semi-precious press

Calgary Venues

2007-10-24T17:19:00.000-06:00

This is such a great idea... I know a few folks with books coming out this fall who've been scrambling for a venue to launch...

k=a=b=a=l=a

2007-10-16T12:54:00.000-06:00

oooooooooooh!

Calgary, Better!

2007-10-10T13:02:00.000-06:00

Anyone voting in the upcoming Calgary civic election, check out The Better Calgary Campaign. Helpful!

You Are Invited! Yes, YOU!

2007-10-02T13:08:00.000-06:00

To the Toronto launch for Booty: Hurricane Jane and Typhoon Mary. Mercury is launching all their fall titles! So Exciting!

Merc! Merc! Mercury!

2007-09-24T11:07:00.001-06:00

My favourite publisher has launched their new site! Hooray for Mercury! You can read about my forthcoming book if you click the "forthcoming" link, appropriately enough, on the site, which is here.

Brea and I have had an excellent time working with Mercury. They are professional, available, super-friendly, flexible, supportive-- I am so excited about the book (launches TBA very soon) and can't wait to see angela and Bev in person in TO to give them a big hug and a buy them a big beer!

multi ilmtu tumil utmli

2007-09-19T13:56:00.000-06:00

WHAT: Calgary MultiArts Variety Show #3
WHEN: Saturday, September 22nd, 7:30 p.m.
WHERE: The Soda, 211 - 12th Ave SW (beside the Drum)

DESCRIPTION: Another big event in support of performers of all kinds and Calgary’s Inn From the Cold Charity. A celebration of Calgary’s imagination!

FEATURING:
BANDS: ‘Kara Keith & Your Dignity’ with ‘The Pine Tarts’
FREESTYLE DJ: Leif Olson
POETS: Calgary Slam Team, Natalie Zina Walschots, William Neil Scott, Jill Hartman, and Brea Burton
SOLO MUSICIANS: ryan fitzpatrick and Michelle
DRAMA: Swallow a Bicycle Performance Troupe
SHORT FILMS: Presented by Garth Whelan

TICKETS:

Tickets $8 at Megatunes and Pages Books on Kensington
Available Saturday September 15

so unorganized

2007-09-12T13:28:00.000-06:00

Brea and I are in the throes of scrambling for cobbling together scratching out a series of tour dates and hosts and venues for Booty. The book is a collaborative work (full title Booty: Hurricane Jane and Typhoon Mary) and will be launched November probably 13 in Toronto, our publisher Mercury’s home. Drifting from blog to blog and searching for reading series and residencies and etc. etc. online always gets me down, quite honestly. I’ve always been patchy at correspondence, even patchier at cataloguing and filing and organizing, so visiting rob mclennan’s blog or Sina Queyras’ blog, I feel like I have failed at life. Ok, not life, but at being in touch and present and engaged with my world and my profession and being the kind of writer who knows how to re-present all the strange and wonderful items of a day or a place or a book and likes to do it daily or even weekly. Blogs. Some writers’ blogs make me so envious.

This fall is going to a little bit busy. The Markin-Flanagan reading with Sina Queryas is on Thursday, then Brea is reading at the Calgary Blow-Out on Friday, and I am also looking forward to hearing Robert Majzels read again, and Emily Carr, who I have heard read just once and who I thought was just terrific, and Bronwyn Haslam. Weekend following Blow-Out, I am reading with Brea, Natalie Walschots, and Neil Scott at the Multi-Arts Variety Show (at Soda at 7:00) and then just couple of days after that Nicole Brossard will be in town. Then the week after that, October 2, I am reading with Rachel Zolf, Sara Lang and Julia Williams at Flywheel (at Pages this time ‘round). The rest of October doesn’t look to congested at this point (not yet anyway, I am sure there are a bunch of things I will want to go to that I haven’t written down—see above about the organizing and filing problem). Then in November, Brea and I and possibly our entourage will be going to Toronto and Ottawa, and maybe one other city. This is after launching in Calgary at one or possibly two places. Oh and Cara Hedley comes to town November 8 to launch her book. And then in December Brea and I are off to Montreal to read at the Atwater series with Jon Paul Fiorentino. If this sounds confusing, it’s because I am feeling a little overwhelmed about juggling dates and places and making sure to do enough to promote Booty, because I want our book to be a success, I want people who might be interested in reading it to find it, to know about it.

Soon Booty will have its own website. That will be pretty cool I think. I’ll post the link here when it is up. Now I am going to go for a walk to enjoy the Calgary fall sunshine like a tourist.

Vacheville!

2007-02-28T12:01:00.000-07:00

It's coming!

Translating Translating Montréal
or: What are those Montrealers Up To, and What’s It To Us in Calgary?
Conference and Readings on Innovative Translational Poetics

CALGARY, March 8 & 9 2007

Join us on March 8 & 9 as the University of Calgary, CJSW 90.9 FM and The New Gallery host Translating Translating Montréal, featuring discussion and performance by four writers from Montréal: Oana Avasilichioaei, Angela Carr, Robert Majzels, and Erín Moure.

Thursday, March 8
University of Calgary – Learning Commons Room, Biology 540A – 2:30pm-5pm - Free

1)Translating Translating Montréal: A Colloquium on the Theory and Practice of Poetic Translation, moderated by Calgary poet Jill Hartman

• Erín Moure – “Co-Translating ‘Nicole Brossard’: Three-Way Spectacle or Spectre de Trois?”
• Oana Avasilichioaei – “Towards a multiplied authorship and against a transparent I: in translational collaboration with the work of Paul Celan and Nichita Stanescu”
• Angela Carr: “Undercover/undiscover: Love and Eros between Languages”
• Robert Majzels: “Whittling: Translating Tang Dynasty Poets into 85 Letters”

University of Calgary – ST 147 – 7pm-8:30pm (by donation)

2)Mountroyal!: Poetry/Translation Performances by the four writers, hosted by dANDelion's kevin mcpherson eckhoff

Friday, March 9
The New Gallery – 516D - 9th Avenue SW – 7:00pm (by donation, door prizes)

3)Vacheville!: Performances by Oana Avasilichioaei, Angela Carr, Robert Majzels, and Erín Moure, hosted by filling Station's Natalie Walschots

The events are sponsored by the Faculty of Humanities, the English Department and the French, Italian and Spanish Department, The New Gallery, CJSW 90.9 FM, along with dANDelion and filling Station magazines.

Oana Avasilichioaei is an emerging Montréal writer who works and teaches at Dawson College in Montréal, and runs the Atwater Poetry Project. She is currently collaborating with Erín Moure on a dialogic work involving translation from and to Romanian texts by Paul Celan and Nichita Stanescu. She has published two translations of Stanescu’s poetry (including Occupational Sickness, BuschekBooks, 2006) and a book of her own poems (Abandon, Wolsak & Wynn, 2005). She has published excerpts from a work in process, feria: a poempark, in a number of journals, and has given readings in Canada, USA and Slovenia.

Angela Carr is a writer and editor based in Montréal. Her translations of the concordance to the Roman de la Rose (Matrix, 2007) are excellent examples of the sort of innovative poetic translations the conference will examine. Her first book of poetry Ropewalk (Snare Books, Montréal) was published in 2006, and she is now working on a new text drawing from medieval and other sources, and from texts in multiple languages. Carr is one of the emerging writers immersed in Montréal’s multilingual and many-cultured scene who reads fluently in more than two languages, and whose work in English is influenced by linguistic and translational concerns.

Robert Majzels, currently on a limited term appointment as an associate professor in the University of Calgary’s English Department, is a novelist, poet, dramatist and past winner of the Governor General’s Award for Translation (for France Daigle’s Just Fine, 2000). His own work has been impacted by French, Hebrew (Apikoros Sleuth, Mercury, 2004) and more recently Chinese (“Books from the Burning Building,” NO Magazine, N.Y, 2006).

Erín Moure, a Governor General’s Award winning poet and author of 13 books, has been involved for several years now on developing innovative translation practices, with books like her acclaimed trans(e)lation of Fernando Pessoa in Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person. She is responsible for making available in English complex works by writers such as the Chilean poet Andrés Ajens, and the Galician poet Chus Pato (M-Tala, Nomados, Vancouver, 2003, and Charenton, Shearsman Books, UK, forthcoming 2007). Erín Moure and Robert Majzels have together translated three books by the renowned innovative Québec poet Nicole Brossard.

Post-Cuba Ennui

2007-02-27T12:23:00.001-07:00

Check out some of my photos from Cuba! We had a great time with Chris and Sandy and Paul's aunts Helen and Eda (at their casa in Playa del Este outside of Havana.) Arrived back in Calgary after 18 hours of travel!!! Feeling cold, so very very cold...

We missed the annual book fair by one day unfortunately, although Eda bought me a couple of books of Spanish poetry. Next time we go, I would like to learn a little Spanish beforehand. But in the meantime, with basically zero knowledge of Spanish, I might try some homophonic translations of the poetry I've got... Translation on my mind after our trip and the "Translating Translating Montréal" conference coming up (more on that closer to the date) and also trying to come up with a final title for Booty. Already behind with Booty business. But before I got too deep into it, I wanted to post some Cuba photos!

Which I've done... Back to work!

No Stinky Basement Suite, Hooray!

2007-02-07T01:46:00.000-07:00

Well, for anyone who was wondering, Paul and Hunter and I found a place to live. We are moving next door-- our wonderful neighbour, who is traveling to Australia and other places for four months, is renting us his house and we're taking care of his cat. Oooohh.... Hunter.... and Jake...... do not get along very well. Yet. And I know Hunter is going to think we are playing some sort of lame and stupid trick on him when he tries to go "home" after a night out carousing with his other bad-ass kitty friends, only to see us on the other porch 20 feet away, beckoning to him with a bowl of tuna, calling to him from THE WRONG HOUSE!

It is actually THE EXACT SAME HOUSE, or at least it would have been when they were both built back in 1918 or so. But our nieghbour's house has been renovated inside, has a washer and dryer, has a claw foot tub and hasn't had its basement turned into an illegal suite. Also it has a new garage, and also our neighbour's television is really nice. So it is better. We are moving on up in the world! We'll be there until August 15th.

