The Jane Day Reader

A banner day

2012-01-26T15:52:00.005-06:00

So I wrestled with this banner for one of UMP's spring titles today, a Canadian reprint of a book about Louis Riel and Canadian identity formation. Like the L.B. Foote project, I'm excited about this book...

Part of my pleasure is being paid to look at photos of Louis Riel. Though it isn't a particularly good photo, I keep returning to this image of Monsieur Riel addressing the court at his trial.

This photo in particular was in the running for the cover - which was designed by David Drummond, who is a far better designer than I am - so I decided to re-use it here.

So it was the best kind of wrestling...and I got to look into Louis Riel's poor sad eyes all day.

Foote fetish

2012-01-18T10:38:00.012-06:00

So I've been working on the project described by this article non-stop the past few weeks. And it's the first time that I've been so proud of / excited about a day-job project...

Now, don't get the wrong idea. I take pride in ONLY working-for-money for organizations whose work I believe in. And I've often felt a sense of accomplishment at work when a project is complete.

But this is different...

I think my zip-zippy-ness can be attributed to the fact that as someone interested in Winnipeg's history generally - and as a poet who worked specifically on a poetry/photography project focused on Winnipeg derelict buildings - I've spent a lot of time with L.B. Foote's photos over the years.

Since that time, my interest in photography has grown, though I have very little interest in anything NOT found in the woods.

And then there's the fact that M's a news photographer, that he shoots many of the same things that Foote would have shot.

On a day to day basis, I hear M's stories about the subjects who grumbled about having their pictures taken, about the flood waters he's waded through, the scrums he's wedged himself into. I've washed the smoke out of his clothes after he's spent the morning at a fire and tried to spot him on the sidelines of televised football games.

So let's just say I'm strangely aligned with Foote.

So the prospect of working not only on the book UMP is publishing of his pics but also on a side project to find/share new Foote photos...well, let's just say I'm over the moooon.

For those of you unaware of Foote's work, here's a bio:

Born in Newfoundland in 1873, Lewis Benjamin Foote arrived in Winnipeg in 1902, where he bought a house on Gertrude Avenue and began a career as a professional photographer. For more than 50 years, Foote’s photographs chronicled the development of the city. He was an active photographer until 1947 and died ten years later.

Bird boxing 2

2012-01-17T00:25:00.003-06:00

Frozen rotten eggs. Duds. But: so beautiful, nestled in the down and straw.

Bird boxing

2012-01-16T23:59:00.004-06:00

All photos Fort Whyte Alive, Winnipeg, MB. January 16, 2012.

* * *
Last year, we picked up snowshoeing. Or, more precisely, we picked up snowshoes at FortWhyte and tried them out. We liked it...and one of our 'projects' while snowshoeing is to hike on the little lakes, moving from bird box to bird box. We look for any leftovers from the growing season: duck eggs/shells, feathers, grasses.

We got our own snowshoes for Xmas this year, which was a lovely surprise. And they're not as wide as the ones we used at Fort Whyte, so we had to sort of adjust our stance. They also came with poles, which gave us occasion for endless fiddling.

And then there was the ten minute blizzard.

But I noticed these lichen clusters on the lid of one of the bird boxes and borrowed M's camera. And made everyone pause for a second under the falling snow.

What I've been doing...or not doing.

2012-01-10T19:03:00.007-06:00

So I've been spending heaps of time lately, both at work and at home, riffling yellowed pages.

At work, we're preparing for the publication of a book of L.B. Foote photos, introduced and prepared by historian Esyllt Jones.

The pic on the left is from a quick visit we made to the Archives of Manitoba to look at Foote's notebooks, clippings and ledgers...in addition to the nearly 3,000 images they have in the Foote Collection.

Given that Foote documented Winnipeg and environs for nearly five decades, it's clear that the 3,000 images at the archives can only constitute a fraction of the photos he shot.

So we've issued a call to the public so that we might unearth some of the 'lost' Foote photos. And I've started a blog to document this process, which means that I've been thinking about photographs and ephemera and Winnipeg history on someone else's dime.

Which is really best-case scenario for me...of course, I'm tempted to start writing poems to some of the pics, but I need to get more work done on my solely-neglected manuscripts before I even think about taking on a new project.

Speaking of which, the pic on the right was taken at the end of a writing day, just before I reluctantly put everything away and started dinner. They're Edison biographies, the earliest of which is from 1929 and the latest 1989, and I've been rooting around, trying to build a timeline from the conflicting accounts of a minor character...

...who's a major character for me, of course. A main witness.

This is the most rudderless I've ever been, writing wise. Usually, I write poems and then I edit them. With this work, I've been reading and reading and scribbling, but nothing that resembles a poem.

But they might eventually resemble a poem or several poems. And for now, that's enough...

Artist mothers

2012-01-08T21:49:00.006-06:00

So many moons ago Amy Karlinsky, arts writer extraordinaire, asked me to facilitate a visual art/literary workshop for artist mums with her.

The artist mums in question are a sub-group of MAWA (or Mentoring Artists for Women's Art), a nifty non-profit organization in town.

I agreed and we dubbed it Readings and Creative Writing for Artist Mothers Workshop. (Surprise, surprise, huh?)

We've had two sessions to date, which we crammed full of feminist art history, first-person accounts from artist mothers, and writing exercizes as well as slide shows of paintings, photographs, and sculptures. And poems. Always poems.

Today we did a writing exercize that focused on body parts. Ten minutes on the “mommy” parts - belly/breasts/uterus/vagina - and another ten on the “other” body parts – elbows, knees, calves, ankles, earlobes.

(Though I usually don't do my own exercizes, today I wrote on my belly and bony elbows.)

Next, we did a mixed media (or collage) exercize. People had the option of incorporating the text we'd just generated but mostly we just threw paints and chalk and oil pastels and markers at people and asked them to come up with SOMETHING.

Anyways, it was a lovely afternoon. And I have this pic to show for it in addition to a LARGE oil pastel drawing of my elbows.

A look back at the books of 2011

2012-01-04T23:49:00.008-06:00

Free Press reviewers recall favourite reads this year
Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

By now, all the awards have been handed out and the sales figures tabulated. The best books of 2011 have been chewed over endlessly in recent weeks, and so have the bestsellers.

This year, as a New Year’s Eve retrospective, we asked Free Press reviewers to choose a few favourites — titles they loved that might have been overlooked.

Here are their choices, with excerpts from their reviews, listed alphabetically.

Non-fiction

Cow: A Bovine Biography,
by Florian Werner
"Werner reminds us that bovines are inextricably linked to humans, and thinking more deeply about our relationship with them can show us a new perspective on our own humanity." — Julie Kentner

It’s So Easy,
by Duff McKagan
"The Guns N’ Roses co-founder and former bassist’s memoir is sobering stuff — and it makes for a compelling read." — David Jón Fuller

Poetry

Nobody Move,
by Susan Stenson
"The Victoria poet/publisher’s latest book is full of well-worn husbands, of sex and childhood and shaggy dogs." — Ariel Gordon

L’il Bastard,
by David McGimpsey
"McGimpsey takes a fun approach to a timeworn poetic form, with hilarious ‘chubby sonnets’ of 16 lines exploring a life filled to bursting with wit, wordplay, and tacos." — Jonathan Ball

smirked

2011-12-29T15:15:00.001-06:00

stumped

2011-12-29T15:05:00.003-06:00

All images Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. December 29, 2011.

* * *

Fresh snow on deer paths. A single squirrel, some birdsong, and an empty parking lot.

(I picked up The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas at McNally Robinson on the way home. It's about a shortage of acorns...)

