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Change comes: Jan Andrews' "Who Wants the Dress?"

2012-03-12T14:00:00.000-07:00

Coming up: Jan Andrews at Voices of Venus, March 14th at 7:30 pm. Venus Envy: 320 Lisgar

Astrid Lindgren, who most people know as the author of the Pippi Longstocking books, also wrote a book that I enjoyed as a child even as it creeped me out. It was called The Brothers Lionheart. A quick run through the plot: Karl is the narrator, a young boy who is sick with some kind of fatal illness. His older brother Jonatan, who is just about perfect, tells him about a place that you go when you die, called Nangiyala, where "all the stories are still happening." He promises that he will follow Karl there, and that even if it's a very long time before he dies, it won't seem that long to Karl. But, as it turns out, Jonatan dies first, saving Karl from a fire. When Karl dies not long after, they're reunited in Nangiyala, where Karl is no longer afflicted by his illness and is finally as strong and healthy as his brother. They settle down there in an idyllic, boys'-adventure life, but have only been there a short time when they get embroiled in a struggle between good and evil (evil in the form of a nasty warlord from the next valley over.) In the course of the battle, Jonatan is mortally wounded. But, he tells Karl, it's okay, because when you die in Nangiyala, you go to another place called Nangilima, which is even better, because there's no evil there. So Karl picks his brother up, carries him to the edge of a cliff, and jumps off. End of book.

I was disturbed by the book as a kid - and not really because the main characters die (twice.) All the usual reasons the book might be thought to disturb a child (suicide as the answer to being crippled, for example) didn't have as much effect on me as the way the book seemed to say that as soon as you think you've got the world figured out - as soon as you think you know what's going to happen, in this world or in the next - you'll discover that there's another layer beyond that, and another, and another. You solve the puzzle of this world (or it's resolved for you - in Karl's case, by death and being reborn in Nangiyala) and there will be more and different conflicts to survive, and yet another mystery of what comes after, waiting for you. Or, as the lady in Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time says: "You're very clever, young man, very clever ... But it's turtles all the way down!"

The Brothers Lionheart popped into my mind after I saw storyteller Jan Andrews performing her show "Who Wants the Dress?" It's a very powerful show, and in part, I think it's about finding out that once you figure out Nangiyala, sometimes you discover there's a Nangilima no one told you about.

Jan's show starts with a telling of a story by the English writer Sara Maitland. The story is a strange and mesmerizing one, about a young man who is compelled by tradition to dress as a woman in order to hunt his first seal. (According to Jan, Maitland claims this is a real folk tradition in some parts of the UK.) Killing the seal is the way to prove his manhood - but when he does dress as a woman he undergoes a transformation, and becomes the woman, and his/her shifting identity feels like a dreamlike discovery and a collapsing of his/her way of seeing the world all at once.

Jan's story picks up from the end of the first, and explores growing up in a time and place where the possibility that she might be a lesbian wasn't even considered. (Jan is nearly 70: it was a different time.) She tells the story of growing up, learning to fit in, learning the conventions (don't kick your leg over your bike, getting on "the boys' way"), wearing the dresses and the pretty clothes, playing the role that she and everyone around her assumed was hers to play. She tells about getting married, having children, all as things should progress. She thought she had life figured out. And then she met the woman that she would fall in love with, and everything changed. Of course things never change so drastically without turmoil, and without looking back at who you thought you were and rewriting it, like laying a layer of vellum over the past and retracing the lines. But eventually the storms cleared and the dust settled and she went forward into the rest of her life, with her partner, having made what most people would consider the greatest discovery and transformation of her life.

But then - at least this is what I felt, hearing the story - after years of settling into who she "really was," an encounter at a storytelling conference got her thinking that perhaps there was a Nangilima that she hadn't known about before, that there was another layer of vellum that could be laid down over the past and retraced on, that you don't ever know, even at 70, that you have everything figured out, that it's turtles all the way down.

What moved me about her story - aside from the obvious courage it has taken for her to put this show together and perform it - was that it rocks the ground under everyone's feet. Not just those who are confronting questions of gender identity and sexuality, as the world's views of those subjects shift and change around all of us, but everyone. The Brothers Lionheart gave me the creeps as a kid because it suggested that nothing is ever finally resolved. It's the disturbing truth at the centre of a lot of philosophies: you don't know that you don't know, and nothing you think you know can be relied on utterly. In the face of the world, you're best not to develop attachments to what you think is true. Change comes. It will shake you.

(If you want to see Jan perform this sit-still, barely-breathe, beautiful story, get yourself to Venus Envy this Wednesday at 7:30 for Voices of Venus.)

Unpacking fairytales in Perth

2012-02-12T20:04:00.000-08:00

Whenever I go to a really good storytelling show, I'm surprised again at how moved and excited and hyped up I get. Friday night I went on a bit of a road trip to Perth with my friends Ruthanne and Talia to see "The Brothers Grimm: 200 Years and Counting" with storyteller Dale Jarvis and musician Delf Maria Hohmann. Absolutely glad I went.

The show was at Full Circle Theatre in Perth, which, I'm told, is a redesigned car wash. It's a really lovely little theatre, and has something of the flavour of an old auto shop about it, although I'm not sure exactly how. Maybe it's the big, garage-looking wooden panels at the sides of the stage, or the high ceilings.

Dale and Delf have put together a show that weaves together the life stories of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm with some of the stories they collected and German folk music (Delf played the music, on guitar, banjo, whistle and dulcimer, and sang.) There were all sorts of things I hadn't known about the Grimm brothers, and a ton of fascinating facts woven into the story about who they were, why they started collecting stories, and the people they collected them from. There were stories about the brothers becoming celebrities, and unwitting political exiles, and a lovely bit played from the point of view of a self-important Hans Christian Andersen (who apparently once came to visit the brothers, and picked the wrong one to try and impress.)

And then there were the fairytales themselves, which were the original stories. Decidedly not the Disney versions. Some parts of these stories were actually pretty disturbing, especially told with the obvious relish for the gruesome bits that Dale showed. (His description of a father unwittingly eating a stew made of his youngest child was curdling. So was the story of the evil bishop plagued by an army of rats. That one actually made me squirm.)

These are weird, weird stories at times, too. As the evening went on you got a feel for them, for the place and culture behind them, and I started wondering, with some of the odder parts of the stories, what older myths they might be fossils of. Bits of The Juniper Tree in particular: which, if you know it, is one seriously strange story.

There were a couple of themes that kept coming back: magic trees growing out of graves, stepmothers eating their children, birds that sing the truth. And having even the familiar stories told in the old versions, and in the style that Dale told them, made me look at them new. I could actually listen to the story of Cinderella - oh, sorry, I mean Aschenputl - with new ears. For one thing, he told the German version. The one with no fairy godmother, but a magic tree and a pair of magic doves. The one where the sisters chop off bits of their feet to get them into the shoes, and the doves call them on it, and eventually pick their eyes out at the wedding. (The other version, which most of us are more familiar with, is actually a French version.) It made it new, and that meant, for me, that a vague sense of the people and the place - a little kingdom in the middle of what would eventually be Germany in the 1800s - started to build, as though I hadn't really imagined them before.

It was partly the style in which Dale told the stories, and partly the German songs that linked them together, and partly the stories that he chose, but I was suddenly thinking of the stories in Joseph Campbell terms. The stories unpacked themselves and I started glimpsing huge swaths of meaning behind them.

Dale ended with the story that the Grimm brothers always ended their collections with - the Golden Key. It's a strange little story that sounds just a little bit like a koan or a parable. A boy finds a small golden key in the forest, in the winter. He figures, where there's a key, there must be a lock, and looks around in the snow. He finds a small iron box, and fits the key in the lock. He turns it once. And we will only know when he finishes turning the key what is inside the box.

Catching up on the last two weekends...

2012-01-30T18:52:00.000-08:00

It's been a crazy couple of weekends - particularly VERSeFest-wise. . .

The two pre-Festival events were both very cool in their own different ways. Poetry For the End of the World was jam-packed with poets, open mikes, and music: I couldn't catch everything because I was running back and forth, but what I did catch was fun. I got to hear a couple of Call Me Katie tunes that I hadn't heard before, including their last number, which was lovely and surprisingly science-fictiony. (Any folk tune that includes lines about how "the ships are gonna burn... burn up on reentry" wins points with me.) I watched the finalists for the Poetry for the End of the World contest read, but missed the featured readers because I was busy running around to the loading dock at Arts Court to get photos of the weather balloon waiting for launch:

At about 10:00, we all headed out to the side of the building (well, not all: a few people didn't feel like heading out in the cold, but some brave souls crunched out to watch.) And the winning poem (Ian Ferrier's "Letters from the Ice Age") was launched to the end of the world. I had my iPhone with me and got video of the whole thing, then had a little fun at home with video editing.

Then we went back inside to see Puggy Hammer, who were a whole lot of fun, although by that time, admittedly, the audience was a bit diminished and a little tired.

Friday I made it out for Once Upon a Slam, although I didn't have a story prepared (I know what story I wanted to tell, I just didn't have time to get it ready.) It was a small crowd and a small slam - the weather was brutal, which probably accounts for that - but with four storytellers signed up there was enough to have one. Anne Nagy claimed the win with a squick-inducing story about trying to be a 'domestic goddess' as a young wife, and a batch of rose hip jelly gone horribly, wrigglingly wrong.

The feature was Luna Allison with a set of stories called "Girl Fail" - which I was really looking forward to, since, well, I've been known to girlfail on occasion myself. Luna was sick, which sucked some of her energy, but in particular she lit up for the excerpts she did from her upcoming Undercurrents show "Falling Open." And her stories were lovely - from a story about a motherless girl struggling at being a 'girl' and then being saved by the riot grrl movement, to a monologue in the voice of a cross-dressing man, to a story of a failed Brownie Hallowe'en party - how was Luna supposed to know that showing up as a dead person stabbed in the back would freak out all the princess-costume-clad Brownies? - to a poignant story about a trans man living a culture that celebrates the birth of boys more than girls - and didn't know that he was a boy.

Strangely enough, I just found a video that Robin LeWilliam-North made of the story he told in the slam: he's just an oddly creative, surreal dude.

Taming the Tides of the Earth from Robin Le William-North on Vimeo.

Then there was last Saturday - the Women's Slam Championships. I knew it was going to be crowded, but I guess I wasn't expecting the massive sell-out that we actually had: there were people sitting outside in the studio to listen over the speakers. In fact, in a moment of chaos as the last seats were selling, we wound up selling more tickets than there were seats in the theatre (there were some people sitting on the floor who shouldn't have been, for one thing: for another thing there was a miscommunication about how many seats there actually are) and I had a fairly wrenching few minutes where I had to tell some people who I had let in at the last minute that I was going to have to give them their money back. The show had already started, and I was starting to freak out about what we would do.

But, then, all twelve of the poets, sitting in the front row, spontaneously got up - as one, to a woman, without even conferring among themselves that I could see - and offered their seats, and went to watch the show from backstage, where they could hear but not see. I got a little emotional. It was a beautiful moment. Afterwards, the ones I talked to said things like, "Well, of course we did, we couldn't make people leave that wanted to see the show," and "It was actually more fun back there because we could cheer each other on more."

I'm not kidding, by the way: that's how mutually supportive, generous-spirited and group-huggy slam people are in this town. It's like the Care Bear Stare. It's enough to make a cynic run screaming.

I listened from outside, where I was watching the merch table, but caught enough of the show to know that there was no way to guess the winner. The scores were amazingly consistent, and right up till the end, it could have been anyone's game to win. All of the poets were solid. Rage lost points when nerves chopped up her poem in the first round, but she came roaring back in the second. I was glad to have a chance to see more of CauseMo and Scotch, both from the Youth Slam Team, and get a sense of their work. Scotch in particular blew the audience away with her second-round poem.

At the end of the night the scores had all been so close I had no idea who would be named. And then Rusty and Ruthanne had to confer with the poets - there was a tie. So they asked if the poets wanted to have co-champions, or a slam-off. Of course they said co-champions. So Ruthanne went back to the audience and told them we had a tie for first - between Sepideh and D-Lightfull. When the cheers died down, she said that we also had a tie for third - between Festrell and Elle P.

That's how close it was.

Like I said, I was listening from outside for most of the show, but Pearl Pirie got some great photos and posted them on Flickr. Some of my favorites:

Sepideh (Co-Champion)

D-Lightfull (Co-Champion)

Elle P (Co-runner-up)


Festrell (co-runner-up)


Judges, raise your scores!

Rusty (in the front) and me (in the back) talking to journalists at the break.

The twelve poets take a bow: host Ruthanne in the front.

Poetry mashups with Pearl

2012-01-24T20:55:00.000-08:00

I have really not had enough time lately to work on writing my own stuff, but over the last couple of weeks I've felt those little twinges again: lines I want to write down, stories nudging to be told, and that sense that somewhere, at some point, my "new" poems are waiting for me to open the right door for them.

Between that nagging urge to write stuff, and the fact that I've been working at home, and so for the last three days I've not really seen anyone else, I decided I had to pick myself up and go to the workshop at the Tree Reading Series tonight. So I did.

The workshop was being run by Pearl Pirie, who's coordinated the Tree Seeds workshops for a while now. I've been to other workshops with her, and one thing I really like about how she does them is that she gets you to play. It's sometimes hard to get a group of poets (particularly older poets, or poets who are firmly rooted in older traditions and styles) to play: this workshop had a couple of people who were initially pretty uncomfortable with taking apart and reassembling their poems. As though they'd break the original poems by messing around with them. But she's so easygoing about it that most of them ended up giving it a good solid try, and being surprised, I think, with the results.

What she had us do was take two of our poems and break them down the middle, by splitting each line into two grammatical parts, more or less at will. Then we spliced the first half of each line on poem #1 with the second half of each line of poem #2, ignoring whether it made sense or not. Then we took the strange Frankenstein's monster we'd just made and looked it over for interesting images, startling juxtapositions, things that worked when spliced together in a way that our conscious mind wouldn't have come up with. It's not that what we were making was in any way a finished product: it was a new starting place, or places, from two old poems.

I found it kind of satisfying just copying out the broken halves of the lines. Meditative. Sometimes a line or two, next to each other, would sound good or give me an interesting image in itself, but I'd leave it to come back to and keep copying. It was like digging new ideas out. I drew a line down the middle of the page and copied the first halves, then the second halves, and reading just the first-half side I'd see patterns and juxtapositions:
dinosaur heads
of construction
and the day
into a finished puzzle box
my body
the passing bus
overhead
of the streetlights
and go
Then as I started filling in the spliced second half, the lines that were created started to surprise me. Even make me laugh. This chunk in particular stood out for me (I did have to switch a couple of pairs of lines for each other and change some subject-verb agreements, and drop out a couple of useless line-segments to get this - yeah, I know, I meant to just type in what I had on my scribbled-up page, but pesky little Ego won't let me do that without just a little teeny bit of polishing. Minimal, at best):
the rain started
ratcheting and broken
dust-dazzling the summer earth
and the orange pylons, wet underfoot
while I take
the gravel-crunch vinyl
for the loop track from stillness to downpour
& the burr of my chain at the change.
Glance back, past the bottles
in our throats
and tank treads. I told you the names
all huge-bulked, weighted; you said you weren't
my balance, the green thing
snaps itself with Canadian flora
my brakes and pedals like a poem,
the wheeling sun. You didn't mind
the blink and glow; it was warm, falling.

Sure. It doesn't make any sense, and it's not a poem yet, and I'm not entirely sure I have a clue what it's about or going to be about, but there are lines I like in it. And a feeling I like in it. And lord knows it's unlike anything else I've written lately. And that in itself is totally worth the trip downtown.

Apocalypse Tonight

2012-01-21T07:23:00.000-08:00

Well, it's tonight: the Poetry for the End of the World party. Personally, I can't wait! Reports to follow, and fingers crossed that the weather cooperates (and that tons of folk show up!)

And, one poem gets to have this view of the world before the balloon blows and it's scattered into the stratosphere:

A love note

2012-01-03T17:47:00.000-08:00

Greg Frankson posted this a couple of days ago, and I thought it was awesome. And sums up a lot of why I love the Ottawa poetry community too. I hope he doesn't mind if I re-post.

Dear Ottawa Poetry Community,

I love you.

I adore how you have come together across all the false boundaries and dichotomies, annihilating the relevance of "page" and "stage" distinctions. I love your diversity of voice, your assortment of opportunities for writers, your binge-worthy buffet of choice for literary lovers in the National Capital Region. I love your bilingualism, your openness to voices in languages other than the two official ones, your embracing of the region's ethnocultural expressions.

I appreciate the way you don't allow those who were once resident in your city to feel anything but completely at home when they come back to visit. And I love the way you wrap the newest additions to the scene in instant acceptance in a bid to build a stronger community one poet at a time.

You are a shining example to the rest of the country and one of the best places to be a poet in the world. I am proud to have been part of this community for nearly a decade and, even though I now call Toronto home, will always consider myself first and foremost an Ottawa poet.

I wish all my fellow Ottawa writers an amazing, prosperous and prolific 2012. Keep setting the world on fire.

With love and respect,
Greg Frankson aka Ritallin

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T07:19:00.000-08:00

Here it is January 1st of 2012, and in keeping with my vague, unstated and relatively nebulous New Year's resolutions, I've already blogged once this year (at about 1 A.M. last night, when I posted my year-end retrospective on my rock climbing blog, Rockbumbly.) The ambition (well, one of them) is simply to write more: to produce more text, on more subjects. To write each day, something at least a bit substantial.

What to write about? Well, conveniently, I can always plug VERSeFest's 'Poem for the End of the World' contest, which is due next week (the 7th) and which I can't enter, but I can encourage others to enter. The winner gets to see their poem literally sent to the end of the world, which is gonna be pretty spectacular.

And appropriately for all the apocalyptic buzz surrounding 2012, I've also just started following Ottawa SF writer Hayden Trenholm on Twitter, and the first thing he tells me is that Bundoran Press is looking for submissions for an anthology called Blood and Water - near future SF dealing with the resource wars that seem inevitable. I've always thought that some of the scenarios described by people like Gwynne Dyer were (almost excitingly) science-fictiony. This is an anthology tackling the subject. Deadline for submissions is in March: I know I won't have time to write anything in time for it (and it's probably a bit out of my league). But maybe I'll try anyway. Contests are one way to give yourself writing challenges, right?

What's in a story

2011-12-15T20:36:00.000-08:00

One of the things that struck me, as I was listening to my friend Marie's show at Voices of Venus last night, was that we were not just hearing a story, we were getting a look inside the process of writing that was far more effective than any Q&A session where the writer talks about how she does it. I could imagine for a moment that I knew what it was like to be the kind of serious (although, not always serious, if you know what I mean) writer that Marie is.

What she'd done was quite clever, I thought. Asked to bring a storytelling set to Voices of Venus, the kick ass women's performance series, she brought a series of kick ass female characters - her own and others' - and took us through the journey of finding the right ending for one of them. She started with a very real object - a broken hoe, one that she had found when she took over her brother's apartment - and put it in the hand of a character, Mariella, who, I realized as she started telling the story, was the main character in the first story Marie had published. "The Taste of Strawberries," I think I remember it being called. The story ended on a serious downer, and I thought to myself, that's not how it ended the last time I heard her tell it. But that's also the point at which Marie started off on a different story than the one we thought we were listening to. She started telling us a story about making a story.

In trying to find a better ending for Mariella, Marie went on, she looked to other characters. Other emotions to give Mariella, working out, almost backward, who this character was. So she told us another story about a different woman, and when it was done, came back to the last scene of Mariella's story and started it again, but infused with that character's feeling and emotion. She shifted from story to story, some of them her own, some of them other authors', and each time she finished a story, she came back to that one final scene of Mariella's story, with her standing over her husband's grave and having to decide what to do next, and she retold the ending.

It's a risk she took, there. Going back, again and again, to the same scene, the same lines. Telling it again, but then taking it in a different direction each time. (Once, even, when things had gotten really wild, there were zombies. Yeah. I should have expected something like that.) But it paid off. We got to know the scene so well that returning to it rang this familiar motif before Marie did whatever she was going to do with - or to - Mariella. (I mentioned there were zombies; Marie also killed the poor woman off at one point.) Meanwhile we got to hear about King Arthur and Guenivere, Barbara Allen, and a brave girl who only wanted to save, and then avenge, her brother. And come back to Mariella and the grave and whatever the right decision was for her to make.

Like I said, one of the things I really liked about it was the way we got taken along for the fun and sometimes ludicrous ride of trying to work out a story. We got to experience it without being told that's what we were experiencing, exactly.

Tree Seeds and Learning Things

2011-12-14T21:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I managed, finally, to make it out to the Tree Reading Series for the season-ending open-mike and the workshop with Phil Hall. Tree so often conflicts with other things on my schedule that I hardly ever get to go: I was amazed to find myself free this time.

Tree is unique among the series in town in that it offers the Tree Seeds workshops, before the reading, and creates a lot of other ways for the readings to be a chance to learn, overtly as well as the learning that happens whenever you listen to writers read. There's the workshop series, held for free for whoever wants to come. There's the Dead/Undead Poets Reading, in which someone is invited to read from or talk about the work of a poet that he or she wants to introduce, or sometimes re-introduce, to the audience. And this evening there was also a talk by Shane Rhodes on the found poem, its history and variations and the theories behind it.

I came in moments before - or maybe after - the workshop started, bike helmet in hand and looking for a place to put my damp, gritty rain pants, and got the last free chair. It seems like a lot of the people participating in these workshops are repeat attendees, although there were, I think, other new faces than mine. Phil seemed surprised at the numbers - about 15 altogether - and said there were about twice what there had been the last time he ran a workshop. I'd love to think that had something to do with the publicity I've been doing for Tree, but I rather think it might have more to do with the fact that Phil won the Governor General's Award a month or two back.

He'd talked, at the previous workshop, about tryptychs, and was continuing on the same sort of theme, bringing out some illustrations and encouraging conversation about what the underlying relationships we have with numbers can do for a poem. Number of syllables, numbers of stanzas, numbers of natural pauses in a line, patterns and rhythms. Rather than present a fully formed theory, he nudged forward a couple of ideas at a time and let them sort of steep. I did feel like I was coming in to the middle of something, a bit, but I didn't feel excluded by the fact that some of the others had clearly been at the previous workshop. I scribbled down some notes and we shared the example poems between us ... an hour went by fast, and then it was time for the reading.

