The Jane Day Reader: the damage, day...um, seventeen?

Thursday, May 01, 2008

the damage, day...um, seventeen?

After several days of events coordination interspersed with odd jobs in the store, Aqua now has books on shelves. Specifically, fiction on shelves.

I spent the last two days shelving and found great satisfaction in emptying box after box.

Though the literary fiction section no longer occupies a great swath along one wall, which I think lent it some grandeur, it was almost relief to handle the books again, to put them on the shelves and see the enormity of craft and art and thought they represent.

Books are objects and events and careers, but they are also surprisingly chock-full of writing. And, shelving them, I was reminded of that again...

Books:
Songs for the Dancing Chicken by Emily Schultz (ECW Press, 2007)*

All Things Said & Done by Marita Dachsel (Caitlin Press, 2007)*

Raymond and Hannah by Stephen Marche (Random House, 2005)

Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom by David Wingrove (Delacorte Press, 1990)**

Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities by Frederick Drimmer (Amjon Publishers, 1973)

As readers of this blog will remember, I used to work-for-money for an organization that provides training for the film industry.

Recently, I switched to penning a writing and publishing column for the Winnipeg Free Press and working as Events Coordinator at Aqua Books.

I haven't yet gotten into a routine with either gig.

Partly this is because that I'm also a writer and a member of the community that I'm writing on. I have to think quite hard about my reasons for including people / events / books in the column and also then scheduling events for the store.

Conflict is inevitable, given how small the community is here, but I'm trying my best to have integrity around both jobs.

Partly its because after a long winter of working full-time, I finally have time to think instead of hurtling from one task to the next. And thinking, in addition to being productive, dredges up things...

For instance, time to think on the fact that in addition to both gigs I'm also a writer without a book to my name.

This can lead to wailing/breast-beating, which is par for the course if you aspire to art-making of any stripe, but I have had to remind myself that my jobs are about books but my life is about writing.

And writing - accompanied by a good cup of tea - makes me happy...

So I'm glad to be able to tell you again about the books I'm reading and the writing I'll be doing as a part of the May Day Poetry Project (we have 14 poets this year! 14!).

* titles recommended to me by co-worker and award-winning writer Chandra Mayor.
** titles to feed genre-book-devouring beast that lives inside M.

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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...)