National Network for Equitable Library Service

Sport literature is never just about sport. The genre's potential to explore the human condition, including aspects of violence, gender, and the body, has sparked the interest of writers, readers, and scholars. Over the last decade, a proliferation of sport literature courses across the continent is evidence of the sophisticated and evolving body of work developing in this area. Writing the Body in Motion offers introductory essays on the most commonly taught Canadian sport literature texts.

Since selections first appeared in the New Quarterly and the National Post as part of “The Afterword,” Steven Heighton’s memos and dispatches to himself — a writer’s pointed, cutting take on his own work and the work of writing — have been tweeted and retweeted, discussed and tacked to bulletin boards everywhere. Coalesced, completed, and collected here for the first time, a wholly new kind of book has emerged, one that’s as much about creative process as it is about created product, at once about living life and the writing life.

Over the past decade, the magic of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has spread across the globe, touching the imagination of hundreds of millions of people of all ages. From the 1997 U.K. publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone through the summer 2007 theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the saga has been an amazing one in print, on screen, and in real life.

Through his recollections we get an inside view of Canadian politics and publishing that rarely gets told, from Jack Hodgins' Vancouver Island to Harold Horwood's Labrador, from Alice Munro's Ontario to James Houston's Arctic. Doug Gibson takes us on an unforgettable literary tour of Canada, going behind the scenes and between the covers, and opening up his own story vault for all to read and enjoy.

'I'll kill him!' said Mavis Gallant. Pierre Trudeau almost did, leading him ('Run!') into a whizzing stream of traffic that almost crushed both of them. Alistair MacLeod accused him of a 'home invasion' to grab the manuscript of No Great Mischief. And Paul Martin denounced him to a laughing Ottawa crowd, saying, 'If Shakespeare had had Doug Gibson as an editor, there would be no Shakespeare!' On the other hand, Alice Munro credits him with keeping her writing short stories when the world demanded novels.

“Save the cheerleader, save the world.”

With that immediately memorable mantra, Heroes became the top–rated new series of fall 2006. Featuring such archetypal characters as one with a split personality, one who can fly, one who can see the future, one who can time travel — and the evil villain out to steal all of the powers for himself — the show touches our inner comic book fan, even if we’ve never cracked open a comic book.

“The outburst of cultural energy that took place in the 1960s was in part a product of the two decades that came before. It’s always difficult for young people to see their own time in perspective: when you’re in your teens, a decade earlier feels like ancient history and the present moment seems normal: what exists now is surely what has always existed.” Margaret Atwood compares the Canadian literary landscape of the 1960s to the Burgess Shale, a geological formation that contains the fossils of many strange prehistoric life forms.

The dismantling of “Understanding Canada”—an international program eliminated by Canada’s Conservative government in 2012—posed a tremendous potential setback for Canadianists. Yet Canadian writers continue to be celebrated globally by popular and academic audiences alike. Twenty scholars speak to the government’s diplomatic and economic about-face and its implications for representations of Canadian writing within and outside Canada’s borders.

This book examines the cultural work of space and memory in Canada and Canadian literature, and encourages readers to investigate Canada within its regional, national, and global contexts. It features seven chapters in English and five in French, with a bilingual introduction. The contributors invite us to recognize local intersections that are so easily overlooked, yet are so important. They reveal the unities and fractures in national understanding, telling stories of otherness and marginality and of dislocation and un-belonging.

Buttressed by a wealth of new, collaborative research methods and technologies, the contributors of this collection examine women's writing in Canada, past and present, with 11 essays in English and 5 in French. Regenerations was born out of the inaugural conference of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory held at the Canadian Literature Centre, University of Alberta, and exemplifies the progress of radically interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and publishing efforts surrounding Canadian women's writing.