Reprint: Book-launch venue hop

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Over the last two weeks of April, I wrote four articles for Quill & Quire. Three were web-only interviews with poets launching books for National Poetry Month: Bren Simmers, Elena Johnson & K.I. Press.

The final article, which was slated to run in the June print edition of the magazine, was to be part of their series called Book-launch Venue Hop, i.e. profiles of popular venues in which to launch books.

So far, they've written about an artsy performance space in Halifax & a poetry-hosting tavern in Ottawa. But in Winnipeg, aside from the Millennium Library, our non-traditional venues have only lasted a few  years each. So: McNally's, which is big and bright and hosts most every launch in town.

It was an easy decision, and, in the service of writing the article, I got to interview Rob Budde, Guy Gavriel Kay & Perry Grosshans. And a bunch of other people too, but when you've only got 600 words, well...people and their quotes get cut.

I also got to include a picture of Chantal Fiola launching her Rekindling the Sacred Fire, which is an UMP title. This wasn't only self-serving. It turns out I only bother taking hi-res photos at events I'm reading at or are working, so the selection was limited...
 
Fun!

Out-of-Town-Authors: Elena Johnson

Quill & Quire, WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Ariel Gordon

Elena Johnson is a Vancouver-based poet who recently launched her first book, Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra (Gaspereau Press). The collection was written and researched during a month-long stint in 2008 as writer-in-residence at a remote ecology research station in the Yukon.

It was a unique experience for Johnson, who’s worked as a field ecology researcher and park interpreter, but who currently makes her living as an editor. “I was helicoptered in with the food supplies, and I hiked out at the end of my stay,” she says.

Johnson spoke to Q&Q about the collection.

This book is set in the alpine tundra. What was it like, working so intensely with a landscape?

It seems I’m almost always working intensely with a landscape. I can’t help it – it’s where my focus naturally goes, especially in longer series of poems. And wilderness expeditions are what I would ideally like to be doing all the time. So spending a few weeks solidly immersed in this remote mountain range, with a tent to sleep in, food to eat, scientists to chat with over dinner, and my days fairly free for wandering and writing, was dreamy.

I didn’t find it very different than writing about other landscapes or ecosystems, except that I had such freedom and time in the alpine tundra to focus and observe. The alpine tundra is a very unique biome: it’s above the tree line, it’s sparsely vegetated with tiny plants, and it’s interspersed with stretches of scree and patches of snow. Where I was, in the Ruby Range, if you climb up to the top of a mountain ridge, you see an endless series of mountain ridges in almost every direction.

The deep silence I experienced in that environment was something my brain had to adjust to. There’s a poem in the book called “Silent for the Dry Season” that attempts to describe this silence; it was one of the most difficult poems to try to get right.

To read the rest of the interview, see the Quill & Quire website.

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This interview is part of a National Poetry Month feature on Quill & Quire. Also in the series were interviews with BC poet Bren Simmers & MB writer K. I. Press.

My thanks to Sue Carter for her judicious editing of the interviews. I compiled them over a week and a half and while I originally felt I could have done more—so many good western Canadian writers with books this spring!—in the end, three was plenty.

Out-of-Town-Authors: K.I. Press

Quill & Quire, WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Ariel Gordon

Originally from rural Alberta, poet K.I. Press has lived in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Ottawa. She’s now lived in Winnipeg for a decade, long enough, she says, that it “has slowed down the pace at which I can process urban fluster.”

Since moving to Winnipeg, Press has launched her third collection, Types of Canadian Women and of Women Who Are or Have Been Connected with Canada, Volume II (Gaspereau Press), got full-time work as a creative-writing instructor at Red River College, and gave birth to a daughter with fellow poet A.J. Levin.

In her fourth collection, Exquisite Monsters (Turnstone Press), Press turns mothering poems on their ear, while focusing on biomechanical androids and pop culture.

Q&Q talked to Press about her latest collection, which launches May 7 at Winnipeg’s McNally Robinson Booksellers.

What made you choose to write about pregnancy and mothering, but with a slant?

I wrote a lot of mothering poems for the simple reason that I had a baby. Only a few of them have survived into the book.

The pop culture and science-fiction references in Exquisite Monsters started with a Battlestar Galactica obsession. I’ve been a fan of a number of sci-fi and fantasy shows over the course of my life, Battlestar being only one. I was pregnant during the final season, and—this is in the poem—I missed the very last episode because it was on while I was giving birth. I somehow found this
significant.

How has teaching creative writing at RRC’s creative communications program affected your writing? 

 I experiment and am more confident in many more styles, genres, forms than I used to be—something I’m trying to hone by working on the multi-genre MFA at University of British Columbia. Getting older and losing fear of failure also helps.

To read the rest of the interview, see the Quill & Quire website.

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This interview is part of a National Poetry Month feature on Quill & Quire. Upcoming: a final interview with Elena Johnson. 

Out-of-Town-Authors: Bren Simmers

Quill & Quire, WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Ariel Gordon 

Bren Simmers' second collection, Hastings-Sunrise (Nightwood Editions), is a long poem that spans a year of living in the East Vancouver residential neighbourhood, one of the city’s oldest.

Though she is now based in Squamish, B.C., Simmers noted that the book came out of a long effort “to find home and a sense of belonging in a city where so many people struggle with the cost of living.”

Simmers spoke to Q&Q about the collection.

What is it like writing from and to a neighbourhood, especially one as freighted as Hastings-Sunrise?

 I think that we’re drawn to our neighbourhoods as extensions of ourselves. Working on this project, I’ve come to see that home is a much larger idea than just our address or personal belongings. Where we shop and eat, or even the streets we walk on and the people we walk past, tell the story of a neighbourhood. And of course, this is just one story of Hastings-Sunrise. The neighbourhood is changing so quickly, and everyone with a connection to the place could tell a different story in a different time. In the years that I lived there, gentrifying forces became accelerated to the point of the neighbourhood being rebranded as the East Village. In these poems, I wanted to both acknowledge my complicity in that process and capture a portrait of a particular time and place.

You worked with Barbara Klar on this book. You mention in acknowledgements that she encouraged you to “put yourself in these poems.” What was it like, writing about your home? Did it place any unexpected demands on you or on the poems? 

 Barbara pushed me to go deeper in these poems, to connect my surface observations of the neighbourhood to my process of making a life there. I think this advice ultimately made Hastings-Sunrise a more meaningful book. To put myself in the poems I was forced to create a character sketch of myself that found a balance in both narrative voice and specific details. The challenge was being able to tell my own story rooted in a time and place while also leaving the reader enough room to reflect on their own experience of home. By writing about your own life, you discover you have blind spots. I am grateful to friends who read earlier versions of this manuscript and provided me feedback, pointing out gaps that were subconsciously filled in by my personal experiences.

To read the rest of the interview, see the Quill & Quire website.

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This interview is part of a National Poetry Month feature on Quill & Quire. Upcoming: interviews with Elena Johnson & K.I. Press.