My Pushcart nominated essay, "Six Pixels of Separation," now available at Amazon

What a fantastic essay! 

 I love it more with each reading!

~ Sylvia Legris, Editor, Grain Magazine

I'm pleased to announce that my Pushcart Prize nominated essay, "Six Pixels of Separation," has just been published at Amazon.com . Normally, I would have put it up on this blog...but I've now accepted (just like The New York Times) that writers must be compensated for their work, and so this 4,000 word piece is available online for the nominal sum of $2.99 (USD).


Six Pixels of Separation originally appeared in Grain Magazine during Sylvia Legris' tenure (Vol. 37.4, Summer 2010, p. 34-43, for those of you who want to read along at home).

Sylvia liked it so much, she also submitted it to Canada's National Magazine Awards, to be considered  in TWO categories: 'Personal Journalism' and 'One of a Kind.'

This is one of my very favourite pieces since I started writing full-time in 2005 and I'm very glad to be able to share it with you in this lovely edition, featuring a photograph of the cabin we five Fishtrap Fellows used when we were welcomed to the 2008 Summer Fishtrap Writing Conference.

Here we are at Fishtrap back in 2008 (funny that all five Fellows that year were women...we called ourselves the Fellas). These are some of the most impressive writers I have ever been privileged to meet, and I'm thrilled to be able to introduce them to you here, in case you haven't yet "met" them. From left: Jennifer D. Munro (originally from Hawaii, a woman who writes with affecting humour of her fertility travails--please see The Erotica Writer's Husband and Other Stories), me, Judith Groudine Finkel, novelist, and author of the moving short story "Two by Four", and two wonderful poets, Anna Ross (Hawk Weather), and Lorraine Healey whose The Habit of Buenos Aires won the Patricia Bibby First Book Award.

Here's the blurb from Six Pixels of Separation; I do hope you find the time to check it out!

"A couple of summers ago, I flew from my home in Montreal across the continent to Oregon for the first time, on points cadged from my husband. He travelled a lot for work. Because I quit science to pursue art several years back, I sponge off him shamelessly these days. And not just for plane tickets..."

One evening, after an argument with her husband about sex, Beverly Akerman wraps herself in a blanket and starts reading Raymond Carver. What follows is a heartfelt melding of reflections on love, sex, the Holocaust, evolution, literature, coincidence, windmills, and a trip to and from the Wallowa Lake, Oregon, celebration of writing and life known as Fishtrap. Read this astonishing essay by a major new writing talent.

Essay section headings: 

I: Irrigator evolution

II: Moraines

III: Raymond

IV: Darwin’s faith

V: Making a difference

VI: Valuables          

VII: Keeping track

VIII: The fellowship of the rings

IX: Renard

X: Rich

XI: The Dalles

XII: Change

XIII: Conflict

XIV: La langue française

XV: Arbeit macht Frei

XVI: RT

XVII: The hard part

XVIII: Windmillus sapiens sapiens

Includes 13 footnotes.

PAY THE WRITER!

The Meaning Of Children: March 24th FREE on Kindle WORLDWIDE!

Well, dear friends IRL and in cyberspace (does anybody use that word anymore? It looks so 2001 doesn't it?), 

I am thrilled to let you know that the SYSTEM WORKS!

And TODAY is the day  

I GIVE my book away. 

Available to all you lovely souls with a Kindle...

OR a Kindle app, apparently!!

(Always an opportunity to learn something new...)

Already downloaded in Canada, the USA, and the UK!! (and it's not even 10 AM!!)

 

Which means, Canada, The Meaning Of Children is available FREE to you, too! 

("Even to Prime Minister Stephen Harper??!" 

"Well, only if Laureen wants to read it!")

Me!

Q: If you're giving your book away, 

does that mean it's worthless? 

A: More like priceless, I'd say. 

But don't simply take MY WORD for it!!

READ the AMAZING things 

the critics have said about 

The Meaning Of Children:

This isn’t the invented childhood of imagination and wonderment…[here] children both corrupt and redeem: each other, family relationships and the female body.

~Katie Hewitt, The Globe & Mail

Akerman holds up our greatest fears, not to dwell on them, but to marvel at our commitment to life, especially to passing it on to others.

