Paperwork

* * *
O the paper I have pushed, lo these last few weeks!

Clockwise from left: The low(est)-tech way to give away a free book to UMP fans on Facebook; first pages of Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers, which is just about to go to press; and a coil-bound version of Laura Lush's Carapace, just before it was shipped off for GG consideration.

Blown

Bouquet of balloons in the back seat.
You swat, adding fingerprints
to the latex covering drifting fists
of noble gas. In the rearview I get glimpses of road,
your heated cheeks, the cars nudging
the few feet between us
at the lights. I don’t ever expect more
than glimpses. How we both got a mouthful
of crabapple pulp today when all you were after
was a single bloom. How you substituted dandelion
for daisy when the oldest charm
rattled through your head: She loves me,
she loves me NOT. And started shedding yellow.
Lately, you’ve relied on I didn’t mean to...
Which means everything I own shredded,
everything I own fragile. Like a balloon
floating into the front seat, static
electricity
a kiss with teeth.

* * *
I just got word that my poem, Blown, is a finalist for the August Goodreads newsletter.

The newsletter goes out to approximately 3 million people...and each edition features a poem.

The poems are shortlisted by judges Wendy Babiak, Andrew Haley and Ruth Bavetta but members of the ¡POETRY! group select the winner.

I've been submitting to here and there over the past few months but have been a bad group member and haven't been checking back all month and leaving comments on other people's poems.

But I got a few comments as the voting period drew to a close, which is kind of nice.

Thanks to my fellow May Day-ers, who gave good comment on an early draft of the poem.

Reprint: Quill & Quire

* * *

One of the last things I did at Aqua Books was take the (uncredited) photos for this Quill & Quire article, printed in the July/August issue.

I really REALLY like Anita Daher's assessment of the difference between Aqua and McNally Robinson:

"At McNally, they celebrate authors, and they're set up to sell new books at launches. At Aqua, it's about the literary community. Aqua is maybe more about books in progress, McNally is about the finished books."

She's so smart.

SPORED: Bren Simmers

From Bren Simmers' poem sequence "Weather Observation Record: Cline Lookout" in her Night Gears (Wolsak and Wynn, 2010).

* * *

I picked exactly two mushrooms on the walk described below. And promptly ripped a page out of Night Gears, which I'd been re-reading at the cabin, and placed it on the woodstove in one corner of the living room.

The next morning, as we were packing up to go to the city, I nearly cooed with pleasure when I saw what the mushrooms had been doing to the paper. Such glorious ruin!

Given Bren's subject matter in much of Night Gears - time spent in fire lookouts in Alberta, a road trip north and her work as a park interpreter - I LIKE that this is a cabin-y spore print.

glading

As ever, thanks to M for the pic.

glade

All photos Hillside Beach, MB. July 15, 2011.

* * *

We pulled on pants on our second-to-last day at the cabin for walk down a moped/quad trail just off what we'd taken to calling pebble beach. Though I dislike it intensely, we also slathered on both sunscreen and insect repellent.

(I wonder how we smelled to the swarms of dragonflies, buzzing the pink clover lane at the trailhead, their wings rustling like paper all around us...)

There were far fewer mushrooms than I would have expected, but I suppose that felled trees take a long time to break down to mulch in non-managed forest...

Together, we discovered patches of wild raspberries and strawberries along one stretch, the fruit just beginning to turn deep red. We watched where we stepped along another, because there were dozens and dozens of tiny frogs jumping back into the bush.

But my favourite bits of the walk were when I spied a clearing under the trees and nipped off to see what mushrooms might be growing.

I couldn't prowl around willy-nilly, because M and I are sort of fuzzy as to what "leaves of three, let it be" looks like...

Anyways, M pointed out this particular clearing, filled with big old logs that were intensely green with moss. And these tiny mushrooms, almost too small to photograph.

What I'll remember about it was that the air was green, not from light mottled through leaves, but something mossy and earthy and dim.

And that when I leaned on the softness of the log to get this shot, some unseen mushroom released its spores and it was like a mouthful of smoke drifting under my nose and I was somehow only faintly worried, me in my long pants and layers of sun/insect ooze.

I could have spent ages in that glade, but M and Aa were patiently waiting fifteen feet away...

Reprint: CBC's Manitoba Scene

Eight reasons why you should read Manitoba books
Posted by Ariel Gordon, Winnipeg writer

In honour of the inaugural edition of Manitoba Reads, SCENE invited Ariel Gordon to come up with five excellent reasons you should read Manitoban.

Like many Manitoban writers, Ariel exceeded expectations.

1. Because a 100-mile literary diet is EMINENTLY easier to achieve than a plain ol' 100-mile diet.

2. Quality over quantity. Yes, Manitoba's literary community is small enough to be categorized as a cabal, but it's very winning: we've got Governor General's Award winners, Giller Award winners, IMPAC Dublin nominees, and ReLit Award winners wandering the streets, notebooks in hand.

The only prize that Manitobans haven't won, sadly, is a Pullitzer. And that's mostly because they're not eligible, as Canadians. (I'm what's called an unreliable narrator, see?)

3. For documentary purposes. Which is to say, Winnipeg (and its bedroom communities, which includes everything as far as Flin Flon) is small enough that you'll probably wind up at a party with a writer. Flash your teeth/wit charmingly enough and you'll probably make your way into a poem or a short story.

But if you don't read Manitoban, how will you know?

4. Because Manitoba isn't Chicago or Omaha or even (swamped) Fargo and our writers aren't afraid to say so. You can read our (swamped) riverbanks and (swamped) farmer's fields in Manitoba books. And, luckily, these (swamped) hometown references are inundated by excellent writing.

