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The third in a series that launched to excitement and acclaim in 2009, The Best Canadian Essays 2011 covers an impressive variety of topics. New series editor, Christopher Doda, and guest editor, Ibi Kaslik, infuse the series with a breath of fresh air—selecting insightful and provocative essays from Canadian magazines that range from personal insights on post-partum depression, a pro-smoking diatribe, and an appreciation of the great opera singer Maria Callas to pieces on “wage slavery”, the plight of zoo elephants, Canada’s ongoing war in Afghanistan and much more. The Best Canadian Essays 2011 exemplifies the outstanding quality and stunning diversity of Canadian nonfiction writing today.

About the Guest Editor

Ibi Kaslik is an internationally published novelist, freelance writer, and teachers. Her most recent novel, The Angel Riots, is a rock’n'roll comic-tragedy and was nominated for Ontario’s Trillium award in 2009. Her first novel, Skinny, was a New York Times Bestseller and has been published in numerous countries. A native of Toronto, Ibi teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies and works as an art educator for youth.

About the Series Editor

Christopher Doda is an award-winning critic, editor, and poet. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Among Ruins (2001) and Aesthetics Lesson (2007). His poems and reviews have appeared in journals and magazines across Canada and he was an editor at Exile: The Literary Quarterly for five years. He is currently the review editor for the online journal Studio.

How to Get a Girl Pregnant is a frank and funny memoir about a dyke trying to get pregnant.

Karleen Pendleton Jiménez has known that she was gay since she was three years old and wanted to have a baby for almost as long. But how is a butch Chicana lesbian supposed to get sperm? Picking up men at nightclubs and restaurants? Asking queer male friends for a donation? Using sperm banks dominated by blue-eyed and blond-haired donors?

This candid and humorous memoir follows Karleen’s challenges, adventures, successes, failures, humiliations, and triumphs while attempting to fulfill her dream of giving birth to a child. It is a confession of desire, humility, and the search for perfection.

About the Author

Karleen Pendleton Jiménez is the screenwriter of the award-winner film Tomboy, and the author for the children’s book Are You a Boy or a Girl?, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She is a professor of education at Trent University. Raised in LA, having lived in Berkeley and San Diego, she now makes her home in Toronto.

A selection of essays that demonstrates the outstanding quality and stunning diversity of Canadian nonfiction writing today.

The second in a series that launched to excitement and acclaim in 2009, The Best Canadian Essays 2010 covers an impressive variety of topics. Editors Kamal Al-Solaylee and Alex Boyd have selected insightful and well-written essays from Canadian print and online magazines published in 2009. Last year’s edition tackled an array of issues, including life with a child with Asperger’s, the last days of a Montreal convent, the devastation of the Alberta tar sands, and the state of Canadian theatre. This year’s anthology is no different in its reflection of the depth and breadth of contemporary Canadian nonfiction writing.

Click here to read an excerpt from The Best Canadian Essays 2010.

Praise for The Best Canadian Essays 2009:

“The individual contributions in Best Canadian Essays 2009 transcend simple reportage and reach the level of art. Each one has something distinctive and informative to say. Take heed.”
—Jennifer Curtis, Quill & Quire

“I should say, I am quite excited by, and envious of, Tightrope’s vision in putting together this and other ‘Best Of’ anthologies. I’d thought of doing something similar, and never got around to it, daunted by the task. I think they should be congratulated, as these volumes fill much needed voids, and have been handled in a very professional and engaging fashion. I’ll be picking up a copy and urge you handful of Thirsty readers to do the same. These are publications we should support in any way possible.”
—Dan Wells, Biblioasis

About the Guest Editor

Kamal Al-Solaylee is an assistant professor at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism. He’s a former theatre critic for the Globe and Mail and has written for the National Post, Elle Canada, Canadian Notes & Queries, and Report on Business. He holds a PhD in Victorian literature from the University of Nottingham in England and is currently writing his first book, Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (HarperCollins Canada), due in 2012.

About the Series Editor

Alex Boyd lives in Toronto. He writes poems, fiction, reviews, and essays, and has had work published in magazines and newspapers such as Taddle Creek, Books in Canada, Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, The Antigonish Review and on websites such as The Danforth Review, and Nthposition. He booked and hosted the I.V. Lounge Reading Series in Toronto for five years, and edits the online journal Northern Poetry Review. His personal site is alexboyd.com, and his first book of poems, Making Bones Walk, won the Gerald Lampert Award in 2008.

