The Jane Day Reader: Free Your Mind Reading Series: Poetry

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Free Your Mind Reading Series: Poetry

Saturday, April 15, 7:30 pm
Aqua Books, 89 Princess Street
(between McDermot and Bannatyne)

Featured readers – Laurie Block, Sally Ito, Ariel Gordon

Free your mind with this new bi-monthly reading series, featuring established and emerging Manitoba writers of all genres in one of Winnipeg’s brightest and cheeriest secondhand bookstores.

The inaugural event will celebrate National Poetry Month and feature poets Laurie Block, Sally Ito, and Ariel Gordon. Future events will focus on everything from biography and mystery to science-fiction/fantasy and young adult fiction.

Laurie Block, award-winning author and storyteller, has performed in schools and festivals in Canada and the USA since 1987. A chapbook of poetry, Governing Bodies, was published by Turnstone Press in 1988. The bilingual collection, Foreign Graces/Bendiciones Ajenas, (The Muses’ Co.,1999) features poetry based on his experiences in South America. His latest collection of poetry, Time Out of Mind (Oolichan Books) is scheduled to launch in the fall of 2006.

Sally Ito has published two books of poetry - Frogs in the Rain Barrel and Season of Mercy (Nightwood Editions, 1995 & 1999) - and a collection of short fiction called Floating Shore (Mercury Press, 1998). She teaches creative writing at Canadian Mennonite University and recently has been a judge for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, an international book prize that recognizes outstanding books published in English from or about the Pacific Rim.

Ariel Gordon is a writer and editor whose recent credits include poetry in a literary magazine in Windsor and on buses in Alberta. She recently completed The Banff Centre’s Wired Writing Studio, working under Robert Hilles on a manuscript of travel poetry, and had the great good fortune to spend the month of June at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. Ariel is also a regular contributor to The Winnipeg Free Press’ Books Section.

The readings start at 7:30 and admission is free. Please join us!

7 comments:

Ken Kowal said...: i'll try to be there

interested in hearing
Laurie read his
Mum poems; 8:13 pm, March 25, 2006
Anita Daher said...: Hurrah! I will try to be there. I will be in the neighbourhood earlier in the day for a Blue Pencil Session.; 6:47 pm, March 26, 2006
Anonymous said...: Anita's much too modest to mention that it's her own Blue Pencil Session, so I'll have to post the details...

Blue Pencil Session with Anita Daher on writing for Kids

Join Anita Daher for an exciting afternoon workshopping your work with a group of enthusiastic likeminded writers.

When: Saturday, April 15th, 1pm-4pm
Where: MWG Boardroom, 206-100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg MB.

For more information or to register contact: info@mbwriter.mb.ca or call (204) 942-6134.; 8:17 pm, March 26, 2006
Anita Daher said...: [blush] Thanks Ariel :-) Should be a fun day in the Exchange!; 4:12 am, March 27, 2006
Ariel Gordon said...: 4:00 am!?! Are you sure you'll be able to stay up that late?; 6:44 am, March 27, 2006
Anita Daher said...: Haha :-) I may need a nap. If only I could nap.

You're up pretty early yourself, m'dear!; 7:52 am, March 27, 2006
Ariel Gordon said...: Yah, between the gestation-in-the- belly and the gestation-in-the-head of the book review I have due today, I'm getting very little sleep...

You have my sympathies, by the way...; 8:58 am, March 27, 2006

Praise for GUSH

"GUSH is a letter to the world declaring that feminists everywhere are ready to take back the period and claim it for ourselves." —Courtney Dickson in Herizons.

"I expect GUSH will be nonetheless passed around classrooms, as well as book clubs, women’s centres, office towers and break rooms. And I hope this sharing and the conversations that no doubt ensue are not hushed and tittering. I hope teachers, counsellors, parents and partners bookmark pages, highlight passages and display the book on prominent shelves." —Katherine J. Barrett in Understorey.

"We love GUSH!"—Open Sesame Bookstore, Kitchener.

