AudioFile Magazine Reviews Helen Porter's "Below The Bridge"

Click here to read what AudioFile has to say about Rattling Books' audio edition of Helen Fogwill Porter's Newfoundland classic in its May 2011 edition.

For more information on Below the Bridge and to hear an excerpt, follow this link. Below the Bridge is available as an MP3 CD and an MP3 download.

Canadian audiobooks from Rattling Books in Newfoundland and Labrador

Author Bernice Morgan Gives "Below The Bridge" Two Thumbs Up

Bernice Morgan, author of Random Passage, said she cried when she listened to Rattling Books' unabridged audio book edition of Helen Fogwill Porter's memoir of growing up on the South Side of St. John's in the 1930s and '40s, Below the Bridge.

Lucky for us, this wasn't because of bad production values. "I thoroughly enjoyed it," Morgan said. "No one knows old St. John's the way Helen does."

Listen to an excerpt from Below the Bridge, available from Rattling Books as an MP3 audio book CD or an audio book digital download.

Poet Leanne Averbach Launching New Book In St. John's, Newfoundland, December 21

Canadian writer, performance poet and experimental filmmaker Leanne Averbach will be launching her latest book of poetry, Come Closer (Tightrope Books), at the Leyton Gallery in St. John's on December 21. Music will be provided by Mary Barry and Charlie Barfoot.

Her debut collection of poems, Fever (Mansfield Press, 2005), was short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Its companion CD is a fusion of her spoken words and the blues/jazz accompaniment of the group Indigo.

Averbach's video-poem Carwash (below) was screened at the Visible Verse Film Festival in Vancouver.



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If you're in the mood for poetry, click here to listen to excerpts from poems by Canada's finest poets. If you're in the mood for singer and musician Mary Barry's compelling speaking voice, follow this link to hear an excerpt from her narration of Helen Porter's Below the Bridge.

Rattling Books' audio books of poetry and prose are available as MP3 downloads, audio CDs and MP3 CDs.

Joel Thomas Hynes Winner of Newfoundland's Cuffer Prize

Novelist, playwright and short-story writer Joel Thomas Hynes seems to be having a pretty good November. Earlier this month, the British and Irish press waxed enthusiastic about Down to the Dirt, his 2004 debut novel, which has just been released in the UK and Ireland. Last week, Hynes won the Cuffer Prize, a short story competition sponsored by St. John's newspaper The Telegram and Creative Book Publishing.

His winning entry, "Conflict of Interest," is an excerpt from a work in progress, which will be published by Beth Follett's Pedlar Press. To read Hynes' sharp glittery shard of Cuffer-awarded fiction, follow this link.

The Cuffer's second place award went to Michael Collins, also no mean hand at putting nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives exactly where they should go. Collins garnered second place for his short story "Mrs. Wakeham." Another of his stories, "The Last Islander," was shortlisted for the award.




Scene from the movie version of Down to the Dirt, with Hynes in the title role.

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Cuffer judges Ramona Dearing, Joan Sullivan and Russell Wangersky thought they might have been dealing with a Hynes wannabe when they read his story. Hynes' said (tongue glued to cheek), "That was because I watched my language and peeled back some of the darkness." If you'd like to hear Hynes when he's not being shy, listen to an excerpt from Rattling Books' MP3 download of God Help Thee: A Manifesto, first published in Riddle Fence and read live by Hynes.

Rattling Books is pleased to have Michael Collins on offer as well. Listen to an excerpt from his short story "Slip," narrated by Joel Thomas Hynes. "Slip" is available as a single MP3 download, and is also featured on the MP3 audio book CD EarLit Shorts 4.

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Click here to listen to Helen Porter's interview with Angela Antle on last week's Weekend Arts Magazine about Rattling Books' new audio version of her 1970s memoir Below the Bridge. Below the Bridge is the story of Porter's childhood in the 1930s and '40s on the South Side of St. John's. It is also a rich memorial to a community that disappeared: the homes and places of work of the South Side were demolished in the late '50s and early '60s to permit harbour development. In the process, the grave of Shawnadithit, the last known survivor of Newfoundland's indigenous Beothuk, was lost.

Below the Bridge, narrated by Mary Barry, is available from Rattling Books as an unabridged audio book MP3 CD or MP3 download.

Helen Fogwill Porter's "Below the Bridge"

In the war years of the last century, a young girl growing up on the South Side of St. John's, Newfoundland, said to her mother, "Wouldn't it be nice if someone wrote about the South Side?" The girl was Helen Fogwill Porter, voracious reader and aspiring author. She would become the person who "wrote about the South Side," in the Newfoundland classic Below the Bridge.

The South Side of St. John's, or "below the bridge," was a tightly knit community of families which had its own identity apart from that of the the capital city across the harbour. In the 1950s, that community was razed so the harbour could be extended. In the process, the grave of Shawnadithit, the last known survivor of Newfoundland's indigenous Beothuks, was lost. The South Side became a grave itself, of the homes and culture of the people who had lived there. But unlike Shawnadithit, the longshoremen, midwives, fortune tellers, shopkeepers, "fallen women," sailors, and housewives of the 1930s and '40s who lived on the South Side have a memorial. In Porter's Below the Bridge, you can smell the "tarry ropes," the sweat of the black horses who drew funeral processions, the Jeyes Fluid and the inevitable Sunday roast. Porter has rebuilt the demolished houses of the South Side, and she takes the reader into them, and into the rich and sometimes fantastical lives of their inhabitants.

"When Helen Porter writes of resettlement and the harbor, of war and the Dardanelles, of dream figures and death, of the Salvation Army and yeast cakes, of rowing to Fort Amherst and glowing at Fort Pepperell, her characters do not resemble those in Chatelaine or in People magazine; they are not over-painted models, pigments of the imagination; they are us. And even if their experiences are not the stuff of epics, by dissecting them free from a worldly background she portrays the fabric of a congregation, a community, a culture; the which, to define operatively, is near-genius." (Dr. William Pryse-Phillips)

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Listen to an excerpt from Rattling Books' new unabridged audio version of Helen Fogwill Porter's memoir of growing up on the South Side of St. John's in the 1940s and '50s.