Charlottetown, PEI based author Jeff Bursey has worked for Hansard in Atlantic Canada for seventeen years, first as a transcriber, and then as an editor. Bursey’s Verbatim: a Novel is a blackly humorous exposé of parliamentary practice in an unnamed Atlantic province. The dirty tricks, vicious insults, and inept parliamentary procedures of the politicians are recorded by a motley crew of Hansard employees. But when the Hansard bureaucrats begin to emulate their political masters, the parliamentary system’s supposed dignity is further stripped away.
Bursey is joined this evening by Michelle Butler Hallett, a current St. John’s resident, novelist, playwright and screenwriter. After living in Ottawa for some time, she returned to St. John’s in 1999 with her husband to raise a family. Butler Hallett has worked as a tutor, proof-reader, shop clerk, radio writer and comedic radio voice, litmag fiction reader and professional researcher. In her latest work, Deluded Your Sailors, the culture industry is a weapon, a victim, and an opportunity, depending on the perspective of two main figures: the unsteady but perceptive Nichole Wright, whose discovery of crucial documents threatens a government-funded tourism project, and the politely menacing, shape-shifting Reverend Elias Winslow. And in parallel storytelling: an early eighteenth-century girl, daughter of a nameless prostitute, winds up first as object of depraved pleasure, espionage agent and courier, and finally captain of a Salem trading vessel.
They are joined this evening by Winnipeg-based author, playwright and freelance writer Bob Armstrong. His first novel, Dadolescence, was published last September by Turnstone Press.
See:
Verbatim: a Novel is a blackly humorous exposé of parliamentary practice in an unnamed Atlantic province. The dirty tricks, vicious insults, and inept parliamentary procedures of the poli...
In Deluded Your Sailors, the culture industry is a weapon, a victim, and an opportunity, depending on the perspective of two main figures: the unsteady but perceptive Nichole Wright, whos...
Bill and Julie live in thrifty middle-class wedded bliss with their 12-year-old son Sean. Julie brings home the bacon while Bill keeps house and frets over his never-ending PhD thesis: an...
