Out-of-Town-Authors: Ami McKay

O (for Oprah) CANADA
Talk show host played role in birth of writing career

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon

Nova Scotia-based writer Ami McKay is originally from Indiana. Two things made her a Canadian writer.

One, she wrote Oprah Winfrey a thank you letter, which resulted in an appearance on the talk-show host's program.

Two, she met and married a Canadian. During her wait for residency papers, McKay wrote The Birth House (2006), which would go on to become a Canadian bestseller and a favourite of book clubs.

McKay followed up on that success with the play Jerome: The Historical Spectacle (2008), which was staged in Nova Scotia and then published by Gaspereau Press.

McKay will read from her just-released second novel, The Virgin Cure, Tuesday at McNally Robinson Booksellers.

1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

I suppose reading in public is a kind of performance, isn't it? Having been a music major in university, the word performance generally conjures up memories of voice recitals, orchestra concerts or musical theatre productions. I suffered from terrible stage fright back then -- dry mouth, sweaty palms, a pounding heart, the works. Thankfully, readings tend to be more relaxed affairs for me. I think of it as an opportunity to share the stories I saved up while I was alone, writing. It's a chance to share a few secrets and dreams, and if I'm lucky, and the conversation really gets humming, I'll get to hear a few secrets from the audience as well.

2) What do you want people to know about The Virgin Cure?

Although it's a story set in Victorian New York, the issues that sit at the heart of the novel are things we still struggle with in the present. Moth, the narrator and protagonist, could just as easily be a girl I saw standing on a street corner last week, or the at-risk teen who just ran away from home.

3) Will this be your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

I was in Winnipeg for half a day a few years back, certainly not long enough to get to know the city. I've heard wonderful things about the arts scene here, especially when it comes to theatre and music. I'd love to spend at least a week wandering around and taking it all in. Maybe I'll come back in the summer. I hear the lightning storms are wickedly beautiful.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I'm reading a fabulous, not yet released novel called The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak. It's set in the earliest days of Catherine the Great and it's got me hooked.

I've been making notes for my next novel, The Witches of New York. It shares a few characters from The Virgin Cure but isn't a sequel in the traditional sense.

5) The Birth House was inspired, in part, by your house in Nova Scotia. The Virgin Cure is based, in part, on the life of your great-great grandmother, a New York-based doctor. Tell me a bit about the process of fictionalizing these real-life sites/people.

In both cases I found early on in my writing that truth really is stranger than fiction. Sifting through personal histories and archives, I stumbled upon many accounts of events that seemed so wild or incredible that I knew I couldn't have imagined them if I tried. The temptation, of course, is to pepper the narrative with every last one of those juicy tidbits. I had to learn to refrain from including things that didn't enhance or further the plot. I think (and hope) I'm getting better at only weaving what's necessary into the story and leaving the rest for another tale.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

my dirty little poem

My poem "How to Write a Poem" has successfully made it online!

The lovely Toronto online art magazine Open Books Toronto has posted it to their site in lieu of their traditional 10 Questions With as a preview for my event at Toronto Women's Bookstore next week.

Funny thing is, given its format (numbered stanzas, no line-breaks), you can't really tell.

If you'll recall, I tried to submit this poem to CBC Manitoba Scene in lieu of an interview. But they said it was too dirty. And I completely understood, but...it's nice to see it out in the world.

(The poem is from my how-to series but don't look for it in How to Prepare for Flooding, as it didn't quite fit the gory urban/nature theme Julia and I were working with.)

Thanks to Clelia Scala at Open Book Toronto! Yay! Fun!

Chapbook! Arrived! Yay!

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Thanks to M for picking up the chapbooks at the printer. And for the pictures. Oh, and for the app to stitch them together in this jolly diptic.

U of M launch

How to Prepare for Flooding: U of M launch!

When: Wednesday, November 23, 12:00-1:00 pm
Location: St. John's College Library (3rd floor SJC)
92 Dysart Rd, University of Manitoba
Cost: FREE!

Please join Ariel Gordon for the U of M launch of her chapbook with Saskatoon's JackPine Press, How to Prepare for Flooding.

Light refreshments will be served, courtesy of the St. John's College Library.