I am going a little crazy with the timing of events right now... Trying to keep ahead of everything that needs doing before we, oh, what? Take a holiday to Cuba? Yes, right in the middle of moving house, editing Booty, applying for a grant, and organizing what I fondly like to refer to as the "Vacheville" colloquium. Feeling a bit overwhelmed... Cuba is going to be surreal I think, in the state my mind is in right now. Give me a mojito! Let's go swimming! To Havana! Where is my cigarillo? All at once. At least Cuba is one of those places where it is truly difficult to stay connected to the interwebular autobahn, if you know what I mean. So everything that I leave undone or partially done in Calgary will have to wait. It simply will have to!

Can't wait for Cuba to spend time with Chris and Sandy, then for Vacheville when we get back-- looking forward to seeing Angela and Oana again when they arrive from Mount Royal. I mean Montréal.

Back in Action

2007-01-29T15:32:00.000-07:00

Some amazing good news! Booty is coming out from Mercury, fall 2007!

This news coming on the tail of my appendicitis made me wonder about taking the bad with the good, the spoonful of sugar... I just don't want to have to pay for success with a pound of flesh each time something good happens!

Other fun stuff happening... "Translating Translating Montreal," a conference and night of performance that I've been helping to organize, is a tentative go! More as it happens. Don't schedule anything for March 8 and 9th, just to be on the safe side. I promise, you won't want to miss it.

Appendix-- Literal, Not Literary

2007-01-19T12:24:00.000-07:00

Last Friday night I was feeling ill, then I was feeling really ill with stabby pains in my right ride. That, I thought, was ominous, probably not appendicitis, but I woke up Paul and we decided to go to the Foothills Hospital. By some miracle we got there right before the regular weekend-night population swell and I was admitted and got a bed in the emergency right away. Soon after, I would hear the mysterious "Code Yellow" and "Code Burgundy" announcements as the remaining beds filled up with alcohol-poisoned, drug-overdosed, and beat-up patients (I just hope no one person embodied all three of those problems) while I writhed and moaned and threw up on my precious cot in my coveted partially-curtained-off spot.

The really nice nurses squeezed blood out of my arm, one nurse chided me for trying to force myself to throw up before I came in to the hospital as she took down my story ("I thought if I ate something bad it would be better to get it out!?" "No no no no no never stick your fingers down your throat") and I managed to pee ONLY into the cup for once in my life. I waited a long time before a doctor saw me, but started to feel better after one last puke (so there, chiding nurse) and I settled down to wait, try to sleep, content to know that my blood was likely in a centrifuge in a lab and that at that very moment, someone was looking at my pee with a microscope.

By about mid-morning (after being there for about 6 hours) a doctor with two first names, such as John Frank, although that was not his name, came to see me. I like to call him Dr. First-name-first-name in my memories. He was very nice and for about the third time I told my story. He even did that hand-on-patient-other-hand-tapping-hand thing that I thought was some sort of stage-doctor convention, but no, all the doctors did it to me as the day wore on. Then he revealed that he was going to go talk to his advising doctor or some such thing, as he was some sort of intern, and so I realized I would be waiting, yes, a little longer, and telling my story, yes, at least once more. Which I did, then strained to hear what the two of them were deciding as they chatted over my chart by the nurses' desk across from my cot. They came back and told me they suspected gall stones. Gall stones? What is that? Who gets gall stones? I never even heard of anyone with gall stones. They told me if I had gall stones I would need surgery and a "probe." Any questions? asked Dr. First-name-first-name. "Where does the probe go?" I was most scared of being probed through an incision, but the reality was not really encouraging, and I wished I hadn't asked. (The throat, and they anesthetise you).

The diagnosis is made using ultrasound, so I was wheeled to a room that looked a lot like a massage uh room. It was dimly lit, and I was asked to lie back on a very massage-like table, and the technician spread warmed stuff on my abdomen. Except the stuff was called "Muko" and the lights were dim so she could read her screen more easily without glare, and there was a doctor in the room working at a monitor. Anyway, no gall stones, so back I went, wheeled by a porter, who all wear burgundy. The halls were packed full by this time with patients in beds, and I got a glimpse of the waiting area, and every seat was taken. Ugh. "Code Burgundy" means that all the beds are full and that there is only room in the hallways. I wonder if it has anything to do with the way the porters wear burgundy, so it's as if the hallways are their domain? I still don't know what "Code Yellow" means. I didn't see anyone wearing yellow. The emergency nurses wear navy blue.

The next thing that happened was that I was to have a CT scan, which is one way of checking for appendicitis. I was supposed to drink 1 1/2 litres of radioactive dye in a two hour period before-hand. This didn't sound good, but it turns out that it is mainly water, and you really can't see the dye or taste the dye, and since I hadn't been allowed to have anything to drink since I arrived (about 8 hours earlier) this was really not so bad. I wish they would have chilled it, because lukewarm distilled water is not the tastiest thing to quench your thirst with, but I wasn't about the give up my vats of water for a second.

By this time I think I had seen the nurses change shift three times, and I had thoroughly read a fall Chatelaine and This magazine that Paul had stolen for me from the waiting area. I wasn't in pain, not really, except when I or a doctor pressed on my abdomen (so don't do that, haha) so it was just really boring. I tried to figure out what was wrong with each of the patients in my ward, and sneak peaks at them as I walked by on my now frequent bathroom-visits. This was sort of interesting but mainly depressing, and not really a fun kind of voyeaurism at all. For example, I listened for hours to the four women next to me talking to their elderly mom. Whenever one of them would take her to the washroom, the remaining daughters would immediately begin to talk about how to convince her to get some sort of assisted living. On the other side, there was a long discussion of what kind of catheter was most comfortable for someone who needs one all the time. All this against the backdrop of another very elderly woman who never stopped moaning through her oxygen-mask. I tried to listen to the nurses instead, and there was a fun interlude when one of the nurses told off a lab technician over the phone for refusing to use a blood sample that had a label that the printer had partially squashed. Those nurses were awesome. They were all (aside perhaps from the chiding nurse) really nice and stood up for their patients ("I don't think it's appropriate to take more blood from an emergency patient just because of protocol-- you can read the health-care number, right? So what's the problem? Yes, have your supervisor call me back.")

Finally it was time to be ported again, to the CT scan place. This time I actually just got an escort though, since I could easily walk. The CT scan technician gave me a "top-up" drink of dye and injected me with dye too. The circulatory system is phenomenal! I was told I would feel a "warmth" through my body as the dye dispersed, and within 2 seconds I felt in in every extremety. It was quite something to realize how quickly our blood circulates. The CT scan is the machine that looks like a big doughnut and the bed you are one moves through it. My CT Scanner had a name. It was "Soma-- something. Something like "Somatron" or "Somatastic" or "Somagic."

Back to my pen. I waited probably another hour, then Dr. First-name-first-name came and he looked actually gleeful when he announced that I had appendicitis. I'm not entirely sure why he was so happy-- was it because the mystery was solved, and they guessed right, or because it wasn't something worse, or what? I felt-- a little scared because it meant surgery and I was wishing it was nothing, just some weird gas or I don't know what, but then I realized that it would be far better to have a clear diagnosis and one that had a treatment that was relatively uncomplicated. So then I was not exactly gleeful, but glad, in a "Hey everybody! I have appendicitis!" kind of way.

Then I got to tell my story again to a surgical intern, and then to a surgeon, and then I got to go up to a real bed in a real room. No bed ever felt so comfortable, after 12 hours in an emergency cot after a night with no sleep. I got a sponge-on-stick that I was allowed to dip into ice water to wet my mouth with, because I wasn't supposed to drink anything before surgery. It was my favourite thing, as it allowed my to covertly suck some water as I was pretending merely to moisten my mouth. I played with the bed controls a bit, and dozed a bit, and Paul went home when visiting hours were over at 9 pm, and still I was on call for surgery. I finally fell asleep, and then in the middle of the night it was my turn. The anesthesiologist talked to me, then the surgeon, then the nurse, then I went in to the operating room (this time ported on my whole luxurious bed, although they moved me to an operating bed once in) and they put me to sleep. Not like dogs and cats get put to sleep, though. I didn't get to count backwards, I was out within probably 3 or 4 seconds.

Lord, this story is getting long. Ok. so I woke up gasping and panicing in a large dim room with monitors glowing on the hazy edges of my vision, and a nurse was in front of me urging me to cough and breathe and helping me to sit up. That was probably the worst moment of the whole affair. If I ever claim to have been abducted by aliens, remind me that all the images and feelings probably come from this one moment of coming out of anesthesia. It was truly terrifying-- I was completely disoriented-- I didn't know where or who I was, I couldn't breathe, and I felt like I just came up from almost drowning. The worst of it was over in less than a minute, thankfully. I got wheeled back up to my room with my underwear in a bag on my chest with my name on a label (not squashed) printed on it. The nurses put things like velcro leggings on me that rythmically contracted and let go, this was to help my circulation apparently. And I got ice water to drink (Hooray!) and warmed blankets and morphine. In the morning I realized I had a catheter (Horrors!) and I got a popsicle, jello and vegetable broth for breakfast, which I had absolutely no interest in. I believe Paul ate my jello.

In the afternoon, my parents came to see me, and we went for a celebratory lap around the floor, pushing my I.V. pole along, the reward for which was to have my catheter removed (Hooray!). Chris and Sandy came to visit, and brought me a little stuffed elephant whom I named "Sniffy" and then Andrea and Jason came to visit, and brought a little stuffed elephant whom I named "Pinky." Paul had brought me a little stuffed cat that looks just like Hunter, and we sort of called him "Hunterette," but that's not final. I got my I.V. taken out (Hooray!) and got to switch to Percocet from morphine (I much prefer Percocet). I played with a mysterious device called "Voldyne 5000" that's meant to help you oxygenate your blood. I stayed another night, feeling better all the time, and the next day I was able to go home in the evening, with no problems, except I puked into the gutter from the car just as we left, causing some smokers to inch away in disgust. Ha ha!