How to Keep a Relationship Fresh

2011-12-28T14:26:00.003-06:00

“New relationships are exciting and invigorating. How can you keep that spunk and vitality in a long term relationship?” – How to Keep a Relationship Fresh, wikiHow.

The yellowing couples massage manual I picked up
at a garage sale says you should
be able to bring me
to orgasm with your big toe
while we sit across from each other at a table.
I try to imagine your waxen toe working
its way out of its tired salty boot
while we wait for crispy ginger beef, clacking
our chopsticks like beaks
or battered plastic chopsticks: all the soft
creases between thumb & forefinger, all the grateful
but not entirely needy mouths
they have been raised to.

I try to imagine your callused toe
lifting from its dusty sandal some Saturday
morning as we look for
& find pleasure
at the bottom of diner mugs.
It has all somehow been many years
of the same Saturday, our daughter coloring at your elbow,
hoping her pancakes will be poured out
with ears, that the cook at the grill has looked out
& seen her bowed head.

I try to imagine your hairy feet planted
on the lino at your parents’ as I pass the roast
& the potatoes, all of it seasoned
by your resemblance
to your uncle, our daughter’s resemblance
to your mother. The long exhale of these years?
Peppery kisses on my forehead as you go by
but also: small piles
of toenail clippings
forgotten on the bedside table.

Words Aloud vids!

2011-12-27T23:02:00.005-06:00

So Words Aloud, the nifty little poetry and spoken word festival in Durham, ON, takes/posts videos from the performances.

In addition to the introduction by comedian/MC Steve Morel, there are three videos of me performing poems from Hump and How to Prepare for Flooding.

And it should go without saying, but it was really REALLY really the most fun I've ever had on stage.

And I can't wait to get up on a stage again somewhere else, though I suspect Words Aloud has ruined me forever...

So lemme know what you think, hmm?

Overheard

2011-12-26T20:58:00.000-06:00

Overwintered

2011-12-26T20:45:00.004-06:00

Left-over

2011-12-26T20:32:00.003-06:00

Melted

2011-12-26T19:03:00.005-06:00

All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. December 26, 2011.

* * *

We've had very little snow this winter so far. And today, what little snow we'd accumulated started to melt.

After the hoopla of the Xmas season, it was a relief to pull into the parking lot at Assiniboine Forest, except that it was chock full. I suppose it's mean-spirited to resent people for having the same idea you do, but still...

So I cursed but walked anyways, cup of tea in hand.

And even though there were people everywhere, they kept sufficient distance between us to keep me happy. And there were small but distinctly satisfying patches of mushrooms and lichen.

AND I was walking with my friend Ed, an expat Winnipegger who I knew from my student press days. He's now a visual artist living in Montreal.

So, it was warm, we walked and mocked and took pictures. And then it started to hail/rail.

To sum: FOREST+TEA+MUSHROOMS+CHIT-CHAT=FUN!

mailbox mushrooming

2011-12-19T16:49:00.005-06:00

So M went to get the paper this morning and came back with an unlabeled jewelry box with a bow on it.

Inside, there was a bubble-wrapped lump. But the bubble wrap parted to reveal a metallic mushroom ornament...

It's the most recognizable of mushrooms, the poisonous Amanita muscaria. Which isn't something I've seen in my forest, but it's a mushroom...and mushrooms make me happy.

I still haven't figured out who stuck it in my mailbox, but it almost doesn't matter. The fact that I know someone that would do something like that makes me stupidly happy.

Which reminds me, given the relative lack of snow this winter, I should go check out the forest. Except the dry summer that preceded this dry winter means that that there weren't any mushrooms to begin with...

Oh! Also: happy goddamn Xmas to my secret admirer! And also the rest of you!

these days

2011-12-14T11:27:00.002-06:00

So these days I've been actually writing. Which is not all that eventful, even if it feels just as exciting to me as traveling around with How to Prepare for Flooding or doing residual readings from Hump.

(Hump is almost two years old. Zowie!)

Though I would never give up touring - and people were SO kind this time out, showering me with frogs' legs and assorted cheeses - I hafta admit that writing is my favourite bit.

The rest of the winter is commitment-free. Strictly speaking, I haven't anything scheduled, but really I know exactly where I'll be, most Wednesdays and Fridays and possibly some evenings. In this goddamn chair, trying to make the Edison ms. speak again.

Or, more appropriately for this ms. in particular, trying to see if I can hear it anymore. (Speak up, you!)

Saskatoon: JackPine launch, pt. 2

2011-12-01T09:12:00.000-06:00

* * *

After a left-luggage incident that involved my small foolish top hat and some judicious show-and-tell of How to Prepare for Flooding, the Delta Bessborough in Saskatoon sent THIS up with a note that said: "Have a good launch!"

To my mind, there's nothing much wrong with a person that can't be solved with wedges of buttery cheese and a nice sipping red.

Bessborough staff were also kind enough to give us access to their Signature lounge, which kept us in tea and coffee while we whiled away the hour or so between finishing brunch and leaving for the airport on Sunday.

Saskatoon: JackPine launch Nov. 26

2011-11-30T10:45:00.003-06:00

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

2011-11-28T20:23:00.001-06:00

* * *

From the fall 2011 issue of Prairie books NOW.

The books! The books!

2011-11-27T17:54:00.004-06:00

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

2011-11-26T15:37:00.000-06:00

berrying

2011-11-26T15:36:00.000-06:00

Fungal infidelity

2011-11-26T15:31:00.003-06:00

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

2011-11-20T22:08:00.006-06:00

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

2011-11-19T19:03:00.007-06:00

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

2011-11-16T10:29:00.003-06:00

* * *

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

2011-11-14T08:30:00.004-06:00

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

2011-11-13T17:09:00.001-06:00

eared

2011-11-13T17:08:00.000-06:00

sneered

2011-11-13T17:07:00.000-06:00

cracked

2011-11-13T17:06:00.002-06:00

smeared

2011-11-13T17:06:00.001-06:00

cupped

2011-11-13T17:05:00.000-06:00

MORE extra marital mushrooming

2011-11-13T16:34:00.004-06:00

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

2011-11-12T13:31:00.004-06:00

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

2011-11-09T12:49:00.006-06:00

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

2011-11-08T19:01:00.008-06:00

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

2011-11-07T23:46:00.005-06:00

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

2011-11-07T11:48:00.000-06:00

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

2011-11-06T09:31:00.000-06:00

scabbed

2011-11-06T09:29:00.000-06:00

Extra marital mushrooming

2011-11-06T09:11:00.000-06:00

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

2011-11-01T21:16:00.005-05:00

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...)

Out-of-Town-Authors: Ami McKay

2011-10-30T11:31:00.006-05:00

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

2011-10-28T10:27:00.006-05:00

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!

2011-10-27T08:45:00.000-05:00

* * *

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

2011-10-26T09:55:00.009-05:00

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.

* * *

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

2011-10-23T10:31:00.003-05:00

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

2011-10-20T21:31:00.007-05:00

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

2011-10-19T11:48:00.014-05:00

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!

2011-10-17T17:18:00.008-05:00

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

2011-10-16T21:07:00.003-05:00

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

2011-10-11T09:07:00.003-05:00

* * *

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

2011-10-10T00:17:00.001-05:00

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

2011-10-09T13:20:00.005-05:00

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.

* * *

Whee! Fun!

SPORED: Jenna Butler

2011-10-08T09:34:00.012-05:00

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

2011-10-07T13:15:00.002-05:00

clubbing

2011-10-07T13:04:00.004-05:00

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

2011-10-02T12:44:00.003-05:00

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.

poetry bashing

2011-09-24T15:39:00.008-05:00

It's funny, but my interest in the bright world of writing and publishing has been dwindling of late.

