Open Book: Ontario is celebrating the 24th Annual Trillium Book Award with The Trillium Ten/Trillium Dix interview series. Find out what this year's Trillium Book Award finalists were doing when they heard the news about their nomination, where in the province they most love to write, who their favourite Ontario authors are and more by following our series. Winners of the Trillium Awards will be announced on Friday, June 17th.
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Open Book congratulates Pedlar Press for their dual Trillium nomination this year: Ken Sparling is nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Book and Dani Couture's Sweet is a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. We asked publisher Beth Follett to let us in on how she knew these two books were something special.
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Open Book:
What was it that drew you to the work of Ken Sparling and Dani Couture?
Beth Follett:
Ken Sparling has got to be one of literary Canada’s finest gifts. The irony is that while his work is loved in parts of the United States, it is generally misapprehended in Canada. I have now published four titles by Ken; Book was the third, and I have just released his fourth. I continue to publish Ken because his works are of a startling originality: intellectually rigorous and beautifully written.
I have published two Dani Couture collections, Sweet and Good Meat. Dani’s thematic concerns are, in her own words: Illness, circumstance, accidents, the environment — what moves in and out of the boundaries of that environment. Her focus on illness and the shifting boundaries of the imagined body seem to me in particular both timely and generous.
OB:
Tell us a bit about bringing these great manuscripts into print.
BF:
The design processes for both Book and Sweet were rather unusual. I have a copy of Marian Engel’s original McClelland & Stewart edition of her novel Bear. The cover carries no image; rather it is a bold and straight-forward typographical treatment, her name only slightly smaller than the book title. I showed this treatment to Zab Hobart, the designer I’ve worked with for 13 years. As you can see, she took a surprisingly effective and thoroughly modern approach, breaking Book into two lines and reducing Ken’s name. Yet his name seems to pop out of the O in which it is set. I have never before received such a wealth of positive feedback for a cover. It made the world go slightly crazy when I first posted it on the Web.
The artist who made the wonky animal in the upper right corner of Dani’s cover went missing at the final hour. The original design used that figure fully, but we needed a higher resolution of the image for our print purposes. We were really down to the final hour, and Zab came up with the "sweet" stripes while retaining the wonky creature, which I wanted for its suggestion of, well, wonkiness. Dani intends the word "sweet" to be taken ironically.
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Beth Follett is the owner and publisher of Pedlar Press, a Canadian literary house based in Toronto. A chapbook of her poems, entitled Bone Hinged, has just been released by paperplates/espresso.
Ken Sparling works at Toronto Public Library and lives with his family in Richmond Hill. His books include two others published by Pedlar Press, an untitled novel and For Those Whom God Has Blessed With Finger. His other books are Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt, handmade and available by special order, and Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, published by Knopf.
Dani Couture was born in Toronto where she lives currently. Her work has been widely published in Canadian magazines and journals. She is the author of one previous book of poetry, Good Meat, and two of her poems were included as part of The Art for Commuters projects, originally screened during Toronto’s Nuit Blanche 2009. She won first place in the fiction category of This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Dani is the curator of the Animal Effigy photo project.
For more information about Book and Sweet, please visit the Pedlar Press website.
Buy these books at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
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