The Jane Day Reader: Reprint: M-K 2015 Artist and Storytelling Retreats

Friday, February 13, 2015

Reprint: M-K 2015 Artist and Storytelling Retreats

Announcing the Muskwa-Kechika 2015 Artist and Storytelling Retreats

Imagine sitting around a fire deep in the wilds and experiencing the spine-tingling stories of Ivan Coyote and Art Napoleon amidst moose and caribou while listening to the calls of loons or splashes of otters.

Or how about feeling your creative juices flow after spirited talks with award winning poets Ariel Gordon and Melanie Siebert on the shoulder of a mountain where few humans have walked?

Wayne Sawchuk of Muskwa-Kechika Adventures and Donna Kane of Writing on the Ridge are working to make this happen.

In the summer of 2015, artists will have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience the greatest wilderness in the Rocky Mountains while honing their craft in the company of exceptional mentors.

From August 9-16, artists working in a wide variety of disciplines (e.g. visual art, writing, photography, video, music) will fly from Muncho Lake to Mayfield Lake, deep in the heart of the Muskwa-Kechika, to explore their craft against the backdrop of nature and wilderness.

Under the mentorship of acclaimed Winnipeg writer, Ariel Gordon, author of two books of nature poetry and winner of the John Lent Poetry-Prose Award, and poet and backcountry guide Melanie Siebert, whose first book of poetry, Deepwater Vee, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, artists will broaden their perceptions of nature and wilderness.

“The artist retreats that ran from 2006-2009 produced a wonderful variety of work that has been shown in galleries and published in books and journals across the country,” says Donna Kane, director of Writing on the Ridge. “We are delighted to be able to provide another opportunity in 2015.”

In all, over 50 artists have taken part in past retreats, including internationally renowned artist Brian Jungen and poets Don McKay, Elizabeth Bachinsky, and Sue Sinclair.

From August 16-23, storytellers will gather at Mayfield Lake under the inspired mentorship of storytellers Ivan Coyote and Art Napoleon.

“Getting the chance to hear stories from Art and Ivan around a campfire will be a highlight for me—it’s going to be an incredible experience!” says Wayne Sawchuk.

Art Napoleon is an award-winning songwriter, storyteller and humorist with a mystic's heart. Former Chief of the Saulteau First Nations, Art also stars in the television show, Moosemeat and Marmalade, which premiered in January of 2015. This revolutionary new cooking show contrasts traditional First Nations’ and World Cuisine cooking styles.

Ivan Coyote was born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. An award-winning author and a renowned performer, Ivan’s first love is live storytelling and over the last nineteen years has become an audience favourite at sold out shows from Anchorage to Amsterdam. Ivan Coyote’s newest book “Gender Failure,” co- authored with Rae Spoon, is a poignant collection of autobiographical essays, lyrics, and images that reveal that gender comes in more than two sizes.

All in all, it’s an impressive line-up. Add the setting of pristine wilderness, friendly horses, and like-minded campmates, and the 2015 retreats promise an unforgettable experience.

The goal of the retreats, besides sheer enjoyment and honing one’s skills as an artist, is to raise awareness of the Muskwa-Kechika. The greatest wilderness in the Rockies, it boasts more species of large mammals, in greater abundance, than anywhere else in North America. Participants will be asked to contribute a story or written piece that features the MK to a web-based site, as a means of bringing this globally important area to a wider audience.

For more information on the retreats visit www.go2mk.ca or contact Wayne Sawchuk at (250) 759-4993 or wsawchuk@pris.ca .

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Praise for GUSH

"GUSH is a letter to the world declaring that feminists everywhere are ready to take back the period and claim it for ourselves." —Courtney Dickson in Herizons.

"I expect GUSH will be nonetheless passed around classrooms, as well as book clubs, women’s centres, office towers and break rooms. And I hope this sharing and the conversations that no doubt ensue are not hushed and tittering. I hope teachers, counsellors, parents and partners bookmark pages, highlight passages and display the book on prominent shelves." —Katherine J. Barrett in Understorey.

"We love GUSH!"—Open Sesame Bookstore, Kitchener.

