Saskatoon: JackPine launch Nov. 26

So after a month chock-full of events, I finished up with the 'launch' of How to Prepare for Flooding in Saskatoon, where publisher JackPine Press is based.

Julia and I spent the weekend wandering around Saskatoon's downtown, flying in Friday and leaving Sunday. Besides the launch, we got in a shopping expedition, a movie, a nice long brunch, and a riverwalk.

The launch was lovely. But given JackPine's history, I expected nothing less...

The best part of publishing with JackPine - besides the opportunity to create a gory little book with Julia - was how supported the press is by Saskatoon's writing and publishing community.

The press' reach meant that I didn't have to spend a lot of time inviting the writers I knew in Saskatoon: they already knew about the launch.

And so it was lovely to hang out with people I've met over the past few years via the Sage Hill Writing Experience and SK stops on tours with Kerry Ryan + Tracy Hamon.

It was also nifty to launch alongside Mitch Spray, Fionncara MacEoin, and Nancy Lowry.

JackPine major domo Elise Marcella Godfrey (and the rest of the collective) deserves major thanks for taking such good care of us, both over the course of the weekend and over the longer term, seeing Julia and I from submission to acceptance to publication.

Yay! Fun!

PBN: Diane Buchanan

* * *

From the fall 2011 issue of Prairie books NOW.

The books! The books!

So I did a reading last week at the St. John's College Library, which is quickly becoming my ALL time favourite library.

(That is, after my childhood library, which was small and full of well-thumbed teen romance novels...knowing the Sweet Valley High canon was NOT, unfortunately, any help when it came to St. Vital's social scene in the late eighties.)

I'm enamored of the SJC library because A) it's just down the hall from my University of Manitoba Press office B) it's the Can-lit library on campus C) I can order books from other U of M libraries and they're delivered to SJC AND I can take books out for months and months at a time.

So it was a treat to plan a lunchtime reading at the SJC library with UMP author/librarian Jim Blanchard which included cookies and an urn full of coffee.

I really enjoyed reading against a backdrop of books, of words and sentences and stanzas.

But I REALLY really enjoyed show-and-telling How to Prepare for Flooding (and, as you can see from the photos, other JackPine titles by Jennifer Still and Sharon Caseburg) with new(ish) U of M friends and colleagues.

Yay! Fun!

And thanks to all the SJC library staff for putting on the event, the first of many they'll be having at the library over the months to come.

Thanks too to Polly Washburn, who went from the event to a screening of her feature film Passionflower but still managed to take these pics for me...

scrabble

berrying

Fungal infidelity

All photos Cosmopolitan Park, Saskatoon, SK. November 26, 2011.
* * *

What does it say about me that the only time/place I'm able to mushroom is in other cities and other forests?

(Saskatoon has had enough snow already that what isn't full of footprints is soapy...but it was still fun to rummage around on the banks of the Saskatchewan river, even if I had to be careful of my footing.)

Out-of-Town-Authors: Rebecca Rosenblum

Short stories, big dreams

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon

Toronto writer Rebecca Rosenblum is a short-story specialist.

Which is similar to a poet’s poet insomuch as they both describe a writer who focuses on a particular genre and who is invested in the genre’s potentials and particularities.

Rosenblum will be reading from her second collection on Thursday at McNally Robinson. She will be joined by fellow Bibioasis author Ray Robertson.

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 used to be terrified to read in public, and I worked really hard to get better. Now I’m relaxed enough to occasionally surprise myself with how the act of voicing something that really illuminates — or alters — the meaning. So I learn about my work when I read, and I also learn from people’s reactions to it. The fastest way to figure out where you’re being self-indulgent is to read it to an audience and feel for the moment when they go dead.

2) What do you want people to know about The Big Dream?

That it exists? Um, that it’s a book about people who work, who have jobs and lives and fall in love and get sick and eat sandwiches and care about each other, but sometimes not enough or not in the right ways.

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

I’ve taken two trips to Winnipeg and both were wonderful. One thing I heard about Winnipeg before I went there is that they are famous for corn mazes. So when I told my Winnipegger friend Stephanie that I would be coming, and she asked what I wanted to do, I told her, "Oh, the corn maze, of course." So, being the awesome friend she is, she looked up a corn maze and when I arrived she drove me way out of town. This was September, glorious weather, but it had rained that week, and it was so sloppy I had to take off my shoes and stockings and go barefoot through the maze. It was hilarious and disgusting. At the end, I was like, "Wow, so this is why Winnipeg is famous for corn mazes." And Stephanie, who had lived there all her life, was like, "Um, no, we’re not, actually." I can no longer remember who told me that, but they completely made it up! I still enjoyed the maze, though.

