The Word Is Wild Literary Festival happens in Maynooth on June 6th and 7th. Maynooth is on the edge of Alqonquin Park and the festival takes place at The Arlington Hotel which is also the hostel for tourists, many from northern Europe, who have come to explore the park. I'll be facilitating a couple of writing workshops and reading on Saturday at 4 pm from The Alphabet Stones, sponsored by The National Public Readings Program of The Writers' Union of Canada.

Speaking of The Alphabet Stones there is a nice new review up at Amazing Stories online, by Canadian author/editor Steve Fahnestalk.

Among other things, Steve says: It has been a long while since a writer has kept me on this kind of knife edge: are there really two worlds? Even though we can see all kinds of things clearly through Jody’s eyes—and the book is a voyage of self-discovery as well as a sort of travelogue of mostly one place—we’re as uncertain as Jody is whether any of this is “real” in the usual sense. A lot of it deals with alienation—Jody’s as well as Ethan’s—which, in a very real sense, is a big problem for youth; often we don’t feel like we belong anywhere when we’re growing up. Like Jody, we sometimes don’t feel as if we’re part of our own family; they can appear to be strangers and we the halfling; as if we have been stolen away by fairies and replaced by some sort of golem. Are we the golem or the halfling? These questions are a part of the confusion Jody often feels, exacerbated by her feelings for Ethan, and the realization that Ethan feels for her sister what Jody feels for him. (It sounds more soap-opera-ish than it is.)

Anyway, I don’t want to quote large chunks of the book; I liked the writing so much I’d rather let the reader discover it for him/herself.