getting there

The news says: Flood! Recession! Flood! But you have to drive
across the city to see it & your ugly old basement is dry
& your guts mutter: Spring!
The same way your guts sometimes murmur at three a.m.,
the windows rattling with wind
& rain & elm branches as your love sleeps
through, his rattle-y nostrils almost
drowned out.

So you visit the river like a tourist, driving past for-lease storefronts
whose dust sighs: Smell my bum! But also past signs
whose neon letters beam: New! Blueberry pet facials
And the river? It's high enough that the tidy back yards
of the houses by the river are filled with ice
& the elms in the tidy back yards
of the houses by the river are encircled by ice.
And you can see how one tree has been uprooted
by ice, how it will slowly
tip into the river once the days heat up again.
But there are no sandbag dikes & no homeowners passing
antiques out of upper windows & maybe their basements burp
and slosh but maybe not, so you go home.

Once parked, you see the enormous clump of slush & ice
& sand, winter & river & weather systems gathering behind
the wheels of your car. You kick it & a hunk
drops, as satisfying as a tooth finally giving way, as a gout
of blood where the tooth was or a baby dropping
after a fall & a winter & a wet spring
carrying it.

If you leave the hunk there, you will have to back the car over it blind
& slushy, so you kick it over to the garage door & out
into the alley but not far enough: for days, every time you leave
the house it crunches under your wheels, turning back
into snow, into dirty water & wet sand
& as you drive under the expensive shoes twirling
from overhead wires, under the strange eyes
of men leaning from windows of old apartment blocks
you finally get it: Flood. Recession.
Flood.

* * *

So I drug myself out of the house on Friday, sick and chilled but wanting to put a face to the all the flood coverage, to the idea that the neighbourhood of my childhood might be under water again.

I thought there might be a poem in it, a poem in the flooding river but also in my unwillingness to go, so I went.

And the river was frozen, except in patches next to the struts of the rusty BDI bridge. And the wind was bitterly cold on the middle of the rusty BDI bridge.

But I dutifully crossed the river and came back at about the same pace I'd use if it was summer and I was walking a BDI ice cream cone across the bridge.

When I got home, I fed my brain with wikiHows on How to Protect a Basement from Flooding and How to Prepare for Flooding and waited for the tickle that said that a poem was coming.

But there was nothing until I got in the car again and went to pick Aa up from the nice hippy lady that takes care of her on my writing days.

And then words and phrases started to come. So I wrote on the pages of my daytimer (because I'd forgotten my journal at home, of course...) at stoplights, cursing green lights for a change.

And since I was a little early, I pulled to a stop half-a-block from the nice hippy lady's front door and finished the poem off.

And the day was much easier to inhabit after that.

chapbookery

I'm writing a review of a novel about an ongoing drought in the deep south while living in the soon-to-be-flooded north and I can't decide if I should get in the car and drive over to the BDI bridge, which overlooks the already-swamped neighbourhood of my childhood.

It's a writing day, see, and while I feel I should write a flooding poem, I'm not quite there. It's just as easy to stay in my high-and-dry downtown home and write my review and attempt to memorize the punch-in-the-gut parenting poem by Louise Gluck for my creative writing class.

We'll see. In the meantime, here are a couple of updates on my continuing forays into chapbookery:

Buffalo Runs, a small press out of Montreal, will publish an anthology in April that features my poem Substitutions.

Rutting Season is an engaging and accessible book that features the poetry of three fresh voices in Canadian poetry and places these poets into a critical conversation with each other. Ariel Gordon, Michael Lithgow, and Linda Besner put their heads together in this unique collection

Nothing wrong with a book with antlers on it. (ALL my books should have antlers on them!) Also, it was lovely to chat up Linda and Michael about various and sundry matters poetical.

In other news, Rubicon Press has just released the first books of the spring 2009 season. Mine is still in the works for this spring, but I thought I'd share the latest news...

Newly released chapbooks from the press include:

Dipika Mukherjee's The Palimpsest of Exile - a beautiful, highly evocative collection examining what it means to belong to many places and the ways in which we find home.
Raw umber cover, floral print Japanese paper flyleaf.

David Zieroth's Berlin Album - a highly-charged travelogue about a man searching for history.
Light tea cover, Japanese silk paper flyleaf.