The Dead/Undead Poet for the night was Leonard Cohen, and Rod Pederson and his daughter Jennifer did something quite lovely; she sang "Hallelujah" while he read it, simultaneously. Besides the fact that "Hallelujah" is one of the more simple and lovely melodies out there (and Jennifer's voice is beautiful), I found it fascinating that with Rod reading the words as Jennifer sang, I started seeing how eerily the spoken and sung words matched up; it was a really subtle illumination of the musicality, the singability, of so much of Cohen's work. His poems are lyrics and lyrics are poems because both of them preserve the natural pace of the words even under the constraints of form and melody.

And then Shane Rhodes got up for his talk on found poetry, which was short enough that I really wanted to hear more. I picked up, and so did some others, I think, on the similarity of found poetry (and other kinds of conceptual poetry) and abstract art in terms of the relationship of process to product. In abstract art, and in some of the poetry that Shane used as an example, the physical thing produced at the end - the painting or the book - is really more of a byproduct of the artistic conversation, thought, process, and questioning that produced it. "The idea is the fascinating thing, and the book becomes something you can put aside," was what Shane said.

And then there was the open mike, with some readers I knew and some I didn't, and then it was time to pack up and head over to the Avant-Garde Bar for Baltikas and conversation.

Had to do it

2011-12-12T21:08:00.000-08:00

This just sums up so much of the bandwagon-jumping happening lately, since apparently all things geek culture are, these days, cool and therefore need to be copied and reproduced by people who actually don't get the genres they're trying to sell, that I had to repost. Plus, the harmonies are lovely, and the lyrics are freaking clever, particularly the rhythms.

December word-related events!

2011-12-12T08:55:00.000-08:00

Recently Local Tourist Ottawa asked me to run down the literary events of the month as a regular column. Since I work for VERSe Ottawa, I'm actually supposed to be pretty plugged in about literary stuff - that is, members of VERSe Ottawa are supposed to get in touch with me about their shows. I've already been to the Dusty Owl's annual food bank fundraiser on the 4th, and Urban Legends' last slam of 2011 last Friday, and then there's this list of upcoming stuff. I've added a couple of new shows, too, that weren't on the list for LTO: the Ottawa Youth Poetry Slam on Monday, this month's Once Upon a Slam, and the Ottawa Storytellers season opener at the NAC this Thursday, among them.

On December 13^th (that's tomorrow,) the venerable Tree Reading Series is holding anall-open-mic session at the Arts Court Library, along with a talk oncontemporary poetics by Shane Rhodes, one of Ottawa’s edgiest poets. Tree’sknown for offering more than a simple reading, being one of the only series intown that offers talks and conversations on poetry as well as workshops. Thisevening will start at 6:45 with a free workshop with Governor General’s Awardwinner Phil Hall, then Shane’s talk at 8:00, and then an open mike – withprizes!

Marie at the Storytellers Festival

On December 14^th, Voices of Venus is presentinglocal author and storyteller Marie Bilodeau. An award-winning fantasy author,with four novels under her belt and a fifth about to be released, Marie isknown – maybe notorious – for her strong female characters, her humour, and herappetite for epic destruction. Marie is also an entertaining storyteller –sometimes hilarious, sometimes lyrical. The show starts at 7:30 at Venus Envywith an all-women open mike: $5/PWYC and open mike performers get in free.

If you’re looking for a Christmassy event, try the Ottawa Storytellers’ season openerat the National Arts Centre Fourth Stage on December 15^th at 7:30. Storytellers AlanShain and Kim Kilpatrick will take the audience through 500 years of Christmastraditions, with live harp music by Janine Dudding from Acacia Lyra. If you’venever heard live storytelling before, you don’t know what you’re missing.Tickets are $20 at the NAC box office.

Ottawa Fountain

If you like the fire of slam, Capital Slam is rounding out the yearwith a fantastic feature at the Mercury Lounge on Saturday, December 17:they’re featuring “Ottawa Fountain,” the National Youth Slam Champions. Thisteam blew the competition away at the Nationals this year with their powerfulteam pieces and stage presence. The youngest of the team is only 13, but anyonewho’s seen them agrees they could all hold their own on the mainstage alongsidemuch older performers. The doors and slam signup are at 6:30: cover is $8, andfree for performers.

And if you like what you're hearing out of the new crop of slam poets, you can catch the Ottawa Youth Poetry Slam, featuring Kingston PEN, on the 19th at 5:30 at the Main Public Library. Kingston PEN came in fourth overall at CFSW 2011, in their first year of existence, and feature some new faces as well as some you might recognize from Ottawa's scene, like Greg "Ritallin" Frankson and arRay-of-woRds. Any time I've been to the Main Public Library for a youth event I have come out amazed and energized at the talent and capability of young artists. The Library is smart to be hosting these events: there's no better way to make the library cool than to have it be a venue where very cool kids do their thing.

On the 22^nd, ThePeter F. Yacht Club, a writer’s group/community/journal which has had apowerful influence over the poetry community in Ottawa, is holding a“regatta/reading/Christmas party” in the upstairs room at the Carleton Tavern(223 Armstrong) from 7:00 pm – there will be readings by Yacht Club Irregularslike Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie, Vivian Vavassis, Monty Reid, rob mclennan andothers. Hosted by rob mclennan, the Carleton Tavern readings are always warm,smart, and fun.

Ronsense at Once Upon a Slam (photo: Jason Walton)

December 30th is the final Once Upon a Slam of the year too! Held at the Mercury Lounge, Once Upon a Slam is a unique storytelling competition. It works like a poetry slam - time limit, audience judges, and all - except you get five minutes to get up and tell a story. No props, no paper, just storytelling. The last feature of the year is Sicilian-Canadian storyteller Charly Chiarelli, who I got to see at the Storytellers Festival a year or so ago. He's a whole lot of fun. Sign up for the slam at 6:30, the show's at 7:15. $8 at the door, or tell a story in the slam to get in free.

Meanwhile, end-of-year deadlines creep up: might as well endthe year by sending out your own writing!

Your next chance to get into the awesome online poetry mag Bywords.ca comes up this week, December 15th - Ottawa residents and former residents are eligible to submit poetry. Deadline is the 15th of each month.

The TreePress Chapbook Competition’s deadline for submissions is December 30. Itcosts $10 to enter and you can submit a chapbook of up to 32 pages; the winnergets an ISBN for their book. Submissions can be sent by mail to Tree PressChapbook Contest, c/o Claudia Coutu Radmore, Managing Editor, 49 McArthur Ave.,Carleton Place, ON K7C 2W1.

In/Words,Carleton’s literary journal, is also looking for submissions of poetry andfiction for their winter issue. The deadline to submit is December 31 – sendyour work to inwordsmagazine@gmail.com.The Winter issue will be officially launched at VERSeFest 2012 (Feb 28-Mar 4.)

Taking my affirmation where I can get it

2011-12-06T13:16:00.001-08:00

One of the reasons I don't post on this blog very much is that, really, I'm pretty sure about 80% of the world has a better, more-informed opinion than me on most things literary. It's hard not to feel like that when the universe of literature is so vast and infinite, and they teach university courses on criticism of it. (Most of which, in university, I avoided, or coasted through, or - in one memorable case - accidentally attended a totally different course, not discovering my mistake until I received the "Fail" on my transcript for non-attendance.)

But, I tell myself, how stupid is that? Today on her blog, my friend Marie posted this lovely list of reasons she gets up (insanely early, I might add) to write. And her reasons must pay off, because she's working on her fifth published novel and was a finalist for the Aurora Award last month. She loves to write and she works damn hard at it.

Now, getting up to work on your novel isn't the same as sitting down to write your blog... or is it? It's all about keeping at it, after all. And it's also about not being paralyzed by worrying about what other people are going to think. Whether you're being 'useful' or not. Or, as another friend put it to me, when you do get recognized for your work, "it makes all the time and care you put into tending your blog-garden worth it."

What she was referring to was this: the other day, I got home with an idea (suggested by the aforementioned Marie) for a blog post for my other, more well-followed, blog, The Incidental Cyclist. It was just a funny little burst of "flyting" (which I occasionally indulge in, because I amuse myself) about the meaninglessness of certain Internet comments. Within an hour, I had a message from the collaborative news site OpenFile, asking to repost my rant, and offering me actual money for it. When I wrote it, I was completely uninterested in who was going to read it (other than Marie, who had gone into giggles with me talking about the idea.) You never know. You just write stuff, from where you are, and sometimes other people like it and sometimes they don't.

But if you never write stuff because you think someone else out there has probably already written it better, or someone else out there will think you're wrong or ignorant, or whatever, then you know what happened?

You didn't write it.

Now, to try and remember that.

Happy Birthday CBC

2011-11-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is 75 years old today. Today I've been listening to all that archive tape; the CBC voices from 1936 and beyond as they're replayed on the radio. And I've been thinking about my relationship to CBC Radio, which is a lifelong, warm one. Those voices are like friends or extended family; people I've grown up with. A couple of weeks ago, when I had the chance to meet and talk to Barbara Budd though the Writers Festival, I felt like I'd known her for years: which, I suppose, in a way, I had.

When I think of the CBC, a couple of instant replays run through my mind:

The low, rolling hills in the middle of Germany, lit a sort of golden green because it was near sunset and the light is low, and a highway curving between them. There were patches of blackish green pine wrapping the hills, and I was sitting in the back seat of my family's car with my younger sister, and we were listening to CBC - was it on shortwave? Was it rebroadcast from the military base? I'm not sure. We were living in Germany at the time, because my dad was teaching at a university there as a guest professor. However it happened, however the sound waves got to us, what I remember is that there they were: Morningside, and As It Happens, and Disc Drive, filling the car while we drove through German fields and pine stands, thousands of miles from home.

Washing the dishes after dinner when I was home for the summer from university: our kitchen radio would go on right after dinner and it was always tuned to the CBC. My parents were still out in the dining room, at the table talking, and I was at the sink looking at myself in the mirror above it (funny: the geography of the kitchen has changed and the sink is no longer in that position; the mirror is also gone) washing the dishes and listening to As It Happens. This was during the Alan Maitland/Michael Enright years, and Michael Enright was interviewing a representative from the Red Cross of Canada about the tainted blood scandal. Enright absolutely cornered and skewered him. You could see it happen, like watching a really good border collie ducking and nudging a sheep, inevitably, in through the fence gate. It might have been the first time I realized that listening to a good interview can sometimes be like watching a good sports game. I dropped my dishcloth, wiped the suds from my hands on my jeans, and went straight to the dining room to tell my parents what I'd just heard - to try to give them some idea of how exhilarating it had been to hear Enright just go for the jugular like that.

In 1997, standing next to the radio, in the corner of the office at the New Brunswick Committee on Literacy, where I was working summers when I was home from university, listening to the last ever episode of Morningside, and crying. (Luckily, I was working alone in the office that morning.) Of course, I also laughed. Particularly over the parting gift of a Madagascar hissing cockroach.

I also remember the day the news hit that Peter Gzowski had died: the flurry of grieving emails that went back and forth among members of my far-flung family, as though someone we knew personally had just been lost.

Riding my bike home in the dark, in late fall when the air was cold, along the bike path on the river, listening to Ideas on my headphones and watching the lights of the Montreal Road Bridge on the dark water: my headlights lighting up a small circle of the path as it ran through the trees, with Paul Kennedy's voice in my ear and no one else around.

Coming home from work a couple of years ago, dropping my keys into my bike helmet where it hung on the handlebars, going into the kitchen to unpack my groceries, switching on the radio to All In a Day, and saying, out loud, as I usually did, "Hey, Adrian: tell me what's going on."

Happy, happy birthday, CBC: here's to many, many, many more years of sounding like home, feeding my brain, being part of my family, filling out my life, and telling me what's going on.

Stand up for the Writers Festival

2011-10-27T15:59:00.000-07:00

photo by Pearl Pirie

I worked the Writers Festival again this fall (last week, October 20-25.) Since I had to leave the team last winter, it's been a bit of a comfort that they can still bring me back for the week of the Festival to deal with driving and some logistics help and general backstageiness. Really, I feel like even if I had a regular nine to five job I would bank up my personal days to take that week off and work for the Festival.

Every time I do, I remember how exhausting it is, how hectic, and how very, very cool. By a few days in I'm fighting fatigue but still managing to sit in on events, come up to the hospitality suite afterward to talk to people, and get myself home in time to wake up early and do it all over again...

And then there are the amazing guests and the conversations that happen on stage. One evening I walked in to the back of a jammed room and on the stage were Johanna Skibsrud, Helen Oyeyemi and Miriam Toews. I stopped for a moment: sure, I knew about the session, but the full weight of the names in it hadn't quite hit me until I saw them up there chatting with Mike Blouin. The session about love with Kevin Chong, Ann Enright and David Gilmour was about as good an onstage as I've seen.

I have huge admiration for the Festival team for pulling this thing together season after season with the resources and manpower they've got. But that's the thing. They do this - two nationally recognized and acclaimed Festivals a year - with a grand total of three full time staff, a few temporary contracts, and a part-time position. IFOA has thirteen people listed as staff on their website. Vancouver International Writers Festival has twenty. And do note - those festivals run once a year only.

Do you see a bit of a disparity here? What's going on? Twice a year, the Ottawa Writers Festival team pull minor (and not so minor) miracles off; with a fraction - literally a fraction - of the staff and funding of other festivals across the country. In what way is this fair, or appropriate for the capital of the country and a city that has produced some of Canada's finest writers?

I'm adding my voice here to those of people like rob mclennan and Amanda Earl, who have written, on a regular basis, about the mystifying lack of support Ottawa seems to get for the arts. I hear, every Festival, that the literary community in Ottawa can't really imagine the year without the Festivals, how much they look forward to them each spring and fall, how impressed they are with the work that Sean and Neil and Kira and Leslie have been doing to put the Festival together for fifteen years now. Every so often I hear someone talk about how amazing it is that they do what they do with what they have - but not nearly often enough. This is our Festival, and I think we need to stand up for it. Be proud of it.

I think there needs to be more noise made in support of the Festival. People who go, as members of the audience or as participants on stage, and who enjoy it - especially the members of the literary community with some name recognition - should write letters of support (send them to whoever you like, but cc the Festival; they use them in applications for funding.) David Gilmour did, a few years ago, and there was response. If they can do what they do with the funding and manpower they have now, just imagine what they'd be capable of if they were given funding commensurate with the work they do. Funding equal to what other festivals get.

Because this last Festival was really great., by any measure. I can only imagine how good it would be if, like VIWF, they had the staff to make it even greater.

(Incidentally, do you know who's still coming to town through the Writers Festival this fall? Wade Davis, Niall Ferguson, and Steven Pinker. Yeah.)

It's that time of year again: The ottawa small press fair is nearly upon us!

2011-10-18T11:44:00.000-07:00

The New Quarterly's table at the book fair...

For a lot of people, there’s something deeply satisfying about browsingthrough tables loaded with stuff you just can’t find anywhere else. There’s just something cool about it: you think of flipping throughvinyl at a record store looking for that rare find, or being part ofthe 'in crowd' before the rest of the world catches on to the next bigthing.

And then there are people who love small presses because, face it,almost every writer starts in a small magazine, or with a chapbook, oreven by publishing themselves. (For example, H.P. Lovecraft, the famedhorror writer and author of The Call of Cthulhu, was a prolificself-publisher of small press chapbooks, newspapers and journals, undera multitude of pen names.) All those different forms of thesmall-to-micro-press lover will be in attendance at the fall edition ofthe Ottawa Small Press Fair on November 5th.

Started in 1994 by Ottawa poet rob mclennan and his colleague JamesSpyker, the Small Press Fair has evolved and grown over the last 17years. Spyker is no longer involved with the fair, but it has beenfaithfully nurtured by mclennan and has steadily grown in popularity.As a university poet many (many) moons ago, I remember bringing thehand-photocopied and stapled books I’d produced for the CarletonEnglish Literature Society to the fair, and later attending with DustyOwl Press: our biggest publication was the novella Tattoo This Madness In, by Montreal writer Daniel Allen Cox, who went on to garner nominations for the Lambda Award for his novels Krakow Melt and Shuck, and for the ReLit Award for Shuck. Which just goes to show, you never know what future award winner’s work may be on the tables at the small press fair.

The fair usually contains exhibitors with poetry books, novels,cookbooks, posters, t-shirts, graphic novels, comic books, magazines,scraps of paper, gum-ball machines with poems, 2x4s with text, etc;vendors at previous events have included Bywords, Dusty Owl, ChaudiereBooks, above/ground press, Room 302 Books, The Puritan, The Ottawa Arts Review,Buschek Books, The Grunge Papers, Broken Jaw Press, BookThug, ProperTales Press, and others. It’s a great place to pick up brand-newliterature at a bargain price, to discover your new favorite localartist, and to meet others in the literary community. Besides, you getto poke through piles of bleeding-edge, cool, local writing!

The small press fair’s fall edition will be held on November 5th at theJack Purcell Community Centre, room 203, on Jack Purcell Lane (just offElgin Street), from 11:00 to 5:00 pm (and if you stick around till5:00, there’s usually a traditional mass-exodus to the James Street Pubfor drinks and bookish conversation afterward.)

SF and Atwood and me

2011-10-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

This weekend my dad sent me a link to this article from the Globe on Margaret Atwood, and then this morning on Q Jian Ghomeshi interviewed her about her new book, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. I saw the book on the new release shelf during my shift at Perfect Books last week, too, and meant to take a look at it, but then wound up busy with other things.

These recent interviews have been making me think, again, about Atwood and SF (and, as my dad said, more favorably.) But there's still something about her take on speculative fiction versus science fiction that bugs me. In her interview on Q today, she said, again, that she defends that distinction because she doesn't want someone to pick up a book expecting one thing - rayguns and aliens, for example - and get something else - say, Winston Smith or Offred.

Well, why not? I've picked up books expecting a YA fantasy and actually gotten adult magical realism. And vice versa. And I've been fine with that. Lots of people pick up what looks like a mystery and get a crime thriller. When I opened Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis, I was expecting fantasy/horror, and in fact got more or less realistic fiction. (Except for the weird bit with the alien cars.) The owner of Perfect Books picked up David Gilmour's latest book expecting it to be like other Gilmour books he'd read, and it wasn't. I don't see what Atwood's aversion to people reading something unexpected is.

Unless - and I think this is why I'm uncomfortable with her argument - she's implying that one is more valid, or worthwhile, or important. Because really, her distinction - that science fiction deals with things that are unlikely to happen, while speculative fiction deals with things that could possibly come to pass - also carries that implication; that the one is entertainment only, and the other has more intellectual or philosophical value.

But I don't see that H. G. Wells talking about the ultimate division of the human race into indolent rulers and troglodyte workers is less of a comment about our social structures than Winston Smith being watched by his television and controlled by fascism. It's just that one has a scientifically improbable time machine and the other takes place in the future without the intervention of a narrative gadget. Neil Gaiman said that all SF was playing 'let's pretend,' and that you can go higher and see further by playing 'let's pretend.' Let's pretend that England is invaded by an absolutely destructive enemy. What would the mass exodus of London look like? That's what I feel The War of the Worlds is actually about. Not octopoid aliens in metal capsules. They're just the reason for the collapse of order (remember, Wells was writing well before the kind of absolute destruction the 20th century brought us was even imaginable.) Same for the zombies in World War Z. What's scary is the description - the believeable description - of the fall of our infrastructures, our social orders, our security, and the ways in which the end could sneak up while we're all going about our daily business. Lemonade sellers around the crater where the killer aliens have landed. A protagonist who can really do nothing but run and hide and hope to survive.

Or let's pretend that there is an androgynous society out there. What would that look like? Let's pretend that America is taken over by a radical fundamentalist theocracy and women lose all the rights they've fought for for centuries. Let's pretend that there's a way to live permanently on a submarine, completely self-sufficient and cut off from the rest of the world. How would you do that? The Enterprise, the TARDIS and the Stargate aren't the point of the story: they're a means of getting to the story. The Dispossessed takes place on another planet, yes, and the people in it are not human. That doesn't mean that it isn't a game of 'let's pretend someone actually created an anarchist society: what would that look like? Would it work?'

But hey, that's just me, and far be it from me to argue with Margaret Atwood of all people. Having read and heard some of what she has to say about this latest collection, I certainly feel like I understand more of why she says the things she says about speculative and science fiction. I like that she goes back far enough to distinguish "novels" from "romances." (Novels being 'realistic' and romances being 'fantastic.') I like that she's even bringing back "romance" in its old definition; that is, a wonder tale. Frankenstein was called "a scientific romance," right? But then to go back to "romances" and "wonder tales" and claim a strict division from thenceforward between probable and improbable settings ... it still feels to me like there's a value judgement buried under that.

Jeff Cottrill's back in town

2011-09-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

The Dusty Owl Reading series will be bringing Toronto spoken word artist Jeff Cottrill back to Ottawa on October 16th., with his high-energy, darkly funny, sometimes uncomfortable monologues and short stories. If you're easily offended, look away.

Last seen in Ottawa at the Fringe Festival with his one-man show Grouch on a Couch, which debuted at the Fringe in June 2010, Jeff Cottrill is a satirical writer, performance poet, journalist and occasional actor based in Toronto. He has gigged in literary series throughout Ontario, England and parts of the U.S over the past decade, and recently had a role in an independent short film called "In the Can." With a darkly comic flavour, Jeff likes to make audiences laugh, cringe, or (preferably) both.

Jeff is the Literary Editor of Burning Effigy Press, through which he has authored four chapbooks, including the most recent, the book version of Grouch on a Couch; he has also recorded two spoken-word CDs and written theatre and film reviews for several Toronto publications, including EYE WEEKLY and NOW. TorontoPoets.com has called him "one of the funniest spoken-word artists in Canada". This is Jeff's third feature at Dusty Owl.

Jeff’s website is at www.jeffcottrill.com.

