Showing posts with label Canadian Notes and Queries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Canadian Notes and Queries. Show all posts

08 January 2024

Canadian Notes & Queries at 114, Véhicule Press at 50, and a Few Favourite Forthcoming Things



A few days into the year and already a new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries. This one – number 114! – features writing by:
Noelle Allen
Tamara Faith Berger
Brian Bethune
Mark Bourrie
Randy Boyagoda
Kate Cayley
Steacy Easton
Alex Good
Brett Josef Grubisic
Canista Lubrin
Ian McGillis
Emily Mernin
John Metcalf
Vanessa Stauffer

As always, the cover is by Seth.

I contribute 'Véhicule Press at Fifty,' an interview with publishers Simon Dardick and Nancy Marrelli. Together we discuss the history and future of the press through ten key titles, beginning with the very first: Bob McGee's Three Sonnets & Fast Drawings

Subscribers also receive the latest issue – number 5! –of The Bibliophile. Just look at the goodness it offers:


So, why not subscribe!

Here's the link.

04 July 2023

The CNQ Dusty Bookcase (2010 - 2023)


The most recent issue of Canadian Notes & Queries landed late last week. Since then, Canadians have been sending notes and queries regarding the future of the Dusty Bookcase.

It will continue, but not on paper.

It was in 2010, when I was focussed on completing my biography of John Glassco, that editor Alex Good invited me to contribute the Dusty Bookcase as a regular column. Naturally, I chose Glassco's grand hoax The Temple of Pederasty as my subject. My review, of sorts, appeared in CNQ 80.

The next thirteen years saw twenty-five more: 

The Miracle Man - Frank L. Packard (CNQ 81)
The Errand Runner - Leah Rosenberg (CNQ 82)
Love is a Long Shot - Alice K. Doherty [Ted Allan] (CNQ 83)
The Abolishing of Death - Basil King (CNQ 84)
John Glassco: A Personal and Working Library (CNQ 86)
Tan Ming - Lan Stormont [Morse Robb] (CNQ 87)
The Bumper Book and Carry on Bumping - John Metcalf (CNQ 88)
St. Cuthbert's of the West - Robert E. Knowles (CNQ 90)
The Land of Afternoon - Gilbert Knox [Madge Macbeth] (CNQ 92)
The Wine of Life - Arthur Stringer (CNQ 93)
There Are Victories - Charles Yale Harrison (CNQ 94)
Don't You Know Anybody Else? - Ted Allan (CNQ 97)
The Treehouse - Helen Duncan (CNQ 98)
Lust Planet - Olin Ross [W.E.D. Ross] (CNQ 101)
The Shapes That Creep - Marjorie Bonner (CNQ 102)
A Lover More Condoling - Adrian Clarkson (CNQ 103)
The Arch-Satirist - Frances de Wolfe Fenwick (CNQ 104)
Christie Redfern's Troubles - [Margaret Murray Robertson] (CNQ 105)
Hotter Than Hell - Mark Tushingham (CNQ 106)
The Master of the Microbe - Robert W. Service (CNQ 107)
The Terror of the Tar Sands - Edmund C. Cosgrove (CNQ 108)
An African Millionaire - Grant Allan (CNQ 109)
East of Temple Bar - Joan Suter [Joan Walker] (CNQ 111)
Behold the Hour - Jeann Beattie (CNQ 112)

Added to these were reviews written for the CNQ website. They're online still:

Not every Dusty Bookcase took the form of a review. There were columns devoted to correspondence between of Norman Levine and Jack McClelland (CNQ 85), Montreal's post-war pulp novels (CNQ 89), the career of Ronald J. Cooke (CNQ 91), Pierre Berton and Charles Templeton's Tour de Force board game (CNQ 95), an interview with Formac Fiction Treasures series editor Gwendolyn Davies (CNQ 96), Brian Moore's Intent to Kill on film (CNQ 99), my hunt for Kenneth Ovis (CNQ 100), and the career of Garnet Weston (CNQ 110).

A selection of books featured over the years.
Cliquez pour agrandir.

The early columns benefited from Alex's red pen, the latter were made whole under his successor Emily Donaldson. I had such fun working with Emily, which made last issue's column, a review of Jeann Beattie's entirely forgotten novel Behold the Hour, something of a challenge. We all knew CNQ 112 was to be her last as editor, despite our pleading.

Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered...

Well, not really. 

I will continue in the role of Contributing Editor, which means that I'll still be contributing, but not as a columnist. Emily joins me at the large oak editorial boardroom table as a fellow Contributing Editor. Alex is by her side. 

My thanks to Alex for inviting me into the room, to Emily for not showing me the door, and to publisher Dan Wells who has gone so far as to host me at his home. Drinks were served. CNQ continues because of their dedication to a book and literary culture that is more than ever preyed upon by foreign vultures. 

As everyone surely knows, vultures have bad breath.

The latest issue of CNQ can be purchased through this link.

27 January 2023

Television Man is Crazy


The one hundred and twelfth issue of Canadian Notes & Queries arrived in our rural mailbox yesterday afternoon. A beautiful thing, wrapped in a cover by Seth, I've been dipping in and out. I read Michael Holmes' remembrance of Steven Heighton first.


It was followed by Ken Norris's interview with Bruce Whiteman.

This evening, I'll be reading 'My Year of Mycorrhizal Thinking' by Ariel Gordon, whose daughter shares something with my own as a fan of Hannibal. Ariel, her daughter, and mine, will appreciate this photo taken in our kitchen not eight days ago.

This issue's Dusty Bookcase column focuses on Jeann Beattie's Behold the Hour (1959), which in my opinion ranks with Ralph Allen's The Chartered Libertine (1954) as one of the two best novels set early days of Canadian television.  

I'm not aware of a third.

Northrop Frye praised Allen's novel. Do I praise Beattie's?

Read and find out! Subscriptions can be purchased through this link.

Other contributors to this issue include:
Carolyn Bennett
James Cairns
Andreae Callana
Preeti Kaur Dhaliwai
Stephen Fowler
Susan Glickman
Alex Good
Brett Josef Griubisic
Graeme Hunter
Kate Kennedy
Rohan Maitzen
Darcy Mason
David Mason
Roderock Moody-Corbett
Shani Mootoo
Ian Clay Sewall
Rudrapiya Rathmore
Richard Sanger
Natalie Southworth
Kevin Sprout
Did I mention subscriptions can be purchased through this link?

Related post:

04 July 2022

A Forgotten Novelist's Hidden Debut



Joan Suter was thirty-seven when her first novel, East of Temple Bar, was published. She'd begun her working life as a fashion illustrator, then headed for Fleet Street, east of Temple Bar, where she found employment as an editor for Amalgamated Press and the George Newes Firm. Suter also wrote short stories under the name "Leonie Mason," which led to some confusion when the London Daily Herald (18 August 1938) reported on the marriage of "Miss Leonie Mason who writes fiction under the name of Joan Suter" to journalist Ogilvie "Punch" MacKenzie Kerr.

London Daily Herald, 18 August 1938
According to the Daily Herald, the wedding followed "a romance of 14 days, which began when they met in a darts match."

Sadly, by the time East of Temple Bar was published, Joan and Punch were no more. She had yet to divorce, but had already met second husband James Walker, a major in the 12th Canadian Tank Regiment. They married in Toronto on 20 September 1946. From that point onwards she wrote as "Joan Walker," and erased East of Temple Bar and her Leonie Mason fiction from her bibliography.

I was on a bit of a Walker tear earlier this year, reading and reviewing her novels Murder by Accident (1947) and Repent at Leisure (1957). In April, I spoke about the author with Dick Bourgeois-Doyle on his Canus Humorus podcast.


I review East of Temple Bar in the new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries. The exercise brought to mind my work on A Gentleman of Pleasure, a biography of self-described "great practitioner of deceit" John Glassco.  

Speaking of Glassco, Carmine Starnino's The Essential John Glassco (Porcupine's Quill) is one of the three reissues I chose for the What's Old feature; No Crystal Stair by Mairuth Sarsfield (Linda Leith Publishing) and The Tangled Miracle by Bertram Brooker (Invisible Publishing) are the two others.

All three belong on your bookshelves.


Invisible, let me know what you're up to!

As always, Seth provides the cover. The Landscape, his regular feature, concerns the long-dead Montreal Standard's magazine supplement.