Broadsides by Yi-Mei Tsiang (On Surrendering) and Mark Jackley (What the Home Inspector Won't Find).

Fabulous upcoming spring collections from Danielle Schaub (Israel) and Ariel Gordon (Winnipeg), plus two new Rubicon Press broadsides by Joanne Ellison and Allan Brown.

Fall 2009 releases include books by John B. Lee (the winner of our 2008 Midwinter Chapbook Competition), Wendy Donawa, Glen Sorestad...and many more.

view 2

wedge

view

lightening

All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. March 15, 2009.

* * *

We came out of a family brunch late Sunday afternoon into sunlight so bright and lemony as to make me giddy. And as we drove to the forest, having pre-packed a complement of rubber boots and cameras, I suddenly remembered the best version of me.

All winter, it's been tucked into a pocket like clumsy origami (is that a bird? a boat?) but now that spring is mostly here, it's been slowly unfolding.

At the forest, I mostly crouched over shrubbery and stumps with M's camera in hand while M pulled poor sickly Aa in her wagon.

We benefited from the last of the snow, which smoothed out the path and permitted said wagon but I benefited from M's grace in the face of my excited leaps from path-side to ditch and back.

He wanted to be there and shooting as much as I did but he turned himself into a papa packhorse instead.

So thanks to Aa for being patient in her recuperation and to M for everything, as always...

First novel has power to jab reader in vitals

Come, Thou Tortoise
By Jessica Grant
Knopf Canada, 432 pages, $30

Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

The opening pages of Newfoundlander Jessica Grant's promising debut novel are disarming. Literally.

Audrey (aka Oddly) Flowers, terrified of flying to begin with, disarms an air marshal on a flight from her adopted Oregon back to her hometown of St. John's. She is going home because her beloved father has been bashed with a Christmas tree and is in a coma.

Next we learn that Audrey has left Winnifred, the titular tortoise that she inherited from an ex-boyfriend, back in Oregon.

But the distance between them doesn't mean Winnifred can't narrate occasional chapters about her current straits ---- being tortoise-sat by a faintly resentful out-of-work Shakespearean actor, for instance -- and muse on Audrey's relationship with Cliff, the ex.

As you'd expect from such a premise (and from an author whose previous book, a collection of short stories, was titled Making Light of Tragedy) the prose is full of puns and other clevernesses that verge on precious.

Underneath it all, thankfully, is a beating heart. As with a tortoise, you just have to wait for the irregular beats.

But as the tortoise herself notes, "When the heartbeats do come, they are magnificent."

One beat is that Audrey's grief over her father's sudden debilitation is stunningly, groaningly real.

Her attempts to reconcile herself to his later death, to the mysteries of her childhood, are confused and illogical but are nevertheless riveting in Grant's capable hands.

A second beat is the novel's loving and subtle portrayal of homosexual relationships, in this case between Audrey's father and the man she was taught to call "Uncle Thoby."

Another is the realization that Audrey's linguistic quirks, which could be mistaken for cleverness-for-the-sake-of-cleverness on Grant's part, is really the highly specific language of Audrey's family melded with a slight Newfoundland accent.

Make no mistake: though there is passing social commentary, Audrey does not have the precocious intelligence and wry, acutely self-aware sense of humour of Miriam Toews' protagonists.

Also, unlike Nomi or even DBC Pierre's Vernon Little, Audrey is an adult. A child-like adult to be sure, but an adult nonetheless. (Her reply to the statement, mid-novel, that she's grown up? "Yes and no.")

So credit Grant for crafting a convincing -- yet odd -- story. Despite the quirks, despite the extravagant wordplay and the storytelling tortoise, this is a novel that has the power to jab you in the vitals.

What does feel slightly unearned, however, are the occasional illustrations and strike-outs. They feel gratuitous (and hipster-lite) in a 400-plus page novel, especially as the strike-outs are abandoned after the first chapter.

But that's a minor quibble for what is, on the whole, a funny and sad and splendid first novel.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Her first book of poetry, with Kingsville, Ontario's Palimpsest Press, is slated for publication in 2010.

round and round

All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. October 26, 2008.

* * *

A photo or two that I had failed to notice in my initial go-through, way back in October. Maybe we'll have a look-see at the Forest tomorrow...

greened

Know Your Mushrooms, part the second

M and I stopped by the Cinematheque this afternoon, to make sure everything was set up for tonight's screening of 136 of my macro pictures of mushrooms (which will be shown before the documentary Know Your Mushrooms, of course).