“A one–man panorama of rage and pop culture. Jeff Cottrill has high energy. Funny and sometimes frightening.”
– Katie Penrose, VIEW (Hamilton)

“A crude but delightfully funny inside look at one of the grouchiest characters in children’s television. Jeff Cottrill is creative and energetic and draws his audience in. Be sure to see this show… just leave the children at home!”
– Amanda Nesbitt, Artword (Hamilton)

“Hits on the perfect balance between slightly exaggerated, tell-it-like-it-is sarcasm, and it’s-funny-because-it’s-true humour.”
– Ashly Dick, Fully Fringed (Ottawa)

So very much to do

2011-07-05T13:43:00.000-07:00

Things are pretty crazy busy these days: between my gig at Arc Poetry Magazine, my other gig with WIEGO, my new gig at VERSeFest, and working the occasional night at Perfect Books, there hasn't been a lot of writing time. But I did want to post this! Yesterday I got an email invite to read as part of the Tree Reading Series' Hot Ottawa Voices show, on August 9th! I'm pretty pleased to have been invited - in fact, I didn't really believe it at first. But, it's now been confirmed.

Also, while I'm tootling away at my own horn, the Ottawa Storytellers' "Stories and Tea" series will be featuring me next Tuesday, the 12th, as part of a show called "Live, Love, Laugh." I'll be telling a story from my own life, all about the trials, the triumphs, and the earth-shattering humiliation of being a not very athletically inclined kid in a rural New Brunswick school. Hearts will race, listeners will be moved, and pudgy kids will careen their way through hurdles. It'll be epic...

Earthborn 2011 & Story Slam

2011-06-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

This weekend is going to be a busy performance weekend for me! The poster above is the gorgeous poster Sean Zio created for the Kymeras' summer show - Earthborn 2011. We'll be at the Clock Tower Pub on Sunday at 7, reprising some of the stories and poems we did in Almonte when we opened for Evalyn Parry, along with some new material, all about bicycles. I've got a couple of new poems to bring, and I hear Marie's telling a story about bike that falls in love. Funny how bikes and love seem to come together. As a bike blogger, I'm pretty happy that it seems that my friends also see the fun of bikes (and have such great stories and poems to share about them.)

I'm also going to be competing in the Once Upon a Slam finals on Saturday night. . . somehow I made it in as a finalist! Check out the website for updates and profiles of all the finalists... and here's a preview of a story I told earlier this spring for your viewing pleasure:

Seriously not cool, and illegal

2011-06-14T08:16:00.000-07:00

Sending out an APB:

Yesterday I saw a series of messages from Rusty Priske and Ruthanne Edward asking if anyone knew anything about someone recording one of the old Oneness Poetry Showcase shows at the East African Restaurant. . . because Rusty had just discovered a website that was selling mp3s of his work, and that of a few other poets in town (Ian Keteku, Chris Tse, PrufRock.) I'd link to the site but I don't want to drive them any traffic, because what they're doing is illegal. None of these poets were asked, or told, and none of them are getting any of the money.

It seems that what happened was that someone recorded the show on video, posted it on YouTube, and someone else downloaded the audio from that, and decided to sell it. Entrepreneurial, I suppose. And illegal and infuriating.

Rusty's putting together a cease and desist order (Google your name and mp3-find, and if you come up, contact him - @RustyPriske on Twitter.) And I started thinking about it. Posting YouTube clips of your work is getting to be practically de rigeur for spoken word poets. Someone will argue that if you posted it publicly, online, you gave up your ownership of it. But that all collapses as soon as money is involved. Rusty's response, on his Facebook profile, was to tell people emphatically not to buy the downloads. "I'll give you the poems if you want them," he said. And someone questioned whether his being willing to give them to friends invalidated his claim against the people who'd put them up for sale.

Nope. It totally doesn't. Rusty wrote and performed his poems. They are his, to do with as he will. If he wants to give them away, that's fine. What isn't fine is a third party taking his work and making money off it without asking him, getting permission, or sharing the profits - or exposure - with him in some way. It's not that they're making money that Rusty would have somehow otherwise got for his work: Rusty doesn't sell his poetry that I'm aware of. It's not that this site is stealing money from Rusty, exactly. But the people that download the poems may think that Rusty was the one that uploaded them, and that the money is going to him, for one thing. They may not know that they're not supporting the artist with their purchase. But that's not even the point.

The point is that even in the broke-ass and not-always-money-based artistic economy, you don't get to profit off someone else's work without compensating them in some way. Maybe this isn't a question of economics (come on, the poems are probably selling for a buck apiece) but it's a question of where the ethical lines have to be drawn. It's not about the money. It's about people knowing, or being taught, about what it means to respect an artist and the work they've put into their art. The money is just a convenient way of marking that respect, but it could just as easily be marked with credit, asking permission, directing someone to someone else's website. There is an intangible economics that has to be respected. What this website has done undermines all that.

Spin

2011-06-06T22:36:00.000-07:00

This weekend the Kymeras got to open for Evalyn Parry and her fantastic show 'Spin.' A celebration of the bicycle (and in particular the phenomenal changes it created in the lives of women), this show is a little hard to describe. Part musical show, part documentary, part one-woman-and-a-guy-playing-a-bicycle show, it was moving and mesmerizing and surprising. Personal and political.

Evalyn's songs and stories and snippets of theatre take us, mostly, through the 1890s and the bicycle craze, when bikes became not just ubiquitous, but also, serendipitously, propelled a good chunk of the women's movement. She tells tales of rebel entrepreneurs, suffragettes and the Ladies' Christian Temperance Union, and interweaves them with her own relationship to bicycles - your bike is a part of you - and the rich metaphors you can wring out of this simple machine. "The past is behind us / the back wheel is the power / the front wheel freewheels / hour after hour . . . "

I was riveted. As well as giving us the songs and stories - Google 'Annie Londonderry' sometime! - Evalyn was joined on stage by Brad Hart, who played a vintage bike mounted on a mechanic's stand. I think I heard him say there were fourteen separate pickups mounted on the bike, so he could play the tubes and fenders with drumsticks and brushes, whack on the seat for a bass line, spin the pedals, ring the bells, use a bow on the spokes, and rattle drumsticks on the spinning wheels. Add to that a set of looping pedals, and the bike sang. It was an absolutely constant presence in the show, a third character, the main character. Your eyes kept drifting to it where it hovered on the stage.

Sean, in the audience, just before Evalyn's show. And the bike.

The Kymeras - well, three out of four of us, since Ruthanne was at a storytelling conference and couldn't come - lucked into this gig. We'd been out to Almonte last year as part of Mississippi Mills bike month: arts organizer and poet Danielle K.L. Gregoire knew that I was a cycling blogger, knew the Kymeras, and asked me if I thought we could do a show about bikes. We did - to a small crowd, admittedly, but it was a fun gig, and this year, with a star like Evalyn coming in, Danielle thought of us again.

So we came out to do a bike-themed Kymeras set, to open for Evalyn. I don't think any of us really realized how big it was going to be until we got to the Almonte Old Town Hall for sound check and saw the seating. There were going to be about 170 people in the audience at this show.

Sean and Marie doing a sound check. Me getting artsy with the camera phone.

We did a very quick sound check and went for dinner with our host and Evalyn and her band, then headed back over to the Town Hall where people were starting to fill in the seats.

We went back to the green room to munch on the lovely bowl of fruit the hosts had put out, run through our poems and stories one more time, and get dressed in our performing getups. Yup, we had a 'look': coloured summery t-shirts and black pants with one leg rolled up (to stay out of the gears.)

Sean and Marie: fashion icons.

And then it was time to go out! I have to admit to being pretty nervous, but the audience was not just big, they were warm, responsive, receptive, and a joy to perform for. I had brought my poems on paper (as the 'page poet' of the foursome, but also because I don't have Sean's confidence for memorization) and as I read, out of an embroidered notebook I'd bought and copied the poems into for the occasion, I could feel the audience coming along with me. It really breathed a whole other life into the words I was performing. The same thing happened the last time I performed in front of a really large audience, in January at the NAC. I could feel my performance getting kicked up a notch. I highly recommend the sensation.

Marie anchored our set with a pair of stories, about love winning over a bicycle, and then about a bicycle winning over love. I came between the two stories with a trio of poems about childhood bikes, about the one I have now (which changed my life) and about taking up my space on the road, and then at the end of the set Sean did a couple of his own poems - which echoed mine in their themes of love and summer and freedom and nostalgia - and then ended with a Mary Oliver cover, "Summer Day."

And then we were done, and giddy, and happy, and we headed down into the hall to watch Evalyn's show, which was, as I've said, totally mesmerizing. Watching Brad play the bicycle was a whole lot of fun, and Evalyn was a complete chameleon on stage, becoming a half-dozen different characters as she recreated the 1890s, and then took us through her own stolen bike and the bits of her life that had been tangled up in it. She got a standing ovation at the end: I was one of the people on their feet first, I think. Jumped up.

And I was so darn happy to get on my bicycle the next morning.

A weekend of fairs

2011-06-01T11:48:00.000-07:00

As some of you might know, I was just hired as Circulation and Marketing Manager for Arc Poetry Magazine. I'm pretty chuffed about it - I love Arc, and the idea that I can actually work for a poetry magazine makes me do happy dances. This weekend I wound up at two separate fairs for Arc: ArtsPark in Hintonburg, and the Ravenswing Craft and Zine Fair.

The table at ArtsPark was organized by some of the Arc board members: I just showed up with back issues, me, and helped to man the table, smile at people, and hand out poetry cards. They had a Poetry Factory set up - a couple of metal boards and about eight different magnetic poetry sets, where people could create their own poems (and possibly win a prize) and a typewriter manned by a volunteer poet who, for a dollar, would write a poem on the spot for you.

I was fascinated by who stopped off at the table. The magnetic boards, perhaps predictably, pulled the kids over. Children, usually, are drawn to any chance to make marks. They see a board full of magnetic words as an invitation to come and move stuff around. Adults, on the other hand, struggle with this worry that they might 'do it wrong' or be judged. That someone might be watching. So, the first ones over were the kids, bringing their parents with them. Usually.

There was also a contingent, usually of older folks, who sidled over to the table and asked, after a moment of blinking, "Is that a typewriter?" and a healthy crop of people, my age and older, who said, with a sort of happy recognition, "Oh, my god, I learned to type on one of those!" I recalled, a couple of times, the old electric typewriter I wrote many of my first stories on (until my long-suffering parents, whose bedroom was next to mine, finally got me a computer to silence the 2:00-AM clatter.)

And then there was the interesting pattern of who would ask for poems, and what they asked for poems about. There were a lot of parents, often of infants, who asked for poems for their children. One boy, maybe 10, pouted and insisted that he didn't want a poem, so his father asked for a poem about fathers and sons. "No!" the boy said insistently. So, Claudia, who was on the typewriter at the time, wrote a poem called "This Is Not A Poem."

Meanwhile, the fair around us was pretty amazing. I used to live in Hintonburg, back when it was less of an artist's haven and more, well, sketchy. The community that has developed and its sheer vitality is inspiring. The crowds were out in force, even if it was kind of a rainy day, and the whole things felt, well, good. I was completely disarmed, in the afternoon, by a unicyclist pedalling around the whole fair, with a flock of small kids running after him and cheering. Like something out of a movie.

The next day was Ravenswing. Admittedly, I didn't think of signing up for Ravenswing until it was too late, which was silly of me. I've known the organizers for years, and I've been involved with Ravenswing since the get-go, when it was a monthly craft and zine fair in Jack Purcell Community Centre. But, I showed up anyway, with a backpack full of back issues and art cards to give out. The first few hours of the fair were pretty dismal - it poured rain and everyone, stoically, even heroically, set up their tables anyway. I hovered under a friend's tent. Next to us, Adam Thomlison of 40wattspotlight stood, with a strange half smile on his face, at a table with three or four zines under a clear tarp covered in rainwater, slowly getting wetter. Undaunted, though. Bless.

But by noon, though, the rain stopped, and the sun actually came out, and even in the rain, the crowds were pretty surprisingly good, and I really got down to wandering around handing out poetry cards, talking to people about Arc, and generally being a part of the fair. Only three times did I walk up to someone and say, "Hey! would you like a poem?" and have them shuffle, look uncomfortable, and mutter, "No, thanks." (Still trying to figure that one out. What, if you take the poem you'll have to, what, read it? Talk to me?)

Most people, though, looked pleased to get the card. More than a few said "Oh, Arc! I love you guys!" Which is a great thing to hear.

Next year, we'll bring the Poetry Factory to Ravenswing. It would go over *really* well.

John Lavery Memorial tomorrow

2011-05-27T10:52:00.000-07:00

photo by John W. MacDonald

I'll just repost the announcement I got from the Writers Festival this afternoon - I know I'll be at the Manx to remember John.

JOHN LAVERY MEMORIAL/WAKE READING

Sunday, May 29, 2011 - 4:00pm

Manx Pub, 370 Elgin Street

DETAILS

A memorial/wake reading for the late Gatineau writer and musician John Lavery (December 31, 1949 - May 8, 2011) will be held at the Manx Pub from 4pm-6pm.

Hosted by David O'Meara, this informal gathering of friends, admirers, fans and otherwise well-wishers will feature readings of Lavery's own words as tribute by some of his friends

If you would like to say a few words about/for Lavery, or have the opportunity to read a short selection from one of his works, email rob mclennan at rob_mclennan@hotmail.com or Max Middle at maxmiddle@gmail.com.

For those who are interested, a limited supply of some of John Lavery's published works will be available for free distribution at\ the event. The family has suggested that those who wish may, in his memory, purchase and donate a children's book to the Campaign La lecture en cadeau (Reading as a gift) of the Quebec Literacy Foundation or a similar campaign in English.

For those inquiring about the cd of original songs John was working on over the past few months, the family will be planning a Celebration of Words and Music in John's memory as a cd launch sometime in September, 2011, with music and readings in English, French and Spanish.

Link obituary for Lavery here: http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2011/05/john-lavery-december-31-1949-may-8-2011.html

Early Summer Morning Honey

2011-05-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning I found myself, quite by accident, downtown early in the morning. (It's a long story, involving a very early appointment far enough out in the western Barrhaven Wilderness that a missed bus meant not getting there at all, thank you to OCTranspo.) So, instead of going to my appointment, I decided to head for Elgin Street and Perfect Books, which I heard had been looking for a part-time bookseller. Figured I'd drop in and talk to them about that, as I'm still on the lookout for part time work.

I got downtown by about 8:30, so wound up sitting in the Bridgehead down the street reading (Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde, if you must know) while I waited for the shop to open at 10:00. In the cool morning sunshine, I walked over, chatted with the owner for a bit, and then made the rounds. Walked right back to the poetry section, since I've been looking for a copy of Michael Blouin's Wore Down Trust (don't ask me why I didn't buy one at the Writers Festival. Momentary brain slippage.) I didn't find Wore Down Trust - but I did find, with a note reading "Local Author!", a small stack of copies of Amal El-Mohtar's The Honey Month.

Now, I've been meaning to read The Honey Month for a long time. I follow Amal on Twitter, and while I've never met her in person, we have many friends in common, to the point where I'm not sure why and how we've never met. She recently reposted the Honey Month posts on her LiveJournal, with extra comments, but I can't read things on a computer screen. I just get vertigo when I try. Seriously.

Anyway, I picked the book up, said 'what the hell' quietly to myself - I might be looking for work but I refuse to deny myself books - and headed to the cash. It felt right. Turns out Amal used to work at Perfect Books, so I chatted to the owner some more about her, and why/how I haven't, somehow, managed to meet her yet. And then I headed out to catch a bus home.

It was a gorgeous day on Elgin. There was a light, cool breeze and a sort of clear, clean-feeling sunlight. The sky was blue, the streets felt clean, the trees had just gotten to full leaf, so they and the grass were a rich goldy-green: it was one of those early summer days. My bus even arrived just as I got to the stop. Everything seemed to be flowing along just about perfectly. And I settled in on the bus and opened the book.

Small presses make such pretty books, for one thing. But also, as the bus rumbled along and I started reading, I got sucked right in. The book opens a jar of a different kind of honey - peach creamed honey, black locust honey, fireweed honey - in each section. Amal describes the colour, scent, and taste of the honey, and then dives into a story or poem, as though the taste of the honey had triggered a synaesthetic fugue. In the stories, or poems, the colours and flavours and personality of the honey run subtly through a rich narrative. It's sensual and dreamlike. I kept emerging briefly to catch my breath and then diving back in with a smile on my face.

And I don't often write reviews per se - seems to me like everyone does and there are a zillion review blogs out there that probably do it better than me - but this is not so much a review as it is a reflection on how sometimes the book you're reading and the day you read it in can be just about perfect for each other. I haven't finished The Honey Month yet; I had to put it down and get back to work when I got back to my place. But as I stepped off the bus, it occurred to me how similar the day and the book were. Gentle, rich, clean, sensual, with a touch of magic hovering over the brickwork and a light, cool breeze. They fit perfectly with each other. It's very possible that any time I pick this book up, now, and my eyes fall on that old-looking serif font and its narrow margins, and the colour panel illustrations, I'll remember one particular day and the way it felt. I think I'll consider that a gift.

Chinatown Remixed

2011-05-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the kickoff of Chinatown Remixed, a really funky little idea of a street festival that started up last year and hit a stride this year, I think. It's an exhibition of local art on the walls of Chinatown shops and businesses, which kicks off with a day of street performers, buskers and musicians. Last year the Kymeras performed at a couple of tea shops, roving-minstrel-style, but it's hard to be a roving minstrel storyteller and possibly even harder to be a roving minstrel poet. We had a blast, but as one of a very small group of performers - that year Chinatown Remixed was mostly a doors-open art exhibit - we weren't really what people were expecting.

This year there were a lot more performers for the kickoff day, and we were set up in one location. What we decided to do was a series of small sets - the same show over and over, essentially - over three hours, at Umi Cafe, where we got the background of writer and artist Ian Roy's "words words" exhibit. Fitting - his works were silkscreen prints over chunks of greyscale text from his own short stories. It worked well - people seemed to come inside in waves, hang out with tea and muffins, stay for our short 20-minute set, and then move on. Each time we performed we wound up with something like 15-20 people in the room, and twice I had a stranger come up to me afterward to tell me how much they liked my poetry; a nice vindication. It was a chance to perform for both friends (someone we knew showed up in time for each set) and strangers, which is also pretty awesome.

Across the street from us, Glenn Nuotio had his keyboard set up in the window of the vintage Tang Coin Laundry. (We got to run over between sets to catch some of his show.)

Original photo: Sizzlevizzer on Instagram

And through the glass of Umi Cafe we could hear the Oda-Wa Taiko drummers down the street and watch people walking in and out of the shops around us (some of them carrying balloons.) Sort of a mini-WestFest. Despite the chilly wind and grey sky, people really seemed to be coming out and enjoying themselves. It was just odd enough, and cool enough, and quirky enough, to fit perfectly with Chinatown.

Sad news

2011-05-09T07:27:00.000-07:00

I came home last night to the news that we'd lost John Lavery. I knew he'd been sick. Two days ago when I talked to Steve and Cathy Zytveld from the Dusty Owl, they said they'd spoken to him that day and, in Cathy's words, he sounded like "he's leaving."

But I certainly wasn't expecting it. Even though I've known a long time that he had cancer. I wasn't expecting it this soon. It's always too soon.

There were gorgeous photos of John passed around on the social networks, and words of grief from the writing community on their statuses. And I couldn't think of anything to say that didn't sound empty. I didn't want to say anything in 140 characters or less, and I really didn't want to 'retweet' something someone else had said, although I tried, a few times, and hit 'cancel.' For one thing, this sort of news always sits wrong for me on a system like Twitter or Facebook, which are designed to be chirpy, full of LOLs and LMAOs. I couldn't think of anything to say in that brightly lit, neon space.

So I didn't say anything, although I felt I should. I didn't know John as well as a lot of people around me did, but I could have listened to him read - or sing - for hours without ever getting tired of it. He went unaccountably unrecognized by the national scene, but his writing, his lyrics, and his musical talent were utterly wonderful.

So I cried, but couldn't say anything. And then last night I dreamed about a guitar that had warped and broken - the neck twisted and the box cracked. It would never sing again, and I woke up sorrowful.

Signed

2011-05-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

I'm mostly posting this picture for Dad, who gave me this copy of The Sounds of Poetry, which I brought along to the ghazal concert last night, which was gorgeous.

Last day of Festival today: I caught the noon event with Mike Carey and JM DeMatteis, both comic book writers among other things, and it was great: more on that later. Two more events to go!

The Sounds of Poetry: Robert Pinsky in Ottawa

2011-05-02T14:05:00.000-07:00

The former American Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, came to Ottawa for the Writers Festival, and I got to sit in on the second half - regrettably only the second half - of the Masterclass session he gave this noon. (I was out doing some driving, in fact taking an author to Osgoode Township High School, and missed the first half.) But the half I did get to see was remarkable.

I stole in through the back door of the basement auditorium at the Ottawa Public Library on Laurier. There was a really big crowd, for a noon poetry show. The immediate impression I got was of the quality of Pinsky's voice: quiet, resonant, measured, quite compelling. He was talking about, as I expected he would be, how the sound of poetry relates to the subject. In fact, he pretty much seemed to be saying that the sound to an extent dictates what is said. He was reciting lines of poetry - and I was amazed by the amount of poetry (other people's poetry) he could recite from memory. It's a lost art and shouldn't be. He was able to illustrate every point he was making with extended recitations of poems that he held up as examples.

The first line to grab me was "The grammar is the melody; the lines are like the rhythm section." He was talking about how to think of a poem not in terms of each individual line (and how it ends, or rhymes, or enjambs, or scans) but in terms of the grammar of it. After that, you can futz with the beats, but they're not the melody, they're the drum line. (When he answered a question, later, about his translation of Dante, he said something similar; that because of the difference in word length between Italian and English, English translations are syllabically much shorter. So, he had translated Dante by translating the sentences, and then trying to shape them with half rhymes, but had not, as many translators do, translated the poetry line by line.)