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

I am reading Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist. It really is as good as everyone says it is, very meta and intellectually challenging, while still being completely human and relatable. And very, very funny. I am currently writing...this interview. I actually have been spending most of my free time on interviews or readings or presentations these days.

5) Why was it important to you to set The Big Dream’s stories in the workplace?

The confectionary idea that I see in a lot of fiction, that life happens after six and on weekends, is not true to me, nor to anyone who has ever faced unemployment in a bad economy, or overheard a colleague crying in the bathroom, or had a really excellent night at the holiday party. It all matters, it’s all real life — I wanted to show that.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

Toronto: Toronto Women's Bookstore, Nov. 3

So my publisher set me up with Laura Lush.

And she was dream date/co-reader. She filled the room with her friends and colleagues, she used ACTUAL REFERENCES TO MY POEMS in her introduction, and then she took me home to Guelph.

I will always remember tearing across Union Station, laden down with my bags, following Laura, who was deathly afraid of missing the night train to Guelph.

Her arms were full of flowers, of course. From her friends and colleagues, who laughed and sighed and bought out Toronto Women's Bookstore's cache of recent Palimpsest titles.

After we filled ALL of Laura's vases with flowers, I slept on the floor of her office, under a GG poster from the year her Hometown was nommed, her computer behind me, her bookshelves to one side.

All good sleepy-time influences, to my mind...and I slept very well.

* * *

Between our trainward sprint and our reading, Laura and her friends and my friend Red and I went down the street to a bistro. Red proceeded to trade me a copy of How to Prepare for Flooding for half a bottle of cava, which we drank over platters of frog's legs and smoked fish.

It had been nearly 15 years since Red and I had seen each other, but it was if no time had passed at all.

Except we both kind of sort of look like adults now.

* * *

There are lots of reasons to write but sometimes, publishing and attempting to get word out about the thing you've published can be humbling. Especially if you're publishing poetry.

And I understand. You win people over to poetry one person at a time, one poem at a time...but even so, it can be disheartening. So much work for so little (apparent) effect!

Which is why readings like this are like humbugs: you can savour them a long time.

Thanks to Laura for her generosity and her poems. Thanks for TWB for the venue and the pre-reading tea.

Finally, thanks to Dawn from Palimpsest for the blind date!

PBN: E.D. Blodgett

* * *

From the summer 2011 issue of Prairie books NOW.

* * *

The final quote from this square story, which did not fit on my rectangular flatbed scanner, is a humdinger and so worth including:

"That the world, no matter how brutal and mindless it is tending to be, is a place of incomparable awe." - E.D. Blodgett

Out-of-Town-Authors: Alison Pick

PADDLES and potty training

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon

Toronto writer Alison Pick is responsible for two books of poems, two novels, and a two-year-old daughter.

Though Pick acquired an early reputation for her nature writing, her most recent novel, Far to Go, explores how family histories intersect with historical events such as the Holocaust.

Pick will read Nov. 17 with Rhea Tregebov as a part of the Tarbut Festival of Jewish Culture at the Rady Jewish Community Centre.

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'm a classic introvert - not that I'm shy, but I thrive in solitude rather than in big groups of people - so I always have to spend some time ahead of a performance going over my notes and thinking about exactly what I'll say. My worst nightmare is having to go in front of an audience without time to prepare. That said, I do love the chance to talk about Far to Go, a book that is especially dear to my heart, and to have the opportunity to meet my readers.

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

Far To Go tells the story of a Czech Jewish family in the late '30s, during the lead-up to the Second World War. Although the book is decidedly not autobiographical, my great-grandparents died in the Holocaust, and the book is written in their memories. My grandparents escaped Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, came to Canada and renounced their Judaism. They had been essentially non-practising, and they were afraid that what was happening in Europe could happen here as well. My dad grew up not knowing he was Jewish, and I only found out the truth by accident as a young teenager. So writing Far to Go was a way for me to imagine what it meant to be the particular type of Jews my grandparents were in the particular historical moment in which they lived.

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

I've been to Winnipeg twice before. The first was to read from my 2003 poetry collection Question & Answer. The second time was on a publicity stop as part of a cross-Canada canoe trip I took to raise money and awareness for mental illness. I had a friend who paddled the whole country over the course of three summers, and I joined her for the middle leg. After 60 days in the woods I was over the moon about being able to take a shower, pick up mail, eat a fresh salad.

