Beverly Akerman

About Me

NEW: The Meaning of Children now available for Kindle (& Kindle app) http://amzn.to/AiGGsm!

Reader and Reviewer Response to Beverly Akerman’s The Meaning Of Children:

A keen, incisive vision into the hidden world of children as well as intimate knowledge of the secret spaces that exist between the everyday events of life. A work with a brilliant sense of story…Magical, and so refreshing for me to read. I absolutely loved it and I hope it goes on to do marvellous things. Yours is a luminous talent.

~JoAnne Soper-Cook, Author and Judge, 2010 David Adams Richards Prize

Loved your book; read it in one sitting…each [story] is told either by a child, or it’s about a child. And it’s interesting because I think depending on the age of the person reading it, you relate to different ones. But especially to feminists, growing up with it, wrestling with our beliefs, and whether it worked out or not… a lot of women that you see in this book are trapped. We were trapped by what we were brought up to believe. And then we’re trapped by the marriages we find ourselves in, and the children we have… But on the other hand, each story ends with a certain resolve. There’s that sense of okay this is my situation But. And that’s what the meaning of children is. And yet, it’s about hope. It’s about the future…

~Mutsumi Takahashi, Anchor, CTV News Montreal (interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyOp2wQlxvk )

A collection of 14 short stories which covers the range of experience from the point of view of children, mums, and also aging parents as well. It’s all there in this lovely little book, short stories about life in a family that might just resemble yours. I wanted to congratulate you on the publication of this book and I hope it goes far far afield for you. A wonderful gift for mother’s day, perhaps more long lived than the usual cut flowers.

~Anne Lagacé Dowson, CJAD Radio journalist (interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djOXwJasZes )

This isn’t the invented childhood of imagination and wonderment…[here] children both corrupt and redeem: each other, family relationships and the female body.

~Katie Hewitt, The Globe & Mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/the-meaning-of-children-by-beverly-akerman/article1899277/

Akerman holds up our greatest fears, not to dwell on them, but to marvel at our commitment to life, especially to passing it on to others.

~Anne Chudobiak, The Montreal Gazette

Haunting and powerfully emotive, drawing on the subtleties of childhood, youth and parenthood that undermine us in strange and unexpected ways. Your writing is polished and mature, something I am always in awe of and why I got into publishing to begin with.

~Meghan Macdonald, Transatlantic Literary Agency

Counter-intuitive to the title, for me these stories resonate with the sad truth of being a grownup. Life is that damn hard and just-under-the-surface tension saturates our existence. But the kids, they know what's going on. They may not understand all the details but they know the score. Akerman nails that sorrow, highlights it with unexpected humour, credits our resilience and almost never skips a beat.

~Chris Benjamin, Author of Drive-by Saviours, on Goodreads (4 stars)

Akerman engages with dichotomies. Childhood is that safe, magical, carefree time and place — but it’s also risky, threatening, ominous and dangerous — full of impenetrable mystery around things seen and experienced, but beyond understanding. And if it’s not too much of a simplification or stating the obvious, life and the world are not gentle on children simply for being children…If, as Dostoevsky once remarked, and as is quoted on the collection’s frontispiece, “The soul is healed by being with children,” it is the tragedy of adulthood that we become so isolated from childhood — and what children offer us. Artfully, evocatively, Beverly Akerman’s The Meaning of Children reminds us of that.

~Darrell Squires, The Western Star (http://www.thewesternstar.com/Opinion/Columns/2011-07-20/article-2655074/%26lsquo%3BThe-Meaning-of-Children%26rsquo%3B-shows-us-ourselves/1 )

Beverly’s background as a scientist, MSc and twenty years as a molecular researcher, inevitably spills into the stories…characters, the settings and her style. Intelligent, objective, open-minded but not clinical, her prose is refreshing and unprejudiced. Her characters are frank and genuine ...With The Meaning of Children, we get a beautifully written exposé on the meaning of life.

~Francine Diot-Layton, The Rover (http://roverarts.com/2011/07/suffer-the-children/ )

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After over two decades in molecular genetics research, Beverly Akerman realized she'd been learning more and more about less and less. Skittish at the prospect of knowing everything about nothing, she turned, for solace, to writing. Her book The Meaning Of Children made the Top 10 for the CBC – Scotiabank Giller Prize Readers’ Choice Contest. Winner of the David Adams Richards Prize, the Professional Writers Association of Canada’s Short Article Award; multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and National Magazine Awards (submissions). Credits include The Hill Times, The Jewish Magazine, Maclean’s, The Montreal Gazette, The National Post, The National Review of Medicine, The Toronto Star, CBC Radio One, and the numerous literary journals and anthologies: Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual 2012, The Antigonish Review, Best New Writing 2011, The Binnacle, BluePrintReview, carte blanche, cellstories.net, Cliterature, The Dalhousie Review, Descant, EarLit Shorts, Fictionaut, Fog City Review, Grain, Joyland.ca, The Nashwaak Review, The New Quarterly, On the Premises, Rampike, Red Wheelbarrow, Rio Grande Review, r.kv.r.y quarterly, The Rover, The Vocabula Review, Windsor Review and The Winnipeg Review. Beverly is strangely pleased to believe herself the only Canadian fiction writer to have sequenced her own DNA. http://beverlyakerman.blogspot.com/.

TV & Radio Interviews: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0i9teebBxk; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyOp2wQlxvk; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djOXwJasZes

Why do you write?

Love and compassion. I want more of them in the world; I think my writing helps achieve this goal. If we understood each other better, maybe there'd be less strife...then again, maybe not.

One does what one can.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Carla Gunn, Jessica Grant, Annabel Lyon, Kathleen Winter, Mordecai Richler (Barney's Version; St. Urbain's Horseman); John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meaney; The Cider House Rules); Harper Lee (there's only 1!); JD Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye); Ron Carlson (At the Jim Bridger)