The next thing to grab me was watching him recreating the process he might go through to create a poem about being on stage in Ottawa by actually doing it, out loud, on the mike: coming up with a starting point - say, that the hotel was very close to the venue - and then ringing changes on the words, associated words, the reverse meanings of some of the words that spoke to him out of the sentence fragments he'd started with. It was absolutely fascinating. He said, "You pick out the elements, the words and ideas that seem to cluster together, and work with them: the other words are just words."

He also said, "The material psycholanalyses you. It determines what you need to say," and went on to explain that he discovers by working with the poem what it is he's saying. He doesn't start out with something he's burning to say or talk about and create a poem that talks about it. He lets the associations of sound and concept play themselves out in his mind and that way figures out what the poem is about as he's writing it.

After his Masterclass Session there was a reception at the American Ambassador's residence, where he recited some more of his own work: and I can't wait to hear the ghazal concert he's doing tonight along with Lorna Crozier, Rob Winger, and Sandra Ridley.

Storytelling workshop

2011-04-29T10:57:00.000-07:00

Kim co-ran the first storytelling workshop I ever took (and I blame her, and Ruthanne Edward, for the story slamming I've been doing ever since...) If you've never tried storytelling, I can highly recommend Kim as a guide into the unexplored territory of getting up on a mike and starting to tell a story . . .)

Intro to Storytelling with Kim Kilpatrick

We all tell and listen to stories by our families, friends, co-workers. What is storytelling and how is it different from reading or from telling jokes? In this very interactive and entertaining program, learn what storytelling is and learn to find, gather, create, and tell stories. Everyone has stories to tell. Kim Kilpatrick has been telling stories all of her life but officially has been a storyteller for ten years. "I love creating and crafting autobiographical stories and helping others to learn how to do this." We will also talk about many genres of storytelling. From folktale to literary work, from historic to epic, there are so many kinds and styles of storytelling. Come and find your voice and find your stories. You'll be glad you did!

Tues 1:00 – 4:00 PMMay 17 – Jun 21 (6 wks)

Fee: $120
Registration: Crichton Community Cultural Centre
2nd Floor-200 Crichton Street
Ottawa, ON K1M 1W2
phone: 613-745-2742 fax: 613-745-4153
communitycentre@rogers.com
www.crichtonccc.ca

Festival Kickoff

2011-04-28T10:13:00.000-07:00

Well, today might be the first day on the posters but last night was the kickoff for the Writers Festival, with a launch for Michael Blouin's Wore Down Trust at the Barley Mow. I love when the Festival kicks off with a party for a local writer. The place was jammed, loud, happy, friendly, and celebratory. The reading even pre-empted Game 7 (it's okay, Montreal lost anyway.)

And the talk all died down completely so Mike could read from the book, which he did with aplomb, reading from each of the three sections of the book (from the perspectives of, severally, Johnny Cash, Alden Nowlan, and a semiautobiographical third character.)

What he read was grounded, bluesy, considered stuff, and I certainly thought I heard a few echoes of Cash's voice. The book itself, from all accounts, is hard to describe, and he didn't read for that long - I for one could have listened to much more. So, I got a sense of the feel of the book, but not, I think, the whole: I know I really want to get my hands on a copy so I can spend some time with it.

Short Stories

2011-04-14T20:09:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, for Literary Landscapes, I got to interview the winner of the CBC Literary Awards for short stories, Meghan Adams - a Masters student in Creative Writing. Her story, "Snapshots From my Father's Euthanasia Road Trip, or, Esau," is a family portrait in miniature, where a daughter finds herself, vaguely unwilling but unable to refuse, driving her father from Nova Scotia to Toronto so he can jump off the Don Valley Bridge rather than die of some unnamed disease.

The show's here, if you want to listen!

Writersfest Season

2011-04-07T08:39:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I haven't actually written about the fact that Writers Festival is coming up in a couple of weeks! I guess because I know everyone else is already posting their picks, etc. - for example, rob mclennan just posted one of his "12 or 20 questions" pieces with J.M. DeMatteis, who will be coming to the Festival this spring. (Search around: he's done 12-or-20s with a few other Festival guests too.) Most Festivals, I've been far too busy running around helping to put the Festival together to write about who I'm looking forward to seeing. But, as most of you know by now, I'm not working at the Festival anymore (although, festivalgoers will possibly not notice much difference, as I will be working for the bookseller and have been hired to drive authors around to schools, so my days during the Festival will be much as though nothing has changed. I'm really looking forward to being on site and part of the team again, actually. It feels really weird to be an audience member. I keep wanting to jump up and help with the mikes or the box office.)

Anyway. Have you seen the new and beautiful Writers Festival website? It's gorgeous. I really like the way you can print off your own tickets, and how the information is organized. Bye-bye scrolling and tiny brown font. And that index page is bold-looking.

What am I looking forward to? Well, I know I'll be selling books a lot of the time, so I may not be able to sit in on many of the events. But I'll be driving for the school program, which means I may get to sit in on sessions with JC Sulzenko, JM DeMatties, Mike Carey, AJ Lake, Lesley Livingston, or Arthur Slade - all of whom are people I really like and/or whose books I enjoy (not having yet met JM DeMatteis, I don't know what he's like in person, although I'm betting he's cool.)

The geek in me, too, is looking forward to Mike Carey and JM DeMatteis's talk on graphic novels, as well as the session where Mike and Andrew Pyper will talk about creepy stories. I'm also very curious about the You Are Not A Gadget session with Jaron Lanier and Lee Smolin, and the session on science's quest for immortality with John Gray. And of course, the geek in me will be there for Robert J. Sawyer's Webmind event. Can't miss out on one of Canada's most important SF writers.

Meanwhile, the poetry nerd in me is looking in anticipation at the next Messagio Galore (if you haven't seen one of these, you've been missing out on some exhilarating mental exercise), wiggling happily about getting to see Pearl Pirie read at the Poetry Cabaret, hoping to sneak in to the Poetry Masterclass with Robert Pinsky, and hoping to finally wrap my head around what a ghazal is and why everyone's so het up about them at the Ghazal Concert (besides,with Lorna Crozier, Rob Winger, Sandra Ridley and Robert Pinsky reading, it's sure to be awesome.)

I've found that, inevitably, going to hear poetry makes me more determined to try and write poetry. Once I get over sitting there with my jaw dropped thinking, "well, crap, I'll never be able to write like that..."

Other things that catch my eye - Marina Nemat, who is always lovely and gracious and whose story is just heartbreaking, is going to be at the Books and Brunch. Michael Blouin is reading from Wore Down Trust at the Barley Mow. There's a Short Story Masterclass with Clark Blaise. And Giller winner Johanna Skibsrud's coming too. And I can never resist an adventurer, so I'm eyeing the Will to Live event with Survivorman Les Stroud.

But that's just me. You be keen on all the stuff you're keen on. And see you there!

More Local Touristing

2011-03-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

My second piece on Local Tourist Ottawa just went up: an extended mix of the review I wrote here of Clare Murphy's show at the Fourth Stage. . . May be doing some writing for them about Once Upon a Slam, too, which I'm heading off to tonight (which reminds me, I really need to run through my story and get it down to 5 minutes! It's a break from my past stories: a historical true story from the last days of the Vietnam War. You'll have come out if you want to know more!)

And then, just for a change, maybe I'll write something for them that's not about storytelling.

First Local Tourist piece!

2011-03-19T20:23:00.000-07:00

Hey, check it out: just posted my first piece on Local Tourist Ottawa, where I'm writing about the lit scene. This post covers the wrapup of VERSeFest and why I think it's going to make a huge difference to Ottawa's poetry scene.

Gods and Monsters

2011-03-18T09:52:00.000-07:00

Am I ever glad I ran - ran - from the CKCU studio to the NAC in time for Irish storyteller Clare Muireann Murphy's On The Heels of the Hound. This was a presentation by the Ottawa Storytellers Fourth Stage Series, and not one I wanted to miss (even if Thursdays are choir night, so, sadly, I often have to miss OST Fourth Stage shows.)

I'm an Irish mythology geek, so I was pretty happy to find out Clare Murphy was going to be here. On Saint Patrick's Day. To tell the really old stuff; origin myths and creation stories and ancient epics.

The room was pretty full when I came sneaking in minutes before the show (and my friend Ruthanne had saved me a seat right up at the front, bless her!) The teller came on stage singing, carrying a staff, in a white dress with a green shawl and ogham letters written down the back (and yeah, I knew what they were and thought that was a great touch.)

Murphy's storytelling is conversational, and vivid. The sound effects and different voices she could produce with just her voice were amazing, and she leaped from character to character, becoming a a warrior poet, a snorting, belching, repulsive giant, a crafty old Druidess, an arrogant king, a little boy - often back and forth between lines of dialogue. She spoke straight to the audience - to particular people in the audience at times - involving us in the story as well. We became, through the show, the chant that healed King Nuada's arm, the sound of the wind, servants put to sleep by magic, druids being chosen for a task, and by the end, the chorus of the song she'd been singing between stories. So in a way we became shapeshifters as much as she did, as did her staff and shawl, which became different objects through the stories as well.

Something about the updated, conversational, 'this is all happening in a time and place we can recognize' tone she used kept the myths she was telling fresh: these stories are thousands of years old, but she kept them from feeling distant. You could relate to these people, which is one of the things I find so interesting about the Irish legends. The characters are very human, even when they're gods. They have human failings and passions and fears and loves - and senses of humor - and Murphy brought that out. I don't think I've ever felt quite so much compassion for Fionn mac Cumhail in his search for his lost wife, or for little, stubborn, innocent, pigheaded, terrifying Setanta (he grows up to be Chu Chulainn, who Murphy described as "like Hercules, but psychotic and homicidal.") And I'm not sure I breathed during the warrior poet Amairgin's crossing of the nine waves to land in Ireland.

I wanted more: when she was done it felt like no time at all had gone by. Certainly not a couple of hours. Now where's my copy of the Dictionary of Celtic Mythology? Think I want to spend some more time with these stories.

VERSeFest Taught Me

2011-03-16T16:17:00.000-07:00

I'll be on CKCU's Literary Landscape tomorrow 6:30-7:00, 93.1 FM) talking about the repercussions and impact of VERSeFest with Jessica Ruano (and possibly other poetry people).

I'll also have a blog post up soon about VERSeFest on Local Tourist Ottawa, which I'm right now composing, and struggling not to drag the possibly-not-yet-embroiled LTO readership into the heated, sometimes vitriolic 'page/stage' debate. But still wanting to give them some sense of why that debate exists, why it matters, and why what VERSeFest did, in bringing together a very diverse group of poetry organizations, was not only important, but got a few people all verklempt at the closing party.

I think it was really important to have a space where people got to hear what was going on at other reading series and among other groups in town. It was very, very cool to hear the spoken word audiences snapping their fingers for the page poets, and the page poets responding to the spoken word. And for me, it was particularly interesting to be there for back-to-back shows and to hear - along with the differences between styles - what was similar.

At the moment, I'm running a quick Twitter campaign - using the hashtag #VERSeFestTaughtMe, I'm hoping to garner some responses on what people learned from this opportunity to be exposed to other people who might be practicing poetry differently from them. Just sent out another call - I'll read whatever I get back out on-air tomorrow.

True fandom

2011-03-15T10:03:00.000-07:00

Okay, now this is a strange and yet kind of impressive tribute. I just stumbled across this tattoo.

Yes, that's fragments of text from William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. Say what you like about tattoos, when so many of them are fairly generic 'tribal-knotwork'y graphics, I have to be impressed by someone who wants an entire sleeve of text. And fragmentary text. And, well, cyberpunk text.

(Click here for an unmicronized version of the photo in its native web habitat.)

VERSeFest (Part 1: Wednesday night)

2011-03-11T13:00:00.000-08:00

Did the people who had never been to a Voices of Venus show have any idea what they were in for? Did the people who had never been to a blUe mOnday show have any idea what they were in for?

If not, that's exactly what I had been hoping for VERSeFest: that I would look around and see someone in the audience being exposed to something entirely new. Although, I have to say that even I can't remember ever having been to a poetry show before where not one, but two of the performers removed clothing . . . but that's another story.

Wednesday night was sort of a girls night at VERSeFest - Voices of Venus, of course, is the city's only women-only open mike & series, and the University of Ottawa's blUe mOnday series, who hosted the second of the evening's events, featured Sandra Ridley and Christine McNair. Voices of Venus hosted an open mike (all erotica and all signed up in advance) and then a sexy set by Beth Anne Fischer, a new and very welcome addition to Ottawa's spoken word scene. She started out the set with a piece accompanied by a lovely flamenco guitar that made the whole poem seem somehow sun-dappled and sultry, encouraged the audience to get loud, did poems that were funny and funky and hot (check one of them out here), gave out chocolate, and wrapped up the set with a polished, fun, really well-choreographed... burlesque routine. Yup, she did a striptease, tassels and all, to Michael Buble's rendition of "Fever." There's a gorgeous picture, snapped by Charles Earl, here.

I've got to say the open mike was pretty stellar as well - the whole set damn near stolen by Luna Allison's theatrical, vulnerable, hypnotic piece, more dramatic monologue than straight up poetry performance. (See? Boundaries and borders getting shoved around all over the place!) But the other performances were also strong: Allison Armstrong's "All Woman" and Emily Kwissa's love poem to anger being standouts for me.

Going from the Voices of Venus show to the blUe mOnday was a brain-expander for me. The crossover that was going on between the different series was made obvious when the host, after their open mike, said something (possibly a bit too self-disparaging) like, "That was a really good open mike. I've seen a lot of those performers as features at other shows. Usually our open mikes are, well, they're kinda different. You know. And usually our open mikes aren't so . . . slam."

"Spoken word!" someone yelled from the audience, "there's no competition here!" (She meant that "slam" is a kind of poetry show which involves a competition, although it's frequently conflated with the style of poetry that most often makes it onto the stage at a slam. That terminology, and all the discussion that goes with it, and all of that stuff about poetry categorization, is getting clawed to the surface at VERSeFest, which is something else I'm happy about.)

"Well, you know what I mean," he said, kind of defensively. "Just - our open mike isn't exactly like that." Meaning, I assume, that their open mike has more people reading their work off pages, and probably more new poets. (I don't know, haven't been, should go.)

But what turned out to be the brain expander for me was listening to Christine McNair and Sandra Ridley, while being aware of the 'spoken word' people in the audience. Christine and Sandra are probably/would probably identify as (not that I want to run around slapping categories on people) 'page' poets. But as I listened to their readings, I started hearing how some of the wordplay is the same. Repetition to create a rhythm and to punctuate. Breaking or twisting a word in the middle to bring extra meaning out of it or to make it sing. 'Team pieces," even, since the two poets joined forces a couple of times to read certain sections of their poems in counterpoint. They both break syntax and juxtapose unlikely ideas and words, allow images and ideas to be suggested at rather than given, and put the listener in the place of building her own linkages and relationships to the poems, but (especially with the open mike bridging between their work and Beth Anne's spoken word) I couldn't help but feel a strong sense of continuity.

Both Christine and Sandra set a whole different rhythm to the night. Quieter, yes: from poems designed to get a round of applause at the end we had moved to a sense of sequence, a sense that it was okay not to clap (although people did, sometimes, for some poems.) It felt we were listening on a longer timeframe (and in fact, Sandra only read two long poems, both of which gave us - and her - time to stretch out and relax into their flow: a meditative way to wrap up the night.

Confession

2011-03-07T09:21:00.000-08:00

Is it wrong to be jealous of Sean Moreland?

I made it across town last night for the Dusty Owl reading at the Carleton Tavern (the new locale, at the moment, since Swizzles had been proving a little unreliable in the being-there-and-opening-the-doors department.) Call Me Katie were there for one of their regular Dusty Owl gigs, with a lot of new material and a collection of fans to fill up the upstairs room. And then Sean got up to read.

Yeah. Jealous. Is that so wrong? He's got the perfect poetry reading voice, and (when he needs to) he stretches and squishes it around like a slightly elastic, pliable substance under the pressure of the words he's pronouncing. I like the sound of Sean's stuff, I like the rolling repetitions of sounds and the dreamlike way the images are suspended. I like that he writes what I would have to call 'horror poetry' - creepily insidious and disturbing even while it's elegant. (The poem 'Alma Mater' was a mesmerizing exploration of the horrific aspects of the feminine. I want to hear it more.) He's also free to do a fairly straightforward narrative prose line (still with that ear for sound, though) or to break words and images down and stretch them around as he reads - both figuratively and literally.

Sean does this stuff so well I'm tempted to throw my hands up and just leave this writing thing to the experts. Except that he also makes me listen to my own words as they come out just that little bit more carefully. And he does make it seem like so much (brainy) fun.

Also, on the verge of VERSeFest, listening to Sean reminds me how much I'm looking forward to the cross-fertilization of the 'performance' and 'page' poets that VERSeFest will (hopefully) engender. Can we get rid of those distinctions please? They're so weighted. Depending on what side of the 'line' you're on, they're value judgements and that's just plain wrong. Sean Moreland is a performer. You can tell he thinks about how the poem is going to sound, not just as he's reading it but as he was writing it. He knows where he's going to drag a consonant out, twist a vowel to get a separate shade of meaning. He's thought about this stuff. Forget this 'page'/'stage' distinction-based-on-content stuff, there are poets that focus on how their poetry is going to sound and then there are poets that don't. But you know? Most of the poets that I enjoy do. Gonna be fun to hear them all in one place for once.

VERSeFest kicks off Tuesday!

2011-03-02T10:48:00.000-08:00

Hard to miss the buzz about VERSeFest lately. Check out their website: I'm definitely booking off some time next week to get out and see what I can! This weekend is packed with pre-Fest events, and then the official kickoff happens at Arts Court on the 8th with Ian Keteku, David McGimpsey, Brad Morden and Craig Poile. . . and it all just goes from there.

I also have to join the rest of town to say congratulations to Pearl Pirie for the Robert Kroetsch Award win!

Ottawa, Ottawa, it's a poetry sort of town. Even if the people at Metro were a little unplugged (and it was funny to watch the indignation fly. Hey, Metro is a massive cheesenews conglomerate. Not that surprising they don't know what's going on in poetry (and that they called VERSeFest the city's "first ever poetry festival.") Really, if you're not involved with the poets, you don't know what's going on in local poetry. . . It IS kind of a niche market.

Translating Talk

2011-02-22T09:56:00.000-08:00

Now this is something that has interested me before: the Literary Translators' Association of Canada is hosting a talk on March 3rd on "Translating the Spoken Word" in The Book of Negroes.

It fascinates me because so much rests on what characters say in a story, and what they say is so dictated by the language, the time, and the culture that they live in. It's vitally important (as came up in an Ottawa Storytellers meeting I was at last night) that the words of the characters - and their diction, and their idiom - serve the story and convey more than just what they're saying. And in translation that becomes a whole separate challenge.

I remember, while rereading Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, years back, suddenly becoming aware of his (frankly brilliant) translator, William Weaver. It was because I was reading along in a passage where the characters were engaged in a funny, witty, snappy bunch of dialogue, and I noticed ... a bit of slang, or a reference to something in pop culture, that had seemed completely natural to me. Until I remembered that the whole passage had originally been in Italian. The novel is set in Italy. The characters are undeniably - essentially - Italian. And I caught myself thinking, "what the hell did Weaver have to go through, if this is not an idiom in Italian, to find an idiom that would make sense in English and still fit the characters?"

Since then, I've been, in a sidelong kind of way, really interested in the question of translation. I remember talking to Marie Bilodeau on Literary Landscapes a year or so ago: she is a native French speaker who didn't really speak English until adulthood, and who now writes fantasy and science fiction novels - in English. And she told me that she wouldn't translate her own work into French, and isn't sure if she's got a 'voice' in French.

It's fascinating. I don't, and can't, translate. But I think I'd like to catch this talk.

Literary Landscape tonight!

2011-02-17T10:40:00.000-08:00

So, tonight I'm breaking from the usual trend of talking to someone about an upcoming book launch or reading or what have you: I read Pearl Pirie's post on poetry and performance on her blog, and thought, yup, that's something I think I want to talk to Pearl about on the show! Check out the post, and then tune in tonight at 6:30 (CKCUfm, 93.1)!

(And, after the show, I'll try and post the audio here in case you miss it.)

Oscar Wilde? Bollywood? WTF?

2011-02-13T08:38:00.000-08:00

This weekend a friend and I got to go see Plosive Productions' The Importance of Being Earnest at the Gladstone. I have had a bit of a soft spot for the play since I was a teenager (when, by way of illustrating something in the middle of an after-dinner conversation, my dad once got me to read through the Lady Bracknell interrogation scene with him. Something to do with his wondering how I would decide to deliver the line "A ... handbag?!?")

It's a terribly clever script, of course, packed with so many one-liners and quotes and aphorisms and tight little reversals and verbal fireworks that you're almost certain to get a laugh out of at least a tenth of them, no matter what you do. After that tenth, the rest of the laughs have to do with how good your actors are. And this production had some solid actors - leading the pack were Stewart Matthews as Jack and Garrett Quirk (what a terrific name, especially for this show) as Algy.

But - but - oh, I can't go any further into the show, really, without addressing the looming, unavoidable thing that's breathing down my neck. I have to get this out of the way. For some reason, God knows why, the director (David Whitely) decided to set the play in British India. And in the 1920's, which is sort of peripheral. Okay. . . fine, upperclass twits are upperclass twits wherever - and whenever - you go in the Empire. Global search and replace London to Calcutta, Shropshire to the Punjab, Victoria Station to Howrah Station, etc. There's an extensive glossary in the program to explain all of the replacements, and I have to be impressed at the research that went into it: looking up a Calcutta cultural equivalent of "the Empire Theatre" or "Willis'."

But I mentioned to my friend, going into the theatre, that I was really curious to figure out why they had decided to do that. As it turned out, the setting didn't change anything, really. The characters are all the same, the story rattles along as archly and cleverly as ever. Except that it was set in India, and the servants popping in and out were Indian. Oh, and then every so often they parachuted in an inexplicable sitar player (Sheldon Heard). Only in the second half: at one point he comes out and plays for a minute or so, when the tea trays come out and Gwendolen and Cecily are being frosty. Then he abruptly stops playing and scurries off stage, presumably because he senses a fight brewing between the two women, although it's not that clear. Then at another point, the lights go dim on the side of the stage where the action is taking place and for no discernible reason he comes out, settles down, and plays while Henna Kaur Sodhi, playing the servant Merriman, performs an Indian classical dance. Don't get me wrong, she was beautiful to watch and an excellent dancer. But what was she doing in the middle of the scene? When the dance was finished, they walked off, the lights went up, and Algy and Jack were still sitting in the garden eating muffins.

