Office Tower Tales

Alice Major emigrated from Scotland at the age of eight, and grew up in Toronto before coming west to work as a weekly newspaper reporter. She served as the City of Edmonton's first poet laureate from 2005-2007. A widely-published author, she has won many distinctions. Her most recent book, Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science, received the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for non-fiction as well as a National Magazine Award gold medal. Her website is www.alicemajor.com.

"Her creations have their genesis in a brilliant, encyclopedic, and inventive mind and are brought to fruition through meticulous craftsmanship." Canadian Literature, Spring 2007 "A series of narrative poems told during coffee breaks, [The Office Tower Tales] is probably also Alice Major's greatest work..As the allusion to Sheherazad implies, women have used stories to survive their subjugation in male-dominated cultures, but also to express the nature of women's broader experiences of childbirth, relationships and illness..an ambitious, accessible, and entirely provocative exploration of the power of women's stories." Jay Smith, Vue Weekly, March 27, 2008 "What makes this collection is the sheer focus of the project, the quality of the writing in a poetry book nearly novelistic in its approach, taking in [Major's] years of living and working in the downtown core of the city...a highly ambitious and fully-formed work." rob mclennan, http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2008/03/alice-majors-office-tower-tales-with.html "Alice Major's tremendous new book of poetry takes a cue from a sprawling epic of English literature, The Canterbury Tales, but grounds its pilgrims in present-day Edmonton and the meaningless office drudgery of the 9-to-5 life...Each story has a five-line stanza form, and each stanza contains a rhyme and closes with a short line. 'I needed something that would sound conversational and give me strong rhythmic presence as well,' Major said. 'It's a project where you're solving all the problems and challenges of poetry as well as the challenges of fiction. There were days when I wondered why I had set the limbo bar quite that low.' The Office Tower Tales are populated by solitary souls working and loving and growing old in an urban world. There's a young woman who longs to become a police officer; a waitress torn between her girlfriend and her fundamentalist church; the office romeo from accounts payable; and a single woman "on the short cord of a secretary's pay" who tries to fit in at work by fabricating a family. There's a good deal of yearning in these pages but also a healthy dose of humour and, finally, of hope." Richard Helm, Edmonton Journal, April 11, 2008 "This long poetic work is both extremely readable and erudite. My first reading of the book was to enjoy the understated and solid poetry and to take in the modern themes. The food court descriptions are exquisitely captured in the prologues. References that might not work in another type of poem gleam here. Instead of Mount Olympus or the road to Canterbury as backdrop, here there are skyscrapers, fast-food kiosks and plastic chairs overlooking a heavily trafficked street. Sheherazade tells wide-ranging stories about abortion, breast cancer, divorce, threatened rape, and more...My second reading of the tales involved hauling out a stack of marginally dusty books from my English undergrad days -- a Norton anthology or two, Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, Ovid, Hesiod, and a classical mythology textbook. There is a lot of fun to be had comparing Major's tales to her precursors, and in working out how her Pandora relates to the Pandora of ancient Greece, but the scholarly context isn't necessary to draw pleasure from this book." Shawna Lemay, Edmonton Journal, April 27, 2008 #8 on the Maclean's Magazine list of Edmonton Non-Fiction Bestsellers. "Major was struck that while so many people spend the large majority of their waking hours in white-collar work, so little poetry is written about it... Incorporating references from Arabian Nights, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the book wears its erudition lightly... [Major notes], 'it's an extra layer of enjoyment, not a cryptic code to let you figure out how to get into the work in the first place.'" Quentin Mills-Fenn, Prairie Books Now, Summer 2008 "In June I went to Poetry in the Crypt at St Mary's Church, Islington, where I heard Mimi Khalvati read from her latest collection, along with Canadian poet Alice Major. Both were fantastic, but I was especially captivated by Alice Major's readings from her latest book, The Office Tower Tales, which I decided had to be a holiday read, due to the fact that it's a massive 252 pages long. So I took it to France with me a couple of weeks ago, where I simultaneously devoured it and fought off my family's attempts to borrow it. The central conceit is that, in a sort-of