Nobody puts Baby in a Corner (Brook,

Okay, that’s a terrible title for this particular post, but I spent the weekend in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, participating in the second iteration of the Horseshoe Literary Festival (adjunct to Horseshoe Literary Magazine), which was pretty exciting. Newfoundland: the only province I had not yet visited! On Thursday afternoon, I caught a flight to Halifax, with a further flight to Deer Lake. I spent two hours at Halifax airport, where I drank red wine, ate Mexican food and read Adam Beardsworth’s recent poetry debut, No Place Like (2023), from Gaspereau Press [see my review of such here]. It was Beardsworth who invited me out for this festival, so I thought the least I could do would be to get a sense of him through his work before I arrived. Also, via text from the Halifax airport, I did try to convince him (unsuccessfully) that I was reading his poems aloud to airport patrons to the point that they cheered and held me aloft (the text chain did get a bit ridiculous).

There had been an option for me to leave Ottawa at 6am for the sake of that night’s open set, but I thought I should be around for school drop-offs instead (beyond not wishing to take any kind of 6am flight). Instead, I landed at Deer Lake around 11:30pm local time (the small airport there reminding me of 2004, when I flew out of Charlottetown: remember that trip? I read with Gil McElroy!), and took a forty-minute cab over to Corner Brook, in conversation with the cab driver the entire time. Apparently Corner Brook is a pulp town, and, as I realized, much prettier than Cornwall, but comparable to Prince George (two other pulp towns I’ve spent time in). I landed at the hotel well after midnight thinking it was only 10pm-something back home and I should probably do something, as I still had loads of energy. I was asleep within minutes.

Friday morning: I encountered a woman in the hallway, each of us attempting to navigate our ways down to the lobby, although I got there first (returning the way I came, I thought, made the most sense; apparently she ended up in the kitchen). We realized we were both festival attendees, as she was Halifax writer Karen Kelloway, a YA author at her first ever festival! So we had breakfast together, and I heard all about her Newfoundland-set new novel Keepers of the Pact (Nimbus Publishing, 2023) and her various plans (she even set up a signing at a local Coles, which seemed both smart and ambitious; far more ambitious than I had any energy for). After breakfast, I made my way to the Corner Brook sign for a selfie, and then the Great Canadian Dollar Store, where I replaced my travel-mangled sunglasses (I sent Christine a selfie with new glasses: interesting choice, she responded; I'm pretending I'm like Bono, back when he was still cool). I did attempt to wander a bit, find where Matthew Hollett was setting up his workshop, but couldn’t find him. Once I wandered back from my erratic stretch of walking through the rain, we did meet up for lunch.

I had lunch with Matthew Hollett, I had breakfast with Matthew Hollett, I had dinner with Matthew Hollett, I had breakfast with Matthew Hollett. He is clearly good company. As well, I met up with organizer Adam Beardsworth and his lovely spouse, Shoshanna Ganz [above], at a local (amazing) local brew pub (Bootleg Brew Co.) before the first event. I used to know Shoshanna during her time at the University of Ottawa, but I don’t think I’d seen her since the Al Purdy conference at uOttawa back in 2006 [see my notes on the conference here; see my notes on the post-conference collection that she co-edited here]. It was a delight to see her! It was almost unsettling to consider how many years it had been.

That evening included readings by Shelly Kawaja [above], Jiin Kim, Leo McKay Jr. [left], Matthew Hollett and Maggie Burton. Corner Brook-based writer Shelly Kawaja is the author of the debut novel The Raw Light of Morning (Breakwater Books, 2022). I was quite taken with the short story she read, working through the particular difficulties of her teenaged protagonist. As it was an unpublished work, she asked for notes (I had only one, and it was terribly minor). St. John’s-based writer Jiin Kim read from her debut YA novel Lore Isle (Nimbus Publishing, 2023) (misspoken by the host as “Love Isle,” which would be a very different book). I enjoyed the clarity of her writing, and the sharpness of her narrative. There was a lot going on in that particular book. She was also wearing the most remarkable (black, shiny, nearly distracting) shoes.

Leo McKay Jr. read from What Comes Echoing Back (Vagrant Press, 2023), and his easygoing narrative style, built perfectly for public performance, was reminiscent of the work of Michael Blouin: both know very well how to work dialogue, scene and performance. McKay’s writing was enormously funny, wonderfully dense and quick-witted. And, given how much I’ve encountered him via social media the last bunch of years, I was actually surprised to realize we hadn’t yet met. Hadn’t we? (I'm still convinced that we did, around the time of his debut.) And of course, Matthew Hollett, who I discovered grew up nearby (his parents were in attendance). He read from Optic Nerve (Brick Books, 2023) [see my review of such here], a book I was very pleased to hear aloud. And he’s just about the nicest, he is. St. John’s-based writer, performer, classical violinist and city counsellor (what!) Maggie Burton [above] read from her full-length debut, Chores (Breakwater Books, 2023), an intriguing first-person lyric on women’s labour, relationships, parenting, family history and sexuality. Apparently Burton and Hollett have been part of a small group of writers meeting regularly, which is interesting (and fruitful, it sounds). After the event, we discussed children, as she has a plethora of children, including two very small ones (and she had her eldest at twenty, just as I had, so we have that in common).