Praise for Stowaways

Winner of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"Stowaways is well imagined and well crafted, each poem tight, the poet’s attention evident. From wildlife to the clutter of the everyday to “how-to” offerings, the reader is charmed and enticed by the poet’s light touch and sure pen. Images jump out at us, grab us by the throat, leave us gasping. Ariel Gordon’s second collection is as strong as the parts of its sum.” —Margaret Michele Cook, Katia Grubisic, and Paul Savoie, judges of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

"Stowaways is a clever and often hilarious collection with its
occasional tenderness let slip amidst a clearly unromantic stance and matter-of-fact prairie landscape. With its freshness of metaphor and crazy juxtapositions, its ironic and often comic twists in narrative, Stowaways is a collection that will hold readers' eyes and play with their wits to the end."—Gillian Harding-Russell, The Goose.

"Though the cover copy promises poems that are 'smart and gorgeously funny' — and they do have those qualities — Ariel Gordon’s voice is more than that. Sometimes within a single poem, she gives us laugh-out-loud humour followed by a poignant smack across the head." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries.

"Adept and assured, Stowaways swaggers." —Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press.

"The poems in this collection grapple with both the wild and the mundane, the animalistic nature of nature and relentless responsibilities of parenthood." —Mark Sampson, Free Range Reading.

"Ariel Gordon’s Stowaways offers a scrapbook of extraordinary everydayness. Its poems decoupage tender snapshots beside snappy comebacks. Fairy tale moments foment against ailing skin. Sly instructions for loving smash into slovenly destructions of living. A beautiful, gluey mess of memory, decay, and dreams!" —Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff

"In the closing poem of Stowaways, the surviving pilot of the first fatal plane crash in recorded history receives a small box of debris from the calamity, 'to amuse him in his convalescence.' What a fitting figure for this collection's loopy juxtapositions and serious surprises. The world in Ariel Gordon's poems is one in which everything and everyone, from a sleep-starved human mother to a miscegenational beluga, is simultaneously endangered and dangerous. If Gordon understands our vulnerability, how 'skin is a thin shield,' that even a birthday balloon, drifting from the back seat is 'a kiss with teeth,' she vividly reminds us that those teeth are ours: 'If I had had twins,' says the new mother in "Primpara," "I would have eaten one.' These are nervy poems that refuse to behave themselves. They are something to celebrate." —Julie Bruck

Praise for Hump

Winner of the 2011 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed." —Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

“Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.” —Robert Kroetsch.

"Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut." —Fiona Timwei Lam, Contemporary Verse 2.

“Not so much sweetness and light, Gordon channels Adrienne Rich's dichotomy of love and frustration with her realism.” —Zanna Joyce, Winnipeg Free Press.

"If you don't know Ariel's work, I can recommend her book Hump, which I keep on my bedside table, along with all my stuff on LOST EXPLORERS and CASTAWAYS and HELLISH SIEGES, as things to pick up and simply open and starting reading anywhere, which is the pretty much the best review a book can get." —Darryl Joel Berger.

"The beauty of this collection is the love of the mother for her child, that relationship that the childfree will never experience. But the beauty is hidden slyly in the gorgeous lines that free themselves when needed from the details of the grime, the blood, the leaking breasts, and the mundane sleeplessness of parenting-turned poetry." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries

“Hump is gentle and sly, but also as sharp as baby teeth and poison mushrooms. And it’s called Hump.” —Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine.

Origin Story

Why is my name Ariel Gordon and this blog entitled The Jane Day Reader, you ask?

Well, my middle names are Jane and Day, after my grandmothers, Ade Augusta Rooseboom (who was called Day Laban after she married my grandfather and moved to Canada) and Anna Vida Mary Barrett-Hamilton (who became Jane Gordon after her immigration and later marriage).

When I was fourteen, I seriously contemplated using "Jane Day Gordon" or "J.D. Gordon" as my pen name. And then realized that there was no point in having an alternate identity in no-degrees-of-separation Winnipeg.

As a grown-up compromise, I started using 'janeday' as the username for my email and then for the name of this blog, which I started reluctantly and never expected to enjoy...

(I also gave my daughter another version of my grandmothers' names...)