Ongoing notes: the Small Press of Toronto Winter Fair

I’m not entirely sure when or why the Toronto Small Press Fair turned into the Small Press of Toronto (SPoT), but there it is (with the most recent one at University of Toronto's Hart House on December 10th), with the implications continuing to broadcast further and forward from the schism of a few years ago, none of which the current incarnation of fair organizers know anything about, but for second or third-hand reports. Why the continued schism?

Kingston PA: I don’t know if this series exists anymore, but I was recently given a copy of Fredericton poet Hugh Thomas’ heart badly buried by five shovels (Kingston PA: paper kite press, 2009), produced as part of the “Supernova Tadpole Editions” series, edited by Hamilton, Ontario writer and musician Gary Barwin. How many chapbooks were produced? Why did it stop? Thomas, who lives in Fredericton but keeps appearing in Toronto, begins his chapbook with the dedication-line, “The last revision is a glass of water.” I don’t entirely know why, but that might be a line that sticks with me for quite a long time.

THE GUITARIST

In pieces, the lament

of the guitarist.

Romping the scope

of the madrigal.

In pieces, the lament

of the guitarist.

It’s useless to call her.

It’s impossible

to call her.

Laura monotonous,

Laura like water,

Laura like the wind

over Nevada.

It’s impossible

to call her.

Laura for distant

causes.

Arena of the South calling her,

paid in white camellias.

Laura, flesh covered in blankness,

Trades in tomorrows,

the first package of mortar

under her arm.

Oh, guitarist!

Heart badly buried

by five shovels.

Unlike much of Thomas’ work that I’ve seen over the years, there is something more emotional about this small collection, something more concrete than his usual-surreal, anchoring the poems in a particular way, even as “THE CITY” (a poem dedicated to Stuart Ross) ends with the lines “Yesterday, this city was named Toronto, / and today, it will be named Toronto.”

Toronto ON: After years of his work at co-founding/editing The Puritan, a fiction journal that moved from Ottawa to Toronto a few years back, as well as the Toronto small press Ferno House, Spencer Gordon has released his first poetry chapbook, FEEL GOOD! LOOK GREAT! HAVE A BLAST! (Toronto ON: Ferno House, 2011). Impressive for a first offering, one might have thought Gordon wrote poems like a fiction writer would (there are so many bad examples of such), but these pieces certainly can’t be mistaken for prose, and Gordon has a good sense of the line, such as in the poem “THE YOUNG BAROQUE PAINTERS,” or “A BILLIE HOLIDAY KINDA SUNDAY.” The poems here might be slightly uneven, but there is a clarity here that comes through, and a humour that allows entry where one might not have been able, otherwise.

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

Life is a long time grieving, especially the first time.

The second time you try, and it’s alright, there’s less tears;

it’s a reunion you never thought would happen. Then

the call comes back: the hard line in the head that said

don’t kiss, don’t dance, don’t do that. And even drinking

is easier, somehow, like each sip was watered down with

berries and pills and ice. You never dreamed it

would be so easy. But this is your second time around,

and you’re used to feeling used, and you want to see

the people you thought were gone for good, and so you

lean toward the fat neck beside you, and you say kiss me

darling, I’m back for you, and you alone, and the trees

aren’t sad, are they? The air is a calm mourner, you say;

it doesn’t need a wake to drink at. It doesn’t need friends or

family. You’re like the wind, you think. You don’t need a friend.

You don’t need another life. And so it ends.

Gordon also recently announced that his first trade collection of short stories is forthcoming next year with Coach House Books, which is pretty exciting. What might those look like?

rob participates in the Small Press of Toronto Fair (formerly the Toronto Small Press Fair), Saturday, December 10, 2011

I'll be participating in this fall's Small Press of Toronto Winter Book Fair at the University of Toronto Hart House from 11am to 5pm with various titles from Chaudiere Books and above/ground press, as well as a number of my own. Looking for that new title by Joe Blades? Recent chapbooks by Shannon Maguire, Ken Norris, Camille Martin, Hugh Thomas and others? That new title I had with BuschekBooks, a (short) history of l.? Who knows what other goodies I might have? Come by the fair!