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How to Prepare for Flooding is a collection of poems modeled on the how-to manuals and survival guides that rattle around your toolbox and clog up your glove compartment. Chock-a-block with illustrations and useful tips, these poems will prepare readers for a raft of natural and personal disasters such as "How to Survive a Plane Crash" and "How to Sew a Button." But more than that, How to Prepare for Flooding asks, over and over, what’s the difference between wild and tame? Natural and unnatural? Also, is this REALLY where we find ourselves?

Coil-bound and printed on bright white Coast VIA Linen paper with Hostmann-Steinberg vegetable-based inks, this book isn't waterproof. But it SHOULD be. (7.5" x 5")

* * *

This should be great fun, given that the SJC library focuses on Canadian literature and is just down the hall from my UMP office. Except that my UMP co-workers will probably heckle. Little do they know that I'm pro-heckling!

Out-of-Town-Authors: Patrick Friesen

Jumping off the page
Performance, motion important aspects of Patrick Friesen's poetry

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon

Since his first work appeared in 1976, Vancouver Island-based writer Patrick Friesen has published 11 collections of poetry, a book of essays and a play.

Lest you think this publishing schedule too lax, know that in this time he also translated two books of poetry with theatre maven Per Brask and collaborated with jazz pianist/improviser Marilyn Lerner on two music albums.

He'll be reading from his latest collection, Jumping in the Asylum, on Thursday at McNally Robinson Booksellers.

1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

While, indeed, I'm alone while I write, I do read everything aloud as I'm writing. The poem has to sound right to me, not just look right on the page. Another thing, I usually have music on in the room while I'm writing. So, yes, I'm physically alone, but not sensually. I approach performance as an extension of the work, not as something separate. It's not unusual for me to change words, phrases, sometimes leave out a line or verse, when I perform poems. It's in performance that I can sometimes hear/feel what doesn't work, or what needs a little modification. I don't write metrically, so how a poem feels coming out of my mouth, whether in my room or in performance, is important.

2) What do you want people to know about Jumping in the Asylum?

I'm not sure there's anything specific I want people to know; best if people read/hear without any preconception. I could say that the title of the book comes from the photograph which is on the cover; it's Nijinsky, as a middle-aged man in an asylum, being visited by several ballet people, suddenly leaping up as if his body's memory has been triggered. There's something very moving about this for me, and there's something about that moment that infuses the book as a whole.

3) Will this be your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

Oh no, not my first time in Winnipeg. I lived in Winnipeg for 30 years. I moved there from southeastern Manitoba when I was 19 and left when I turned 50. Winnipeg is still home, in some fundamental way. It's where I first married, had two children, did much of my writing, knew and interacted with other artists, and simply lived. Of course, the Winnipeg that's inside me is no longer identical to the current one. Everything is perpetually in motion. Winnipeg is a spiritual source, a powerful place for an artist to come out of, a place of artists. The Winnipeg I know inside me has a raw authenticity I continually draw from.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I always have three or four books going on at the same time. Just now I'm rereading Lost Light: An Interpretation of Ancient Scriptures by Alvin Boyd Kuhn. I'm also reading The Disinherited: Exile and the Making of Spanish Culture by Henry Kamen, and Dancing Into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, and Japan by Sondra Horton Fraleigh.

There are still strands from Jumping in the Asylum showing up in my work, but I'm mainly finishing off a new manuscript of poems due out in 2012 and working my way through a monologue for stage.

5) Tell me about the interplay of jazz and poetry in your work.

Jazz is important for me in terms of its exploration and improvisation. The way you can hear the musical "thinking" of Bill Evans, for example, his constantly moving long lines, his voice. Not the lock-step thinking we all typically engage in most of the time, but the immediate motion of mind and body, like gestural drawing, as Evans himself once wrote. I once asked Margie Gillis what she thought of during performance. She said she didn't think at all; there was only "imagery, imagery." Well, this is the kind of "thinking" I'm talking about.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

Huddled for Warmth

What: PechaKucha Night, Vol. 8 in Winnipeg
When: Thursday November 10 - doors open at 7:30 pm (first speaker hits the stage at 8:20 pm)
Where: Park Theatre, 698 Osborne Street
How Much: $5 (suggested donation, at the door)

Post-Hallowe'en sugar crash? Pre-Grey Cup jitters? Snow shoveling anxiety? No worries, mates! GDC Manitoba promises the cure for what ails you: a big medicinal swig of PechaKucha.

