The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

David Franklin is former Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and editor of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and the Renaissance in Florence, a catalogue published by Yale University Press to accompany a major exhibition of the same name held at the Gallery from May 29, 2005 to September 5, 2005. We talk here mostly about the exhibition catalogue as book: what differentiates it from typical works of scholarly non-fiction, the challenges of catering both to the research community and the general public. what is it? A tour guide? A souvenir? A text book? Offering words for works; the drawbacks of publishing to deadline; how, ideally, catalogues should be written after exhibitions take place... But we don't ignore content: the pragmatism of Giorgio Vasari; his art collection; the primacy of drawing in Renaissance Florence; painting as a process of investigation; and the jolting juxtaposition of illuminating essays and academic catalogue entries...

Christopher Pratt is one of Canada’s most ‘prominent’ painters. He is now also a published poet. We talk here, in his home of St Mary’s Bay, Newfoundland on the Salmonier River, about his book A Painter’s Poems (Breakwater Books, 2005), about parallels between his writing and his art, emptiness, loneliness, cleanliness, juxtaposing real and imagined worlds, getting it right, abandonment, absence and how it draws in readers and viewers, leaving important things unsaid, seasons, a man drawing circles in the sand who, when asked why he does it, responds "Well, I’d be a damned fool if I didn’t," and about how creation involves sharing what is most intimate in order to communicate; in order to find out about and connect with the same in others.  

Barbara Reid’s plasticine artwork makes her books instantly recognizable. They have won acclaim around the world, and many awards. We talk here about what makes her so good, about great children’s book illustrators, the accurate conveyance of emotion, mice in subways, making room for the imagination, chiaroscuro, working in ice cream, wanting to show things to those you love, pony-tails, playing hooky, and war.  

Ramona Dearing lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and is the latest member of the longstanding (and increasingly famous) fiction collective The Burning Rock to publish a collection of short fiction. Dearing works for CBC Radio where she is currently busy putting together a nationally broadcast program featuring young Canadian artists. So Beautiful was published in 2004 by The Porcupine’s Quill Press. We talk here about her stories, my favourites, and hers, bodies in bags, judging one’s own work, doing the right thing, frustration, Christian brothers at Mount Cashel, dogs, Kafka at the CBC, the importance of radio and the weather to Newfoundlanders, Brad Pitt and parallel plot lines.  

Here's Tim Parks on his novel Cleaver: "Cleaver comes out of my love of the South Tyrol and a growing awareness/ irritation/ anxiety about the invasive nature of the public voice, the spoken media, in our minds and lives. And of course Cleaver, this charismatic, chaotic, destructive, hatefully likeable man who seemed just right for bringing out all the tensions between the seductive fizz of public life, various family nightmares and the magnificent emptiness of the mountains." We talk about the challenge of being left alone with oneself, being isolated in Italy removed from the buzz, getting above the noise line, the current proliferation of confession with its roots in Rousseau, not wanting to spend time with nice people who have nothing to say, predictable antagonisms in the news media, the awareness that celebrity is vacuous and yet still pursuing it, building reputation even after ceasing to believe there's any meaning in it, and how good novels open space for difficult topics to be discussed with pleasure. 

Lisa Moore’s fiction has been published widely in literary magazines and in anthologies. Her two collections of short stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open have received praise for their ’supple sensuality and emotional authenticity.’ She lives in Newfoundland. We talked there, and here about her recently published first novel, Alligator, about tea, pine martins, time, the exotic, Tasmania, Cezanne, St. John's as a bowl of oranges, Cubism, being in the present, survival, light, if it’s ever okay not to be good, cadence and wit in storytelling, and the colour blue…quite a few things really.    

Michael Crummey is a Newfoundland-born poet, short story writer and novelist. He is known for his historical fiction. His multi-award winning novel River Thieves depicts the relationship between European settlers and the last of the Beothuk indians in the early 19th Century. The Wreckage tells the story of a young Newfoundland soldier and his beloved during and after World War ll.  We talk about Michael's goal of taking the bare facts of historical events and making the people in those events feel real, maintaining a spine of fact, the impossibility of seeing inside what extinction felt like, conjecture, emotional authenticity, false assumptions, the honesty of fiction, and falsehood of factual 'truth,' respect for the reality of people's lives, fiction being best at capturing rich complex weave of lived experience, marketability; The Wreckage, evil, 9/11, boom times in Newfoundland during WWll, and finally, the mistaken expectation of  getting facts from historical novels.  

James O. Born is a Special Agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and author of three best selling crime novels. We talk about his most recent, Escape Clause; about blurbs, putting humour and a human face on the real life experience of cops, how life followed art in this novel, Karma and good moral compasses, the goal of writing compelling prose with surprise endings, cheer leading competitions, smacking people who talk of movie options without deliverying, Jaws, the compulsion to write and the unsurpassibility of Elmore Leonard.

Australian Tim Winton wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer (1982), at the age of 19. It won the Australian Vogel National Literary Award. Born in Perth, in 1960, he is the author of Shallows (1986), a novel set in a whaling town, and Cloudstreet (1991), the story of two working-class families rebuilding their lives. Both won Miles Franklin Awards. The Riders (1995) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won a Commonwealth Writers Prize. He is also the author of two collections of short stories, Scission and Other Stories (1987) and Minimum of Two (1987), and co-author of several travel books about Australia, including Land’s Edge (1993). His novel Dirt Music (2001), was shortlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize. I spoke with him during the Toronto International Writers Festival about his latest book The Turning, a series of linked stories. He seemed tired, a bit bummed about having been away from home for so long. The bloody tape ran out right in the middle of a lovely story he was telling about his converting wood from an old weir into a set of bookshelves for his library. Tim is an extremely likable, self effacing man with interesting ideas about the relationship between writing and music, as you will hear if you choose to listen…  

ANDREW MILLER was born in Bristol…in 1960 (induced, according to the family legend, by his mother eating a large supper of fish and chips). At age eleven, having convincingly failed his Eleven Plus, he went to boarding school in Wiltshire…Master of Arts in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia in 1991…PhD from Lancaster University…In February 1996, after six years of writing, ‘Ingenious Pain’ his first novel, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Grinzane Cavour prize & the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Ingenious Pain & his second novel Casanova are being/have been adapted for Film. His novel, Oxygen, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2001. His third novel, Oxygen was shortlisted for the Booker. His books have been published in over twenty countries. He now lives in Brighton and believes that on clear days he can see the coast of France. We talk about his novel is THE OPTIMISTS, prizes, Shakespeare, Hardy, Lawrence, stylism, and his looks and wish to be a fat woman. Andrew Miller is as articulate verbally as he is on the page. Listen…don’t just take my word for it…