We even got to sit in the dark with a theatre's worth of wrappers and floor popcorn and see the photos on the screen, all in the name of a tech survey.

It was sort of lovely and sort of like pulling teeth to collect the images from their various folders on my external hard drive and put them all in one place. Oh - that one! Yes! I kept muttering to myself.

Part of it was that I'd forgotten some of the photos, given that they dated as far back as 2003.

Part of it was that after a long long cold winter, I miss the forest like nobody's business. But after ten years walking its highways and byways, I'm confident it's still there, even if I've neglected it (again). Unless CMU students burned it down (again). And this summer, I WILL spend as much time as possible there.

Part of it was just the difficulty of assembling the images. My computer was elsewhere the first part of the week and then, once I got my grimy hands on it, I had to wade through folder after folder to find the images I distantly remembered.

M reminded me we lost a hard drive a few years ago, which accounts for some of the frustrating can't-find-it-ARGH feeling.

I also reminded myself, after a good long look at my first posts in this space, that I did a lot of plant studies and landscapes in addition to the mushrooms early on. Which were just as satisfying as shooting mushrooms but not applicable for a GATHERING of mushrooms.

Did you know that 136 images, displayed for 4 seconds each in a slide show, is about twenty minutes of visual stimulus? Or, put another way, did you know that 136 images equals five years of shooting?

Weird!

(Fun!)

p.s. I won't be there tonight but will be in attendance on Saturday from 8:15 onwards, with the proverbial bells on. Wanna sit with me? Wanna hold my hand?

The damage, day...whatever.

Here are some of the titles I scooped up at Aqua Books this week, as we had several people come in with teetering pleasing stacks of lit.

Swing Low: A Life by Miriam Toews (Stoddart, 2000)

[After hearing someone talk about it so movingly. What does it mean to write from your father's point of view, I wonder...]

The Tristan Chord by Bettina von Kampen (Enfield and Wizenty, 2008)

[After having made a special trip to purchase Christina Penner's novel The Widows of Hamilton House at McNally's last week, both it and the Tristan Chord appeared at the store yesterday. Sigh...but also admiration. Local press Great Plains has done a great job with the cover design of this new imprint: bravo!]

In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand (Vintage Canada, 1997)

[I remember sitting in the downtown McNally's for Brand's afternoon book chat with the Writers' Festival a few years ago. I was mesmerized by Brand's suede pants. When we said hello after the event, she confessed that she was a trifle mesmerized by my suede shoes. It was a very suede encounter.]

The Wire-Thin Bride by Cornelia Hoogland (Turnstone Press, 1990)

[I'm actively seeking out pregnancy and mothering poems right now and Hoogland's first collection contains a good clutch.]

The Mother of all Toddler Books: An All-Canadian Guide to Your Child's Second and Third Years by Ann Douglas (Wiley, 2002)

The December 2000/January 2001 issue of Canadian Gardening devoted to botanical art.

Know Your Mushrooms

Hey all,

There's a splendid documentary called Know Your Mushrooms appearing at Winnipeg's Cinematheque March 13 & 14.

Alternative pop culture director (Grass, Comic Book Confidential) Ron Mann has created the definitive film about mushrooms, as engaging as Les Blank’s opus to garlic, Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers.

Centred on a four-day event held in the mountains of Colorado, the Telluride Mushroom Festival, the film is led by hosts Gary Lincoff, a mycologist (the technical name for a mushroom expert) and Larry Evans (known as the “Indiana Jones” of mushroom experts) as they embark on a treasure hunt for the magical world of mushrooms.

We discover everything there is to know about mushrooms, from their food value - served up deliciously pan fried – to their importance as an aphrodisiac, cancer inhibitor and possessor of psychedelic properties.

Featuring a wonderful soundtrack by The Sadies and The Flaming Lips, Mann also uncovers hilarious archival footage and scenes from the 1933 Alice in Wonderland.

I'll be projecting a a slideshow of my mushroom photographs in the theatre prior to the screenings, but I would have been there anyways.

My thanks to Dave Barber, Cinematheque Programming Coordinator, for this opportunity and for bringing in the film.

To sum: Mushrooms! Yay! My photos on the big screen! Yay!