So, I have been home since monday night, and Hunter and I have been watching a lot of Project Runway and Arrested Development (Thanks Andrea and Jason!) and sleeping a lot and getting really really bored as I feel better and better. The recovery is supposed to take 2-3 weeks. Last night I think I pulled apart an inside suture. I called the invaluable "Healthlink" line-- (did you know you can call and talk to a registered nurse over the phone any time of the day or night? I didn't know that! How handy is that?!!) and today I am back to hobbling a bit and walking carefully and trying to keep still, bleargh, but I am feeling better all the time aside from that little set-back. I only have three little "stab-sites"-- they used some sort of chopstick-scalpel or maybe a laser and a camera to remove the appendix. One is sort of IN my bellybutton, one is just above my public hair, and the third is the only one that will really show, off to the left side. I don't have stitches, just tape over the stab-sites, although I guess I have some sutures with dissolvable stitches inside, as the Healthlink nurse explained.

That's my story! Hooray for the health-care peeps at the Foothills Hospital, it was fast, efficient, and everyone was really nice and explained things to me. Thank-you to all well-wishers and most of all to the heroic Paul, who's getting awfully tired himself after all this-- if you see him, give him a chuck on the chin! Goodbye to my appendix! Silly thing really. Who needs it!Thanks to Sniffy for demonstrating what my large instestine looks like before (at start of post) and after (here at the end)!

what's auld, what's newe

2007-01-10T02:32:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time! Hello. How was your New Year's and the bit that comes before? I had a nice time in Winnipeg with Paul, all things Kennett and Kowalawich, Hedley, Ducroix, Woods, Prince, and, well, you get the picture. Er, though I don't really have many pictures of people, here are some of the drive and the big snowfall we had just around New Year's.

2006, 2006... What can I say.

Nice things about 2006-- attending the Sage Hill Writing Experience and getting to know some new Montreal and Winnipeg friends... Revisiting my Scrabbalah project there and going on to publish new work from it in NoD and this month's Matrix. Having work from St. Ampede appear in Capilano Review... Appearing on the cover of Alberta Views as the antlered face of Alberta's "evolving culture..." Leading a poetry workshop at the Alexandra Writers Centre and getting to know three particularly talented poets who don't travel in the (sometimes claustrophopic) "Calgary Writing Community..." Joining the board of the Alberta Magazine Publisher's Association and meeting interesting and energetic people publishing magazines about all kinds of things, from horses to art to seniors to poetry... Our downstairs neighbour's cat Shudu returning after being missing for two weeks...

Not so nice things about 2006-- applying for two jobs at one of the few Calgary-based publishing companies, getting really excited about each job in succession and not getting either of them... Having the Booty rejected sight unseen from the fourth publisher we've tried... Having Scrabbalah rejected (albeit very nicely) on it's first submission...

Things that are neither all good nor all bad-- the house we've been in for about 4 years being sold (our address will be changing in March)... the Calgary Blow-Out and how things have changed since... Friends who've moved elsewhere (I wish they lived here but it's nice to visit other cities and nice to have pajama parties when they visit us!)

Things I am looking forward to in 2007-- !!!Cuba!!! in February with Paul, Chris and Sandy... Finding a new home... Getting two more cats to join Hunter...

And what am I wishing for? I so want at least one of my completed manuscripts to get accepted for publication, before they are published in their entirety in dribs and drabs and bits in 18 different magazines and chapbooks... And I am in the process of applying for some Writer-in-Residencies-- I would love to go to Vancouver Island, the Yukon, Toronto, or even get one here in Calgary...

And I resolve to: be a positive force and be open to the positive things around me. I was chatting with Andre for a long time at Travis, Jason, and Andrea's party before Christmas and I was struck by what an amazingly good-hearted and positive person he is. So, sure, making a list of the not-nice-things that happened in 2006 isn't all that positive, but it will be the last time I mention them as a negative, just to get it out of my system. Yay 2007!

Friday Morning, I Opened the Cream from the Wrong Side, Be Good Tanyas

2006-11-17T08:43:00.000-07:00

It still pours just fine :P

Feeling a little Be Good Tanya... Finished teaching my 8-week course at the writer's centre last night and caught robbie-o at the pub (missed his reading from his new, Aubade.) I had a Freddish average of students finish the course with me (3/7) but boy am I thrilled with their manuscripts and their writing... Dr. tell-me-no-secrets-I'll-tell-you-know-Lai's (heh don't even really know what that means) visit for her convocation was one of those Calgary love-in moments, and emails from Grecian Formula Gordo and from Patrician Hazel (um heh meaning Cara) and the melting disintegrating jack-o-lantern on our for-sale porch, why, it's all just got me feeling luxuriously melancholy. "Things keep changing..."

Paul and I are going to see the BGT overdrive at Knox United on Dec. 7.

Going to prepare some of that St. Ampede stuff for submission. Accidentally printed a student's MS on the back of St. Ampede poems I thought sucked. But now I like them again. Could it be my mood? Nostalgia and melancholy are enabling bedfellows.

Reflection is Fun!

2006-08-13T13:28:00.000-06:00

Navel-gazing... My favourite Tarot site no longer offers readings, so I just found a new one: Lotus Tarot. I've been getting back into Tarot lately-- took some cards with me to Sage Hill and did a reading for myself and a couple of other people. These images are from Aeclectic Tarot.

Call Me "Teach"

2006-08-13T13:03:00.000-06:00

I'll be running an 8-week poetry workshop at the Alexandra Writer's Centre this fall:

3.00 Poet! Get Thee to a Publisher

Instructor: Jill Hartman
Fee: $110 members $140 non-members
Day: Thursdays
Time: 7:30 - 9:30 PM
Date: Commencing Thursday, September 28, 2006

Intermediate and advanced writers with a body of unpublished work; what are you waiting for? This weekly workshop will help you pull that overwhelming pile of paper on your desk together and shape it into a neat and tidy manuscript with guidance, critiques, and feedback from the instructor and other participants. We’ll also discuss publishing options suitable for each person's project. Participants should approach the course with a body of work (at least 15-20 pages/poems or more) and expect to write enough new material to end the course with 40-110 pages.

I'm also running a Saturday Seminar, on November 18, out of the same super little organization. A repeat (yet new and improved!) of last spring's chapbook/small press workshop. I'm hoping it'll compliment the 8-week course nicely.

Alberta Welcome-Wagon

2006-08-08T11:55:00.000-06:00

Within a day or two of being back in Alberta, Paul and I went on a little hike in the Kananaskis. Pictured above is the Sandwich-Seeking Not-So-Big-Horned Sheep. No, we didn't feed him any sandwiches, but some unscrupulous humans obviously had before, the way he stuck his head right into the car.

We hiked "Ptarmigan Cirque." I really wanted to see a Hoary Marmot (I couldn't make that up!), but those Hoary Marmots were probably off in their Hoary homes. We did see ground squirrels (of course), a pika, and ptarmigans! Below is an image of them. They sort of blend in-- but I swear, they are there, ptuttering and ptecking.

Jul-August Backdate!

2006-08-08T11:18:00.000-06:00

Alright, I am back from Sage Hill, I've been spotted 'round the town so I can't lay low any longer.

Q. How was Sage Hill?

A. It was great! Friars, 100-year old Birthday Party for everyone, Northern Lights as I have never seen (half the sky, or er, half the hemisphere, so the quarter-sphere? and green and red!) Film screenings, Experient Readings, Nicole Brossard! Laundromat afternoon during which I read Mauve Desert! bpnichol pome poem recital by a spontaneous group of non-sound-poets! Tarot cards and Scrabble games and labyrinth walking, humid heat wave and thunderstorms and strange prairie birds, clouds of yellow butterflies and even some sage...

Q. But did you get any writing done?

A. Yes! I wrote 20 pages of new material and with Nicole's help felt brave enough to cut about 50 pages of failed attempts to finish the book that I'd written before I ever got to Magical Wonderful Sage Hill! I wrote new CONCRETE poems! And prose poems! Weird! In a couple of weeks the manuscript will be well and truly done and I will send it to be (hopefully) published! Hooray!

Q. A cell? Really? Like a monk?

A. Yep-- sometimes one needs a cell of one's own. It was perfect!
I met so many talented and cool people and I have lots of new books to read. It is a great program-- so well-run and such a great setting. The person who makes the magic happen, Steven Ross Smith, is taking a year's sabbatical from the program that he has been director of for 17 years (!), but he's got a temporary magic-maker doing his job for that year. You writers reading this should go! You'll love it!

July Update!

2006-07-22T12:49:00.000-06:00

On Sunday or Monday I leave for the "Sage Hill Experience," a writing program/retreat in Lumsden, Saskatchewan. I will be participating in the Poetry Colloquium led by Nicole Brossard. I am pretty excited about working with Brossard and being at Sage Hill, but I must admit I have mixed feelings about the project I am taking with me to develop. I'm setting aside my St. Ampede work for now (some of which you can find in the forthcoming Capilano Review) to revisit my Scrabble/Oujia project, which I last worked on more than a year ago. JA = Nine: Scrabbalah is narrative poetry about a woman who uses a Ouija Board to contact a ghost-poet, and the ghost-poet uses the Ouija Board to play Scrabble. I completed a version of this manuscript as my Master's thesis last spring, but the more time I have away from it, the more I know that while the thesis was successful in its purpose, the manuscript is-- well-- failed. I made too many compromises trying to satisfy my supervisor's tastes and preferences, and ended up with a manuscript that isn't really me. It's not very interesting, for one, and the unusual formal elements are not all that unusual. Having time away from the project was definitely necessary. Part of my reluctance to dive back in is that I have about 10 versions of the manuscript, some differing in small elements and some different by up to 20 pages of material. Which is the "real" manuscript? Where do I start?

I'll probably start with the writing sample I sent to Sage Hill. Not too voluminous, and a bit of a mix of some of the elelments I think I want to make work, even though they don't cohere yet. I love the book that this could be, but right now it is one of the most awkward collections of drafts I have.

And what's going on with getting The Booty published these days? Brea Burton and I have had a rejection, a negotiation, a false start, and the manuscript is still sitting at the publisher we most want to work with-- you know the one, the publisher who takes 1-3 years to respond. At the start of our journey to get the manuscript published, it seemed that we would certainly have a publisher before 1-3 years went by. Now, I am really starting to hope that publisher X will get to reading it. If I knew we weren't going to get anywhere in the last year and a half, I could have just accepted that publisher X would respond in a couple of years, and not run around and wasted energy trying to convince publishers to take a chance on a funny, bawdy, feminist, two-backed beast. Where are you, risk-taking publishers? Yarr....