Praise for Stowaways

Winner of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"Stowaways is well imagined and well crafted, each poem tight, the poet’s attention evident. From wildlife to the clutter of the everyday to “how-to” offerings, the reader is charmed and enticed by the poet’s light touch and sure pen. Images jump out at us, grab us by the throat, leave us gasping. Ariel Gordon’s second collection is as strong as the parts of its sum.” —Margaret Michele Cook, Katia Grubisic, and Paul Savoie, judges of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

"Stowaways is a clever and often hilarious collection with its
occasional tenderness let slip amidst a clearly unromantic stance and matter-of-fact prairie landscape. With its freshness of metaphor and crazy juxtapositions, its ironic and often comic twists in narrative, Stowaways is a collection that will hold readers' eyes and play with their wits to the end."—Gillian Harding-Russell, The Goose.

"Though the cover copy promises poems that are 'smart and gorgeously funny' — and they do have those qualities — Ariel Gordon’s voice is more than that. Sometimes within a single poem, she gives us laugh-out-loud humour followed by a poignant smack across the head." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries.

"Adept and assured, Stowaways swaggers." —Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press.

"The poems in this collection grapple with both the wild and the mundane, the animalistic nature of nature and relentless responsibilities of parenthood." —Mark Sampson, Free Range Reading.

"Ariel Gordon’s Stowaways offers a scrapbook of extraordinary everydayness. Its poems decoupage tender snapshots beside snappy comebacks. Fairy tale moments foment against ailing skin. Sly instructions for loving smash into slovenly destructions of living. A beautiful, gluey mess of memory, decay, and dreams!" —Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff

"In the closing poem of Stowaways, the surviving pilot of the first fatal plane crash in recorded history receives a small box of debris from the calamity, 'to amuse him in his convalescence.' What a fitting figure for this collection's loopy juxtapositions and serious surprises. The world in Ariel Gordon's poems is one in which everything and everyone, from a sleep-starved human mother to a miscegenational beluga, is simultaneously endangered and dangerous. If Gordon understands our vulnerability, how 'skin is a thin shield,' that even a birthday balloon, drifting from the back seat is 'a kiss with teeth,' she vividly reminds us that those teeth are ours: 'If I had had twins,' says the new mother in "Primpara," "I would have eaten one.' These are nervy poems that refuse to behave themselves. They are something to celebrate." —Julie Bruck

Praise for Hump

Winner of the 2011 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed." —Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

“Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.” —Robert Kroetsch.

"Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut." —Fiona Timwei Lam, Contemporary Verse 2.

“Not so much sweetness and light, Gordon channels Adrienne Rich's dichotomy of love and frustration with her realism.” —Zanna Joyce, Winnipeg Free Press.

"If you don't know Ariel's work, I can recommend her book Hump, which I keep on my bedside table, along with all my stuff on LOST EXPLORERS and CASTAWAYS and HELLISH SIEGES, as things to pick up and simply open and starting reading anywhere, which is the pretty much the best review a book can get." —Darryl Joel Berger.

"The beauty of this collection is the love of the mother for her child, that relationship that the childfree will never experience. But the beauty is hidden slyly in the gorgeous lines that free themselves when needed from the details of the grime, the blood, the leaking breasts, and the mundane sleeplessness of parenting-turned poetry." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries

“Hump is gentle and sly, but also as sharp as baby teeth and poison mushrooms. And it’s called Hump.” —Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine.

Origin Story

Why is my name Ariel Gordon and this blog entitled The Jane Day Reader, you ask?

Well, my middle names are Jane and Day, after my grandmothers, Ade Augusta Rooseboom (who was called Day Laban after she married my grandfather and moved to Canada) and Anna Vida Mary Barrett-Hamilton (who became Jane Gordon after her immigration and later marriage).

When I was fourteen, I seriously contemplated using "Jane Day Gordon" or "J.D. Gordon" as my pen name. And then realized that there was no point in having an alternate identity in no-degrees-of-separation Winnipeg.

As a grown-up compromise, I started using 'janeday' as the username for my email and then for the name of this blog, which I started reluctantly and never expected to enjoy...

(I also gave my daughter another version of my grandmothers' names...)