~Anne Chudobiak, The Montreal Gazette, Edmonton Journal, and Regina Leader Post 

Loved your book; read it in one sitting…each [story] is told either by a child, or it’s about a child. And it’s interesting because I think depending on the age of the person reading it, you relate to different ones. But especially to feminists, growing up with it, wrestling with our beliefs, and whether it worked out or not… a lot of women that you see in this book are trapped. We were trapped by what we were brought up to believe. And then we’re trapped by the marriages we find ourselves in, and the children we have… But on the other hand, each story ends with a certain resolve. There’s that sense of okay this is my situation But. And that’s what the meaning of children is. And yet, it’s about hope. It’s about the future…

~Mutsumi Takahashi, Anchor, CTV News Montreal; Interview

A collection of 14 short stories which covers the range of experience from the point of view of children, mums, and also aging parents as well. It’s all there in this lovely little book, short stories about life in a family that might just resemble yours. A wonderful gift for mother’s day, perhaps more long lived than the usual cut flowers.

~Anne Lagacé Dowson, CJAD Radio journalist; Interview 

Akerman engages with dichotomies. Childhood is that safe, magical, carefree time and place — but it’s also risky, threatening, ominous and dangerous — full of impenetrable mystery around things seen and experienced, but beyond understanding. And if it’s not too much of a simplification or stating the obvious, life and the world are not gentle on children simply for being children…If, as Dostoevsky once remarked, and as is quoted on the collection’s frontispiece, “The soul is healed by being with children,” it is the tragedy of adulthood that we become so isolated from childhood — and what children offer us. Artfully, evocatively, Beverly Akerman’s The Meaning of Children reminds us of that.

~Darrell Squires, The Western Star

 

Beverly’s background as a scientist, MSc and twenty years as a molecular researcher, inevitably spills into the stories…characters, the settings and her style. Intelligent, objective, open-minded but not clinical, her prose is refreshing and unprejudiced. Her characters are frank and genuine...With The Meaning of Children, we get a beautifully written exposé on the meaning of life.

~Francine Diot-Layton, The Rover

Your book is filled with insight and wisdom and gorgeous moving stories...You are dazzling. (I had read “Pie” long ago. It is just as moving the second time).

~Hal Ackerman (no relation), UCLA Screenwriting Area Co-Chair and author of Stein Stoned and Stein Stung

Counter-intuitive to the title, for me these stories resonate with the sad truth of being a grownup. Life is that damn hard and just-under-the-surface tension saturates our existence. But the kids, they know what's going on. They may not understand all the details but they know the score. Akerman nails that sorrow, highlights it with unexpected humour, credits our resilience and almost never skips a beat. 

~Chris Benjamin, Author of Drive-by Saviours, on Goodreads 

And there are many, MANY more! 

I'd love it if YOU, TOO, would comment on the book at Amazon.com!

REVIEW it and LIKE it HERE or on Facebook!!

And celebrate with a slice a mah "Pie" 


or


a laugh--at Brian Mulroney's expense--


with my Joyland.ca story, 


"The Hardboiled Stress of Being Santa" (NOT in TMOC!


comments on the story welcome here).

And celebrate with a slice of my award winning

Pushcart-nominated

"Pie"

or 

a laugh on Brian Mulroney with 

"The Hardboiled Stress of Being Santa" at Joyland.ca

Beverly Akerman's The Meaning of Children released by Exile Editions

My first book, The Meaning of Children, has just been released by Exile Editions! This award-winning collection is available through my publisher, Chapters.Indigo.ca or Amazon.ca and will be in stores soon!

A version of the manuscript won the 2010 David Adams Richards Prize from the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick. Judge JoAnne Soper-Cook said the work shows

a keen, incisive vision into the hidden world of children as well as intimate knowledge of the secret spaces that exist between the everyday events of life. There is knowledge here, knowledge of those important, life defining moments of puberty, the birth of a sibling, an encounter with a possibly dangerous stranger. Overall, a work with a brilliant sense of story.

