Cities of Refuge Archives | Research & Innovation

Professors Michael Helm & Priscila Uppal to share International Festival of Authors stage with 91��ɫ alumni

fmaquito — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

The 31st International Festival of Authors (IFOA) has started and several 91��ɫ professors and alumni are on the bill.

91��ɫ alumnus (right) (BA ’95) of CBC Radio will host and moderate “Celebrating 40 Years of the Juno Awards”, which will launch the new book Music from Far and Wide: Celebrating 40 Years of the Juno Awards (Key Porter Books, 2010) Saturday, Oct. 23 at 9pm at the IFOA. The event will feature three of the book’s co-authors Karen Bliss, Nick Krewen and Jason Schneider, along with special guests Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo – who wrote the book’s foreword – singer-songwriter Dan Hill and musician Emm Gryner.

The following day, another 91��ɫ alumnus (BA Spec. Hons. ’81) will be at the IFOA as one of three authors participating in The Word Doctors Are In: Master Class on Sunday, Oct. 24 at 11am. Ricci will speak about “What Every Writer Should Know”.

Poet and 91��ɫ creative writing alumna (Hons. BA ’00), editor of The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen (Exile Editions, 2007) and author of the poetry collection Junkman's Daughter (Exile Editions, 2004), will read from her latest collection A Good Time Had by All (Exile Editions, 2010). Strimas, who works at Quill & Quire magazine and for the University of Guelph's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, will read on Sunday, Oct. 24 at 1pm and again on Friday, Oct. 29 at 8pm.

91��ɫ English Professor (left) will read from his latest book, , Wednesday, Oct. 27 at 8pm, along with the other finalists for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

91��ɫ English Professor (right) will be part of a roundtable discussion with IFOA Ontario in Milton Wednesday, Oct. 27, and will read from her newest work Friday, Oct. 29 at 8pm at the IFOA in Toronto.

The IFOA will once again bring writers of contemporary world literature for 11 days of readings, interviews, lectures, round table discussions and public book signings from Oct. 20 to 30.

For more information, visit the website. You can or call the Harbourfront Centre Box Office at 416-973-4000.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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Professor Michael Helm a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

fmaquito — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 08:00:00 +0000

91��ɫ English Professor is up for yet another literary prize for his novel . Last week he was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; this week he’s been selected as one of five finalists for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize announced by the Writers’ Trust of Canada yesterday.

Along with Helm, who was nominated for the prize in 2004 for his novel In the Place of Last Things, the nominees for the $25,000 prize are Trevor Cole for Practical Jean (McClelland & Stewart), Emma Donoghue for Room (HarperCollins Publishers), Kathleen Winter for Annabel (House of Anansi Press) and Michael Winter for The Death of Donna Whalen (Hamish Hamilton Canada).

Jury members and authors Lisa Moore, Andrew Pyper and Eden Robinson read 143 titles submitted by 46 publishers. Each finalist will receive $2,500.

In Cities of Refuge, a single act of violence resonates through several lives, connecting close by fears to distant political terrors. At the story’s centre is the complex, intensely charged relationship between a 28-year-old woman and the father who abandoned her when she was young. The novel weaves a web of incrimination and inquiry, where mysteries live within mysteries and the power to save or condemn rests in the forces of history, and in the realm of our deepest longings.

Right: Michael Helm. Photo by Alexandra Rockingham.

Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at Toronto’s Isabel Bader Theatre, hosted by CBC Radio One broadcast journalist Shelagh Rogers, on Nov. 2. The Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize and the Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for short fiction, along with four other prizes will also be awarded during the evening.

For more information, visit the website.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Third novel by English prof wrestles with what people believe

fmaquito — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

91��ɫ English Professor likens writing novels to driving bumper to bumper at 120 kilometres an hour for half a day, and being emotionally and physically spent by the end. That’s on good days.

“You have to concentrate so hard, but when you get out of the car, you’re just so exhausted. I always find it physically draining,” says Helm, author of the recently published , already number eight on the . Helm will read from his new book at Toronto’s Festival of Arts & Creativity June 12.

