Cornwall ON – Cornwallite Michael V Smith has a new novel coming out; his second; Progress on Cormorant Books.
Michael V. Smith’s first novel Cumberland received national acclaim and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca / Books in Canada First Novel Award. Now, eight years later, comes his brand new and highly-anticipated novel, Progress.“Michael V. Smith’s characters’ stories of love and loss have so much emotional impact that they don’t need embellishment. Sometimes a book creeps up on you. That’s what happens with Cumberland, a novel that starts out as just another day in the bar for middle aged millworker Ernest but soon enters more explosive areas.” —NOW Magazine.The novel follows Helen, a woman who, after losing her fiancé, is unable to move on with her life. But life itself is moving on around her, literally: the building of a dam is forcing her small town and her family home to relocate..The construction project means more than the loss of a home — Helen’s brother, Robbie, who
disappeared without a trace many years earlier, suddenly resurfaces. As he re-enters his sister’s life, he reveals the secret of why he left in the first place: a secret that tore their family apart, and affected Helen’s life in more ways than she ever realized.
“I think history is in large part determined by what kind of story we carry with us, what we make of our lives from that story,” Smith says. “Progress questions who we are if that story is interrupted, disturbed, revealed as false. Part of moving forward, to remake yourself, is figuring out how to unshackle yourself from your story. How do you see a new version of the past, so that you might find yourself a better future? Is that possible?”
Quiet and provocative, honest and stirring, Progress is a story of relationships, history, and lives lost and found.
Michael V. Smith is an assistant professor at UBC, where he teaches creative writing. His short fiction has won the Western Magazine Gold Award for Fiction and been nominated for the Journey Prize. In 2007, Smith received the Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging Gay Writers and Vancouver’s Community Hero of the Year Award. A native of Cornwall, Ontario, Smith currently lives in Kelowna, BC.
Mr. Smith will be reading at the Cornwall Public Library Sunday May 1st at 1PM reading from Progress!
We’re looking forward to meeting Mr. Smith at the People’s University. Congrads to another rising star from Cornwall. Jake and I feel we can count on Michael to help us with our current law-suit against the Canada Council For The Arts. They claim to support the arts. Ha.
They rejected funding for our book, which was obviously going to be a best seller, called, “Diefenbaker Jokes For Teens”. This comes on the heels of sabotaging our previous book, “Sir Charles Tupper – Father of Rap’. In the face of such alarming censorship, we know we can count on Mr. Smith to under-write our legal costs, and would like to thank him in advance. Thank you, Mr. Smith.