Conundrum Press, Montreal: 10 whole years

Congratulations to Montreal writer/publisher/editor Andy Brown, who celebrated the 10th anniversary of his publishing house Conundrum Press last night with a gala event featuring readings, performances, music and multi-media, as well as the launch of Valerie Joy Kalynchuk's second novel, Beauty is a Liar, and the launch of the portable conundrum, a 10th anniversary Conundrum Press anthology. Performing to a packed house (including much of the younger literary Montreal crowd, with other authors as audience such as the touring Vancouver poet Elizabeth Bachinsky, who was wandering through the spaces between bar and book table, former Ottawa resident Wanda O'Connor, finishing her first year of creative writing at Concordia, and fan favourites Jon Paul Fiorentino, David McGimpsey, and the irrepressible Jason Camlot…) were various Conundrum Press contributors (all thirty-some contributors are included in the portable conundrum), including Catherine Kidd (the first Conundrum Press author, or, as Corey Frost called her, "the oldest author published by Conundrum"), Andy Brown, Golda Fried, Dana Bath, Vincent Tinguely, Marc Ngui, Corey Frost, Suki Lee, Julia Tausch, Nathaniel G. Moore and Robert Allen, with multimedia (sans author) performances by Shary Boyle and Joe Ollman. With incredible performance after incredible performance, including film clips of Shary Boyle doing art performances as part of Canadian singer Feist's concerts in Paris, France in February 2005, and short cartoons by Joe Ollman and Elisabeth Belliveau (she was there last night, but decided to hide in the corner during the showing of her magnificent animated short, Perfect). And you have to see the strange short films by Toronto author Nathaniel G. Moore, who launched his "novel" Bowlbrawl with Conundrum Press last year, and last night launched a new short film called "dear canada council," which, he suggested, might never get him the funding he so desperately craves.

Brown's Conundrum Press is, as was mentioned last night, one of the few literary trade publishers in Canada interested in publishing comics, and has so for years, publishing pieces by Ollman and Ngui as well as Mark Bell, and the mad-genius of Billy Mavreas. The multimedia aspect of the evening was especially impressive, merging all sorts of considerations including animation, text, performance and music; where else but in Montreal do the barriers begin to break? Even that the portable conundrum itself would include fiction, comics, essays, drawings and everything in between call for not only the wide interests of editor/publisher Brown, but the range of activity happening at the ground level in Montreal (and various other cities, there and here) over the past decade. Parts of this energetic group of creators were also featured in the anthology Brown and I edited for Vehicule Press, YOU & YOUR BRIGHT IDEAS: NEW MONTREAL WRITING (2001), and also appear regularly in such places as Matrix magazine (I made a point of wearing my 80s-era Matrix t-shirt last night, made during the Linda Leith years…), fish piss, the Headlight Anthology, the Moosehead Anthology (both from Concordia University) and occasionally, DC Books.

One of the finest moments (for me) of the evening, was talking to the bartender (also stage manager) about Ernest Hemingway, Richard Brautigan, English-language fiction and various other things; she said her name, Lori, was spelled "just like Superman's other girlfriend." "You mean the mermaid," I said? Nice… (what an obscure reference…). In and out quick, my travelling-buddy Jennifer Mulligan and I were back in Glengarry county by three in the morning, much later than the last time we went to a Montreal event, a few months back. Check it out, if only for the photos of Brown, Moore, Fiorentino, Kidd…