On Friday January 12th at 7:30 p.m. the next event in the LUMINARIES Reading Series takes place in the Brenda Wallace Reading Room at Laurentian University's J. N. Desmarais Library. For contact details and directions, please check out our events section.

The fifth visitor in the 2006-2007 Series is Stephen Henighan, whose Governor General's Literary Award shortlisted essay collection When Words Deny the World (Porcupine's Quill, 2002) rolled through the Canadian literary world like a tsunami. Holding no prisoners, Henighan challenged the Canadian production of what he calls "free trade fiction." According to James Grainger in Quill and Quire, Henighan's "analyses of such classics of 'free trade fiction' as The English Patient, Fugitive Pieces, and The Stone Diaries are some of the most blistering and erudite pieces of Canadian literary criticism ever published."

Stephen Henighan is also a significant fiction and prose writer in his own right. Recent books include the short story collection North of Tourism (Cormorant, 1999), the travel memoir Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family (Beach Holme, 2002), which was published in a Romanian translation, and the novel The Streets of Winter (Thistledown, 2004). Henighan's short stories, published in nearly 40 magazines and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Europe, have been awarded prizes such as the Potter Short Story Prize in the U.S. and the McNally Robinson Prize in Canada.

The doors to the Brenda Wallace Reading Room in Laurentian University's Desmarais Library will open at 7:30 p.m. The reading will begin at 8:00 p.m., with discussion to follow. Free admission and refreshments. Enter from outside entrance "E". Parking in Lot 4.

The LUminaries Reading Series is sponsored by the Laurentian University English Department, the English Arts Club, the Vice President Academic Anglophone affairs, the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

For more information please call Kelly Smith in the Laurentian English Department, 675-1151 ext. 4340. For contact details and directions, please check out our events section.

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Francois Dupuis said:

I love Stephen Henighan just because he is not afraid to speak is mind. In the Spring 2006 issue of Geist, he tells the unhappy ending to Margaret Atwood's stab at being a technological innovator whereby she invented a remote-controlled pen which allows her to sign books for her fans from thousands of miles away. Henighan nails the issue when he writes: LongPen, by Atwood?s own admission, is the brainchild of a jet-lagged superstar who wants to spend more time at home. By enshrining the author as a remote talking head, it harks back to an older vision of the writer as inaccessible authority figure. The device?s conception is counterintuitive to the logic of virtual culture going for ironic detachment rather than emotional involvement, which characterizes Atwood?s fiction; it evokes the diffidence of traditional southern Ontario WASP culture. LongPen seems likely to go the way of quadraphonic sound because our ever less WASPish society craves emotion and disdains artificial barriers, and even art itself, preferring the ?real story??even if, as on reality television, the result is often ersatz emotion fuelling mediocre melodramas. Contrary to its claim to be a ?democratizing force,? LongPen will be perceived as elitist and anti-democratic. The reader who seeks connection will respond to the promise of an automated signature by imitating the author and staying home. Boom goes the dynamite!

January 02, 2007

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