Thank you, McGill Bookstore! And an outing tonight to the Rialto Theatre for D & Q...

Although I'm on extended parental leave at the moment, I have worked at McGill since I moved to Montreal 10 years ago. I would visit the university bookstore on my lunch hour and peruse the fiction section, wondering if they would ever stock one of my books (this is before I ever wrote one) and if this imaginary book would rate one of their featured little red tags reading, "McGill Author," or if those were only reserved for alumni.

I can't remember if I ever blogged it and I can't find the photo now, but one day (and I think I have a philosophy student to thank for this) Bone and Bread appeared on the shelf with that coveted little red tag. It was an exciting moment!

Then I had the pleasure of doing a Lunch & Livres Homecoming 2014 event at the Bookstore with two other wonderful Montreal writers, Elaine Kalman Naves and Peter Kirby. I don't think I ever shared the photos, so here are a few. I was exactly 8 months pregnant at this event.

Baby bump visible! And red McGill Homecoming lanyard.

Talking about Bone and Bread at McGill Homecoming 2014

With Peter Kirby and Elaine Kalman Naves at Lunch & Livres 2014

But to get to the point, this week, a professor from the philosophy department sent me these photos of a Canada Reads display in the McGill Bookstore window. Thank you!!

Is that a Canada Reads display?

Yes, yes it is!!

Tonight I'm focusing on two other books at a Drawn & Quarterly event at the Rialto Theatre: Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine (this book killed me...in the best way possible) and Was She Pretty? by the endlessly talented Leanne Shapton.

That's right. I get to hang out with the cool kids tonight. See you there?

Fall blur

The one good thing about a prolonged absence from blogging is that it sometimes means I have been doing other writing. In this case, it happens to be true. I'm probably jinxing my progress by mentioning it here (doh!), but I feel like I've got momentum right now and I can see my current draft taking shape. I think I've talked about this particular project being almost done for at least two years running, if not longer, but it has been stuck at the 70% mark for a long time. Even when I edge up the word count, the scope gets larger, so the progress feels negligible. Anyway, I think I was saying, yay writing. So yay!

I also never posted the result of the Montreal Tournament of Books at Paragraphe Bookstore. Bone and Bread won! They very kindly invited me in to sign some stock.

Signing stock at Paragraphe Bookstore

Ahhh, early September, when it was still warm enough to wear a sleeveless linen dress. What you can't see is that I'm also wearing my wedding shoes: yellow flower Seychelles heeled sandals. I am colour-coordinated infrequently enough (and restrained to just one colour even less frequently) that I think this fact needs to be documented here. Actually, for a pair of yellow shoes, it turns out they match quite a few things I own! I wish I could say the same for all my other brightly coloured shoes. Also: I like how long my hair looks in this picture.

I also asked for a photo in front of the tournament poster!

Yes, that is a French poster for a tournament of English books. 

Other semi-recent goings-on in the writing world include a reading at Drawn & Quarterly for the launch of Teri Vlassapoulos's novel Escape Plans. Here are some photos from the evening that I grabbed from Facebook!

With Ian McGillis (host of the evening and former QWF mentor to both me and Teri), Teri and Lesley Trites.

Just the readers. 

I have been saying no to a lot of readings because they are always scheduled at exactly my baby's bedtime, but I have long admired these ladies and a trip to my favourite neighbourhood bookstore is always a treat. Thanks for the invitation!

Singing at a holiday concert tomorrow afternoon, so I'm off to see if I still have my dollar-store Santa hat from years past. I have a feeling it was a victim of the fire, but I'm hoping to be happily surprised.

Montreal launch and the four-day weekend

Thursday was the Montreal launch for Bone and Bread, and it went really well!  Thank you so, so much to everyone who came out.

Outside Drawn & Quarterly bookstore.

I met up with some writer friends beforehand, at Le Depanneur cafe, an hour before the Monday Night Choir performed in support of the launch.  (I'm not in this choir, though I've submitted my name to the long waiting list.)  Their set was amazing, and I cannot even describe how special it felt to have the evening start with music like this!  Below is a picture of them performing.  (This photo, and actually all the ones in this post were taken by amazing publicist K.)

Monday Night Choir performing at Le Depanneur cafe

Then we crossed the street to D & Q, where I read a couple of short sections of the novel.

A rare photo of me looking semi-normal while reading!!

This was followed by a fun Q & A with Drew Nelles, the editor of Maisonneuve Magazine, and then, deliriously happy that the public speaking part of the night was over, I signed books and chatted with people and generally felt like the luckiest girl on earth.  And we sold out of all the books!

The lovely peeps at D&Q also blogged about the night here.  

Chatting with Drew Nelles of Maisonneuve.

Post-reading, I've just been recovering.  My cold got worse after Toronto, and it was so bad just before the launch I actually had to miss a day and a half of work (which almost never happens), and it is in fact still going.  I have actually never seen this much green goo (yuck, sorry) in my whole life.

BUT...it's the four-day weekend!  One of the best things about the Easter weekend is that it always seems to sneak up on me and therefore feels like a surprise holiday.  In the past, I've used this weekend to write furiously, stay up late, and make a huge dent in a project.  Instead, I've been watching endless episodes of Homeland and knitting like mad.  (Shhh...don't tell my piles of laundry and taxes.)  I'm working on a new spring cowl that I'm looking forward to wearing with my leather jacket once the weather is warm enough.  And once I finish it.  I wonder which will come first?  Today the weather in Montreal is weird and windy.  I'm excited for a stretch of warm weather to come.

Hope everyone had a fun and restful long weekend!

Readings, readings, readings!

We've been wonderfully fortunate in our literary events lately in Montreal. Thanks to the Concordia Writers Read series, George Saunders was in town two weeks ago to give a reading, which I can honestly say was the best reading I've ever attended (a close second being Yann Martel reading from Life of Pi at a free event at the Winnipeg International Writers Festival, the same morning he found it was shortlisted for the Booker). Saunders read from his recent story in The New Yorker, "Victory Lap." It's a classic Saunders story -- I'm not sure anybody does tragicomedy better than he does. He did different voices for the characters, including a Mickey Mouse-type voice for the imaginary baby deer (read the story, you'll understand) that is still cracking me up whenever I think about it. He answered the questions generously and interestingly and humbly. Everyone I went with was equally impressed.

Then this past Monday was the Biblioasis Metcalfe-Rooke reading at Drawn and Quarterly, where Kathleen Winter, Rebecca Rosenblum, and Amy Jones read from their winning short-story collections (actually, in Rebecca's case, she read a new story, which was a treat). They were all excellent and inspiring readers, and there were some yummy snacks there to boot. Kathleen very nicely sent me home with some of the leftover blue cheese. I'm pretty sure that living off of literary reading leavings means that I'm a REAL writer now.

And tonight at Arts Cafe is a poetry and prose reading, with a lineup including Alice Zorn, who will be reading from her wonderful book Ruins & Relics. The collection is deservedly shortlisted for the Quebec Writers' Federation McAuslan First Book Prize, and I'm rooting for it to win. And on the subject of the QWF Awards, why don't you come to the gala? As always, it promises to be a great event, and at just $10 a ticket, I suspect it is the most affordable (yet still glitzy) literary gala in the country.