#mcclelland&stewart

[jacobwren]

McClelland & Stewart is accepting submissions of unsolicited and unagented work from Black, Indigenous, and racialized writers, as well as those of other traditionally underrepresented communities during the months of March and September. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/imprints/MS/mcclelland-stewart/submissions

[roughghosts]

“Foolish I may have been, but never silly.” The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence

“Foolish I may have been, but never silly.” The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence #CanadianLit

Now I am rampant with memory. I don’t often indulge this, or not so very often, anyway. Some people will tell you the old live in the past—that’s nonsense. Each day, so worthless really, has rarity for me lately. I could put it in a vase and admire it, like the first dandelions, and we would forget their weediness and marvel that they were there at all. Meet Hagar Shipley. A woman nurtured and…

[mioritic]

“I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries”, Leonard Cohen

from The Spice-Box of Earth (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961)

[hearthwrm]

𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐍 𝐀𝐒 𝐈 𝐇𝐎𝐋𝐃 𝐘𝐎𝐔 // 𝐈 𝐀𝐌 𝐋𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐆𝐎.

ⓒ :

kui, ryoko. delicious in dungeon (ダンジョン飯, danjon meshi, lit. “dungeon food”). yen press, 2018. 14 vols. / carson, anne, et al. antigonick : sophokles. toronto, mcclelland & stewart, 2012.

[dk-thrive]

now, you’re in this book, it’s reading you, you’re caught by it, you can’t get out

— Margaret Atwood,  "Alias Grace" (McClelland & Stewart, 1996)

[gregor-samsung]

" Vivevamo di abitudini. Come tutti, la più parte del tempo. Qualsiasi cosa accade rientra sempre nelle abitudini. Anche questo, ora, è un vivere di abitudini. Vivevamo, come al solito, ignorando. Ignorare non è come non sapere, ti ci devi mettere di buona volontà. Nulla muta istantaneamente: in una vasca da bagno che si riscaldi gradatamente moriresti bollito senza nemmeno accorgertene. C'erano notizie sui giornali, certi giornali, cadaveri dentro rogge o nei boschi, percossi a morte o mutilati, manomessi, così si diceva, ma si trattava di altre donne, e gli uomini che commettevano simili cose erano altri uomini. Non erano gli uomini che conoscevamo. Le storie dei giornali erano come sogni per noi, brutti sogni sognati da altri. Che cose orribili, dicevamo, e lo erano, ma erano orribili senza essere credibili. Erano troppo melodrammatiche, avevamo una dimensione che non era la dimensione della nostra vita. Noi eravamo la gente di cui non si parlava sui giornali. Vivevamo nei vuoti spazi bianchi ai margini dei fogli e questo ci dava più libertà. Vivevamo negli interstizi tra le storie altrui. "

Margaret Atwood, Il racconto dell'ancella, traduzione di Camillo Pennati, Ponte alle Grazie, 2019², pp. 80-81.

[Edizione originale: The Handmaid's Tale, McClelland and Stewart, 1985]

[theaskew]

You Have the Lovers, a poem by Leonard Cohen, from Leonard Cohen: Selected Poems, 1956-68 [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969]

[totallyfuckd]

I have lost a telephone with your smell in it I am living beside the radio all the stations at once but I pick out a Polish lullaby I pick it out of the static it fades I wait I keep the beat it comes back almost asleep Did you take the telephone knowing I’d sniff it immoderately maybe heat up the plastic to get all the crumbs of your breath and if you won’t come back how will you phone to say you won’t come back so that I could at least argue

Cohen, Leonard. “Waiting for Marianne”. Flowers for Hitler. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Limited, 1964. Print.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries”, Leonard Cohen

from The Spice-Box of Earth (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961)

[thebeautifulbook]

THE HOUSE OF THE MISTY STAR: A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan by Frances Little (New York/Toronto: Century/McClelland, Goodwill & Stewart, 1915). Cover design by Decorative Designers. Illustrated by Arthur E. Becher.

source

[contremineur]

According to the craftsman’s handbook chapter XXXVII Il libro dell’arte by Cennino d’Andrea Cennini who tells us there are several kinds of black colours. First, there is a black derived from soft black stone. It is a fat colour; not hard at heart, a stone unctioned. Then there is a black which is made from vine twigs. Twigs which choose to abide on the true vine offering up their bodies at the last to be burned, then quenched and worked up, they can live again as twig of the vine black; not a fat, more of a lean colour favoured alike by vinedressers and artists. There is also the black that’s made from burnt shells. Markers of Atlantic’s graves. Black of scorched earth, of torched stones of peach; twisted trees that bore strange fruit. And then there is the black that is the source of light from a lamp full of oil such as any thoughtful guest waiting for bride and groom who cometh will have. A lamp you light and place underneath—not a bushel— but a good clean everyday dish that is fit for baking. Now bring the little flame of the lamp up to the under- surface of the earthenware dish (say a distance of two or three fingers away) and the smoke which emits from that small flame will struggle up to strike at clay. Strike till it crowds and collects in a mess or a mass. Now wait; wait a while please, before you sweep this colour—now sable velvet soot—off onto any old paper or consign it to shadows, outlines and backgrounds. Observe: it does not need to be worked up nor ground; it is just perfect as it is. Refill the lamp, Cennino says, As many times as the flame burns low, refill it.

