English to French to English

I was so goddamn honoured to be asked by Bertrand to read with him at Aqua's annual bilingual Lansdowne - and thereby have my work translated by literati Charles Leblanc - that I couldn't bring myself to turn him down...

...as is my usual practice when people ask me to read with them at Aqua Books, given that I'm events coordinator and my job is not technically to provide myself with reading opportunities.

But bookstore owner Kelly Hughes rolled his eyes twice at my do-you-think-it's-okay anxiety before I agreed to do it. So I figure it's okay.

* * *
Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry Series
Bertrand Nayet with Ariel Gordon & Dennis Cooley

When: Thursday, January 27, 7 pm
Location: Aqua Books (274 Garry Street, between Graham and Portage)
Cost: FREE!

The Aqua Lansdowne is Manitoba's largest poetry prize. Based around the award and hosted in conjunction with the Writers Collective of Manitoba, this series celebrates the best in Manitoba poetry.

This event is bilingual, featuring English-to-French translations of Gordon and Cooley's work by Charles Leblanc and French-to-English translations of Nayet's work by Mark Stout.

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Ariel Gordon is a writer whose first book of poetry, Hump, was published in spring 2010. How to Prepare for Flooding, a collaboration with designer Julia Michaud, is forthcoming from JackPine Press in 2011. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

Since 1973 Dennis Cooley has lived in Winnipeg where he has taught, edited, and written. He is currently past-president of the Manitoba Writers' Guild.

Born in Auxerre France in 1962, Bertrand Nayet lives in St. Norbert, Manitoba. He has published short stories, stories, and poems in various magazines and anthologies. He also writes for the theatre, directs and performs with various theatre troupes in Manitoba. Nayet is a founding father and Secretary-in-Perpetuity of Le Collectif post-neo-rieliste, a group of French-speaking Manitoba creators. He also collaborates on the programming of Le Foyer des Écrivains, the French side of THIN AIR, The Winnipeg International Writers Festival.

Né à Auxerre (France) en 1962, Bertrand Nayet réside à St-Norbert au Manitoba. Il a publié nouvelles, récits et poèmes dans diverses revues et recueils. Il a aussi écrit du théâtre, créé des mises en scène et joué plusieurs rôles pour diverses troupes du Manitoba. Il est l’animateur, un des pères fondateurs et secrétaire perpétuel du Collectif post-néo-rieliste, un regroupement de créateurs franco-manitobains. Il collabore à la programmation du Foyer des Écrivains, la partie francophone du Winnipeg International Writers Festival.

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Mark Stout lives in Winnipeg, where he works as a freelance translator and translation instructor for the translation certificate program at Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface (CUSB). He has lived and worked in the United States, France, and Canada.

Charles Leblanc is a St. Boniface translator, writer, editor, actor and poet. He is a founding member of the Collectif post-neo-rieliste, and helps to create the Foyer des écrivains, the francophone programming for THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival. He won the Prix littéraire Rue-Deschambault at the 2005 Manitoba Book Awards for L’appétit du compteur.

holiday get-up

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This year's holiday get-up includes the snowpants M got me in the States this fall while I was on tour (which earned him a look) and the skates I got for Xmas when I was 19.

I'm quite sentimental about these skates. I remember going to a local rink soon after receiving them and teaching myself, slowly and precariously, to skate backwards.

And then looking up and seeing my mum at the side of the rink, leaning on the boards. Watching me. And knowing, just knowing, that she was proud of me, for something as simple as being determined to figure out skating backwards.

(She told me at Xmas supper, this year, that she was probably out walking the dogs anyways.)

Thanks to M for the photo and for winching up the girl as she figures out skating forward and the pleasure of being boneless in our arms or on the ice.

And, I suppose, for the snowpants.

Great reads from a great year

Winnipeg Free Press
PRINT EDITION

Free Press reviewers pick their top titles of 2010
POETRY

Pigeon
By Karen Solie
"Winner of the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize, Pat Lowther Memorial Award and Trillium Award, Karen Solie's third collection alights with stories of residence, high school reunions and ecological bewilderment. An essential new year's read that challenges us to reach deep into our personal stores of hope." - Jennifer Still

Lookout
By John Steffler
"After nearly three decades in Newfoundland, the Ontario-born Steffler has acquired the status of familiar come-from-away. This confers some advantages on a poet with a naturalist's eye for re-examining official histories. " - Ariel Gordon

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I'm SO proud of my poetry co-columnist, Jennifer Still.

She somehow convinced the books editor at the Winnipeg Free Press to include poetry in his year-end round-up!