I decided back in July, for instance, that I didn't want to HOT AIR this year (i.e. helm the THIN AIR blog) and so my attendance at this year's festival was spotty.

I didn't even bring my camera with me to Wednesday's Poetry Bash, which is scandalous, given that I've covetously photographed the winning poet's hand for the last handful of years. (Heh.)(I look this grainy darling with my iPhone...)

Not that I wasn't interested in the writers on offer. There were many readings and conversations and performances I wished I could have attended, but it just wasn't possible this week to make the life/writing life equation work in the festival's favour.

As I mentioned before, I've also given up the monthly poetry column in the Winnipeg Free Press that Jennifer Still and I co-helmed. And as of November, will no longer be haphazardly publicizing poetry for Palimpsest Press.

So in addition to clearing the decks, work-wise, I'm also withdrawing a bit from the bustle.

I'm not sure what's coming, in terms of the writing. Which project, precisely, needs this pace and this space. But I'm content to wait.

I'm also content to note that the Poetry Bash was lovely. Jenn Still's reading was lovely. I also greatly enjoyed UMP author Kim Anderson's event.

Out-of-Town-Authors: Guy Vanderhaeghe

2011-09-18T14:41:00.005-05:00

A Good GUY

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon

Saskatoon-based writer Guy Vanderhaeghe has published five novels, seven collections of short stories, and two plays.

His first book, Man Descending: Selected Stories won a Governor General's Award in 1982. He repeated the trick with 1996's The Englishman's Boy. His novel The Last Crossing was selected for the 2004 edition of Canada Reads.

Vanderhaeghe has written a new 'Western Epic': A Good Man. He'll be launching it Friday as a part of the Thin Air: Winnipeg International Writers Festival.

He'll do a solo reading at the Millennium Library at 12:15 p.m. before appearing at that night's Mainstage with Clark Blaise, David Homel, Rosemary Nixon, Waubgeshig Rice and Miriam Toews.

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?

Public readings are never easy for me and I always approach them with plenty of trepidation. Since I'm no actor, the best I can do is to try to let the words speak for themselves. What I like best about readings is the opportunity to meet and talk with an audience that loves books. For me, that's the real benefit.

2) What do you want people to know about A Good Man?

A Good Man, like any novel, is almost impossible to summarize. The book is set in roughly the same time period and geography as my earlier historical novels, The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing. In part, it deals with the arrival of Sitting Bull in Canada after the Battle of Little Big Horn and his complicated relations with Major James Walsh of the NWMP. But it also covers other events: the establishment of the first Canadian secret service, the invasion of Canada in the 1860s by the Irish Republican Army, and Confederate conspiracies hatched in Toronto to attack the northern states. This may sound like a history lesson, but it's simply the backdrop for a much more intimate story concerning two men, Michael Dunne and Wesley Case, who each have a secret past, and are vying with one another for the attentions of a young widow named Ada Tarr.

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

I've been a participant in the festival once before in 2002. Thin Air is a great event and Winnipeg has a vibrant writing and arts scene so I'm expecting things to be exciting and lively. I'm grateful to have been invited to take part this year.

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

Right now I'm reading Marilynne Robinson's Home, the sequel to Gilead, a novel that I admired. At present I'm writing nothing, simply fiddling with ideas and feeling guilty that I haven't started on something new.

5) Your work has garnered a bristling bouquet of awards and other recognition. What are your goals for your writing career now?

I don't really have any goals for my writing career because I've never been able to think of myself as having a "career." When I started writing, my aim was to become better at my craft and to fashion whatever I was working on with all the care and attention I was capable of bringing to it. I don't feel any differently 30 years later. I don't look beyond what I'm working on and have no expectations beyond those I put on myself.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

Reprint: Poetic Edits

2011-09-11T23:34:00.004-05:00

Vancouver-based writer Kevin Spenst is doing a series of interviews with poets focused on the editing process. He calls them Poetic Edits.

I was tickled, after receiving his interview request, to see that Bren Simmers, Sandra Ridley, and Linda Besner were all there, saying smart but also heartfelt things about editing.

Here's an excerpt from my interview, posted today:

Any pet peeves when it comes to editing your own work or someone else’s?

Ariel Gordon: I’m no one’s wife but I OFTEN find myself married to the original idea/image/sound in a particular work.

Convincing myself to radically change a piece – throwing out most if not all of it, dramatically re-writing the rest – is hard mental work, especially if I’ve got something that sort-of-kind-of-but-doesn’t-quite-FUCKING-work.

The problem is that you have to be committed to changing the piece for the changes to be any good.

And if you’re not convinced that it needs changing, well…it feels baby/bathwater-y.

The absolute worst is when I’m having a stupid day and somehow decide, in the midst of my stupidity, that maybe I should edit my poems.

Thank gods I keep all the different e-versions of my poems...

I have two thoughts, late on a Sunday night the day before school starts. The first is: Thanks Kevin! The second is: Oh what fun...

Cabin fever

2011-09-06T23:24:00.001-05:00

So my co-conspirator Julia Michaud and I are nearly done our JackPine chapbook, How to Prepare for Flooding.

We've got another session of tweaks planned and then it's off the printer, where its gory reds and blacks will be printed on BLINDING WHITE PAPER.

I'm so grateful to J. for all her work on this project.

And so I'm greatly looking forward to launching it with her, both in Winnipeg and in Saskatoon.

In the meantime, here's a shot of me doing final edits at the cabin this past July.

I wedged my computer into a space on the kitchen between the girl's craft gak and M's late night snack.

I was lucky enough to have notes from three Writers-in-Residence (Melissa Steele, Ivan Coyote and Meira Cook) and to have the first prototype of the chapbook to consult.

(Thinking in terms of the poems. Thinking in terms of the design.)

And the front door was open and there was a bit of a breeze and M brought me a cup of tea without much prodding....

Thanks to M, both for for the pic AND for including the absolutely-vital-for-the-a-cabin-in-the-bush tube of Afterbite in the pic.

Goodread-ing!

2011-08-31T22:25:00.003-05:00

An excerpt from a poem of mine, "Toddle," is a finalist for September's Goodreads Newsletter Contest. (If this sounds familiar, I was also shortlisted for the poem "Blown" in August...)

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.

So if you're a Goodreads member, join the ¡POETRY! group and vote for me!

If you don't know what Goodreads is, then, well, ahem, here's a poem of mine that was shortlisted for something, randomly, on the internet.

Yay! Fun!

* * *

Toddle

Storm-light’s grey clarity & you
bluster. Syllables batter against the rear-view, cling
to the meat of my earlobes
still half-a-city from home.

Rainclouds unroll over rush-hour, their ticking
stale from storage. Mouth open, I blare My Bonny
shoulder-checking headlights
& grit twisters at the curb.

In evening’s rush-light & traffic’s flare
your face goes china, goes bone
before you drop off, leaving a body to bob
over swells of asphalt & tar
a body for me to bundle inside.

Out-of-Town-Authors: Frances Greenslade

2011-08-29T17:43:00.005-05:00

Skip supper, read Shelter

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon

There are two things you should know about Pentiction, B.C.-based writer Frances Greenslade. One, she prefers to be called Francie. Two, her latest book caused a furor at this spring’s London Book Fair.

It should go without saying that most writers dream of the words "bidding" and "war" coming in close proximity...

When all was said and done, Greenslade had deals to publish her novel Shelter in Canada, Australia and the U.K. Next year, it’ll be released in the U.S. and there’s both Dutch and German translations in the works.

