Contributors to Issue 72

James Arthur is a recent graduate of the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at the University of Washington. His poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in The Iowa Review, Many Mountains Moving, Descant, and Puerto Del Sol.

Dionne Brand is a poet, novelist, and essayist living in Toronto. Her latest non-fiction, A Map to the Door of No Return, is a meditation on Blackness in the diaspora.

Semi Chellas has written a number of feature films and now runs a dramatic television series, The Eleventh Hour.

William Corbett is director of Student Writing Activities of the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. He is a poet who lives in Boston’s South End.

Lawrence G. Davidson has been a buyer at Cody’s Books of Berkeley, California, since 1977. He co-founded the Probabilities show on KPFA Radio of Berkeley. More recently, he co-authored the critically acclaimed book Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines with Frank M. Robinson.

Gerald Wallace Goode worked in journalism for forty-five years, on and off. He is eighty-seven years old and continues to write from his home (no longer a Plymouth station wagon) in Reseda, California.

Jim Harrison’s memoir, Off to the Side, has just been released in paperback (Grove Press).

David Heiden is an eye surgeon who lives and practises in San Francisco. He has served as a medical relief worker for Kampuchean refugees in Thailand, at the Boo’co refugee camp in Somalia, and at the Wad Kowli and Fau 3 refugee camps in eastern Sudan. Since becoming interested in the problem of blindness, he has worked at the National Leprosy hospital in Yemen, as well as in India, Tibet, and Nepal. His photographs have been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States.

Harry Hook is a screenwriter and film director. Born in 1959, he spent his childhood in Sudan and Kenya. He graduated from the British National Film School in 1983. He has directed feature films including The Kitchen Toto, Lord of the Flies, Last of His Tribe, and All for Love. He lives in London and dreams of Africa.

Pico Iyer is the author most recently of Abandon and, coming next spring, a series of unorthodox explorations, Sun After Dark.

Rae Johnson is a painter living and working in Toronto. She has had more than twenty solo exhibitions at home and abroad.

Seeking the solitude of deserts and abandoned architectures of ancient cultures, Elaine Ling is exploring the shifting equilibrium between Nature and the Man-made. She has exhibited extensively in North America and Europe.

Richard A. Lupoff recently published his fiftieth book, The Great American Paperback, a work of cultural history. Many of his stories have been collected in such volumes as Before 12:01 and After, Claremont Tales, and Claremont Tales II.

Guy Maddin was born above his Aunt Lil’s beauty salon in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1956. His feature films include the cult classic Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, and, most recently, The Saddest Music in the World. He lives in Winnipeg.

Ross Manson is an actor, director, writer, and the artistic director of Toronto’s Volcano theatre company.

Alice Munro’s most recent collection of short fiction is entitled Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

Sandy Nicholson was educated in Melbourne, Australia, and since 1995 his work has appeared in more than a dozen exhibitions. His photographs have been featured in numerous magazines, including Rolling Stone, Shift, and Vogue. He is represented by the Tatar Gallery in Toronto.

Robert Rauschenberg was born in Texas in 1925 and studied art in Paris and North Carolina. His interest in new ways of seeing has taken his career through painting, sculpture, film, and photography. He had a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1997, and he continues to be active.

Nathalie Robertson will be eight in December.

Carol Shields wrote many plays, collections of poetry, and novels, including Unless and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Stone Diaries. She died earlier this year.

Rick/Simon’s work is sight-specific.

Barbara Sjoholm is the editor of Steady as She Goes: Women’s Adventures at Sea (fall 2003) and The Pirate Queen: In Search of the Lost Stories of Maritime Women (spring 2004), about her own travels around the North Atlantic. She is now working on a travel book about Arctic Scandinavia.

Rosemary Sullivan is a poet and biographer. Her most recent books are Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsession and, with the help of her companion Juan Opitz, Cuba: Grace Under Pressure, with photographs by Malcolm David Batty. She lives in Toronto.

Sheila Watson was the author of four novels, including The Double Hook and The Winter Guest. She was married to the poet Wilfred Watson (the “W” of her journals), and the two of them taught English at the Univeristy of Alberta. She died in 1998.

Lawrence Weschler was a staff writer at The New Yorker for twenty years before his recent retirement to become the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at nyu, where he is attempting to start a magazine of his own, entitled Omnivore (its slogan: “Hopelessly utopian, Desperately needed”). His dozen books include A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers, Calamities of Exile, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Boggs: A Comedy of Values, and the forthcoming Vermeer in Bosnia.

Richard Wolinsky produced, co-hosted, and hosted the Probabilities radio show on kpfa-fm in Berkeley from 1977 to 1995, followed by Cover to Cover Thursdays from 1995 to the present. Archived audio interviews can be found on-line at www.bookwaves.com, and current programs can be accessed at www.kpfa.org during their regularly scheduled times.

Annette Schouten Woudstra, originally from Alberta, lives in the central African country of Gabon. Her poetry has appeared in various Canadian journals. She is working on completing a collection of essays.


If they had become singers, cowboys, or -ologists, the world would lack:

Ken Babstock: Days into Flatspin
Dennis Bock: The Ash Garden
Lynn Coady: Play the Monster Blind
Karen Connelly: One Room in a Castle
Michael Crummey: River Thieves
Erika de Vasconcelos: My Darling Dead Ones
Nick Earls: Perfect Skin
Forrest Gander: Science & Steepleflower
Bill Gaston: The Cameraman
Camilla Gibb: The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life
Alison Gordon: The Dead Pull Hitter
Jane Hirshfield: Of Gravity & Angels
Fanny Howe: One Crossed Out
Isabel Huggan: Belonging
John Irving: The Cider House Rules
Pico Iyer: Abandon: A Romance
Charles Johnson: Middle Passage
David Macfarlane: Summer Gone
A. F. Moritz: Mahoning
Mary Morris: Nothing to Declare
Jacques Plante: Six, count ’em, six Stanley Cups.
      And Step by Step Hockey Goaltending
Andrew Pyper: Lost Girls
Will Self: Great Apes
Susan Swan: The Biggest Modern Woman of the World
Madeleine Thien: Simple Recipes
Alfredo Véa: Gods Go Begging
Alan Warner: Morvern Callar
Darren Wershler-Henry: The Tapeworm Foundry
C. K. Williams: Poetry and Conciousness
C. D. Wright: Steal Away: Selected and New Poems