The Jane Day Reader: How to Launch a Chapbook

Sunday, October 09, 2011

How to Launch a Chapbook

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

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

Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Le Prix Lansdowne du poesie is Manitoba's largest poetry prize. Based around the award and hosted in conjunction with the Writers' Collective of Manitoba, this series celebrates the best in Manitoba poetry.

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

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

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

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

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

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Whee! Fun!

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Praise for GUSH

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

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

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

Praise for Stowaways

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Praise for Hump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Origin Story

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

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

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

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

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