reworking of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and One Thousand and One Nights, three office-workers meet at their break to drink coffee, eat muffins and talk about their lives. It's a brilliant idea and superbly executed; each tale is by turns moving, comic, wistful, tragic, and each feels like an utterly true evocation of white-collar working women at the end of the twentieth century. I loved how the writing was deeply real and honest while at the same time incredibly poetic, riffing around unexpectedly beautiful, interlinked images. I also loved how Aphrodite, Pandora and Scheherezade were not at all just a conceit, but very real, central characters. I would recommend this book to pretty much anyone, whether interested in poetry or not, it's that good, and that accessible. Of all the books I've enjoyed reading this year, this is the one I've been most delighted to find." http://52poets.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/twenty-nine-alice-major-the-office-tower-tales/ "Alice Major's newest collection, The Occupied World, is a vibrant exploration of what is at the heart of a city . [The Occupied World] effortlessly sweeps from Roman rituals for the selecting and naming of a city's birthplace, to downtown encounters with local youths and those living on the street. This is no light read; it's a collection that requires the innate trust of its audience, as it speeds from global view to city-specific in a short few pages. Once immersed in this book, there are no easy answers when Major questions what home really is. The Occupied World is a collection of incredible luminosity, embracing both the objective and the personal and fashioning from them something quite rare." Jenna Butler, September 20, 2008. (Full review at: http://poetryreviews.ca/2008/09/20/the-occupied-world-by-alice-major/) "In The Office Tower Tales Alice Major has written a contemporary equivalent to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales...Instead of the spiritual pilgrimage of Chaucer though, we listen to stories of contemporary characters as they struggle in their search for meaning. Her tales...explore a range of issues that are very topical: cancer, adultery, divorce, conflict with an unreasonable boss, gay and lesbian rights, and many more. One thing Major does extraordinarily well is to bring the characters in the stories to life through well-crafted metaphors that suggest an uncanny range of emotion. Her language is consistently at this high level, making the collection readable, memorable, and enjoyable." Ian LeTourneau, Legacy Magazine, Winter 2008 "The storyteller, Sheherazad, works for an engineering firm, as do her friends Pandora and Aphrodite. The narrative follows them over the course of nine months, ending on the eve of the new millennium, through experiences common to women everywhere: a cancer scare, fear of aging, difficulties with husband or child, not knowing what to do with your life. And as they discuss all these things, Sheherazad responds with stories. ... The narrator's voice is often lyrical, with all the alliteration, assonance and evocative simile that marked Major's writing in The Occupied World. At the same time, the atmosphere is thoroughly urban, with the frame narrative taking place mostly in the food court. ... The tales, mostly in free verse, take a variety of forms. Some take place in the present, telling of people the women know. Others travel to different times or places, like 16th-century Hispaniola in 'The Mother's Story.' 'The Gingerbread Girl' retells an old folk tale, while 'The Office Romeo's Tale' and 'The Tale of the CEO's Daughter' blend myth or fairy tale elements with a present-day story. ... What Sheherazad does is what women so often do: tell stories to build ties with each other, to commiserate, to spell out their lives and those of their families. In this sense Sheherazad's tales are life-giving, even if they don't literally save lives as in the legend. Alice Major has once again gone deeply into the familiar and infused it with new depth and meaning." Joanne Epp, Prairie Fire, January 2009 "Edmonton writer Alice Major's The Office Tower Tales has likely been avoided by some reviewers because of its length. But this book, Major's ninth, has a number of unfashionable virtues, including entertainment value. It assumes that poetry is a natural narrative mode. The three protagonists are Aphrodite, a receptionist, Sheherazad (or Sherry), a PR worker, and Pandora, from accounting... The Waitress's Tale tells the story of Jaynie-Lynn and how she dupes Pastor Eggleston into performing a lesbian wedding. It's a thoroughly Chaucerian theme, but religious hypocrisy never gets stale, and neither is the language here. This is an enjoyable and ambitious romp." Maurice Mierau, Winnipeg Free Press, February 22, 2009 "Pandora's box is open, and out come tales spun by Sherry. The Office Tower Tales is about the vivacity of life and living. It expertly weaves the mundane