The reading + the e-reading

Hey all,

On October 8th, I will be appearing at Winnipeg's McNally Robinson, reading with Clarise Foster and John Barton as a part of Prairie Fire's FallWORDfest.

And through the magic of the sparkly interweb, I'll also be performing work in support of Rutting Season. In Toronto. On October 8.

(Not live from the PF event, sadly. Via a pre-recorded mp3.)

So I've got two sets of poetry to rehearse.

Some How-To poems for the Barton event, including my first-ever sonnet, and a micro-section of the micro-poetry that is Substitutions for the TO event.

Fun!

* * *

John Barton tours his new book of poetry, Hymn!

On Thursday, October 8 Prairie Fire Press presents readings by John Barton, editor of The Malahat Review, with local writers Clarise Foster and Ariel Gordon. Barton has published nine books of poetry and five chapbooks, including his most recent book of poems called Hymn, a journey in search of love through the contemporary homoerotic male body. This event will take place at McNally Robinson Booksellers' Grant Park location (travel alcove). Reading starts at 7:00 PM and is free to the public.

(More event details after the turn...)

AUTHOR BIOS

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based author who has recently published two small-press chapbooks. Her work has appeared in fine literary magazines such as Carousel, PRISM International and Prairie Fire. Ariel's first collection of poetry, Hump, is forthcoming from Ontario's Palimpsest Press in spring 2010. When not being bookish, she enjoys tromping through the woods taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

Clarise Foster is the editor of Contemporary Verse 2 and the author of two collections of poetry. She most contentedly resides in Winnipeg with her two dogs and two cats.

John Barton has published nine books of poetry and five chapbooks, including Designs from the Interior, Sweet Ellipsis, Hypothesis, and Hymn, which was released by Brick Books in August. A third and bilingual edition of West of Darkness: Emily Carr, a self-portrait, his third book, was published by Buschek Books in 2006. Co-editor of Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay-Male Poets, he has won three Archibald Lampman Awards, an Ottawa Book Award, a 2003 CBC Literary Award, and a 2006 National Magazine Award. He lives in Victoria where he is the editor of The Malahat Review.

* * *

Montreal's Buffalo Runs Press invites you to celebrate the release of Rutting Season: Poetry & Conversation. This anthology, edited by Correy Baldwin with Katye Seip, features poems by Ariel Gordon, Michael Lithgow, and Linda Besner, and concludes with the three poets discussing each other's work.

Come out to bohemianly sketchy venue Unit 102 (located at 46 Noble Street in Parkdale) to hear Michael Lithgow, Ariel Gordon, and Linda Besner along with fiction writers Sarah Selecky and Matthew J. Trafford. This BYOB event is cunningly located across the street from a liquor store.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer and editor. Her poetry has recently appeared in fine lit mags such as Carousel, QWERTY, and PRISM International, as well in a chapbook from Edmonton's Rubicon Press entitled Guidelines: Malaysia & Indonesia, 1999. Ariel's first full collection of poetry, Hump, is slated for publication with Kingsville's Palimpsest Press in spring 2010.

Michael Lithgow is a PHD student at Carleton University, School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His poems have appeared in a smattering of magazines and journals across Canada. He has worked as a community media advocate and journalist in television, radio, and print. He is currently a research associate with the Campaign for Democratic Media and a contributing editor at artthreat.net

Linda Besner is originally from Wakefield, Quebec. Her poetry has appeared in journals including The Malahat Review, Grain, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Arc, and Maisonneuve. Her radio work has aired on CBC Radio's DNTO, Outfront, and The Next Chapter. Her first book of poetry, The Id Kid, is forthcoming from Signal Editions in 2011.

Sarah Selecky studied writing with Natalie Goldberg and Lynda Barry and earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Her writing has been published in The Sun, Geist Magazine, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, Event and The Journey Prize Anthology. Her short story collection, This Cake is for the Party, will be released by Thomas Allen Publishers in Spring 2010.

