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Fresh fiction at the library

By Meriha Beaton, Arts Contributor

 

Lovers of fiction joined in the Special Collections Reading Room of the Killam Library last Thursday to hear the latest works of Dalhousie students Danny Jacobs and Nicole Dixon.

The young writers are both in their final year of the MLIS  program at the School of Information Management. They’ve already been acknowledged for their creative talents, published in literary magazines such as Grain and The Fiddlehead.

Introduced as “one of those rare poets that actually writes poetry,” by Dixon, Jacobs began the reading with seven original poems, all of which detail the simple daily pleasures that inspire him.

He warmed up the audience with a short, love poem entitled “Before Waking” which expressed an intimate moment between him and a lover. Then, moving on to a far less sexy subject, he recited a poem called “Fetch,” about his brother’s dog. As he read he tapped his foot on the ground, keeping up a steady rhythm.

The rest of his poems had similarly everyday content- from describing a pool game to detailing the various passengers of a bus.

Jacobs’ writing is fresh and modern, which is largely due to his avid consumption of contemporary poetry. He is engaged in what surrounds him in the present, which is reflected in his writing.

“A lot of people want to be a writer and when you ask them what they read that’s contemporary, they say ‘that’s not really my thing,’” said Jacobs. “If all you read is Wordsworth, then that’s not going to fly.”

While some poetry can be contemplative and abstract, Jacob’s words painted pictures of the familiar activities of life. The audience could easily visualize the places in his poems.

“You must make a landscape be more than a landscape,” said Jacobs. “If you are going to bring in a landscape you need to make it do interesting things.”

Next, Jacobs introduced Dixon. The writer, who holds a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing and English, uses powerful female characters to drive her narratives. Jacobs described them as strong, believable and unique. And while their choices aren’t always the best, they are done with conviction.

“On top of their bodies is their heads, and in their heads are their voices,” said Jacobs, quoting a line from Dixon herself.

Dixons’s story “Mona says Fire, Fire, Fire” was inspired when she saw the five words of the title spray painted on an overpass. She didn’t know what she wanted to write, but she knew it had to be something with those words.  The short story is a about a woman, Mona, who moves from a big city to a small fisherman’s village.

“I had just finished my M.A and was having a really hard time writing,” says Dixon. “I just did the old thing everyone tells you to do, which was write what you know and I had just moved to a small fisherman’s town.”

The protagonist of Dixon’s short story is relatable and familiar. The character lacks pretension as she struggles to find her way through a foreign Nova Scotia town. She says and does things most young Canadian women do.

In a passage detailing Mona’s rendezvous during a French Immersion program in Quebec, Dixon read: “they found themselves dizzily dancing to French hip hop, drunk on bottled Export, bumping hips on the sweaty Friday night dance floor beside fellow students literally half their ages. And then, unable to go back to the rooms in their billeted houses, they found the lee side of a woodpile in a dewy-grassed backyard. They broke the French-only rule when neither knew the word for condom.”

Dixon’s goal with her characters is to make them as realistic as possible, and to steer away from female stereotypes that are so ingrained in Canadian literature.

This short story is one of a collection from Dixon’s first book, High Water Mark, which is to be published in 2012 with Porcupine’s Quill.

For both Jacobs and Dixon, writing is a huge part of their lives. And after hearing some of their work, it is clear that life, in its simplest form, plays a huge part in their writing.

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