For years, I preferred
the idea of cartoon depictions on the back covers of chapbooks and books, as
opposed to professionally-done author photos. I spent a long period unhappy
with any photographic depictions of myself, and thought that by asking comic
artists irregularly to draw me for such would be far more interesting, and make
a cool archive down the road. Since the early 1990s, various artists that have
drawn or painted me include Greg Kerr, Gavin McInnes, Dave Cooper, Heather Spears, David Cation, Diane Woodward, Tom Fowler [see the amazing "engagement photo" he did for us here] and the artist once known as emily
whist (for years, I’ve dreamed of the possibility of an author sketch by Adrian Tomine or Kate Beaton, but so far, nothing yet). There was even a quick sketch
once done by the poet George Murray that I used for a chapbook at one point. Here
are a couple of examples I’ve discovered, while preparing my archives for the
University of Calgary.
I originally
met Ottawa artist and musician Greg Kerr through the small
self-published comics he sold through Crosstown Traffic, Buncha Stories, immediately reaching out to write a short piece on
him for The Charletan, during that
period (circa 1993) I was writing regularly for Carleton University’s paper. Kerr
drew a number of depictions of me over the years (most of which I’m still
digging around my archive for), but he drew this one specifically for my first
Broken Jaw Press publication, the chapbook Poems
from the Blue Horizon (1994).
The “donut”
reference on the coffee cup in the drawing refers to the fact that I wrote for a
number of years in a Dunkin’ Donuts on Bank Street, where he used to
occasionally visit me (after it closed, the location became a Tim Hortons,
currently at the corner of Bank and Gloucester Streets). Without space in my
shared house to write, I wrote six days a week, five hours a day in that donut
shop (from 10am until 3pm) from roughly May, 1994 (after it opened) to June
2000 (when it closed), and most of my first few published books were composed
in that donut shop window. During that period, I wrote poems and reviews in the
donut shop, and fiction during occasional evenings at The Royal Oak.
Greg Kerr
later on had a comic strip included in the visual art and literary journal I produced
in the mid-1990s, Missing Jacket, and
above/ground press produced a small comic of his, Drunkboy Stories (May, 1997). For a short time, his strips were
included in the Ottawa X-Press, but,
despite his loyal legion of Ottawa fans, nothing since.
Gavin McInnes sketched this mocking image of
me for the seventh issue of STANZAS (above/ground
press, November, 1995). The portrait gives the impression he didn’t have high
opinions of either myself, poets or Toronto, but he claimed later that it was
mockery, and he was shocked that I had actually published the thing. Why not? At
that point, McInnes was self-producing a small comic zine he sold through
Crosstown Traffic, but hadn’t yet started up at Vice Magazine. He later appeared on at least one panel on
Politically Incorrect, and has recently produced a series of strange, short and amazing videos.
For a period
after that, McInnes was co-producing a comic strip with Dave Cooper, who still
keeps in touch with him.
emily whist was the pseudonym of the Ottawa
artist Rob Nelms, said to be part of the family that owned and operated Nelms
Opticians. I originally saw his artwork in the strangest corners of the
University of Ottawa during the period I took a poetry workshop there, the
1992-1993 academic year. He had produced a series of very strange images, put
them on stickers, and hid them throughout washrooms, on billboards, and various
other locales.
I don’t
recall specifically how I ended up meeting him, but this image was drawn on a
paper placemat as I sat with Rob and his partner for a couple of minutes around
midnight, at a Chinatown restaurant at the corner of Somerset Street West and
Bronson Avenue. They were having dinner, and I was slowly making my way home
from something, slightly or even somewhat intoxicated (I must have been wearing my "Go Fish" t-shirt that night, produced by another Ottawa artist from that period).
He was
another who drew me more than once, and he even gifted a package of artwork I was
free to use for various above/ground press chapbooks. I used fragments of his
artwork on Natalee Caple’s poetry chapbook, The Appetites of Tiny Hands (Nov 26, 1997), the WHIPlash 2 reader (the anthology of the
second annual WHIPlash poetry festival, June 1997) and various issues of the
long poem journal STANZAS, including meghan
lynch (now Meghan Jackson)’s “inside
first floor at the
randomization factory” (issue #13; June 1997) and ryan fitzpatrick’s “further
revisions” (issue #25; July 2001).
He had
large-scale paintings that once hung in galleries all over Ottawa, and he and
his partner were the core of the most amazing noise-band, The Kittenling
Foundation, who once performed as part of the second annual WHIPlash poetry festival in 1997. Their
performance included a Theremin, singing, noise and a toaster. Stories of what
happened to him after that vary, and are mostly unverified. Needless to say he was
damned talented, incredibly strange, well-liked, and, bafflingly, simply disappeared.