Matthew J. Trafford's short story Past Perfect won the Far Horizons Award for Fiction from The Malahat Review and was nominated for a 2008 National Magazine Award. His drama The People and the Stones was produced by DaPoPo Theatre as part of their show 13 Ways of Looking at a Madman, which toured Germany and performed at the 2006 Atlantic Fringe Festival. His story Gutted recently appeared in Matrix Magazine.

Reprint: Indyish.com

Hey all, I just got sent the link to this review of Rutting Season, the mini-anthology of poetry + conversation by Montreal's Buffalo Runs Press:

"Rutting Season contains work by three poets, Ariel Gordon, Linda Besner, and Michael Lithgow, and finishes with a conversation between the poets about the poems at hand, and the act and purpose of poetry generally.

The poems chime up against each other anyway, by virtue of proximity, so the conversation seems a logical conclusion and moves the poets from the land of hovery, lovely, heartbreaky, wordsmiths to people you can curl around tea with, and wonder about everything, and pull out your hair comfortably in companionship, all not knowing but hoping and anyway, working hard.

Here are some of my favorite moments in a book that is heartily worth the $10 purchase:

From Ariel Gordon, a poem that makes everything flip and flicker into it’s otherself and closes all the gaps with a spluttering sound of infinity..."

This is the "first official review" of this book, according to Correy Baldwin, publisher and editor extraordinaire.

Fun!

(For the rest of the review, click here.)

Sometimes the leap is as interesting as landing

The Wonder
By Diana Evans
Random House Canada, 314 pages, $33

Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

THE U.K.-based Diana Evans' second literary novel, The Wonder, is concerned with what it has meant to be young, black and British over the past 50 years.

It is also interested in how neighbourhoods, such as London's Notting Hill where her novel is largely set, have changed into something better and worse for their residents, "useful only in [their] ethnic contribution to the area's general feel of being interesting."

Finally, it is preoccupied with the space between dance -- and the deliberate leaping out into the unknown that dancers must be capable of -- and madness.

No shortage of big ideas, to be sure, but is Evans able to clothe and shod them with story? The answer is a qualified "mostly."

Her 2005 Orange Prize for New Writers award-winning debut, 26A, was set, quite literally, in the witchy space between a set of twins but also within the larger circle of a large, mixed-race family, and the larger circle yet of 1970s London.

Its somewhat unfocused intensity and domesticity seemed earned by the subject matter -- children growing up into post-modern life. (Evans herself is a twin and grew up in the same neighbourhood as her character.)

The Wonder, though it has ambition in droves, is cooler and less appealing.

One problem is the book's twinned storylines.

The first features a pair of adult siblings, Lucas and Denise, who have lived together in a rusted-out houseboat since they were orphaned as children.

The second features the comings and goings of their doomed parents, Antoney and Carla, who were part of the black dance scene in England in the '60s.

Lucas and Denise are barely on speaking terms as the novel begins, and it only gets worse between them when Lucas decides to find out more about his long-dead parents. Shiftless at the novel's outset, he spends much of his time stoned and depressed.

(More after the turn...)

While Antoney and Carla's storyline elevates the novel -- and allows former dancer Evans to try her hand at ekphrasis (i.e. writing about art) -- we know from the outset that it is all fleeting.

Which means that readers will most likely be able to admire of and feel sympathy for the elder generation but not much else.

This lack of buy-in, coupled with Lucas and Denise's open-ended but static storyline, kills any momentum the novel tries to build.

And while Evans' concerns seem similar to those of Zadie Smith and Jonathan Lethem, her characters are not clever or rich. Part of it is that Evans seems not the least interested in satire or even a heavy larding of pop-culture references, favouring documentation instead.

While documentation is valid artistically, it means that Evans' work lacks some of the humour and bite of her acclaimed contemporaries.

A more apt comparison, perhaps, is Canadian Camilla Gibb's Sweetness in the Belly (2005), given that Gibb also seems to understand how race, poverty and mental illness operate.

Finally, the paralleling of Antoney's brilliance and then descent into madness with that of Russian great Vaslav Nijinsky seems too neat.

This is not to say the novel isn't worth reading. The scenes set in Antoney's native Jamaica, circa 1950, are nearly flawless, and Evans' writing around about gentrification and the issues facing the children of mixed-race families is worthy of note.

