New voices from down east

The wealth of downeast literary talent keeps growing. Two dazzling new fiction writers, Libby Creelman from St. John's and Ian Colford from Halifax, will be featured in the Winter's Tales Authors Series on Thursday, February 5, at 7:30, in Confederation Centre Art Gallery. Their reading is co-sponsored by the Gallery and UPEI Department of English.

Creelman's first book, Walking in Paradise, a collection of short stories, was shortlisted for the first annual Winterset Award for excellence in Newfoundland writing. Her much-anticipated first novel, The Darren Effect, is a finely rendered portrait of both the physical and psychological effects of grief.

Heather Welbourne grieves secretly for the married man she loves. He is dying of cancer, and his wife and son cannot accept the loss, or forgive his betrayals. Into their small coastal community arrives Darren, a scientist consumed with the lives of seabirds. His unusual habits and knowledge of nature transform Heather's and others' lives. Shockingly funny, The Darren Effect vibrates with memorable characters, intimately recognizable in their struggle with self-mastery and desire.

The Globe and Mail writes, "Creelman is concerned with affirming life, even though she is well aware of how death lives among us. The novel marries the tragic and comic to wonderful effect in developing the complexity of ordinary lives."

Ian Colford, a librarian at Dalhousie University who has traveled extensively in Europe and Turkey, draws on his journeys for his first book of stories. Evidence is a sequence of adventures and reminiscences by a single narrator, Kostandin Birtri, a wanderer uprooted by war from an eastern European country. As he moves to Western Europe and then North America, searching for a home and his identity, he relates his encounters with brutality and corruption, but also with kindness and generosity.