Disconcerting though the slight stabs at "Indian-ness" were, the crowning silliness came at the end, when after everything's come to its frothy conclusion, the servants came back out with a bunch of colourful scarves, the music came up, and my friend nudged me. "They're not going to do a Bollywood number, are they?" she asked. I didn't say anything. We both knew the answer. And they did. A slightly haphazard and rather white Bollywood dance number, complete with one of the actors lip-synching some of the vocals, and Lady Bracknell doing hip shimmies.

It was jarring, it was weird, and it came close to driving the entirety of the rest of the play out of our heads. And it went on just that bit too long, with the actors dancing around and clapping in time and waving their scarves around.

It occurred to me what the reasoning might have been: In this day and age, where do you find a romantic comedy that hinges on social standing but in Bollywood? Yup, The Importance of Being Earnest is a great plot for a Bollywood movie, a la Bride and Prejudice. But it seems to me that if you're going to do that, you should go all the way. Get an Indian cast, get someone to write you a couple of catchy tunes, and reimagine the play. The way this turned out, it's like someone had the idea, but then had to invent ways to fit the India theme in so the Bollywood dance number at the end would have had some setup. It didn't work.

Which is a shame, because there was some solid acting, as I said. Stewart Matthews was a lot of fun as Jack - and his timing, especially paired with Garrett Quirk as Algy, was really impressive. He's a really good comic actor, and the two of them pulled off, physically, the same sort of quick, clever wit as is in the dialogue. And Quirk's characterization of Algy was great - he was a completely disarming insouciant rake, and someone ought to register his devilish smile as a deadly weapon (which he deployed knowingly.) In the first half he spoke too fast at times, tripping himself up and burying some of the dialogue, but he settled into it in the second half.

Bronwyn Steinberg, as Cecily, was adorably bubbly, and her scene with Algy, where she explains to him that in her diary they've been engaged for months, was great. I thought Katie Bunting's Gwendolen was a little severe at first, but got used to her by the end of the play. Kel Parsons' Lady Bracknell wasn't quite the force of nature she could have been - some of her great lines ("To lose one parent..." for example) would have benefitted from a pause, or a reaction. Something to set them up before delivery.

But as we walked out, my friend said, "I can't remember the play now. All I can remember is that Bollywood bit."

You know you're hooked when...

2011-02-07T08:28:00.000-08:00

The other night I had a fairly vivid dream about retelling Frederik Pohl's classic SF story 'The Day After The Day The Martians Came' at Once Upon a Slam. It's strange, because so far I haven't really been able to picture telling a literary story. I know that people do it, but somehow it just didn't seem like the kind of thing I could do. I couldn't really imagine doing anything but personal stories.

But then on Saturday night I was talking to my friend Simon - who wanted to be at the last story slam but couldn't - and somehow the subject came up of telling a Lovecraft story. I think it was because the last slam's Sacrificial Teller was Marie Bilodeau, and she did a story inspired by 'The Shunned House.' And it suddenly struck me that you could do some Lovecraft stories in five minutes... you'd just have to pick your story. Simon hadn't really realized that you could tell a literary story - someone else's work - and I told him yeah, sure, you could do any kind of story: folk tales, ghost stories, literary stories... you could even do 'The Statement of Randolph Carter' if you thought you could get it into five minutes...

And I think I'd been thinking along those lines. Anyway, I woke up the other morning out of a dream in which I was at the slam, ready to get up, and running the "Martian jokes" that are central to Pohl's story through in my head. Reminding myself that I didn't need to remember all of them as long as I remembered enough. Trying to figure out how to deliver the zinger of a last line.

Ruthanne, who runs the slam, will probably be pretty pleased about this.

She's created a monster.

VERSefest: Call for Poetry Submissions

2011-01-29T08:55:00.000-08:00

I'm passing this along from rob mclennan's blog:

Poetry for Human Rights

at VERSeFest 2011

THE EVENT

Poetry for Human Rights will be a showcase incorporating stage and/or page poetry that engages topics of human rights: women's rights, migration rights, democracy and self-determination, social justice, indigenous rights, and/or other topics related to oppression and resistance.

It takes place March 12, 2011 at 3pm, as a part of VERSeFest 2011.

THE FESTIVAL

VERSeFest is Ottawa’s new poetry festival, scheduled to take place from Tuesday, March 8 through March 13, 2011. The festival is being staged by a collective of 14 Ottawa poetry groups that is known as VERSe Ottawa. The total attendance at these groups’ events varies seasonally between about 750 and 1,000 people per month. Audiences range in age from school and university students through to the retired.

The poetic arts in Ottawa and, indeed, the country are rising in popularity and are becoming increasingly mainstream. VERSsFest is a collaborative project to leverage all the energy and capacity of these groups to build a critical mass for the poetry community as a whole, to share audiences, and to deliver a festival on a new scale. Ottawa deserves an annual festival of poetry, and VERSeFest will grow into an annual international poetry festival.

THE POETS

All poets, whether performance-based, page-based, or somewhere in between, are welcome to apply. The showcase is not limited to poets from the Ottawa region, but VERSeFest will not be able to cover any travel.

THE PROCESS

Please submit a brief statement (500 words maximum) explaining your work and its human rights resonance, along with at least three pieces of sample material.

We can evaluate printed poetry (Word, OpenOffice, or rtf files), performance video (in .mpg or youtube URLs), or audio (in .mp3 or CD audio) to ktmatthews@gmail.com by February 18, 2011.

While electronic submission is much preferred, hard-copy submissions (including printed paper, CDs, DVDs) may be mailed to: PFHR VERSeFest submissions, 243 Booth Street, Ottawa, K1R 7J5.

Deadline is February 18, 2011.

A selection committee will get to work and select three artists for the showcase. Results should be announced by February 26.

THE COMPENSATION

One poet will be selected to give a full reading/performance (of 30-35 minutes), and two others will each give a "half" reading/performance (less than 20 minutes). Artists will be compensated at Canada Council rates for readings.

Sorry, we will not be able to cover any travel costs.

Riddle me this:

2011-01-28T08:20:00.000-08:00

Has anyone else noticed this illuminated sign over the Sussex/Rideau corner of the Rideau Mall? My parents and I spotted it while running from dinner to the NAC and Dad stopped long enough in the middle of the intersection (the little orange numbers counting down all the while) to snap this shot on his BlackBerry. I like the picture, actually. We're still confused and slightly charmed by the sign. Anyone know what it is? Will knowing what it is remove all the fun and mystery?

Surprised again by the Play Date

2011-01-25T21:27:00.000-08:00

For the first time in what feels like months, I made it to the Creative Writing Play Date tonight! I think the cold had probably scared a lot of people into staying home, but frankly, after a couple of days below -30, something more in the -15 range felt practically balmy. Nevertheless, there were only a few of us braving the winter chill at Mother Tongue Books: four, in fact: Sean, the moderator, and three others including me.

I think that over the Christmas holidays, when I was inspired and creatively kicked in the pants by the poetry of my niece Rachael Wyatt (I got to read her portfolio while I was home, and it really made me want to write, which is one of the things good writing should do), and also over the last few months when I've been focusing so much on developing Chasing Boudicca that it felt like stealing energy from the show to work on new things, I just hadn't been doing that much creative writing. I think I walked back into the Play Date ready to surprise myself. Or at least ready to loosen up and let whatever came out, come out.

Which it did. Tonight's exercise involved randomly drawing an archetype, one of either "Poet," "Artist," or "Scribe," and then reaching into Sean's Crown Royal bag of plastic animals and pulling out an animal. You were then supposed to write a story where a person, who fit the archetype, was confronted with a countless number of the animal. In the story you were to explore the tone and mood suggested by the animal, and work out what the relationship was between the character (and his/her archetype) and the animals.

I got "poet" and a pink plastic pig.

This launched me off into a 45-minute visceral, visual and tactile dream-dive into the sheer physicality of pigs, their earthiness and bodily presence. I won't say it was good, but it was certainly weird, and unexpected and satisfying to write. Words I hadn't been expecting to use came burbling up, and I felt a whole lot less resistance than usual. Often my rational mind balks at just letting go and seeing what comes out. This time, as soon as I decided this was about dreams, I managed to release. Or maybe it was just that I'm ready to write some new stuff, and do some new things, and check out some other creative roads, now that Chasing Boudicca's a little more behind me.

I like some of what I wrote, and will have to play with it more. A lot more, really. What I like about it has more to do with feelings and images than actual words. Once again, not something I would ever have chosen to write about, for which I have to thank Sean. The Play Date is really good for me. I've missed it.

The Creative Writing Play Date, by the way, meets every Tuesday from 8:00-10:00 at Mother Tongue Books. In the first hour you get a prompt and write about it: in the second hour you share what you've written and get feedback. It's on a drop-in basis, and newcomers are always welcome.

Chasing Boudicca, reviewed!

2011-01-25T20:23:00.000-08:00

Pretty cool - how often does storytelling get reviewed? Here's Nichole McGill's review of the show in Ottawa Tonite.

More plans are underway for the show: but next up, we're planning for Fireborn 2011, in March...

Wicked typography animation

2011-01-23T10:39:00.000-08:00

My dad just sent me a link to this poem, particularly because of the animation of the typography. I've seen this visual language more and more lately: think of those truck commercials, and I know I've seen another commercial that stole the same dropping, spinning, coincident with the voice-over style. But this one does it really well. And the typography geek in me smiles at it.

Incidentally, and having little to do with the above video except for the visualization of the spoken word (and the speaking of the visual word) are you going to Messagio Galore tonight at the OAG? It's going to be a mind bender!

Back down to earth?

2011-01-22T09:25:00.000-08:00

Chasing Boudicca, on Thursday night, was a fantastic experience. After months of living with the warrior queen and working with Marie and Ruthanne, after the last couple of weeks in which I saw the others practically every other day for rehearsals and plans (we probably should have just moved in with each other for a couple of weeks), after a couple of sleepless nights on my part and a lot of racing pulses, we walked on stage at the NAC and started to share our Warrior Queen with a packed, and hushed, audience.

It was an incredible experience. Somehow the presence of the audience out there, who had never heard the poems or stories before, was galvanizing: I felt my own words coming alive in a way they hadn't before. And as we moved through the story, I slowly began to realize: we know this piece. We're living it. And ... have I seriously not dropped, or lost, or stumbled on, a single line?

Ruthanne and Marie were as good as I've ever seen them: at points I don't think the audience was breathing, and at points I know some were crying (that's good, we were going for that.) And Nathan Bishop was better than I could have expected, punctuating and propelling and participating with his bodhran, and the whistle that he'd brought along unbidden, and which he suggested we use at three points in the story where it turned out to be heartbreakingly perfect. At the intermission we stopped and looked at each other and said, "this is ... this is amazing!" while feeling a little as though we didn't want to jinx it.

I almost cried - but didn't quite - during the last poem: and when we got off stage and over to the side I did cry a bit, just overwhelmed by the high pitch of the emotions we'd been riding for the last few hours, and particularly the last two. It was a combination of relief and release and catharsis and happiness. We all hugged each other, and I tried not to collapse into tears entirely, because there were so many more people to hug and talk to. It was a really powerful experience for us, and I gather from people in the crowd that it was for them too.

There will be more pictures - there were a lot taken - but this is the one I've got at the moment, from Dad's Blackberry not long after the show. (My parents came up from NB for the show, which meant a hell of a lot to me: the show wouldn't exist were they not the wonderful people they are, and I'm happy and proud that they could be here!)

Marie's thoughts on the show, from her blog, are here.

And then late last night I got sent a link to our Christmas present from Marie's Roomy! Kymeras fan art! It's so awesome I keep making 'squee' noises.

So I keep claiming I'm going back to "regular life" - although I sort of know that when you've got friends and co-creators as wonderful and strange as I do there's no such thing as "regular life." One project is finished, there are more ahead. I've got writing to do, and the Kymeras have a Fireborn show to put together for March. We want to tour Boudicca, and there have been rumours of theatre festivals and academic conferences that we just might want to bring it to: not to mention folks in Montreal and Toronto that want to see it. "Regular life"? Hah!

It's tomorrow!

2011-01-19T09:26:00.000-08:00

So a project that has technically been more than 20 years in the making is coming to a major point in its development tomorrow!

Years and years ago, when I was living in England with my family, I discovered the first century warrior queen Boudicca, and I've been interested in her ever since. Several years ago my mom reminded me of the time we spent traveling around the countryside looking for the towns she destroyed and the battlefield where her story ended, when she sent me a copy of Manda Scott's Dreaming the Bull, which features Boudicca, and said it reminded her of the times we spent "chasing Boudicca."

That became the title of a poem, which then became more poems, which were then encouraged and nudged and massaged by my friend Sean Zio until there was a collection of about a dozen of them. I read the cycle for the first time as a unit at the Voices of Venus series last February - where better to inaugurate a series of poems about a warrior queen than a women's open mike? - where Caitlyn Paxson, the artistic director of the Ottawa Storytellers, heard them, and thought they'd make an interesting storytelling show... if I could only recite them rather than read them. Not long after that I was invited, along with fellow Kymeras Ruthanne and Marie, to put together a full-length show for the 4th Stage series.

... And that show is happening tomorrow!

It's been a long and interesting project, the last few months: I've been memorizing my work, which has been a massively educational experience for me, and Ruthanne and Marie and I have taken whole weekends to get together and dig into the history and archaeology to create the stories that they will be telling, into which I drop my odd little poems about being thirteen, about discovering the story, about not knowing what is and is not true, about making up your own stories around the bare bones of history and archaeology, and about what your version of Boudicca's story says about you.

I've been watching the storytellers work and learning about creating oral stories, I've been rehearsing with them and dissolving into giggles and videotaping bloopers and being moved even in the middle of the rough drafts. I've discovered that certain parts of the story still make my heart race as they tell it, even though I know what's going to happen and I've heard it many times before.

Tonight we're going on Click Here on CHUO (89.1 fm) to talk with Mitchell Caplan about the show, and tomorrow morning Marie and I will be on CBC Ottawa Morning around 8... and then we're meeting up with our musician, Nathan Bishop, an absolutely fantastic bodhran player, to run through the drum cues. Then it's mike check, butterfly taming, and we're off to the first century!

I can't wait.

VERSeFest

2011-01-17T12:21:00.000-08:00

So there's now a Facebook page for VERSeFest Ottawa! This is a new project that looks like it's going to be very cool - a coalition of reading series, slams and spoken word series which will be running a poetry festival in March.

Organizations involved include Tree Reading Series, Capital Slam, The Muses Reading Series, Plan 99, Dusty Owl Reading Series, Factory Reading Series, AB Series, ARC, Sasquatch Reading Series, Urban Legends, blUe MOndays, In/Words, Oneness Poetry Collective & Voices of Venus - the sheer diversity of the groups involved means I'm looking forward to what they can pull together. From what I've heard, each group will be curating an event, and there may be other events going on too - things are still being developed.

March 8-13 at Arts Court. Keep an eye out!

Next Story Slam...

2011-01-13T13:35:00.000-08:00

Story shaping

2011-01-12T14:41:00.000-08:00

One of the really interesting things about the work that Ruthanne Edward and Marie Bilodeau and I have been doing on our upcoming show (The Warrior Queen: Chasing Boudicca - next Thursday at the NAC Fourth Stage as part of the Ottawa Storytellers Fourth Stage Series, be there or be square) is what I've been learning about story shape. Or not so much what I've been learning about it, as what I already knew and am now having vividly illustrated.

The show will be one long story, essentially, with the three of us taking different voices and approaches. I step in from time to time as the poet, reciting poems from my series, Chasing Boudicca, which I've been (off and on) adding to for the last few years. I'm a bit of an outside voice, speaking, mostly, from the point of view of myself as a 13-year-old living in England and discovering Boudicca's story. Marie and Ruthanne take the history of the Boudiccan Rebellion between them: Marie more or less covering the story of Boudicca the mother, and Ruthanne covering the warrior aspect. More or less.

We've been working on the show for a long time now - in November we took a couple of weekends and vanished to a cottage out in Westport to brainstorm and talk through what we wanted to do. I came into this with the most previous research, since I've been a Boudicca fan since I was thirteen, and I also came into it as the non-oral-storyteller of the group. I learned quick. All the stuff that really fascinates me about the different purposes Boudicca's story serves and how many times she's been reinvented and rediscovered and made to mean different things - I learned that all of it was going to have to inform the story, the way we were telling it, but not overpower it. We couldn't have multiple versions of her story. We couldn't talk about the archaeological realities - not directly. But we could take the research we'd done, the new discoveries that had been made, and put each cool fact into the story in one line of detail. The temple at Camulodunum wasn't finished when the city was sacked? Okay, we can use that to have the roof unfinished. But not actually say outright that we know for a fact the temple was incomplete.

I mean, it is really interesting what happened to Boudicca's story: written down by her enemies, preserved by chance, rediscovered in the Middle Ages, re-rediscovered by the Victorians, then resurrected again by historical fiction writers aplenty in our time, and every time made to mean something slightly different. There's just so much that can be read in to her story - or to the bits of it that we've kept over the intervening two thousand years. Or into why some bits of her story are accepted as canon now over others.

But. The point is. None of that makes a good story in itself. It's a history lesson or a semiotics lecture or a women's studies course. But it's not a good story. So what I have been learning from Ruthanne and Marie is how to take all of our research, and boil it down into a story. And not just that, into a story that will take only about an hour and a half to tell, and which must come out one syllable at a time, and be received one syllable at a time.

Between watching Ruthanne pack our hours' worth of discussion into a thirty-second snatch of dialogue (go to the show and listen to how she works what you need to know about the Rebellion of AD 47, led by Caractacus, into three lines of a mealtime conversation between Boudicca and her husband) and seeing how Marie defines a character using one action or one line, I've been awed. They make it look so easy. Me, I'm constantly being sidetracked by more little details. They manage to know which ones have to be there.

One of the things about a story you're telling aloud is that the audience can't flip back and reread a part if they didn't follow it, and a lot of the work we've been doing is to make sure that as the story goes, the things the audience needs to know are clear. When we do foreshadowing, it's got to be pointed enough that it sticks with the audience until that element comes back around (we do some recurring notes with swords, with Boudicca's resolve not to be captured, and with the different destinies of the two daughters.) Without, of course, being heavy-handed. Where information can be delivered as part of the action, it needs to be: just giving a list of facts, or even a list of events, will be flat. (We had a fascinating moment when the two storytellers first started telling their full stories, and we discovered that some parts had come out as simple lists of facts: the three of us brainstormed actions and dialogue that would convey the facts and within 20 minutes the story was transformed, and far more exciting.)

There was also the fact, which I realized a couple of nights ago, that oral storytelling has a series of expectations and understandings which make it possible - in fact, sometimes necessary - to introduce conventions. Things that come close to what, in print, would be cliche. But sometimes you need to borrow from the images and understandings that the audience can be expected to bring. It's like when you start a story with "there was a time, and it was not my time, and it was not your time, but it was a time, when..." Or when you know you can rely on the audience to understand that the third son is going to be the honest, brave and clever one.

On top of that, I'm relying on the audience to keep trying to make the connections between my poems, which are more or less loosely tied to the narrative, and the parts that Ruthanne and Marie are telling. My poems, I think, cast a bit of an extra shade on the story. There's nothing explicit about the relationship between my adolescent temper and the fury of Boudicca, but I'm trusting the audience to see the resonances and make their own connections for a lot of the poems.

So yeah. So much depends on how you deliver the story. The constraints of a live telling, in front of an audience, are different in some ways from the constraints on a story in print: some of them are the same, but some of them are dependent on the listener, their attention, their interest, how much information they can or will want to process at once. I know a lot of this from workshops on fiction writing; "show, don't tell," "if you have to use an adverb you're not making your characters clear enough," "give personality traits through actions and speech, not directly," "go through and take out all the bits that aren't doing anything for the story."

But something about doing it for a live performance, and something about doing it collaboratively with two other performers, makes it so much clearer. It's something I think would be worth working into a writing workshop: the collaboration, the immediacy, and the constraint of it has certainly been eye-opening for me.

My voice on CBC? Coooooool!

2011-01-10T19:48:00.000-08:00

Just got the link for the piece freelance journalist Rob Thomas did on my first foray into storytelling, as a competitor in the Story Slam at the Ottawa Storytellers Festival. Here's the link: click the link under the CBC logo.

Like the idea of story slam? There's a regular monthly slam in Ottawa at Mercury Underground. Fourth Sunday of the month. It's a hell of a lot of fun. Ask me about them if you're interested!

My $0.02 about Peter

2010-12-27T17:31:00.000-08:00

I wanted to thank Amanda Earl and Greg Frankson for posting about Peter Simpson's recent bit in the Citizen, in which he lists slam poetry as 'hot' and other poetry readings as 'not.' Nice to hear essentially the same response to this bit of ignorance coming from significant folks on both sides of the spoken word/page divide.

And not to repeat what they both said, but excuse me, Peter, I can't say I've ever seen you at a poetry reading, so where do you get off calling them 'funereal'?

This smacks, to me, of knee-jerk-ism. And that's what bothers me. Peter was constrained to present his list as pairs of things that are "hot" and things that are "not," and while he's dead right that, at the moment, poetry slams are red hot in Ottawa, that convention caused him to say to himself, "now I need a 'not' to pair it with." He couldn't really, at that point, do anything but slot "literary" readings into the "not" column, and he could do it with impunity because the stereotype is so ingrained. But of course! Everyone knows that poetry readings are boring, inaccessible, and grim! Cue the knowing chuckles!

It bothers me that people who never go to poetry shows use them to get cheap laughs in sitcoms and McDonald's commercials. It's as though "poetry" is shorthand for "dense, obscure, elitist, boring." But I understand that for the vast majority of people, the last time they read a poem was in high school when someone made them 'interpret' Robert Frost, or Wordsworth, or bloody Keats, and that their only exposure to it since has come in the form of black-turtleneck-clad caricatures, or winking references to angsty teenagers burning candles and writing about death and suffering.