Greenslade had previously published two award-winning memoirs, one based on travels in Ireland and the other focused on her experience of pregnancy and mothering.

She will be reading from Shelter in McNally Robinson’s atrium this Thursday at 7 p.m.

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 an amateur singer, so I think of reading aloud like singing, except less terrifying. I love the rhythm that comes through in a live reading. It reminds me why I shouldn’t use words like threateningly in my writing.

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

It’s about two sisters whose mother leaves them to billet with a family friend in a small B.C. town, and doesn’t return. I hope it’s the kind of novel people will bring to the cottage and read right through the dinner hour, as the sun goes down, and they get a glass of wine instead of supper. Shelter looks at the expectations we have of our mothers, our first shelter, and the shock that comes when we realize they are more than just our mothers, but women with lives that don’t always include us.

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

I lived in Winnipeg for many years, from age 11 to 24. For a while, I lived in a friend’s firehall off Corydon. In the tower, I could look out over the treetops of the city and watch the thunderstorms roll in. Now that I live in the semi-desert of the Okanagan, I think of Winnipeg as lush and humid, prairie jungle.

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

I’m on a Daphne du Maurier-a-thon. I just finished Jamaica Inn and I’m now reading Rebecca. I’m at work on a second novel called Sing a Worried Song. It’s set in India and in rural Manitoba.

5) Your last two books have focused at least to some extent on mothering and tragedy. Why are the two linked for you? Or is this a coincidence? (Is there such thing as a coincidence?)

Definitely not a coincidence. I think my fascination (or obsession) with the complexities of mothers and mothering comes from two things. My own mother died when I was 24 and I had only just begun to know her as an adult. And my experience of becoming a mother was tumultuous. I hemorrhaged, came very close to dying, and had a long recovery. So I’ve thought a lot about the separation of children from their mothers. It’s almost unbearably sad and yet it’s a necessary part of maturing.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

Giving up

2011-08-28T09:30:00.001-05:00

After two years co-poetry columning with Jennifer Still, this is my last review. We decided to give it up for Lent.

Neither of us is Catholic but it was a definitely a voluntary sacrifice writing the column.

So many months it felt like torture condensing my thoughts on a book and the years of thinking and feeling behind it down to 150 words. And then doing it again three times.

But at the same time, I was so grateful to be forced to read. And I felt so goddamn current: short-lists would come out and I'd have read/reviewed at least half.

It'll be a sacrifice to not be writing the column. I was SO proud to be writing the column, given the example of Alison Calder and Maurice Mierau. And it was good for me to have poetry stuffed up my nose month after month.

I'll miss it but I'm glad it/we're done. And Jonathan Ball, who will be taking over as of September, will do a bang-up job.

And if he doesn't, it's none of my concern! HA!

My thanks to Books Editor Morley Walker and to Jennifer Still, who will be touring that new book of hers this fall to points east.

Mooney's second collection offers depth, strange intimacy

2011-08-27T18:01:00.008-05:00

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by: Ariel Gordon

Jacob McArthur Mooney's second collection, Folk (McClelland & Stewart, 104 pages, $19), is a kind of archeology and anthropology of his childhood home and his current home - that is, Nova Scotia and Toronto.

But Mooney's poems are much more about placelessness as they are about place.

The first section, for instance, unpacks the 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111 in St. Margaret's Bay from the point of view of locals, which absolutely includes the kid in "Deterministic Error Chain," "who saw the sign at the saltwater pool that read / No Diving and thought, I should really draw a picture / of an airplane, there."

Folk's second section circles Malton, Ont., whose chief employer is Lester B. Pearson International Airport. And grounding the poems in this neutral location, in an anonymous point of departure instead of a known destination - a known outcome - lends the book depth and a strange intimacy.

* * *
Open Air Bindery (Biblioasis, 72 pages, $19) is also the second collection for David Hickey of London, Ont.

Hickey hails from the Maritimes originally, so here, too, we get prodigal poems, but Open Air Bindery is as informed by the poet's insomnia and his (perhaps concurrent) backyard astronomy as it is by any notion of homecoming.

Set on ferries and in hotel rooms and suburban neighbourhoods with their "collected sidewalk(s)" and "selected raccoon(s)," these poems are wry and tired and human.

Hickey might proclaim himself "lost in the staging / of the twentieth-first century. // And never sure / if it's my turn to sing" ("Short Lives"), but in this book he croons out into never-ending night, ignoring the demands of the day to come.

* * *
To date, more than 3.3 million people have watched Halifax poet Tanya Davis perform her poem "How to Be Alone" in a short film by Andrea Dorfman on YouTube.

The poem ends abruptly, appropriately, with the following lines: "You could be, in an instant, surrounded, if you need it. / If your heart is bleeding make the best of it // There is heat in freezing, be a testament."

Davis is also a singer-songwriter, so it is no surprise that she put out three albums of music before publishing her first book, At First, Lonely (Acorn Press, 72 pages, $18).

The genre-bending Davis is at her best when writing long prose-like meditations like "Lapsed Catholic" (on guilt), "Made in Canada" (on hitchhiking across the country) and This "Tear Is a Word" (on crying in public).

At First, Lonely is a brave little book, full of thoughtful consolations.

* * *
Gabe Foreman hails from Thunder Bay but lives in Montreal, where he manages the soup kitchen at a mission when not writing poetry.

But in his debut - A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People (Coach House Books, 96 pages, $18) - Foreman is less interested in documenting the disparities between urban and rural or rich and poor and opts instead for surreal soap opera.

Featuring a cast of characters that includes Shy Rhonda, the Oracle, the Colonel and Your Dad, Foreman contemplates "types" as varied as bargain hunters and organ donors, innocent bystanders and empty-nesters.

Think loopy libretto. No, think social network-as-poetry, with its attendant bad puns and empty threats, as in "Armchair Psychologists": "I'm the sort / of extrovert / who makes his own furniture / and forces people to sit in it."

Experimental poets are expected to write their way out of elaborate constraints, through fanciful conceits, and have whimsy to burn.

In Foreman's case, being faithful to the conceit - the encyclopedia format - apparently means including illustrations. They range from pie charts to Venn diagrams to doodles, but their effect is inconsistent and therefore distracting, especially as the poems are so very assured.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

Writing by the Fire

2011-08-26T15:05:00.018-05:00

Writing by the Fire:
A Workshop with Ariel Gordon

When: Sunday, November 13, 1-3:30 pm
Location: FortWhyte Alive (1961 McCreary Road)
Cost: $45. FortWhyte Members $40. Register at (204) 989-8355 .

By November, the geese have gone, the trees have lost their leaves and FortWhyte’s year-round residents are about to go into hibernation. Join award-winning writer Ariel Gordon in an afternoon writing workshop that will see participants tucked into the Siobhan Richardson Field Station with a warm fire and all the tea you can drink. We’ll workshop your fiction, poetry, or non-fiction and try our hands at a few exercises designed to have you writing, thinking and feeling summer all winter long.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer and editor. In spring 2010, Palimpsest Press published her first full-length poetry collection, Hump. She is the 2010 recipient of the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer and the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry/Le Prix Lansdowne du poesie. How to Prepare for Flooding (JackPine Press, 2011), a collaboration with designer Julia Michaud, will be launched this fall. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

* * *

I do so love FortWhyte. Walking there, eating there, and now teaching there semi-regularly...

Artistic Licence: Emerging/Enfant

2011-08-24T10:07:00.003-05:00

So I got my Artistic Licence last week.

