the banff notebook : , eleven days in may

In case you hadn't caught, I've been posting a series of missives from my time in Banff back in May over at my substack [I know I posted a little tiny at-the-time report on my Banff adventuring, but this is far more substantive], writing on days spent writing and reading, but also hanging out with such as J.R. Carpenter, ryan fitzpatrick, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Hiromi Goto, Jordan Abel, Adele Barclay, Sharanpal Ruprai, Conor Kerr, Derek Beaulieu, Joshua Whitehead and plenty of others, as I attempted to both be present within that space and group, and push the ends of a novel-in-progress. More posts in the sequence still to come, but catch the posts-so-far: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six and part seven. I also have a new short story posting at the substack later this week, and some cool essays forthcoming. Stay tuned!

unidentified fiction remains and the true nature of banff

I recently spent a week at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity as part of celebrating the University of Alberta's Writer-in-Residence 50th anniversary [and there was even a livestreamed showcase reading by the group of us, which I posted about over here]. I honestly can't fully process all the adventures during that week, with a group of writers it would have been stellar to see even individually, let alone as part of a group. And did I mention I briefly got to meet Daniel MacIvor? (and yes, I know it's a Brad Fraser title I mangled, above). MacIvor was in Twitch City, you know, which was a small work of genius. And did you see him recently in an episode of Law and Order: Toronto? I got to hang out with Michael Barnholden and Adèle Barclay, meet writers such as Ryanne Kap, Sharanpal Ruprai and Conor Kerr. The wealth of the company was staggering.

We had a week, most of which was our own. We caught meals, although I was at breakfast first, most mornings. My body said, 8am, time to get up [although post-karaoke, I missed breakfast altogether, which allowed ryan fitzpatrick that morning's first slot]. One morning I even managed an hour's work before leaving my room, and another, about half an hour's work before anyone else showed up for coffee and morning what-nots. While there, I was attempting to further my novel-in-progress, the one that rests somewhere between On Beauty (2014) and the follow-up, downstream from Missing Persons (2009); a novel that follows the threads of a handful of folk who don't necessarily interact, but exist within the same stretch of relative time. I hadn't presumed I could finish it, but after a week sitting within its pages (and at least four days prior attempting to re-enter), I think I can now actually see that light at the end of the tunnel. The week included a planned dinner or two, a karaoke night (and second round, given it was so successful) and a trip to town (which I did skip, needing to sit at my desk). We had our big showcase reading, which was incredible.

J.R. Carpenter [see my review of Carpenter's latest here] has a collaborative app you should check out, This Is Not A Good Sign, a curious eco-poetic of phrases one can overlay atop photographs, presumably of landscapes or whatever else, I was playing with while there. I spent the week taking the occasional picture as part of such, a number of which I did post over at Instagram, and am hoping to continue on same, here and there. It was very cool to hang with ryan fitzpatrick [see my review of fitzpatrick's latest here], get some good conversations with Fred Wah and Daphne Marlatt, get to learn (or learn better) folk such as Conor Kerr, Cody Caetano, Joshua Whitehead [see my review of Whitehead's latest here], Jason Purcell [see my review of Purcell's latest here]. Caetano's memoir is so remarkably, powerfully, good. I read much of it on the flight out. And so many other folk were around, there, participating, wandering through or wandering by. You probably already know I produced a handful of chapbook titles for the week as well, by myself, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, J.R. Carpenter, ryan fitzpatrick and Derek Beaulieu. Copies were distributed free to all the participants, with a small handful left over for the reading event (further copies will be distributed through the University of Alberta Department of English and Film Studies, prod at Jordan Abel if you wish for copies, he has a bunch).

I worked to further this novel, as well as attempting a "Banff notebook" project, akin to "the green notebook," a journal-essay stretch from that week I'm still working to hammer into some kind of publishable form, with the hopes to start posting excerpts from same across my substack real soon. There were drafts of a poem, however slow. Sketch-notes. There might be something else, also. I am thinking through the bounds of a poem, certainly.

This was my first time spending any length of time at Banff Centre (beyond two days in May 2008 I don't really count, as I never quite landed and didn't know anything or anyone, so kept fallow).