Margaret Atwood looks at the the short stories of Clark Blaise.

Other contributors include:
Marc Allen
Barry Baldwin
Elaine Coburn
Robert Colman
Jeffery Donaldson
sophie anne edwards
Sadie Graham
Brett Josef Grunisic
Tom Halford
Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin
Kate Kennedy
Marius Kociejowski
Kim Johntone
Robin Mackay
David Mason
Dominik Parisien
and 
Alice Petersen
Jean Marc Ah-sen interviews Dimitri Nasrallah.

Megan Durnford interviews Céline Huyghbaert.

Sindu Sivayogan adapts Shyam Saladurai's Cinnamon Gardens.

As always, the last page belongs to Stephen Fowler, who serves up Melva E Adams' Marshmallow Magic. Self-published in 1978, it belongs in every Canadian kitchen.


Subscribers receive John Metcalf's The Worst Truth: Regarding A History of Canadian Fiction by David Staines.

Sixty-one pages in length, I read it in one sitting.


Subscriptions to Canadian Notes & Queries can be purchased through this link.

My review of Prof Staines' history was written for another magazine.

It's coming.


21 March 2022

Joan Suter, Angus Hall, and the Collector in Me



I've got several paying projects on the go, all with tight deadlines, meaning there won't be any reviews here for the next month or so. Something to do with feeding the family, you understand.

However, I did want to share a few things about one of those paying projects: a review of Joan Suter's novel East of Temple Bar for my column in Canadian Notes & Queries

Until this year, Joan Suter's name meant nothing to me; I encountered it while researching Joan Walker, whose 1957 novel Repent at Leisure I reviewed here in January. Not much has been written about Walker or her career; most of what has, jacket copy included, refers to Repent at Leisure as a debut novel.

Marriage of Harlequin
Joan Walker
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1962
I have Daryn Wright and Karyn Huenemann to thank for setting me straight. Their Joan Walker entry at Canada's Early Women Writers brings the revelation that Repent at Leisure wasn't the author's first novel, or even the second, but the third. Published in 1946 under her maiden name, East of Temple Bar was Walker's true debut. The same year saw her follow-up, Murder by Accident, which appeared under the pseudonym "Leonie Mason."


Copies of East of Temple Bar aren't plentiful, but they are inexpensive. I wanted the dust jacket, so and splurged all of £7.50 on mine. Money well spent, it brought this front flap:


East of Temple Bar was published in London by C & J Temple. A fragile pale green hardcover with thin pages, its worthy of study by those interested in supply constraints faced by printers in post-war England. My copy, purchased online from London's Small Library Company, once belonged to British novelist Angus Hall (1932-2009). As he would have been thirteen or fourteen when it was published, I'm guessing Hall bought it used when he was a young Fleet Street journalist.

East of Temple Bar revolves around Eve Smith and Hugh Fenwick, two friends who meet while working on Fleet Street. Like Hugh, Angus Hall became a film and theatre critic. Like Eve, he eventually left Fleet Street for a life as a novelist.


Hall's first novel, Love in Smoky Regions, was published in 1962 by Constable. It appears to have been very well-received; just look at the TLS quote on the cover of this paperback edition:


The High-Bouncing Lover (Hammond, 1966) was his second novel. Apparently, it's about a failed writer. I can't help but note that The High-Bouncing Lover was one of the working titles for The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's first commercial failure.

By the time the 'seventies hit, Hall had made a reputation for himself as a horror writer. His 1969 novel Devilday was adapted to the screen as Madhouse (1974), starring Vincent Price.


He also wrote the novelization of this 1971 Hammer Horror:


And then there's this, which may frighten some readers:


I count sixteen titles in total, though it's hard to say for certain. Sadly, like Joan Walker (née Suter), Angus Hall is more or less forgotten. What remains of his personal library now rests with the Small Library Company. How it ended up there is an interesting story, told through this Abebooks podcast. One of the Company'a goals is "to find good homes for the books."

Angus Hall's copy of East of Temple Bar has found a good home on my Upper Canadian bookshelves. My only disappointment is that he didn't write his name in it.

Related posts:

23 December 2021

Just in Time for Christmas!


The new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries arrives at a busy time of year, which suits me just fine. I usually race through each issue, reading it from cover to cover, but am now forced to slow the pace and savour.