Lorna Goodison, To make various sorts of black (from ‘Supplying salt and light’, McClelland & Stewart 2013)

Georges de la Tour, The repentant Magdalen (oil on canvas, c.1635–1640)

[kitchen-light]

Madhur Anand, from her collection "A New Index For Predicting Catastrophes",  McClelland & Stewart Inc., 2015 [ALT TEXT under cut]

“We’re Not Worried” by Madhur Anand

Danish astronomers have just discovered sugar

– simple molecules of glycolaldehyde – floating in the gas around a young, sun-like star, four hundred light years away. The molecules are falling toward a binary star, a system of two bodies, one primary, one companion, orbiting about a common centre of mass. This space sugar, they think, helps replicate DNA. We too orbit. Tonight

it’s ice cream at The Boathouse Tea Room, noticing where the Speed River’s melting and, more urgently, the sides of cones. We choose chocolate and vanilla, measure the deviations. An old lady is feeding geese.

Astronauts wanted neapolitan for their trips to the moon. Freeze-dried prototypes proved impractical. Crumbs were dangerous to microgravity, like bird

parts in plane engines. Now they sell it at the NASA gift shop, so we can all travel to outer space too.

There are more choices than stars. Scientists are making breakthroughs in slowing down melt, though can’t make it healthy.

You can’t take sugar out because of the role it plays The chemical structure girds against dismantlement

[ojo-rojo]

There's another skin inside my skin that gathers to your touch, a lake to the light; that looses its memory, its lost language into your tongue, erasing me into newness.

Just when the body thinks it knows the ways of knowing itself, this second skin continues to answer.

In the street - café chairs abandoned on terraces; market stalls emptied of their solid light, though pavement still breathes summer grapes and peaches. Like the light of anything that grows from this newly-turned earth, every tip of me gathers under your touch, wind wrapping my dress around our legs, your shirt twisting to flowers in my fists.

Anne Michaels: "Flowers",  from: The Weight of Oranges / Miner's Pond. McClelland & Stewart, 1997. p.83

[sassafrasmoonshine]

The Handmaid's Tale (The true first edition) • Margaret Atwood, author • Tad Aronowicz, design; Gail Geltner, collage • McClelland and Stewart, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publishers • 1985

[raynerwilde-kjrp]

CROSSROADS: a work by Rayner Wilde

NOTE BEFORE READING: CONTENT WARNING: Death, blood, suicide, depressive imagery with hints of gallows humour

This is the work Rayner has been writing over the past few days. Rayner is naturally critical and feels a lot of anger and despair in this moment. Please be advised his writing and beliefs are not a reflection of my own.

The stars are dying out. I can see it every night, the patterns have Altered, death knell from light fading From our eyes and souls, sucking us into oblivion. Infinite black holes Grasping our desires until We’re bled dry. Counting the sand grits under my fingers to distract me. My legs and back ache from the heat from the rocks from the movement

from the shooting. I’ve been hiding but at what cost?

Here’s my crossroad, but one side is blocked off. Barricade, Where do I go? How do I act? I have no stars to guide me and no review process to aid my Understanding. Empty but aware, aware of the Obliviousness within I and the chemicals.

This is not a nature poem.

Hiding from the war from the losses from the love, let night not see my blackest desires so they fade without knowledge.

A destruction of society. Scratch that– a deconstruction of our society. Maybe that’s what needed, what’s more necessary: rebirth or deconstruction? I watch you wilt and shrivel as I tried to help you, Stoichiometry into the night to balance Life’s chemical equation to create equilibrium, but what I found was only a decomposition. Too much radiation leading to carbon dioxide without Enough oxygen, unbalance. The crossroad is my apocalyptic report, One side blocked off, can I destroy the barrier? Will you let me? This self-destruction, I hope, hasn’t completely stained my hands with black and red.

Welcome to the anthropocene, misfit chaos leads to disgust at oneself. Becoming turned foul Through radioactive counters and Sadistic rebels in the same of a Sadistic dystopia. Perhaps Orwell and Wells were both wrong: how many times have you heard the “leader” threaten to Murder your friends? Welcome to the apocalypse, allow me to show you how we kill ourselves

with Ignorance mislabelled as Bliss for the sake of so-called freedom and resistance, and war crimes have become just the average day of living. Is this a crossroad anymore? Or have we destroyed the opportunity to choose? Removal from this madness means the black and white eyes continue to laugh at our own failing. 

we die badly always public and graceless

But we keep going… But we keep struggling And pushing forward And walking towards the crossroad And questioning

And fighting

And dying And wondering And dreaming

Will this ever end?

This is not a nature poem

I trudge on Without you, With tunnel vision As I read your note over And over And over, trying to find My own flaws. It was stupid of me to think I stood a chance, and yet I let myself fall into the stupid ideas as always. I’m holding all my ambiguity and emotions together. Bottling them up so I learn from these mistakes. I don’t wish it to be a mistake, no; it’s

not a mistake. 

If it was a mistake I could deconstruct it, lay it out for all to see and use against me, break it down to it’s basic formulas. 

Welcome to the anthropocentric apocalypse, where interstellar innocence is astonishing and rare like the dreams of seeing the stars in clarity through the radioactive atmosphere. If I see the stars again, I’ll think of you, and maybe this crossroad will gain two paths again.

Works Consulted

Abel, Jordan. The Place of Scraps. Talonbooks, 2013. 

Brand, Dionne. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. McClelland and Stewart, 2022. 

Major, Alice. Welcome to the Anthropocene. University of Alberta Press, 2018.

Pico, Tommy. Nature Poem. Tin House, 2017.

[dk-thrive]

Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.

Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault (McClelland & Stewart, April 16, 2009) (via Alive on All Channels)