the ottawa small press book fair, spring 2024 edition: June 22, 2024

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

    the ottawa
    small press
    book fair

spring 2024
will be held on Saturday, June 22, 2024 at Tom Brown Arena, 141 Bayview Station Road (NOTE NEW LOCATION).

“once upon a time, way way back in October 1994, rob mclennan and James Spyker invented a two-day event called the ottawa small press book fair, and held the first one at the National Archives of Canada...” Spyker moved to Toronto soon after our original event, but the fair continues, thanks in part to the help of generous volunteers, various writers and publishers, and the public for coming out to participate with alla their love and their dollars.

General info:
the ottawa small press book fair
noon to 5pm (opens at 11:00 for exhibitors)

admission free to the public.
$25 for exhibitors, full tables
$12.50 for half-tables
(payable to rob mclennan, c/o 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9; paypal options also available

Note: for the sake of increased demand, we are now offering half tables.
To be included in the exhibitor catalog: please include name of press, address, email, web address, contact person, type of publications, list of publications (with price), if submissions are being considered and any other pertinent info, including upcoming ottawa-area events (if any). Be sure to send by June 3rd if you would like to appear in the exhibitor catalogue.

And hopefully we can still do the pre-fair reading as well! details TBA

BE AWARE: given that the spring 2013 was the first to reach capacity (forcing me to say no to at least half a dozen exhibitors), the fair can’t (unfortunately) fit everyone who wishes to participate. The fair is roughly first-come, first-served, although preference will be given to small publishers over self-published authors (being a “small press fair,” after all).

The fair usually contains exhibitors with poetry books, novels, cookbooks, posters, t-shirts, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, scraps of paper, gum-ball machines with poems, 2x4s with text, etc, including regular appearances by publishers including above/ground press, Bywords.ca, Room 302 Books, Textualis Press, Arc Poetry Magazine, Canthius, The Ottawa Arts Review, The Grunge Papers, Apt. 9, Desert Pets Press, In/Words magazine & press, knife | fork | book, Ottawa Press Gang, Proper Tales Press, 40-Watt Spotlight, Puddles of Sky Press, Invisible Publishing, shreeking violet press, Touch the Donkey, Phafours Press, etc etc etc.

The ottawa small press fair is held twice a year (apart from these pandemic silences), and was founded in 1994 by rob mclennan and James Spyker. Organized/hosted since by rob mclennan.

Come on by and see some of the best of the small press from Ottawa and beyond!

Free things can be mailed for fair distribution to the same address. Unfortunately, we are unable to sell things for publishers who aren’t able to make the event.

Also: please let me know if you are able/willing to poster, move tables or distribute fliers for the event. The more people we all tell, the better the fair!

Contact: rob mclennan at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com for questions, or to sign up for a table

Oh yes, and the fall fair will be held at the same location on Saturday, November 16, 2024, if you need to know that, also.

happy christmas holiday what-sis goodness etcetera

What is it Doctor Who said, during my first post-mother Christmas ten years ago? We are half-way out of the dark. We are getting through this, and already most of the way. A good seasonal holiday to you and yours from our house-bound menagerie.

(another) very short story

I’ve been holding a theory that Donna, companion to David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor in Doctor Who, was actually the Doctor’s mother. Or at least, would be. Despite her memory “re-boot” at the end of her story-arc, she was still half-Time Lord, infected by the Doctor’s spare hand. After all, he had offered once that he was part human (although: the Doctor lies). Why else was the Doctor, pre-Donna, drawn to her grandfather, Wilf? Why was he still, long after she had returned home? Why was the Doctor so drawn, twice, to Donna at all? There was the elder red-headed Time Lord that only Wilf could see in the second part of The End of Time, a woman that writer Russell T. Davies has since admitted was meant to be the Doctor’s mother. Why was she so drawn to Wilf, but for the sake of a final assist to her grandfather? The series certainly wasn’t overrun with redheaded women: the elder version of Donna, having reconciled the rift in her human-Time Lord state for reunification, memories intact. Some might argue a stretch, given the poor ending the writers gave poor Donna Noble, but all the clues are still there. She would become his mother, and the elder version couldn’t tell him. Not yet. 

see also: The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (2014)

prose in the park + the ottawa small press book fair!