Issued as a part of a "performative installation" called the Artistic Licence Bureau by Glen Johnson, the PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts was transformed.

A wall bisected the gallery space, with an opening to dispense and take in forms and a second opening to take the applicants' photos. Add to that chairs, clipboards, a rack of pamphlets, a bell signalling that the 'clerk' was needed and the effect was complete.

BING! (I rang the bell, of course...and tried to keep from giggling.)

My favourite part of the exhibit, besides the card, manual on how to apply for an Artistic Licence, and the half-dozen pamphlets on a variety of art-y subjects was how panicked it seemed to make "innocent" bystanders.

People would come in to Artspace's lobby, peer into the installation from the doorway of the gallery, and look dumbfounded.

The 'clerk' would cheerily invite them in. At which point, they'd take a nervous step back. A few entered the installation and browsed the pamphlets. ("Was this a joke?" I could almost hear them thinking, as I finished filling out my application.)

I will add my Artistic License to my 2004 ID card from the Banff Centre that listed me as an Artist and featured a similarly bad photo. (But oh, how I needed to have someone call me an artist...)

I will also mentally add it to the Winnipeg Sun designation by Tom Broadbeck, years ago, that I was "con artist" (it was an article protesting WAC and its distribution of funds; I'd recently got a grant and so they listed me by name...).

Yay! Fun!

* * *

From Platform's website:

"In a parody of the bureaucratization of the art world, and the seemingly endless ways artistic practices have become systemized, Glenn Johnson has created an office where artistic licences are dispensed.

Visitors to the Artistic Licence Bureau [ALB] will be able to experience all the fun that comes with a trip to a government office: waiting in line, filling in forms and having an unflattering photograph taken.

The ALB also offers a veritable potpourri (pronounced potpourri) of information pamphlets intended to demystify the various artistic practices one might endeavour to pursue: "It's Nothing Really, a Guide to Making Conceptual Art"; "ME, ME, ME, Turn Your Self-Obsession Into a Career as a Performance Artist"; and "How Long is This Thing? A Guide to Video Art" etc. Visitors to the ALB will be able to apply for (and possibly receive) a provisional Artistic Licence in order to finally have proof that they are not dilettantes but actual artists.

Since graduating from the University of Winnipeg with a BA in classics in 1993, Glen Johnson has produced a large body of writing that has been distributed in the form of brochures, novellas, and insertions within various catalogues and books. His performances, invariably involving text, and that take the form of storytelling segments or lectures accompanied by projected images, have been performed at The National Gallery of Canada (2008), the University of Winnipeg's Gallery 1C03 (2007), Winnipeg Art Gallery (2006), Mount Saint Vincent University (2005), PLATFORM, Winnipeg (2005), aceartinc (2009, 2005, 2003), and The Annex (2004). Among other strategies, Johnson incorporates humour in almost every (guess which ones!) artwork he produces.

Artist mothers

2011-08-21T13:27:00.006-05:00

Oh, this workshop series will be so fun, even just the time spent with the delightfully non-linear Amy Karlinsky. And it will be so lovely to talk mothering and art and writing and pregnancy and children and process...

* * *

Readings and Creative Writing for Artist Mothers
with Amy Karlinsky and Ariel Gordon at MAWA

Dates: Monday, September 12, 6-9 pm; Sunday, October 23, 1-3 pm; Monday, November 21, 6-9 pm; and one date in January TBD

Registration deadline: Friday, September 9, 2011, at 4 pm

$30 for MAWA members. Email your intention to attend to programs@mawa.ca and put “Mothers” in the subject heading. If you are not already a member, please also submit a MAWA membership form and payment. MAWA membership costs $15 for underwaged persons and $30 for others.

* * *
Amy Karlinsky and Ariel Gordon will lead a four-session reading and writing workshop for artist mothers.

The sessions will focus on texts by artist mothers that encompass poetry, fiction and non-fiction, as well as “mothering” images from art history and contemporary art. Participants will identify themes, patterns and issues; share their own writings and imagery; and develop ideas. This is an opportunity for artist mothers to discuss and theorize experiences, to examine the objective/subjective, social/cultural/economic position of the artist-mother in art and literature, and to create out of the experience of being an artist-mother. It is a forum for play and collaboration, and may be an opportunity to expand the use of text in your visual arts practice.

* * *
Amy Karlinsky is a writer and curator with experience in galleries and museums in New York State, Manitoba, Ontario, British Columbia and Nunavut. She has taught sessionally for the departments of film, women’s studies and native studies, and at the school of art at the U of M; has facilitated workshops for Aqua Books, Manitoba Association of Art Educators, Early Childhood Education Council, and Limmud; and has mentored for MAWA. Her art criticism has appeared in Border Crossings, Canadian Art, the Winnipeg Free Press, etc., and her writing has been short listed for the Manitoba Book Awards. She has taught mothers, babies and children at Villa Rosa and Osborne House and she currently teaches art at TEC VOC High School in Winnipeg.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer and editor. In spring 2010, Palimpsest Press published her first full-length poetry collection, Hump, which focuses on pregnancy and mothering. She is the 2010 recipient of the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer and the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry/Le Prix Lansdowne du poesie. How to Prepare for Flooding (JackPine Press, 2011), a collaboration with designer Julia Michaud, will be launched this fall. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

NOT a mushroom

2011-08-20T15:54:00.003-05:00

* * *

In case anyone was wondering, this has been a WRETCHED year for mushrooms.

When a rainstorm is followed by a few hot days, M and I know there will be lots of mushrooms. But ALL we've had through July and most of August is HOT with very little rain...

So front lawns and boulevards are brownish and crunchy and tomato plants look stunted.

But entering the forest this morning, I was sort of hoping against hope that there might be a few mushrooms here and there. But even the forest's ditches were dry and walking the boardwalk was like attempting stilts.

So in addition to Aa falling down THREE TIMES on the uneven path and then bursting into tears, there were NO mushrooms.

We found ONE log covered with what M and I refer to as 'potato chips' - i.e. dried-up old mushrooms layered one on top of each other - and I half-heartedly took a few pictures, but really there was nothing.

It was nice to stretch our goddamn legs. And a perfect opportunity to continue our walking-in-the-woods-is-good brainwashing programme. (Poor Aa!)

* * *

I think this might even be purple loosestrife - the invasive bane of Winnipeg riverbanks - but I'm not sure.

Gimme some sugar...

2011-08-19T14:06:00.003-05:00

...or else I'll re-decorate the blog with sugary image.

(There's nothing a quiet afternoon and a sugary cup of tea can't fix.)

Image/text/image

2011-08-17T12:32:00.004-05:00

* * *

If I were in a punny frame of mind, I'd say that it's been a banner few months for me, working life-wise.

But I'm NOT feeling particularly punny, so I'll just say that it's been an interesting exercize creating these banners for the University of Manitoba Press' website.

For many of the banners, I'm able to use the archival photos used in the books themselves. But some don't have photo sections and/or don't lend themselves to a particular visual concept.

Though I am not and will never be a designer, making images out of text (or around text) is an interesting reversal of my normal writing process, which is images to text, the world to the word.

Reprint: Turning the last page

2011-08-14T10:46:00.005-05:00

Turning the last page
Customers mourn demise of Aqua Books

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by Ariel Gordon

Sad news for bookish people this week.

On Thursday, Kelly Hughes announced the bookstore and restaurant he and his wife own at 274 Garry St. would be closing, saying, "the financial burden has become too much."