Left: Michael Helm. Photo by Alexandra Rockingham.

On bad days, Helm says, he might suddenly think the manuscript he just spent the last seven months working on is boring, “like I was just plodding along”. He has to go back and figure out where he took a wrong turn, made a wrong choice. In the end, it usually works out, but it’s a process punctuated by crises.

Take his new book. After rewriting the first 80 or so single-spaced pages five times, he realized it was becoming a very different story, faster paced, than what he wanted, “the kind of novel I might have written 12 years ago. It wasn't a novel I’d even necessarily want to read anymore,” says Helm, an editor at the literary journal from 1991 to 1998 and co-editor for magazine since 2003. The main character had to go, that much was clear – he was taking over the story. “The draft that wasn't working had a lot of frenetic energy and I needed a book that was slower, but still had dramatic tension – sort of a slower drawing of the story.”

After all, Helm is not the same man he was when his first novel, the Giller Prize-nominated made its surprising debut. Until that point, Helm hadn't published a short story or a poem.

Now, Helm has written his third novel, Cities of Refuge, which takes place in Toronto, a multicultural, cosmopolitan city Helm no longer lives in, but still enjoys for its energy. The problem with trying to write a particular kind of book is the intuitive part of the process doesn’t always cooperate, at least initially, and certainly not the way Helm approaches it. “I usually don’t know where the story is going,” he says. It evolves as he goes. He gets in for the ride and hangs on, never knowing where it's going to stop.

“If you’re doing a good job, it starts to form into recognizable shapes and wholenesses with understructures as you recognize things there you hadn’t realized were there. And that’s a sign you’re doing something right.”

It can't be rushed, though. It requires taking the elements of the novel "as far out as you can until it starts to break apart and you go through a crisis and if you come through that crisis then you’ll see a different thing and you’ll see it better,” he says. “One of the tasks of writers, whether we’re talking about narrative or character, is to take seeming certainties and to drive them into doubt, to the farthest reaches that you can and make them start to break apart. Though it’s no fun when the book does come to a big crisis and you think ‘Oh no, I got this dead wrong’.”

But to create great fiction, risk is part of the process, as is doubt. And so to get to the story he wanted, he had to elevate his two secondary characters to main billing and give them space to develop without really knowing where they would take him. As it turned out, Kim Lystrander, a 28-year-old PhD dropout volunteering at a local agency that helps refugee claimants who have been rejected, and her father Harold, a professor of Latin American history with an undetermined past, wanted to further explore a familiar theme – belief. Helm hadn’t realized at the time that the theme was also present in his last novel and to a lesser extent in his first.

It's about "the investment we make in different kinds of stories, and those can be personal stories, national stories, religious mythic narratives, the things we find meaningful and why do we find them meaningful, and what happens when those stories turn out not to be worthy of our investment," he says. "One question that I think the new book asks is, ‘can a thinking, thoughtful person, embrace old beliefs about story’, which is to say our seemingly fundamental shared instinct, a need to believe, a need to believe things that we can’t always know with certainty have validity."

In Cities of Refuge, Harold, who divorced his wife and abandoned Kim, is forced to confront his dark, unknown past, his beliefs, after the violent attempted rape of his daughter, and becomes obsessed with finding her assailant. Similarly, Kim suddenly doubts those things she once cleaved to as truths; all that has been stripped away. But as Kim gains strength and clarity, Harold falters.

“He’s a guy who’s perpetually contorted so as not to see what’s right in front of him. He doesn’t want to stare at the truth of his life, who he is and how he has behaved in the face of brute power in the past,” says Helm. Whereas Kim contains a "perceptive imagination and she understands him to a degree that he would never understand himself." And their relationship takes on different hues and rhythms in the aftermath.

As Helm says, most people’s characters are fully formed by the time they're adults and they have a good sense of themselves. The trick then is to discover “what we believe and why we’re messed up the way we’re messed up”.