And poetry reading series, far from not being hot, are starting, once again, to proliferate. The House Band Reading Series, Voices of Venus, the new blUe mOnday series, the rapidly growing AB Series, the Poetry Show . . . all new, all good, all growing. Someone, clearly, is enjoying them, if not Peter.

But, hey, I'm probably preaching to the choir here. At least I hope I am. And if I'm not, go find a poetry reading. Somewhere in Ottawa. Here's a good place to start looking. Go into the basement of the Royal Oak on Laurier, or down the stairs into the Manx Pub, or under the Thai Restaurant on Queen at Kent, or the upstairs room (and sometimes the roof) of the Carleton Tavern, or the Raw Sugar Cafe on Somerset on a nice night, or a rainy night, or a stormy snowy afternoon. Get yourself a beer, or a wine, or a cup of coffee or tea. Sit down. Get comfortable. Strike up a conversation with your neighbour. Talk poetry. Or talk whatever you want to talk. Listen to the banter, the chatter, the community, and the poet or poets up there on the stage. Maybe catch a catapulted chocolate or shout out a word to include in the next poem. I've seen people jump up and perform brand new, just-written poems in flash-writing contests. I've seen djembes appear for impromptu jams. I've laughed out loud and chanted along, been impressed and touched and encouraged and reminded why I go to these things, more times than I can recount.

If that's funereal, I really should be attending more funerals.


This was at a poetry reading....

And so was this...

I mean, just look at all these un-pained, smiling, cheerful, non-moping people! They actually appear to be enjoying themselves! (And yup, this picture too was taken at a poetry reading. 'Nuff said.)

Ain't the Future Something?

2010-12-17T11:06:00.000-08:00

My brain hurts. How do they do this?

Graphic

2010-12-17T09:27:00.000-08:00

I was on the bus this morning killing time by scrolling through Twitter. I'm still not sure I 'get' Twitter, but there are a few people I follow that are entirely worth it. William Gibson is one of those. (@GreatDismal, in case you're wondering.) And sometime last night he posted this link with the question, "So just how accurate *is* this thing?" It was a graph of incidences of the use of the word "cyberspace" (of course) in books published between 1700 and 2008. Naturally, it was a pretty simple graph, with one big spike.

He followed that up with a question about the odd bump around 1900 (turns out, I gather, that it's the result of some publications being tagged with their date of founding rather than the date of publication of the actual work in which the word appears. Whew; wouldn't want to think that some careless time-traveler had gone and published a critique of Neuromancer back in 1902: or, as someone Tweeted to Gibson: "@GreatDismal Apparently you were quoted by the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1888. http://j.mp/gKZJac")

Then he started having fun. Next, he graphed out "flying saucer:"

Then he posted a few more searches - "Cthulhu," "opium," "buggery" - and announced he was done, and heading off to bed with the latest Fortean Times. But what was interesting was the graphs other people created following that, which he reposted. I was particularly interested in the "graph of fears," comparing how often the words "negro," "terrorist" and "communist" appeared:

Sure, just the idea of software that can graph out the frequency of a word across that many books is amazing enough. The idea that Google has that many books digitally stored is also pretty mind-boggling. But it's funny how we can take that for granted and go straight to playing with it, taking the psychological pulse of the last 300 years by way of killing time before bed. We're awash in this kind of massive sea of information, and we have these little toys with which we can all dabble around in it. Here you go, kids: everything Google's got in the literary world from between 1700 and now. Make pretty pictures with it, and maybe learn something.

What Happens After

2010-12-13T16:17:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Jo Walton's new book, Among Others. I read most of it in a morning, and it was an interesting experience. I met Jo about a year and a half ago, when she came to the Festival, and I read her Small Change books then: an alternate-history trilogy which I remember enjoying, although I don't know how much I could tell you about them now: I'd need to reread them.

But Among Others was something new, and something quite surprising. I suppose you would classify it as fantasy: after all, there are real fairies, of the creepy-wood-spirit variety, and a sort of complicated and nebulous form of magic. But unlike almost any other fantasy I've ever read, in this one very little actually happens. In fact, it's all happened already: this book is an aftermath, in a way. It's what happens to the character after the dramatic battle and the life-altering events. When the book opens, it's 1979 in England, the narrator, Morwenna, is fifteen, and she is getting on with the rest of her life after a conflict with her apparently mad, apparently witchcraft-using mother, which left Morwenna lame and her twin sister dead.

Now that seems like a spectacular sort of thing, and the kind of thing that many fantasy writers would choose to end their book with. In Walton's hands, though, the actual events that killed Morwenna's twin are never particularly clear, never described, and certainly not part of the action. The book is written as Morwenna's diary, after it's all over, and she never needs to go back and explain. The Big Battle is background to the everyday world of bitchy classmates, arbitrary rules, trying to get to know a father and family she's only just met, and trying to find a place to fit in, in her typically horrid and petty boarding school. Oh, and reading a lot, with the kind of obsessive ravenousness that a lot of born readers can relate to. (I did.)

Morwenna can use magic - a sort of very vague, sympathetic magic that only really shows its presence in coincidence and changes in fortune - and talk to fairies. She is also a voracious reader of science fiction, and her diary entries are peppered with titles of books she's reading now, and authors she's obsessed with (she's an omnivore with a particular love for Delany, Zelazny, Le Guin, and Tiptree, but she takes in practically every major work of science fiction published pre-1980 on the way.) While she waits to meet up with the fairies - who need her to perform rituals, the purpose of which she's not always entirely clear about - she brings along a book, settles down to rest her bad leg, and vanishes into Callahan's Crosstime Saloon or Cat's Cradle.

Jo Walton's breaking all kinds of SF conventions here. The magic is a lot more ordinary and unremarkable to Morwenna than the latest Asimov, and she isn't an outsider so much because she has a tragic, magical past as because she's a SF-geek bookworm with a limp who has moved to an English boarding school with a Welsh accent and a weird name. Which should sound familiar to anyone who survived being a nerd as a child. (I did.)

Okay, there are points during the story in which Morwenna learns things about using magic, of the Le Guin-like "with great power comes so much responsibility that you're probably better off not even considering using your great power" variety. When she's tempted to do a ritual to find a circle of friends, she's then troubled by the thought that maybe the book club of fellow SF lovers she finds only exist because of her ritual, and are therefore somehow less real, less genuinely her friends. But then, what outsider hasn't wondered if maybe the friends they find are really their friends, or if it's all some kind of elaborate trick?

So the magic probably could stand in for all sorts of things: adulthood, responsibility, taking charge of your own life, moving on out of a tragedy, hanging on to the creativity and wonder of your childhood and using it to strengthen yourself. At its heart, though, I think the book is about being an intelligent and lonely teenager and finding your way: it's a love letter to the intense relationship some teens can have with science fiction and fantasy - or any subculture that involves that kind of intense consumption: perhaps Morwenna could have been a fan of, say, punk music, collecting bootleg tapes and fanzines. But Jo Walton being who she is, it's about magic, starships, and interlibrary loans.

Once Upon a Slam

2010-11-27T12:50:00.000-08:00

Last night I continued my foray into competitive storytelling by showing up for the second ever Once Upon A Slam. I told the same story as last weekend - got it down by about a minute and a half, coming in at something like 5:47, I think - and was pleasantly surprised by a couple of marks over 9! Besides, I got to go first this time: it's like they say, I guess, 'the last shall be first'... So, once my story was over with, I could go get a Beau's and relax.

It was a small crowd, really, but then the series is just getting rolling. Once again the stories (and tellers) were varied: there were seven tellers, doing everything from folktales to mythology to personal stories to a fairly wild bit of surrealist comedy. I'd been joking around with a couple of the other tellers about running over time, because I knew I was going to: one of the other slammers said he was thinking of calling himself "Captain Overtime," so I swore I was taking that title. We were all completely eliminated in the time-deduction wars, though, by Festrell, who clocked in at just under 16 minutes, gaining herself the biggest time penalty I've ever seen: a final score in the negatives. (There was an infatuated, drunk and gender-switching Loki involved.)

In the end, Keirsten Hieber headed home with the championship for a story involving her father, mother, tractors, and some ill-advised suntanning, and we all hung out a bit longer to talk stories before heading out into the (rather impossibly gusty) evening.

Now I've got to come up with a new story for the next one. Although I may not make the next: it'll be December 31 and I think I may well be in New Brunswick. But for January? I think there's an action/adventure autobiographical story waiting to happen.

Funny: I've never done poetry slam - I was always quite intimidated by it - but this story slam thing is, for me, far less scary. I wonder why?

Slamtastic

2010-11-26T09:25:00.000-08:00

I know the lululemon bag says to do one thing a day that scares you. (It's such a good sentiment that I'm really annoyed at its ubiquitousness in mainstream platitude-culture.) I did that last weekend. Twice.

The Ottawa Storytellers Festival, which wrapped up on Sunday, had a really stellar lineup of workshops. Instead of packing in a ton of short workshops, which it would be easy to be tempted to do, they went with a single indepth workshop each day. I hang out with storytellers - so I had been talked into/nudged toward/skootched into signing up for the workshop on Saturday afternoon: How to Tell A Story In Five Minutes. The idea of the workshop was to get you prepared for the Story Slam the next afternoon. So, with no previous (formal) storytelling experience and only a day between workshop and performance, I was pretty much leaping into the deep end without a lifejacket. I mean, I already know that shorter doesn't always mean easier. Getting a story down to five minutes is a challenge for experienced storytellers. But, in for a penny, in for a pound.

The workshop was held in the foyer area in the basement of Saint Brigid's, with about 20 people there to start with. Most of them, like me, had no storytelling experience, and all came with different reasons for being there, from plain curiosity to wanting to be able to do movie pitches, to literary or mythological interest. Me, I was there for the challenge.

Ruthanne Edward and Kim Kilpatrick tag-teamed the workshop really well: they started with a story told by Kim, and a discussion of what constituted a 'story,' as opposed to an anecdote, monologue, or rant. They got us to think about the elements of a story, and did some practice with visualizing all the details of the story - even if you aren't going to tell all the details, they said, it helps to know your setting and characters and themes intimately, so that you can be more vivid in your telling.

There were a couple of exercises that pushed me a little way out of my comfort zone: One involved telling the story of Little Red Riding Hood in first five minutes, then three, then one, then ten words, to get down to the bare bones of the story. It was a lot harder than I thought: I had the advantage, though, of being paired up with a more experienced storyteller, so I could watch what he did in the exercises and try to learn from him.

The other exercise that kicked my ass was to try and speak continuously without using any filler words like "um," "er," "so..." or "well..." I lasted a grand total of sixteen glorious seconds.

But I did walk out of the workshop with a sense that maybe I could do this. And, more importantly, I walked out with an idea of the story I wanted to tell: something that had been triggered by one of the exercises. It was, surprisingly, a completely different story than the one I'd thought I was going to work up. But I thought it would work.

So, I went home. (Well, I didn't. I went to a friend's place for the last half of a Doctor Who marathon. Then I went home.) And I sort of thought about my story, but I didn't really work on it much till the next morning. And I kept thinking: am I really going to do this? I imagined myself stopping on stage with the words just trickling to a stop, getting lost, forgetting whole chunks of the story, finding myself in one of those wandering aimless sentences that you suddenly discover you can't bring to anything like a satisfactory end. But I wrote out the story once, and recited it back to myself a few times (what with this, and my rehearsals for the Chasing Boudicca show in January, I hope my neighbours are starting to get used to me talking away to myself in my living room.)

The story I chose worked well, I thought: it was about getting yourself into something that you're not really prepared or qualified for, and soldiering on through it even if you know you're going to lose. It was about doing a thing being more important than winning a competition. And it was about a humiliating moment in my junior high career when I momentarily, deludedly, thought that signing up for track and field was a Good Idea for a pudgy, bookish seventh grader like myself.

Whatever I did, I couldn't get the story under 7 minutes. I ran it through a few times but nothing I did would get it down. And I started worrying about whether I'd be able to pull it off. But, I had promised a bunch of people that I was going to slam. So I talked to myself on the bus most of the way downtown, and got to the venue early enough to do a quick pre-slam interview with a guy from CBC Radio who was interested in doing a piece following a hapless newbie like myself through the workshop and slam process.

The audience wasn't huge - there were more audience members than competitors at least - but they were keen, which was good. I put my name in, and took my seat in the front row. Then, I proceeded to wait in agony as storyteller after storyteller was drawn from the hat. I kept thinking to myself, "Come on, John, pick me, get it over with... won't it suck if I'm the absolute last name drawn?"

Guess what.

So it was kind of hard to pay close attention to the other stories, since I was still occasionally being pulled off by my brain, which was busy trying to remember everything I wanted to say, all the points that were in the story, the bits I could cut to try and shave down my time... but I did still manage to relax and listen to a few of the stories - personal stories, folktales, tall tales, literary stories, a caper. I was impressed at the variety of stories, and tellers. And then I'd find myself thinking, Come on, me next, please...

But yes, I went last. I got up on the stage. I took a moment, like Kim and Ruthanne had suggested, to set up the mike and take a breath and look out and realize I couldn't see the audience at all through the lights. And then the first sentence came out of me. "No one would have accused me, when I was in seventh grade, of being an athletic kid. . . "

Seven minutes later it was over. I hadn't forgotten anything, my sentences hadn't wandered away from me, I hadn't stopped and realized I didn't know where I was going. I'd told the story, got a few laughs, choked a couple of people up, bowed, and gotten my relieved ass off the stage.

After the show a couple of people came over to give me spontaneous hugs and tell me how much they enjoyed it. I got some really nice compliments on my telling, from people I really respect. And I was told to keep doing it. (The ever prolific Faye Estrella even posted a poem mentioning my story on Facebook that afternoon: I was pretty chuffed about that.) I got a six point time penalty - I missed going the longest by one second exactly - and I kind of crowed about that: hey, half the point of the story was that it doesn't really matter if you come in dead last, if just doing it in the first place is the challenge. Once Upon a Slam is tonight... I think I may have to sign up!

Oh yes. The winning story was a rollicking sort of tale about thieves in love (and what happens when the world's greatest thieves have a baby.) And the prize?

Spectacular

2010-11-20T08:55:00.000-08:00

Oh, the trouble with wanting to write about a festival while it's happening is that there's a great bloody festival going on, distracting you from writing about it by being fantastic and unmissable!

Friday night I hit the Mayfair Theatre to see Ivan Coyote's marvellous show "You Are Here," featuring Ivan (seriously, Canadian National Treasure) telling stories about her home in the Yukon, accompanied by songwriter and musician Rae Spoon, and with the screen behind them being used for projections of still photos and Super 8 footage. If you haven't heard Ivan tell, or read, find out when she's next in town and GO. There's something about the informal, easy way she tells her stories, and the simple, beautifully observed humanity of the people and moments she describes. Oh, and then there are the seemingly effortless, crystal clear images and totally original turns of phrase that she just drops in, in passing, while going on to tell you about permafrost and family and what it's like to drive north and north through hours of sunset, chasing the light. Those amazing, single lines that grab me by the guts and remind me that damn, she's also one hell of a great writer.

Then last night I headed out to Saint Brigid's to see Tim Tingle's "Rolling Way the Rock" and the late night Vernacular Spectacular, which featured Anita Best, Marie Bilodeau, Ivan Coyote, The Copper Conundrum (Kevin Matthews, Danielle K.L. Gregoire and Rusty Priske), Charlie Chiarelli, and Alan Shain.

Tim Tingle blew me away. He had me mesmerized for at least an hour and a half while he told what was billed as "the story of the youngest man ever sent to Alcatraz" but what was really the story of a couple of Choctaw kids on a nearly inevitable steep slope to disaster, and about the tragedy that is the prison system, and about, finally, how there is goodness in the hearts of everyone. It was heartbreaking and gorgeous. I was astonished at the fact that he managed to maintain, through the whole thing, three very specific vantage points. One was himself, talking to a man, Cecil, who had spent thirty years in prison. One was the man, telling his story, and one was a third-person recreation of the experience of Cecil's friend Clarence, who was the teenager sent to Alcatraz. And you never lost sight of those three vantage points, even though when he was speaking as Cecil it was so intense - so clearly visualized, so vividly told, and so emotional - you believed he was teling his own story. It was hard, on the breaks and at the end, to haul myself back out of the world he'd created and into the present day: I wanted to stay and sit with it for a moment.

The 'Vernacular Spectacular' late night cabaret started out at 10:00, with dirty ballads from Anita Best (and Marie's sexy ghost story, which I always love), ended with a moving poem done by the Copper Conundrum that had the whole audience singing the refrain of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and in the middle taught me about Sicilian farmers and Yukon men, and finally gave me a chance to hear Alan Shain do his standup comedy (which was hilarious.) I wish there was time to talk about all of them in depth. It was a smaller, but not insignificant, audience, and we only left the venue at about 12:30 AM. There was a lot of cheering: a rowdier audience than at the earlier show, which was just perfect. And some Really Good Food being passed around by the youngest wait staff ever (I think she was about ten.)

I'm off this afternoon to the workshop "How To Tell a Story in Five Minutes," to get ready for the Story Slam tomorrow afternoon. I've never done any storytelling before, so this should be... enlightening. I'll report.

Storytellers Festival starts tonight!

2010-11-18T12:44:00.000-08:00

I'm off tonight to the Mayfair to see Ivan Coyote's You Are Here (also performing: Rae Spoon) - the first event of the Ottawa Storytelling Festival. The Storytelling Festival's been revamped, rethought, rejiggered and relaunched for the 21st century, and the program is a great mix of traditional and nontraditional tales. They'll be featuring everything from a retelling of Frankenstein to a celebration of traditional Newfoundland stories, and taking in spoken word poetry, history, personal stories and native legends on the way.

Storytelling is a rapidly reviving art in this town: at least, I'm seeing more and more of it. The Shenkman Centre hosts a series of outside-the-box telling, the Fourth Stage series continues at the NAC, the Billings Estate series brings history alive with storytelling theatre, and this upcoming Festival looks like it's going to kick it out of the park. The city's first Story Slam, Once Upon a Slam, just got rolling last month - and there will be a story slam workshop at the Festival for anyone who's curious about that particular kind of short-form, competitive storytelling. (Think competitive storytelling is a brand new wacky modern idea? Think again, and go find a copy of the Canterbury Tales.)

Storytelling isn't like reading, and it's certainly not just for kids. This isn't going to be 'storytime at the library.' (Not that I need to tell most readers of this blog that.) There is something immersive about live storytelling - more so than readings, I find. It's part of a storyteller's job to interact with the audience, to gauge her listeners and shape the story to fit the room, and that has the effect of making the whole experience that much more intense. If you haven't had someone tell you a story in a while, I highly recommend it. I'd be inclined to argue that it's built into our brains to listen to a voice weaving a story. It might even be good for our brains. It certainly feels that way to me.

Anyway, I can't wait to hear Ivan Coyote tonight. I've been a fan for years. Mayfair Theatre, doors at 6:00, show at 7:00: you can't get tickets in advance - sales at the door only - so expect to line up!

Can you help me get published?

2010-11-02T08:28:00.000-07:00

It's funny because, scarily, it's true. I see these people everywhere. Thanks Rhonda for posting this on FB!

Night of the Living Dead: Live at the Mayfair

2010-10-31T14:50:00.000-07:00

Friday night I finally got out to see the Mayfair Theatre's production of Night of the Living Dead: Live. I missed it the first time they staged this show, back in March, and I really had wanted to catch it. So, while I was working at the Mayfair all of last week (the Writers Festival happens there) I mentioned to Mike Dubue, the theatre's manager and the composer and conductor of this show, that I wanted to go, and he gave me a ticket. So, after about a week spent in the Mayfair behind the scenes, I found myself back there, only this time as an audience member, ensconced in the second row of a sold out theatre with some friends, a plastic cup of beer, and some popcorn. Ahhhh.

The Mayfair's website calls it "Ottawa's home of stuff you won't see anywhere else," and this show pretty much proves it (as George Romero himself commented in a taped introduction.) What Mike Dubue's done with this show is like nothing I've heard of before. It's a little like the inverse of going to see the "Met in HD" opera shows at the big cinemas, actually. He's written an original score (for a combination of strings, guitar, & percussion, with some atmospheric electronics) and done the sound design for a complete live soundscape of the film. Actors read the lines in sync with the screen, and a foley artist supplies all the sound effects (with the exception of big sounds like doors slamming or explosions, which are done with the percussion section.) The whole front of the theatre was jammed with performers: the instruments off at stage left being conducted by Mike, who was also playing a number of the percussion instruments, the foley artist and what I assume was an effects board toward the middle, and a line of actors with their scripts illuminated by little pen lights sitting in the front row of seats to the right.

I think that most of the time I was aware that there were live musicians and actors, even though it was easy to forget and just watch the movie. But it was far too fascinating watching the foley artist and the instrumentalists to only pay attention to the screen. (Where, incidentally, they were rolling a 35mm print of the movie, not a digital remaster. I actually saw that reel, up in the projection booth, earlier this week when I took an author up there to do a pre-reading interview. Cool.)

The live music had an interesting effect on the movie - it suddenly seemed a bit more like an art film. Now, I'm pretty sure that even Romero would be the first to say that he was just trying to make a movie, when he and his friends shot this film, although there are plenty of things that could be said about Romero's social commentary through his "Dead" films. But once you take the sound away from the original print, treating it, in a way, like a silent film, and add Mike's original score, you somehow are more likely to see the ways in which the film is artistic.

The graveyard scene, where Barbara runs from the first zombies, came across as almost ethereal, dream-state-like, because while Jennilee Murray, who played all the women in the show, spoke Barbara's dialogue, she didn't make any sounds as Barbara ran, and stumbled, and fell, and picked herself back up, and fought off the zombie, and tried to hide in the car, and drove off only to hit a tree, and lost her shoes, and finally ended up pelting barefoot along the road. It was all eerily silent, with just the musicians to underscore it.