And then, of course, I'll still be around the following night as Christine McNair and Pearl Pirie read at Toronto's AvantGarden Reading Series, Holy Oak Cafe, 1241 Bloor Street West, 6:30-9:30pm.

Ongoing notes: Toronto + Ottawa small press fairs,

I recently attended the Toronto Small Press Fair, as well as our own ottawa small press book fair [a snapshot of part of the Ottawa room]. Here are a couple of items I picked up, between the two. Each fair holds two events per year, and there are various other fairs around Canada (Toronto's Canzine in the fall, Montreal's Expozine, and Toronto's upcoming Meet the Presses, etc), many of which post to the (canadian) small press fair blog, so be sure to check back regularly for updates for future events!

The next event I'm aware of is the first-ever chapbook-only Meet the Presses in Toronto on July 9, which includes many Toronto-based publishers, as well as Ottawa's own AngelHousePress and Apt. 9 Press.

Ottawa ON: It was good for Toronto author Jim Smith to be able to come through the pre-fair reading in Ottawa to launch his newest chapbook of poems, Exit Interviews (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2011), a collection of pieces composed in tribute to a series of dead, male poets, including bpNichol, Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn, David Aylward, Frank O'Hara. Vladimir Mayakovsky and Federico Garcia Lorca. There was something compelling about the way he read, also, ending the pieces before the end, giving the closure of each piece its own soft edge, tied up in subtle ways.

Ted Berrigan

POOF!

I'm dead.

& you can't keep me here

As is mine

Great mud intelligence

That icebox I hadn't read

You cant keep me

Davy Crockett is right on

What thoughts I have

Smoking a pipe

You cant keep

Sober dog

White powder

Ron Padgett said

Me here

Go back to speed

Chicago,

It's made of everything!

[Jim Smith, seeing his Apt. 9 Press chapbook for the first time] Interesting to think he might have twigged on the idea, possibly, after a similar series by Toronto poet Victor Coleman, who wrote poems for a series of his late poet friends, each piece dedicated to another, his “Eulogistics” series (originally published as STANZAS #20), which appeared in his trade collection ICON TACT : Poems 1984-2001 (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2006). 

In both authors' series, the writers weave in echoes, slight traces, of the poets they write on, write for, small tributes to each, and the legacy they might have left behind. 

Of Jim Smith's work I'm aware of (which is, admittedly, quite little), these pieces strike as some of the more interesting of a mid-length (so far) career, from his One Hundred Most Frightening Things (blewointmentpress, 1985) to his most recent trade collection, Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2009).

Federico Garcia Lorca

At five in the afternoon.

I will not see it.

Spain is the only country.

Yet the Milky Way

Has filled the valleys of Spain.

The rest was death.

Now, archer, now

There are newly crated things,

There are jellyfish,

There are angels who never attack.

I love the song

I love the cartwheel

I love the rooster.

Que pasa, rooster?

The best bullfighters fall,

Torn apart by the horns

Of their mothers.

Spain stretches out

At five in the afternoon

All is finished

The bull

Loses itself, the fighter

Scares himself.

Ottawa ON: I've only been requesting review copies from In/Words Magazine and Press editor David Currie [that's him in the middle, there] for six months, so it's good to finally see a small stack of publications, including two poetry chapbooks from jesslyn delia smith, her so it's the first really warm day (In/Words, Chapbook Series 8.10, February 2009), edited by Cameron Anstee, and rescue poems (In/Words, Chapbook Series 10, January 2011), listed as, since she was about to end her fourth year as an English student at Carleton University, “her last in/words chapbook.”

behind mike's place in january,

thinking about the future

from where i stand

the flag is lit

on brilliant fire

behind

cold stone pillars,

rising with smoke,

supporting

our flourishing minds

Whereas the poems in the first of this pair of chapbooks seem unformed, unfocused and with so very little happening, the poems in her second, some two years later, read like koans in comparison, short, thoughtful poems that reveal by what they manage to hold, so briefly, back.

love lines.

decisions have been

made, unlike before, white

tea seeps from sponges,

creases of your skin,

love lines

and yellow bruises

on the backs of both

my knees, my ankles, from

kicking them in slip-on

princess shoes

There's a gaze here that focuses inward here, and considers, and is considered. The first chapbook might not have been much to grab the attention of too many, but smith's rescue poems intrigue. She might have moved away from publishing with In/Words, but one can only hope that this doesn't mean the end of her publishing. That would be a shame; she should keep going. I'd like to see where she goes.

