Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one: Rose Maloukis, Ksenija Spasić + Kristjana Gunnars,

By now you know we’ve come and gone through the 30^th anniversary edition of the ottawa small press book fair [see my notes from the spring 2024 fair here and here, by the way], which was the largest (by a third or so) to date of our semi-annual event, which is quite remarkable. And all the vendors I heard from said it was the best in sales they’d ever had! So that is deeply exciting. And did you see this report Amanda Earl made after the event?

Be aware that our next two dates are already booked and confirmed! Saturday June 21, 2025 and Saturday November 22, 2025, again at Tom Brown Arena, just west of Ottawa’s downtown core. If you lose track of those dates, you can always check here, of course. And make sure to keep track of theoccasional posts at the (ottawa) small press almanac, our small collective of Ottawa-based small publishers, yes?

myself, Stuart Ross (Proper Tales Press) + Cameron Anstee (Apt. 9 Press)

Montreal QC: I’m a bit behind, clearly, in my reading of Montreal poet and visual artist Rose Maloukis’ work, only now catching her chapbook Offcuts (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2023), a follow-up to, among other titles, Cloud Game with Plums (above/ground press, 2020). Her chapbook-length sequence “Offcuts” suggests an element of collage, of stitching lines and sentences together, each page a self-contained burst of phrases held together with precise intent. “one / thousand / would that be / enough to send / into the world / to say,” she writes, early on in the sequence, “here / look at these / and just for / a moment / yield [.]” There is a curious way that Maloukis works her own ekphrasis, engaging through text her own ongoing visual practice, allowing the one side of her creative work to reveal itself through another form, akin to a kind of commentary or poetics of her visual art.

to save my life for eleven days
I made drawings
                            my body
                            smoked
the novelty

lay on the floor
under a table

burnt ultra-thin candles
not to flame the paper
                            only to mark
                            with soot

this dirty foul smoke
and dangerous wax
                            affirms

all the charred days
bring back
                            my thirst

Ottawa ON: I was intrigued to see that Jeff Blackman’s Horsebroke Press has expanded to include single-author chapbooks, with the new title, the beautiful the bearable by poet Ksenija Spasić (November 2024) appearing, according to the colophon, as “These Days #29.” There isn’t an author biography included for Spasić, although a quick online search reveals the Moscow-born author currently lives in Montreal, after studying at both the University of Toronto and Concordia University. Has she published anywhere else? Either way, the beautiful the bearable is a chapbook about family and war, offering ten first-person poems documenting response, aftermath and how one can never fully escape. Referencing The Complete Works of Primo Levi (2015) by the Jewish-Italian chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (1919-1987), Spasić offers: “Levi writes madness, / but describes method / orderliness, the gears that make it go. / Like transposing the patterns of life/ to give intelligible form / to death.”

There are small gems within these poems, some of which really strike, and make me curious about what else she might be writing or working on. “Into these words,” she writes, to close the poem “Ritual,” “I take a part to flee the whole, / perform the ritual / that shrinks a shoreline or a man / into the beautiful, / the bearable.”

jwcurry, Room 3O2 Books

Toronto ON/Vancouver BC: I’m frustrated to only now discover (via our small press fair “free stuff” table) Canadian poet and artist Kristjana Gunnars’ chapbook sequence At Home in the Mountains: A Report on Knowledge in Twenty Parts (Toronto ON: Junction Books, 2019) [catch the essay I did on her fiction a while back here]. As she writes at the offset: “I want to acknowledge the University of Alberta Department of English and Film Studies for hosting the writer-in-residence anniversary event in 2016, which became a precursor to these poems.” This is wonderful to hear, but frustrating, as I had also been part of that event, and had even produced a new chapbook of poems by Gunnars as part of it (and a further one since). I had no idea this existed! As Gunnars writes as part of her “PRELUDE AND INTRODUCTION” to the collection:

            Because I have fused the traditional poetry manuscript with the more academic or literary essay, with the attendant paraphernalia, I am thinking of this work as “essay-poetry.” Mixing genres can be illustrative of a way of thinking that is not strictly “according to rule” and doing so often opens up avenues otherwise left untouched. We are not living in the age of Rumi, or in the age of the chanting of lyrics, unless they come to us as musical presentations. We live in a textual age, brought on by the uses of the computer with all its tentacles. We are now used to seeing “hypertexts” and feeling comfortable with many layers of text and information coming to us at once. I have simply followed an inclination brought on by contemporary technology in creating the present manuscript, and I feel I am able to imply a great deal more this way, and allow some of the voices I have left out of the poems to enter the field.

