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.
Contest! If you enter by noon on June 9th, you could win tickets to the Trillium Book Award author reading and reception that takes place on Thursday June 16th, 2011 at the Toronto Reference Library. Click here for more details.
Guelph-based poet and physician Shane Neilson is nominated for the English-Language Trillium Book Award for Poetry for his book Complete Physical (The Porcupine's Quill). This collection unites two of Neilson's fascinations — which also happen to be among the great subjects of poetry — love and death. His affecting lyrics on illness and the work of the physician are accompanied by line drawings from 19th-century anatomy texts. Open Book asked Porcupine's Quill publisher Tim Inkster to tell us about getting to know the work of Dr. Shane Neilson.
_________________________________
Tim Inkster:
The name Shane Neilson first crossed my desk on a book review, or perhaps a critical essay, or some other sort of unsolicited submission to Canadian Notes & Queries, a magazine we published from 1997 to 2005. The submission was remarkable because it came to us from Labrador, and we didn’t get many submissions from Labrador. I don’t recall that I knew at the time that Shane was a physician.
Some years later, perhaps 2006, the Family Health Clinic in Erin Village found itself looking to replace a physician who had resigned. My wife, Elke, and I would have been acutely aware of this circumstance, for personal reasons. As it happened, we were enjoying lunch one summer afternoon on the patio behind the BookShelf Cafe in Guelph when we were approached at table by Dr. Duncan Bull, who wanted to thank us on behalf of the Family Health Clinic for our assistance in helping to persuade Dr. Shane Neilson to accept the vacant position.
This bit of intelligence came as something of a surprise, given the situation as was known to us. Which was, in fact, that we didn’t actually know Shane Neilson. My curiosity, however, was piqued sufficiently that I did just enough research to discover that Dr. Neilson was also a poet.
Some months later I had an opportunity to meet the Doctor at the Erin Health Clinic. I attended the consultation armed with the latest Porcupine’s Quill poetry releases: Hand Luggage, a Memoir in Verse by P. K. Page, was likely one. Hot Poppies by the irrepressible Leon Rooke might have been a second. Dr. Neilson acknowledged that he had long been an admirer of the production values we were able to achieve in the production of little poetry books, and generously offered to fill my Turbuhaler prescription gratis, with stores taken from the Clinic’s pharmaceutical sample case.
Time passed. Traffic in Turbuhalers and slim volumes of poetry in Erin Village ensued.
The next summer a literary lunch was arranged for the Bistro Riviere on the Main Street of the Village that was attended by Alex Good, a noted literary blogger who would become Editor of Canadian Notes & Queries under the new regime of Shane Neilson and myself. Dr Neilson explained that he had a manuscript of poems that concerned itself with the practice of medicine, and I explained that I just might be interested in publishing such a thing because I owned a cache of 19th-century engravings, some of which were lifted from anatomy texts and might be used to illustrate such a text to advantage.
This is what we at the Porcupine's Quill were known to do. To use 20th-century offset printing technology to replicate the quality "look" and feel of a 19th-century letterpress product. And the engravings themselves had been rescued from an abandoned barn up on the moraine overlooking a branch of the West Credit River.
Shane Neilson’s manuscript, at the time provisionally titled White Coat, Black Bag, was duly dispatched to editor Wayne Clifford, himself a legend in Canadian small press publishing, because Wayne had been the first acquisitions editor at Stan Bevington’s Coach House off Huron Street in Toronto in the late 60s, and more time passed.
By the time production started in earnest, in August of 2009, the title of Shane’s book had been changed to Complete Physical, but the White Coat / Black Bag dichotomy survived as section titles which led us to illustrate the first half of the collection with images of body parts that are typically associated with diagnostics (ears, eyes, nose and throat) and the second half with images of less savoury organs. The book illustration even extended to the inclusion of a complimentary "tongue depressor" bookmark, on which an engraving of an open mouth leads inexorably downward and hence mimics the structure of the collection as a whole.
One of our better marketing ideas for Complete Physical was to commission a pair of oversized foam‐core mounted reproductions of the book cover, on which a nose is seen to smell the foot of a skeleton, which are currently displayed prominently on the walls of the examination rooms at the Erin Clinic.
Read more about Shane Neilson in his Poets and Profile interview.
 |
Born in New Brunswick, Shane Neilson is a physician who practices Family Medicine in Erin, Ontario and currently lives with his family in Guelph. He has published two previous books of poetry, Exterminate My Heart and Meniscus, in addition to two non-fiction works, one of which is a memoir about his training as a physician called Call Me Doctor. He has recently finished work on an anthology about what lies behind poetry called Approaches To Poetry, a book collecting together 27 poets who write about what moves them.
For more information about Complete Physical please visit the Porcupine's Quill website.
Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
|
Post new comment