Co-editors Megan Griffith-Greene and Stacey May Fowles have compiled an anthology of fearless and funny non-fiction about strong, smart and shameless young women.

With wit and honesty, the writers share stories of their teen experiences (both positive and negative) on everything from pop culture to high school principals.

The book is founded on Shameless magazine’s tradition of smart, sassy, honest and inclusive writing that reaches out to young female readers who are often ignored by mainstream: freethinkers, queer youth, young women of colour, punk rockers, feminists, intellectuals, artists and activists.

Click to read an excerpt from She’s Shameless.

Featuring work from Nicole Cohen, Melinda Mattos, Stacey May Fowles, Megan Griffith-Greene, Amy Saxon Bosworth, Shannon Webb-Campbell, Nicole Pasulka, Adrienne Mercer, Jowita Bydlowska, Teri Vlassopoulos, Shannon Gerard, K Bannerman, Jessica McGann, Shaunga Tagore, Karma Waltonen, Denise Reich, Dianah Smith, Catherine Graham, Pam Park, Maggie Dort, Julia Serano, BJ MacBain, Jessica Lockhart, Cora Goss-Grubbs, Sarah Pinder, Tara-Michelle Ziniuk, Emily Pohl-Weary, Zoe Whittall, Suzy Malik, and Lynn Bartels.

Editors’ Bios:
Stacey May Fowles is a writer and McGill Graduate in English Literature and Women’s Studies who has worked in the literary and gallery communities of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Her first novel Be Good (Tightrope Books) came out in 2007, her second book Fear of Fighting (Invisible Publishing) was launched in 2008. Her written work has been published in various digital and literary publications, including Fireweed, The Absinthe Literary Review, Kiss Machine, sub-TERRAIN, Lickety Split and Hive Magazine. Her non-fiction piece “Friction Burn” appeared in the widely acclaimed anthology Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (ed. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, Seal Press). Her work is also in the anthology Transits: Stories from In-Between (Invisible Publishing) and Cahoots Magazine. She is the publisher of Shameless magazine.

Megan Griffith-Greene’s experience in activism, arts and journalism started when she was a very shameless teen growing up in Toronto. Now, she is the editor of Shameless magazine, a feminist magazine for teens and young women, and a contributing editor of Chatelaine. She is also a founding editor and designer of The New Pollution new music review, a web-based magazine and pod-cast on indie music. Her writing has appeared in THIS magazine, The Walrus and Chatelaine.

In this remarkable portrait-survey of thirty-six of Toronto’s most distinctive and influential art dealers, artist Viktor Mitic has captured and illuminated the unique individual personalities of his subjects.

Depicting by turns their passion, insouciance, vivacity, shrewdness, eccentricity, geniality, and more, these portraits successfully reflect the rainbow of human emotion and expression.

As Gary Michael Dault says in his insightful introductory essay, “there isn’t a portrait here that doesn’t provide not only a fine likeness of its subject, but also a telling, charming, incisive route into the sitter’s essential nature.”

Viktor Mitic was born in Belgrade, Serbia. A University of Toronto graduate artist, classically trained in art schools in Europe, Mitic has produced a major body of work that spans a career of over two decades. For a number of years, he was painting non-representational paintings using natural elements such as rain and hail to render surfaces of the paintings in oils on canvas. Mitic has successfully integrated various materials into his recent body of work: charcoal, graphite, oil, acrylic, watercolour, pen and ink, and japanese traditional natural pigment. He has recently developed a distinctive, some would say provocative, method; he paints portraits of international iconic images and later shoots the outline of the figures using various weapons and live ammunition. He has had many successful solo and group shows of his paintings in Europe, the United States, Canada, and, most recently, Japan. Viktor Mitic lives in Toronto.

