Stegner house: end-of-term reading

The Wallace Stegner House presents: a reading with Ariel Gordon

When: Monday, June 13
Time: 6:00 pm
Where: Wallace Stegner House, Eastend, SK.

What: An end-of-term reading + potluck in the backyard of the Wallace Stegner House.

* * *

I haven't decided if I'm going to read from Guidelines or from material written while I was here, which seems foolhardy but also apropos...(more after the turn)

Speaking of which, the clutch of Edison poems I wrote as a part of this year's May Day Poetry Project have expanded while I've been here, from 12 or 13 pages to 34 pages as of last week.

Also, my thinking shifted on the project, which is to say that Edison has hijacked the entire manuscript.

I'm still at the first draft section for much of this, so pages and pages (i.e. poems and poems) will most likely drift out of the manuscript or change radically...but the poems are coming and there is a bit of a fretwork to support them now, so I feel confident in my first draft insecurity.

If that makes any sense...

* * *

Beautiful goddamn storm out the window. Makes me want to head outside so I can watch the clouds move across the hills but it also makes me want to hole up on the front porch with a the purplest of purple biographies and prime myself for tomorrow's work.

Leaping in. Leaping...

* * *

In other news, I had the great good fortune to have a houseful of artists at several points this week...

The first instance was because the house had been scheduled for some maintenance, mostly to the roof and upstairs windows. Luckily, the person doing the repair was a Saskatoon-based fine furniture maker/photographer, Zach Hauser, who'd been coerced to the work on this heritage house. He in turn coerced his wife, the painter Iris Hauser, to come with.

I must say, if I had to have anyone banging on the roof/walls/windows whilst here, I'm glad it was them. I even foisted one of my Guidelines chapbooks on them.

One day, when I'd taken a break for lunch and similarly coerced Zach/Iris to take a break with iced chai, a poet rapped at our door.

It was Bruce Rice, a Regina-based poet who was part of a gaggle of writers & painters who'd taken up residence at a ranch-house up the hill. This shifting pan-Prairie-based group spend five days writing/painting every year here in Eastend and have grand communal dinners on their windy stretch of hill.

Bruce invited me to dinner, so, after a hot day of childminding, I drove myself up the hill, a bottle of wine in the passenger seat. And let myself be tangled up in the wind and in the conversation (and shared the wine, thankfully)...

I walked away, five or six hours later with Rice's The Illustrated Statue of Liberty, Jerry Rush's The Bones of their Occasion, a print of snowy early-June Eastend (!) by Regina-based sculptor Dennis Evans, and a head-ful of good art chat.

And minus four Guidelines chapbooks. And minus a reading in the round from said chapbook...

* * *

So if any of youse SK-based folk were wiffle-waffling about making the trek to Eastend for my reading, I'll tell you now: I'm making pasta salad.

(With fresh tarragon & basil, peas & cherry tomatoes, fig-scented balsamic & garlic puree...)