And so, all I've read thus far is Seth's regular column 'The Landscape.' The beginning raised a smile of self-recognition:

There are still a few places in Ontario where one can find shelves (or piles) of old second hand books for sale that have not been curated. Randomly acquired, roughly heaped into sections, and priced not by author and title but by paperback or hardcover status alone. These places are dwindling fast but I still know a few prime spots. Don't expect me to name them or tell you where they're located though. s if. I don't want you going there. These are my secret places. My old books! Keep out.

Seth's focus this time is The Canada Permanent Story, 1855-1955. "These corporate books weren't really meant to be perused," he writes, yet Seth has done just that, sharing this endpaper illustration:


My own contribution concerns Garnett Weston, whose books and film work consumed much of my summer. They also consumed a fair amount of my income. I've yet to find a Weston in any of my secret places.

Garnett Weston
1890 - 1980
RIP

It's not entirely true that I've only read Seth's column. Among the other contributions is 'Telling the Story,' in which Susan Mayse remembers her father Arthur Mayse's writing career. I commissioned the  piece as the forward to the forthcoming Ricochet Books reissue of Arthur Mayse's 1949 novel Perilous Passage.


There's so much more to look forward to, including writing by:
Stephanie Bolster
Alex Boyd
Kornella Drianovaki
Megan Durnford
Stacey Easton
André Forget
Stephen Fowler
Alex Good
Ronald L Grimes
Brett Joseph Grubisic
Luke Hathaway
David Huebert
Mark Anthony Jarman
Kate Kennedy
Aris Keshav
M Travis Lane
Rohen Maitzen
Dancy Mason
David Mason
Jeff Miller
Nofel
J R Patterson
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Patricia Robertson
Naben Ruthnum
Cal Sepulia
Drew Tapley
Rob Taylor
Carl Watts
Bruce Whitman
Given that it's the season... Anyone looking for a last minute Christmas gift can't do much better than a subscription to Canadian Notes & Queries. I bought a couple. You can, too!

07 June 2021

Criminal Notes & Queries


The most recent number of Canadian Notes & Queries – The Crime Issue – arrived last week in our Upper Canada rural mailbox. I was honoured to serve as Guest Editor. It was a pleasure putting it together, though I must admit that the heavy lifting was done by regular editor Emily Donaldson.

As always, Seth's provides the front and back covers. Tell the truth, do you not see yourself in one of his mugshots?


In The Landscape, Seth shares an undated, uncredited insert from The Weekend Magazine – which, as he notes, was itself an insert.

"What’s Old," our regular salute to reissues, coupled with offerings from the country’s antiquarian booksellers features Austin Clarke's When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks (Anansi, 2021),  Carmine Starnino's Dirty Words: Selected Poems, 1997-2016 (Gaspereau, 2021), a new translation of Markoosie Patsauq's Hunter with Harpoon (MQUP, 2021). Windsor's Juniper Books offers The Executioners (Harlequin, 1951) and French for Murder (Fawcett, 1954), two old Brian Moore pulps that the late author's estate has kept out of print.

The Guest Editor’s Note, in which I recall childhood trauma brought on by a speeding ticket, is followed by the issue's Dusty Bookcase. This one is unusual in that the volume covered, Grant Allen's fin de siècle novel An African Millionaire, is not only in print, but is a certified Penguin Classic. We all remember studying it in high school, right?


Adam Sol and Manahil Bandukwala provide verse.

The issue's features begin with "Sin City," Will Straw's look at Police Journal, the post-war Montreal crime tabloid that anticipated Allô Police.


In "A Requiem for Skid Row," Amy Lavender Harris writes about a Toronto that has fallen to condos, but lives on in the works of Juan Butler, Austin Clarke, and Hugh Garner.

Novelist Trevor Ferguson (aka John Farrow) writes of his encounters with the criminal element in  "Fringe Elements."

Dedicated readers will remember my interest in the mysterious Kenneth Orvis (aka Kenneth Lemieux), author of Hickory House, The Damned and Destroyed,  Cry, Hallelujah!, and four other novels. You may even remember my 2016 plea for information about the man. Imagine my surprise in discovering that former 39 Steps frontman Chris Barry – whom I've seen onstage in Montreal and onscreen in Hannah and Her Sisters – is the mystery man's nephew.  Chris' "Uncle Ken, We Hardly Knew Ye: Kenneth Orvis’ Nephew Surveys the Writer’s Life, Hustles, and Mysterious Disappearance" helps fill in the gaps.


