Curtain Call

Barbara Carter is a retired high school English teacher and Department Chair and head poetry editor for The New Quarterly. Inspired by her students, she writes to keep her place in the circle.

Erling Friis-Baastad was born in Norway and raised in the US but has spent most of his adult life in the Yukon Territory. He worked at a myriad of uncomfortable but strangely edifying jobs before landing behind a desk at the Yukon News in Whitehorse. His poetry collections include The Exile House (Salmon Publishing, Ireland) and Wood Spoken: New and Selected Poems (Northbound Press/Harbour Publishing).

Mark Anthony Jarman lived in Rome for a month in 2008 and also traveled to Pompei, Naples, Sorrento, Almalfi, and Positano. He loved it and is now working on a novel set in Italy. In Rome his room was right by the Vatican walls and he became convinced he could run for Pope. His last book was My White Planet. He lives in Fredericton, NB.

M. Travis Lane also lives in Fredericton, NB. She has received numerous prizes, among them the Pat Lowther, the Atlantic Poetry prize, the Alden Nowlanaward, and the Bliss Carman. Her eleventh collection of poetry, The All Nighter’s Radio, will be coming out from Guernica late this year.

John Metcalf is a writer, critic, editor, and anthologist. His latest book is the critical memoir, Shut Up He Explained. He is currently fiction editor at Bibliosasis press and a senior editor of CNQ, a journal of literary opinion and reviews. He also edits Oberon press’s annual Best Canadian Stories. “The Museum at the End of the World” is the third story published in TNQ featuring Forde, Metcalf ’s literary alter ego. The first of them, “Forde Abroad,” took the gold medal for fiction at the National Magazine Awards.

David O’Rourke lives in Port Hope and teaches at Centennial College in Toronto. Past publishing credits include helping Irving Layton write Waiting for the Messiah. His book Once There Were Giants is forthcoming from Biblioasis Press.

Patrick M. Pilarski is the co-editor of DailyHaiku, an international journal of short-form poetry. His first full-length collection, Huge Blue, will be released in
fall 2009 by Leaf Press, and he is the author of one chapbook, Five Weeks. Patrick’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies across North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan, recently including PRISM international, The Antigonish Review, Literary Review of Canada, Carousel, and on CBC Radio One as part of the CBC Poetry Face-off. He lives in Edmonton, AB.

Patricia Robertson was one of 20 short story writers featured in last summer’s “Salon des Refusés,” a joint response by TNQ and CNQ: Canadian Notes and Queries to the “establishment” choices of The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Her most recent collection is The Goldfish Dancer: Stories and Novellas (Biblioasis). In the fall of 2008 she was Writer-in-Residence at Green College, University of B.C.

Mark Rogers lives in Toronto with his wife Sara, son Thomas, and two cats. In 2005 he was awarded a grant from the Toronto Arts Council under its Grants to Writers program, based on his novel-in-progress. He has published fiction in a variety of Canadian and British literary journals. The story in this issue is a version of a chapter from the (very nearly completed) novel.

Carrie Snyder was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1974 and spent the first ten years of her life on the move, living in Germany, Ohio, and for fourteen
months in Managua, Nicaragua, before her family returned to Southern Ontario where she has lived ever since. Her first book, Hair Hat, was published by
Penguin Canada in 2004. She has since won a CBC Literary Award for fiction, and continues to write and to publish while devoting most of her energy to
mothering four young children (this too shall pass). She blogs at http://carrieannesnyder.blogspot.com.

Susan Stenson’s work has appeared in many Canadian literary magazines, most recently, The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review, Event, and Arc. She won Arc’s national poetry contest in 2004 and Arc’s Reader’s Choice Award in 2008. She will be teaching poetry at Sage Hill’s Summer Colloquium 2009-2011. Join her. Her next book, Lollygag, is forthcoming from Sono Nis Press.

Tom Wayman’s latest book is Songs Without Price: The Music of Poetry in a Discordant World (Institute for Coastal Research, University of Vancouver Island, 2008), based on a lecture he gave as the institution’s 2007 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Chair. His latest poetry collection is High Speed Through Shoaling Water (Harbour, 2007). His poems have appeared in three recent (2009) anthologies: Nancy Holmes’s Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, George McWhirter’s A Verse Map of Vancouver, and John Bradley’s Eating the Pure Light: Homage to Thomas McGrath. His first novel, Woodstock Rising, is forthcoming. Wayman teaches English and writing at the University of Calgary. When not working, Wayman lives in the Selkirk Mountains of southeastern B.C.

Shoshanna Wingate is an award-winning writer, a founding editor of the arts and culture journal Riddle Fence, and a new mom. Originally from South
Carolina, she has lived in St. John’s, Newfoundland for five years with her husband, Peter.