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

I've got a two-year-old daughter, so I'm really not reading much outside of books about temper tantrums and potty training. I am, in fits and starts, enjoying Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge and Charlotte Gill's Eating Dirt. In terms of writing, I'm working (slowly!) on a memoir that arose out of Far to Go. It explores a depression I suffered while I was researching and discovering my family's hidden Jewish history, and the ways in which the decisions of our ancestors can echo down generations, affecting the present in very real ways.

5) Canoe trips have featured in both your fiction and your poetry. How is writing about canoeing like and unlike actual canoeing?

The last big canoe trip I took was in 1999 - these days I'm lucky if I get out for a day or two every summer. But I'm still passionate about the wilderness in the same way I am about writing. Both seem to bring me home to myself, to make the world feel more hospitable, more peaceful. And certainly a long canoe trip is not dissimilar to the writing of a novel in terms of the patience, persistence and sheer grunt work required. That said, at this point in my life I can live without those epic canoe trips, whereas if I had to live without writing I'd be a very unhappy person indeed.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

feathered

eared

sneered

cracked

smeared

cupped

MORE extra marital mushrooming

All photos Riverstone Retreat, Durham, ON. November 6, 2011.

* * *

It was such a lovely day, moving through patches of late fall sun, moving through thickets of tiredness and elation.

And there were bird's wings on the ground, tangled in the leaf litter. And there were hardwood logs furred with incandescent moss.

And there was small stump, trimmed down nearly to the ground by an axe, and growing on the stump was a deep brown and a deep green mushroom. And crouching there, I felt pierced by affection for that stump and those mushrooms.

So I sat on the cedar-strewn ground and tried to get a picture that looked like something. But, as is the way with representation, didn't succeed.

But I was pleased with the day and these unexpected mushrooms.

SPORED: Robert Kroetsch

From Robert Kroetsch's poem "Making an Impression" in his Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait (University of Alberta Press, 2010).

* * *

So this is an ugly spore print, from last-chance mushrooms I found on the boulevard instead of in my precious forest. And I think it's right that it's ugly, sort of jagged and shapeless, because that's how this poem in particular makes me feel.

Because Kroetsch died by the side of the road, after an accident. And I'm still (selfishly) sad that he's dead, despite not having really known him.

So RIP Robert Kroetsch. And RIP Michael Van Rooy, whose face peered down from the wall at McNally Robinson when I was there for an event last week.

And RIP to M's grandmother and Aa's great-grandmother, Julia Onody, who died Thursday night, her daughters holding her arthritis-gnarled hands.

Out Loud

So I spent three days in Durham Ontario this past weekend at the Words Aloud Spoken Word Festival.

I think Words Aloud - the authors, the audiences, the organizers - has ruined me for subsequent festivals. I spit on superlatives normally, but it was probably the best experience I've ever had as a writer.

To start, instead of making me take the bus from Toronto and Durham (which can be as long as six hours) I was picked up at the airport and enjoyed two hours of chatter with festival authors.

Then I was driven to the Riverstone Retreat just outside of Durham, a beautiful place enclosed by cedar woods. And then we were fed homemade soup and pizza, because organizers were concerned that we wouldn't have enough time to eat before our performance otherwise.

I got frocked up and was driven to Durham's art gallery where the mainstage performances were. And although we weren't able to get my laptop - containing a slide show of images from How to Prepare for Flooding - to talk to the digital projector, I felt, well, ready.

Even though my set was slated for 35 minutes and I've never done more than 20-25. Even though Lillian Allen and Ayub Nuri were also on the bill. Even though Anne Simpson, Steven Heighton and John Giorno were in the room, watching...

I was the first performer. And so I wasn't prepared for the applause after I read "Tit Poem," but it was just...so much goddamn fun.

To listen to the audience and to know that they were listening hard, that they were prepared to come with me wherever I wanted to go. That they were willing to laugh and sigh.

And, somehow, even though I'm usually timed down to the minute, I made the ultimate rookie mistake: I read too long.

I don't know when again I'll have the problem of such a generous audience, but I've made a mental note to get a stopwatch that BINGS at me when I'm near time. Because the LAST thing I want is to get a reputation for reading over time...

And then I was done. I stepped down from the stage, took a sip of water, and settled in for the rest of the festival. Which was a lively thing, with afterparties and dinners and readings. And I even got in two sessions of mushrooming, of walking Durham's streets, before I was driven back to Toronto airport, snoozing in the passenger seat.

