some (further) Edmonton (and Calgary, and Ottawa) readings;

A note on things that happened before; a lag while Ottawa sinks its claws or fangs or whatever else…

Tuesday, December 4; rob’s Edmonton book launch for white

A good little event, with about twenty people or so, including Barbour, Lemay, Stewart, Hedley, Kostash, El Labi. I read most of the first section (but not all) with the idea that I might never read it in Alberta ever again; going to do the same in Ottawa next week, read about twenty minutes or so of the first section; it’s such a little book that it’s difficult to really read anything less without not giving enough for a sense of it; after Ottawa, will I even pick such a thing up again?

Wednesday, December 5; Yann Martel, presented by Edmonton Cultural Capital

Yann Martel, Man Booker Prize winner and current Saskatoon resident, did a talk to a packed house in the Manitoba-Saskatchewan Room of the Westin Hotel in downtown Edmonton (it was moved some time ago from its original location of the Stanley A Milner Library Theatre for the sake of the crowd). Recorded by CBC Radio (to be aired somewhere over the next few weeks) and hosted by CBC’s Peter Brown, the event was structured around the publication of the new hardcover The Illustrated Pi, a new edition of his third book, Life of Pi, that won the Man Booker Prize in 2002.

The evening was structured into three parts: a talk on the new edition, a talk on his current project, and an on-stage interview on “The Active Artist” by Brown. There is something lovely and even envious about how Martel speaks, with a kind of casual deliberateness that shows how much he thinks about what he is saying, and the obvious craft behind the talk that he gave. Martel talked about the process of finding an artist for this new edition through an international competition, one that brought in 1600 submissions that were eventually boiled down to sixty and then six, into the final winner, Czech artist Tomislav Torjanac. A well-crafted evening, I think I filled about twenty pages of notes (pretty much every second or third line he spoke was quotable); far too much to get into in so short a space as this.

Thursday, December 6; Christine Stewart’s making strange poetry reading

Held at Remedy Café in the middle of the afternoon, Christine Stewart hosted a reading by her 399 class, “Making Strange Poetry Reading,” with Megan Cleaveley, Allie Grande, Natalie Helberg, Carlos Lara, Judy Lin, Victoria Meszaros, Nina Varsava and Erin Weisgerber. Not everyone made it to read (there were one or two missing), but there were certainly some interesting experiments coming out of class projects on the canto, homo-linguistic translation and other poetic structures designed to get these young people moving outside of their own "voice." I was particularly taken with some of the pieces performed by Carlos, Judy and Erin, with some impressive lines coming out of just about everyone; will these be names we should be keeping an eye on?

After it was over, I stayed around for a bit for drinks; should I tell you which one published a Harlequin Romance novel last year?

Saturday, December 8; Calgary extravaganza!

A carload of us—Trisia Eddy, Lainna El Labi and I (delivering Cara Hedley [see her recent feature in The Danforth Review] south as well)—appeared in Calgary for the Calgary Extravaganza, as twelve Calgary authors launched eleven titles; why can't other cities do such as this? One of my crew noted how all of the writers seemed University-related; are there any writers in town in this group that don’t have anything to do with the program at the University of Calgary? With fantastic (albeit brief) readings by Robert Majzels [see his 12 or 20 here], derek beaulieu [see his 12 or 20 here], ryan fitzpatrick, William Neil Scott, Jill Hartman [see her 12 or 20 here] & Brea Burton, Cara Hedley, Natalie Zina Walschots and various others, it was interesting to see the range of publishers represented on stage, from Snare Books (Montreal), Information as Material (England), Oberon Press (Ottawa), The Mercury Press(Toronto), Coach House Books (Toronto) and Nightwood (Gibson's Landing, BC), but only one title from an Albertan publisher, Edmonton's own NeWest Press. Why doesn’t Alberta have more literary publishing?

Starting his tour reading the first part of his novel, Scott decided that, for this final reading on the same tour, ending where he began, he would read the last part of the novel; what made it interesting, particularly, is in what he didn’t give away. And it was good to see some of these folk I haven’t seen in some time, including beaulieu (we traded envelopes) and Christian Bök; an offshoot of our conversation has me reconsidering the last two poetry collections (un and yesno) by Dennis Lee…

And then there were the adventures in Red Deer each way, an hour or maybe two.

Tuesday, December 11; Christine Stewart at the Olive Reading Series

I couldn't be happier with the appointment that University of Alberta made of Christine Stewart, doing the job that Douglas Barbour used to in the Department of English and Film Studies; Barbour pretty much said the same thing when he was introducing her reading. The little chapbook is an interesting series of accumulations about Mill Creek Ravine and the bridge she goes under twice daily en route to her office; how does someone from another space conceptualize something that so many locals would otherwise find familiar to the point of unremarkable? It's interesting how she comes from a more socially-aware poetic gaze, coming out of the language writers and various KSW alumni from her years of Vancouver, working critically on Lisa Robertson, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Nancy Shaw, Susan Clark and so many others that seem, predominantly, invisible in Canadian crit (but not so in American or other-crit).

Tuesday, December 13; rob's Ottawa book launch for white

With the idea I might never read from the book again (very hard to excerpt from such), I read roughly twenty minutes worth from the novel to a crowd of roughly fifty, which was pretty exciting, and hosted by old pal Monty Reid. A group of us ended up at the Dominion Tavern afterwards, including Max Middle, Megan Hughes, Amanda and Charles Earl, Pearl Pirie, Sean Dowd, Genevieve Wesley and Nicholas Lea, and Josh Massey. A very long night; I think I arrived home around 3am. Is this why I'm tired all the time?

See the photo of such here, by Charles Earl; did you see the review in The Globe and Mail?

