a slate of (Ottawa) readings

Knowing that I'm going away, I've been finding it interesting to keep to specific projects over my past few Ottawa readings, as opposed to mixing up new against newly-published. When I read for that Imagine Ottawa benefit a few weeks ago, for example, I read only from the unpublished "apertures" manuscript, keeping the reading to a singular unit; at the Carleton Tavern, read only from a small new publication, After Spicer (draft) and most of a longer piece, "sex at thirty-eight: letters to unfinished g."

Today going through a few options for the reading tonight, considering they're expecting me to read for forty-five minutes, after all (I only found this out yesterday); I've done long readings before, so I'm not that worried; last fall at the University of Alberta doing same with 20 minutes of my unfinished novel "missing persons" (the novel I hope to finish while west) and 20 more of the long poem "avalanche." Perhaps I might dig out that long poem again?

There is something pretty entertaining about keeping to a single piece or maybe two pieces for a reading of such length. I used to spend a long time worrying that a reading needed to represent the range of where my writing was going, had been; why not simply represent the work instead?