Saturday morning: what did I do on my second full day there? I wandered a bit, seeking out whatever I might find. I found a store that sells collectables, only to discover that they had a reproduction of the Mona Lisa (I immediately sent to Christine with a caption suggesting that the one we saw in Paris that time was a complete fake; THE REAL ONE IS HERE IN CORNER BROOK). The store also had two different pump organs from the late 1800s, which I was admittedly tempted by. There were also a handful of images (portraits, photographs, prints, plates etcetera) of a young Princess and/or Queen Elizabeth II throughout. Curious, but I was seeking postcards. Doesn’t anywhere in this town have postcards? I mean, I found the Shoppers Drug Mart, which had stamps; I found the Dollarama, which had some comics I didn’t have (stop looking at Dollarama, Christine responded; go look at Newfoundland!). Once I found Adam, he offered to take me to the Emporium, a small store a bit further that had a whole array of postcards, which I picked up. For reasons unclear to me, this store also had a pipe organ, some plates with the Mona Lisa upon, and a slew of images of the mid-century-era Royal Family. I am sensing a particular theme from Corner Brook, Newfoundland. Why were all these pipe organs brought over, and what has prompted so many to be abandoned? Perhaps one could theorize about the loss of power of the church, and dwindling attendance forcing churches to close, or even modernize (but that is purely conjecture, obviously).

The second evening included readings by myself, Allison Graves, Aley Waterman, Karen Kelloway [left] and Adam Beardsworth. I didn’t realize until I walked into the reading that I would be first, but at least it allowed me to actually hear the rest of the readers. I read the array of poems (a quartet, so far) on our Rose wishing for a fish, getting a fish, and then having various fish die and be replaced (the latest only recently passed, so I am still working on a memorial piece; the household is also still deciding on what we might do next). I was taken by St John’s-based writer Allison Graves’ reading; she read from Soft Serve (Breakwater Books, 2023), her newly-published debut of short stories. Following Graves was Corner Brook writer Aley Waterman [below], recently returned from Toronto, where she’d launched her debut novel Mudflowers (Dundurn, 2023), a book with some fantastic energy to it. Karen Kelloway moved through folklore and YA exploration reading from her latest novel (which she said has been praised by children and grandmothers alike). To close out the readings was Adam Beardsworth [further below], who offered a precise calm through his ecological debut poetry collection of attention, elegy and landscape.

[photo of me reading, by Adam]

And the final morning, a breakfast with Matthew, Adam, Shoshanna before she drove myself and Allison off to the airport, where we each caught our flights home (I flew through Montreal, myself). Where am I now?

The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy

eds. Gerald Lynch, Shoshannah Ganz and Josephene Kealey
I recently got a copy of The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy (Ottawa ON: University of Ottawa Press, 2008), produced out of the conference that the University of Ottawa had on the late poet Alfred W. Purdy a couple of years back [see my note on the conference itself here]. The event even included a poetry reading that Gerald Lynch had me host, with readings by conference participants George Bowering [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Steven Heighton and Laurence Hutchman and two locals, Stephen Brockwell [see his 12 or 20 questions here] and Gwendolyn Guth. The book from the conference itself, then, has a wonderful mix of formal and informal essays, as well as a couple of poems by Brockwell and Guth, written just for the event. I’m very appreciative of being able to go to these conference, with this being my third, after Modernism [see my note on the book for such here] and the Long Poem Symposium back in 1996; I should really start going to more of these things.

One of the highlights of the collection (and of the conference itself) had to be Steven Heighton’s piece “On Trying to Wear Al’s Shirts,” that even includes the editors’ note, “Steven Heighton did in fact deliver an earlier version of the following essay while wearing a loud blue polyester shirt that had belonged to Al Purdy.”

How do we come to wear the shirts of mentor poets? Is it a good thing, bad? Is it a gesture of loyalty or a ghoulish appropriation? Or is it neutral—utterly beside the point? I’m going to talk here in an impressionistic, non-syllogistic way about wearing the shirt of an admired older poet while trying to fill it out in my own manner.

The Bowering piece, while managing to work his way through all of the arguments and concerns of his TISH and post-TISH days, managed to distract just long enough to slip in some of the finest commentary on Purdy and Purdy’s work of the whole event, and is worth the price of the collection alone. Being that George Bowering wrote the first little mimeo on Purdy’s work back in 1970, many of the conference participants, whether they wanted to or not, had to reference what he had done (and a number of them really didn’t seem to happy about that). Bowering’s “Purdy among the Tombs” begins:

Al Purdy and I exchanged letters, as they say, for forty years, so of course we had some differences of opinion. The last time I saw him was a week before he died on Good Friday, 2000. It happened that I owed him a letter, so a couple of years later I left one for him on his book-shaped headstone at the bottom end of Purdy Lane in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

I never thought that he’d write back. I should have known. So here I am with another letter I owe him. I am really looking forward to his reply this time.

The next conference, Postmodernism, promises to be amazing, and happens from May 9-11, 2008 (I’ve already purchased my flight home for such), & even includes two different poetry readings, one by locals that I'm in, and another, with Frank Davey, Dennis Cooley [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Christine Stewart [see her 12 or 20 questions here], the Max Middle Sound Project, etcetera...