Happy Birthday CBC

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

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!

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

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

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

Started in 1994 by Ottawa poet rob mclennan and his colleague James Spyker, the Small Press Fair has evolved and grown over the last 17 years. Spyker is no longer involved with the fair, but it has been faithfully nurtured by mclennan and has steadily grown in popularity. As a university poet many (many) moons ago, I remember bringing the hand-photocopied and stapled books I’d produced for the Carleton English Literature Society to the fair, and later attending with Dusty Owl 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, Chaudiere Books, above/ground press, Room 302 Books, The Puritan, The Ottawa Arts Review, Buschek Books, The Grunge Papers, Broken Jaw Press, BookThug, Proper Tales Press, and others. It’s a great place to pick up brand-new literature at a bargain price, to discover your new favorite local artist, and to meet others in the literary community. Besides, you get to poke through piles of bleeding-edge, cool, local writing!

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

SF and Atwood and me

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

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

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

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: