What’s Up, National Post?

There’s some smart and relevant book coverage going on at the National Post right now. I for one, am shocked. Why the sudden shift, National Post? Has Shinan Govani been on vacation?

There’s an interview with Andrew Steeves, publisher at Gaspereau Press, one of Canada’s finest small presses. They’ve recently had to reduce staff, and Steeves was anxious to make it clear that the layoffs were not the result of the current economic crisis, but rather a move to find a healthy, stable scale for their operations.

I think it’s important to stress that I don’t think this is directly related to the more general economic downturn. Honestly, when you start a business from scratch you gradually try and figure out what size works for what you’re doing. I mean, you go through so many years where there isn’t a normal; the year previous can tell you nothing about what to expect. And only in the last couple of years have we started really to see several years in a row that looked similar, where we weren’t seeing massive growth or massive change. So the last few years we’ve had a better look at what the reality is. We could see what problems were the growing problems and what problems were like ‘Wow, we’re really just in over our head’ problems. That would be my sense of it.

I’m sorry that they had to let staff go. It can’t be easy for a house that small, but I am glad that they’ll be able to continue operating.

Secondly, Craig Davidson‘s debut collection of short stories, Rust and Bone, is being made into a film by French director Jacques Audiard. (No jokes about the French’s lack of machismo, please.) Davidson was recently interviewed about the deal, and about some difficulties he’s had as a writer.

My worry was: if you throw the entirely [sic] of yourself into any given endeavor and still wind up on what you perceive as the short side of the ledger … it does have an oddly unhealthy manner of worming itself into your psyche. The idea sort of was: if I give myself fully to this at the expense of most other aspects of human existence and still fail, well, what am I really fit to accomplish?

It might seem a bit nasty of me, but I like to hear about writers struggling with issues of confidence; not because of some kind of schadenfreude, but rather because, as still a largely unpublished writer, it’s good to know that I’m not the only one with those kinds of worries. Because God knows I’ve experienced some of those feelings myself.

Of course it wouldn’t be the Post without something like this Q & A with Nathan Sellyn, whom readers may remember as the author of Indigenous Beasts, the book of short stories that gave me a panic attack on the streetcar. The questions are so inane the interviewer may as well have asked “where do you get your ideas from?” Maybe they just didn’t want me to feel like I was missing out on coverage of Govani’s calibre.

August

Writer. Editor. Critic.

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