Special Issue on the Scholar and Poet, Harry Garuba (1958-2020)
New Deadline: September 30, 2020
After the generation of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and John Bekederemo-Clark, Harry Garuba, as a world-renowned scholar and poet in Ibadan where he also led the Thursday group of poets, was at the bridgehead of a new wave of Nigerian Literary culture and scholarship since the 1980s till his passing in February 2020. For over 30 years, he sponsored, mentored, taught, supported and befriended that new generation. Always self-effacing, he never took or sought credit for his intellectual and moral generosity, a palpable example of which was the 1987 poetry anthology, Voices from the Fringe, which he organized and edited. This work is a formal introduction of the third generation of Nigerian writers to the literary world. In the area of scholarship Garuba’s quite but powerful intelligence and erudite influence is widespread. His academic essays are landmarks of rigorous postcolonial enquiry within a global school culture. Garuba inspired and straddled the scholarly, writerly and social worlds of a visionary generation of intellectuals. The Maple Tree Literary Supplement, MTLS, calls for submissions from Garuba’s colleagues, friends and acquaintances – and especially the ‘Thursday Group of poets’ – about his life and work in the form of poetry, essays – scholarly and otherwise – anecdotes or even prose fiction. These submissions will be published in a forthcoming issue of MTLS and collected into an anthology in the future. Submissions should be sent online through MTLS submissions form at https://www.mtls.ca/issue24/submissions/ or emailed to managingeditor@mtls.ca>. Submission deadline hs been extended to 30 September 2020.
Submit Your Work! Please Use the Submissions Form Below!
Writers and readers should please take note that typos and corrections that were missed in the heat of production will be weeded out from this website’s content during two weeks of post-mortem after an issue’s publication date. We need two weeks as this is a huge journal.
Important note*: All contributions already published in MTLS cannot be removed or changed for historical, research and archival reasons – just as with print publications. Moreover, this journal is collected by the Canadian National Library and Archives for the same purposes and as a record for posterity as well as now being circulated by EBSCO to global university libraries.
General Call for Submissions: Ongoing
Issue #24 is now live.
submissions deadline towards issue #25: 30 September 2020
The Maple Tree Literary Supplement provides a platform for dialogue or interviews on any topic between and amongst Canadian writers while featuring their work and reporting on literary events, landmarks or festivals in Canada and around the world–with an emphasis on their Canadian composition. MTLS has some of Canada’s most exciting writers on its editorial and advisory board, including George Elliot Clarke, Olive Senior, John Ralston Saul and Stephen Brockwell, with Amatoritsero Ede as Managing Editor.
Usually, we pay a 30-dollar honorarium to each contributor in any one genre. However, we have temporarily suspended this payment due to operational and fiscal reshuffling until further notice. Contributors should kindly take note. We will inform the public when we resume payments. Thank you for your understanding. Please indicate the genre to which your writing belongs in the submissions forms.
Prospective contributors should browse our site at www.mtls.ca and target their submissions to specific sections of the journal – Poetry, Essays, Creative Non-Fiction, Reviews, Roundtable, Impressions, Literary Images and Drama. All contributions should be sent to submissions@mtls.ca and enquiries to managingeditor@mtls.ca. While some materials will be solicited directly, unsolicited submissions are welcome – especially images of literary events with captions from Canadian Literary Festivals. Text Submissions should be in Times New Roman and 12 point size, without numbering and in word document format; pictures/images should be in Jpeg format. Please add a cover page with bio and address. All text should be submitted as one file. It is a good idea to take a look at those MTLS pages, which are similar to your submission when formatting your material. Reviews, for example, should follow the formatting we have on the site.
Since MTLS is a triannual journal, response time will fall within the four months preceding an upcoming issue. Essays on a broad range of subjects should be in a relaxed non-academic, free-flowing style, without footnotes or superscripts unless they are of the occasional scholarly type. Reviews should be between 500-800 words in length. Fiction includes short stories and excerpts from longer prose work in progress; creative non-fiction comprises travelogues and other kinds of literary non-fiction. Poetry should be of high quality and numbered between 4 and 6 poems of not more than 60 lines each or one long poem of not more than 120 lines. Excerpts of dramatic pieces between 3 and 4 pages are encouraged. The Roundtable section is in the interview or dialogue format between two or more Canadian writers. Contributors can propose a topic of discussion to us and find a respondent writer or writers to take part in that conversation. Publishers, especially small presses, are welcome to take part in the Impressions section, discussing the history of the making of a particular book, its reception, fate and challenges as well as the histories of their own presses. This is apart from a general discussion of the history of the Canadian book and printing industry up to such recent developments as online publishing technologies.
Review copies of literary works by publishers should NOT be sent to the publisher’s address as was the practice but directly to the reviewer. Reviewers may also write, with the support of MTLS, to publishers and directly solicit review copies. Again, literary festivals and reading series may contact us since we welcome unsolicited images capturing literary events in pictures for the Literary Images section of the journal. Pictures should be of high resolution and in colour. As mentioned above, all textual contributions should be in word document format, and photos should be sent as jpeg files. Contributors should attach their pictures and a short bio; in the case of publishers, we would appreciate a jpeg attachment of institutional logos and a brief history of the publisher and their major areas of operation. You may, alternatively use the form on the middle column to submit your work. It is fast and tidy, and material is directed into the <submissions@mtls.ca> mailbox.
