Vancouver Manuscript Intensive is now accepting applications for all programs through November 9th. ​Vancouver Manuscript Intensive and Dr. Yosef Wosk are working together to fund the Yosef Wosk VMI Fellowship to mentor emerging writers of promise. We celebrate this partnership by renaming the program that was formerly known as the “VMI Fellowship” in honour of Dr. Wosk’s philanthropic support.

The Yosef Wosk VMI Fellowship is for a writer of exceptional promise with a manuscript in progress, who has faced significant barriers to fulfilling that promise. This competitive Fellowship includes a full scholarship to the Six-Month Intensive 2023 program to work with one of our award-winning authors. While Canadian, U.S. and international applicants can apply, communication and work will be in English. The successful Fellow will be featured at the program’s graduation reading in June 2023 and may be interviewed for publication on VMI’s website and in literary journals.

Application deadline: November 9, 2022
Notifications: November 30, 2022
Tuition amount: WAIVED
Course dates: January 2023—June 2023. An orientation for the group on Zoom will take place in the first week of January. The mentor and Fellow will decide together on a date to begin their work.
The Fellow may be mentored by any one of our active mentors and may apply with work in any genre. Mentor pairing is determined by several factors, including mentor availability, enthusiasm for the proposed project, and VMI’s careful assessment of the best match. www.vancouvermanuscriptintensive.com/mentorship-options/vmi-fellowship/

What a great year it's been for writers at VMI. Now we celebrate their efforts with the end-of-year graduation reading this Saturday June 18, 2022 at 4pm PST‑5:15pm PST! Please email VMI to request the link for the event. https://www.vancouvermanuscriptintensive.com/about/contact/ne 18, 2022 at 4pm PST‑5:15pm PST!

What a phenomenal job our new Poet Laureate is doing! I was proud to share the stage with her and what a joy to hear the winning poets read their exceptional poems at VPL: ​https://fionalam.net/poetlaureate/vanpoet-blog/

CBC Books published a reading list for Short Story Month this month. The post is here: https://www.cbc.ca/books/23-canadian-collections-to-read-for-short-story-month-1.6455986 - The Octopus has Three Hearts was included! Thank you, CBC Books. It's lovely to see the Octopus in such good company.

 

 So appreciative of this thoughtful review in the ​https://www.jewishindependent.ca/beauty-amid-harshness/. Particularly appreciated this observation about the stories in The Octopus: "The Octopus Has Three Hearts was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Rose is no stranger to awards and recognition for her writing. She is the poet laureate emerita of Vancouver for good reason. She writes with succinct and oft-times detailed brutality, with touches of dark humour, and with much insight into humanity. Elements of her characters – whether they be ex-cons, cheating spouses, or people who just made a terrible mistake – are within all of us to some degree and our world would probably be a better place if we confronted these aspects of ourselves, instead of burying them or pretending they don’t exist."

 I'm looking forward to our even at the Jewish Book Festival in February (with Ami Sands Brodoff, author of the excellent collection The Sleep of Apples.

 Wonderful to see The Octopus Has Three Hearts in such superlative company! www.cbc.ca/books/the-best-canadian-fiction-of-2021-1.6275969

VMI 2022 Fellows Announced
DEC 3, 2021 | BY ELEE KRALJII GARDINERWe are delighted to welcome two Fellows for the 2022 season to work with director Elee Kraljii Gardiner. Congratulations to Brandon Wint and Olajide Salawu!

VMI is pleased to offer these two Fellowships in the second year of this developing and important program. We received applications from a wide pool of talented and committed authors seeking mentorship for their works-in-progress. We thank each person who applied and want to state what a pleasure it was to spend time with the submissions. We are encouraged to know how much fine work is taking place all around us, both in Canada and internationally. The abundant interest confirms our efforts to support authors at all stages of their careers.
Meet the Fellows:
Brandon Wint is an Ontario-born poet and spoken word artist who uses poetry to attend to the joy, devastation, and inequity associated with this era of human and ecological history. For Brandon, the written and spoken word is a tool for examining and enacting his sense of justice, and imagining less violent futures for himself and the world he has inherited. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after, touring performer, and has presented his work in the United States, Australia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Jamaica. His poems and essays have been published in national anthologies, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013) and Black Writers Matter (University of Regina Press, 2019). Divine Animal is his debut book of poetry.

Olajide Salawu is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland published under African Poetry Book Fund, edited by Kwame Dawes. His works have appeared and are forthcoming in The Journal, Oxford Review of Books, Rattle, The Offing, Saraba Magazine, Lolwe, Glass, and Obsidian Literary Magazine. He is also a PhD student at the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His research interests include, rurality, urbanity, African cyber poetry experience, digital humor, African films and Nigerian book culture. His research works have appeared in such publications as Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Third Text.
Brandon and Olajide will work independently on their poetry projects as members of the 2022 cohort in the Six-Month Intensive. We invite everyone to attend their public reading to be held in June.
​
The Fellowship program will continue next year with an invitation for applications in the fall for the 2023 season. Please follow vancouvermanuscriptintensive.com for more info and consider donating in support of the Fellowship program!

