[BRIEF NOTE] McCormack/Sparling Reading
Dec. 7th, 2004 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThis evening, I attended a reading by Derek McCormack and Ken Sparling at the Toronto Reference Library, starting at 7 pm and lasting until a quarter past eight. I admit that I went mainly because of McCormack. I'd read his Dark Rides on Prince Edward Island, and while our writing styles are rather different--as Bookninja notes, McCormack's is "compressed, precise, extreme [. . .] stripped back and minimal to the point of disruption"--something in his vision, in Dark Rides' sparse short anomie-ridden stories, appeals to me. (See here for more, including McCormack's "Ghost.") I brought my copy of The Notebooks, which contains an extract from an earlier version of McCormack's novel The Haunted Hillbilly, with me to the reading. (Hoping for an autograph isn't a bad thing, is it?)
Although Sparling had good material, and based on the work of McCormack (a writer he edits) he has good taste as a writer and a reader, his reading tended to be a bit scattered and poorly presented, with unannounced switches in reading material and an overall lack of thematic unity in the selections presented. McCormack read from The Haunted Hillbilly, and it's certainly enough of a radical rewriting of the Hank Williams narrative to merit my future interest. (So many interesting books to read, so little time.) The questions and answers session following the two writers' readings was interesting, though I think that Canadian literature is doing a fine job of breaking through the CanLit shackles.
Afterwards, I approached McCormack for his autograph. I'm happy to report that he was quite nice, signing his section of The Notebooks for me and asking about my own interests as a writer. Time well spent.
Although Sparling had good material, and based on the work of McCormack (a writer he edits) he has good taste as a writer and a reader, his reading tended to be a bit scattered and poorly presented, with unannounced switches in reading material and an overall lack of thematic unity in the selections presented. McCormack read from The Haunted Hillbilly, and it's certainly enough of a radical rewriting of the Hank Williams narrative to merit my future interest. (So many interesting books to read, so little time.) The questions and answers session following the two writers' readings was interesting, though I think that Canadian literature is doing a fine job of breaking through the CanLit shackles.
Afterwards, I approached McCormack for his autograph. I'm happy to report that he was quite nice, signing his section of The Notebooks for me and asking about my own interests as a writer. Time well spent.