Acting director of 91��ɫ’s Creative Writing Program, Helm is also the author of , a finalist for the regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

Currently, Helm is working on a short novel, under 150 pages, that he is trying his best not to complicate, as he says, crazily.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Professor Michael Helm's novel reviewed in Edmonton Journal

fmaquito — Tue, 04 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

, assistant professor of English in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, has published his third novel, . Helm's novel has attracted media attention through reviews and interviews.

Helm's brother, Richard, :

It's a tricky business this, writing about your own brother. But what can I do? He’s produced another damned novel and I’m supposed to write about people who write novels.

Besides, this one’s mighty good.

Michael Helm is 48, he teaches English and creative writing at 91��ɫ in Toronto and makes his home in a leafy little acreage just outside of Dundas. His writings on fiction and poetry frequently appear in North American newspapers and magazines, including Brick magazine, where he has been an editor since 2003. He fancies himself something of a golfer.

Michael and I chatted recently, just a few days before Cities of Refuge hit store shelves.

Q: Are you comfortable being interviewed by your brother?

A: As long as we stick to the book. You don’t mention my strangeness at age seven and I won’t mention any of that stuff from your teen years. I mean, how does a guy get his pants on backward between classes? And then not notice? So none of that. But otherwise it’s fine. And Mom would have approved. So thanks for asking.

Q: It’s been six years since [your last novel] In the Place of Last Things. Is that about the cycle that works for you? Do you sometimes wish you could knock these things off like Alexander McCall Smith?

A; The math is three novels in 13 years, and that doesn’t count the time it took to write the first one. The writer’s either slow or exercising heroic discretion.

It just takes time to get it right. When a novel is forming in the imagination, characters are like invisible planets. I know they’re there because there’s a kind of gravity at work, and this gravity seems to draw a certain kind of language and that’s why I end up writing about this character and not that one. I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious – I’m trying to be exact. If this sounds mysterious, it is, and whatever offers me this mystery is probably why I write.

Q: What's up next? What are you working on now?

A: I have a couple of novels in early stages. I’d like the next one to be short, but it seems to have other ideas.

Novelist Robert Wiersema April 23:

Take Cities of Refuge, the new novel from Toronto writer and previous Giller nominee Michael Helm. The novel begins with a rape scene, but the novel is neither a thriller nor a healing journey, though it includes elements of both. It is set, in part, among Toronto’s immigrant communities, but it is not just an immigrant novel. It struggles with the weight of history, and with philosophical issues, but it is neither historical, nor a novel of ideas. And so on. It is, in short, a mosaic, and a stunning read.

Helm is the author of , which was a Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist, and , a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Professor Michael Helm interviewed and reviewed about his new novel

fmaquito — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

, assistant professor of English in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, has published his third novel, . His is the author of , which was a Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist, and , a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book.

The Globe & Mail April 23. Helm was also interviewed:

Q: Where did the idea for this book come from?

I know exactly where the last two books started, the sentence or image they stared with, but this one has been torn down and built back up again so many times I don't think there's any original lumber left in it. For a long time, I wanted to write about Toronto because it's the place I've lived the longest and I am interested in cities of this size ... open cities in this moment.

Q: What is this moment?

Well, the start of the 21st century, the open city, for the usual reasons people find a city interesting, the mix of histories and stories and languages, the surfaces of the place, the so-called erotics of public spaces. But also because I also think it's true that almost anything can count as character in fiction, in the way that landscape can be character in Thomas Hardy. And I think cities sort of work in fiction the way people do, that they have an outward part of themselves that is a promotion of a mythology and a much more interesting and richer interior. And I know the city, I think I know it pretty well and have enough intuitions about it as well. It's full of dramatic possibilities, I think.

The complete is available on the Globe's Web site.

The Toronto Star also on April 27:

“I don’t know how marketable or sexy it is, but I think of it as a book about different kinds of belief,” says Helm, who will read from the novel Wednesday at Harbourfront Centre on a program that also features Russell Smith and Erin Moure.

“I wanted a book that was pleasurable on every level and, for me as a reader, one of those levels is a book that slightly resists easy understanding. There’s always more than one thing happening at a time, on the level of character, tone or language. I find that very pleasurable when I read.”

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer.

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