(For those of you not familiar with the round-up, since time immemorial it has included 10 fiction titles and 10 non-fiction titles...and ONLY 10 fiction titles and 10 non-fiction titles.)

And while we tried to finagle two picks each, I'm still happy with my singleton appearance.

Which is only fair, really, because none of the other reviewers got more than one, no matter how many fiction/non-fiction titles they reviewed over the course of the year.

Yay Jenn!

Author speaks in many voices in debut novel-in-verse

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by: Ariel Gordon

WENDY Phillips' debut, a young adult novel-in-verse called Fishtailing (Coteau Books, 200 pages, $15) was recently awarded the 2010 Governor General's Literary Award for children's literature.

Phillips, who teaches high school in Richmond, B.C., has managed several minor miracles in Fishtailing.

First, she writes convincingly from the point of view not only of four very different teenagers but also their creative writing teacher and guidance counsellor.

Second, she writes about child abuse, mixed-race identity politics and traumatized refugee children without sounding earnest or preachy. And, finally, she manages to tell a fairly complex story without overburdening the poems with exposition or plot.

Highly recommended for any older teenagers on your list that you want to impress.

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Like many in Saskatchewan's thriving literary community, Saskatoon writer Dave Margoshes has taken advantage of the artists' colonies at St. Peter's Abbey in Muenster.

Dimensions of an Orchard (Black Moss Press, 110 pages, $19), which won the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award at the 2010 Saskatchewan Book Awards, is set in - and framed by - Margoshes' experiences in that religious community.

Which means that this, his fifth collection of poetry, opens with a slightly smart-alecky re-telling of the Genesis story before moving on to poems that focus on the process of writing poems, as in his "Reading poems at McIntosh Point":

"You read a poem that moves within me / like the eyes of the bear we saw from the car / driving here, the frightened menace, the awe. / The beer is cold as the night, and I shiver."

This is poetry too skeptical to be born again but tender enough to believe in almost anything.

* * *

As in Dimensions of an Orchard, Richard Greene's latest collection is a re-examination of ways of being in the world, of love and spirituality and decline.

Boxing the Compass (Vehicule Press, 80 pages, $16), which won the 2010 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry, spans 20 of the Cobourg, Ont., poet and prof's life.

Given that it includes poems from his two previous titles, Boxing the Compass could almost be dubbed a selected-poems. But you'd never know unless you'd read the acknowledgements.

Which is to say that the seams holding together these poems - the learning process inherent in 20 years of thinking and writing - don't show.

And that is, in and of itself, a neat trick.

Particularly good are the poems about Greene's father living and dying, which provide a specific mortality amidst slightly more formal poems about Christian martyrs and meditations on place.

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Craig Poile, who co-owns Ottawa bookstore Collected Works, recently won the 2010 Archibald Lampman Award and the Ottawa Book Award for his second collection.

True Concessions (Goose Lane Editions, 76 pages, $18) contains poetry that acts like the light that knifes through a sky full of clouds, drawing the eye to a barn or a tree or the stillness in the middle of a field.

In Poile's case, the things illuminated include a cotton candy booth at a fairway, a bluebottle that lands on his hand, and his parents' beige rotary phone, as in his "Extension 1":

"With a wail, my sister bashed the phone, / Smashed the dial to pieces / With the receiver, like a cave dweller / Staving in skulls with a bone."

Also worth noting are poems that chronicle office cubicle days and nights with small children, whose restrained but very present emotion ever so slightly undermine Poile's orderly verses.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer whose first book, Hump (Palimpsest Press), is nearly a year old.

I'm SUCH a last-minute gal

In that I was asked to submit something for the Advent Book Blog at the beginning of the month, but between early deadlines and advent-ish doings, I only just got around to it on Tuesday.

Heh.

Besides my last-minute-ness, I also wanted to take the time to think about what I would specifically recommend from last year's reading, which wasn't as wide or as deep as I would have liked.

Which never is, come to think of it, between the have-to read books (for articles and reviews) and the books I read for research purposes, depending on what I'm writing at that moment.

In any event/advent, here's the text-only version of my recommendation, specifically of Harry Karlinsky's The Evolution of Inanimate Objects (Insomniac Press, 2010).