Yes, there are two book fairs coming up in Ottawa, if you can believe it:

Prose in the Park: June 6: the first of what suggests as an annual event, comparable to when we used to have Word on the Street in town (remember those?). Big, medium and small publishers will be displaying and selling their wares, and a number of authors will be reading throughout the day. And of course, Chaudiere Books will be there as well (thanks to Marilyn Irwin...).

the ottawa small press book fair: June 12 (pre-fair reading) and June 13 (fair itself): co-invented by myself, I've been running it twice a year since it was founded way, way, way back in 1994. Quite honestly, the best of the small press. If you love great writing, small publishing and a whole ton of local materials that you might not otherwise be aware of, this is your event.

And then, of course, Congress is happening right now at the University of Ottawa, which also includes a book fair.

We live in glorious times, I'd say.

The Capilano Review 3.23: Languages

1

WE LAY

already deep in the macchia, when you

finally edged into view.

Nevertheless, we could not

darken out to you:

ruled by

lightduress.

2

WHO FOUGHT FOR YOU?

The lark-figured

stone from the fallow.

No tone, only that mortalbrightness carried

within.

The height

whirls itself

out, more violently still

than you. (“from Schwarzmaut (Blacktoll) by Paul Celan,” Mark Goldstein)

As Jenny Penberthy writes in the “Editor’s Note” for the new issue of The Capilano Review, the “Languages” issue (May 2014) is filled with “Multilingual poetry, ‘the clockwork discourse of Doctor Who,’ the language of invertebrates, the Red River Twang, Chiac, the language of the Psalms, html, and much more. An extraordinary variety of voices and languages is embedded in these pages, each piece a response to TCR’s call for ‘translations of new or old texts, re-translations, comparative translations, experimental translation, language/s behaving in unexpected ways, multilingual writing, older Englishes, mimicry, mis-translation, fumblings between languages, faux-translation, trans-translation, the ‘languages’ of different genres and the interplay between them.’” One of the most striking sections in the issue has to be by Christian Bök, another interplay on bpNichol’s infamous Translating Translating Apollinaire as “Translating Translating Apollinaire (Gallifreyan),” raising the bar on a piece that Darren Wershler once translated into Klingon. Through his sequence of circular visuals, Bök translates bpNichol’s piece into “the clockwork discourse” of Gallifrayan, the language of the Time Lords in Doctor Who. There are some other lovely interplays throughout the issue, some by writers emerging as some of our most challenging and engaged, from Jordan Abel to Oana Avasilichioaei to Liz Howard to Sarah Dowling, as well as more established poets such as Colin Browne, Nicole Brossard, Erín Moure, George Stanley, Rachel Zolf, Peter Culley, Steve McCaffery, Ted Byrne and Stephen Collis. Collis’ contribution to the issue is a translation of Empedocles' Fragment 17. As he includes in his short piece on the translation:

I began translating Empedocles when, after publishing too many books too quickly, I didn’t know what to write, and didn’t want to write anything really. Translation, especially the slowness of translating ancient Greek, seemed the ideal stop-gap—the ideal way of feeding my compulsion, while in some sense avoiding writing. A means of resistance. A brake.        

            Empedocles had been an interest since I re-read the Presocratics while working on a book about change. That dialectic—it struck me as a dialectic—of Love and Strife, of attraction and repulsion, union and division, stuck with me. Everything now especially seems such a tug of war—the things I want to join, defend, and hold together—those things I want to resist, cut loose, disperse forever. To at once love and struggle against a humanity bent on the beauty of creation and the ugliness of destruction. To find these human attributes incommensurable and yet indissoluble. Walter Benjamin: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” How to resolve this? I fear we cannot.

