We have just kicked off a campaign with Eco-Libris that is pretty exciting. Read about the details below.

Raincoast Books and Eco-Libris announced today the results of their first joint environmental campaign: Buy a Book, Plant a Tree.

Raincoast Books has signed up 80 Canadian retailers who will be selling a wide range of environmentally themed books through April 2008 which are emblazoned with Eco-Libris stickers stating that for each book purchased a tree will be planted in Central America and Africa. Participating independent bookstores, located from cost-to-coast, have purchased over 4,500 specially stickered books and hence over 4,500 trees will be planted on behalf of Canadian readers.

Raz Godelnik, Eco-Libris Co-founder and CEO explained that these trees not only benefit the environment but also the local communities where they are planted: “More than 12 acres of trees will be planted on behalf of the Canadian readers, offering many benefits to the local communities, from trees planted on the mountain slopes in Guatemala, preventing mudslides, conserving soil for more productive crops and protecting water to fruit trees that provide additional food and income in Malawi.

“Reading books should not have an adverse impact on the environment,” adds Godelnik, “and planting trees to balance out the paper usage in books is a practical first step towards sustainable reading, by replenishing our dwindling forest resources on this planet. We plant these trees with the help of highly respected U.S. and U.K. registered non-profit organizations who are screened for, and work to, very high ecological and sustainability standards. This way we make sure that Raincoast’s efforts to go green will have a maximum impact on society and the environment

“Raincoast and our Canadian customers are very pleased to be working with Eco-Libris on the ‘Buy a Book, Plant a Tree’ campaign,” said Jamie Broadhurst, VP Marketing for Raincoast Books. “No one campaign is going to solve the challenge of creating sustainable publishing practices, but each new campaign raises more awareness and makes that goal more attainable. We have a lot more work to do.”

For more information and great book recommendations go to: www.raincoast.com/green/

For more information on Eco-Libris go to: www.ecolibris.net

Does ALL SOULS draw on your real life experiences as a teacher?

The choral sections, where unattributed speech serves as a scene, draw on real life exchanges I have overheard as a teacher. 

“We didn’t know you were coming.”

“I tried to save you a place.”

“She couldn’t invite you; she could only have six friends.”

The literature taught in the novel is literature I have taught to seventeen-year-olds; and more than once I have heard the complaint that nothing happens in To the Lighthouse.  From middle school on the big books are all about death, but death in books.  In All Souls, a school community, uncommonly small, privileged, insular—another ruined garden, if you will—confronts death outside of books.  In math class Marlene Kovack, one of the sick girl’s classmates, muses, “Astra Dell’s dying: What did it mean to them all in this overheated room?” The book is bent on answering this question. 

Do you worry about what your students might think of your work, and what they might extrapolate (erroneously or otherwise) from it?

My earlier books, the two story collections and the novel, Florida, I would like kept on a high shelf until my students come of age, but All Souls, I hope, will amuse them for being familiar; moreover, it is a more accurate portrait of the school than may be seen on TV.  The author of the Gossip Girl series is a former student of mine, a good writer, who, by her own admission, spent her weekends riding horses; nevertheless, her depiction of school life tends to be sensational. All Souls is in part a response to the stereotypically repugnant, empty, pretty-girl models most often paraded in novels about private schools.

Your prose is beautifully succinct.  Do you edit yourself ruthlessly?

I do edit myself ruthlessly and rarely move forward until the passage is right. 

There’s also a kinetic energy though.  Is it difficult to balance the editing and control with intensity and daring? 

I don’t usually think of myself as balancing control with intensity; the struggle is to move characters, create scenes; the struggle is to stay interested in the scene.

Do you feel a strong affinity to poetry?

As has been true for many writers, poetry came first for me; I wanted to be a poet but despaired of achieving an evolved soul, fully believing then and now that poets live in a purer atmosphere that will not sustain lesser mortals.  I don’t think novelists ever reach the slopes of Parnassus although some have come close. 

What motivates you?  Do you have any rituals when you’re writing?

Reading is a provocation.  Reading other fiction or poetry is as much an inspiration as experience.  As to rituals, none beyond securing some privacy and time, but I do not write on trains or planes.

What are you working on now? 

I am working on a very difficult long something that I sometimes call a novella even though I don’t understand what a novella is exactly.  This long-something is to be part of a third short story collection.  Most of the stories have been published in NOON, a literary annual. 

Thank you Christine!

Click here for part one of Christine Schutt’s Q & A

Christine Schutt is the author of the short-story collections A DAY, A NIGHT, ANOTHER DAY, SUMMER and NIGHTWORK (named by the poet John Ashbery as the 1996 Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year) as well as the critically acclaimed novel FLORIDA, which was a 2004 National Book Award Finalist.

In her new novel ALL SOULS, published by Harcourt (April 2008), popular high school student Astra Dell fights a rare cancer in the hospital, whilst her classmates at an exclusive Manhattan private school concern themselves with boys, teachers, exams, dance recitals, college applications, graduation, and, of course, the ailing Astra. 

Christine Schutt lives and teaches in New York City. We caught up over email.