Somehow it also lets you notice some of the subversive (for the time) stuff that's going on with the character of Ben. I saw an interview once with George Romero in which he said that casting a black man in the part had actually been a complete fluke: they'd written the part for just anyone, and then cast the actor they liked without thinking about it. So you wind up with a black man ordering the white men around, taking charge, being the leader, and hitting a hysterical white woman - none of which was written specifically to address the race issues of the time. But it does, simply by treating the character as an equal. The overtones of lynch mob in the final sequence also come out not because they were written in exactly, but because the audience reads them in.

Mike's score was made up largely of slow pulses of sound from the strings, with some plucked highlights, but definitely not using the high, sharp cues of most horror films of the time: it was ominous and slow most of the time, with a rumbling undercurrent of white noise as though there were a storm or a subway rolling in the distance. It worked for me.

Sure, the voices didn't always sync up perfectly, and at least once there was a glitch (I assume) that meant a section of the film that was supposed to have its original sound didn't. (The actors ad-libbed a couple of references to it later that made the audience burst out laughing.) And one of my friends took exception to Ian Keteku as Ben (said his voice was too high for the part: I thought he sounded fine, and was particularly good at syncing with the film. Jennilee Murray played all the women, and occasionally had to have conversations with herself: she managed to sound different enough that it worked. Through the last bit of the movie, too, her screaming abilities were definitely put to the test. And it was fun that the radio announcer was played by, um, a radio announcer: Alan Neal, from CBC's All In A Day.

And most of all it was entertaining. I enjoyed Mike's scoring, I got to watch him direct with one eye on the screen, I got to watch the foley artist bashing about with chunks of wood and hammers and drawers full of silverware, and I got to watch the actors having fun (and I think ad libbing in spots.) It was entirely satisfying: glad I finally got a chance to see it. If they do another production of it, I highly recommend checking it out.

Festival, and the writing groove

2010-10-19T20:54:00.000-07:00

Yup, the Festival kicks off tomorrow, so I'm about to vanish into the real world for seven days or so. I can't even start to do my picks: I won't, sadly, get to see a lot of this stuff, actually, because I'll be running around backstage (and driving authors back and forth, and helping at the box office, and doing school visits.)

But you can see Amanda Earl's picks here: and the Apt 613 highlights list is here.

My last evening before the Festival, though, was spent entirely satisfactorily: although I did work right up till the Creative Writing Play Date at 8:00, I made myself a promise I was going to stop working in time to go to the Play Date. Which I did.

It's an odd thing that sometimes when you're stressed out, the writing can flow much more easily. I've had days at the Play Date where I felt like I was forcing myself to write. But this evening, I not only slipped right into writing mode, but I got that lovely sensation, which I rarely get, that I was surprising myself. The exercise started with us writing three words - a room, a family event like a wedding or birth or funeral or some other large occasion, and an emotion. Then Sean talked a bit about descriptive writing, setting, and mood, emphasizing those aspects in what we were going to write, and then we all traded pieces of paper randomly. (I particularly like the tendency for Play Date exercises to randomize the prompts that way: keeps me from falling into writing ruts when I'm being handed something I wasn't expecting to have to write about, and so don't have any 'motor programs' built up for.) And what I ended up writing had a couple of those moments where ideas popped into the story that I hadn't been expecting. Usually I take a long time to actually get to the story and this evening there was none of that.

So, that's the secret then? I can really get into writing when I ought to be doing something else? That makes some kind of sense, actually.

Because Hallowe'en is nigh...

2010-10-18T16:22:00.000-07:00

... I thought I'd pass along this story contest, which I got posted through the Writers Festival's Facebook letterbox. I assume that the deadline for this contest would be sometime before Hallowe'en, but I don't know when exactly. I bet they say on their website though. (Sorry about any formatting weirdness: that's what I get for cut-n-pasting things.)

Whippersnapper Press wants your scary stories for Hallowe'en. Bonus points if you're holding a torch under your face while you write them.

We like short, snappy writing that's biting. We also, (for 'tis the season) want it gory, unnerving, suspenseful - or in some other way thoroughly worthy of treats.

As ever we are poor artists and we run the website on good will and shoelaces, but because it's Hallowe'en we will be posting sweets/candy to any authors we publish.

Email your tales of terror to Whippersnapper.Press@gmail.com

with 'Submission' in the subject line.

Word limit: 3,000 max.

Some more info on what we take:
http://www.whippersnapperpress.com/?page_id=24

Slam Poetry in the Schools

2010-10-16T14:30:00.001-07:00

The Canadian Festival of Spoken Word’s main event is definitely the competition - the poets from cities across the country getting up on stage and going head to head for the title of National Champions. But along with the bouts - and the showcases and jam sessions - the festival also provides a chance for the spoken word community to share skills, with their workshop series. I caught the one on Bringing Slam to the Schools, led by Danielle Gregoire and Lara Bozabalian, both of whom have a lot of experience working with children and youth.
    The people at the workshop were there for all sorts of reasons - from looking for ideas, to wondering how to start a slam in a high school, to questions about details like where to find funding and how much money a poet should ask for to work with a class. And Danielle and Lara did what they could, in the limited time they had, to touch on all of them. I realized, in the workshop, that a lot of these poets are professional artists, or want to be - they were here because they want to make their poetry financially viable. And one of the best ways of doing that happens to also promote the art form and foster the next generation of poets.
    Mostly what the two leaders did in this workshop was to give their tricks - some exercises they use to get the kids writing, usually without really giving the game away that they were writing poetry until after they’d already done it: the trick, with kids as with adults, is often to get them to do the thing, then tell them what they’ve done, rather than to stand up and give a lot of theory or spell things out. In a classroom, not all the kids will even want to write poetry, so a certain amount of sneaking it in helps. “Don’t tell them what a metaphor is and then ask them to write one,” Lara said. “Set up a way that they write the metaphor first, then tell them. And high-five the teacher, because now she can cross that off the curriculum list.” (That is an important one: it’s particularly good if you can show the teacher that the kids are learning something she can report back. It’s all about showing that their time is being spent in a valuable way.)
    The exercise they had time to actually do with us was one where each table took a group of random words, then speed-wrote a group poem and performed it as a group. They hadn’t really taken into account that it was a room full of poets, so the poems produced were a little longer, and took a little longer, than anticipated, but Danielle did a great job of using the spaces between presentations to talk about how she uses this exercise to show the kids, while having them engaged in something, the basics of a slam - how she models listening, shows them how to snap and get involved in the poem as an audience member, and so on. Then Lara ran through a collection of possible exercises, mostly loosening-up exercises meant to dispel the students’ fears about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers and to get them used to just writing.
    There wasn’t a lot of time for questions, but the questions there were went straight to funding - how much to ask, where to go for funding, how to write a proposal, how to explain what the value of what you do is, how to assign a value to what you do (something I find poets have particular trouble with.) And they did pass around an email list and promised to send more materials on and keep the conversation going.

CFSW Semifinals, Bout One!

2010-10-16T13:17:00.001-07:00

I found myself thinking about strategy while I was watching the CFSW semifinals. Not to the exclusion of the fantastic poetry going on on the stage, of course, but every so often, as the poets took the stage and the audience made its deafening noise and the score cards went up, I thought about it, in my back row seat where I was sitting so the laptop wouldn’t annoy anyone.
    Maybe that was because the scores were so damn close. In the end it came down to one or two points out of a hundred between Capital Slam, Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto’s Up From The Roots. Time penalties made a difference: and I wondered if some of the teams were looking at the judges’ scores and trying to work out what this particular set of five people likes. Whether they were deciding to send up a funny piece to follow something heavy, or vice versa. So much can depend on such small things.
    But I didn’t have to worry about strategy, so I got to sit with the poetry. I didn’t even have to judge (which is a tough job.) Lucky me!
    I felt like I got a feel for the teams’ strengths in Bout One - Vancouver brought strong team pieces and unorthodox subjects, Montreal brought a strong dramatic flair, sometimes doing team pieces that only used one voice (and showed bravery in doing one poem almost entirely in French, considering they couldn’t know whether all the judges would be able to understand.) Capital Slam brought their fire and musicality (the guys on that team all have very flexible and controlled voices) and Up From The Roots brought, in general, an urban grittiness.
    A lot can depend on small things: Leviathan stumbled in a poem using a long string of animal metaphors and idioms to talk about respect between men and women, and it did cost points. Time penalties could make a difference. (But when they happened, it was entertaining to hear the whole room yell in unison, “You rat bastard! You’re ruining it for everyone! But it was well worth it!”) But still, it was so damn close.
    The team pieces might have been one of the highlights of the evening. They allow for some great staging, and something about having more than one poet up there delivering the work kicks the energy up (although some individuals are all the energy one stage can handle - Open Secret’s one-man conflagration on Joan of Arc was one example.) Moments that stick out for me? The sweet, scary delivery of Sasha Langford’s first poem, from the point of view of a little girl whose words sound innocent and belie a dark reality; Team Vancouver’s evocation of the Depression-era work projects that tried to keep joblessness and economic collapse at bay: “building libraries with the workdays of men who signed their names with X.” Dwayne Morgan’s scary rage at all the different roles black people are forced to play because of white society’s assumptions; Alessandra Naccarato’s heartbreaking story of her father’s, and her, mental illness (emotionally told, but also wonderfully worded),Chris Tse’s poem about the Asian sex trade, which started as a lyrical love story until it became frighteningly clear that the girl the narrator was in love with was being sold to Western sex tourists.
    And yes, all the other poems were fantastic too. That’s just a nearly-randomly-sampled list.
    In the end, Montreal and Ottawa Capital Slam came out on top, and are heading to the finals tonight (at Dominion Chalmers United Church, and it’s going to be spectacular.) They’re going up against Burlington and Ottawa Urban Legends - yeah, that’s fully half of the final four that are going to be from Ottawa. This is going to be interesting. And jaw-dropping, and mind-blowing, and roof-raising.

RC Weslowski - I've Been Thinking

2010-10-16T07:27:00.000-07:00

I heard him do this one again last night at the CFSW semifinals. I've heard it before: it's still fun. And one of the things I like about it is how different it is. Certain types of poems are such sure-fire crowd-pleasers: political rants, poems about oppression, poems about poetry, and poems praising self-respect and human dignity. They're gonna get cheers, and good scores. You do something this off-the-wall and it's a bit more of a risk. Sure, a good performance of it helps, but there's always that possibility that somene will say, "But, that poem wasn't really about anything," and thus points will be lost. (Which isn't to say that it isn't about anything: it's just not immediately obvious.)

Geek heil!

2010-10-15T12:49:00.000-07:00

Fair disclosure: I’m a poet, and I’m a self-proclaimed geek. And even I can appreciate that maybe people don’t necessarily associate the two. Especially not geeks and slam poetry. I mean, the steoetypical geek, if he writes poetry, writes angst-ridden love poems to the barbarian princesses of distant planets, or to Deanna Troi, and then never shows them to anyone, right? Slam? That thing where people get up on stage and strike fire into their audiences with their verbal mastery, captivating performances and emotional intensity? Aren’t nerds supposed to be shy, awkward, retiring folk, only truly comfortable with their computers and 20-sided dice?
    So what are they doing getting up on the mike and pulling roars and cheers and sighs from their audience?
    They’re celebrating.
    The – to use its official title – Steve Sauve Memorial Nerd Showcase, part of the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, seemed to me to be just that: a celebration. Featuring Nadine Thornhill and Bart Cormier, who put together a beautifully shaped - “adorkable” - joint performance that even included a little soft shoe (at the urging of the audience), the show was hilarious and smart. Rather like nerds themselves.
    What constitutes geek poetry? It turns out that it’s not just that geek poetry is about math or science fiction or Batman. Sure, the geek references flew like laser fire at the Battle of Yavin: it helps to know why it would hurt to step on a Warhammer 40K figure, what “Sayyadina” means, and why it’s funny to say “I’m your differential / touching all your curves.” But there’s also, built into it, a shared experience of having at some point in your life felt like an outsider, like you just didn’t fit into society, and of having found other likeminded people along the way, because face it, there was a room full of other likeminded people there. All nerds and geeks have felt like that at some point – but then, hasn’t everyone?
    So the poetry that came out at the showcase was also universal: funny, bawdy, touching, moving, encouraging. At first glance you wouldn’t think Nadine Thornhill’s poem “Loser,” which she premiered at this event, had a particularly geek-centric theme, but the basic idea of it – having been convinced at some point that if you didn’t excel at something by society’s standards, you shouldn’t try, and learning that in fact you had every right to play even if you were bad at the game – speaks to anyone who was picked last for gym class sports.
    Sure, there were blaster-rifle and jumpsuit-laden odes to classic SF, there were slightly obsessive and terribly funny love letters to Natalie Portman, there were Monty Python references, there was a poem combining Kraftwerk and Ricardo Montalban, there were allusions to Warcraft, hit points, Doctor Who and Dune, and there were self-deprecating appearances of inhalers and retainers and acne and all the other nerd stereotypes; but these were also poems about unrequited love and about loving (or lusting after) someone’s mind more than their body, they were about finding community, and about dreaming big. There were superheroes aplenty. And yeah, there was also an opening ‘sing-along’ performance of Steve Sauve’s signature ‘Clarion Call (The Geek Poem.)’
    Bart Cormier might have gotten the loudest shouts of the night with his poem that announced, bluntly, that geeks, nerds, poets, artists, and all their ilk are not cool. Absolutely not cool. Because ‘cool’ doesn’t care. ‘Cool’ has seen it all, done it all, and thought it was lame before anyone else even discovered it. By those lights, the enthusiasms, the passions, the obsessions, the loves, the joys, and the creativity of poets (and geeks, and nerds, and artists, and sculptors and dancers and all the others) are decidedly uncool. “I am not cool,” he thundered. “You are not cool.” And the whole room joined in to yell, “WE ARE NOT COOL!”

The joys of Twitter

2010-10-12T20:04:00.000-07:00

I had to work this evening, from home, and I couldn't be at the first bout for CFSW. But I've got Twitter popping up in the corner of my screen, and it simultaneously keeps me informed, and makes me wish I was there. I just saw the scores - Urban Legends taking first place - and then Nadine Thornhill's quick 'tweet' right after that: "Hearing poetry always inspires mento write poetry and now I'm in parking lot making notes. @cfsw2010ottawa"

I've been able to follow this afternoon's Last Chance Slam, and find out who was going to wind up on the Wild Card Team (yay, Festrell!). I've caught the articles popping up in advance of CFSW - Xtra's kind of sweet article on Beth Anne Fischer and Truth Is, lovers who happen to be competing on opposing teams, the Citizen's coverage of Ottawa's teams (and their video of Inez Dekker performing "Wild Thing"), the buzz about the whole festival. Okay, so that means, so far, that I know what I'm missing. Damn my other responsibilities. Still cool to know what's going on.

No, it doesn't feel like I'm there, because I didn't get to be in the jam-packed venue, and I didn't get to hear the poems: although I knew, in real time, who was on stage right now - and does that ever strike me as strange sometimes. I remember a world before BBS's. And now I'm sitting at my dining room table, working, and aware at the same time, in blow-by-blow detail, of what's going on at the poetry slam I'm missing. While simultaneously watching friends and fans banter with William Gibson (@GreatDismal, in case you were wondering) and being made aware that the first of the Chilean miners is being lifted out of the pit. Right now. While I'm working, at my dining room table.

But that's beside the point. The point is that I had to miss the first night of CFSW, and I pretty much wish I didn't have to. Sounds like it was great. Congratulations to Urban Legends for carrying the day! I was with you in spirit. And in Twitter.

CFSW CFSW CFSW

2010-10-12T10:25:00.000-07:00

The Canadian Festival of Spoken Word starts today! This means there are a large number of spoken word artists from all over the country roaming the streets: keep an eye out.

Although it sort of feels like the prelude was last night - I was at Voices of Venus last night for a show featuring the Lanark County Slam Team (the only all-female slam team ever, and the only rural slam team.) The team also features the youngest ever national competitor - Satinka Schilling - and the oldest, Inez Dekker. Toward the end of their set, the doors of Umi Cafe opened up and a bunch of local members of the Capital Poetry Collective came in, followed by a handful of visiting poets, fresh from a welcome dinner over at the East African Restaurant. And things started to feel kind of Festival-ish.

I thought the Lanark County team seemed shaky, to be totally honest - with the exception of a couple of really good pieces by Emily Kwissa - who has been belying her age for a couple of years now, and who writes subtle, strong, cohesive stuff, and then performs it well - and Britt Pruden-Faraday, particularly an imaginative and funny and thoughtful piece about her emo bobblehead alter ego. Both are strong performers even when they read off the page, which is a help. I'll be interested to see what they bring to the competitions.

I think the next thing I'll be able to get to is the Nerd Showcase (technically the Steve Sauvé Memorial Nerd Showcase - and incidentally, today is Steve's birthday: kind of fitting, isn't it?) on Thursday at 4:00: I've promised to bring my Dungeons & Dragons & DC Heroes poem, and might also drop my steampunk poem about a young lady scientist who's building a doomsday machine in her fiancé's attic. Now you know you want to come, right? The Nerd Showcase will be featuring Nadine Thornhill (the Adorkable Thespian) and Bart Cormier, with plenty of open mike for anyone who considers themselves to have written a nerd poem. Poems on anything from astrophysics to Zot! are welcome.

Now that's what I call ephemera.

2010-10-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

Just spotted this: Bookninja has posted a handwritten sheet of densely scribbled ballpoint - JK Rowling (AKA Lord Volderowling) laying out the plot of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Niiiiiiiice. Totally worth squinting at for a couple of minutes.

Just remembered recently discovering one of these that I did back in college: nowhere near as orderly. In my recollection it consisted mostly of a slightly woggly line curving downward with an arrow somewhere in the middle indicating the introduction of a character, and a cloud of scribbles at its beginning. Now I really want to go home and find it. If I do... I'll post it.

AB Series next Saturday

2010-10-08T12:05:00.000-07:00

A B SERIES PRESENTS

Readings by award-winning poets

SHANE RHODES & JAY MILLAR

* SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2010 *

* Doors open 7:00pm *
* Readings at 7:30pm *

WHERE:
Gallery 101
301 1/2 Bank Street
(top level)
Ottawa, Ontario

More info:
ABSERIES.ORG

Literary Landscape, September 30 2010: The Rolling Darkness Revue

2010-10-06T17:49:00.000-07:00

For the last Literary Landscapes show, I got Peter Atkins on the line from California, and Sean Moreland in the studio, to talk ghost stories: Peter Atkins and Glen Hirshberg are coming to Ottawa with the Rolling Darkness Revue, on its first ever visit to Canada. This visit was organized on our end by Sean Moreland and James Moran. The Rolling Darkness Revue is an annual ghost story tour, featuring music and stories. I have to apologize for the fact that the first few minutes of the interview got cut off: but I got the rest on tape, and Pete had some really interesting things to say about ghost stories, and why they both frighten and comfort us. The Rolling Darkness Revue will be featured at the Ottawa Writers Festival - check out the schedule at www.writersfestival.org - and at a special presentation at the University of Ottawa.

Click here to listen.

Another Banned Books week gone...

2010-10-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

Yup, it's Banned Books Week - last year, I think, I posted a banned book a day, randomly selected from the ALA's interactive map of challenged books. But this week I've been run ragged with a couple of huge events, and I think I didn't really have the energy to even look at the mass of wriggling ignorance that produces most book challenges.

But the week is meant to get attention, and it's heartening to see that people have been, as usual, posting and blogging about and tweeting the top 10 banned books - most of them YA books, many of them very popular YA books, and some of them the perennial returnees (Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse Five, Huckleberry f*cking Finn.) And Tango Makes Three has been resting comfortably in the top five for years for the horrifying, childhood-destroying observation that two male penguins once set up house together and adopted a chick. Twilight's on the list this year, I see: not for the reasons that you might think, like "creepy hundred-year-old vampire stalks teen girl, portrayed as romance," but for having "sexually explicit themes." Or maybe someone objected to the undead thing.

So here we are at the end of the week: so to set up a variation on the theme for this year: Just found a list of banned graphic novels. (I discovered it because Neil Gaiman recently tweeted his disappointment that Sandman was up at the top of the list.) I think I want to go read all the graphic novels on this list that I haven't yet read (a surprising number, actually).

I also read a blog called "Letters of Note" (there's a link to it on the sidebar to the right) which posts correspondence that the editor finds interesting or enlightening: conveniently, for Banned Books Week, he just posted a letter from John Irving to a school library which had successfully managed to stop the removal of The Hotel New Hampshire from the school. Irving's letter in response is gracious and reassuringly calm. I particularly like his observation that "Real readers finish books, and then judge them; most people who propose banning a book haven't finished it. In fact, no one who actually banned Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" even read it."

Sad news

2010-09-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

This is really sad: Key Porter Books just laid off most of its staff and is relocating out of Toronto. What a bummer: I've really liked working with Key Porter, with the kids program at the Writers Festival. And I have to feel for the folks that just got laid off. That just sucks.

Happy Birthday English!

2010-09-28T08:46:00.000-07:00

It might be kind of arbitrary to call this the birthday of English, but if you had to pick a day for the birth of the language as we know it, this one might be it. I spotted this today in a newsletter I get called The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1066 that William the Conqueror of Normandy arrived on British soil. He defeated the British in the Battle of Hastings on October 14, and on Christmas Day, he was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey.

The Norman invasion had a larger and more pronounced effect on the development of the English language than any other event in history. Within the course of a few centuries, English went from being a strictly Germanic language to one infused with a large Latinate vocabulary, which came via French.

We wouldn't have this language as we speak it without the Norman invasion of Britain. And we wouldn't have one of the things I really love about it: two different vocabularies, each suited to a different level of politeness. When I used to teach English to ESL students, I told the high-level ones that if they were ever confused about which word was the more polite, the more formal, the more scientific; pick the longer one. 'Talk' or 'converse'? 'Spit' or 'expectorate'? 'Walk' or 'perambulate'? 'Trip' or 'voyage'? You want the gutsy, visceral (and there's another example!) version of a word, go for the Germanic. You want the fancy, formal version, go for the Latinate.

There's just so much you can do with English. It's a complete hodgepodge of Celtic, Germanic and Norman roots with a whole bunch of loan words grafted on. Sure, it's a bit of a creole, a chimera, a kluge, a mongrel. That's what's so awesome about it.