In "Vale of Fears," Monika Bartyzel looks at the influence of a 1935 murder on the fiction of Phyllis Brett Young, our most unjustly neglected novelist.

Jennifer Hambleton disturbs with "Shut Out: How University Libraries are Increasingly Limiting Public Access.

David Frank writes on the relationship between Jack London and all but forgotten Canadian socialist Wilfrid Gribble.

Chris Kelly looks at Blue City, the 1986 adaptation of the 1947 Ross Macdonald novel of the same name. You remember it, right? Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy starred.

No?

This GIF may refresh you memory.


I intrude again with an interview with Danny McAuley of Brome Lake Books in Knowlton, Quebec.

David Mason's Used and Rare column concerns book thieves and a revelation about a certain famous author.

In the North Wing - selections from the Lost Library of CanLit Graphic Novels -  Nathan Campagnaro adapts Thomas King’s DreadfulWater.

We've also got a new short story from Caroline Adderson, “All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone.”


At a time when newspapers and magazines are slashing space devoted to book reviews, we buck the trend with:
Bruce Whiteman on Erin McLaren’s Little Resilience
Rohan Maitzen on Anna Porter’s The Appraisal and Deceptions
Laura Cameron on Amanda LeDuc’s The Centaur’s Wife 
Brett Josef Grubisic on Michael Melgaard’s Pallbearing 
Alex Good on Pasha Malla’s Kill the Mall 
Paige Cooper on Carrie Jenkins’ Victoria Sees It 
Dancy Mason on Patricia Robertson’s Hour of the Crab 
James Grainger on Andrée A Michaud’s Mirror Lake
Emily Donaldson on Sarah Berman’s Don’t Call it a Cult
The Shelf Talker belongs to The Bookshelf in Guelph. Catherine Bush's Blaze Island is one of their four titles.

As always, we finish off with Stephen Fowler's Exhumations. His pick this issue is Writing Thrillers for Profit: A Practical Guide by Basil Hogarth (London, Black, 1936), a volume that once belonged to "a recently deceased author of detective novels." Stephen suggests that it may have been a "joke gift." I'm betting he's right.


The CNQ Crime Issue can be purchased through this link.

It's a steal.

30 January 2021

Erring on The Terror of the Tar Sands



A 1968 children's book, one of the most obscure novels I've read since beginning the Dusty Bookcase, The Terror of the Tar Sands came under fire at the 2012 International Symposium on the History of the Oil and Gas Industry.

I was not invited.

The criticism originated with oil historian Joyce Hunt, who took issue with the use of "tar sands" in its title:
Contemporary rhetoric creates fear in the minds of those unfamiliar with today’s vital energy industry as it puts on hold construction jobs and the economic hopes of thousands. The media and those opposing oil sands development constantly refer to Alberta’s oil sands as tar sands, a technically incorrect term.
Does that not seem a bit unfair? After all, "oil sands" is also technically incorrect. And let's not forget that "tar sands" was used for decades by the industry itself. Still is:


Hell, I grew up with ads for the tar sands, like his one, which featured in the 31 October 1977 issue of Maclean's:

cliquez pour agrandir

(Am I alone in thinking that a sitting MLA shouldn't be on Syncrude's payroll, never mind serve on its Management Committee?)

I'm not a fan of The Terror of the Tar Sands either, but my criticism has nothing to do with the title. You can read all about it in the new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries. My copy arrived today. You're a subscriber, right? If not, here's some of what you're missing, beginning with this cover by Seth:


Dan Wells' Publisher's Note introduces a new series, Shelf Talkers, bringing together recommendations from independent booksellers (among them, my old friend Ben McNally).


Rod Moody-Corbett writes on Percy Janes, whose House of Hate is both one of this country's most controversial and most neglected novels. Only in Canada is such a thing possible.


We have a fable from Pauline Holdstock and a short story by Shaena Lambert.


Bruce Whiteman contributes a memoir.