A sequence of twenty poems, Gunnars moves through and across prose poems to the more traditional lyric mode, offering a sequence of meditations on writing, thinking, living and solitude. “and yet the life of everyday is nice; food and drink,” she writes, to open the poem “LOVE’S INEBRIATION,” “walking, sleeping, talking, regular life, as we know it; / how nice also for Milarepa when he returned home from the mystical heights / and the villagers spread for him a feast of food and happiness— [.]” I complain of a lack, and yet, if I could figure out where I put my copy of her more recent collection, Ruins of the Heart: Six Longpoems (Brooklyn NY: Angelico Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], this particular poem-sequence is most likely and completely included in there as well. Is my attention really that fractured?

without a word, without even a thought. I am trying to decipher
the botanical prints leaning against the wall, the faded cardboard
and singed edges of our hearts—the ones we have tried to read
like maps or graphs or mathematical formulas, our long-lost

perspective that hangs by a thread, and how we cannot say
the words. how speechless we are, how mute, how afraid we seem
of the possibility it will all be destroyed again: as it will, as it will

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Faye Guenther

Faye Guenther is a writer living in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Joyland Magazine and she has published a chapbook, Flood Lands, with Junction Books.  Swimmers in Winter, published by Invisible Publishing, is her first collection of short fiction.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I wrote each of the two projects at different times in my life. I had begun the work that appears in the chapbook, Flood Lands, many years earlier, and the poems and story were one way that I came to understand myself in the world.  They were a form of slow excavation. The chapbook was published by Carleton Wilson’s Junction Books, in 2017.

By the time I wrote the stories in my first book, Swimmers in Winter, and then revised them after the manuscript was accepted by Invisible Publishing, the process was more extensive, more precise, and more revelatory. I enjoyed being able to push myself beyond old limits, and it was an experience that really engaged me. It filled up my life with creative work in a way that was new to me, and I will never forget that feeling. Swimmers in Winter was published by Invisible Publishing in 2020.

I can see that there are some similar themes and preoccupations that run though both the chapbook and the short story collection. In each work, I’m exploring different experiences of intimacy, of seeing and being seen, of creating, and of the city as a queer space. In both projects, I’m writing about how histories and memories are held in the land and in cities and carried in the body and mind.   

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

In my poems I was tracing images and fragments of situations that I wanted to represent with language, but I was still trying to understand what their stories were. As a reader, I love the concision of poetry and the ways poetic form can transcend narrative or transform it into something else. At first, I read and wrote poetry to learn how to express what I wanted to put into language when I was still searching for the stories. Poetry is an essential source of inspiration for me. But I’m usually preoccupied and driven by a character as I create. As I read a poem, I often think about the speaker as a character, and I want to know more about their story. Still, when I write fiction, the birth of a story starts with the essence or trace of a poem.  

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

The time it takes to start a writing project, and the pace of that initial work, really depend on what the project is. I revise a lot. It’s how I find and understand my own voice and what it is I’m creating. I use revision as a means of discovery, or as an excavation, and it often takes me in a different direction from where I started. It’s intuitive. It requires a kind of giving in to the writing process, letting it take me where it will or might, and the time and the space that are needed to do this.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I begin with an image, or an emotional charge, or the tone and sound of a phrase, or a piece of dialogue. As I write something, and it grows and changes, I do think about how it could be read in a book.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Public readings are part of my creative process. They happen after the book is finished so they’re a chance for me to meet my characters again on the page. I approach my readings as creative performance because I want them to be worthy of the audience’s attention.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

For me, theoretical concerns are a result of the creative work rather than what generates it. In Swimmers in Winter, one of those theoretical concerns is about making meaning out of certain embodied experiences of queerness.

A broad question, or a set of questions, I’m exploring in the story collection, is about the different kinds of relationships that the characters, as queer women, find, as friends, as lovers, as fellow workers and fellow artists, as strangers, and also about the ones they have with themselves. These relationships take place in different settings, at different points in history, but they all occur within a wider culture that is often directly or indirectly hostile to queer people. So, the consequences of connection and disconnection in these relationships are significant for queer women. That’s true for the characters, and I think it’s true in the world as I’ve experienced it. In the stories, I also ask questions about the shape and movement of these consequences in the characters’ lives.