Aqua Books housed more than 40,000 used books and hosted up to 400 events a year, everything from book launches to fringe plays to jazz shows to something called a "puppet slam." In addition to having a nut-free menu, EAT! bistro had vegetarian, vegan and celiac-friendly options and chef Candace Hughes did all her own baking.

Left to mourn is avid reader Louise Jones, who discovered Aqua when it was on Princess Street.

"I stumbled on Aqua Books by accident and was quite delighted with what I saw -- I love old buildings, old books, old furniture," says Jones. "I went back again and again and always found something of interest and the prices didn't hurt, either. When he finally unveiled the new store, I liked what I saw there, too.

"I like that there are chairs to sit on if I want to relax for awhile and read the latest treasure that I found in the stacks. The food in EAT! bistro is good, the coffee is delicious, and the atmosphere is peaceful and cheerful (love the decor!). What am I going to do for cupcakes now? I've been to the other bookstores, used and new, and there's nothing like Aqua - Kelly put his whole personality into it and it shows."

Heather Leask Armstrong, a librarian at Carman Collegiate, is another longtime customer.

"As a librarian, I was aware of Aqua Books before Kelly and Candace made the move to their current location and frequently used Kelly's expertise to source low-cost, high-quality and often difficult-to-find books," notes Armstrong. "But as a freelance writer and a closet poet and fiction writer, Aqua Books was way more than a bookstore to me. Aqua Books also became the place where I got to meet my favourite authors and discover new authors... I wrote the first draft of a teen novel under the inspiring tutelage of Aqua's first writer in residence, Anita Daher. It was at Aqua that I read a poem in front of a roomful of strangers for the very first time.

"It was at Aqua that I felt comfortable hanging out with strangers and new friends, whether at Kelly Hughes Live, eating at EAT! bistro or taking part in a writing workshop. To tell you the truth, Aqua and the creative energy that exists there even got me through a pretty dark time in my life."

Also grieving is Allison Norris, who has celiac disease.

"I received phone calls from friends and several co-workers at the office alerted me as soon as they found out Aqua Books and EAT! bistro were closing," says Norris. "Everyone who knows that I can't have gluten also knows how much I value what EAT! bistro has done for people with celiac disease. At EAT! bistro I don't feel isolated by my plate and no one at the table feels it necessary to apologize for eating their food; I can once again take for granted the experience of sharing an entree or dessert with family or friends and dining out becomes a enjoyable social activity rather than a challenge to Frankenstein menu items and an exercise in my trust of a kitchen's understanding of my disease."

But losing a favourite restaurant isn't Norris' only concern.

"I've gotten to know both Kelly and Candace and the rest of the staff and that makes the closure difficult on a personal level, but as a downtown resident, I'm concerned that such a unique business will close its doors. It is a tremendous loss to the downtown and arts community."

Customers aren't the only ones who are feeling the loss of Aqua Books and EAT! bistro.

Mel Marginet is an actress and the co-founder/artistic head of theatre company Theatre by the River, which mounted a production of Judith Thompson's play Habitat there in May 2010.

"I was devastated when I read that the store was closing," says Marginet. "There is no other venue for artists like Aqua Books. From theatre, music, comedy, poetry... so many artists have found a place to perform. It's a space that creates a great environment for artistic events: a central location, a place where the audience can eat and have a drink and a quirky, fun space.

"Kelly is an arts ambassador and will work with you and your budget to make the space work. Kelly and Candace have set the bar high with Aqua Books and EAT! bistro, and I don't know how anyone could ever fill their shoes."

No one is sure when Aqua Books and EAT! bistro will close their doors. They've pledged to honour their commitments until the end of September. But after that, no one knows.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer and former employee of Aqua Books.

Reprint: "Spoken Word Needs YOU!"

2011-08-11T21:52:00.007-05:00

About Spoken Word: "Spoken Word Needs YOU!"
August issue of Mosaic Newspaper

by Terry Burns

No, this isn’t Words Aloud Spoken Word and Storytelling Festival’s version of a recruiting poster, but now that I’ve got your attention, let’s talk poetry...and I mean literally.

Because that is what spoken word is all about, poetry and stories coming to you not just by the printed page, but via the bodies and voices of their creators, onstage and in person, immediate, visceral, and fresh. Before the printed word became ubiquitous, this is the way it had always been, a dynamic, embodied relationship between bard and listener.

To give you an idea of this dynamism and embodiment, we need to get a little audience participation going, and this is where the talking comes in. Several of the remarkable spoken word artists who will be joining Words Aloud in November have provided us with some choice pieces of work as festival “spoilers”, and that makes a great opportunity to begin to get some idea of the vitality of spoken word. As we take a look at the pieces, you need to do only one thing: read them aloud. Roll the words around on your tongue, listen for the rhymes, feel the rhythms and syllabic stresses like tides surging and ebbing, experience the way your lips and tongue navigate their way around consonant repetitions. Read the work to others, by all means, or read them when you are alone, with only your dog sitting at your feet thinking you’re talking to her.

* * *

Humour is a key ingredient in Ariel Gordon’s poetry, especially in her first book of poems, Hump (Palimpsest Press), which details her unsentimental experiences with pregnancy. This poem is called “Seven Months: ultrasound introductions”.

I am the fork-scarred sink, the water table
you are the warming goldfish
your father is the big eye anxious on your domestic bulge
the wet magnification of dorsal flicker
ventral thrum.

I am the dip & dunk tank, the basin overflowing
but they should have known better –
you might circle my drain
fin & bony ripple on every grainy pass
but I’m the only one likely to go belly up.

Again, it is in the saying it aloud that certain things about this poem become apparent. The insistent first beat of many of sentences and the repetition of the words “I” and “you(r)” lend the poem a solemn incantatory quality. And yet, this gravity is belied by the playful use of water/plumbing/fish imagery which works so well in the context of bodily pregnancy fluids. The solemnity and the wit then merge seamlessly in the last line, where the first strongly stressed beat is again the word “I”, and the rest of the sentence is a humorous reference to the birthing position, with a touch of menace thrown in by other connotations of the term “belly up”.

This short little piece, in its content and its structure, gives us a glimpse of the simultaneous seriousness and silliness inherent in pregnancy and birth. We see again that reading a poem aloud reveals not just semantic meaning, but can also offer a sensory counterpoint to the content which deepens our understanding of the work.

* * *

This article was written in advance of my appearance at the WordsAloud Festival this coming November, where I'll be reading with dub poet Lillian Allen and Iraqi journalist/writer-in-exile Ayub Nuri.

I know it's my traditional response but this time I REALLY mean it: Yay! Fun!

(Long) longlisted!

2011-08-01T22:16:00.003-05:00

So Hump was longlisted today in the poetry category of the The ReLit Awards, whose slogan is "Ideas, Not Money."

There are 69 other poets on the longlist, so it's a LONG longlist, but being nommed for the ReLit was one of the small dreams I had before publishing a book...so I'm sort of blissed out.

Did I mention the prize is a ring? And that I enter the only OTHER lit prize that awards a ring (Prairie Fire's Bliss Carman Prize every GODDAMN year?)

The shortlist - typically seven books per category - comes out at the end of August.

Paperwork

2011-07-31T17:52:00.001-05:00

* * *
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

2011-07-27T10:39:00.005-05:00

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

2011-07-18T21:03:00.007-05:00

* * *

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

2011-07-17T22:51:00.004-05:00

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

2011-07-16T23:36:00.003-05:00

As ever, thanks to M for the pic.

glade

2011-07-16T23:01:00.004-05:00

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

2011-07-14T22:05:00.007-05:00

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

2011-07-13T23:52:00.001-05:00

kindling

2011-07-13T23:39:00.004-05:00

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 cals '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...