There were quiet conversations and loud gatherings, languid stretches of walking solo, working solo, walking to town. I made a bad joke at a museum [a solid joke, really], and lost my breath singing, and walking, and standing [higher altitude, you know]. I took a big swing attempting a song from Frozen 2 at karaoke, which didn't quite land (but big swings are the point, certainly). I saw two full days of snowfall, and an overcast so complete, they put the mountains away for safety, only returning them once it cleared. I stayed out too late with writers, and the one night all the writers crashed, I stayed out too late with playwrights. I bought a t-shirt the wrong size, and had dessert with every meal. I got some nice time with Derek Beaulieu, and saw his office, far more ordered than had it been mine. 

Oh, and our final night there, as Thomas Wharton, Marilyn Dumont and I were walking through town back from dinner, catching a group singing loudly hey now, you're a rock star, get your game on, hey, and realizing the group was all dressed as characters from the Shrek animated films. A bridal party, clearly. Did Wharton take this picture? Dumont at the front, there. The bride (dressed as the prince, centre) was so proud of the fact that this was all her idea. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise. In hindsight, I did wonder, what might have been the theme of the wedding?

INDIGIQUEERNESS: Joshua Whitehead In Dialogue with Angie Abdou

 

            Looking back now, as thirty-three-year-old Josh, I realize I saw myself in those books.
            I didn’t know at the time, but I was connecting, having fibres of paper also attaching to tendrils of Joshua’s identity.
            I’ve seen myself in books without having the language or terminology to explain why I’m so attached to these queer figures or cyborgs or mutants. Now, looking back, that work was so formative to me becoming a Two-Spirit person and writer. I got to escape into a wormhole and be devoured and devoid of all things around me, and in that space of nothingness, there was all things – which made the experience so rich and formative.

I’ve been appreciating the structure and content of INDIGIQUEERNESS: A Conversation About Storytelling: Joshua Whitehead In Dialogue with Angie Abdou (Athabasca AB: Athabasca University Press, 2023), an extended conversation British Columbia-based fiction writer (and Athabasca University professor) Angie Abdou and writer Joshua Whitehead [see my 2018 Ploughsares interview with him here] around blending literary and genre writing, queer and Indigenous content, working to emerge as a writer and performer, and of aiming work for a young adult audience. I’m curious as to what prompted this particular conversation, and how it fell into a book through the press, but I’m appreciating the insight into Whitehead’s work and thinking, the way an approach to writing was formed across genre. Part of me wishes there could have been at least some spark of introduction to this collection, but there is something enticing, as well, about simply launching immediately in. Throughout his work, as well as through this conversation, I appreciate how Whitehead is open about his influences, blending genres such as YA novels, science fiction, punk and anime, and citing Richard Wagamese, Ursula K. Le Guin and Billy-Ray Belcourt; open about the writing in which his writing exists with in a far larger conversation.

I’m also appreciating how the conversation is broken up through design and asides of accompanying visuals, including quoted texts, old poems, photographs and archival materials, providing the body of the book as a performative space, one that is all-encompassing, well beyond the scope of the immediate conversation. “Poetry is at the base of everything I do.” Whitehead responds, mid-way through the conversation. There are some really interesting elements discussed within, also, of how pieces that didn’t fit into his full-length poetry debut, full-metal indigiqueer (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here], evolved into his award-winning debut novel, Johnny Appleseed (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), and how he engages elements of genre writing, fully aware of a conversation of how literature often looks down on genre.

            I remember walking down Ellice Avenue, another street just off the University of Winnipeg campus, adjacent to that creative hub. I was taking notes on the graffiti and the trash and the mundane things that nobody sees. From that, I wrote a poem, and it became the first poem I ever published, in Prairie Fire. I remember getting my cheque for $100 payment for that publication, and it’s been a snowball effect since then. I was working long hours and writing poems for pennies and performing in the streets of Winnipeg for free…and now, being the emerging writer that I am, and sitting on the stage at Canada Reads blows my mind still – that I’ve achieved that level of optics in a short span of time.
            But I never write in a vacuum. Everything I’ve crafted and made has been a whirlwind of community and folks and friends and lovers and family. I kind of write as an animated avatar. A lot of my material comes from listening fiercely to those around me and witnessing that which is discarded or not seen.