I think the current questions often have to do with the future, of communities, of cities, of the earth and the living world. Looking at the future also means asking questions about the past, and about how this past is unfolding in the present, sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes as a state of emergency.   

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I don’t believe there’s a one current role for a writer. There are many activities and positions that writers can have within larger culture. For myself, I understand that to be a writer is to be a witness and a perceiver, and to create or recreate what is witnessed and perceived, through language, for potential readers. It’s a relational way of being, receiving through the senses and giving through language in order to be read. It requires the sometimes painful and sometimes liberating practice of sustaining an openness and tenderness, regardless of what happens in life.                                

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

It’s essential.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Here are two ideas about ways to live that have stayed with me over time:

“You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing / that is more than your own.”
(From Sonnet 4 in Part One of Sonnets to Orpheus by Rilke.)

“Pour yourself out like a fountain. / Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking / finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.”
(From Sonnet 12 in Part Two of Sonnets to Orpheus, by Rilke.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

It happened for me intuitively. It felt necessary.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

The creative process has its own changing rhythm. Sometimes the rhythm is hard to find or to follow, but it’s at the centre of my life. I need it, and I also need to practice staying open to it.

Every day, I try to read something closely, I try to write something new and revise something I’m working on, and I also go outside to be able to listen and look, closely, if I can,  and gently. Sometimes the reading and the writing and the noticing are contained by everything else in my life, and sometimes they come before everything else. The consistency of my practice is where the routine comes in. It feels like a promise I can make to the rhythm of the creative process, like the lungs work with the heart.

It seems that if I can begin a day with a still mind, I’m more receptive to the rhythm and how it changes. A meditative practice is one way I know of to find this stillness.   

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I turn to moving and being moved. But I also turn to stillness. I look out the window. I try to focus on my breathing. I go out for walks or bike rides. I find creative work that startles me or takes my breath away or changes my ways of thinking or soothes me, and I try to pay close attention to what this engagement feels like. It also helps sometimes to read or listen to interviews with writers and other creators of all kinds.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The way the air smells just after a rainstorm.  

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

The living world and all the elements of nature, and music, photographs, visual art, film, and theatre.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Writings that give me new ways to think and to feel, and new ways to understand someone else’s experience, are important for my work and for my life. I’m always discovering or rediscovering writers that offer this.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I turned 40 this year and the list is long.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’ll try the second part of this question: I’m certain that if I had not been a creative writer, I would be a really different person in a lot of ways. It’s possible that because I did my PhD in English, and I work as a college professor now, maybe I would have tried to be an academic full time. When I think about it though, that would be another way to be writer.     

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It feels right and it feels necessary, even when it’s difficult.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire directed by Céline Sciamma

20 - What are you currently working on?

A novel. It’s still very new to me so I’m not going to try to describe it just yet.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Meet the Presses’ Indie Market (part six,

[Kate Siklosi and Dani Spinosa of Gap Riot Press]

Boy, did I pick up a lot of stuff in Toronto! See my first post here! And my second post here! And my third post here! And my fourth post here! And my fifth post here! And my posts on the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market here! And my third post from the 25th anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair! And more yelling about chapbooks!

Toronto ON: From Kirby’s knife│fork│book comes the first issue of NOT YOUR BEST (2019), produced as an anthology of concrete and visual poetry edited by Toronto poet and critic Eric Schmaltz, and featuring work by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, bill bissett, Billy Mavreas, Gary Barwin, derek beaulieu, Sacha Archer, Tom Comitta, Mark Laliberte, Kate Siklosi, Arnold McBay, Amanda Earl, Rasiqra Revulva, Jessica Bebenek, Dani Spinosa, Cam Scott, Imogen Reid and hiromi suzuki. This collection provides an intriguing overview of work by numerous (and for many, emerging) concrete and visual poetry practitioners, and assembled as an open call as opposed to a sequence and series of solicitations. While I’m aware of the work of most, if not all, of the names included here, it is wonderful to see new work move out into the world. The variety is striking, from hand-drawn works to collage, from full colour to accumulative twists on typesetting and individual letterworks. A few years ago, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl presented a paper at a conference at the University of Ottawa on her work-in-progress “The Vispo Bible,” some of which is included here, and it was easily the highlight of the entire conference (which, itself, was incredible).