Toronto ON: I've long been a fan of the small chapbooks produced by Sarah Pinder [see a previous entry on her here] through her bits of string, and the Toronto Small Press Fair provided copies of COLLAPSE (May, 2011) and THE RYE HOUSE, a suite (October, 2010).

one street named after a saint or a mountain, another after blood, pealing bells, loose live gerunds strung across, pitched in hum, every eye a question, a pan, an establishing shot

the alternate ending: wreck this, move with speed, a leash, obedient, the click and what follows, wagging, eager, all breath

after the foot lifts, the cloud of upper sound in the flat wet warmth of the afternoon, you want the drag in chorus, field spent, the clench of taking aim at exhausted scrap, blowing it all – the name of a pocket, a hand carved tattoo (COLLAPSE)

What I like about her writing is the cool clarity of the lines, whether the prose or short line-lengths, and the smooth way that these chapbooks so wonderfully seem to exist outside the boundaries of trade publications. I don't know what her goals are, but I think I almost prefer that I haven't seen any of her work outside these small items; it gives her work a kind of credibility, stepping outside the mess of publications, journals, funded book-length works.

Lake Ontario

New York State on the other side,

but you had turned away,

flicking a match into

the velvet frozen sand (THE RYE HOUSE, a suite)

[Here is Sarah at the most recent Toronto fair] Hers are small, lovely poems that require extra thinking, that require attention of all sorts, for the reader to enter slowly, and live inside for a while, listening.

There's a part of me that would love to see her writings collected into a larger form, and another part of me that just wants to leave the whole of it alone. 

Go find her work, please. Give her your money, and ask, politely, for some of her works. 

If you can't find her, you should be able to at the next Toronto fair.

Son-in-Law Tony at Home, Sept 1973

before he embarrasses himself

with the axe. (THE RYE HOUSE, a suite)

the ottawa small press book fair: today,

When James Spyker and I founded the ottawa small press book fair in late 1994, we were patterning our event loosely on what we knew of the Toronto version, co-founded some seven years earlier by Toronto writers and small press enthusiasts Stuart Ross and Nicholas Power as an extension of their monthly ‘Meet the Presses.’ During the early 1990s in Ottawa, there was an emerging, albeit scattered, community of small press, all without a venue to properly display and sell their wares. Those interested in such were forced to look further afield for attention, whether Toronto or Montreal, or even Vancouver, and New York. There were certainly no outlets available to discuss chapbooks, or coherent bookstore space. As well, like little islands of production, most of these producers of poetry, fiction and/or non-fiction books, chapbooks, journals, comics, zines and pamphlets seemed to barely have any awareness of each other. The first thing we wanted was to help develop a community that was at least aware of themselves, even before introducing that community to the larger world. How can anything improve or develop when compared only to itself?

There is sometimes the misconception that small/micro press purely exists as some kind of farm team for larger publishers, as though the step from one to the other inevitable, and step solely in one direction, presumably up. It’s much like the idea, for some, that writing poetry is automatic precursor to fiction, but those inside know the difference (every poodle is a dog, but not every dog, a poodle). Certainly, some of those who have published poetry chapbooks with Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner’s The Emergency Response Unit or Cameron Anstee’s Apt. 9 Press might also engage with book publishers, whether currently or down that hopeful road, but jwcurry and the myriad publications that fill his table exist purely and deliberately along the margins of small publishing. His small items might never see the inside of a bookstore, and are predominantly experienced either through direct knowledge of his catalogue, or attending a small press book fair, otherwise his thirty-plus years of publishing become completely invisible.