Join GDC Manitoba and a roomful of 10-day-old Movember mustaches as we present our eighth PechaKucha Night event in Winnipeg (and final event of the 2011 calendar).

Once more we've assembled a dazzling and diverse display of speakers for an evening of inspiration and creativity. From fine arts to upstarts, masters of the pens, lens, drums, stage and all that jazz, PechaKucha Night in Winnipeg, Vol. 8, guarantees good times - guaranteed.

So without further adieu, we present the stars of our show:

Celes Devar, travel outfitter
Ariel Gordon, poet, and Julia Michaud, designer
Sarah Hodges, writer/photographer
Ivan Hughes, videographer
ML Kenneth, artist
Joe Kerr, photographer/gallery owner
Nick Kolisnyk, drummer
Paul Nolin, executive director, Winnipeg Jazz Festival
David Pensato, interactive brand strategist
Alix Sobler, writer/performer
Albertine Watson, RRC Creative Communications student
Shel Zolkewich, food/travel writer

PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in 2003 as an event for designers to meet, network and to show their work in public. The concept has since turned into a global movement, with events happening in cities around the world. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of conversation ("chit chat"), it rests on a presentation format based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds - keeping presentations concise and moving at a rapid and entertaining pace.

Eager to know more? Check out everything PechaKucha here, or scroll through this PechaKucha backgrounder.

* * *

After many months ogling the line-ups for Pecha Kucha events, I finally get to go to one. And I'm in the line-up!

How to Catch a Wild Rabbit

This is one of my favourite spreads in How to Prepare for Flooding.

The design for this poem was highly collaborative. Julia and I sat at our respective computers, six blocks apart, doing simultaneous google image searches: "cat" "angry cat" "cat with open mouth"

We'd email each other images when we found something promising:"How about this?" "Or this?" "THIS ONE!"

I remember finding this yawning cat. And I just knew that Julia could 'drown' it, by which I mean two things. One, that it was big enough to survive being converted to an illustration, that it could handle all the black and white and red. And two, that it had visual punch in spades.

Which is sort of how I write, come to think of it. My goal is always to come up with punchy images/phrases that work in the context of the longer poem.

I forget whose idea it was to put the last stanza of the poem in the cat's mouth, but that idea quickly followed. I mean, how could you NOT?

(The poems were laid out in spreads, which we then chopped up to make into facing pages. I'm sharing the chop-chop version, if only because the spreads are so long and narrow that blogger can't display them properly...)

* * *

The Winnipeg launch of How to Prepare for Flooding is Nov 2 at Aqua Books and features Julia Michaud, Jennifer Still, and Matthew TenBruggencate.

Carpace!

Toronto launch of Carapace
Laura Lush with Ariel Gordon

When: Thursday, November 3, 6:30 pm
Location: Toronto Women’s Bookstore (73 Harbord Street)
Cost: FREE!

Please join us for the Toronto launch of Laura Lush's fourth collection of poetry, Carapace, which will include selections focused on pregnancy and mothering.

* * *

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer. She is the 2010 recipient of the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Writer and the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Le Prix Lansdowne du poesie. The chapbook How to Prepare for Flooding (JackPine Press), a collaboration with designer Julia Michaud, will be launched in fall 2011. Gordon’s first full-length collection, Hump (Palimpsest Press, 2010), is shaped by pregnancy and mothering: “month by month, stanza by stanza, Gordon attempts to adequately represent the wonder and devilment of being-with-child.”

Laura Lush has an Honours B.A. in English and Creative Writing from York University and an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from The University of Calgary. Her books include Hometown, which was nominated for the 1992 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, Fault Line, The First Day of Winter, in which selections of this book tied for second place in the 2002 CBC Literary Contest, and a collection of short stories, Going to the Zoo. Her latest collection, Carapace (Palimpsest Press, 2011), includes poems “told through the eyes of a new mother as she attempts to balance the complex and often-times conflicting emotions that accompany motherhood: joy, anger, uncertainty, awe and fear.”

* * *

This should be SUCH great fun. And then I'm off to Words Aloud in Durham the next day, where I'm appearing with Ayub Nuri and Lillian Allen...