There have been scatterings of volumes of concrete and visual poetry anthologies published in Canada over the years, including bpNichol’s infamous The Cosmic Chef (1970), the boxed anthology Headz & H&z edited by jwcurry and Michael Dean (1985) and derek beaulieu’s Courier: an anthology of concrete and visual poetry (1999) (one should also mention the WELCOME TO CONCRETE anthology that jwcurry was more recently printing on literal concrete at sites around Ottawa), but unlike the current project, this trio of box-anthologies were each extensions/accumulations of the editor’s respective micro-publishing ventures: bpNichol’s Gronk/ganglia, jwcurry’s 1cent and derek beaulieu’s housepress. Even British poet and publisher Anthony Etherin produced his recent paperback anthology Concrete & Constraint (2018) as an extension/continuation of some of the work he’d been doing through his Penteract Press. One could say that due to a variety of factors—the increased visibility of concrete and visual work, the advent of the internet, and a vibrant community of concrete/visual practitioners, publishers and enthusiasts across Canada—editor Schmaltz has the advantage of not having to become a micro publisher in order to access those who produce such work (I mean, he could do such a thing, but he doesn’t have to).

Unlike most text-based works, I find it interesting that assemblages of concrete and visual poetries are automatically, it would seem, international in scope, perhaps for the ease in which visual works can cross borders, cultures and even language. Given the wealth of visual materials being produced by Canadian writers, I would doubt that the scope of these books is due to any sort of Canadian-only lack, but, instead, the very nature of how communities of concrete and visual poetry creators and publishers are established, something that does feel very different to those communities constructed around writers of more text-based (including narrative and lyric) works. As editor Schmaltz writes in his afterward, “Some Letters from the Editor”:

What is there to write about a poetry that is without writing? What should be noticed about poetry that, despite its striking visual qualities, is something said to be overlooked? What is to be written about a poetry that sometimes doesn’t look like writing at all? Really though, none of these poems are without writing. They are not resistant nor are they overlooked (though maybe a little bit). The poetry that marks the inaugural issue of Not Your Best is very much with writing – all sorts of writing, in fact – and it is indeed striking.

There is a lot to be said about the poets who labour at the intersection of text and image, who fuse their poetics with strategies used by collagists, graphic designers, illustrators, sculptors, photographers, and other mixed media artists. These are poets who typically resist the rules of syntax and semantics. They challenge conventional uses of the page-space for poetry – eschewing its margins, gutters, columns, and borders – to create a poetry that foregrounds visuality as a key component of its meaning-making. Historically, visual poets’ rejection of borders has manifested in its geographical consciousness since it has been heralded as one of the true transnational poetics of the mid-twentieth century with nodes of activity in Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, Japan, Sweden, the US, and elsewhere. Jamie Hilder’s Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movements, 1955-1971 (2016) says much about this as he traces the proliferation of a global, visually-inflected poetics that was catalyzed by the transnationalizing forces of computers, the atomic bomb, rockets, and the itinerant flows of migrants and jet setters. With contributors from Burlington, Brooklyn, Calgary, Hamilton, London, Los Angeles, Montreal, Ottawa, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Toronto, and Welland, this issue of Not Your Best, in its modest way, gathers an international company of poets who provide us with a glimpse at what is happening across the field now, nearly fifty years after the first wave of modernist concrete poetry.

So far, this series opens with an impressive volume of stellar work and exquisite design; I am curious to see where this series might go next.

Toronto ON: It is always good to see a new title by Toronto writer Stan Rogal, as well as the emergence of another publication from Carleton Wilson’s Junction Books (Sonnet L’Abbé’s Junction Book title, for example, which won the 2017 bpNichol chapbook award), this time the soft-bound chapbook SYMBOLOGICAL: an extrapolation (2019). Rogal is no stranger to the serial poem, and SYMBOLOGICAL: an extrapolation is a sequence constructed in fourteen sections, opening with zero and rising consecutively to thirteen, writing on and around creation, from humanity itself to what humans have made with their hands, and how writing and thinking are actually created. Rogal works within the serial poem, but one composed as both collage and accumulation, moving through references to and meditations upon science, theory, pop culture references (including a reference to Jack Spicer himself, who dubbed the ‘serial poem’), history and language, writing on writing as writing. As he writes to open the poem “Ten: Odysseys wandered for nine years & returned on the tenth; Troy was besieged for nine years & fell on the tenth”:

allowing that artistic expression is a continuous

flowing, causal, direct relation between the inspiration

& the final representation, which is both the means &

the end of the expressive process

whereas symbolization is discontinuous, static, indirect

transcending the object in which it is enshrined

Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses (part two,

[view from my table]

I’m sure by now you’ve seen the first part already, but here are some further items I picked up at the recent Meet the Presses fair in Toronto last weekend; might we see you today at the ottawa small press book fair? I mean, there might even be cookies!

