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Event – 2006

Volume 35

2006

Annual

Laura van den Berg

The new issue of Event, a Canadian magazine out of Douglas College, gets off to a promising start with the “Notes on Writing” section, a suite of brief essays that cover the perils of writing about one’s family, using the “cheese factor” as a means of evaluating poetry, the balance between “real life” and creative pursuits, pop culture, and the art of concentration.

The new issue of Event, a Canadian magazine out of Douglas College, gets off to a promising start with the “Notes on Writing” section, a suite of brief essays that cover the perils of writing about one’s family, using the “cheese factor” as a means of evaluating poetry, the balance between “real life” and creative pursuits, pop culture, and the art of concentration. The prose and poetry that follows is adept, although the arrangement—isolating the genres, as opposed to interspersing the poems, for example, throughout the issue—became a bit monotonous. Standouts in poetry include Sioux Browning’s “Fat Woman Ponders Science and Discovery” and Brenda Leifso’s “The Land Where Night Enters”: “this is the land where night enters / unturns for you / the sun the length of light you cannot follow / your breadcrumbs eyeless / in the dark of your hands / the coil of string / cannot be undone.” For the most part, the fiction is on the shorter end and steeped in realism, and I particularly enjoyed Jessica Grant’s clever “Desert Island. The quartet of reviews at the end of the issue makes for a nice closer. [http://event.douglas.bc.ca] –Laura van den Berg

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