From Anna Hirsch at the Baton Rouge Lagniappe:

The stage is bohemian basic—two standing house lights, a mic stand, some patterned cloth, and a lava lamp.  Behind the stage area tacked up to one of the wooden cabinets, a sign reads "This is a WordPlay safe space."  The scene is far from the Puritan New England landscape that Nathaniel Hawthorne evoked in his 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter.  Yet for the teens, standing up in front of a crowd of their peers—I imagine—breathing softly into the microphone, trying to gather their nerves and vocal chords into some kind of unified performance, Hester Prynne's pillory experience of public examination isn't actually that far off.

Judy Stoffman, staff writer for the Toronto Star reports that Alice Munro is retiring.

The only major living writer in English to have staked her career entirely on the short story, Alice Munro has this year done a remarkable thing: still in full command of her powers, she announced that she has finished writing because at 75, she has used up all her material and has nothing left to say.

Through 120 or so stories, she has shared with readers her sense of the "shameless, marvellous, shattering absurdity" of life, as she put it in "An Ounce of Cure." There are four more stories completed and yet unpublished, she told the Star in October.

So ends her tales, usually seen in the New Yorker, of unfaithful wives, disobedient girls, men who betray trusting lovers, parents and spinster aunts with dark secrets, guilt-tormented daughters unable to love an aged mother.

Her friend Margaret Atwood and editor Douglas Gibson don't believe she means it. And at a recent event held at the World's Biggest Book Store, where Munro read to the Toronto gathering long-distance and signed books using Atwood's LongPen, readers pleaded with her to continue writing, but to no avail. She said she is done.

The CBC reports that the city of Montreal is about to adorn its streets with some literary graffiti. Starting in September, the words of 10 Montreal writers will be painted on buildings, billboards and brick walls around town.

Lines from famous Montrealers such as Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler, Michel Tremblay and Monique Proulx will go up in places where the public can read them. The project, from Montreal's Blue Metropolis Foundation, is being called City of Words . . . "This mural project is an opportunity to create new visual landmarks in Montreal, to emphasize the city's status as a literary and cultural metropolis and to appeal to the community as a whole through literature," said Lucas Lhotsky, director of development and fundraising for Blue Metropolis, in an interview with CBC Radio.

Read the rest of the article at CBC Arts.

TORONTO – June 1, 2006 – Kamau Brathwaite and Sylvia Legris are the International and Canadian winners of the 6th annual Griffin Poetry Prize. The C$100,000 Griffin Poetry Prize, the richest prize in the world for a single volume of poetry, is divided between the two winners. The prize is for first edition books of poetry, including translations, published in English in 2005, and submitted from anywhere in the world.

The awards event was hosted by Scott Griffin, founder of the prize. Simon Armitage, renowned poet, author and playwright assumed the role of Master of Ceremonies. Judges Lisa Robertson and Eliot Weinberger announced the International and Canadian winners for 2006.

More than 400 guests celebrated the awards, including former Governor-General, the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, acclaimed Canadian actors Albert Schultz and Sarah Polley, Senator Jerry Grafstein and his wife Carol, among others. In addition, poets, publishers and other literary luminaries attended the celebration.

The evening's theme was Shangri-La and featured a silk route marketplace replete with banners of fuschia, purple and gold. Hundreds of pigmy orchids and butterflies in a dizzying array of colours adorned the room. The event, which took place at The Stone Distillery in Toronto, offered up a menu of decidedly Asian fusion cuisine. Appetizers included mango and Thai basil sushi rolls, deep-fried plantain, sweet corn tamales, crab cakes on a bed of remoulade, and a sweet potato and jicama salad. The main course featured seared strip loin of beef with a mini risotto wild rice pancake and for dessert, a chocolate fountain with assorted sweets.