One of the things that wasn’t really discussed during the whole Toronto Small Press Fair ugliness a couple of years ago was the real function that these fairs play within the community, whether the Toronto fair, Broken Pencil’s Canzine, Montreal’s Expozine or the ottawa small press book fair, going strong at twice a year since fall 1994. Over the years, other fairs have emerged and disappeared, one as suddenly as the other, including an Ottawa zine fair that happened twice in the mid-1990s, and our own Word On The Street that seemed to come and go without too much real fanfare. Other fairs across the country seem to appear and disappear as well, including those organized in Vancouver, Hamilton, Edmonton, Fredericton and St. Catharine’s, Ontario. Those of us who organize these small press fairs are predominantly volunteers, working unpaid positions of love, and do so as caretakers for inherently community-driven events; if the events don’t fulfill and anticipate the needs of the community they serve, what purposes do they actually fill?

There are still rumours of problems at the Toronto fair, despite a few coordinator shifts since the “struggles,” and despite everything the current organizers have accomplished. Meet the Presses, the original 1984 pre-cursor to the Toronto fair, has even returned, thanks to founders Ross and Power, along with a board of other small press creators. Ebbs and flows, any community knows. Things slow down as one others rise to fill their place, but it can take as many threads of consistency to hold a community together. The landscape was certainly different when we started our little fair in the capital. There were no Chapters, General Distribution still existed, Coach House was still known as “Press,” and we still enjoyed independent booksellers such as The Double Hook in Montreal, Books Canada and Food for Thought Books in Ottawa, and all those west coast Duthie’s locations. The next wave of small press hadn’t yet taken hold, still sullen from the hangovers of the past. Presses have since come and gone and others begun, and yet we are still here, working to support those that insist and persist, including AngelHousePress, Room 302 Books, BuschekBooks, the Ottawa Arts Review and other local ventures, as well as those who travel a bit further to engage in that conversation called literature. We have not only persevered, but thrived, a room of our own twice a year in Jack Purcell Community Centre on Elgin Street, a room we invite the whole world to be part of.

Ongoing notes: the Toronto Small Press Fair, spring 2010;

[Nathaniel G. Moore at the TSPF; and then he went to the movies.] I don’t understand why the literary community in Toronto still keeps such a wide berth from the semi-annual Toronto Small Press Fair; I mean, I understand why, but the current organizers didn’t even know about the “troubles” the fair had a few years back (one wasn’t even on the continent at the time, and the other wasn’t much closer to the fair). Those involved on both sides don’t even come near, so what I don’t understand, why does everyone else also stay away? The new Meet the Presses fair is a positive thing, but why this insistence on factions? Why can’t we all just get along? I am not interested in factions; here are a couple of the items I picked up at or around the fair this time around. 

Toronto ON: Since discovering Sarah Pinder’s work at the previous Toronto fair, I’ve been quite taken with these small, graceful poetry and fiction chapbooks produced by her Bits of String, including Garden, Gardener: poems by Sarah Pinder (2008). Her poems are odd, quirky things, and her chapbooks are only two or three dollars; how can one not be charmed?

Half-Price Bed and Breakfast

On pilgrimage, I post,
aim and erect.
Missing cotton, velveteen,
a purple bite, a powder-puff,
I make a mini regatta in
crisp paper and set them a-sail
in the trout stream.

There’s something charming, naïve and then not-so in her pieces (I like this one, shades of Richard Brautigan’s surrealism), and even the back page, writing “I made this in Hamilton, ON, listening to my neighbours set off Victoria Day fireworks.” Check out her website for more information.

Toronto ON: Another little chapbook I picked up was Catherine Paquette’s A Theory of Darkness (the unkindness of ravens press, 2010), what appears to be a little sampler from a “larger cross-genre mystery novel” work-in-progress. Why do you, Pacquette, require an introduction at the beginning instead of little essay at the end? As a reader, I’m less interested in the explanation than the work itself, and wish she would have let her readers experience such without preconception. There are some good lines here, in a series of small straight-prose sections, albeit in need of editing: “Time is a formula to hate. Clocks are laughable containers. Like hearts.”

The Funeral Home of Time

A mug shatters. It is like that – the fragmenting. Something breaks into something else. The sun is rising. Breaking out from the darkness and the moon is fading out with the stars. Her breath regains and loses itself unevenly as she steps over the shards. Yes, she has lost. There are deaths all around her. she is grasping for something, but the temporal grope leaves her empty handed. She sits and watches the dark becoming light. The ruins of the night. Invisibly present and invisibly past, weaving in and out of the shifting moment. Now, she is hungry and takes in, chewing. Changes matter into mush and uses it to fuel her now. An empty plate; a broken cup. No, we do not have time to attend all the little funerals.