Stealing Content from Gary Barwin

2006-05-29T12:50:00.000-06:00

Ok, so Gary Barwin's blog is one of the ones I check out now and again, seeing as it's one of the ones linked on one of the ones I link, you get the picture, and so forgive me if you've already seen this Kevin Bacon, and any other of the 6 degrees, but I just love this site!

Ah, Memories

2006-05-12T14:55:00.000-06:00

I was looking at some photos and feeling a little nostalgic. I had a dream last night that seemed to be about me being on a reality-show of some sort in Scotland. Well, I actually did go to Scotland in 2004 to perform with Brea Burton and Cara Hedley at a conference at the University of Stirling, and derk b, Brett S. and Paulie K. came too. I noticed a trend in the photos-- not just the ones from Scotland, either-- first, exhibit A-- Brea double-fisting drinks, is remarkably similar to what the shadowy figure in my previous post is doing.
The second trend I noticed is what we like to call "Blue Steel" and/or "Le Tigre." Fans of Ben Stiller will recognize this look. I have countless photos of Blue Steel, but Cara's example in the photo is, well, exemplary. She's so cute! Note as well Paul's "Mirror-Steel."
A third common pose seems to be the "tongue-on-cheek" show of affection. It is sometimes very sweet, as in the photo of me and Paul from Scotland-- is that bliss on Paul's face? Yes, I believe it is.

But sometimes the gesture is meant to disarm, as in the photos of me and Jordan and of Cara and Jason. Those two boys are very stoic, but when successful, the tongue-on-cheek results in one of my favourite photos of me, Glen and Erin. Shock and alarm!

There were other trends I noticed, for example the "No-Pants" trend and the "Let's Embarrass Travis" trend (which seems to generally coincide with the "No-Pants" technique), but the upshot is that I am silly. No, really, look at the last exhibit! I am silly, my friends are silly, and I love them! Hooray! Anyway, I'm not sure what my dream was about other than I need to take a holiday again. It feels like summer and I miss Paul, who is participating in the writers' studio out at Banff. He's having a great time and I am thinking of getting a kitten. I spent an hour on Cute Overload last night when maybe I should have tried writing. Or publishing or writing a business plan or doing my taxes or reorginizing the furniture or... The strange thing is, I am also feeling like I need alone-time, along with my nostalgia. Weird, huh?

She's Master Burton Now!

2006-05-11T13:37:00.000-06:00

Congratulations to Brea Burton on the successful defense of her Master's Thesis! A few of us got together yesterday to help Brea celebrate. In these photos you'll see Brea holding her bottle of Jim Beam and her "I'm-too-drunk-to-drive-please-don't-tow-my-car" parking pass as we leave the University, sunburnt and still thirsty. The rest of the photos are at the Kensington Pub, where someone appears to be double-fisting drinks in the shadows while Brea drunk dials all the out-of-towners. Ahem. One of my favourite photos is the sunray pointing to what Brea got-- a "Number One." She's Number One! She's Number One!

Lamp-Love-in!

2006-05-07T16:09:00.000-06:00

Andre Rodrigues was the only one to show up at Chris Ewart's hometown launch with an actual lamp-shade on his head-- more of a torchiere bowl, and he looked, as Paul pointed out, like a member of Devo, only rounder, softer, and altogether more Andre. Paul and I met Chris Blais sprinting down Kensington Road, as it was 7:30, the scheduled start-time for Ewie's reading, but we reminded Chris Blais that Chris Ewart was likely still at home doing some sit-ups without a shirt on and still needed to choose his reading for the evening. In other words, our Ewie is ALWAYS late, and we fully expected him to be late for his own launch. I'll give him credit, he was there, as were about 50 of his friends and fans, but everyone was outside laughing and enjoying the sun.

We filed in to Pages soon enough. Chris's reading was terrific. His performance of the different characters' chapters was funny and sweet. I've heard Chris read from this project quite a lot in the past few years, and it was kind of thrilling to hear and know and feel that it is complete. It's gelled, and that's some yummy jello! I shivered a little at how good it is. Miss Lamp is on my bedside table and I've been reading myself to sleep with it so that my dreams are sweet and quirky and funny. I have to admit, I never got the "Banana Tray Hair" image until Chris's launch reading. I always imagined it was a tray that bananas might be sold on by the bunch, like a styrofoam tray that you get meat on. I've never seen bananas sold this way, but it was all that I could conjure up. But finally, now that the book is done, the image is clear to me! Thank you, Chris, for reading the passage that includes the line "Her hair is yellow like the banana tray in front of her checkout and she has all the shape of a swizzle stick"-- gears moved, clicked, and all of a sudden I got it!

Well, it wouldn't be Chris if we didn't go to the Kensington Pub, and we did, so it was. And it wouldn't be Chris if somehow he wasn't late for some part of the evening, and he was, because although he'd booked the upstairs in anticipation of us all streaming out, he sold, I believe, over 50 books and sat signing them at Pages for far longer than he thought he would, so when we got there, the pub was full of a bunch of unlucky people who didn't even know about Miss Lamp. Yet.

And in conclusion, to tie this little report together, I'll let you know that once again we convinced Sandy Lam to do her Bill Cosby impression, the one where she talks about Jello Pudding Pops and also what the jazz is all about, but Aaron Smelski had to do it too to convince her to do it. They were probably banana-flavoured Jello Pudding Pops.

Go here to order your very own copy of Miss Lamp!

Ridiculously Good Writers

2006-04-29T13:59:00.000-06:00

One of the nice things about having friends who are writers who don't live in the same town as you do is that you tend to get stuff when they visit. Hooray! Like books, I mean, and also dinner sometimes. Jon Paul gave us his book Asthmatica, mainly because he has a man-crush on Paul. I've been reading it to relieve myself of the tension of The True History of the Kelly Gang, which is getting really sad, what with Ned Kelly's mom losing her teeth and itinerant husbands left right and centre. Wow, is Asthmatica ever good! I remember being really jealous when I saw that JPF had written crossword puzzle poems and published them in Matrix. That's totally cheating, Tino. My crossword poems weren't any good and weren't funny at all and my thesis advisor at the time advised me to stop writing them, and he was probably right, but it still hurt that someone else had the same idea as I did and did it better and was in a position to say "Screw you, academics, I'm publishing them myself!" So the crossword poems are in Asthmatica along with a healthy dollop of other really good stuff. I'm so jealous. I wish I could be less serious and more fun just like Tino Dancer, only without being called the Elton John of Canadian Letters.

Speaking of writers stealing each other's ideas-- er I mean being mutually responsive and reflexive or something like that-- below are two examples of "Framing the Narrative," one by me, the other by Chris Ewart. Chris wrote a story responding to derek beaulieu's concrete poem and had Paul Kennett and Sandy Lam assist him in reading it on thursday night at the NoD launch. I perfromed mine at his Calgary launch at Pages about a month or so ago. derek's been getting people to do his dirty work for him with the poems from his latest book Fractal Ecomonies (sic) since the poems are basically impossible to read conventionally and he knows it.

He also managed to corral angela and Fiddy, who, you'll notice from the photos, are also plagiarizing each other. They both did an interpretive dance. Ok, just kidding, we all know Fiddy would never do that. He read a couple of his own poems, showing some self-promotion smarts there, while angela DID in fact dance. In homage to "derek's unhealthy obsession with rubbing," she treated us to some frottage. Like a katydid. angeladid. In keeping with the theme of stealing ideas, Kevin McPherson read some poems earlier in the evening-- found language from comic books, but only the POWS FRAPS BANGS and POKS. He vowed never to read them again, since he'd learned that Mark Hopkins had the same idea, but really, he should perform them MORE, not less, thereby staking his claim.

The night was so full of readers I can't even name them all, because I didn't take any notes. It's this new thing I'm trying for blog reviews-- I call it "irresponsibility." Actually, it was more that I was a little nervous, since I was performing with angela from WSfL and we'd only had an hour or two to practice that afternoon. I ~think~ it went really well... angela is a very skilled performer, and had rehearsed with other people at length, so any pauses/mistakes/missed cues were entirely on my side of the a hoosh. Anyway, in addition to the four stars of the evening (beaulieu, Christie, Fiorentino and rawlings), I think the most interesting and fun performance was from James Dangerous, who read a story and then sang a translation of a fictional poet's fictional poem in a fictional language, and there were singing bowls, gongs and an impressive tremolo. Nicely done, Dangerous!

The evening at The Carpenter's Union Hall wrapped up with The Russian Artist Factory playing some songs, and there was some ridiculously good dancing. Then there was pizza. I found that I am a ridiculously good photographer, especially with a head rush from intensive a hooshing and a ha-ing, as evidenced below. Too bad my camera's batteries ran out! Also-- see how derek is trying to take over JPF's staus as the Elton John of Canadian letters? He can't even play the piano! C'mon!

We miss you already, angela and Jon Paul!

Guess Who Put the Nch Back in Launch?

2006-04-27T12:21:00.000-06:00

Congratulations to dear friends and fellow dealers in smut Jason Christie, Jon Paul Fiorentino and angela rawlings on their wild and fun joint book launch at the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival! Their books of wonder and fabulousness, Canada Post, The Theory of the Loser Class, and Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists are a trio of excellence in the pool of awesomeness that is Canadian poetry these days! I smell book awards! Mmmm... smells sort of chemically...

Jason read first, tickling the crowd's collective sweet spot with his gently sad poems about capitalism, nationalism and language. Example--

GALLOP POLL
Fuck off!

Canada Post's "I" puns and disjuncts language, sentences and lifts headlines to urge the listener/reader in the gentlest way possible to shift their paradigm and join a quiet revolution... or maybe eat some pancakes--...West Hillhurst will separate if our demands are not met...

angela rawlings read next, treating us to a hoosh and a ha. Check out the fluttery action of her hand in the photo! Her reading from WSfL was seductive and disturbing, a perfect performance of the text's treatment of sleepy innocence and the violence of aquisitiveness. The juxtaposition of angela's text with her live performance is the ideal demonstration of the difference between a live moth and one pinned, between in silk nests caterpillars in silk... larva is a cage where moths bleed silk and Collect, kill, and mount specimen. WSfL cries out for its flipside whether you are reading the text (beautifully treated and visually stunning) or listening and watching angela's performance. I feel so lucky to have experienced both.

