Montréalités Words

Congratulations to our short story winner, with the take home prize of $100, J.D. Fleming!

                                                                                                                                                                                 Photos: Featherstone Family Archive.

                                                                                                                                                                                                Louisville, Kentucky ,c. 1930.
                                            Flash Blindness

Two men stare at a dead doe. The younger man smokes a cigarette, a .300 savage pressed against his left shoulder. The other man, slightly older, pulls his neck into a fur- lined coat. For a while they say nothing, then the older man clears phlegm from his throat and turns his gaze to the white sky.

Good, he says, eyes sheltered in a squint. Hair from his lower lip flosses between his teeth.

The younger man kneels beside the kill, and removes two knives from a backpack. The first knife is sheathed in its handle, a collar lock; the second has a gut hook on the end of a stained blade. The gut hook is laid on top of the snow next to the backpack. The collar lock is drawn from the handle and locked into place. The doe's head is held back while the blade of the collar lock slides then sinks into the throat. It takes pressure to puncture hide, fat, and arteries of the neck, but the sharp blade makes it fluid; blood drains from the wound. The younger man makes another cut into the lower abdomen. After setting the collar lock back into its handle and placing it into the backpack, the younger man places the tip of the gut hook just inside of the cut inside the abdomen. In a smooth motion the blade moves towards the neck opening the chest, clicking on the collarbone. He sits on the ground, knife in both hands, and pulls hard toward himself breaking the collarbone. Most of the insides remain in the ribcage. The younger man carves out the gut, warming his hands inside the ribcage, and circles around the anus, so that whatever remains inside the snow colored tubing doesn't damage the meat. The younger man gathers everything the stomach has to offer on top of the snow. The heart and liver are kept in the upper chest cavity. Steam rises from the entrails. The younger man cuts between the Achilles tendon and the anklebone on both hind legs of the doe, creating secure handgrips.

by Samuel Rutledge

I'll come back in May and

I'll call you and we'll follow

The trail down to

The beach where

The waves lap at tan sands.

We'll enjoy the pollen, and

The falling seagulls gawking at

Hotdogs.

We'll pant in the heat and

Bathe in the salt and

When the crescent moon rises in

The late afternoon

We'll sip white wine in                                                                                            Image:Flickr 

The cave I found just

A short walk from the logs.

And of course I'll carry you up the stairs when

The sun sets.

By William R. Landry for all women on International Women's Day, March 8, 2012

One way to gauge a nation's progression toward gender equality is to analyze the historical fiction it has produced. According to Finke (1996), fiction is generally less politically coercive than government sanctioned media because authors generally focus on text as an art form rather than maintaining hegemonic agendas. There are, however, exceptions. While analyzing a series WWI and WWII posters, I discovered a female author named J. G. Sime, who, during WWI, was commissioned to use her vaguely feminist fiction to help coerce women who sought freedom from domestic servitude into serving the war effort instead. Her story was reprinted widely during the Second World War due to the effective nature of its propaganda.

Cover of The Girl on the Fridge: Stories

Listen to a reading of his story "Hat Trick" from his collection, The Girl on the Fridge.

Attention Montrealites readers and contributors! We are currently inviting members of the Montrealites community - meaning you guys - to submit entries for the short story/ personal essay competition. If you're interested, here are the guidelines:

• Word Count: Maximum 1000 words.
• Last Day for Submission: March 30, 2012 at 12:00 am.
• Winning Entry Prize: 100 $ CAN. (cha-ching!).
• Submit your Entry via e-mail to our fiction editor L. Edith Featherstone and title it "short story competition".

We're anticipating your entries and encourage everyone to go for it! Competition information may also be found on our twitter and facebook pages.
Good luck you talented lot!

It's the middle of December and the weather this morning is terrible--cold and windy with freezing rain. Thankfully, it's warm inside the headquarters of the Blue Metropolis Foundation, which hosts Montreal's largest annual multi-lingual literary festival. In fact, the St Henri office feels like the perfect place to curl up and read a book. Housed in a loft-style space, the office would seem something more of a shabby-chic apartment with its high ceilings and large, factory-style windows if it weren't for the staff who are already buzzing around the rooms and hard at work, despite the early hour.

For those who haven't attended the festival, the event is five days of intellectual food for your soul. Novelists, journalists, historians, poets, and industry experts from all over the world gather to participate in panel discussions, one-on-one interviews, readings, and lectures. Some past participants include Gore Vidal, Michel Tremblay, Paul Auster, Heather O'Neill, Norman Mailer, and Margaret Atwood, to name a few.

You don't have to be familiar with a particular author to have a great time, either; panel discussions are centered around an interesting theme, and the interviews are conducted by the industry's best, guaranteeing an engaging discussion. General topics change from year to year, but many events are focused on issues of interest to students, such as human rights and other political topics.

I stand to greet the foundation's new president and artistic director, William St-Hilaire, who ushers me into her office where the interview will take place.

" I don't consider myself a writer. I'm a passionate person who likes to DO things."

That's correct; William is a she. She gave herself the name William after being repeatedly looked over for jobs as a sailor in Quebec City. And she is just as creative and unorthodox as her name suggests.

Elegant, composed, tall, and slender, St-Hilaire is dressed in all-black and adorned with a heavy necklace and fashionable glasses, much like what you might expect an art gallery director to look like.

Image via Wikipedia

I am one of those rare individuals who doesn't own a cell phone, iPad, or gaming system . I'm not against gadgets; I just don't buy these things until I either have a need for them, or their earlier version that I already own wears out or breaks. If it weren't for my mother's addiction to new technologies, I wouldn't have an iPod and would probably still be using my discman.

And my thriftiness isn't just confined to gadgets, but extends to everything I own. Despite my pragmatic approach, friends wrongly assume I have an aversion to anything created past 2000. This is why friends are always surprised to hear that I have read the majority of my books online for years--long before the eReader became available.