So, to sum: This was my first festival as an out of town author and now I'm ruined.

I've still got things to say about about the Winnipeg launch of How to Prepare for Flooding and the reading with Laura Lush at Toronto Women's Bookstore, but that'll have to wait for another day.

(Thanks to Artistic Director Liz Zetlin for the pic: I somehow managed not to take any photos of the festival itself while I was there...)

the ORDER

The order for this Thursday's PechaKucha thinger has just been announced.

(Julia and I worked up our slides, which include a yawning cat and a plane crash and a button between my lips and a flooded house from the 1950s flood, yesterday over excellent tomato soup...)

I like being before the beer, because it means that I can sit after I'm done and then continue sitting after the beer and just enjoy myself...

ML Kenneth

Nick Kolisnyk

Ariel Gordon/Julia Michaud

Joe Kerr

Jason Boychuk

Celes Davar


BEER BREAK


PKN Video

David Pensato

Albertine Watson

Paul Nolin

Sarah Hodges

Blair McEvoy

* * *

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)

PechaKucha events fill the room fast - so grab your seat early or you'll end up walking in the cold November rain.

Out-of-Town-Authors: Michael Rowe

ENTER, anti-Twilight
Winnipeg occupies big spot in the heart of vampire-novelist Michael Rowe

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon

On the surface of things, it may appear that Toronto-based writer and journalist Michael Rowe is coming to town to launch his new vampire novel, Enter, Night (ChiZine Publications).

But the true horror lies deeper: the event is also a high school reunion of sorts for Rowe, who attended St. John's Cathedral Boys' School in Selkirk from 1977 to 1981.

"I came to St. John's from a private school in Geneva, Switzerland," says Rowe, whose father was a diplomat. "My parents were a little concerned at the level of privilege I was growing up around in the mid-70s. I had a cousin who'd gone to St. John's, so it was a logical family choice. They thought St. John's would challenge me and toughen me up."

The school was renowned for its outdoor sports program, which included snowshoeing and canoeing.

"Over the four years I was at St. John's, I canoed something like 2,200 miles through the northern Ontario and Manitoba wilderness," says Rowe. "It made an impression. The Canadian hinterlands are really gothic if looked at just the right way. For a burgeoning horror writer, which I probably was even at 16, they're almost Canada's Transylvania - a wild, untamed part of the world where almost anything could happen."

It seems logical, then, that Rowe's first full-length work of fiction would be set in a northern Ontario mining town - as does his choice to name the fictional Parr's Landing after his SJC history teacher, Fred Parr.

"I love small towns," says Rowe. "I lived in a small town in Switzerland when my dad was at the UN. Selkirk was a small town. I lived in Milton, Ont., for six years in the late '80s and early '90s. It's largely a suburb now, but then it was a small town surrounded by farmland. Small towns are great places for writers with my interests to watch people."

Enter, Night represents something new for Rowe, who has also published three books of non-fiction and edited two anthologies of queer horror fiction.

"My work up till now, with a few exceptions, including a handful of short stories and a novella, has all been essays and journalism," says Rowe. "In many ways, although Enter, Night is tangentially about vampires, it's about a lot of the things I usually write about - for instance families, bullying, the corrosive effect of power on vulnerable people, and how human beings treat each other, especially in the face of a crisis."

"When I decided to write this novel, I'd anticipated a light supernatural romp, but in many ways it's the deepest, darkest, and most soul-scouring story I've ever written."

That darkness is probably what prompted Rowe's publisher, respected horror press ChiZine, to dub Enter, Night "the anti-Twilight."

"In many ways, I guess, Enter, Night is a very retro vampire novel," says Rowe. "The devastation that vampirism wreaks on the population it infects is significant in the book. In many ways, it mirrors the devastation that other parasitic elements in the story also wreak - anti-Indian prejudice, homophobia, tyrannical families, and carnivorous small towns.

"And underlying it, of course, is the fact that the vampire himself is a resurrected Catholic priest who came to Canada in the 17th century to colonize the Indians. The concept of colonialism is surely the ultimate vampirism - feeding off an indigenous population, consuming them, and making them like you."

Though Rowe is currently hard at work on his next book, a ghost story called Wild Fell, he is glad to have the chance to share Enter, Night with Winnipeg readers.

