Publication of Jeunesse 1, no. 2

The Winter 2009 issue of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, and Cultures has now been published! It includes an editorial by co-editor Mavis Reimer, reviews by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Jenny Kendrick, and Jamie Paris, and a forum entitled “‘The Child,’ Childhood, and Children: Defining our Terms,” with contributions by Margaret Steffler, Mona Gleason, Patrizia Albanese, Shauna Pomerantz, and Julia Emberley. It also features the following articles:

• Toward a Zeroth Voice: Theorizing Voice in Children’s Literature with Deleuze / Jane Newland
• Little Red Riding Hood and the Pedophile in Film: Freeway, Hard Candy, and The Woodsman / Pauline Greenhill and Steven Kohm
• Retraduire un classique: Dépoussiérer Alice? / Isabelle Nières-Chevrel
• “Better Friends”: Marshall Saunders Writing Humane Education and Envisioning Animal Rights / Roxanne Harde

Subscriptions to Jeunesse include open access to all issues of Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse. Back issues of this journal are also available.

The Blythes Are Quoted on CBC’s “Year in Books”

The publication of The Blythes Are Quoted has been selected as one of the “10 biggest publishing stories of 2009″ on a CBC.ca news story:

Fans of the precocious, freckle-faced redhead from P.E.I. had reason to rejoice this year when an amended version of the final Anne Shirley stories was released under a new title, The Blythes Are Quoted. But the book’s additional 100 pages revealed a darker story – complete with references to adultery and suicide. Novelist Jane Urquhart ably provided a context for these bleak scenes in her comprehensive, unflinching biography of Anne’s author, Lucy Maud Montgomery. Anne’s banner year ended with a triumphant Sotheby’s auction – proof that great CanLit never goes out of fashion.

See “The Year in Books” for the full story.

Congratulations to Kelly Norah Drukker!

I would like to offer my warmest congratulations to Kelly Norah Dukker on the publication of her long poem “The Burning House,” which appears in the Winter 2009 issue of The Malahat Review. Way to go, Kelly!

Interview on CBC Radio’s Ontario Today

I will be interviewed on Ontario Today on Monday, 14 December 2009, sometime between 12:00 and 12:30, on CBC Radio One:

L.M. Montgomery’s last manuscript, The Blythes are Quoted, has just been published for the first time in its entirety. The manuscript was submitted to Montgomery’s publisher the day she died. It’s the ninth volume in the Anne series. The editor who re-discovered the typescript will be our guest on Ontario Today. And of course Ed Lawrence will join us as well.

UPDATED 15 DECEMBER 2009: The interview can be streamed from the Ontario Today website for the next thirty days.

Norval and Kitchener

I’ll be signing copies of The Blythes Are Quoted at the Lucy Maud Montgomery Museum located at Crawford’s Village Bakeshop in Norval, Ontario, on 12 December 2009 from 1:30 to 3:30 PM (more info), and also at the Kitchener Public Library in Kitchener, Ontario, on 16 December 2009 beginning at 6:30 PM (more info).