Toronto ON/Vancouver Island BC: Vancouver Island poet and critic Sonnet L’Abbé’s latest title, produced through Carleton Wilson’s Junction Books, is the beautifully designed and bound poetry chapbook Anima Canadensis (2016). Composed as part of a “larger project,” Anima Canadensis opens with the sequence, “PERMANENT RESIDENTS’ TEST,” a poem that speaks to Canadian cultural and historical contexts, referencing Indigenous displacements and European settlement through, among other means, discussing flowers (“Identify the native species in this passage.”) and other “agricultural products.”

Answer the following questions.

In order to stay in what form? In order. In order to keep the nuclear grazing, the gentle seep? In order to keep? To keep order. The way and flow and the way of things. The order of things. The will to keep, to keep on, to go on, to sustain. To keep out of trouble. To maintain. Love your ability to sustain. In order to sustain in what form? Please complete this human form. This formal question. How will you stay? Is the order complete? What form sustains? Where there is will some will remains. How will you sustain order? Prove your ability to sustain. Please fill out this shape. Take a new form. Prove your ability to love.

I’ve been utterly fascinated to see the shift in L’Abbé’s work since the publication of her first trade collection, expanding outwards from metaphor-driven lyric to more experimental works that attempt to navigate and explore issues around race, identity and colonization [see her recent Touch the Donkey interview that touches on some of the same]. Her work, in both form and content, has become more socially and politically engaged, more open to alternate forms and, to my mind, has become far more compelling, putting her on a Canadian poet shortlist of required reading. As she writes to open the poem “LOVE AMID THE ANGLOCULTURE” : “Is it not of the same gravity / as going to war, / the decision to love?”

BRAIN STEM

Strong neck the channel through which your roots become branches. Strong neck the trunk through which your impulses flow, tides of perception and reaction. You are a battery of cells, positive of material, anti-positive of nervous potential. You, a dyad of bunches of waving branches and bundled branches, of bunches of searching roots and rooting roots. The spine of your decision-making: a flexible tension between head and heart. The moving tree grows in more dimensions than knowledge: in its reach, yes, in its span, but also, if it is lucky, in its rootedness, in its density, in the neck’s rough skin thickened to injury, that lifts above its heart a head of power—ever spring-fond, ever fall-wise—a tender, leafy power to love light.

Toronto/Picton ON: New from Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner’s The Emergency Response Unit is Toronto poet Phoebe Ka-Ir Wang’s chapbook HANGING EXHIBITS (2016), a title constructed of poems that respond, predominantly, to visual art. Obviously, ekphrastic poems (poems that respond to other creative works, including poems, visual art, etcetera) have been around forever (works by Diana Brebner, Stephanie Bolster and Robert Creeley come to mind), and far too often simply describe or explain the artworks they claim to be “responding” to, but the narratives of Wang’s poems seem to respond sideways to the original works. She seems to compose intriguing little narratives that emerge from, or are even influenced by, the originals. As she writes at the end of the poem “STILL LIFE WITH ANCESTORS”: “She’ll tell us there’s more to the story.” Wang’s poems do seem to suggest far more than what they say, offering both alternate considerations and even addendums to their source materials.

STILL LIFE WITH SURFACES

after Matisse, Goldfish and Sculpture, 1912

She’s gone in ahead of us, testing

the bathwater. When she winces

we feel it too. The heat applies

its deep vermilion to her knees,

her thighs, the tract of her tummy,

forcing them to bloom.

We slough off cotton

socks and tank tops, climb in

as if into a second skin,

first my sister, then me.

we’re slippery as fins.

The light amniotic, rinsing us

in cerulean, and even when

we’re clean and we don’t emerge.

Outside, the air is frigid

and hostile. We’d rather live here,

inside the dance of chiaroscuro,

where the hour’s tropical.

Mom passes something to us—

a scrap of cloth, a white pill of soap

(her impulsiveness, her innate talents)

gives us no choice but to use them.