Tino FM brought the scheduled part of the evening to a close with his energetic greeting to Moosejawians. Er Moosejawers. Um Moosejavans. Micejaw? A confused Fiorentino read work that fitted nicely with Christie's (We don't have much time left/ so please don't touch me) interspersing poems with banter that can only be described as witty. The Elton John of Canadian Letters (someone in Ottawa called him that and we're never going to let Jonny forget it!) is a crowd-pleasing bundle of fun, and his newest book is a snappy mix of playful ("Binary Code Sonnet 1.0"-- ...01001001001...) and lovely (a trail of loosestrife led me/ home // always maintained a semblance of balance/ the challenge to temporality // That is to say/ I'm lonely or lonesome or both). His performance was a fun wrap-up to the trio of launches--Jon Paul is always a hoot. A ha.

The charismatic and gracious host Paul Kennett brought us back for the second part of the evening, the OPEN MIC. I believe there were eight eager beavers who signed up for their two minutes of glory, and the ensuing oral happening was varied and on the whole, AWSORM. No one had to be herded off the stage and there were many styles, many styles, ranging from spoken word and spoken word/hip hop to avant garde language poetry and Bok beat box. I expect nothing less from our talent pool of readers/listeners, and our community is lucky to have so many poets who know how to listen and so many listeners who know how to poet. Well done open mikers!

Next? The NoD launch at Ye Olde Carpenters' Union Hall... There will be readings, oh yes, there will be readings, and happy faces. Tune in again and maybe I will have more to say and more importantly, more fun photos! Here area few for the road-- open mikers Emily Elder, X Box, and Fiddy, Laurie Fuhr and Ryan Fitzpatrick, the mess of paper and text and drink on our tiny table-- oh, the writing life! A hoosh!

Magalomania

2006-03-03T11:17:00.000-07:00

Went last night out in the cold and snow to Pages Bookstore on Kensington road for the Magalomania reading, put on by AMPA, otherwise known as The Alberta Magazine Publisher's Association. First to read was Sandra Vida, who read a piece she wrote for Artichoke magazine. It was a series of journal entries interspersed with a narrative describing her visit to Glasgow and some of what she learned about the "Glasgow Girls," "The Glasgow Boys," and the "Glasgow Gorillas" (Geurillas?) and her performance at the People's Palace wearing a gorilla mask, playing hopscotch. A very well-written and engaging piece of journalism, and a great example of the kind of writing that literary and arts magazines can host. I can't imagine a newspaper indulging Vida or anyone in that particular kind of literary journalism-- but an arts magazine has the ideological space to allow writers creative license, and even allow them to write about themselves as subject in the first person!

Speaking of creative license, Christian Bok read second. He read "Chapter I" from Eunoia, some pieces from his current work in progress The Cyborg Opera including a beatbox piece, and ended with his Ubu poem. Well-read, very well-performed. The room was small enough that his impressive projection abilities made the furniture resonate and the room was full enough that our bodies absorbed enough sound to dampen the echoic tendency of such a ringing delivery. Fun! Jordan Nail held up a sign for Christian that said "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E enough for ya?" with "Bring out Robert Frost" on the flip side, which made for a fair amount of hilarity and broke a bit of the inevitable tension that builds when you've got a crowd of literary types who run the gamut of style, school, etc. (the event was, in addition to being a great couple of very different readings, also a promotion for nine Alberta magazines including filling Station and dANDelion but also Alberta Views, Prairie Journal, and the Alexandra Writers' Centre publication Freefall, among others. Subscriptions to all the magazines are currently available through AMPA for 25% off! Email ampa@albertamagazines.com with the subject line "maglo06" if you would like to take advantage of the offer.)

Congratulations Papa Smurph

2006-01-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

Last week (boy time sure flies! um) I went to Travis Murphy's art opening. I meant to bring my camera, but I forgot it, so I can't post any photos of the show. I meant to take notes, but I don't even know what the title of the show is. Was. It's probably over by now-- I think the Little Gallery (see-- I know the location at least) has a high rate of turnover, what with all those Visual Art students vying for space. So I can't really recommend you go see it, because I bet some young turk with charcoal-stained clothes and interesting hair is already in there painting and sanding and imperiously pointing to blank spaces, friends scurrying to and fro with mixed-media trailing behind them in an effort to get the new show ready for its opening.

But I can tell you that Travis (fondly known as Smurphy, smirkingly known as Randy, and when we're abusing him, known as Louise) and his real friends Sandy Lam, Chris Ewart and derek beaulieu put up a really cool exhibit and Travis' hair was just as interesting as ever. The theme of the work (mixed media) was Travis' late lamented knuckle-- you know, the one he savagely mangled using the wood shop at the Art Department last fall. Talk about self-reflexive! Or not so flexive. Or extra-flexive, because it is a bionic joint now.

There were wax and resin casts of his (non-injured) arm and fingers, grainy and too-close x-rays of his knuckle, a photo essay of his developing bruise and healing finger, and pride of place, an examination table. The idea of the ideal was suggested by a diagram of the Golden Mean as applied to a human arm alongside a cast of Travis’ uninjured left arm and hand. The casts of fingers were laid out in a sequence of opaque wax gradually lightening to transparent resin to reveal springs and screws embedded in the knuckles. He used mouse trap springs! I liked that. I bet Jason Christie really liked that too—what with his Robot poems. I bet Larissa Lai would have found it really interesting too, since she also had a recent mechanical injury.

Well I liked it, and I did have my New Year's Conga-Line Disaster-injury to ponder on (not that that was very bad at all-- turns out those hot springs actually DO have healing properties!) And the opening was well-attended. Wine was drunk and so was I har har har. No actually I wasn’t, I left early—that is, earlier than the move of location to Ming and the exhibition that Travis apparently put on there. Something about passing out, though sitting up?

An Open Letter to Matrix:

2006-01-16T14:04:00.000-07:00

How did you get so perfect? “The New Canadian Pornography” by angela rawlings, “The Writer’s Hobbyhorse” by Steve Luxton, featured poetry by Anastasia Jones about Betty, Veronica, etc.—all touch on stuff I am trying to write, and present (much like a baboon presenting red ass) ideas for looting—er—inspiration. Um, weird metaphor. Maybe I should go back to reading Matrix for more inspiration.

Anyway, my Stampede poetry project (so far) is aimed at exposing the absurdity of the romanticized rural, the cultural violence of the Western pastoral that Steve Luxton is interested in—though instead of writing about Western heroes like Doc Holliday and Wild Bill Hickock as Luxton does, or about Billy the Kid (my favourite book of all time, tied with XEclogue by Lisa Robertson, is The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje), I am writing about “Cowboy Poetry” and “St. Ampede” and uh Wonder Woman. I’ve been writing a lot about sex, sexism, gender, slang and violence with the Booty MS (TWAT Team material—still no word on WHEN WHEN WHEN it will be published) and the Stampede project is a way to continue writing the good fight, but this time in context of gender modeling in a very specific place I know very well—good ol’ cowtown. So you see, the rawlings landscape pornography, the Jones treatment of comics characters’ inner lives, the Luxton discussion of the Western Romance, all give me a prod in the direction of sitting down and getting to writing the Stampede. So I will. Go write.

Thank you, I love you,

Jill

My Alberta Beef, Ice Cream, & Haiku in the Winter

2006-01-08T13:09:00.000-07:00

Paul and I made chapbooks to give as presents this year. (Sorry the photo's kind of crummy-- I am still having some trouble uploading photos sometimes and I couldn't upload the edited cropped and enhanced photo that I so carefully prepared. Grr.) I am also teaching a chapbook workshop on March 18th at the Alexandra Writers' Centre:

Whoever said small press was small potatoes? Sure, a chapbook rarely nets you more than beer-and-nacho money when you sell a few after a reading, but chapbooks can serve as impressive calling cards, literary ephemera to trade for other books or chapbooks, and a valuable textual link between you and a potential reader.

Bring 1-5 poems or a short short story (postcard) and we’ll use paper, scissors, glue, string, staples, typewriters, stamps and paper cutters in assembly-line-production-style to produce chapbooks under the imprint Alexandrite Press in editions of 30. Lots of examples of chapbooks will be provided for inspiration, and you’ll leave with 20 copies of your own chapbook and 10 different chapbooks from each of the participants (based on a 10 person class size)- an instant collection! While we’re working, you’ll learn lots of handy small press skills as well as tidbits and tips about being part of the small press community.

So, I guess I am back at it-- the next semi-precious press chapbook (or precious city press, as the My Alberta Beef and Ice Cream chappies were printed as-- a combo of my imprint and Paul's One Great City Press) will be a poem of Trevor Speller's that I've been meaning to do since the filling Station Blow-out in the summer.

Look for it here in the next little while!

P.S.-- anyone who has been wanting to borrow my long-arm stapler or paper-cutter, why not sign up for the chapbook workshop? I promise it will be fun. C'mon, fifty bucks is nothing for a collection of ten chapbooks! How else are you gonna spend your Saturday afternoon and your $50.00-- on the Ship & Anchor patio? Ya lushes.

Halcyon New Year's Trip of Wonders!

2006-01-06T16:23:00.000-07:00

Breakfast at 2 pm? It's Halcyon time! (Also known as Ewart time in other places...) Paul made delicious omelettes to order and all our clothes redolent of bacon for the duration of the trip. Jordan enjoyed doing calf raises on the deck. Julia, Paul and I watched Jordan, Chris and Dan doing manly calisthenics like it was TV! (I won't post the pic of Sandy pantsing Chris as he does pull-ups.)

Halcyon New Year's Trip of Wonders...

2006-01-06T16:22:00.000-07:00

The only two New Year's Eve photos that were clean enough (or focussed enough-- ramped up on tequila and braised in the hot hot pool with champagne, I honestly can't remember getting out of the hot springs and back to the cabin. Paul and I both misplaced our bathing suits, there was a conga-line accident, Jordan lost his water bottle. Hmmm. I recall pie-eating and someone's manly chest in some combination, but little else after midnight. What a bunch of nuts!)

Halcyon New Year's Trip of Wonders

2006-01-06T15:56:00.000-07:00

The fun outdoors adventure that I didn't go on due to previously-mentioned conga-line disaster. Oh, let's face it, I had a migraine from excessive drinking!

Halcyon Hooray!

2005-12-27T13:35:00.000-07:00

Santa Doodle got me some memory for Christmas so I can finally upload photos to my blog! Yay! Here are some from last fall's trip to Halcyon Hot Springs. Those of us going back will raise a glass to those who miss out this year and we'll get Jordan to run naked through the woods to harden himself in honour of last year's shenanigans.

It Was Home, Home on the Free-Range

2005-12-27T12:49:00.000-07:00

Paul and I made dinner on Sunday for my fambly out at the Ranch. It was fun, and exhausting-- and we're really grown-ups now!

Lessons learned:

1) A convection oven is a most amazing yet confusing appliance. The turkey took about 2 hours to cook, which meant it was done at about 1 or 2 in the afternoon-- and my family is not one of those eat-christmas-dinner-at-lunchtime families, so we set the turkey on the counter for a few hours, only to realize that my mom's fool-proof method of telling when the turkey is done (wiggling the leg) is not so fool-proof, necessitating a 5 o' clock scramble to put the rather cool turkey back in the oven and get it up to the actually fool-proof trick of meat-thermometer-at-170 F. (Speaking of scrambled, wasn't that sentence?)

2) No matter how fancy the apple-cider-glazed turnips with sage, the orange-dijon green beans, the maple-roasted brussels sprouts with glenfiddich, she cooking the vegetable dishes will be stubbornly referred to as a wonderful sous chef. Hmph.

3) It's really tiring! Cooking all that stuff! And Grandma even brought the cabbage rolls and the perogies already-made!

4) An afternoon cheese course from Janice Beaton got my Dad eating blue cheese (which he "hates") and my Grandpa to skip his nap and not grumble for dinner to start at 4 o' clock. Good to know for next time.

5) There will definitely be a next time-- it was really fun! And my mom really appreciated it! Points!

It was a beautiful sunny 12 C, we cooked with the porch door open and the fresh air coming in, listening to the chickadees and watching a piliated woodpecker through the window.

Stuffing Stalker

2005-12-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

Last eve was the Writer's Guild of Alberta and Wordfest Christmas Party at the Rose & Crown Pub. Fun fact: the R & C used to be a funeral home. The party was also a reading-- Julia Williams and Melanie Little each gave a stellar reading and there was also an open mic.

Melanie read first, and she read a story called "Certain Things About My Mother," a short story which appears in a 2003 Annick Press anthology by the same name. I really liked the story and thought MY mom might like the story for Christmas. Melanie underestimated the demand for a Little literature though, and had only brought along her collection Confidence, which I happily bought instead. I think my Mom will ike that one too. The WGA presented Melanie with a family skating pass as a gift, which was very nice.

Julia read poetry from The Sink House. It's been a while since I have heard her read from that and I really liked hearing her voice with those words. She also read new stuff from her agoraphobic paranoid hypergraph project (see my December 7th post) and ended with the line "One day I will stop writing, even imaginary writing, and then even I will know I am dead." Good stuff! Samantha of WGA presented Julia with a skating pass too, which suited Julia just fine as she admitted she jumped at the chance to read alongside Melanie as she's stalking her. Heh.

I think we're all a little in love with a Little. Melanie sold some books to the WGA crowd, which was great! But Julia's book took a walk and Dave of the WGA had to track it down and threaten an elderly woman in order to get it back, prompting Julia to quip that her book doesn't make much of a stalking stuffer... er... anyway it was brilliant last night.

Fun facts: Peter and Melanie are staying in Calgary after the Markin Flanagan W-inR term is up! Peter is fond of punning to a degree only witnessed in db previously in this town-- so I think we need to lock the two up together in the Rose & Crown basement for an evening so they can work that stuff out of their system.

Jason's Cheese Log!

2005-12-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

Yay! Fromage!

The Lady-Pirate Meme

2005-12-11T13:35:00.000-07:00

JPF just sent me this link to Emily Pohl-Weary and Willow Dawson's project Violet Miranda, Girl Pirate. I love it! No word yet on whether Brea Burton and I have a publisher for our pirate-and-burlesque poetry, but when we do, wouldn't it be cool to have Willow Dawson illustrate the cover and maybe have Emily Pohl-Weary blurb us?

See how I think way ahead of myself? No wonder I get disappointed so often... I'm an ideas wench. Yaaarrr!!!

Slap-Happy dANDelion Launch Report

2005-12-11T12:43:00.000-07:00

dANDelion Editor Natalie Walschots and Ass. Ed. Jordan Nail should be ecstaticly proud! The dANDelion launch on Friday night was a fun fun night of multi-media-multi-style performance and the issue looks terrific! Congratulations!

The night began with excited people milling about while Jonathan Ball screened short films sans sound, drinking Jonathan HiBalls, the Nedalie, the Jordan Nail. There was a mysterious series of curtains shielding the main gallery from the raucousness. I went in there for some quiet time, only to happen upon David Bateman rehearsing alone in the dark...

Josh Smith, Smithjosh, as he bills himself, performed next. People were likely enjoying The Smith, that is to say Molson Canadian, while he was playing. He is a talented musician and singer, and the crowd was enthused and excited.

We had a break, and people came to the bar to fill up on the Christian Bok, which is of course red wine, or, in honour of the upcoming performer, the ChiChi LaRue (white). Melanie and Peter arrived late and admitted Jordan had browbeat them into buying a subscription, but they were pleased to see all the fun stuff that included! We had dANDelion chapbooks, dANDelion buttons, dANDelion t-shirts, and people who bought the issue got to be entered in to the draw for the fabulous prizes!

David Bateman performed "Jackie-O--the Show She Never Gave"-- if Jackie-O had been a stand-up comedian and a crossdresser named David Bateman, then this would have been her last show! Pink suit, pillbox hat, and I believe those were at least three-inch heels! David came out with Josh accompanying him on guitar, and cheeky crowd-members (mainly Sharanpal) accompanying him with catcalls and wolf whistles. He mixed himslef a drink and sang a little song a cappella. The tremolo would break your heart! "Stand By Your Man" went over really well, as you can imagine. The performance has David's Jackie-O schtick (Jackie, you've got a tight box and no tits! John, get off my back!) morph into a sometimes sweet and often rather harrowing (yet still often hilarious) performance of nostalgia (something about the Christmas tree traditionally being on fire in his family in honour of a cross-bred dog who peed on the family tree in '93...) with slides. I love the slides. It is as if David is performing "university instructor" in addition to Jackie-O, "the poet," in drag... I love it when he sweetly intones "next slide please..."

When David was done, we awarded the fabulous prizes. I had to throw out Paul's ticket, since it would seem shady if my boyfriend won the grand prize (sorry Paul!), but as it turned out, Jordan's dad won the second prize... Heheh. Colin Martin of NoD fame won the first prize which inlcuded fabulous booty donated by McNally Robinson, Martian Press, a dANDelion t-shirt and buttons, a gift certificate for Purr, and a ceramic squirrel lamp. Fabulous!

We drank Canada Dry, or at least drank the Rodrigues (traditional), the Smarty Pants (Heineken) the dANDelioneer, or as I secretly call it, the Hartman Detox (Perrier) and the Papa-D (Strongbow) until derek finally had to chase us all away. Yay New Gallery! They are such good sports and donated the space as well as the liquor proceeds to the dANDelion cause.

Please please please consider buying a subscription to dANDelion-- we need to build up our subscriber base, and if you've ever read a dANDelion and enjoyed it, why not buy a subscription? It is a labour of love for all of us involved. I have to admit, I have picked the funnest job for a board member, which is to say, buying stuff like t-shirts and buttons and helping to plan the party, but it is indeed a labour of love and dANDelion needs community support! Ok, getting off the soap-box now.

See you at the next dANDelion launch of fabulosity?

AFA-OK (YAY!)

2005-12-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

Alright, the letter arrived. My secret unofficial good news is now officially unsecret-- I have been awarded an AFA Grant to complete the first draft of my poetry MS St. Ampede, Cowboy Poetry and the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth!

I feel so happy, relieved, validated, excited to write! I know a lot of you reading this can relate to the constant feeling of tension and the frequent rejections that comprise the bread and butter of the writing life. I've applied for a few writerly positions in the last two years, and submitted my Booty MS only to have all my wide-eyed hopes (and sometimes my self-esteem) crushed. I've asked a lot of people to write me letters of support, too, and when I get rejected for a grant, or a Writer-in-Residence position, or have my MS rejected, I feel like I've let those people down too. Sort of like they backed a losing horse. Which is silly, because I don't feel like that when I lend my support to other writers, but there it is.

Thanks especially to Jon Paul Fiorentino, who wrote me a terrific letter of support specifically for the Stampede project, and to Paul Pearson at the AFA for being such a helpful, accessible contact. And-- I get to say this now for the first time in my life-- thank you to the AFA for their generous support! (although it doesn't kick in until the new year... gives me time to solve my problem with uploading images to this blog-- so I can paste the AFA logo here! Santa is bringing me more memory.)

Bait & Shift & Sift & tsk & Swish & Schist & List

2005-12-07T11:17:00.000-07:00

The Calgary Launch of Shift & Switch happened last night at McNally Robinson. There were about 45 people in attendance, including our two lovely hosts Penn and Teller-- er derek beaulieu and Jason Christie, and readers Ryan Fitzpatrick, Jay Gamble, myself, Larissa Lai and Julia Williams. We read in alphabetical order, so I was the "hump" poet.

Ryan had a snappy little set, pulling out his cock
poems, apparently set free from the fear of parental disapproval (his parents refused to come out after JPF swore at the Post-Prairie launch a few weeks ago). No word on whether Julia's parents plan to attend a potty-mouth er poetry reading again. Ok, ok, I've teased Ryan, so now to the praise-- the poems were funny, full of faux-logical one-liners and non sequiturs. He very sweetly dedicated poems-- the first to his rarely-seen-sister Megan, who came out with his often-seen-sister Erin, and happy we were to have them there representing Ogden and all things Fitzpatrick. The next poem, something called, I think, "Why I Like Big Butts" was for Jordan Scott. I think we can all guess why. Then he read "My Penis Hurts When I Glue it to My Hand," for derek. No comment. His last poem, "A Life Less Originary" was dedicated to Jason. When Ryan has an appreciative audience, his deadpan delivery is interspersed with grins, although he tries to read the his poems as though, like a UPS guy, he's been charged with their delivery but is not responsible for the contents. Some lines are delivered as though he's showing us something he found on his shoe. It could be dog poop, or it could be dirt, or it could be some sort of magical mud pie that transforms into a time machine-- he's not sure, and so he doesn't judge. It's a very funny and effective style for his writing, which, after all, is culled, gleaned, collected, grown from found language. Google I think.

Jay Gamble was introduced by Jason. Jason promised that Jay would sing "Famous Blue Raincoat" at some point in the evening. (He was not wrong, and much much later, the Bear and Kilt was treated to a second performance from Jay with a little help from his friends.) Jay first read the inscription that Ryan had written in his copy of Shift & Switch, and I'll share that: "Jay-- how can I make a life out of poop?" Indeed. Jay then read a poem for Carmen, who was away with their son Lochlan. He read one of his very-long-sentence poems, the one about the french-kissing couple at the theatre with the torn screen from the toast thrown by the guy in his mother's dress who died while gardening... That was a paraphrase, or maybe a periphrase-- Jay's poem was much more dynamic as well as grammatically elegant. I love that poem. He also read some of the poems with no nouns, blaming Nicole Markotic for them- not really a dedication, more of... an injunction... (and by the way, all the really fun things happen after the readings in Calgary-- Jason and Jay told the story of how they met in Nicole Markotic's writing class, and Nicole was expressing how glad she was that she didn't have any students with the same name for once, and Jason whispered to Jay "but we're close" and how Jay put up his hand and said "We're close" and then felt like an ass. Oh, how we laughed! Hmm. Well, there were a lot of birthday shots going around.) Jay's poems enact his dissertation topic ("Nothing," "absence") in very creative ways. I'm really looking forward to seeing his MS in print.

Hump poet read next. That would be me. I dedicated some poems too, and not just cause it was the thing to do! I read some Booty poems for Brea, and a Booty/skating poem for Cara (...a fishwife a harridan a dirty nancy kerrigan...), "Deadman's Flats" for Paul, and a poem for angela:

wear your welcome
the word made flesh
the oldest profession a book

the language I use
is desire

did you expect me to talk about you
did you expect me to use language?

a thrush in the hand
sings in the bush
you kiss your mother with that trenchmouth?

We then had a break. Sometimes this doesn't work at McNally Robinson (though splitting the reading works perfectly and wonderfully at The New Gallery) because there often is an undercurrent of having to stick to a time-slot-- either there's a musical act coming on to play jazz for the non-reading-attendees, or even, as was the case with the Post-Prairie launch, another literary event following. But anyway, last night was somehow free of most of that tension, and the break was long enough to chat and circulate without being too long.

Larissa Lai humped her way up to the mic and read the "Rachel" poems that are in Shift & Switch. I want to see more of her poetry-- I am mostly familiar with her (awesome) prose. I hope she publishes the "Rachel" stuff as a book of poetry soon. And also, she and Jason Christie should publish a chapbook together-- the robot poems and the cyborg poems-- well-- they talk to each other. Seriously. The page Larissa was reading from mecha-meched into a mouth and called out for Jason's notebook. Jason mentioned that Larissa's work is being featured in an upcoming issue of West Coast Line-- very exciting and I can't wait to see it...

Finally, Our Julia stepped up. derek introduced her as "Calgary's Best Smart Aleck" and he's right, although I think the term "Smarty-pants" is more commonly used to describe Julia. She was looking ravishing in a rose sweater and chunky glass necklace, her pants stylishly cropped to reveal her cunning bog-green urban hipster boots. I love Julia! She then dazzled us with her poems about-- I know I'll get the phobias wrong here-- an agoraphobic claustrophobic hypergraph. This set of poems is brilliant. I love poetry with characters and/or a narrative of some kind. It gives the poet a chance to flex her voice-adoption techniques-- er-- I guess what I mean is that Julia is a phenomenal story-writer, which may not be widely known outside Calgary, since her first book, The Sink House, is technically poetry. I'm torn-- I love Julia's poetry, but her smart-alecky-ness really shines through when she adopts a voice for a narrative. So this new project about the agoraphobic hypergraph is wonderful. I loved the poem about the a-h breathing letters into the frost on the windows all winter long-- afraid to go out, uncomfortable in, hovering at the window and so compulsively writing that her very breath writes.

The reading part of the evening wrapped up, and we slowly gathered ourselves to go to the nearby Bear and Kilt, or, as I like to call it, the Impotent Scotsman (Bear...and...Kilt...Barren...Kilt...) Calgary-style literary-fun ensued! Many people from the reading came out to the pub, although we lost the Julias and some of the shyer attendees. Leonard Cohen was sung, db birthday shots were drunk and so was I. I have in my bag a series of important things to remember written on the back of a Christmas Party advert ("CHRISTMAS IS UPON US AGAIN") which, at the time, seemed crucial to include on this post, so, to honour that impulse of my last-night-self, I close with this:

Erin Bodner: "Ralph Klein = Madonna."
Paul Kennett:" Jill, you're my Ralph Klein."

Old-Fashioned Affliction. I Need my Smelling Salts.

2005-12-06T12:39:00.000-07:00

Tonight is the Shift & Switch Reading here in Calgary. As has happened on a few occasions, I woke up (the day of a reading) with a migraine. I get them as often as once or twice a week if I am stressed or maybe not for months. Also sometimes I will get a migraine the day of some event-- like a reading, or a party-- the Martinis and Weenies Party we had in the summer was crummy for me for the first part because I was trying to be a '50's-style hostess while fighting off a migraine (the point of the party was genteel kitsch or something like that). Of course, migraines are sort fo '50's, so maybe that worked. But instead of writing something new to read tonight or rushing around shopping for something new to wear (two things I love to do the day of a reading if possible) I'm writing this frustrated update and then going back to bed to try to sleep it off. I'm in for approximately 6 hours of migrainity.

So, yeah, Chinooks aren't all they're cracked up to be. Dumb Chinook.

somnabus

2005-12-04T12:37:00.000-07:00

I'd like an omnibus for Christmas. Except they're hard to read in the bath or in bed.

Wank wank

2005-12-04T11:39:00.000-07:00

Sort of in response to Ryan's post on the Calgary blog about blogs (and Jonathan's comment)... Have you seen the "Word of the Day" and the "Word Match-up" I added to my sidebar? Not quite content, more like the blue light people put to glow under their car, or the fuzzy dice on the rearview, or the I heart Aberta Beef bumber sticker. The idea that a blog is public and personal... Some people change the colours and font etc. (like I do) but it's based on a template... Changes accrue over time, however, so that you (if you're one of those people who likes to personalize their template) have an aesthetic performance of individuality. Or the performance of a yearning for individuality.

And what's my blog for, anyway? The content consists (so far) of a pastiche of poetry, open letters, reports, shout-outs, embedded in which are apologies, plugs, maybe the odd dig. Who do I think is reading this? Why do I think they care? The comments option (which you can remove-- I hate it when people remove the comments option from their blog-- I think it is arrogant and closed-- heh-- them's fightin' words) and the site meter (an add-on) give me a filtered view. With the site meter, I can find out what site people came from, and what point of entry they used. It's kind of like spying. Or at least peeking.

What's this blog for? What does it do? What does it perform? Not sure yet, except that it is growing organically (metaphorically speaking-- there are no fungi creeping over my computer) and the AMOUNT of content is a shortcut to making it worthwhile. Worth something. Like Jonathan's mention of a museum piece in culture.

The blogs that seem to work the best are the ones with a focus, a theme, a topic-- cheese, or news, or whatever. Right? Or is the disjunctive mish-mash of content alright?

I started this blog, called it semi-precious press, to encourage myself to start publishing chapbooks again. I figured this site would be a place to announce each new chapbook's completion and availability. So I was using the blog form to be a motivational tool, to be repurposed as a bookstore when that function was fulfilled. I guess it is still doing that, although its purpose (or at least what I expect from it day by day) is to be an oblique communication with my friends and colleagues. But mainly friends. It's doing that quite well. I almost prefer it to email, in that I can communicate news to friends without the necessity or expectation of a response. The problem with that is that I can't be nearly as gossipy and innappropriate as I normally am in emails to friends.

A Cat Tale (Groan)

2005-12-03T12:23:00.000-07:00

There is a small orange cat with a pointed face in our neighbourhood who we call the Gremlin. He LOVES our cat Hunter, loves to hang out on the porch with Hunter (cat-hanging-out: sitting on opposite sides of the porch not looking at each other) but he doesn't like to be approached or touched by humans. He tries to come in our house when we let Hunter in, or when we leave. He does this to our downstairs neighbour Tonya too, who has an orange cat named Shudu. (Shudu's face is not pointed but his nose is a little funny-looking since he was in a car accident-- Tonya says he's had reconstructive surgery.)

At first I was annoyed that Gremlin was so anti-social (he will growl and maybe scratch if you try to touch him) but then I realized that he is Hunter's friend and not mine. So for the last year or so that he's been around, we just ignore him and try to keep him from slipping in the door (because he promptly goes under the furniture and won't come out), and it seems he and Hunter are happy as ever. (Our glassed-in porch is the primo cat-hang-out in the neighbourhood-- all the kitties come to pay their respects to the Godfather.)

One day, our next-door-neighbour Justin (who came up with Gremlin's name) came to the door and asked for our help in getting G to the vet-- the cat was bleeding from his head and skulking about. So Paul and Justin took G to the vet, and asked the vet to phone us if they couldn't trace the owner-- the way G eats voraciously from Hunter or Shudu's bowl, the way he's always around, hanging out on our porch for the entire day, had led us to wonder if G was abandoned. He has a collar, but of course never would let anyone get close enough to him to see his tag.

The next day, G was back in the neighbourhood with stitches on his head. Obviously, the owners DO live in the neighbourhood. So G is just a little difficult. Or maybe he's mistreated, and that's why he doesn't spend much time at his own home?