Otherwise: check out these reports from Ottawa on Monty Reid’s reading at Dusty Owl (one from Amanda, another from Pearl); read what Shawna Lemay said about Anne Le Dressay's new poetry collection; don't forget the Ottawa launch of the Peter F. Yacht Club or the beginnings of the first of the new Factory (West) Reading Series in Edmonton, or the next Ottawa reading of the Factory Reading Series on January 24 to launch the fourth issue of ottawater!

readings in edmonton (again); the past few days

Part of what I’m really enjoying about my time in Edmonton is the fact that author readings are happening pretty regularly, and usually just a floor above my office, where I seem to spend most of my time.

Tuesday, October 30; Elizabeth Bachinsky

It’s been quite a while since I’ve heard Vancouver poet Elizabeth Bachinsky read [see my review of her book; see my review of her second book]; part of her trip to Edmonton was to interact with Jars Balan and Myrna Kostash [see my note on Myrna Kostash here], to do research and ask questions about a non-fiction project she’s working on regarding her Ukrainian background. She read from both her published collections and some new work as well, which was pretty entertaining, and talked about working her poems within constraint, whether the structural procedures from her bookthug collection, or the more traditionally formal models from her nightwood edition book.

And then we had dinner and talked about absolutely everything (but I couldn’t get her to come out to the Garneau Pub after).

Tuesday, November 6; Gary Geddes

When I was seventeen years old, growing up in that old Glengarry, Gary Geddes was the first “real writer” I’d ever met, and now, here I am, writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta some thirty years after he did the same (he was the second, after Matt Cohen). It was very good, admittedly, to see him again, since he was quite good to me in my late teens and early twenties, back before I knew what the hell was going on (now I’m pretty sure I have no idea; back then, I still thought I could figure it all out).

While here, Geddes read from his new collection falsework (Fredericton NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2007), a “documentary poem” about a bridge disaster in Vancouver in 1958, when the “Second Narrows Bridge collapsed while under construction.” Geddes’ book writes the story of the ironworkers who were killed, and of those who were left behind to deal with the mess.

Widow’s Talk

Saints, onions, synaptic leaps, the expression
of grief impossible. Accusatory looks.

I disappear into the woodwork, incapable
of playing the stricken widow. Anger

looks back at me from the bathroom
mirror, a patina of toothpaste, tiny

food particles. Bastard, how dare you?
You’re not Christ, you can’t walk

on water. I’m at the counter peeling onions,
asking the blessed Virgin, my hand

shaking, to forgive me. Male bonding,
shit! Beers at the Cecil. I’d rather

be married to a live plumber than a dead
ironworker. Freckles, halo, summer.

After the reading, I asked him why, since he seems to like narrative, story and doing research, he hasn’t written fiction or more non-fiction (the book was even performed by actors around the time it was released)? He talked about how he doesn’t understand why writers keep wanting to remove story from the poem; it wasn’t like that for the epic poems of Chaucer!

I bit my tongue, knowing I had plenty of things to say about that; Chaucer certainly didn’t have CNN, fiction, non-fiction, daily newspapers, all the outlets that now provide for what used to all be part of and the function of poetry. With all those things stripped away, poetry must do something else; I mean, how could it not be otherwise?

Tuesday, November 6; Paul Pearson, Marita Dachsel, Jonathan Meakin + Christine A. Stewart

You know you missed a good reading, the first in a series of events I’ve got planned at the “underdog,” the space underneath The Black Dog on Whyte Avenue. Scheduled as the Edmonton launch of the newest issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club, each reader managed to give the audience something that they might not have otherwise been expecting [see Marita’s 12 or 20 interview here; see my review of her first book]. Pearson gave a couple of pieces for his late mother and his late mother-in-law, and the first one was magnificent (even if he read it a bit too quickly); there was something there I wanted to savour. And I’m amazed at the almost matter-of-fact deliberateness of Christine Stewart’s poems [see her 12 or 20 here]. As she said, her poems have moved from definition to description, and the poems she read, come out of her daily commute through the Mill Creek Ravine, were utterly magnificent. She reads again, apparently, at the Olive Reading Series on December 11th at Hulbert’s.

Mundis:

Mundis is abandoning function. Seductive, it does not know. Seen, unseen. It is dream-shit. Dream delicate war repeating actual as event. As if ridiculous. But suffering. Furnish this present, furnish those who murder with place. Research of acceptance in place.
Mundis is flat, unflattened, un-flat. Automatic: an incurious close and worldly work. Mundis is blind release, but familiar. Lovely. Stasis and intimate in Mundis thousands dead and filling. Not minding suffering. Not minding being. In also suffering. Minding. Wanting. (from TAXONOMY)

With Black Dog manager Chad’s help, now toying with doing something potentially monthly down there, which would be pretty cool.

Wednesday, November 7; Cara Hedley + Jessica Westhead

The two Coach House girls are floating around the country doing readings for their first novels (they went to Calgary the following morning); was good to finally hear them both read, especially since they read in Ottawa the same day as the small press book fair! A block away, and I couldn’t hear them read (cuz I was still at the fair); am looking forward to getting into their books. The narratives for both seem pretty straight, but funny in parts.

And then at the bar afterwards on 104th Avenue, to see a photo of Cara Hedleys’ great-great grandfather on the wall? Apparently he was part of the Canadian hockey team outta Winnipeg (made up all of Icelandic immigrants) who ended up winning the first Olympic gold medal for hockey for Canada! How bizarre; how does one drink in a bar under that? Even more that Hedley’s novel was about women’s hockey; in hindsight, everyone agreed it would have been pretty cool to have had her novel launch there instead of at the bookstore…

And now: I’m off to Toronto for my novel launch; will I see you there? Although it means I’ll be missing the Michael Trussler reading here in the department the next day (I’ll still be on an airplane)