The Evolution of Inanimate Objects is a book that rattles the cutlery drawer of your brain...in that it is the story of a psychiatrist named Harry Karlinsky discovering that Charles Darwin’s youngest son Thomas was confined to a London, ON asylum in 1879 for his theory on the evolution of eating utensils. Except that Harry Karlinsky is a novelist in addition to being a (real) psychiatrist. And Thomas Darwin is a theory of Karlinsky’s, his history cobbled together from bits and pieces of his (real)...moreThe Evolution of Inanimate Objects is a book that rattles the cutlery drawer of your brain…in that it is the story of a psychiatrist named Harry Karlinsky discovering that Charles Darwin’s youngest son Thomas was confined to a London, ON asylum in 1879 for his theory on the evolution of eating utensils. Except that Harry Karlinsky is a novelist in addition to being a (real) psychiatrist. And Thomas Darwin is a theory of Karlinsky’s, his history cobbled together from bits and pieces of his (real) siblings’ lives. Read it alongside the recent biography-in-verse by Ruth Padel (Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter) and you’ll get really confused. And amused. And maybe even a tiny bit sad for poor addled (unreal) Thomas and his fistful of forks.

I say text-only, because the recommendation over at the Advent Book Blog is an audio recommendation (!).

Broadsheet: Fall back

Broadsheet: The navel gaze

Broadsheet: Pre-conception

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So I'm doing a signing on Thursday, eh? At McNally's. And Sara Harms recommended that I print a few poems on fancy paper so that people can see what it is that I do without committing to the whole book.

And so I asked Julia Michaud of Instant Noodles. The brilliant designer I'm doing the JackPine chapbook with.

My only criterion were that her design had to nod towards the cover Palimpsest designed. Be in keeping with the cover Palimpsest designed.

And now I feel like weeping. (And planting a chestnut tree...)

So lovely!

Hands: Anita Daher, take two

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Anita also wanted me/us to know that she's double-jointed.

(I wonder what a double-jointed book would look like?)

Hands on: Anita Daher

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If you know anything about YA writer Anita Daher, you know she has a thing about horses. But she also REALLY likes dim sum, to the extent that her bio used to conclude: "Anita lives in Winnipeg, and will always accept invitations for dim sum." Though not directly related to writing, keeping your hands supple via the regular application of a currying brush or chopsticks probably not a terrible thing, hey?

(Anita's weakness is pork dumplings. Put an order or two on top of your ms. and she'd probably be considerably swayed...)

* * *
Anita Daher has been entrenched in the book publishing industry for more than fifteen years. She feels “place” infuses her writing, and is grateful to have lived in communities like Summerside, PEI, Moose Jaw, SK, Churchill, MB, Baker Lake, NU, and Yellowknife, NT. Her short stories have appeared in Prairie Fire Magazine, and she is author of seven youth novels, including Arthur Ellis and MB Book Award finalist Spider’s Song (2006), and Arthur Ellis, Hackmatack and Diamond Willow finalist Racing for Diamonds (2006). She has led workshops across the country, and has been a popular presenter at conferences and festivals. When not teaching, presenting, or working on her own stories, Anita edits teen novels for Great Plains Publications.

In Conversation: Marita Dachsel

Marita Dachsel will stop being so nice to me one of these days.

Until that happens, here's part of an e-interview we did about my poem Toddle:

"You said that Toddle is composed of many short bits that work together, and that this is not how you normally write poems. I'm wondering how you made them work together. Did you work on sounds, images, and rhythm after choosing the pieces, or did you choose the pieces because of certain aspects that worked together? And if so, what stood out to you?

Looking over the poem now, it feels very 'buggy' to me. And not dreamy-dragonfly-pastoral buggy but live-with-us-urban buggy. Also, the first part of the poem - with its syllables battering against the rearview - makes it seem as though there's a swarm in the car and not a distressed kid. My kid.

That's all after-the-fact guessing. Because I didn't make any of those linkages when I was writing all the bits or when I was grafting them together."

The rest is on her blog, see?

Sign my Hump.

Sara Harms said "Have a candy bowl. And broadsheets on pretty paper."

Andrea Ledding said "Have a t-shirt made that says 'I'll punch you if you don't buy this book.'"

Andris Taskans said "Do your signing from the back of a camel."

So here we are.

I'm doing a pre-Xmas signing at McNally Robinson. WITH a big bowl of chocolates, some artfully laid out broadsheets, and perhaps a witty t-shirt.

And while I'm short on dromedaries, I'll sign your hump if you've got one.

* * *

Ariel Gordon - Book Signing

When: Thursday Dec 16 2010 4:00-7:00 pm
Where: McNally Robinson Booksellers (Grant Park) by the Cash Desk
Cost: Free

Hump (Palimpsest Press, 2010) is a mash-up of pregnancy-and-mothering poems and urban/nature/love poems that functions as an anti-sentiment manifesto from Winnipeg writer Ariel Gordon. Month by month, stanza by stanza, Gordon attempts to represent adequately the wonder and devilment of being with child. Hump is a love poem written to a father and child, to a lover with a glimmer in his eye, and to a city that is gritty and faded but still greener than most.