What was the inspiration for ALL SOULS?

First came the name Astra Dell on an afternoon when I had been thinking of Pip’s Estella, and her name’s associations, the stars, the sky, the sky as it is experienced when Pip and Estella walk in Miss Havisham’s ruined garden.  Romantic, gauzy associations were in the air when I came up with the name Astra Dell, which combined sky and dell and seemed silly but worthy of any and all exaggerated beauty and gracefulness I might wish to attach to it.  The name, the dancer, the hair in that order; I committed to her saintliness when I took up her sickness and a community’s reaction to it as the way to organize and write a school novel with a large cast.  The saintliness and the sickness I took from life, a former student’s; she is thanked in the acknowledgments. 

The novel is set in New York in 1997.  Was it a conscious decision to set it before 9/11 or were there other reasons for the date?

Yes, I wanted the New York City I knew before September 11, 2001; the earlier date allows for a jolly solipsism, self-involvement mitigated by age and inexperience of emptiness.  In the novel, when Astra Dell is rumored sickest, she is a topic avoided for the simple reason that the sick girl’s “futureless future” horrifies her friends.  (Healthy girls, marginally unhealthy girls, American girls of all classes, do not, in my experience, look into a summer and see blank; rather, there is camp or a trip or an internship.) Since September 11, 2001, the possibility of the futureless future for us all in an instant occurs to anyone even passing through the city; everyone has been made a bit older and harder by the event—even the girls I know and teach seem born cynical.  As to why 97, my choice was made by my sons, teenagers at the time, full-blown, wonderful and awful; they and their friends and their girlfriends and the girls I taught made a deep impression on me in 1997.

All Souls raises some very uncomfortable issues (notably sexual relationships between adults and teens in their care).  Do you think it is important for fiction to be challenging?

Writers look for dramatic interest, and my experience of outdoor dramas—one drowning, two suicides, some accidents involving animals or heavy machinery—is yet small in comparison to the indoor dramas I might elaborate on.  The greatest of these dramas involve plausible sexual transgressions that keep me awake when I am writing. The writer, as much as the reader then, is challenged to look. 

I found it interesting that you’re quite un-judgmental of your characters’ behavior.  Is moral ambiguity important to your fiction?

I don’t set out to be morally ambiguous.  I want to be fair in the treatment of my characters, to admit any action is possible. 

Read part two of my Q & A with Christine Schutt tomorrow!

The Canadian Bookseller Association announced today that Raincoast has been short listed for the CBA Libris awards for Marketing Achievement of the Year for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and for Distributor of the Year.  Raincoast won the Marketing Achievement once before in 2005 and Raincoast has won a plethora of distribution awards over the years: being named the fastest distributor in the two annual Quill & Quire industry surveys (2003 and 2004), winning the CBA Distributor of the Year Award four times in the last six years and having be named by the Western Book Reps Association as The Best Shipper through Hell and High Water.

The winners of this year’s Libris Awards will be named on June 15 in Toronto. Many thanks to our customers for their vote of confidence in our abilities. 

Can you share an interesting experience you had researching INVISIBLE NATION?

As I describe in Chapter 6, I think I’m the only journalist who used his entire gas mask and chemical suit during the war, investigating what luckily turned out to be a bum-steer from the Kurds about a chemical shell they said had made a bunch of them sick.

Has US involvement in Iraq has aided the Kurdish cause?

The Kurds have been struggling for centuries, and in recent history they owe their worst defeats and their greatest victories to American foreign policy.  At the moment they’re riding high as Washington’s most trusted ally among Iraq’s factions, but they’re watchful for a hint that America might cut them loose again.

Will their situation change dramatically if the US military withdraws from Iraq?

If America leaves the region the Kurds will be able to hold their territory in the north against any of the internal factions.  It’s outside powers like Iran and Turkey - both with restive Kurdish populations of their own - that the Kurds of Iraq see as a major threat.

What inspired you to become a writer?

I got addicted to travelling when I was 19 years old, taking a back-pack to Central America and Middle East and I always kept a journal.  It wasn’t until 1996 that some journalist friends clued me in to the fact that I could make a living from it.

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring foreign correspondents, what would it be?

I’d skip school and head out into the field.  Once you get a taste of the “ground truth”, you’ll never go back to watching from a distance.

Is there a particular ritual involved in your writing process? Or is it all about the deadline?

For writing news, the deadline is the only incentive you need, I’ve filed stories from the top of an armoured car stuck in human traffic (that was in 2005, the last time the Gaza border with Egypt burst open).  For writing the book I enjoyed a long cross country ski in the morning before a long day of writing, then another one in the evening if I’d earned it.

How do you relax?

I’ve been building a house out of stone in Maine for about a dozen years, it’s an eternal work in progress and once of my favourite things to do when I come back from the field.

What books are you reading at the moment?

I’m reading What is the What, by Dave Eggers and The Accidental Empire by Gershom Gorenberg - about the Israeli settlers movement. I also just picked up The New Cold War, by Globe and Mail correspondent Mark MacKinnon.