A hockey/poetry event

Kitty Lewis of Brick Books is a dynamo, pure and simple.

I met her several years ago, when Brick was in town for a literary press group meeting and hosted a reading that featured local Brick authors such as Meira Cook and Maurice Mierau and well as several related literary types.

As an emerging writer, I enjoyed the reading and the elbow-rubbing, but I also appreciated the opportunity to meet the woman who ran one of Canada's premiere poetry presses.

I was shocked when, a year or two ago, she wrote me a note that recalled our meeting and also mentioned that she enjoyed my blog. Since then, I've allowed her to trounce me (and I mean TROUNCE) a few times in Facebook Scrabble.

Par for the course, Kitty has 671 friends on Facebook...and I have about a hundred. I suspect it's because she likes people more than I do.

In any event, Kitty's current whiz-bang effort is a series of events, including something at the Hockey Hall of Fame, to launch an Brick title that focuses on a Ukrainian Winnipeg-born NHL goalie.

Since Terry Sawchuk a local boy, naturally one of those events is going to be in Winnipeg at McNally Robinson...so if you're in town, I'd suggest you stop by.

See you there!

Brick Books invites you to celebrate the launch of
Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems by Randall Maggs

Prairie Ink Restaurant, McNally Robinson Booksellers
Grant Park, Winnipeg
Thursday, February 21, 2008

8:00 p.m.

* * *

A hockey saga, wrapping the game’s story in the "intense, moody, contradictory" character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies.

"Through his marvelous, moving poetry, Randall Maggs gets closer than any biographer to the heart of the darkest, most troubled figure in the history of the national game.

This may be the truest hockey book ever written. It reaches a level untouched by conventional sports literature... His Sawchuk is real." - Stephen Brunt, Globe and Mail columnist and Canada’s premier sportswriter and commentator

Randall Maggs is the author of Timely Departures (poetry, 1994), and co-editor of two anthologies pairing Newfoundland and Canadian poems with those of Ireland.

He is artistic director of Newfoundland’s March Hare festival of music and literature, and teaches literature at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University, Corner Brook, Newfoundland.

This event is supported by the contribution of the Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies, University of Manitoba and the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre in Winnipeg (Oseredok).