Easy, Breezy...

I attended the Atlantic Book Awards ceremony last night. A classy event to round off a hectic week for yours truly. Despite crossing my fingers and my toes, Track & Trace did not earn its author a cool 2 grand. That purse, and the prize it accompanies, went to Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen's Lean-To. Congratulations to Tonja and to all the other winners hier soir.

Greg Malone's memoir, You Better Watch Out, also came up short in the first book award, losing out to the juggernaut of Shandi Mitchell, whose novel also won the biggest prize, purse-wise, of the evening, the Thomas Head Raddall Award for Fiction, beating out lightweights Linden McIntyre and Michael Crummey. Greg and I had a good cry together. I thoroughly enjoyed Greg's reading from YBWO in Charlottetown the other night, so I bought a copy, which I started reading today. It's been pretty damn neat getting to know a guy I used to watch on TV when I was a kid. Not exactly something I foresaw happening when I first started filling notebooks with wretched verse twelve-odd years ago.

Today, my mug graces the cover of Halifax's weekly, The Coast, along with 5 other Haligonian literati. Here's the wee interview they've published. Last time I was on the cover of a Halifax newspaper was 1998, when I appeared on all three dailies because I was leading chants at a rally in support of locked out Dalhousie faculty. It's a fact!

Looking forward to a bit of relative calm now, tho events abound in this most cruel of months. Kindly, one of them is the launch of Peter Norman's much anticipated (by me, anyway) first collection of poems, tomorrow, 7 pm at the Company House on Gottingen St. He'll be reading with some cool folks: Jeanette Lynes, Jesse Patrick Ferguson and Alice Burdick. I'll try to remember to bring my recording device. Which reminds me, I have audio to upload, edit and publish. Anon. Now, I plan to nurse my latest cold virus and fall asleep listening to a Blue Jays game on the radio.