Out-of-Town-Authors: Marina Endicott

From Shadow-puppets to the Shortlist

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon

Marina Endicott’s third novel, The Little Shadows, tells the story of the Aurora Belles, a vaudeville act that consists of three sisters in their teens.

The Edmonton resident, whose résumé includes stints as an actor, director and playwright, has been making appearances at festivals and bookstores across the country since the late summer.

This past week, The Little Shadows was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, which in the vernacular of the book, means it’s officially hit the big time.

Marina Endicott will be appearing at McNally Robinson on Tuesday.

1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

I think everyone has an introverted and an extroverted side—and I love the conversation between those two. My introverted side spends years alone, in the company of gradually constructed shadow-puppets; then one day I let my extroversion out of the box, and put some of the work in front of an audience to see how it plays. I ran a reading series for many years in Cochrane, Alta., and now run another with Lynn Coady here in Edmonton. I’ve come to believe that public reading for a willing, intelligent crowd is the best testing ground a writer can have.

2) What do you want people to know about The Little Shadows?

That it’s not a history, but a story of people and their work that happens to be set in vaudeville — that extroverted/introverted, backstage-shadow/footlight-glowing world.

3) Will this be your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

I spent a very enjoyable week in Winnipeg last summer, giving a workshop at Canadian Mennonite University, with beautiful weather, great students, and visits with two of my writing friends, Joan Thomas and Ian Ross.

I have heard that Winnipeg is fah-reezing cold except for that one week in summer.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

The wagonload of very good Canadian books that have come out this year: just finishing Madeleine Thien’s beautiful, difficult Dogs at the Perimeter, and for some leavening humour, Sue Sorenson’s engaging and intelligent A Large Harmonium.

I’m in the early stages of a novel called Hughtopia, about an art gallery owner who attempts to achieve heaven on earth by fixing the lives of all his friends.

5) What were the challenges in writing/researching such a specific time and place (i.e. First World War-era vaudeville)?

I wanted to examine what it would have meant to be girls and women on the edge of respectability in those days; not unvirtuous, but living outside the general society, and not considered entirely decent. It’s hard, now, for us to enter into (fall back down into) those old assumptions underlying every girl and woman’s life then, the unquestioned beliefs about the limited natural rights and abilities, and the frailty, of woman.

Writing about performance was a challenge: trying to find a way to bring those delightful artistes, their skill and talents, to life on the page.

And underneath it all, I wanted to catch the physical life of 1912: as Alice Munro says, "Every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting."

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

Postering

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In late spring, Aqua Books asked Julia Michaud to do a poster up for this year's Lansdowne Prize for Poetry Winner. Unlike event-specific posters, the Lansdowne posters were up permanently at the store.

Julia has done the majority of Aqua's posters, magnets, and logos...and so I was looking forward to seeing what she would do this year for me.

Since by this time Julia and I were deep into our collaboration on the JackPine chapbook How to Prepare for Flooding, it seemed natural that the poster would reflect that project.

Here's the final poster. It wasn't ultimately printed but that's not a huge surprise, given the upheaval at Aqua this summer.

Out-of-Town-Authors: Guy Gavriel Kay

Here’s where the fantasy began

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon

Toronto-based writer Guy Gavriel Kay has legions of fans, drawn both of from geekdom and the literati.

His pedigree is as epic as his books: in his 20s, he moved from Winnipeg to Oxford, England to help J.R.R. Tolkien’s son, Christopher, edit The Silmarillion.

In his 30s, he published The Fionavar Tapestry, a critically acclaimed trilogy of high-fantasy novels.

These days, Kay writes what he calls ‘historical fantasy.’ His latest, Under Heaven, won a Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and was nominated for several other prizes.

Kay will be appearing at McNally Robinson on Thursday to celebrate the paperback release of Under Heaven.

1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

A good, complex question! There is a wide range of comfort among writers for the road show/performance aspect of the business. I spent many years writing and directing in radio drama, so I am comfortable with an audience or a microphone, but I do worry about the blurring of an author’s public persona with the work itself. A good ‘performer’ can make a mediocre book sound strong, and a shy author can leave listeners missing the excellence of his or her writing. I get the most out of touring overseas, the exposure to completely different cultures (China, Croatia, Russia, France, Mexico...) and seeing how my work is received there. That’s hugely rewarding on a personal level.

