Wednesday, October 25, 2023

“In Winnipeg / I'll eat your leg.” — Dennis Lee

You know that poem, don’t you? From Dennis Lee’s classic Alligator Pie (Toronto ON: Macmillan, 1974). If you don’t have a copy, you should certainly get one. I doubt the book has been out of print since it originally appeared. Over the weekend, I made my way to Winnipeg for a quick overnight to launch my latest poetry collection, World’s End, (2023), a collection that immediately pre-dates my University of Calgary title, the book of smaller (2022). The publisher, ARP Books, had set up a group launch for a trio of their recent poetry titles, including Ottawa poet natalie hanna’s lisan al’asfour (2022) [see my review of such here] and Vancouver poet Nina Mosall’s Bebakhshid (2023), both of which mark their full-length debuts.

Oh, Winnipeg. It has been a while since I’ve been this way. The prior weekend I was at a festival in Corner Brook, Newfoundland [see my report on such here]. In December, I launched my Mansfield Press pandemic essay collection in Toronto with Stephen Brockwell and Amy Dennis, etc [see my report on such here] and another Toronto reading last July through Larry Sawyer/milk magazine [see my report here]. Remember all those? Before that, nothing back to February 2020, when Christine and I read in Vancouver as part of Lunch Poems at SFU [see my report on such here]. Did I ever do a report on my prior reading in Winnipeg? Going back through my posts, it does look like I toured a full thirty days back in 2006, posting all sorts of travel nonsense during that time [landing in Winnipeg; being in Winnipeg; leaving Winnipeg]. Has it really been that long since I read there? I know I’ve been at least once since to meet up with some of Christine’s aunties and Oma. Either way, I think my notes make more sense now.

natalie and I met at the airport at some ridiculously-early time for our shared flights (a brief stop-over in Toronto), as we shared hazy conversation until boarding (we were seated rather distantly on the flights themselves). I deliberately brought no reading material with me to force myself to finish the final edits on this forthcoming collection of short stories, On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press), supposedly scheduled for next fall, if I can complete these edits in time.

We landed, we made for the hotel, we lunched. We sat for a moment, to breathe. She caught her room prior to lunch, mine wasn’t ready until after. Once we were finished our lunch, she went to crash for a bit and I wandered, ending up at the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, an artist run centre almost directly across the street from our hotel, where I saw some really interesting shows (that I would completely recommend). Farah Al Qasimi’s work, The Swarm, is quite stunning. Ultimately, I was heading to the big ridiculous Winnipeg sign at The Forks, which led me more than a kilometre of walking (repeatedly asking locals if I was headed the correct way), wandering in, around and through downtown in a zigzag. I caught the Portage Place mall (where I spent many hours writing in their food court, during prior visits), and saw the march of some hundreds of people protesting Israel’s bombing of Gaza, which is devastating the Palestinian people (everyone needs to stop all the bombing, please). I wandered the corner of Portage and Main for a selfie, none of which captured either sign for proof. I walked through the train station, one of the few of those original train stations still functioning across Canada (Calgary is shuttered; Edmonton and Ottawa stations relocated years ago). Once I found it, two tourists from Philadelphia were kind enough to capture the photo of me at the sign.


Once done, I headed straight back, another kilometre-plus back into the Exchange district for the sake of Red River Books: this is one of my favourite used bookstores in Canada, and I easily mailed boxes of purchased books home from this store across those years of touring from 1997 to 2006. I made the store by 4pm, just in time to realize it had already been closed for an hour. What! And being Saturday, there was no point attempting the ArtSpace building, which houses Turnstone Press, CV2 magazine, Prairie Fire, The Manitoba Writers Guild, etcetera (I used to spend half a day on each trip wandering the building, visiting). This is when and were I first met Todd Besant, who currently runs ARP Books, during his tenure at Turnstone. Instead, I sought out a seat somewhere for the sake of some food, perhaps, and possibly a drink, landing at the Amsterdam Tea Room and Bar. I mean, I needed to be at the reading venue by 5:30pm, and it was only a couple blocks further, so there was no point in wandering back to the mall for the food court (which I did consider).

The Amsterdam was curious: a fancy bar for tea-flavoured cocktails (their menu for such was extensive; I ordered a stout, avoiding all of that). While there, I wrote postcards for the children, only to have a younger couple nearby stunned that I was writing postcards. It’s a lost art! he said. Can I take your picture writing postcards? she asked? Um, I suppose?

And did you see this? En route to the gallery: a building with a restored original front for that whole block, and new back. Completely lovely.

The reading itself was glorious! It was a small crowd, but quality. I don’t think I’d seen A.J. (Adam) Levin since 2004, when we read together at the Windsor Festival, when I launched my Palimpsest Books title (I still have copies, despite it being out of print). K.I. (Karen) Press looked no different than she had ever done. Why doesn’t she age? And it was great to finally meet (in-person) Winnipeg poets Julian Day, melanie brannagan and above/ground press author Melanie Dennis Unrau. Dennis Cooley, as well, was his usual self, his pulse of electrical energy just there beneath the surface. The benefit, also, of those latter four being above/ground press subscribers, I was able to hand them three envelopes each, which did lighten my load considerably. And did you know cam scott [did you see my review of his latest?] is part of aceart as well? I hadn’t met him yet, either. Oh, he's so good. We’ve been discussing doing a chapbook together for some time now.


Christine’s two maternal aunties were also there! They live in Winnipeg, after all. It was lovely to see them.

The last time I was at aceart, Winnipeg’s glorious artist-run centre, it was in a different location. For reasons unknown, Sylvia Legris thought I should be part of an art auction they were running back in the fall of 1999, and, given I’d recently won the Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Prize for Most Promising Writer (in any genre) in Canada under 30 (their only non-cash prize, but included two free tickets to anywhere Air Canada flew), I was able to use one of those tickets to fly into Winnipeg for the sake of that auction. I stayed with Dennis Cooley, brought along terrible artwork and spent the evening working the bar at the event. At least when Karen Connelly won the same prize nearly a decade earlier, she used her tickets for a bit more purpose: flying to Thailand, where she spent a year composing her Governor General’s Award-winning travel memoir, Touch the Dragon (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1992).

natalie hanna does occupy an interesting space in Ottawa literary circles: despite this being her full-length debut, she’s been active for years (with a break mid-way for the sake of law school and articling), even back to the second half of the 1990s, when she was involved with running readings at Mother Tongue Books (a series, if I recall correctly, organized with Stephanie Bolster) and above/ground press even published a chapbook-length long poem of hers as an issue of the long poem magazine STANZAS. The reading was straightforward enough (and we were all amazing, I’ll have you know), but what was intriguing was Andrew Lee prompting a panel conversation between the three of us at the end of the event. He opened with a question, and then asked if we had questions for each other (I didn’t realize we’d had homework).

Nina, on her part, immediately jumped at the opportunity, and pulled out a whole list of questions she’d prepared (citing that, as a librarian, this was something she was quite good at). Her questions were interesting, although I made a point of prompting her to answer each one as well, after natalie and I had. After a handful of Nina’s questions, I pointed out that all of her questions seemed to be structural (ie: variations on form, as opposed to questions around content), which prompted me to ask her how her poems begin. She hadn’t even realized her direction. I feel seen! she said, startled.


K.I. (Karen) Press

All in all, a very fine event, a very fine trip. Thank you, co-readers, and to everyone at ARP Books: Todd, Irene (in absentia) and Andrew. Thank you.


myself reading! photo by Andrew Lee, ARP Books

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