2011-07-10T17:11:00.003-05:00

pebbled

2011-07-10T16:52:00.006-05:00

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

2011-07-03T22:53:00.005-05:00

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

2011-07-02T16:48:00.004-05:00

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."

Keillor has good ear for overview of American poetry

2011-06-29T14:16:00.004-05:00

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by: Ariel Gordon

GOOD Poems: American Places (Viking, 484 pages, $36) is a poetry anthology edited by writer/radio host Garrison Keillor.

Like his previous anthologies Good Poems and Good Poems for Hard Times, it contains poems selected for - and read aloud on - Keillor's NPR show The Writer's Almanac.

Though Keillor declares himself "strongly biased towards the high-spirited and jazzy voice" and poems that are "straightforward, declarative, in plain English," he still manages section heads that include: The Place Where We Were Naked and 2X2X2 in addition to the more straightforward On the Road and City Life.

If you don't buy the populist conceit - given that the great majority of the writers included in Good Poems: American Places are poet/profs - then another possible framing mechanism is "poems by contemporary American lyric poets." Particular favourites of Keillor's, going by the number of poems he included from each poet, include Rexroth, Stafford and Kumin.

Organizational quibbles aside, Keillor has a good ear. His anthologies are a good place to start for anyone wanting a quick and dirty, lovely and lilting overview of American poetry.

* * *

Speaking of contemporary lyric poets, Sue Goyette has made quite a name for herself since The True Names of Birds appeared in 1998.

In addition to being nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry and both the Pat Lowther and Gerald Lampert Awards, Goyette's debut is now in its seventh printing.

Her third outing, Outskirts (Brick Books, 112 pages, $19), represents a departure for the Halifax poet. Prose poems and long sequences prevail where in her previous books Goyette favoured poems a page or two in length.

Goyette has also italicized the poems here with only the odd proper noun or bit of dialogue in regular typeface. The effect is that of a writer speaking from the sidelines, as if she regrets her previous pronouncements.

"There was a secret / level to all of this but I hadn't collected enough feathers to get into it," she notes in her poem Memoir.

But perhaps the sotto voce is useful for a poet who is also the mother of teenagers, who is using the language of government and reports to write about the loss of darkness in our fluorescent cities, of privacy and time and the poisoned sea.

* * *

Raised in Dauphin but based in Vancouver, Rachel Thompson won the First Book Competition at the Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University.

The result is Galaxy (Anvil Press, 96 pages, $16), a coming-of-age collection full of memorable strikes of pleasure and pain, as in her Coriander:

"Your kiss hello is a bee sting. / Both of us would rather you hit me / to complete the violence / of your gesture."

Galaxy is a book of extremes: the poems rocket between childhood / adulthood, rural / urban and desire / love. And although Thompson traffics in strong images and abrupt juxtapositions, she also allows room for doubt and ambivalence.

Which is to say: Very nice! (More poems, please!)

* * *

Ken Babstock's fourth collection, Methodist Hatchet (Anansi, 102 pages, $23) is brimming with allusions, with dry wit and the precise language with which Babstock delivers his precise images, as in his As Marginalia in John Clare's The Rural Muse:

"The wall-mounted paper dispenser // narrating nightmares of scale, sores fell / from fingers - get well petals - and grew // back puce."

The Toronto-based poet and editor's three previous collections have been nominated for every award under the sun and the poems in Methodist Hatchet are likewise dazzling and dizzying.

They're poems you attempt to follow because you trust the poet to deliver you somewhere unexpected and yet familiar, even if you get snarled in the pop culture and canonical shrubberies to either side of the path.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

And one more...

2011-06-28T22:49:00.005-05:00

* * *

I'm not sure where this door leads. I suspect out to the expanse of rooftop out my windows. But I WILL find out.

First day

2011-06-28T22:08:00.004-05:00

* * *

So I've been working at the U of M Press for two weeks now.

The is the view out of my door that includes the St. John's College Library, whose focus is, at least in part, Canadian literature.

Which makes it a VERY friendly neighbour...

Beyond that, one wall of my office is windows; it's light and I can work away the whole day without talking to more than a handful of people.

It's precious and twee but also true: I'm entering the job a manuscript/web page at a time.

Reprint: The Mother 'Hood

2011-06-27T23:02:00.013-05:00

So Canadian Bookshelf is a new lit website. It's brand new, so new as to be beta. (Is 'beta' the new 'site under construction' or 'store open during renovations'?)

But they're already doing recommended reading lists. And having guest list-ers and people coming up with themed lists.

And this week, Hump was included in a list called The Mother 'Hood, which is "Canadian books that explore the mothering experience - the good and the bad."

My thoughts, fleeting and sparse after a busy Monday day/night are: "What a good list!" and "I can't wait to see what the list-er thinks of Hump!" and "I MUST FINALLY read Pathologies..."

I've reviewed a fair number of 'mothering' anthologies over the last few years (see my review for Great Expectations here) and in addition to the ones listed here, I'd also add a recommendation for Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood.

Yay! (Mothering) fun!

Robert Kroetsch: 1927-2011

2011-06-22T12:38:00.018-05:00

I heard today that Robert Kroetsch died in a car accident. And, after watching the news 'trend' on Facebook for a while, I logged out and started to think on how he'd influenced me as a reader and writer...

I mean, I've lived inside his books for so many years now: The Studhorse Man. The Puppeteer. Badlands. Seed Catalogue, and, most recently, his Too Bad: Sketches Towards a Self-Portrait.

Kroetsch's writing combined high and low registers, caroused and grieved, whispered and screeched. And I got it. I got all of it, or enough that I always felt hollowed out but also filled after reading his poetry and fiction.

But I never studied with him, though I tried to talk my way into Kroetsch's novel colloquium at Sage Hill when I was in my mid-twenties.

It didn't work: Steven Ross Smith was gracious but it was clear to both of us that I didn't have the credits or the experience.

Another time, I wrote him an earnest letter, asking if he'd be willing to apply to the MWG's Emerging Writer Mentorship Program as a mentor and then, maybe, pick my submission.

But he was just on the cusp of retirement and wrote back to say that couldn't take on another responsibility.

But over the years, I got to know Kroetsch well enough to say hi, even if I was just one of the many well-wishers that thronged him at readings and conferences.

A year and a half ago, when I got the (dreaded) author questionnaire that preceded Hump's publication and had to think about who "would speak for my work," it took me a long long time to come up with a shortlist.

But Kroetsch was the first name on that list.

So I tentatively contacted Kroetsch. And it took him less than a week after my ms. made its way to Leduc, Alberta, where he was living, to get back to me with this:

“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

And then I found out that my publisher disliked blurbs, so it wouldn't be going on the back cover. And then I found out that he'd also blurbed several friends with new books, including Jonathan Ball & Tracy Hamon.

But I didn't care one whit. Because even the idea of Robert Kroetsch, ROBERT KROETSCH, reading my poetry, was enough to make me weep. And twenty years from now, that'll be all that matters.

What I'll remember most was my last exchange with Kroetsch, back in February.

Dear Ariel,

I reread your poems this grey Alberta winter morning and marveled once again at your ability to translate the experience of our senses into sensual language. What a gift!

Robert

And I could somehow see him as he was writing the email, the light, his hands on the keys, and it made me so very happy.

I'd been thinking about Kroetsch of late, how I should send him an email and tell him again how honoured I was to have him read my work. And maybe, if I was very lucky, to chat with him a bit about writing and the writing life.

But Robert Kroetsch died yesterday on the way home from a reading in Canmore. And I'm just so sad, even though he was very nearly 84, had lived a good long life and was still writing (!).