2) What do you want people to know about Under Heaven?

I lived with this book, researching, incubating, writing, for seven years, even through the writing of another novel. Because of this, the awards and honours it has received feel hugely reassuring: the idea that taking time, being careful, polishing, are still worthwhile in today’s sped-up world. The novel is inspired by the Tang Dynasty of 8th-century China... the most glittering, dazzling period in their history. It embodies what has become my ‘method’... close attention to real history and then a "quarter turn to the fantastic" as the Globe and Mail reviewer put it. (A phrase I like and have obviously stolen!)

3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

Um, well, gee...I grew up here! I’ve heard it all (well, probably not quite!): Kelekis, the BDI for ice cream and romantic walks over the bridge, Corydon, Osborne Village, Juniors for midnight hamburgers (the original one, opposite the train station!), Winnipeg Beach, Falcon Lake, mosquitoes, hitchhiking to campus in winter, the hockey rink behind Sir William Osler School (I pretty much grew up on that sheet of ice, or on the football field we used just north of Taylor, around Mathers Bay). The radiators of University College on campus (did some more growing up there), the River Heights library and Mary Scorer Books (dating myself), graham wafer pie at Salisbury House. What else have I heard? Rumour has it there’s a hockey team again. Go Jets!

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

Just finished The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, nominated for a lot of awards this fall. I enjoyed it a lot. We share a film agent and he tells me the book’s been optioned by John C. Reilly, the actor...and he’d be flat-out perfect for the lead role. I hope it happens. I’m in the middle of writing my next book. I never talk about books in progress, I could decide to change it to a series of seafood recipes, after all.

5) You’ve published 11 novels...and one book of poetry. Tell me about the urge towards poetry.

I started with poetry, first recognition, first awards. The impulse and the writing never went away; I just stopped sending them out to magazines around the time I released my first novel. The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That’s how Beyond This Dark House appeared. There’s a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves...that never goes away.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

How to Launch a Chapbook

Lansdowne Prize for Poetry Series
Ariel Gordon, with Jennifer Still, Matthew TenBruggencate & Julia Michaud

When: Wednesday, November 2, 7 pm
Location: Aqua Books (274 Garry Street, between Graham and Portage)
Cost: FREE!

Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Le Prix Lansdowne du poesie 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.

The first event in the series features 2011 winner Ariel Gordon and includes the launch of her JackPine chapbook, How to Prepare for Flooding. Her guests include actor/Theatre by the River major domo Matthew TenBruggencate, poet Jennifer Still and designer/chapbook collaborator Julia Michaud.

* * *

Jennifer Still’s first collection of poems, Saltations, was nominated for three Saskatchewan Book Awards. Poems from her new collection Girlwood (Brick Books, 2011) were finalists in the 2008 CBC Literary Awards. After living her adult years until just recently in Saskatchewan, Jennifer now lives in Winnipeg with her husband and two children.

Matthew TenBruggencate is a co-artistic head and a founding member of Theatre by the River, whose members he would gladly be marooned with on a desert island. Local acting credits include One Good Marriage, Habitat, Saint Joan, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The History of Theatre, Comedy of Errors, The Elfin Knight (Theatre by the River) Cherry Docs, Talk (Winnipeg Jewish Theatre) Stripped Down Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare in the Ruins) The Skriker, The Misadventurous Perils of Pauline (Echo Theatre) Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure (Tom-Tom), among others.

Julia Michaud started off her fledgling design career in the 80s, drawing book report covers with smelly markers for her artistically-challenged classmates at St. Ignatius School. Julia joined the illustrious ranks of highly talented illustrator and designer graduates from RRC in 1999. Her first full job in the industry, doing black and white car ads at the Auto Trader, gave her the motivation to go after a more colourful position. Her first taste of design fame came via Brad Hughes at Fanfare Magazine Group, which produces publications with the highest hip factor anywhere – Ciao! and WHERE Magazines. After five years creating glamorous retail and restaurant ads, art-directing photoshoots at Amici and eating chef-created cuisine, it was time for new opportunities. Her company, Instant Noodles Design, serves clients like The Garden Room, the Folk Arts Council and Aqua Books.