Ottawa ON: Produced by Ottawa writer Matthew Firth’s Black Bile Press is Toronto writer Nathaniel G. Moore’s “Sensational” Sherri (2009). Just what is it about professional wrestling, between this and his first novel, Bowlbrawl (Montreal QC: Conundrum Press, 2005) that keeps Moore (who once appeared on City TV’s Ed the Sock in a Mexican wrestling mask and subsequent match), and even Michael Holmes, going? “Never mind Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler…” the back cover tells us.

Ricky’s face filling red, voice evaporating. “Hey,” he said. Not sure if his words could be heard, not that if they mattered, just if he was actually speaking or lying down somewhere thinking this was going on and, “So, hey,” shifting the stool closer to the strangers, “But have you, or Carla, do you know?” He was slipping on and off the stool. “Hi … there.” He was using a bad Elvis voice. “Do you, hold on,” [wobbling his ass on the stool]. “So have you, you …” [focusing on one of them, one girl’s bony bare wrist. “S-s-s-sorry; I’m Rick by the way, must be wondering,” [slurrrr slurrrrr]. “Can you sit sit sit, okay, can you sit on on … a white frost cake. I mean, doesn’t goddabe white frost per say, can you sit on a cake for my birthday; it’s in July?”

Heels don’t turn but stay the same way. Heels are bad guys who work with heroes or baby-faces. When a heel becomes good, it’s called a face turn, or turning face.

Toronto ON: I didn’t get this at the fair, but Brian Fawcett handed me a small stack of his THE NORTHERN B.C. RULES with The Regulations for Snipe Hunting (David Mason Books, 2010), a small booklet of lists including “The General Rules,” “Survival in the Bush,” “Surviving in Town” and “The Snipe Hunting Regulations.” You can take the boy out of Prince George… What I enjoy best of all in this unassuming chap is the space at the end, the “several blank pages for additions to these rules. If you would like them to be considered for subsequent editions, please forward them to the publisher or author,” the inside says. Do you think they really would? As the colophon claims:

These rules are designed for physical survival in the Canadian north, which is an area that starts anywhere 100 kilometers north of a major Canadian city and extends to the geographical point at which all-terrain vehicles and skidoos outnumber normal transport, and government officials outnumber human beings (at which point “north” becomes “North” and only idiots are willing to put up with the cold and bugs).”

Fawcett, currently in Toronto but originally from Prince George, British Columbia, has a long history with the north, and about writing creative non-fiction works that could best be described, I suppose, as suggestions on negotiating various aspects of the world, including his work through the ongoing Dooney’s Café. From the first page, here are the first four, for example, general rules:

1.) In the north, rules only work in optimum conditions. Most of the time the rules are frozen solid or fouled with mud like everything else.

2.) Only things designed in the north work in the north. Everything is now designed south of the north.

3.) The most common natural hazard in the north is other people with beer or hard liquor on their breath. Unless you’re actively looking for trouble, bears are down around 17th in the list of things likely to harm you.

4.) All government and corporate megaprojects not only fail to produce promised benefits, they also produce unexpected side effects that eventually make life worse while exponentially increasing the volume of broken down or abandoned vehicles and other non-rustproofed machinery littering the landscape.

Who can argue with the logic of that?

the toronto small press book fair, june 19 at the great hall, queen west

Come visit me at the Toronto Small Press Fair at the combined Chaudiere Books / above/ground press table on June 19th (with the pre-fair reading the night before, including Chaudiere Books author Michael Bryson); or maybe you want to come to the Ottawa fair the next week instead (with our own pre-fair reading)? I have lots of books and conversation (and even some handouts); why not come by?

Sarah Pinder: some detritus;

A Shout!

Obviously, I’m open-minded,

but who handles the handover?

What is important is that you’re serious,

and who can handle that? (Do You Like What You See?)