things of life into a tapestry of priceless collectables. The tales paint life with a new brush, post-modern paint, and extraordinary strokes. They are mythical, classical, and iconoclastic. Not since Chaucer's Canterbury Tales have we seen the frame narrative, now a mock epic for a contemporary audience. This is an epic work, huge in scope; an examination of the minutia of the ordinary lives of recognizable people, using the tropes of mythology as its metaphoric base." Jurors, Pat Lowther Memorial Award for Poetry, April 2009 "Established Edmonton poet Alice Major and Montreal-based newcomer Katia Grubisic won the two highest honours granted annually by the League of Canadian Poets at its Poetry Fest in Vancouver on the weekend. Major won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, which honours the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman in the preceding year, for The Office Tower Tales, described by the jury as 'an epic work, huge in scope.'" John Barber, Globe and Mail, June 17, 2009" "Alice Major, Edmonton's first poet laureate, has been a central part of a fulmination in the local literary scene. Her great success has been to marry art and entertainment with narrative poems that are thoughtful and funny, intelligent and accessible." Todd Babiak, Review of Fringe Theatre Festival performance of The Office Tower Tales, August 20, 2008 "The words 'blockbuster' and 'poetry' seldom go together, but there are no better words to describe Alice Major's latest book. The former poet laureate of Edmonton spent about a decade crafting the words for The Office Tower Tales and it appears not a second was wasted for the brilliance that unfolded from that time. This is truly a masterwork, the kind of writing that is wonderful not just because of its high quality but because of the rarity of its structure: the elusive long poem...Her main characters seem to have stumbled right out of ancient mythology and landed under fluorescent tube bulbs near a water cooler... What the business is actually doesn't really matter. What does matter is the power of the word, the formation of characters and the brilliance of storytelling." Scott Hayes, St. Albert Gazette, August 12, 2009 "Winner of the prestigious Pat Lowther Memorial and Book Publishers Association of Alberta awards, The Office Tower Tales is the gold medal performance of Alice Majors's poetic corpus. With a bow to Geoffrey Chaucer, Majors's lengthy narrative records office coffee klatch as a postmodern epic of hope in the face of death from that most dreaded of all modern diseases-inconsequentiality. Its tales are spun from the ordinariness of the (dys)functionality of three women in their seemingly impotent spheres of influence in the Edmonton engineering firm where they toil. Major has heroized these tales by giving them poetic heft and honouring the humanity of their tellers, even if not literally, as in the epics from which she has drawn their literary frame. As if in the ethos of a Greek myth, the three women meet daily for nine months eponymously as Aphrodite, Sheherazad, and Pandora during the time that Pandora awaits grandmotherhood. In their conversation, Major's narrators offer her readers literary light with the craft and insight of mature female wisdom, courage, and erudition. In doing so, they bravely face male domination in the place of business and the devalued experiences of women's work in childbirth, the care of the ill, the creation of community, and bearing of its fracture in their families. Their interior and exterior life stories are profound and life-generating, emotive and authentic. In a series of prologues, tales, and epilogues, brilliant musicality and emotionally vertiginous imagery ironize the banality they seem to advertise. The five-line stanzas that the narrators' voices serve shine with the meticulous crafting of words perfect to their purpose, offering a pilgrimage of their construction of meaning; the volume's themes are epitomized in its afterword: "Touch me and touch this place . / where we construct our lines from the wordless / like windbreaks. Where we make the edge / bite like the knife that shapes the quill. /. Our letters take their shapes / from magpie flight . / . th[eir] teetering trail printed across sand / or snow. The path of record blurred / by baffling drifts, lacunae." In these lacunae, the magpie, as the talisman of the tales and the aptly selected book's cover image, flies into our consciousness where its mimicry echoes our own female mythology. This volume is necessary to every library of women's studies and Canadian poetry." Lynn R. Szabo "In 2008, Major published verse novel entitled The Office Tower Tales, which was set in a food court in Edmonton but inspired in form and content by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and by the tales of the Arabian Nights. The result was a wonderful mix of magic, humour, love and friendship." Jamie Hall, Edmonton Journal, March 23, 2010 blah blah