In the end, Evans' sophomore effort isn't technically perfect but it's definitely a leap. And sometimes the leap itself is as interesting as where the dancer, or novelist, ends up.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Her first book of poetry will be published in the spring.

HOT AIR 2009

This portrait of Bonnie Burnard's hands constitutes my first post to HOT AIR, which is, for those of you not keeping track, the official blog of the 2009 edition of THIN AIR, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival.

I'm not approaching HOT AIR with as much gusto as in years past. Besides being in the middle of editing Hump, my partner and I are also officially house-hunting...but fortunately, there are three other bloggers to share the bloggy load. And they're all magnificent.

It should go without saying that I'm looking forward to shooting more hands and having more haphazard thoughts about writing and books and festivals centered around books...and to spend the better part of a week celebrating writing.

See you there! (Or, if not in person, at HOT AIR!)

A reading with John Barton

Arc's Poem of the Year shortlist thingy

Hey all,

A poem of mine has been shortlisted for Arc Magazine's Poem of the Year contest this year.

Which means in addition to being eligible for the usually win-place-draw, my poem will also be included in their Readers' Choice sub-contest.

As such, the ARC editorial consortium has compiled 41 poems (on 64 pages) into a PDF document for distribution to friends-of-poetry.

They'll also I'm told, be posting same to their website over the next day or so.

So, if you feel so inclined and have 64-pages-worth of time on your hands, lemme know...I've printed it off and will get to it sometime before the September 30 deadline.

Thanks! You're grand!

Hump

NOUN:
1. A rounded mass or protuberance, such as the fleshy structure on the back of a camel or of some cattle.

2. A deformity of the back in humans caused by an abnormal convex curvature of the upper spine.

3. Vulgar Slang The act or an instance of having sexual intercourse.

4. 1. A low mound of earth; a hummock. 2. A mountain range.

5. Chiefly British A fit of depression; an emotional slump.

VERB: tr.
1. To bend or round into a hump; arch.

2. Slang 1. To exert (oneself). 2. To carry, especially on the back. 3. Vulgar Slang To engage in sexual intercourse with.

* * *

I just received the first batch of notes on Hump, which, when published, will be my first trade book of poetry. (More after the turn...)

I'm itchy with the desire to stay up all night with the notes and a fresh copy of the ms., but I've got an article on Edmonton's Thomas Trofimuk due tomorrow and so I must desist.

But tomorrow, first thing, I'm going to fire up the printer and make what should be the last copy of the ninth draft of Hump. And then I will print out the notes from Jeanette Lynes, my editor.

And then I will make a cup of tea. And maybe check my email, shakily.

But then I'll start editing the damn thing. With the hope of falling for it, with the hope of sharpening it, with the hope of not embarrassing myself, come launch time.

Yay! Fun! (?)

singe

This from our walk last week, in which there were many bugs and not many good pictures.

I've only ever seen this particular bit of flora once or twice before but given this year's this-year-ness, they're everywhere. They're also much easier to photograph now that they've gotten a bit...crispy, white-on-white not being my camera's favorite thing to shoot.

It is no coincidence that I'm also feeling a bit...crispy these days. Stupid first-cold-of-the-fall.

In other news, the HOT AIR blog will soon be whirling away in service of THIN AIR, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival. I've got a shiny new template, a fresh URL, and 3/5ths of last year's blogging crew.

I won't be quite as involved in the blog as in years past but couldn't quite give it up for lent.

So far, I'm planning to take more portraits of writers' hands, primarily because I'm fascinated by the role that our flesh and bones plays in getting a story onto the page but also because it's easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

I'm also interested in find out how a Wednesday Poetry Bash differs from a Saturday Poetry Bash.

A part of me wants to shout: Heresy! Treason! And a part of me says...why not? It'll give me more time to secure that nifty Bliss Carman ring, that's for sure...but it seems as though its winner, Linda Frank, has slender hands, which is no good for me.

Maybe next year's winner will have man-hands, like me, or, better yet, be a ring-hating man.

Heh.