Coming out of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair recently, one of the very few tables with publications that really stood out was by former Montrealer Sarah Pinder, through her series of lovely little chapbooks, covering her table as she sat quietly, knitting. Deceptively small, her publications include the single-poem chapbook thanksgiving (2006), the poetry collection Do You Like What You See? (2009), the short story collection The Beautiful Province (2009), the essay/talk ‘My things, my grand-mother’s things’ (2009) and a two-author chapbook of two short stories, Pearls Before Swine Flu / This Is Plague City (with Dave Proctor, 2009).

I used to fuck men in plaid lumberjack shirts all the time when I first moved to this city – saw the canoe paddle over the door of the first boy I dated here and knew I’d have his dick in my mouth in five minutes’ time, though we’d just met. I wanted someone to take me home. All the wilderness tips came back, a thousand kilometres away, regardless of whether you’ve ever actually had to stare down a bear in the middle of a trail. Us kids spent most of the time popping strips of caps on the sidewalk with jagged rocks, or killing small creatures in snares off where the street ended.

But still, that mountain man cliché got under my skin in the middle of Toronto; made me ache for smoke and sweat until I went around sealing my mouth second-handedly over every smoker I could find. Walked around with little dead fires in my mouth all the time, wanting more and more ash. (“Neighbor Study,” The Beautiful Province)

In little publications that run the gamut from essay to poems to short story, hand drawn roughness to carefully-crafted design (the photo series in Do You Like What You See?, for example, is quite lovely), part of what appeals is the lack of self-consciousness in these small chapbooks, from someone who appears to write and publish quietly, out of a sense of necessity, and out of the occasional (making each publication, thusly, a true occasion), as opposed to habit. Her chapbook ‘My things, my grand-mother’s things’ comes out of, as she writes at the back, “a lecture at OCAD at a symposium called Collectorama that focused on people’s obsessions with the act of collecting.” Her essay begins:

I want to say something about houses, and the way they end up becoming repositories. When I was fifteen, my mother sold the house I grew up in. I remember walking through the halls of the little bungalow with my camera, taking flash photos of the empty rooms and naked walls, while telling my confused mother it was because I wanted to remember the house we’d lived in. when I got the roll of film developed, I leafed through the photos I’d meant to describe our life before the atomizing effects of divorce and just saw the flash bouncing off those naked white falls, flattening each room into a box devoid of sentiment. That roll of film made clear to me then that memory is sealed to things that fill the spaces we spend our time in – objects and possessions from paint by numbers to egg slicers that say ‘we are here’.

Still rough in parts, this is a lovely personal essay written as story with all the weight of the personal, adding another bit of thread from her larger weave of concerns, and makes itself, almost, just as much a treatise on art and memory. Does it take going through a writer like Pinder to realize just how little heart comes through in so much other writing? There is much heart, certainly, in Pinder, but rarely a moment of over-sentiment, even while wandering through a series of familiar tales of failed dating, losing one’s own past, and working to negotiate oneself through a new and unfamiliar city.

I was at a yardsale over the weekend, and a woman had a large box of photographs from the 1950s-70s that she was giving away for free. Upon inquiry, she revealed she’d found them at the intersection a few years before – decades of documented family dinners and trips to the beach, which she’d assumed had been tossed to the curb when someone had died. Every photo was carefully annotated with dates, names and little in-jokes or asides about the images themselves. Another woman going through the box with me announced that it was too depressing to look at these images stripped of meaning by the absence of their owner, and her statement neatly named my desire to hold on, archive, become the narrative link.

Where exactly is Sarah Pinder heading with these small, glorious (and sometimes, uneven) moments? I could see something collecting all of the above as a warm and loving arm in a collection produced by, say, Pedlar Press, as very few other publishers seem to want odd little bits of prose and poetry mixed into a single package, but perhaps Pinder remains happy making as many of these as she sees fit, whenever the moment strikes. In many ways, I certainly hope so. I know I would like to see more of these odd, and extremely personal, little productions.

Snap that string and let me reel

out, driving bald highways

towards a holiday I don’t celebrate

with anything but food,

simple movement and talk

of money, grief.

I fill the gas tank in stripped

small towns – payphones and

and lists are my roadside relief

now. I must rake leaves (thanksgiving)

For more information on her or her little publications, check out Sarah Pinder at bitsofstring.wordpress.com