• LITERATURE


• REVIEWS

By Karim Alrawi 09/29/2021

http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/seemingly-irresolvable-traumas-reading-rachel-roses-octopus-three-hearts/


In his book The Adventurer, critic Paul Zweig claims the themes of imprisonment and escape provide “a conduit for the mythology of modern times.” Recast as isolation and communication these are also the themes capably explored by Rachel Rose in her debut collection of short stories, The Octopus Has Three Hearts.
With tenderness and humor and descriptions of sex that are at times seething and at others raucous, she deftly leads the reader on an exploration of worlds turning on axes of love and despair. Worlds whose conflicts are mediated by children and animals from bats, pigs, and parrots to dogs and kittens. In these stories, some linked by a common location, the characters struggle to overcome seemingly irresolvable traumas to find their way, with varying degrees of success, to redemption and sanity. Though the failings often start as venial, redemption rarely comes easily.
In the title story, “The Octopus Has Three Hearts,” Mica fibs to the two men in her life that she is pregnant only to admit she isn’t, risking a breakup of their relationship. While in “White-Noise Syndrome,” Claire, distraught while receiving cancer treatment, is unfaithful to her husband Jorge. In “Of Rats and Men,” Piper cannot overcome her feelings of violation, having been abused as a child, and so is unable to maintain a relationship with her twin sister who herself may or may not have been abused. In “Troll,” Troy is both sinner and sinned against, and desperate for absolution. By showing pity for two abandoned dogs, he earns sufficient compassion from men at a Buddhist temple to start piecing together a life broken in shards.
The compassion in the stories goes deeper than the justice or injustice of human failings with characters struggling to communicate through barriers of loneliness and silencing caused by emotional and physical abuse. One such story is “Karma,” about Marina and her autistic son, Theo, and the three chickens they adopt Karma, Dharma, and Dukkha. Marina is estranged from her mother in a country not her own. Her husband, abdicating responsibility, leaves her to cope alone with finding ways to connect with their son. In this story and others, women are the force that binds families together when men go AWOL. In others it is the men who bear the load.
The theme of animals as surrogates and alter-egos is humorously illustrated in some stories and tragically in others. In “You’re Home Now,” Roxanne renames a pet and so resolves a conundrum, finding peace with herself. While in “Wings on Pigs” a pet dog allows a police officer, unable to make amends, to come to terms with having killed an innocent man. In “Revolting Beasts and Those Who Love Them,” Sarah finds inspiration in Charlie the chameleon.
The device of doubling is skilfully deployed in many of the stories. The doubling is mostly of similarity and complementarity rather than duplication. A condition described by the essayist Thomas Carlyle as “all things have two faces, a light one and a dark.” And a case of one self can do what the other self can’t. In “Will You Accept the Charges,” Lisa assumes the role of an imaginary Mexican American she calls Valentina. In a moment of lucidity, she diagnoses her malaise as part of a general obsession with “who’s in and who’s out.” With mimetic doubling being the ultimate in, she darkens her complexion and changes her appearance to fit her image of being Mexican. But Lisa’s doubling as Valentina is a stage too far. Despite fantasizing the person she could be, if only she were Mexican, Lisa cannot overcome being Lisa.
In several stories, light and dark selves are divided into separate though related characters. Piper is the dark to her twin sister Steph’s light. Roxanne’s family are doubled in the pets she keeps. In “Jericho,” Destiny’s boyfriends Jay and Carlos are doubles. Their sum total adding up to less than the man she needs to care for her child. In “Porco Dio,” Jaxon is doubled with the pet pig Francis Bacon and is less of a son to his parents than the pig. The policeman Craig is doubled with David Maynard, both 22 years old, killed by him as a consequence of his “unintended bias.” The doubling is lightly underscored by the dog David bought his mother being eventually delivered by Craig. Mark is dark to Will’s light in “Revolting Beasts and Those Who Love Them.” In “Warhol,” the marital situation of Jane and Del is mirrored in that of Kuniko and Harry with the story turning once and then again on the words of a parrot. In “The Glass Eye,” possibly the most haunting of the stories in this collection, two families are doubled.
In some of the stories a character’s world is paired with others mythical, phantom and virtual. In “A Toss Through Time,” Jael, after a traumatic divorce, moves to an island to live the life of a would-be writer. After a tussle with Pan, the cloven-hoofed god, she discovers her writer’s voice and doing so escapes the prison-house that is the silence of “frozen emotion.”
There is a buoyancy to the writing that with humor, insight and surprise carries the reader through stories that range from the magical to gritty realism. Read collectively they tell of a world tilting on its axis and in need of greater empathy and understanding to right itself. A world familiar and yet also defamiliarized in the telling.

In Conversation: Rachel Rose and Maria Reva
Moderated by Renée Sarojini Saklikar
Join Rachel Rose, author of the story collection The Octopus Has Three Hearts (Douglas & McIntyre) longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Maria Reva, author of Good Citizens Need Not Fear (Knopf Canada), for discussion and readings in celebration of their latest books. Hosted by bestselling writer Renée Sarojini Saklikar and presented by Massy Books, this free event will take place on Sunday, September 19 at 11 a.m. on Zoom. It will also be livestreamed to Facebook. Spaces are limited, and advance registration is recommended:
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/strange-beasts-good-citizens-in-conversation-rachel-rose-and-maria-reva-tickets-172351918227

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