5. For the free cheese. (THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival, which features an unholy number of Manitoba writers, always has Bothwell cheeses on offer at their nightly mainstages.)

6. Even though there is only ONE non-fiction title on the Manitoba Reads longlist and NO poetry, rest assured that Manitoba's poets and non-fiction specialists will NOT bite anyone they come across reading the winning book or indeed ANY of the longlisted titles. (I'm pretty bite-y, usually, but I'll try...)

7. People always mutter about the stack of books they plunk down on bookstore counters.

"I don't have room..." they say, "I'll have to get new shelves."

But just think. You could be spending all your money on opium and prostitutes. Books are a MUCH better alternative...

8. Seriously. Even though we're known for our literary North End, our about-to-be-shunned Mennos, our epic Icelanders and our burgeoning Aboriginal writing communities, Manitoba writing is wonderfully impossible to categorize. Writers of every stripe, of every genre and inclination, live here. And it's just neighbourly to support that. Literally.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer and editor. In spring 2010, Palimpsest Press published her first full-length poetry collection, Hump, and in 2011 she was awarded the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Le Prix Lansdowne du poesie. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

* * *

Almost immediately after this was posted to the Manitoba Scene website, the following comment appeared: "As for awards, Carol Shields won the Pulitzer for The Stone Diaries and she wrote most of her books while here in MB."

Which I'd completely forgotten about. Ugh. Those tricksy dual citizens!

spike

kindling

All photos Hillside Beach, MB. July 13, 2011.

* * *

So I investigated the piles of kindling around the cabin we're staying at, knowing that mushrooms love decaying wood best of all, and found this clump near the old outhouse.

I like it when mushrooms go mouldery green. It's very satisfying, just as taking a hammer to ferns is ALSO very satisfying.

(Did I mention that our afternoon craft was creating what the cabin craft book we bought calls 'fern smash t-shirts,' where you lay fresh fern fronds on a white t-shirt, cover them with paper towels, and smash the shit out of them with a hammer? The chlorophyll in the ferns - or any greenery, really - dyes the shirt, the paper towels and possibly also the hammer head.

Though it sounds unnecessarily violent, the result is uncanny. Like a grainy goddamn photocopy of a fern. It's the fern equivalent of a spore print or, I suppose, a macro photograph.

Now I want to smash ferns endlessly. But worry, somewhat, what that says about me...)

And one more...

pebbled

All photos Hillside Beach, MB. July 10,2011.

* * *

M mowed the lawn today at the (rented) cabin. Under protest and with beer breaks. But it had to be done...

When he returned, he told me that he'd seen five or six bunches of mushrooms on the lawn. And that instead of coming in and telling me about them, he mowed them under.

I must have looked like I was about to bite him, because he hastily told me he'd ALSO seen some 'bumpy orange ones' on some logs.

I retracted my fangs/claws/tusks and proceeded outside with my (underused) camera.

Beach reads

Otherwise known as the stack I'm bringing to the cabin. There's more here than I can possibly read in two weeks' time, especially given that I've also got two UMP manuscripts to leaf thru, but it's also a symbolic act:

I'll be reading my way back into the Edison manuscript.

I've had a stack of exciting-for-me biographies out from the library and haven't been able to get to them. (Renewed them twice already...)

And I really really need to get into some kind of routine with this manuscript or I will pull my hair out and perhaps even attempt to get a grip on the short hairs on M's shaven head.

That bad, yes. But there have been a few extenuate-ings and I'm still reasonably certain there's still juice in the poems. (I have a bit of a thing for the poems, in fact, which is probably why I'm so impatient...)

There's also books here that I have been putting off reading for months, again because of the pile of must-reads.

You also have to plan for different reading moods when going out of town, where there's no TV and only the cooling night between me and bed.

Finally, right on top of the pile is the How to Prepare for Flooding proof that I've been playing show and tell with for months. Now we have to do final text/image touches and get the damn thing printed.

deep affection, part the second

In a TIMBER-y follow-up to my previous life-in-the-trees post...

The tree NEXT TO 'our tree' has been looking rather sickly, having dropped a rotten section on the boulevard the morning we moved in a year or so ago.

We've been re-insulating our basement (by which I mean we've found the money to PAY people to re-insulate our basement, given that our house is a hundred years old) and I came upon one of the guys looking up into the canopy Thursday.

"Now that's a widowmaker," he commented, pointing to a large leafless branch and confiding that he was also an arborist. "Next half-decent windstorm we get, it'll probably come down."

Nevermind half-decent storm: it came down the NEXT day. We pulled up in front of the house after attending a wedding and saw that the branch he'd pointed at was half-down, resting on a neighbouring tree.

A City of Winnipeg truck towing a chipper showed up within the hour. So the girl and I sat on our deck and watched them wield several different-sized chainsaws from the ground and from a bucket on a crane.

They cut down the hanging branch and cleaned up the break but left the rest of the tree. And, also, the larger chunks of downed wood, which now sit on the boulevard. The rest went into the chipper.

The girl oohed and ahhed. I noticed that the amount of time it took to take apart the branch was ridiculously short compared to how long the tree took to grow it. I also wistfully - and selfishly - hoped that the tree would somehow survive.

This was a rather stark example of 'tree management,' given my thoughts on Winnipeg's elm canopy of late. (The crew said that three trees - or bits of trees - had come down yesterday around Winnipeg...)

Finally, in my last post, I referenced Jamie Swift's 2000 article The Return of the Stately Elm.

The article is worth reading in its entirety, but the following quote has bobbed around in my subconscious since then and I thought I'd share it:

"If you ever want to lose elected office in Winnipeg," says [former] mayor Glenn Murray wryly, "say something bad about a tree."