Margoshes wins
Anne Kyle, The Leader-Post
Published: Monday, November 26, 2007
Regina author Dave Margoshes' fiction collection Bix's Trumpet and other stories (NeWest Press) was the big winner at the 15th annual Saskatchewan Book Awards gala on the weekend.
Margoshes' book, a compilation of short stories, won the 2007 Book of the Year Award as well as the Regina Book Award.
A newspaper reporter for years, Margoshes has been writing books for the past 20 years since he came to Saskatchewan. In journalism, writing is merely the means to the end whereas in creative writing, he said, writing is the end. So it is completely different.
"This is the 15th year of the book awards and over the years I have been nominated a bunch of times, I've forgotten how many -- this is my 12th book, but this is the first time I have ever won,'' Margoshes said.
"So that feels very good. They always say, 'Winning is just the gravy, being nominated is what is important,' and there is some truth to that. But it really feels good to win.''
Awards are crapshoots, he said, explaining the difference between winning and losing is the width of a dime.
"Obviously, you have to produce something that is pretty good in order to get into the running, but after that luck plays an awfully big part. So this year I was lucky and I am glad for that,'' he said.
Margoshes' people anything but ordinary
Bill Robertson, For The StarPhoenix
Published: Saturday, December 29, 2007
BIX'S TRUMPET AND OTHER STORIES
By Dave Margoshes,
NeWest Press, $19.95
It's a marketing division cliché at publishing houses to say of a short story collection that its characters are ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances, or, in the words on the back of this book, "humdrum lives . . . shaken by unexpected stress."
That is, however, what many stories are about. It's what people want from fiction, or the movies, for that matter. Regular guy Cary Grant is mistaken for someone else in Hitchcock's North By Northwest and the next thing you know he's slugging it out on the faces of Mt. Rushmore.
These people aren't Superman or the Prime Minister or Bill Gates, just regular Joes and Josephines who win the lottery and take their families straight to hell; or have a twin sibling they never knew about; like that guy at work -- you know -- remember what happened to him?
In Dave Margoshes' latest collection, Bix's Trumpet and other stories, the Regina writer deals in just these kind of people -- and many of them get their surprise after a death in the family.
In the title story, a man gets a letter from a friend's widow, setting in motion a set of reminiscences about two fellows at college and their love for jazz -- one of them even owned Bix Beiderbecke's trumpet. Now that's extraordinary.
Has anyone read the story? Is there an explanation of why it is "Bix's Trumpet" and not "Bix's Cornet"? I guess "Bix's Trumpet" sounds [no pun intended] much bettter than "Bix's Cornet" as a title?