Individual stories have also won or placed in contests, including the Sheldon Currie Prize and Best New Writing 2011 (Editor's Choice Award). Here’s a sampling of the feedback received from editors and judges on individual stories:

“Emotional and tightly written.” David Bright, Gemini Magazine;

“Solid and very funny. Great stuff!” Karl Jirgens, Rampike;

“Oh, it's lovely. I like it when my body responds to writing; right now there's an ache in my throat.” Susan Rendell, EarLit Shorts;

“The judges liked…the resistance to the happy ending, and the idea that there is often something or someone waiting for the small mistake.” The Writers’ Union of Canada, 2007 Short Prose Competition Jury

“I love the mystery and the fear in this story—the ending works so well.” Colleen Donfield, The Sun;

“...beautifully unbearable...” Nancy Zafris, Flannery O'Connor Awards.

These fourteen stories approach the world’s complexities through a child’s eyes (‘Beginning’), grapple with the sorrows and ecstasies of the child-bearing years (‘Middle’), and probe truths that confer a child-like clarity near the end of life’s journey (‘End’). A girl discovers a fear of heights as her parents’ marriage unravels; a thirty-something venture fund manager frets over his daughter’s paternity; an orphan whose hands kill whatever they touch is accused of homophobia; a mother of two can only bear to consider abortion in the second person; the wife of a retirement-aged professor finds him unconscious near his computer…The Meaning of Children speaks to all of us who—though aware the world can be a very dark place—can’t help but long for redemption.

About me:

After over two decades in molecular genetics research, I realized I'd been learning more and more about less and less. Skittish at the prospect of knowing everything about nothing, I turned, for solace, to writing. Recent accolades include nominations for the Pushcart Prize (fiction and nonfiction) and National Magazine Awards. Credits include The Antigonish Review, Best New Writing 2011, The Binnacle, BluePrintReview, carte blanche, Cellstories.net, Cliterature, The Dalhousie Review, Descant, EarLit Shorts, Exile Quarterly, Fictionaut, Fog City Review, Grain, Joyland.ca, The Nashwaak Review, The New Quarterly, On the Premises, Rampike, Red Wheelbarrow, Rio Grande Review, r.kv.r.y quarterly, The Vocabula Review, Windsor Review, myriad other lay publications and learned journals. It pleases me strangely to believe I'm the only Canadian fiction writer ever to have sequenced her own DNA.

Nominated for a Pushcart prize and Best of the Net award

After over two decades in molecular genetics research (mostly in McGill University-associated labs), Beverly Akerman realized she'd been learning more and more about less and less. Skittish at the prospect of knowing everything about nothing, she turned, for solace, to writing. She's been winning awards for her work ever since.

Sixteen of her short stories have appeared (or soon will) in publications hailing from Canada, the USA, and Germany: The Antigonish Review, The Binnacle, BluePrintReview, carte blanche, Cliterature, The Dalhousie Review, Gemini Magazine, Descant, Ear Lit Shorts, Fog City Review, The Nashwaak Review, The New Quarterly, Red Wheelbarrow, Rio Grande Review, r.kv.r.y. quarterly, and Windsor Review. Her story "Pie" was recently nominated for a Pushcart and a Best of the Net nomination (Sundress Publications) (read "Pie").

She attended the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop, studying with novelists Brad Kessler and Nancy Zafris, and has also been a Fishtrap Fellow, attending the Oregon workshop with Pulitzer Prize Nominee and Kiriyama Prize winner Luis Urrea. In 2009, Beverly participated in The Banff Centre for the Arts's Writing Studio residency program as well as completing a Quebec Writers' Federation mentorship with Robyn Sarah.

Her other achievements include: first prize in the Fog City Writers Short Story Contest and in Gemini Magazine's Flash Fiction Contest; second place for the Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize; honourable mentions for The Potomac Review Fiction Prize, The Binnacle's Sixth Annual International Ultra-Short Competition, and the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick’s David Adams Richards Prize; finalist, Freefall Magazine’s Prose Contest, The Writers' Union of Canada’s Short Prose Competition (twice), and for the Glass Woman Prize.

Beverly's writing has also appeared in venues such as Maclean's Magazine, The Toronto Star, The National Post, The Montreal Gazette, A&U America's AIDS Magazine and on CBC Radio One, as well as in a number of other lay publications and learned journals. She is working on her first novel. Her most recent article is "'Have you ever seen a bus full of the English blow up?'".

Click the title to hear find her reading an excerpt from "Tumbalalaika."

It pleases her strangely to believe she's the only Canadian writer ever to have sequenced her own DNA.