Gwendolyn MacEwen was born in Toronto in 1941 to a mother who spent much of her life in and out of mental health institutions and a father who died young from alcoholism. She dropped out of high school – to study on her own terms – and eventually taught herself Arabic, Hebrew and Greek. (It’s worth noting, if only to appreciate the symmetry, that she later wound up with corresponding lovers for each language.) As a young woman in the early sixties, she earned a reputation as a precocious regular at Toronto’s legendary Bohemian Café, where she wowed Margaret Atwood and other early CanLit luminaries with her powerful readings – and where she also met Milton Acorn.

The Mountain Clinic is tagged as a novel, though both at first glance and after close reading Harold Hoefle’s book reads more like a wanting collection of linked stories. Going Dutch is usually an amicable decision, but inevitably there will arise some disagreement over who foots how much of the bill. When a book is assured and self-contained such an argument becomes flimsy. As Mary Swan put it to me, sheepishly and exhaustedly, when I pressed her if The Boys in the Trees was either a novel or a book of short stories (a question I suspect she was forced to field often during all that Giller fuss): “Can’t it just be a book?”

The relationship between the Journey Prize Anthology and its parade of nominees is devoutly mutualist; the anthology offers young writers a safe and tasteful home and the writers, in turn, provide an exceptionally bright and cheerful welcome mat to lure the passing reader. And who wouldn’t love the invitation to the boisterous little party going on inside, audible for miles around? Two of the three jurors for the 2008 Journey Prize had stories featured in past editions, and this volume’s first ten pages, as well as its jacket, collect enthusiastic statements exclusively from past nominees. Elyse Friedman, quoted on the book’s back cover, calls the anthology that featured her in 2003 “one of the best showcases for short fiction in Canada.” Alissa York, who won the $10,000 prize in 1999, describes the Journey Prize Anthology as “a national tradition of literary discovery.” And Yann Martel, in the feistiest and most provocative statement of them all, declares that “for young writers, it’s the Journey Prize or nothing.”

In 2003 the Alcuin Society undertook a much needed overhaul of their annual book design awards catalogue, and from a rather poorly designed, saddle-stitched booklet, an aesthetically sophisticated, well-printed and nicely bound volume came into existence. For a novice designer like myself at the time, the catalogue provided an essential showcase for the sort of thing that most folks, even book folks, are hardly aware of: book design in Canada. And for those as eager as I was to see good contemporary work in book design – if for no other reason than to prove that such work existed – the Alcuin catalogue was a yearly gift. In a format suitable to its subject, and in some cases with commentary by the awards’ judges, the craft and talent of this country’s finest book makers was made available to examine. The problem was you had to know about the awards, not to mention the Alcuin Society itself.

When The Book of Negroes won the 2009 edition of Canada Reads, CBC Radio’s annual Survivor-like literary elimination contest, broadcaster Avi Lewis, who was championing the book, referred to author Lawrence Hill’s “titanic task” in taking on the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century and refracting it through the life of one woman, Aminata Diallo, an African girl who is kidnapped as a child and shipped to the Thirteen Colonies where she is sold into slavery. It is likely that Lewis didn’t intend the obvious pop cultural association that accrues to his particular choice of words in this instance, but in fact Hill’s book shares much in common with James Cameron’s Academy Award-winning film about the great twentieth-century nautical disaster.