Other contributors include:
Ho Che Anderson
Michel Basilières
Steven W Beattie
Juliane Okot Bitek
Andreae Callanan
Laura Cameron
Sally Cooper
Steacy Easton
André Forget
Alex Good
Brett Josef Grubisic
Tom Halford
Jeremy Luke Hill
Mikka Jacobsen
River Kozhar
Allison LaSorda
David Mason
John Metcalf
James Grainger Morgan
Nick Mount
Shane Neilson
Rudrapriya Rathore
Patricia Robertson
Mark Sampson
Richard Sanger
Souvankham Thammavongsa
Phoebe Wang 
It all ends on page 88 with Stephen Fowler's remarks on this book:


But wait, what's this?

The same envelope containing the latest CNQ brought the very first issue of Bibliophile, which features the latest news from CNQ mothership Biblioasis. 


Subscriptions to Canadian Notes & Queries can be got through this link.

One last thing: It was through reading The Terror of the Tar Sands that I first learned of Project Cauldron, a 1958 proposal which would have seen nuclear bombs used to separate bitumen from the sands. Why were we not taught this in school? After reading up on it all, this illustration from The Terror of the Tar Sands doesn't seem so insane.


01 September 2020

A Red in the White House?



Their Man in the White House
Tom Ardies
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971
198 pages 
One of the wealthiest men in the United States is running for the presidency, and intelligence agencies are concerned because Russian operatives are exercising influence. Do they have something on him? Does blackmail play a part? And what are we to make of the peculiar relationship between the candidate and his blonde adult daughter?
So begins my review, just published online at Canadian Notes & Queries.

A novel for our times, don't you think?

You can read it here:
Cold War, Warm Bed
Do not judge this book by its cover.

Related posts:

24 July 2020

Canada Reads 2020: "Shouts Out to Tara!"



After much delay, Canada Reads 2020 has come and gone. Congrats to Samra Habib, whose memoir We Have Always Been Here won the game show and was crowned "The One Book to Bring Canada Into Focus."

I listened with as much interest as ever, and was surprised to hear from people asking my opinion. This may have had something to do with "No Country for Old Books," an article I wrote last year for Canadian Notes & Queries. If so, the head doth swell.

As in other years, my thoughts take the form of complaints, like the 2014 decision to focus on the new.

Canadian Notes & Queries #104, Spring 2019

For those keeping track, all but one of the titles in this year's competition was published in 2019, the outlier being Eden Robinson's Son of a Trickster, which appeared in bookstores in 2017. The average age of a Canada Reads 2020 title was 13.5 months.

Canada Reads' preference for the front list was something I discovered through a letter CBC Books sent to publishers. An eye-opener, you can read it in "No Country for Old Books." In researching the game show, I've found CBC Books to be less than forthcoming. Imagine my interest when host Ali Hassan revealed, just yesterday, that Canada Reads has a style consultant named Tara Williams.


I remind that Canada Reads is a radio show.

My main quibble with Canada Reads remains. In its early years, panellists chose the books they wished to promote. In 2002, Leon Rooke, argued on behalf of The Stone Angel, a novel he'd read many times. The same can be said for Denise Bombardier, who in 2007 championed an old favourite in Gabrielle Roy's Children of My Heart.

This year, each of the "defenders" revealed that they had not read their respective books before being asked to participate.

We Have Always Been Here was a national bestseller before it made Canada Reads. It had won a Lambda and had been longlisted of the RBC Charles Taylor Award. The memoir was the subject of a Globe & Mail feature and a subsequent review. It was a 2019 "Globe 100" title. Published internationally, We Have Always Been Here was featured on The Next Chapter, and in the pages of  the Toronto StarNOW, Stylist, and something so distant as the Tampa Bay Times. CBC Books had been pushing We Have Always Been Here for more than a year, beginning with its excited 3 June 2019 article "10 Canadian books coming out in June we can't wait to read."

And yet... and yet, in making her case, Amanda Brugel, its defender, stated: "I wouldn't have been aware of this book until it had been brought to my attention via this competition."

Isn't this a sad state of affairs?

One last thing:

Ali, "The One Book to Bring Canada Into Focus"?

In 2020.

You're a comedian.

Was it too obvious?

Full disclosure: I wanted Eden Robinson's Son of a Trickster to win.

Related post: