Our Winnipeg:

Okay, so we spent the weekend in Winnipeg, for the sake of Christine's family things. Her mother is from there, so our whole crew, plus Christine's brother and his family, met up with mother-in-law and her two Winnipeg-based sisters, to acknowledge what would have been Christine's grandfather's one hundredth birthday. The last time I was in Winnipeg was for the sake of the ARP launch in 2023, which was plenty fun [see my report on such here], but this trip more for a couple of family events, and the kids seeing cousins. I've been moving around a lot lately, far more than usual, catching a recent week at the Banff Centre [see my report here] and an exciting weekend in Victoria, with three events in two days [see my reports on such here]. Otherwise, our last family trips would be Park Omega in February [a quick overnight, see my report] or that trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland last July, following Rose and her choir around as they performed [see my reports on such here], or even Calgary, the November prior (where Christine and I also read, and Rose had a birthday) [see my report on such here]. There is talk of our household (sans cats) attempting to drive to Halifax later this summer to visit Christine's brother and his family, but nothing is settled quite yet.

We spent the weekend in Winnipeg, landing Friday just before noon, and the young ladies and I left Christine to rest in our hotel room while we ran off to the Assiniboine Park Zoo [our young ladies have requested fewer pictures of them online, by the way], another Robert Kroetsch reference, his poem "The Winnipeg Zoo" [see also: Mile Zero]. Although, if this zoo (established 1904) was always known as the Assiniboine Park Zoo, why did Kroetsch title his poem thus? Was it the presumption that folk beyond the city's boundaries wouldn't have known the reference? Or was he, in New York State, misremembering? Mid-point through the zoo adventure, we met up with Winnipeg poet Melanie Dennis Unrau [see my review of her debut here], which did prompt Rose to complain less about having to be out at all, at a zoo, whatever. Aoife was having a grand time. She wanted to see snakes! She wanted to see polar bears! Melanie showed us the polar bears, who seemed tired, bored. But the heat was some thirty degrees. One barely poked his head up from the pool.

After the zoo, we went off to meet up with Christine, and then with her brother and his family for dinner, before they took the kids to the pool, and I wandered out to a pub night with various Winnipeg writers (Christine had considered joining, but her energy didn't allow for such), including Unrau [pictured], Marjorie Poor, melanie brannagan frederiksen, K.I. Press, Angeline Schellenberg, Julian Day and Kathy Block at a local place called Barn Hammer, which I quite liked. It was good to meet Schellenberg, who I hadn't prior [she had a "Tuesday poem" back in 2022], and I'd forgotten that Poor actually used to work at the late, lamented Heaven Art & Book Cafe, so we hadn't seen each other since the end-of-Heaven party back in, what, June 1999? Apparently Block had attended, during Covid, an online chapbook-making conversation I was invited to do, sponsored through one of the provincial Writers Guilds (Alberta? most likely). And did you know that Unrau has a new chapbook with Gap Riot Press? It is a lovely thing, hoping to get my hands on a copy of my own at some point. It was a grand adventure! Always good to see folk, certainly.

The next morning, a brunch, as our young ladies hung out with their cousins. More time at the pool, in which the young ladies hung out with their cousins [and I began to read the book, above, that Christine found at the Ottawa airport, as we were leaving]. And a bbq at Christine's auntie's house, where the young ladies hung out further with their cousins, a wall of photographs of Christine's grandparents. Christine's brother's family live in Halifax, after all, so we're only able to see them a couple of times a year. And at the bbq, a birthday cake or two for Christine, to mark her own birthday [do you remember the birthday poem I wrote her in 2011?], even wearing the birthday pin that I got her (or was it the one her mother got her? we each picked up the same). 

We visited the graveyard, on Sunday, where mother-in-law's parents lay, and a quick trip to Red River Books (finally) and then the Manitoba Museum before heading back to the airport. So quick! The big ship at the back of the Museum was pretty cool. Go see that!

And did you know that Winnipeg is the Slurpee Capital of the World? I had no idea! Although we did appreciate it, in the thirty-plus degree heat.

Cleveland Review of Books, Jamie Tennant + Winnipeg Free Press,

American ex-pat poet Katie Ebbitt was good enough to interview me recently, newly up at the Cleveland Review of Books! That's pretty cool, I'd say. We talked about the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and of some of my activity through above/ground press. Jamie Tennant, master podcaster, had me on recently for a conversation around the new poetry book as well, now posted online. And Winnipeg poet melanie brannagan frederiksen reviewed the same poetry title over at Winnipeg Free Press as part of a group review, alongside new titles by Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi and Margo LaPierre as well! Thanks so much! You can catch her review at the link, or below, as she writes:

The latest collection from rob mclennan, The Book of Sentences (University of Calgary Press, 198 pages, $20), is rooted in his close attention both to the matter that makes quotidian life and to the semantic components of language. The COVID-19 pandemic, mclennan’s father’s death, the deaths of poets and friends and the emergence into a more fragile and fractured world are rendered in “The plain language of the earth. Our youngest monologues/ the long grass, anticipating mowers. In lockdown the world// is through this window.”

Among the things mclennan is both working out and honouring in the collection are the personal and intellectual losses and legacies. In Burning the dead grass, he uses the remembered “springtime ritual: layers of controlled burn” as an entry point to consider the settler relation to the land: “Monty Reid: No way to distinguish// what one has chosen to remember// from what one has chosen to forget. {…]/ {…] Lineages// the settler descendants do not reference.”

Overall, the book of sentences is a prolonged consideration of the intersection of writing, thinking and life. From the poems called Autobiography, one of which begins, “Neither a short walk nor a short talk. Once upon a time,” to Lecture, on craft, where “Not the first death./ The ways in which we/ swallow form. A crease// of each turned page,” mclennan brings together citation and observation with equal degrees of attentiveness.

“In Winnipeg / I'll eat your leg.” — Dennis Lee

You know that poem, don’t you? From Dennis Lee’s classic Alligator Pie (Toronto ON: Macmillan, 1974). If you don’t have a copy, you should certainly get one. I doubt the book has been out of print since it originally appeared. Over the weekend, I made my way to Winnipeg for a quick overnight to launch my latest poetry collection, World’s End, (2023), a collection that immediately pre-dates my University of Calgary title, the book of smaller (2022). The publisher, ARP Books, had set up a group launch for a trio of their recent poetry titles, including Ottawa poet natalie hanna’s lisan al’asfour (2022) [see my review of such here] and Vancouver poet Nina Mosall’s Bebakhshid (2023), both of which mark their full-length debuts.

Oh, Winnipeg. It has been a while since I’ve been this way. The prior weekend I was at a festival in Corner Brook, Newfoundland [see my report on such here]. In December, I launched my Mansfield Press pandemic essay collection in Toronto with Stephen Brockwell and Amy Dennis, etc [see my report on such here] and another Toronto reading last July through Larry Sawyer/milk magazine [see my report here]. Remember all those? Before that, nothing back to February 2020, when Christine and I read in Vancouver as part of Lunch Poems at SFU [see my report on such here]. Did I ever do a report on my prior reading in Winnipeg? Going back through my posts, it does look like I toured a full thirty days back in 2006, posting all sorts of travel nonsense during that time [landing in Winnipeg; being in Winnipeg; leaving Winnipeg]. Has it really been that long since I read there? I know I’ve been at least once since to meet up with some of Christine’s aunties and Oma. Either way, I think my notes make more sense now.

natalie and I met at the airport at some ridiculously-early time for our shared flights (a brief stop-over in Toronto), as we shared hazy conversation until boarding (we were seated rather distantly on the flights themselves). I deliberately brought no reading material with me to force myself to finish the final edits on this forthcoming collection of short stories, On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press), supposedly scheduled for next fall, if I can complete these edits in time.

We landed, we made for the hotel, we lunched. We sat for a moment, to breathe. She caught her room prior to lunch, mine wasn’t ready until after. Once we were finished our lunch, she went to crash for a bit and I wandered, ending up at the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, an artist run centre almost directly across the street from our hotel, where I saw some really interesting shows (that I would completely recommend). Farah Al Qasimi’s work, The Swarm, is quite stunning. Ultimately, I was heading to the big ridiculous Winnipeg sign at The Forks, which led me more than a kilometre of walking (repeatedly asking locals if I was headed the correct way), wandering in, around and through downtown in a zigzag. I caught the Portage Place mall (where I spent many hours writing in their food court, during prior visits), and saw the march of some hundreds of people protesting Israel’s bombing of Gaza, which is devastating the Palestinian people (everyone needs to stop all the bombing, please). I wandered the corner of Portage and Main for a selfie, none of which captured either sign for proof. I walked through the train station, one of the few of those original train stations still functioning across Canada (Calgary is shuttered; Edmonton and Ottawa stations relocated years ago). Once I found it, two tourists from Philadelphia were kind enough to capture the photo of me at the sign.