Ariel Gordon is a writer whose first book of poetry, Hump, was published in spring 2010. How to Prepare for Flooding, a collaboration with designer Julia Michaud, is forthcoming from JackPine Press in 2011. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

snacks + readings, part the second

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Speaking of snacks and also readings, this was the repast Tracy Hamon and I shared when she marched into town for a reading/visit.

Her reading, conducted salon-style with Jonathan Ball and John Toone, was great fun. My favourite part was how John looked like he wanted to clothesline Jon after every poem of Jon's.

But that may have been personal business being hashed out on stage...

For those of you who don't know - and the quarrelsome Jo(h)ns didn't - a salon-style reading is one where a poet gets up and reads a single poem. The second reader, having listened to the first reader, then reads something from her/his book that sparks off an image or a theme or even just a single word from that poem. The third reader listens to the second reader...and you just keep going.

In this case, each reader did eleven poems. But most of them were short, so altogether it amounted to about 45 minutes. Which is about what they would have done if it had been a standard 15 minutes per reading...

The next day T and I visited EVERY single shop(pe) in Wolseley, including a vintage shop I hadn't yet frequented. And then collapsed next to this convenient spread.

Snacks + readings

So Jennifer Still and I judged this year's poetry contest for the Writers' Collective of Manitoba.

We made our decisions over foamy-milk tea and pinwheel cookies and read the poems vying for win-place-show aloud. Which is not a bad way to spend a Friday afternoon, it seems to me.

The gala where the awards are handed out relies on much the same equation, in that there are both snacks and readings. Maybe not foamy-milk tea, but still, tea. With cream and sugar.

So thanks to the Writers' Collective and administrator/writer Michael Van Rooy for having Jenn and I again as judges and to Jenn herself and, finally, to all that submitted.

* * *

And the Winners of the 2010 Winnipeg Free Press/Writers` Collective Non-Fiction and Poetry Contests are . . .

NON-FICTION
First Place – Epitaph for El Toro’s by Rachel DeGagne, $500.00 and a year’s membership to the Writers’ Collective.
Second Place – Down to the Willows by William Backman, $300.00 and a year’s membership to the Writers’ Collective.
Third Place – Airport by Jessy Arden, $100.00 and a year’s membership to the Writers’ Collective.
Honourable Mention – The Woodcutters by Denise Jacobs, a year’s membership to the Writers’ Collective.
Honourable Mention – Mom’s Dream by Virginia Johnson, a year’s membership to the Writers’ Collective.

POETRY
First Place (tie) - Predator by Lindsey Childs, $150.00 and a year’s membership to the Writers’ Collective.
First Place (tie) - Therapy by Jessy Arden, $150.00 and a year’s membership to the Writers’ Collective.
Second Place – things she won’t say by M.E. Powell, $100.00 and a year’s membership to the Writers’ Collective.
Third Place – folding by Debbie Strange, $50.00 and a year’s membership to the Writers’ Collective.
Honourable Mention – Through A Glass Darkly by Judith Johanson, a year’s membership to the Writers’ Collective.
Honourable Mention – Twister by Don Trent James, a year’s membership to the Writers’ Collective.

Winners will be published in the Winnipeg Free Press and in an upcoming issue of the Collective Consciousness.

Many thanks to the Winnipeg Free Press for their ongoing support of this contest.

Thanks also to the judges; Gerald Flood, Ariel Gordon, Chandra Mayor, Jennifer Still and Michael Van Rooy.

Gala Awards Night!

Everyone is invited to the Gala Awards Night honoring the participants in this year’s contests.

The evening will begin at 7:00 pm on Thursday, December 9, in the Carol Shields Auditorium at the Millennium Library (251 Donald Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba).

Readings by winners will be featured and all are welcome. Light refreshments will be served.

Keystone poems

I've a single stanza on a single page in Contemporary Verse 2's second anniversary issue, dubbed CV2: The Keystone of Canadian Poetry Turns 35.

But I am fond of that single stanza (for those who like names named, it's the second part of Infestation Lullaby, published in its entirety in Hump and reprinted here...) and it's in very good company, with more than 70 poets in the issue.

The list includes heaps of Winnipeggers but also Anna Swanson and Bren Simmers and Jenna Butler and Linda Frank and Jeanette Lynes and Shawna Lemay.

i.e. people whose work/person I like.
i.e. what a party!