Bad Little Habits

Wednesday Press - Call for Submissions

It's been a while. I lost my laptop and acquired a new job during the last several weeks, so my access to the internet hasn't been great. This is a good thing generally, but bad for this little blogging project.

Speaking of new projects, my roommate, her very talented friend and I have started up a little press. Here's our call out:

Wednesday Press is a collectively-run micropress dedicated to publishing little books, narrowsides, chapbooks, and other printed matter. Drawn to multi-sensory, high-risk, expired, unhinged, understated, or scavenged work, we collaborate with writers and artists at various stages to publish and distribute new or resuscitated text, image and intermedia works, including experimental fiction, poetry, essays, and artist books. We hope to contribute to an informal and unsettled Prairie infrastructure of illegitimate insight, criticism, and sincerity.

Call for Submissions:

Wednesday Press currently welcomes artists and the aesthetically-inclined to submit frontispieces of unwritten or unwriteable books. As illustrations conventionally facing or immediately preceding the title page of a book, frontispieces may or may not include text, dates, or robust nudes. The black and white renderings will be compiled and published as a small, 5" x 7" book of perpetual frontispieces – the first publication of Wednesday Press.

Deadline: May 22

Please allow two months for us to contact you regarding the status of your submission. Unfortunately we are not yet able to pay contributors, although those selected will receive two copies of the publication. Published works are not exclusive to Wednesday Press. Please send submissions and a short bio with "Frontispiece Submission" in the subject line to wednesdaypress@gmail.com or to the following address along with a self-addressed, correctly-stamped envelope:

Wednesday Press
4A – 1 Roslyn Road
Winnipeg, Manitoba
R3L 0G1 Canada
wednesdaypress@gmail.com

wednesday press on the web

At last, the literary art$ are given their due

The Toronto Star reported over the weekend that the office of Jim Flaherty, Canada's Conservative Finance Minister, paid marketing research consultant Hugh MacPhie a sum of $122,000 for "analysis, assessment and advice" during the preparation of the 2007 Federal budget. This revelation has caused an uproar in the House of Commons for a number of reasons, including the size of the contract ($122,000 for a two month period of work, or alternately, a generous $22 per word) and the fact that the job was not subject to a tendering process, which is required by Treasury Board regulations for any contract of $25 000 or more.

That Mr. MacPhie was previously a speech writer for Conservative Ontario Premier Mike Harris (Mr. Flaherty was Harris's  Finance Minister) and that he supported Flaherty's bid for the province's Conservative leadership have afforded the affair an ironic odour of dirty linen; the nepotism displayed in the Liberal sponsorship scandal and the Conservatives' professed commitment to 'accountability' were key to the success of Stephen Harper's 2006 federal election campaign.

But, in the words of S.E. Hinton, that was then, this is now.

Flaherty assured his colleagues in the House today that Mr. MacPhie's contract “provided good value for money". If this is any indication of the state of writing in Canada, these are good times indeed.

I'd like Mr. Flaherty's office to know that I'm available this spring and am willing to go as low as 20 bucks a word.