My condolences go out to Kroetsch's family, to his many friends and colleagues, his many ex-wives and ex-girlfriends and ex-lovers, but, mostly, to his readers.

Here's to you, Robert. Thanks again for everygoddamnthing.

Out-of-Town-Authors: Dale Barbour

2011-06-19T21:32:00.004-05:00

Life's just beachy
Former Winnipegger taking Winnipeg Beach tales to Gimli on Tuesday

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon

Usually, people refer to the thick books they lug to the cottage as "beach reads."

Dale Barbour has got it backwards.

He wrote a slim book about the beach entitled Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900-1967.

Barbour will be importing Winnipeg Beach to Gimli (or, for those who were following, lugging the slim book about the beach to another beach) on Tuesday.

He'll be reading with Patti Grayson and Sheila McClarty at an event hosted by Tergesen's General Merchant at the Aspire Theatre.

* * *

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?

Traditionally I've approached it with a feeling of raw terror and impending doom. But I'm starting to relax a little. I try to select a reading that can stand on its own and catch the attention of listeners who haven't read the book. Ideally, I'll get some good questions or comments. That's critical in a history project like mine where the people I'm reading to have often lived through at least part of the period I'm studying. They can learn from my research, I can learn from their experience.

2) What do you want people to know about Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900-1967?

If you went to Winnipeg Beach in your youth, this should bring back a lot of memories. It's a cultural history and that means I'm focused on how people lived, worked and played at the beach in the first half of the 20th century. But even if you've never been to Winnipeg Beach, this book is a window into how relations between men and women have changed over time and how Manitoba's cultural mosaic has changed. I like to say that form follows function, and when it comes to Winnipeg Beach, the resort was very much a creature of the gender and ethnic relations of the early 20th century. As those relations changed, so too did the resort.

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

I've been in Toronto working on my PhD for the past two years. But previous to that I lived in Winnipeg for about eight years; Winnipeg Beach was researched and written while I was working and studying at the University of Manitoba. Plus I grew up in the south Interlake - Balmoral - a half-hour north of the perimeter. So, for me Winnipeg has always just been "the city."

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

I just wrapped up Toronto: A City Becoming, edited by David Macfarlane and then I'm on to Toronto: The Place of Meeting by Frederick H. Armstrong. You can see the trend. I'm just starting to research my thesis, which is going to focus on Toronto, so for the next little while I'm going to be doing a lot more reading than writing. I did come up for air the other week and read World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks because one should always be prepared for a zombie apocalypse.

5) What do you think Winnipeg Beach would have been like, at its height?

It would have been as much a part of Winnipeg as Portage and Main. The Canadian Pacific Rail link ensured that people could flow back and forth between the city and the beach and one of Manitoba's first provincial highways headed straight to Winnipeg Beach. It was the place where families set up for their vacation at a time when having a vacation was still a novelty, where workplaces came for a picnic and where men and women came to play together. On busy weekends, it drew 40,000 people when Winnipeg's population was only around 250,000 or 300,000.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

deep affection

2011-06-18T16:05:00.004-05:00

* * *

So this is the elm canopy that covers our house. It shades our deck, makes it bearable to sit out there mid-day, and drops seed, new leaves, and incandescent canker worms onto its slats.

It mottles & shushes & makes any number of shades of green.

It also houses heaps of birds, though so far no owls or merlins (I am trying very hard not to hold that against it.).

And suddenly, though I've had elms towering over me for most of my adult life, I've developed a deep affection for MY elm.

I recently learned that Winnipeg's elms - which make up the elm canopy that for me defines Winnipeg, at least physically - are all about a hundred years old, which is a dignified age for an elm.

We had an elm removed from our block this spring. And my elm has some bare branches, a few of which come to rest on the boulevard whenever there's a particularly stormy storm.

So here's hoping that my deep affection for the tree is at least as good of a safety measure as the tanglefoot bands that go up every year.

Out-of-Town-Authors: Waubgeshig Rice

2011-06-15T13:42:00.004-05:00

Written voice: Aboriginal author draws on traditional storytelling

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon

Waubgeshig Rice is an Ottawa-based broadcast journalist and writer, who grew up in Wasauksing First Nation and spent four years in Winnipeg.

He will launch his first book of short stories — entitled Midnight Sweatlodge — next week.

He’ll be joined at Aqua Books on Wednesday by poets Rosanna Deerchild and Duncan Mercredi.

* * *

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 performance is an integral part of being a storyteller. I write as though I’m describing a scene or a story to someone face-to-face.

That’s due in large part to the traditional Anishinaabe storytelling I grew up with. The stories and lessons my grandmother, aunts, uncles and other elders passed down to my generation were essentially performances. They had to engage us as kids and leave us with valuable teachings that we would carry with us and eventually pass down to our kids. I learned early on what it takes to convey the emotion and power in an ancient story, and although my writing isn’t nearly as influential, I try to conduct my stories live the same way.

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

I want people to know that the stories in Midnight Sweatlodge are just a small taste of what it’s like to grow up as an aboriginal person in this country. It’s essentially a short-story collection that touches on specific experiences and emotions, and although many of those are universal on reserves across Canada, there are thousands of more important stories in our communities.

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

I was fortunate enough to call Winnipeg home for four years as a reporter for CBC. I loved my time there (except the -30 C days) and I am thrilled beyond words to have the opportunity to come back and share my first published work of fiction.

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

I just started reading Richard Wagamese’s One Native Life. It’s essentially about his life’s journey. I’ve always looked up to his writing so as I begin this new journey as an author, I’m looking forward to learning a lot from this book. In my free time I’m working on my first full-length novel. Otherwise, my primary creative outlet is my blog — www.waub.ca.

5) How does your work as a journalist add to/distract from your creative writing?

It can be a big distraction. When you’re working on deadline all day to make a story interesting and meaningful for viewers/readers, it leaves little left in the creative tank when you sit down at home to write. Broadcast writing and creative writing are very different — like the difference between swinging a baseball bat and a hockey stick — so the challenge is to draw parallels between the two formats and become a more well-rounded storyteller.

Even if I’m exhausted or worn out by the time I get home after a day out in the field and in the newsroom, I try to translate those experiences onto the laptop screen or into the notebook. From there, I can usually shift gears back to whatever creative project I’m working on.

And one more...

2011-06-11T13:11:00.003-05:00

Last day

2011-06-11T12:17:00.009-05:00

So Wednesday was my last day at Aqua Books, what bookstore owner Kelly Hughes has dubbed Winnipeg's Cultural City Hall.

And this is the view from my desk at Aqua, where I schemed up events for three years.

I'll miss the joint. I'll miss having the chance to chat with writers and musicians and actors and arts administrators about their events, to interact with readers and hand-sell my favourite titles.

(Frances Itani's Deafening. Colin Smith's 8X8X7. Jane Smiley's Moo. Kerry Ryan's The Sleeping Life. Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words. Joan Thomas' Reading By Lightning.)

But it will be nice not to be administering within my own discipline, to not have to be constantly weighing and measuring how much of conflict of interest I'm feeling at any one moment...

I'm also happy about my NEW job as Promotions/Editorial Assistant at the University of Manitoba Press.

I'm looking forward to the work but also how the OH SO INTERESTING topics they publish on (like social histories of the prairies, like literary criticism, like native studies) will influence my own work. Which is kind of a two-fer, if you get my drift...

Thanks for Kelly for the support over the years. For letting me swear in public. And for playing Hut 33 over the bookstore sound system when I needed it most...

Fergus: "Minka, you look very nice today."

Minka: "Correct."