So, thanks for the invasion, William. Happy birthday (joyous anniversary), English.

John Vaillant at Nicholas Hoare

2010-09-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

I didn't really have a chance to write about this back when it happened, but I spotted the photos I took from the back rows at the packed reading at Nicholas Hoare today, and thought I'd post one.

This book - The Tiger - is really, really good - a very skilful braiding of multiple threads together while never losing the thread of the through-story, which is hard to believe, tense, and would make a great movie. Apparently there has been some interest in the movie rights - keep an eye out. The story would play out something like The Ghost and the Darkness, but I personally think it would be better, and more interesting, especially if the movie can hang on to the idea - which shows up in the books - that what the rest of the world thought was great for Russia - perestroika - was actually disastrous for the people and the tigers of the far easten coast.

I also have to say, if you weren't there, you missed a great reading - Vaillant has an exceptionally good reading style. I asked him later if there was an audio book, and if he did the reading for it. I'm happy to report that he did. . . and maybe the experience of reading for the audio book helped him. Too often I've been disappointed by an author who has a great book, and can't read it aloud: this was mesmerizing. Vaillant is also a very good storyteller, and the way he talked about the creation of the book and explained all the factors that contributed to this complicated relationship between a community of humans and a wounded and angry Amur tiger fit easily between the sections he chose to read. I'm not surprised the bookstore came close to selling out of the book.

And Nicholas Hoare was a great setting. "This place... it's a shrine," Vaillant said, about the shop, with those awesome floor-to-ceiling shelves and rolling ladders. Have to agree. There's not much in the way of seating for an event like this, but it feels so good to be there.

The Stone Book

2010-09-21T20:20:00.000-07:00

The daughter of a stone mason learns the old ways of her family when her father shows her symbols carved into stone in this classic work of magical realism. Based on the book by British author Alan Garner and shaped for the oral tradition by storyteller Jan Andrews, this is a coming of age story that examines our relationship with our history and our landscape.

I remember being read Alan Garner's stunning The Stone Book when I was probably too young to really understand it: which may be why the magic sank so deep. I remember that, like a lot of Garner's work, mystery underlay everything: the landscape, the people, the rhythms of the way they talked. I remember the opening of the book - the ploughman's lunch, and the dizzying, vertigo-inducing image of a child riding a weathercock at the tip of a steeple as though she was galloping through the sky, spinning above the countryside. And every time I see the tilted layers that you see in Ontario granite, or the weathered-out shelves of the schist cliffs I climbed near Aberdeen in Scotland, and nearly every time I see the pattern that receding waves leave on a beach, I think of the child looking at those ripples across the roof of a cavern, and understanding that once, somehow, the stone above her head had been an ocean floor.

So I'm particularly excited that Jan Andrews has adapted The Stone Book to the oral tradition, and is going to be telling it on October 3rd. And I can't help thinking that Jan, who is also a rock climber, will have just the feel for stone that the story asks for.

Happy Birthday Bilbo!

2010-09-21T09:18:00.000-07:00

Yup, it was on this day in 1937 that The Hobbit was published. I'm actually re-reading my copy these days - it sits on my bedside table. I just got to Beorn's house.

I don't need to get into how incredibly important a book this fairly silly little tale with a fairly ridiculous hero is, do I? So here - in celebration of the Little Dude's 73rd birthday, something completely frivolous, that also sort of illustrates how much a part of our culture this book has become:

Vox Femina at Umi Cafe

2010-09-20T10:50:00.000-07:00

Oh, I wish I wasn't busy on the 23rd: I would absolutely be at this reading otherwise. Vox Femina is made up of Luna Allison (Ottawa, Montreal), Jill Battson (New Mexico, Toronto), Sandra Alland (Edinburgh, Toronto) and Adeena Karasick (NYC), and they're all fantastic. I can only imagine what it's like when they join forces. This show is a Voices of Venus special presentation: props to VoV for putting together yet another stellar special!

The show's at Umi Cafe, which is a little place, so get there early to get a seat: 7:00, September 23rd. (Yep, that's this Thursday!)

Incidentally, in case you didn't know, Jane Urquhart is at the Mayfair Theatre tonight at 7:00 with the Writers Festival - fresh off the announcement this morning of the Giller Prize longlist. (That link goes to the CBC announcement: I'd send you to the Giller website but it seems to have been security blocked for suspicious activity. I'm not sure what that means, but it's just about the absolute worst time for it to happen. Wonder if someone at the Giller pissed off a hacker? Or if they have a beef with one of the nominees?)

P.S.: I got this comment on Facebook from Amazon, who is one of the people that runs Voices of Venus, and she said she'd tried to comment here and run into issues with the 'select a profile' thing. So, for the record, what she wanted to say was:

Wish you could come, too. Thanks for the signal boost! :-D

I should clarify, though: Vox Femina (who will be at the Kingston Writers' Festival after their show in Ottawa) approached VoV as an already-formed group (via Luna Allison). Also, we're getting a tonne of help from Ladyfest Ottawa. (The poster has since been amended to reflect that).

http://www.facebook.com/photo_search.php?oid=82921239343&view=user#!/photo.php?pid=14900467&o=all&op=1&view=all&subj=82921239343&aid=-1&id=691780051&oid=82921239343

Does a writer's DNA matter?

2010-09-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

I posted the schedule for the Fall Edition of the Festival on the Festival's Facebook and Twitter feeds last week, and created a Facebook event for the Festival itself.

I'd already done the same for the pre-Festival lineup, and one of the Festival's Facebook friends had responded by asking, "Um... what happened to the womenz?"

I wrote back, explaining that we don't really give much thought to the sex, race, religion or sexual orientation (or physical condition, or age, or hair colour, or number of tattoos) of a writer when considering him, or her, or hir, or whoever, for an invitation to the Festival. If we had a 50/50 policy, wouldn't that be a bit strange? "We must invite precisely 35 men and 35 women writers"? How many of those men, and women, should be, say, black? And of those black men and black women, how many should be Caribbean, how many African-American (and by 'American' I mean 'North American'), how many from Africa, and how do we make sure the correct countries are represented from Africa? Do we then find ourselves desperately trying to find a writer to invite, any writer, who's female and from Namibia?

Well, okay, I didn't say it like that. I said that we consider what's out there, and who is touring, and who has a great new book out, and who we think is likely to grab the interest of our audiences, or who we think is important to introduce our audience to. Sex doesn't enter into the decision making process one way or the other - and it does turn out that, some years, there are more of one demographic group than another. One year, every fiction author was female. It was totally unplanned; it just happened to fall out that way. (And no one complained at the lack of men, incidentally.)

But then, the same Facebook friend responded to the full Festival schedule by announcing that she was going to boycott the Festival, because there weren't enough women in it.

Okay. That's, as far as I can tell, her prerogative. I think she'll be missing out on a pretty sweet lineup, personally, but that's her call to make.

And then one of her friends added that she was going to give us the benefit of the doubt, but "if it doesn't change next year" she would cancel her membership, and I started to feel - defensive? Confused? Indignant? I started counting women. And it felt weird. Last fall, 29 out of 75 writers were women. What does that mean? Does it mean anything? Suddenly I was looking at writers and putting them in boxes. Male. Female. White. Native. Indian. Black. Muslim. Jewish. Christian. Gay. Straight. Sometimes it had a bearing on the book they were here to present. Usually it didn't. But suddenly they all had a tag, or it felt like they needed one. And it felt weird.

We get people every year who call and ask me, "Are there any queer writers in the lineup this year?" or "Are there any Aboriginal writers?" or "Are there any Muslim writers?" To which I usually find myself shrugging and answering, "You probably know better than me: the authors list is up on the website." Sometimes I don't know a writer's sex until I look up their bio - what if they have an indeterminate name, or go by initials only? The same goes for religion, sexual orientation, anything you can't tell from a name.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should be making an effort to ensure a gender balance in our lineup. But passing up a Michael Cunningham, or a John Lavery, or a Richard B. Wright, because he's white and male seems strange to me. I'm a woman: I don't feel excluded by this lineup of authors. I don't understand canceling a membership or boycotting the Festival in protest against it, as though it was a deliberate, patriarchal decision on the part of the staff to exclude women (for one thing, three-quarters of our full-time staff are female). I'll say it again: we invite authors who are good, who are interesting, who have new books out, who we think will draw an audience, spark an important conversation, or help our community better understand itself.

Sean, the Artistic Director of the Festival, told me that he once had a conversation with Donna Bailey Nurse in which she told him the Festival had a good reputation in the black community. "Why's that?" Sean asked her, and she said it was because they knew there was no tokenism in the Festival: if a writer was invited it wasn't because we 'needed some colour,' it was because we thought she was good, and as a member of a community that gets tapped for the sake of diversity, she valued knowing she was being included on her own merits, not for the colour of her skin. I'd say the same thing about the women in this Fall's lineup - I mean, look at who they are. Two of them are Booker shortlisters this year. Three are members of the Order of Canada. We've also got an IMPAC longlister, and the recipient of the inaugural Human Dignity Award from the European Parliament. I'd say the women in this fall's lineup are pretty impressive people. And none of them were invited because of their sex: they were invited because of their talent.

And I really wish I could stop counting women now, but it's a bit like having the Barney song stuck in your head. Argh.

Talk like a 13th Century Pirate - Challenge!

2010-09-17T10:35:00.000-07:00

My father just sent me this, from the 18th-Century Literature list he's on: not sure if it's a real assignment, but I'd like to think that it is. (He asked if I'd heard of Talk Like A Pirate Day: arrrr, an' knowin the sort o' scurvy bilge rats crossin' my wake across the Seven Cyber Seas, it's sure as curses in dead men's eyes I'll savvy the High Holy Day o' the Pastafarians...)

I think this assignment is awesome, too. In fact, I'd love to toss it out there as a challenge. (Steve Zytveld, I'm looking at you.) If you want to give this a try, the assignment, as originally posted, is below. Post your translations here in the comments section! (If you post them by Monday, that's extra points. Points are redeemable for 'geek cred,' the standard currency of conventions, comic stores, online discussion boards, and any and all MMORPGs, particularly the ones with pirates. Also legal tender in many fine academic establishments.)

(N.b. You do not need to be a geek, nerd, or medieval literature student to participate.)

"This coming Sunday, Sept. 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Any of those who have chosen to write at least one two-page paper for their paper options may, for this Monday only, translate any 50 lines of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales into pirate-ese. You must demonstrate understanding of the original text in your translation -- no random translations, please. Your grade will reflect the accuracy and originality of
your translation. I will, of course, take into account different possible readings of lines.

If you need some direction in talking like a pirate, check out this website:

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/howto.html

The links from this page are probably more useful than the page itself.

Good luck, have fun with it if you choose the translation exercise, and see you all Monday.

--James Rovira"

Cool Things Roundup

2010-09-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

It's been a hell of a crazy day, so don't mind my moment of geek: is it so wrong that after a long, very exhausting pre-Festival-crunch day, I got home, sat down, and played my cell's ringtone (the sound of the TARDIS taking off) to make myself feel better?

This is the sound, incidentally. It may make you feel better too. Or it might just make you worry about my sanity.

But on my list of other things that have brightened my day (and that are more in keeping with the theme of this blog):

Local storyteller and author Jan Andrews posted today that her children's book The Auction is going to be made into a children's opera. Not only is the idea of an adaptation pretty exciting, but I love the idea of a children's opera. There should be more of that type of thing, please! I'm also pretty happy for Jan. What a cool project to be involved with.

Also, the National Post's Opening Line of the Week was posted today, and it's the first line of John Lavery's brand new novel Sandra Beck. Hooray, it's here! Hooray, it's great! I've been loving John's writing for a long time. Nice to see other people think he's great too.

And I see on Pearl Pirie's blog that Sean Moreland is involved in starting up a new reading series at U of O? The first reading is on the 20th. I'll be working that night (that's the Jane Urquhart reading at the Mayfair) but I want to come check it out when I can!

And, a couple of copies of Ken Sparling's BOOK arrived at the office today. I don't think I've seen a more instantly gorgeous book in a long time. I haven't had a chance to even think of reading it, but that didn't matter. I just wanted to touch it and feel it and flip through the pages and look at the fonts and the way the ink sat on the paper. What stunning design. Sometimes books, as objects, are just awesome.

P.S. Just to head back to the geekiness of the beginning of this post - if you don't know about the blog Letters of Note, you probably should. It's a collection of fascinating letters, memos, faxes and telegrams from around the world, from all sorts of people on all sorts of topics. It's arch, smart, enlightening, and often very funny (one of my personal favorites for this year is the letter from a 14-year-old Slash - yes, that Slash - to his ex-girlfriend.) But that's not the one I liked today. The one I liked today was the response by the BBC to a fan named Ronald's request for blueprints for a Dalek.

It's here!

2010-09-14T10:42:00.000-07:00

Well, it's finally up and online: the Ottawa Writers Festival fall schedule. I've had my head buried in web design for the last couple of weeks to get this ready to go and I'm actually a day ahead of schedule! Highlights for me? Well, hell, where to start?

I could list all the stuff I want to catch but the truth is, I may be running around in the background, so I can't get my hopes up that I'll be able to make the events I want to see. Good thing we usually video our events for YouTube (and this time with better sound quality, I promise!)

But if I don't get in to see William Gibson on the 24th I'll be very sad. Just sayin.

Raise It (again)

2010-09-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

CFSW is coming! CFSW is coming!

The first time I ever attended a slam was at the first Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, which was held here in Ottawa at Library and Archives Canada. I've written about the experience before - I'd never seen or heard anything like it. The energy level was amazing - in fact, after one session I remember walking out of the theatre slightly stunned, getting myself home and then just heading to my room to lie down on my bed, feeling like I'd just run a marathon.

It was the idea of people jumping to their feet screaming like rock concert fans, for poetry, that really grabbed me. There was one moment when the judges apparently didn't love someone's piece as much as the audience did, and there was an eruption of 'boo's' for the judges, and then I vividly recall the standing ovation in defiance of the points awarded, where the whole audience clapped and cheered and turned to face the poet as he went back to his seat in the auditorium, and had to be quieted down eventually by the host.

After that, I started seeing Capital Slam ramping up in Ottawa, and slams jumped up all over the country, and a spoken word scene developed, particularly here, that was tight-knit, passionate, and thriving. But it wasn't just Ottawa, it was thriving all over the country. CBC started their Poetry Face-Off contest. From Vancouver to Halifax, poets started popping out of the woodwork. And climbing into vans to drive to each other's cities to perform and crash on other poets' couches. And organizing event after event. I kept thinking that eventually a critical mass would be reached, and we'd reach what the market in Ottawa could bear for competitive spoken word. But it didn't seem to be happening. Then other slams and slam-style performance series started appearing. The Onenesss Poetry Showcase at the East African Restaurant. Urban Legends at Carleton University. Bill Brown's 1-2-3 Slam. Voices of Venus, the women's spoken word series. OutSpoken featured queer spoken word during Pride Week. Lanark Country got a slam series after the inimitable Danielle Grégoire moved to Almonte and started a writing workshop. There are spoken word workshops happening all over, particularly the ongoing Ingredients workshop at Umi Cafe. And Ottawa's slam team took home the gold at the last CFSW, and one of its members, Ian Keteku, recently became the World Spoken Word Champion in Paris.

Oh, yeah, and the Canadian Olympic Committee decided to feature Vancouver poet Shane Koyczan in the Opening Ceremonies this winter. So, a spoken word poet made up part of an international showcase of Canada.

So now CFSW is coming back to Ottawa from October 12-16 (it moves locations from city to city across the country) with all the momentum it's built up, and bringing with it a nation-wide community of people who generally all know, respect, admire and learn from each other. If you haven't heard spoken word before, this would be the place to do it: the best in the country, giving it their best, and an audience that is beyond excited about being there.

Back again. With a tiger.

2010-09-09T20:13:00.000-07:00

I tried to post this on my old blog... and realized how much I don't like the Tripod blog tool. So, here I am!

Amanda Earl's kicked me into action with a great short rant on her blog about the lack of coverage of literary events in Ottawa. How come a town that's so booming in very cool indie publications covering the arts, fashion, culture and theatre somehow manages to get less publicity for the literary side of things? Not no publicity, but somehow tangibly less. It's a little more lackluster.

I might argue that maybe the literary scene is more insular, but I don't really think that's the case. Maybe all the poets already know each other, and so don't think to promote? Or maybe, as Amanda suggests, people see the word 'poetry' and assume, well, that can't be cool? (and in this case I'm talking about page poetry, since the spoken word scene is booming, and 'cool' is pretty much the word everyone involved in it would use to describe poetry.)

Don't know. But Amanda said, get out there and blog. So, with my fire lit again (and sadly, just before I'm about to be eaten by the Writers Festival) I'm going to try to get back to blogging.

Although, the Festival is about to eat me. The first event is next Friday, and, coincidentally, I've been wanting to write about it. It's a book launch for John Vaillant's book The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. It's usually pretty hard for me to read all or even most of the books that we feature at the Festival, but I've been giving it a try this season, and I lucked out with The Tiger. It took me only a few days to read. Can I use the word 'gripping' without sounding like a cheeseball?

The book follows a series of actual events in the far eastern corner of Russia, an area called Primorye, which is sandwiched in alongside Mongolia, and is a surprisingly alien place. His descriptions of the land make it sound like the Genesis planet: his coinage for it is 'boreal jungle,' the sort of place where it's 30 below but there are tigers and jaguars alongside the wolverines and caribou, and where the native population, who share a lot of physical traits with the Inuit, are sharing their space with emigrated ethnic Russians from the western end of the country.

The book starts with a hunter who is killed by a Siberian tiger, the world's biggest cat, and with a group of men who are, essentially forest rangers, although out here most of the forest rangers are ex-military, as are a lot of the poachers they deal with. It follows the tiger, which is not just hunting people, but destroying them, leaving virtually nothing behind, and even going after their cabins and destroying those as well, and it follows the men whose job it is to hunt the tiger down and kill it. Along the way it takes in the history and biology of the Siberian tiger, the way in which tigers and humans might once have shared the same ecosystem more or less peaceably, the economic and social dissolution of eastern Russia that forces the local people to poach tigers for the Chinese market, and the psychology of the sort of people who can live in a place as barren and forbidding as Primorye.

The landscape is a character. The cold is a character. The tiger - both the actual tiger and the mythical, mystical, psychological tiger - is definitely a character. And the way in which the story slowly follows the hunt for the tiger, with elegant, graceful side detours into the history of Russia, the lives of the people involved, the local ethnography and mythology, and the harsh realities of the landscape, kept making me stop with my jaw dropped. How did he do that? I'd think to myself, and then dive back in. It was like listening to a really good jazz musician improvising for ages while never really losing the arc of the whole tune.

Admittedly, I also have a certain fascination for survival, for the kinds of people who can accomplish the kinds of physical and mental and emotional feats that these people can, and I love reading about completely unfamiliar places. Score on all counts.

And I've just come across this review from the Seattle Times which says everything I'd like to say, and also had the insight to compare him to John McPhee (albeit they call him "John McPhee on steroids," which makes me giggle, and sort of kind of nod in agreement - especially about the virtuosic and seemingly effortless amount of stunning background detail.)

Can't wait to hear him read next Friday. (It's at Nicholas Hoare Books, at 7:00, and it's free! Wine and cheese, and blood freezing on the snow. Awesome.)

Moving Day

2010-09-09T16:11:00.000-07:00

New platform, new lease on life. At least, I hope so. The Tripod site I used to use has gotten clunky and was never all that pretty to start with. And after the inimitable Amanda Earl's rant today about the lack of literary coverage in town, I thought, hey wait... I really should be adding my (admittedly minor) voice. So, I've moved to Blogger, where I already have a blog on cycling, The Incidental Cyclist. (Which would be why you see Mike muscling in on my literary opinions, in the 'posted by' lines.)

We'll see if having both blogs in one virtual place keeps me on track...

free range print

Change comes: Jan Andrews' "Who Wants the Dress?"

Unpacking fairytales in Perth

Catching up on the last two weekends...

Poetry mashups with Pearl

Apocalypse Tonight

A love note

Happy New Year!

What's in a story

Tree Seeds and Learning Things

Had to do it

December word-related events!

Taking my affirmation where I can get it

Happy Birthday CBC

Stand up for the Writers Festival

It's that time of year again: The ottawa small press fair is nearly upon us!

SF and Atwood and me

Jeff Cottrill's back in town

So very much to do

Earthborn 2011 & Story Slam

Seriously not cool, and illegal

Spin

A weekend of fairs

John Lavery Memorial tomorrow

JOHN LAVERY MEMORIAL/W​AKE READING

Early Summer Morning Honey

Chinatown Remixed

Sad news

Signed

The Sounds of Poetry: Robert Pinsky in Ottawa

Storytelling workshop

Festival Kickoff

Short Stories

Writersfest Season

More Local Touristing

First Local Tourist piece!

Gods and Monsters

VERSeFest Taught Me

True fandom

VERSeFest (Part 1: Wednesday night)

Confession

VERSeFest kicks off Tuesday!

Translating Talk

Literary Landscape tonight!

Oscar Wilde? Bollywood? WTF?

You know you're hooked when...

VERSefest: Call for Poetry Submissions

Riddle me this:

Surprised again by the Play Date

Chasing Boudicca, reviewed!

Wicked typography animation

Back down to earth?

It's tomorrow!

VERSeFest

Next Story Slam...

Story shaping

My voice on CBC? Coooooool!

My $0.02 about Peter

Ain't the Future Something?

Graphic

What Happens After

Once Upon a Slam

Slamtastic

Spectacular

Storytellers Festival starts tonight!

Can you help me get published?

Night of the Living Dead: Live at the Mayfair

Festival, and the writing groove

Because Hallowe'en is nigh...

Slam Poetry in the Schools

CFSW Semifinals, Bout One!

RC Weslowski - I've Been Thinking

Geek heil!

The joys of Twitter

CFSW CFSW CFSW

Now *that's* what I call ephemera.

AB Series next Saturday

Literary Landscape, September 30 2010: The Rolling Darkness Revue

Another Banned Books week gone...

Sad news

JOHN LAVERY MEMORIAL/WAKE READING

Now that's what I call ephemera.