Part of the appeal of The Capilano Review is how each issue works to engage with the visual arts as well as writing. Allyson Clay, who provided the cover art, has a sequence of paintings reproduced in the issue, “Groundsplatpink,” which she writes of to introduce her section: “My recent body of paintings, collectively titled Groundsplatpink (2013/14), stems from my longtime fascination with how paintings, particularly abstract paintings, are written about and described. Such descriptions are ubiquitous in art history texts and catalogue essays dealing with modern and contemporary painting. Books about painting tend to concentrate on surface treatments. (Interesting writing about painting can also be found occasionally in ‘how to’ books on painting.)” Really, there’s an enormous amount of worthy material in this issue, and far too much to write about in a single posting, from the synaesthesia works by Nyla Matuk, visual works by Margeaux Williamson, Michael Turner’s essay, “Text-based Public Art Works in Vancouver,” and Colin Browne’s exploration of Apollinaire’s Vancouver. Well known as being a translator as well as one of our finest poets and thinkers, Moure, for example, includes “A tale of a translation in process: François Turcot’s Mon dinosaur,” composing an essay as a sequence of journal entries:

I’m almost halfway through a first draft of Montrealer François Turcot’s fourth book of poems, a homage to a father, his father, and a co-presence with the final days of co-being with his father. And, après, a meditation on his absence. It is a Book of Hours, lost by the father and rewritten by the son. The book accompanies me eerily in these first months that follow my own father’s finale, in Edmonton.

Here, almost halfway: what does it mean to be almost halfway? Time’s membrane?

As well as a piece by Brossard, there are three translations of her works, by Amy Butcher, Karen Ocaña and Lary Timewell, who writes:

love cobbles its unreal span, a fragile above

among animals amongst words among doves

in the present continuous we wake, are awoken

repossessed of now as our own, the body s/urges

all possible plurality, ecstatic narrative of

the continuum caresses, (each)

tendril-exfoliate, (each) root of (each)world

knows this a confoundment / an exhuberance

babies boom all day, full-bodied from the hip, become

‘boys & girls’ rolling out from (onto) flat tradition script

to be ‘just & fair’ in the ‘near & far’, lost

realms & sentiments & solitudes require

vertiginous words & animal names, energies given that

in dreams from genre & gender escape

At the desk: rob mclennan (Open Book: Ontario,

I recently participated in the Open Book: Ontario series "At the desk," where I write about my little writing space in our house on Alta Vista Drive, as well as a variety of my office tokens, the mounds of paper and books, and the places in which I used to write, before the invention of Rose. The process made me curious to see what else I'd written in other stock-taking essays, turning to my "What are you working on right now?" piece for Johnathan Ball in September 2012, and my two prior pieces in Open Book: Ontario's variety of series: "The Dirty Dozen" from June 2012 and "The Proust Questionnaire" from August 2010. See how far I've come!

Toronto, and the (Christmas) week that was,

We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.

Miranda July, “Majesty”

[Christine by giant mask in Distillery District] Today we head back to the Capital, in Toronto since Christmas Day visiting, various running around, and what-not. So much what-not. Will we even recognize Ottawa? Home had snow, Glengarry had snow, but Toronto took a few days, as we stayed with Christine's mother near Old Mill, Toronto. Today, there is snow.

My almost-mother-in-law. My soon-mother. What do I call her?

December 26, lunch on the Oakville/Mississauga boundary with some of Christine's friends. We talked about weddings and comic books, we talked about the kitten we are supposedly getting in January. We toured PetSmart to see what the options were, and staff acted as though we were there to save all their errant kittens. But this one has been here so long, they said. We're just looking, thanks. I'm having a harder time fending off the kitten we're supposedly getting. I think it happens once we return to our little apartment. Two weeks ago, she even bought kitten food.

Burlington, to visit her friend Kim, with baby Addison. I have to admit, I don't feel as though I've accomplished anything through all this Toronto-suburban driving, learning their vast suburban geographies. Did you know that, at least at the border, Mississauga and Oakville look pretty much the same? Both Mississauga girls, Christine and her friend Christine (I know) might claim otherwise...

December 27, Christine and I sat a couple of hours at the Second Cup at Bloor Street West and Windermere with a stack of newly-acquired books, including her own collected Gertrude Stein, and I with a collection of essays by Milan Kundera. Both of us were even able to get some writing done, if you can imagine it. I sketched out the beginnings of a couple of short short stories, including one involving snow globes, another about sexy dreams. What else did we do? Dinner at the Mill Street Brew-Pub in the Distillery District with further of Christine's friends. She sure has a lot of friends. Extended conversation about weddings and comic book movies, Doctor Who episodes and what the hell they did to Torchwood. Didn't you think it was better when it was a series, as opposed to these random mini-series? Many pictures, including the pre-Mill Street image of Christine standing by a massive mask, somewhere on the Distillery grounds. We walked cobblestone older than 1812, older than so many other Canadian things we could even imagine.

December 28, driving back downtown to Bloor West and Spadina for lunch, meeting up with Christine's friend Anne, from the East Coast. We ate vegetarian food in a restaurant across from Matt Cohen Park on Bloor Street West, in the area where he lived for parts of his adult life, and wrote some of his novels. I had vegetarian food shaped like meat; shouldn't that be considered strange? I complained, but only a little.

But where are all my friends? I attempted one, caught up with busy and Christmas and parents and stress, so that didn't work out. There is always never enough time in the day, etcetera. We played Scrabble with her mother, one of our Christmas gifts. Christine kept saying she was terrible at it, but then easily won.

And we were (finally) able to watch the new Doctor Who Christmas special; isn't it good that he finally realized he has a home to go to? Lovely. Every special so far ends up being my new favourite.

December 29, I ventured down to my favourite Toronto haunt, the Future Bakery on Bloor Street West to meet and meet up with poet Allison Grayhurst, to talk about her forthcoming above/ground press chapbook. She had a first trade book back in the 1990s, and then life interrupted sending work out, but not getting work done. She claims to have a number of completed manuscripts around their house. Driving over, I didn't get lost at all, and even honked at Nathaniel G. Moore around Bloor and Davenport. Dinner in the St. Catharines area with Christine's mother's uncle and aunt, we two driving down with her mother to Thorold. We talked about local War of 1812 sites, and the history of their magnificent house, which was built by a local lumber baron back in1870. Wonderful! I requested a tour, but they claimed some of the children's bedrooms weren't in the shape for such.

Looking forward to home, though not looking forward to the drive. Already scraped a layer of ice-snow from the car, and Christine thinks we're heading to Yorkdale Mall before the 401.

Looking forward to the three days of mail that is sitting for us. Money? A load of books, certainly.

A Christmas in Glengarry, another in Toronto

[trees, just by my sister's house] A first Christmas, properly shared. We divide between Glengarry and the wilds of Toronto. How does one begin? Christine and I drive to the farm on December 23^rd, and return to Nepean briefly to pick up Kate from her job the next afternoon for the sake of a homestead Christmas on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Between work and other family considerations, the options are few; we’re okay with that, having had Christmas Eve Christmases a number of years now, given the large size of my sister’s husband’s family, large enough they require hall rental on Christmas Day to fit them all. We have a goodly turkey meal in the middle of the afternoon at my sister's house, with her brood, husband and our dad, and then the children tear into presents, as is appropriate.

Glengarry, with slow, quiet trees and a layer of snow. We see all the stars, driving in.

[just before Christmas dinner, Christine teaching my sister's girl Emma to knit; Rory on the couch; Duncan with his inflatable gloves looking at gran'pa] Nephew Duncan got an inflatable punching bag with inflatable gloves. The bag had water to weigh the bottom, instead of sand. By the time we'd arrived, he had already punctured the bag, leaking water throughout. I had his sister Rory take it to their bathtub. A matter of hours: I was impressed. This, a boy who accidentally put a hockey stick through their big-screen television, cancelling his third birthday party. My father gave him a Woody doll (from the Toy Story movies) that he loved so much, he was actually stunned the first few minutes. At first, we couldn't even tell if he was happy or pissed off. You. Got. Me. A. Woody. Doll. Repeated about four or five times. I think it's pretty difficult to stun a three-year-old.

Toronto is as it ever was, waking up Christmas morning to get into the car. Our original plan was to drive Kate back to Ottawa and continue, onward, to the Big Smoke for a late lunch with Christine’s father and stepmother, as well as her brother, Michael. My father offers to drive Kate, and we take it, in the car by 9am and at Christine's father's house not until just after 2pm. It is so good to not be in a car anymore, driving. It is good to not have to be driving. At least the 401 was relatively clean, and the snow, once we moved west from Cornwall, went from a light dusting to nothing at all.

Strange, the idea of being out on the 401 at all, driving such lengths on Christmas Day. 

[Christine, mother Karin, + brother Michael at their mother's house] Mike lived in our new apartment before we did, and he often, still, gets more mail than we do. What else could I do but wrap it all up in a tidy parcel, lovely bow? The evening, Christine, Michael and I make for their mother’s house for a dinner with extended clan.

