Off the Page

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Somewhere along the way I got the impression that the fundamental property of a novella isn’t its brevity, or that it’s stuck somewhere between a story and a novel, but that it’s this: a novella wrestles with the worst day of a protagonist’s life. I like the German tradition in novellen that the story comes to a surprising but logical end, which for me as a writer means I need to convince the reader there is no other possible outcome than the ending we arrive at together.

You’ll read a lot of different definitions of novellas, mainly about word length (10,000 to 50,000 words by some accounts, shorter or longer by others), but for me, the novella, like a poem, loves a turn, tastes its words as it delivers them, and lasts in the mind long after the book is closed.

This selection of Canadian works is short on novellas but each one is novella-ish in its love of language, its unforgettable characters, or its inarguable nature—some of these read like ur-texts, like they’ve always existed and we were lucky enough to find them washed up intact onshore.

One aspect or another of each of these books echoes a …

Poet Dennis Lee's children's classics Alligator Pie and Garbage Delight are brought back to life this month in sparkling new "classic editions" published by HarperCollins Canada. Though the popularity of Lee's work for children hasn't waned since the 1974 publication of Alligator Pie—which went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies around the world—the book has been out of print since publisher Key Porter folded in early 2011. Thankfully, HarperCollins Canada's gain is all of ours, as they've bought up Lee's entire Key Porter backlist and will be reissuing his children's collections season by season.

Alligator Pie was a groundbreaking book. The world of Canadian publishing was very a different place in 1974, and there was very little regard for children's literature within the industry. In his memoir Stories About Storytellers, editor Douglas Gibson recalls that there were no children's bookstores and only one children's publisher, Tundra. He writes of his arrival at Macmillan Canada when “...the corridors... were alive with gossip of how [publisher Hugh Kane] was championing a crazy project, a couple of children’s books by a poem named Dennis Lee, illustrated by Hugh’s old friend Frank Newfield, that would need to sell ten times the usual number of …

Keavy Martin is author of the new book Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature. Here, she recommends some of her favourite reads on Inuit culture, Indigenous culture, and the history of Western Canada.

If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground by J. Edward Chamberlin: This is one of the first books that really got me thinking about Indigenous rights—and about the stories through which we all lay claim to land. But the thing that still inspires me to this day is the way that Ted Chamberlin navigates these tricky issues. Weaving in and out of tales from his own, extensive experience in Indigenous territories around the world, Ted models for me what a good and responsible scholar should do: honour the expertise that exists outside of the Ivory Tower—and the readers out there too.

The Curse of the S …