Once done, I headed straight back, another kilometre-plus back into the Exchange district for the sake of Red River Books: this is one of my favourite used bookstores in Canada, and I easily mailed boxes of purchased books home from this store across those years of touring from 1997 to 2006. I made the store by 4pm, just in time to realize it had already been closed for an hour. What! And being Saturday, there was no point attempting the ArtSpace building, which houses Turnstone Press, CV2 magazine, Prairie Fire, The Manitoba Writers Guild, etcetera (I used to spend half a day on each trip wandering the building, visiting). This is when and were I first met Todd Besant, who currently runs ARP Books, during his tenure at Turnstone. Instead, I sought out a seat somewhere for the sake of some food, perhaps, and possibly a drink, landing at the Amsterdam Tea Room and Bar. I mean, I needed to be at the reading venue by 5:30pm, and it was only a couple blocks further, so there was no point in wandering back to the mall for the food court (which I did consider).

The Amsterdam was curious: a fancy bar for tea-flavoured cocktails (their menu for such was extensive; I ordered a stout, avoiding all of that). While there, I wrote postcards for the children, only to have a younger couple nearby stunned that I was writing postcards. It’s a lost art! he said. Can I take your picture writing postcards? she asked? Um, I suppose?

And did you see this? En route to the gallery: a building with a restored original front for that whole block, and new back. Completely lovely.

The reading itself was glorious! It was a small crowd, but quality. I don’t think I’d seen A.J. (Adam) Levin since 2004, when we read together at the Windsor Festival, when I launched my Palimpsest Books title (I still have copies, despite it being out of print). K.I. (Karen) Press looked no different than she had ever done. Why doesn’t she age? And it was great to finally meet (in-person) Winnipeg poets Julian Day, melanie brannagan and above/ground press author Melanie Dennis Unrau. Dennis Cooley, as well, was his usual self, his pulse of electrical energy just there beneath the surface. The benefit, also, of those latter four being above/ground press subscribers, I was able to hand them three envelopes each, which did lighten my load considerably. And did you know cam scott [did you see my review of his latest?] is part of aceart as well? I hadn’t met him yet, either. Oh, he's so good. We’ve been discussing doing a chapbook together for some time now.

Christine’s two maternal aunties were also there! They live in Winnipeg, after all. It was lovely to see them.

The last time I was at aceart, Winnipeg’s glorious artist-run centre, it was in a different location. For reasons unknown, Sylvia Legris thought I should be part of an art auction they were running back in the fall of 1999, and, given I’d recently won the Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Prize for Most Promising Writer (in any genre) in Canada under 30 (their only non-cash prize, but included two free tickets to anywhere Air Canada flew), I was able to use one of those tickets to fly into Winnipeg for the sake of that auction. I stayed with Dennis Cooley, brought along terrible artwork and spent the evening working the bar at the event. At least when Karen Connelly won the same prize nearly a decade earlier, she used her tickets for a bit more purpose: flying to Thailand, where she spent a year composing her Governor General’s Award-winning travel memoir, Touch the Dragon (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1992).

natalie hanna does occupy an interesting space in Ottawa literary circles: despite this being her full-length debut, she’s been active for years (with a break mid-way for the sake of law school and articling), even back to the second half of the 1990s, when she was involved with running readings at Mother Tongue Books (a series, if I recall correctly, organized with Stephanie Bolster) and above/ground press even published a chapbook-length long poem of hers as an issue of the long poem magazine STANZAS. The reading was straightforward enough (and we were all amazing, I’ll have you know), but what was intriguing was Andrew Lee prompting a panel conversation between the three of us at the end of the event. He opened with a question, and then asked if we had questions for each other (I didn’t realize we’d had homework).

Nina, on her part, immediately jumped at the opportunity, and pulled out a whole list of questions she’d prepared (citing that, as a librarian, this was something she was quite good at). Her questions were interesting, although I made a point of prompting her to answer each one as well, after natalie and I had. After a handful of Nina’s questions, I pointed out that all of her questions seemed to be structural (ie: variations on form, as opposed to questions around content), which prompted me to ask her how her poems begin. She hadn’t even realized her direction. I feel seen! she said, startled.

K.I. (Karen) Press

All in all, a very fine event, a very fine trip. Thank you, co-readers, and to everyone at ARP Books: Todd, Irene (in absentia) and Andrew. Thank you.

myself reading! photo by Andrew Lee, ARP Books