Thursday, April 29, 2010

Hands on: Tracy Hamon



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I shot this early in the tour, before our first reading. Tracy had resurrected an old journal and found first drafts of poems that were now in the book at her elbow. While she was leafing through its pages, I noticed that her hands were pink and looked cold. I grabbed her fingers, because that's the kind of relationship we have, and they were cold.

Girl-with-bad-circulation cold. Girly-girl cold.

My favourite hands-on moments of the tour included watching T. sign books. She refused to use anything but hotel pens. And then there was the time Tracy pulled out an emery board and started filing her fingernails during a reading in Edmonton (not mine, thankfully.).

We were sitting in the back row, so I'm pretty sure I was the only one to hear the soft percussion...

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Tracy Hamon is a mother, a university student currently finishing a MA in English with a creative option at the U of R, a part time barber/stylist, and the coordinator for the SWG Writers/Artists Colony. She recently founded the Vertigo Reading Series. Born in Regina, she currently lives there.

Her first poetry collection, This is Not Eden, was published in 2005 and her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Grain, Spring, A Room of One’s Own and Event, as well as numerous anthologies. Her manuscript of poetry on Egon Schiele was short listed for the 2007 CBC Literary Awards.

Her latest book is Interruptions in Glass (Coteau Books, 2010).

3 comments:

Kimmy said...

i remembered to steal all the Sutton Place pens in honour of Tracy!

Kimmy

tracy said...

Hey, I told you not to use the one that looked like my fingernails were dirty!

Yeesh!

It looks like we've been on the road for days!

Yay kimy!

Ariel Gordon said...

Kimmy, that's good. Very good! You keep her in pens and she'll keep me in bookmarks.

Tracy, I didn't have any clean-looking fingernail ones! And this IS how your hands looked! So NYUH!