"I've always considered Winnipeg one of my 'homes,' one of the cities of my heart," says Rowe, who has since lived in Beirut, Havana and Paris. "In a very real sense, this is a homecoming. My book is part of what I have to show for my 32 years away, roaming the world."

Michael Rowe will launch Enter, Night at McNally Robinson Booksellers on Thursday at 7 p.m. He will be introduced by fellow horror writer Susie Moloney.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

* * *

This was a one-off article about former Manitoban writer Michael Rowe. It appeared on the same page as my regular Out of Town Authors interview with Will Ferguson.

Out-of-Town-Authors: Will Ferguson

Riel: Check. Now, how about Burton?

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon

Calgary-based writer Will Ferguson's biography is quintessentially Canadian.

Born in northern Alberta and raised by a single parent, Ferguson traveled Canada with Katimavik and abroad with Canada World Youth. Then he taught English in Japan and, after returning to Canada, worked for a company that gave tours of Anne of Green Gables sites in P.E.I.

And then he wrote about all of it and won three Leacock Medals for Humour in addition to selling a pile of books.

Ferguson will launch his ninth book, a collection of essays entitled Canadian Pie, on Wednesday 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?

Writing is a solitary pursuit, which I enjoy, but it can make one a little stir-crazy. I try to write travel articles and travel memoirs regularly if only to get me out of the house.

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

It's a collection of work that spans 15 years, starting with the very first thing I ever wrote for publication (a travel piece about a Shinto retreat I attended in Japan) up to my work on the 2010 Vancouver Olympics closing ceremonies. It's a wide swath of work, from humour to travel to personal essays.

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

I've been to Winnipeg several times and have always enjoyed it. Last time, I popped across the river to see Riel's grave. Always up for a late-night visit to Salisbury House, as well. I keep hoping I'll run into Burton Cummings. He still hangs out at Sals, right?

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

I'm reading a history of Nigeria. It's background for a novel I have coming out next year about a woman who gets caught up in an Internet scam, titled 419.

5) You're a three-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour. Have you ever thought of doing stand-up? Or writing tragedy?

Spoken comedy is so much different than stand-up (even a book reading and comedic talk isn't the same), I don't think I'd have the guts. My next novel is not comedic, though. It's a much sadder, darker tale than I usually write. It was a new experience for me - very cathartic.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

stumped

scabbed

Extra marital mushrooming

All photos Riverstone Retreat, Durham, ON. November 5, 2011.

* * *

I always feel deeply conflicted about mushrooming in woods other than Assiniboine Forest. I've spent more than a decade shuffling its paths and am always trying to get there, no matter how busy or tired I might be.

But I'm STILL compelled, when traveling, to root around the trees, should there be trees nearby.

I was in Durham Ontario this past weekend for a writers festival, Words Aloud. Organizers put me and several other authors up at the Riverstone Retreat, where, in addition to the big house where we stayed, there was a campground.

Which meant that I could actually walk between stands of white cedar in the forest, that there were heaps of stump and downed trees.

It was a completely different forest from the boreal forest I grew up in and the aspen parkland I now inhabit. So I was glad that I was able to find specimens, that ultimately, mushrooming is mushrooming.

Reprint: CBC's Manitoba Scene

Winnipeg poet prepares for flooding with poetry
Posted by Ariel Gordon, poet

I grew up in a house on the river in St. Vital.

That meant the lights and music of the Paddlewheel Princess on summer weekends and the awful clunk of metal on ice as my father cleared a rink come winter.
That also meant meant finding a perch somewhere during break-up every spring and listening to the thousand tinkling chandeliers, the thousand jaws crushing cubes.

Trees went by. Uprooted trees and unmoored docks and lawn chairs on giant slabs of ice.

Some years, the river corridor at the bottom of our property filled with water. That meant our basement was also flooded, and that our neighbours' basements were also flooded, and that once the water receded we'd all work to salvage what we could and pitch what we couldn't.

In 1997, I was living in Halifax and watched the wall of water approach Winnipeg frame by frame on the news. My father and his family were evacuated, just as my father and his family were evacuated during the 1950 flood.

How do you prepare for flooding? You install a sump pump and back water valve and hope that this year, it isn't your basement that gets the fallout of settling a flood plain.

If you're me, you write poems. Poems on "How to Prepare for Flooding" and "How to Survive a Plane Crash" but also "How to Sew a Button" and "How to Water Your Lawn Effectively" that are riffs on the wikiHows of the same names.

(Oh, and you find a brilliant designer to work when you're laying them out. And a nifty little chapbook press out of Saskatoon to publish them...)