The best contemporary North American short story collections that find the beauty in hard-ass, hard-luck cases
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Posts from the ‘Arts & Culture’ Category
Apr 19
My Interview at NFReads
Tony Earnes of NFReads.com kindly invited me to participate in an author interview, something of a Proust questionnaire, rapid fire. Fun questions and I hope you enjoy the answers.
The Scales Project
The wonderful Bethany Gibson recently honoured me with an invitation to contribute something literary to her online art project, The Scales Project, “a conversation between artists … a call-and-response, a provocation, and a forum for connection and communication through art about the climate crisis and ecological collapse.” Going through the posts from other artists, I was blown away by the quality of the work, the depth of thought and insight, and the emotional power of the conversations.
I contributed two pieces. One, “Blank Vision Board,” is an excerpt from a short story called “Mulch Glue,” about a teenaged aspiring activist who finds little support in town, where the toxic mill has economic control. The other, “Terrible Twos,” a response to Tom Cull’s excellent poem, “Anthropocene,” is about frivolity and being confronted with the knowledge of its destructiveness. At least, that’s how I read it.
If you’re an artist with something to say about climate and ecology, consider submitting something to the conversation.
Chris Benjamin’s Favourite Books of 2015
A little late, as has become my custom, here are the best books I read in 2015, in the order I read them [Click on the image to learn more about the book]:
Newfoundland Poet Mark Callanan in Atlantic Books Today
The following is an excerpt from a column about young writers in Atlantic Canada, written by Chris Benjamin and published in Atlantic Books Today in June 2015. This column focused on Newfoundland poet Mark Callanan:
In the mid nineties Mark Callanan could have been a portrait of proto-teen, banging awkwardly at a guitar trying to make up songs. You know, working on his music. It didn’t take him long to realize Read more
NBA Analytics article from Men’s Journal
The following is an excerpt from an article published by Men’s Journal in June 2015, called “The 4 Fallacies of NBA Analytics,” based on an interview with economist David Berri:
In recent years, basketball fans and writers have shed heavy pixels and ink on the ascendancy of geeks over jocks in pro sports. Heavy number crunching – complete with new stats and endless logarithms – have taken over the games we love.
And yet, according to one of the thinkers who sparked the statistical revolution, most NBA teams still don’t know squat about how to win with numbers. David Berri co-authored his now-classic Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport nearly a decade ago. His work has focused on understanding which statistics most impact the desired outcome: winning.
“Wins in the NBA are determined by Read more