Ariel Gordon is a writer whose first book of poetry, Hump (Palimpsest Press, 2011), won the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry/Prix Lansdowne de poésie at the 2011 Manitoba Book Awards. How to Prepare for Flooding (JackPine Press, 2011), a collaboration with designer Julia Michaud, will be launched with this event.

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Whee! Fun!

SPORED: Jenna Butler

From Jenna Butler's poem "Petroglyph Trail" in her aphelion (NeWest, 2010).

* * *

When the ONLY place, perversely, that mushrooms are growing is the boulevard in front of a neighbour's house...you make (figurative) hay.

Which means picking a few from the edges of the inky clumps and making spore prints! On poems!

First up is a gory print on a poem from Edmonton poet/publisher Jenna Butler. After Winnipeg and maybe Regina, I think Edmonton has one of the dreamiest poetry communities. So many good poets!

Still to come is a spore print on a poem from Robert Kroetsch's Too Bad. Which I'm saving for a (figuratively) rainy day.

clubbed

clubbing

All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. October 7, 2011.

* * *

A terrible year for mushrooms, yes. But there are always consolations, especially on warm blustery days like today.

Shirtsleeves in October. The absolute yellow of that goddamn fall sun.

How my tea is still warm when I rise from my rusty crouch, having spotted these teeny-tiny club lichens on a log.

Out-of-Town-Authors: Terry Jordan

Meet your new WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon

As of Oct. 1, Saskatoon-based writer Terry Jordan will be the Winnipeg Public Library's 2011-2012 writer-in-residence.

The award-winning writer and playwright, who recently led the fiction workshop at the Sage Hill Writing Experience, will be the twenty-second W-i-R since Sandra Birdsell kicked off the program in 1985.

Jordan will split his time in Winnipeg (October to April) between individual consultations with writers and working on his own writing.

Please consider this your introduction: Terry, Winnipeg. Winnipeg, Terry.

1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

As story, which exists as the world exists. Everything, every thing we can touch or imagine, is involved in various levels of at least one story. Books included. The process of writing them will contain stories, the text and spirit of them also, of course. It's just one of the reasons we read, but we, all of us, are storytellers to some extent. Often, what we find most interesting in other people are their stories and their ability to tell them. Different cultures give stories as gifts. Writers do, too. We like to give; we like to receive. Like all generosity, giving is receiving.

2) What do you want people to know about you?

My connectedness to writing and to people who love to write and read. I'm approachable: come see me at the library.

3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

I have been to your city a few times for shorter periods, but this will be the first time in quite a while. A number of scenes from the novel I'm just completing, which depict fishing and whaling in the 19th century off Canada's eastern coast and south from there, were written in a cabin overlooking Lake Winnipeg.

The city itself owns a vibrancy that is much talked-about in other parts of Canada, and its reputation is well-deserved, I think.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I've always got about eight books on the go. I've just been looking through a book by the photographer Stephen Collector called Law of the Range: Portraits of Old-Time Brand Inspectors, which is striking and original. I'm wearing an editor's hat, so I'm immersed in a number of projects - fiction and non-fiction. I'm reading Catherine Bush's new novel The Thief in manuscript form, which is beautiful and to-be-looked-for when it is published. I've just started Guy Vanderhaeghe's A Good Man and finished David Homel's Midway, it's very moving. Dickens again, whom I love, because my daughter was asking that I read it to her. Lovely. Then Linda Hogan, James Welch and Gerald Stern. A book on Ireland's Nine Years War by Timothy O'Donnell.

I mentioned I just finishing writing a novel, Been in the Storm So Long, set in Nova Scotia and New Orleans, which follows, in a different sort of way, the migration of the Acadian people 100 years after their expulsion. I'm also at work on a book to follow this, the second of a trilogy I have planned, but I'm much too superstitious to say any more about it.

5) What are your goals for your term as W-i-R?

In meeting the all and, hopefully, many writers in my time in Winnipeg, talking to them, working with them to both celebrate and overcome the beauty of our imperfect language, our wonderful failure of expression. To quote Joy Williams, "None of this is what I long to say. I long to say other things. So I write stories in my attempt to say them."

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.