Gary Michael Dault is a writer, painter, and art critic in Toronto. He is the author—or co-author—of a number of books, including Cells of Ourselves with artist Tony Urquhart (Porcupine’s Quill, 1989), Esko Mannikko: Mexas (Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Sweden, 1998), Photographs by Tom Sandberg (Astrup-Fearnley Museum, Oslo, 2000), The Prix de Rome in Architecture: A Retrospective (Coach House Books, 2006), and Captive: The Zoo Photographs of Volker Seding (Les 400 Coups, Montreal, 2007). He has published a number of books of poetry, including The Milk of Birds (Mansfield Press, 2006) and Southwester (Lyricalmyrical Press, 2007). His Handyman: New Poems is forthcoming from the Black Moss Press. A limited edition of his Hebdomeros Suite—with watercolours by David Bolduc—is forthcoming from Coach House Books. Dault has written widely about contemporary art in Canada in journals such as Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Ciel Variable, Prefix Photo, Parkett, and ARTNews. He contributes the weekly art-review column, “Gallery Going,” to the Globe and Mail, and has written innumerable catalogue essays for galleries and museums. As a practicing artist, Dault has exhibited frequently, most recently at Toronto’s Peak Gallery, Gallery Page & Strange in Halifax, and the Michael Gibson Gallery in London, Ontario. Upcoming in 2010, he has exhibitions at Index G in Toronto and Modern Fuel in Kingston, Ontario. Among his writings for television is the six-hour mini-series, Inside the Vatican with Sir Peter Ustinov (1993). His writings for the stage include Alice in the Orchestra (with composer Gene Di Novi, 2005), The Goal (with composer Eric Robertson, 2003), and, also with Eric Robertson, Hauntings for Orchestra (2007).

Praise for the paintings of Viktor Mitic:

“Provocative art with religious connotations.”
—Peter Goddard, Toronto Star

“Serious painting, but it’s fun . . . there is levity to it.”
—Terry Graff, Telegraph Journal

[He's] taken . . . an iconic religious image and used a gun on it . . . What next?
—Mark Coles, BBC

For nearly forty years George Fetherling has been the professional outsider who is nevertheless at the centre of things, a cyclone of activity in the arts generally and a supportive presence for those who labour there alongside him.

His more then fifty books, including Selected Poems and Travels by Night, form a persuasive argument for a distinct Canadian brand of humanism, rooted in our own time and place but honouring the past while acknowledging the cosmopolitan character of Canadian cities.

In George Fetherling and His Work, Linda Rogers brings together a range of critics, academics and fellow poets from across the country to discuss various aspects of his life and ideas. Readers who know Fetherling’s writing in a variety of genres will gain fresh insight from this retrospective collection. Those coming to Fetherling for the first time will find the book a useful introduction.

Featuring work from Linda Rogers, Eric Marks, George Fetherling, John Burns, WH New, George Elliott Clarke, John Clement Ball, Brian Busby, Jennifer Toews, and Rhonda Batchelor.

Click to read an excerpt from George Fetherling and His Work.

George Fetherling was born in 1949. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Toronto Star has called George Fetherling the poet, novelist and cultural commentator, a “legendary” figure in Canadian writing.

Compiled from dozens of Canadian magazines by two award winning authors, this collection of essays covers a diverse range of topics by Canadian writers.

By turns these essays move and excite the reader and help shape Canadian cultural consciousness.

Featuring work from Alex Boyd, Carmine Starnino, Kalam Al-solaylee, Katherine Ashenburg, Kris Demeanor, Jessa Gamble, Nicholas Hune-Brown, Chris Kontges, Anita Lahey, Alison Lee, Nick Mount, Denis Seguin, Chris Turner, Lori Theresa Waller, Nathan Whitlock, and Chris Wood.

Click to read an excerpt from The Best Canadian Essays 2009.

Carmine Starnino has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which is This Way Out (Gaspereau Press) nominated for the 2009 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. His poems have won the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize, the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award. He the author of A Lover’s Quarrel, a collection of essays on Canadian poetry, and the editor of The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry. A new collection of his poetry criticism is forthcoming from Biblioasis in 2011. He lives in Montreal, where he edits Maisonneuve magazine.

Alex Boydis the author of poems, fiction, reviews and essays and has work published in magazines and newspapers such as Taddle Creek, dig, Books in Canada, The Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire and on various sites such as the late Danforth Review. He was the host of the IV Lounge Reading Series from 2003 to 2008 when the series closed its doors. He’s co-editor of the online jouirnal Northern Poetry Review, and his first book of poems Making Bones Walk was published in 2007 by Luna press, winning the Gerald Lampert Award.