Ploughshares : an interview w/ Joshua Whitehead

My latest post for the Ploughshares blog is now online! an interview with Joshua Whitehead.

You can see links to all of my Ploughshares posts here, including interviews with literary book designer Kate Hargreaves, Montreal poet Susan Elmslie, Ottawa-area poet and fiction writer Michael Blouin, Erín Moure on translation, Montreal writer Jacob Wren, Toronto poet Marcus McCann, founder/editor Robin Richardson on Minola Review: a journal of women's writing, Toronto poet Emily Izsak, Ottawa poet Faizal Deen, Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Elliott Clarke, editor/critic Erin Wunker, Arc Poetry Magazine Poetry Editor Rhonda Douglas, editor/publisher Leigh Nash on Invisible Publishing, Cobourg, Ontario poet, editor, fiction writer and small press publisher Stuart Ross, Toronto novelist Ken Sparling, Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen and Toronto poet Soraya Peerbaye.

Joshua Whitehead, Full-Metal Indigiqueer

LATE-NIGHT RERUNS

there are brief moments

when the television cuts out

usually during commercials

between segments of seinfeld

that looming break

elaines offering: a cigar store ndn

its now

i see myself

in that blackened shiny eye

refracted fractal fractions

was i right[questionmark]

(this chaos

breeds

a special

kind of silliness

i reserve

for you)

i must have been

i am a funny man

jerrys retort: lets bury the hatchet

now,

im gone

simple really

that really knocks me out

Calgary-based storyteller and academic Joshua Whitehead’s first trade collection of poems is Full-Metal Indigiqueer (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017), a spirited collection of text that “focuses on a hybridized Indigiqueer Trickster character named Zoa who brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binary) in order to re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity.” Exploring Indigenous representations and mis-representations through blending pop culture references up against those images, Whitehead’s Full-Metal Indigiqueer shifts and spins, smashing preconceptions from within and without his immediate vicinity. As part of a recent interview over at CBC Books, Whitehead responds:

I didn’t realize that the poems were all connected at first. I thought this was just going to be a collection of poems that I could call a book. But as I started working on these poems, I noticed a thread that was binding them all. It was all about disruption, ruptures, breakages and just straight up revisionism. I wanted to recentre Indigenous characters in canonical texts. I’ve always played with the idea of Indigeneity, whether outright or not. The way to do this is by bringing in the character of the Trickster — someone who can shapeshift, mould and form, and almost envelope, consume and redigest these types of stories.

Fiercely intelligent, the poems in this collection move at a pretty high speed, playing with narrative, visual and concrete poetry structures and image, and includes a list of sources at the end some three pages long, from Seinfeld reruns to The Faerie Queene and A Christmas Carol, King Lear, Mean Girls, Richard Van Camp, Zora Neale Hurston, Leanne Simpson, Annie Proulx, Larissa Lai and Harry Potter. Even with all of the research and reference, there is a heavy performance and narrative aspect throughout, akin to the stripped-down narrative of Michael Turner’s original Hard Core Logo (a title originally produced as a poetry title, since republished as a novel), which makes one wonder if an adaptation for this work might also be possible?

i am the liberal project for a happy hour experiment;

i wonder if he feels like jake gyllenhaal in that bathroom

james franco[questionmark]

sean penn[questionmark]

when the waitress brings our feers

i down one, sip the other

think about what jack twist means in a town like this

& channel my inner ennis:

“i wish ii knew how to quit you –

i do

i do” (“ITS THESE LITTLE THINGS, YOU KNOW[QUESTIONMARK]”)

After hearing him perform recent as part of the Arc Poetry Magazine “Oh Canada, We Have Issues” launch at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, it became unmistakable that his work has a considerable weight, utilizing some significant word-play and a wide array of cultural knowledge to craft a body of poem-essays on identity, exploring what Indigeneity and queer-ness means, both individually and together. This is an impressive work, and a writer very much worth paying attention to.

Spotlight series #15: Joshua Whitehead

The fifteenth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead. The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao and Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn.