Heather Spears, author, artist, winner of Governor-General's award for poetry
will launch on Friday September 5, 2014, at Librairie Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal, together with Phyllis Rudin's novel, Evie, the Baby and the Wife. The event is from 7-9 pm. Please join us!
Publisher's blurb:
Motion Sickness is a flash novel consisting of 55 chapters of exactly 500 words each and accompanied by a wood-cut like, scratchboard illustration that follows one young woman’s humorous and poignant misadventures in the worlds of employment, friendship, dating, birth control and abortion. The illustrations are dark and somewhat whimsical as is the text.
Penelope, the twenty–year old narrator is a guitarist who writes some lyrics, has a good colour sense and a social conscience. She has kicked a drug habit and is now mainly drinking and sometimes jamming in after-hours clubs as well as writing letters of protest. She finds herself alone when her roommate goes to Calgary to be with her mother who has breast cancer. At the same time she is increasingly attracted to Theo, a slightly older bass player who turns out to be married and who shares a similarly poetic take on the world, but who, unlike her, sticks with people and jobs. He finds her employment with him silk screening T-shirts where they develop a more intimate but non- sexual relationship. In between birth control methods she finds herself pregnant after a drugged threesome which involved the very sexy but potentially violent Stan. She has an abortion. Stan becomes a frightening stalker. Theo remains a stable anchor and it becomes increasingly clear to both of them as well as to Theo’s wife that their intimacy is not to be ignored.
This is a smart, engaging, well-written novel that should appeal particularly, but by no means exclusively, to young women dealing with the responsibility of reproductive control, finding their way in the world of creative work and the social life of a young single person. The style is full of humour, poignancy and sadness. Motion Sickness contains subtle magic realist and slipstream elements.
Cover blurb:
A picaresque miniature, Motion Sickness describes a young urban woman’s bewildering adventures on the verge of the real as she learns to trust friendship, and finally, love.This little book is a winner. Each of the facing pages forms a delightful and inextricable unit: a starkly-incised illustration and a 500-word chapter, with titles that read like a poem.Ursula Pflug’s voice is unique, funny and tough, and the dialogue is so exact it can be heard. SK Dyment’s dark and whimsical illustrations play with and enhance the tersely visual prose.
-Heather Spears, author, artist, winner of Governor-General's award for poetry
motion sickness launches in toronto
I totally forgot to mention about the Toronto Launch of They Have To Take You In, plus several other events, alas, but am trying not to be remiss by letting you all know I'll be reading from Motion Sickness at Inspire on Sunday at 10:30 am on the Discovery Stage, with Phyliss Rudin and Alisha Piercy. We'll be interviewed by Susan G. Cole afterwards.
The official Toronto Launch for Motion Sickness is at The Supermarket on Monday 6:00-8:30 pm.
268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto
Co-sponsored by LeftWords Festival of Books and Ideas, Come out and CONSPIRE with Inanna authors for an evening of readings and celebration.
Featuring:
Pam Galloway, author of "Passing Stranger"
Susan McCaslin, author of "Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga"
Ursula Pflug, author of "Motion Sickness"
Phyllis Rudin, author of "Evie, the Baby and the Wife"
Also featuring the jazz musical stylings of Jonah Cristall-Clarke
Refreshments will be served. Free!
inanna
The official Toronto Launch for Motion Sickness is at The Supermarket on Monday 6:00-8:30 pm.
268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto
Co-sponsored by LeftWords Festival of Books and Ideas, Come out and CONSPIRE with Inanna authors for an evening of readings and celebration.
Featuring:
Pam Galloway, author of "Passing Stranger"
Susan McCaslin, author of "Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga"
Ursula Pflug, author of "Motion Sickness"
Phyllis Rudin, author of "Evie, the Baby and the Wife"
Also featuring the jazz musical stylings of Jonah Cristall-Clarke
Refreshments will be served. Free!
inanna
