A Bad Year for Journalists
by Lisa Pasold
Pop music jingles, statistics, the frames of text and camera selecting the world’s headlines for our perusal. A stroll along the Champs Elysees jammed against the slum of Kibera — A Bad Year for Journalists feeds the jagged, seductive language of media into the emotional cusinart lives of the media’s flawed and courageous practitioners. To say
what it was
not what it was like.
Awards/Award Nominations
Shortlisted for Alberta Book Awards Trade Fiction Book Award
Reviews
Renaming Stillness and Travel by Antje M. Rauwerda
By turns sympathetic, critical, darkly funny and painstakingly lyrical, the poems trace journalistic travels in the Middle East – “places at their best dismantled” – and overlay the national and geographical settings with characters and anecdotes so vivid the reader feels as if she might be at home in these places after all… In an increasingly hyperbolic idiom where everything is so conveniently unspeakable, Pasold speaks up, conveying more than impressions or exaggerations; these poems explain “what it was/ not what it was like”. ~Katia Grubisic, The Globe and Mail
Pasold has an unusual ability to paint a whole emotional world. It’s impossible to pluck a Pasold line out of context to show what I mean — her work is just too organic. You’ll have to read the whole book, and you’ll be glad you did. ~Alex Rettie, Alberta Views
A Bad Year for Journalists, in hard lines and fragmented images, evokes the bizarre world of international journalists: the surreal combination of danger and privilege that they embody and their tourist-but-not tourist relationship to the places they cover. ~Lee Shedden, Calgary Herald
A compelling cartography of war torn territory. ~Anne Burke, Prairie Journal
Pasold sneaks in mind’s-eye metaphors and images, the poems carefully structured and solid, belying their driving narrative – she weaves disjointed memories, from rusty jeeps to lust to typewriter. A thrilling, amazing work. ~Bryn Evans, Fast Forward Magazine
Samples
Kinshasa (hands on the steering wheel)
darkly she can be ok casual for days then suddenly on Thursday, eyes broken windshields behind sunglasses, driving towards Kinshasa in a ’72 Mercedes listening to Lionel Ritchie. each body a separate statistic. collateral damage she adds up the numbers, makes the phone calls from what’s left of. plaits her hair, swats flies. define wounded. define this a finger at the latest checkpoint. keeps it discreet. those polite requests for better funding, flights to Paris: ivory, coffee, ghosts. once she caught the stewardess’s eye you can see them too, huh, didn’t say anything. the unexpected she takes into her mouth, files the photos. harder to believe in, get so tired of falling asleep. overnight kit missing ground sheet & sleeping bag what the fuck is that about, she keeps going. maybe it won’t end. maybe it will never end. she drives as if her mouth is filling with shards of ice
what’s possible
“Hidden agendas: How journalists influence the news”
she reads. that’s just fan-tas-tic, I knew they’d get
to blaming us one of these days.
it’s a simple job, “radicalizing the pain of others.” Or selling it.
because she's there to make money off their situation. at least,
they think she is.
can you sell this?
so they throw shit at the car. their own shit. towards her.
splatter the windshield.
(if she worked, say, for FOX, she could skip
this, make it up as she went along. like whistling a tune.)
where’s her handy pith helmet and guidebook? in the Strand once
she came across Directions for Englishmen
Going to India. 19th century binding opened in her hand
to page 41. Bodoni Book font, smudged advice:
"Stand still and wave a white handkerchief. This should
confuse the elephant."
there was no illustration.
but the handkerchief remains, the elephant pauses
to decipher meaning
—truce? surrender? you're
about to blow your nose?—the elephant’s hesitation
an opportunity:
Run. Run away.
Keep driving, she says now from the passenger seat.
Just keep driving.