With all this new family and driving, feels odd to have Christmas without even a reference to the Queen's Message, without being able to (yet) catch the new Doctor Who Christmas episode. Odd.

But, a stocking at her father's house, another at her mother's. Lovely, and unexpected. I haven't had a stocking since, I think, my sister started having children (Emma just turned eight, a few days ago). The years before, stockings at the homestead for myself, sister, my daughter. Nearly a decade since, and here I get two. Nice. 

In Toronto until the 30^th, Christine has us scheduled to visit with various folk once, if not twice, daily, driving from downtown to Hamilton to Burlington, some days. There will be an hour or two, perhaps, daily for writing of some sort, in-between the wedding magazines and what else. Apparently, in a few days we drive down to St. Catharines/Niagara with her mother for a dinner with further family. Just what have I got myself into? Hah,

Our Hallowe'en costumes: Doctor Who and Idris

Strange, isn't it? This is possibly only the second year I've dressed up in nearly thirty years, when I used to take my younger sister around Maxville to trick-or-treat, our mother waiting for us in the car. We walked the village with pillowcases, most often to houses our mother knew, my sister dressed as whatever she was that year, and myself, borrowing one of my father's caps, achieving perhaps the laziest costume-making possible. I'm a feed salesman, I'd tell them. And then I'd empty my pillowcase in the car after every third or fourth house, so people might think we had only begun, and perhaps offer more. Terrible.

I don't even want to get into my ill-fated Morpheus (a la Neil Gaiman's The Sandman) costume from the mid-1990s.

This year, Christine and I went to a house-party as Matt Smith's Doctor Who and the TARDIS-in-human-form, Idris (from that episode written by Gaiman; are we noticing a theme, anyone?). Here's a picture of the two of us [by Cathy McDonald-Zytveld] in costume in front of our new residence, the third floor of a century-old house on McLeod Street. And yes, we actually live in the turret. During our outside photo shoot, we even managed to finally meet our downstairs neighbours, as they came outside to admire Christine's costume, and show off their own (“Bride-zilla” and “Rogue,” from X-Men)

Christine spent three days putting the costume together from an array of material, and I'm impressed at just how much she looked like Idris herself; damned sexy.

Still, one of the few people at the party who understood our costume was a young twentysomething, Anna, dressed in Ukrainian garb. She even had, in her purse, sonic screwdrivers for both Doctors ten and eleven, as well as a Doctor Who sound effects hand-held device. All of these carried completely unrelated to Hallowe'en and the party (apparently she doesn't often tell folk she carries these things around with her). Hilarious!

Part of what I always find entertaining about making public declarations of any of my particular interests—my collection of some 6,000 comic books (almost exclusively Marvel, with some Vertigo thrown in as well), or my adoration of the Doctor Who reboot six seasons ago—is in seeing just who ends up responding, whether Rusty Priske mentioning his appreciation of the work of Brian Michael Bendis, or this Doctor Who/Silence fan video that Adeena Karasick sent, made by her daughter, Safia. My favourite, still, a comic book conversation with Thomas Wharton while over for dinner; we knew it was bad when we realized even his then-five and ten year old sons looked bored by it. And any conversation I've had with Toronto YA author Leslie Livingston is enough to drive anyone away with a roll of their eyes.

Still, questions remain: will we ever figure out, who was piloting the TARDIS at the end of Matt Smith's first season? That whole damned season was set up as a trap for the Doctor, far more complex than the other, smaller trap of the Pandoricum; the things in Amy's room set the trap for the Pandoricum by the Daleks, Cybermen, etc., but the crack in the wall was the result of the explosion, which was done by someone else. Who was it pulling the strings to make the TARDIS explode in the first place? The whole plotline feels as though it's been set aside. Yes, the “Let's Kill Hitler” episode wrapped up a few too many other threads up too quickly, but the season's final episode was quite magnificent.

Will the next season finally bring Doctor number eleven back to the mystery of who took control of the TARDIS? I suspect the only one who might hate the Doctor that much could only be himself (was the dream episode a clue?); is it a fragment of the Doctor himself, whether internal or external, working some large multiple-season plot? Why all these loose ends? Why does every new Doctor since the reboot then become my new favourite?

Bowties are cool.