Last night Paul and I were skipping Rob Budde's reading (it was impossible to get a cab and grumpiness was quickly mounting). We'd gone to get Land of the Dead to watch instead. We heard a meowing at the door, and double-checked with each other that we hadn't let Hunter out (Hunter is a big cold-weather-baby like me-- he meows to go out, takes a look at the snow beyond the porch, and runs back inside-- kind of what I've been doing lately). I told Paul it was probably Shudu and to let him in. (We have a standing arrangement with Tonya to care for each other's cats, and Shudu and Hunter like to visit each other-- Hunter loves redheads.) But it wasn't Shudu, it was Gremlin. Well, it was -100 million degrees outside, and I thought we better let him in to warm up.

He perched under the futon by the heating vent. He wandered a bit and Hunter oversaw the sharing of his food. I love watching cats interact-- Hunter was totally being the host-- sort of following G around, or maybe escorting him around the house-- he was hyper-aware of G, where G was, what G was doing.

Well, G sat under the futon after cleaning out Hunter's food bowl. I opened the door a couple of times to see if he'd go out, but he didn't.

Cats are nocturnal.

All night long we were awoken by purring meowing sounds, pitter-pattering, etc. I got up a couple of times but didn't see G after this noise-- opened the door, but no one wanted to go out. Hunter looked at me with his gormless expression from the middle of the living-room floor, but I couldn't see G. Once I went into the office and turned on the light and caught the two red-handed under the desk. Playing I suppose, though they stopped whatever cat-thing they were doing as soon as I saw them. (Is the cat under the desk dead or alive? You won't know until you turn on the light...)

Did G want to leave in the morning? Of course not! And now he's just used Hunter's litter-box. Oh man. He hasn't been growling, though, and he's let me pet him briefly a few times.

Now, whether he's mistreated or not, his owners are probably really worried about him. It was deadly cold last night-- still is, for a kitty. I was hoping if he had to use the litter-box he'd want to leave, but no such luck. I haven't refilled Hunter's food- dish, in the hopes that G will want to leave to get some food at home. So far, no good (he just polished off Hunter's catnip, so maybe that's tiding him over.)

Well, this story doesn't have an ending yet, so I will leave it there for now...

People Who Need People

2005-11-30T13:54:00.000-07:00

Everytime I update this blog, I spend a little time clicking the "next blog" button to surf blogger blogs. It's kind of fun. Why? This is why.

Now if only Jason Christie will follow through on his Cheese Blog idea, I will be thoroughly occupied for the afternoon.

Listen Up Sports Fans

2005-11-30T12:21:00.000-07:00

It all begins tomorrow. The next week and a half are going to be intense. I don't know if my liver will survive.

Tomorrow night is the NOD launch-- Colin Martin and the English Literature Student's Society's new lit mag. Colin's mandate as interpreted by me (i.e. I take full responsibility if I get it wrong): to publish students (unlike dANDelion, which has a strict rule about publishing current students at the U of C) to publish ~really new~ writers, and to publish them alongside a few old hacks. I believe derek b is the issue for example (hehe! just teasing d). I think that this is a great idea and fills a niche that, though it's been filled at other times (orange, in grave ink) is not currently being filled in Calgary. (fS doesn't tend to publish the ~really new~. If you think ~really new~ is a euphemism for "never-been-published-before," or "young," you're right-- my ego rails against saying "young" writers, in part since I've always wanted to be a child prodigy, which didn't happen. Dammit!) The event is Colin-designed, which means it is at the Lazy Loaf and Kettle in Parkdale. Yay! Delicious sandwiches...

Friday night is the Rob Budde reading. He'll be at McNally Robinson. I'm keen on Rob. He's very sweet and his writing is so varied. Rob's got a magazine, stonestone at UNBC. it isn't new like NOD, but it's online, which I like. I'm putting a sidebar link up ASAP! As for Rob's reading, I'm voting now for "Not-the-Unicorn" for the after-reading location.

The weekend is mercifully free of literary events (Or at least that I am aware of).

Tuesday: Shift & Switch!!! Yay!!! My only sadness is that angela r chose to visit Vancouver for the S & S launch and not Calgary. What, you think the ocean is so great? Humph. ;) if Jordan S didn't take angela and conor to the Naam, I'm going to kick his ass. In a sporstmanlike fashion. The launch of this amazing and lovely anthology (younger writers, or young at heart-- not sure what the mandate was except that writers too much older than 30 didn't tend to submit writing for the anthology) is at McNAlly Robinson at 7-- readers: derek beaulieu, Jason Christie, ryan fitzpatrick, Jay Gamble, Jill Hartman, Larissa Lai, Julia Williams.

Thursday: Flywheel at McNally Robinson. (How will I get through this week? I'm already getting tired just writing about it!) Readers: Eugene Stickland, Jonathan Ball, Peter Norman, and Sharron Proulx-Turner.

Friday: dANDelion launch!!! Scroll down for detailed info. Suffice to say, it will be SO FUN. SO. FUN.

How does one preprare oneself for SO MUCH FUN? One drinks a lot of Perrier in an attempt to detoxify the "Cara's-in-town-let's-throw-caution-to-the-winds" liver in preparation. Cara, the big bubble-blowing baby, is leaving today for Winnipeg. She was probably afraid of the upcoming tidal wave of fun.

I like Perrier. I like the lemon-flavour version. I know that it is distributed by Nestle. Or at least, I just noticed that. Paul just noticed that, actually. So, does anyone have a suggestion for an alternative bubbly water? (I don't like San Pellegrino. Too much like sipping a hot tub-- the pH seems dangerously basic to me.)

Over and Out.

Frogments From the Frag Pool

2005-11-27T12:32:00.000-07:00

Went last night to the launch of this book by our derek and Gary Baldwin. The lovely Sandy Lam hosted, and Pages was the venue. Unfortunately the Enchiladas and Sangria Friday in Tuxedo wrecked me for the next day, and I had to skip the KP fun after-party-- I blame LaFawnduh's Sangria del Diablo, but also the beers at the Unicorn after that (for Holly's "I'm leaving TRUCK and becoming ever more awesome" party. And just to bitch a little, the waitress was there, and she actually shoved people to get them out of her way. She harshes the mellow in the harshest way.)

The Frogments reading was really great-- I think this book is so good-- a perfect balance of clever and sweet and painfully punny. The poems are haiku-- why do I not write haiku? How has it escaped me that haiku is the perfect form? I love how the book looks, too-- the frog-like dimensions, the un-frog-like green-- Mercury did a really good job. I see angela edited-- well done! Congratulations derek and Gary! This one is going to be a prize-winner, I can smell it!

So, in honour of the launch of Frogments From the Frag Pool, check out this sweet website and think of derek.
Hopkin

Peart of a Hoet

2005-11-27T12:11:00.000-07:00

My DVD copy of "Heart of a Poet" arrived in the mail last week. I had to wait for a chance to watch it with Cara and Brea, and there needed to be alcohol involved, so Enchiladas and Sangria night in Tuxedo was the night to watch it. (The enchiladas, btw, were amazing and I'm totally going to make Enchiladas a la Fawnduh at home. Maybe an Enchiladas and Tequila Night in Hillhurst is in the cards.)

It's tough watching yourself on the tv. But I was able to watch the whole thing without hiding behind the pillow too much (or biting the pillow at all). The "Heart of a Poet" People (HOAPP for short) did a really fantastic job. It made me think about getting into film-making. It really looks like it would be fun-- fitting together fragments and fragmenting figments and making the subject appear well-spoken etc.

The half-hour show culminates with the TEAM performance at Lexiconjury, and they left in the bit where I say, in regards to "aaaring" and clinking beers, that that's "how we do it in Calgary" which made me have a tear in my sangria a little bit. They kept in a Cameron House interview with Paul, and the caption referred to him as a "TEAM Groupie" (and he looked so hot! also a little drunk and a lot charming).

I was surprised to see that HOAPP had interviewd Gregory Betts (who, along with Derek McCormack was one of the other readers at Lex-- both of their readings were really terrific) at Cameron House that night. He had a lot of nice and insightful comments about our TEAM performance, which I thought was really sweet of him, considering the way the HOAPP and I kind of hijacked the vibe at the Lex that night. Also, because I hadn't met him before. That's generosity and grace!

So, thank you to HOAPP, to Cara and Brea, to angela, to Paul, to Gregory and to Derek, to Mark Truscott, to Bill Kennedy, to Alana Wilcox, and to the crowd at Lex! The underwear made the cut... I am so tickled.

Ok, one more plug for the air-date of my show-- December 14th on BOOK TV. Now I will stop talking about it.

A Fun Game!

2005-11-26T17:33:00.000-07:00

Can you identify the poet/artist/teacher/engineer/dog?

lil’ Sister
Fiddy
Brettof
Papa D
General Chang
Smurphy
LaFawnduh
Doodle
Baby Sister
Nedalie
Short Bus
Gordo
T-Bone/T-Mo
Slam
Squatch
Dre
Robocrotch
Nattie
Chi Chi LaRue
Jovo
Stu

and, for bonus points, identify the members of:

Team Poop
Team Dead Fucker
TEAM

Cowboy Poetry's Chinook Poem

2005-11-25T18:45:00.000-07:00

ranchers kill gophers
richardson's ground squirrels
quarrels seal sorrels
florals teal sky at night
rancher's delight

Deadman's Flats

2005-11-25T18:30:00.000-07:00

people don't kill people
with moustaches kill people
don't kill people
with guns don't kill people
kill babies with
moustaches kill
baby killer
bee (Apian Flu).

all that's killing me
migraine chinook
chiniki Chinaman's Peak
Sir Edmund Hilary
Tenzing
Norgay
Mt. Norquay
ski hill
avalanches
kill

people.

Secret Unofficial Good News

2005-11-24T17:20:00.000-07:00

I am feeling happier... I got some very good news on the down-low yesterday. When I receive the letter in the mail, I will shout my secret news from the rooftops! Or, er, from this here blog.

dANDelion Magazine Launch!

2005-11-24T17:13:00.000-07:00

dANDelion magazine presents...

Issue 31.2 Launch!
Friday, December 9th at 7:00
The New Gallery—516 D 9th Avenue SW
Calgary, AB

When is Alberta’s oldest literary magazine new again? Twice a year! dANDelion magazine’s latest issue features new writing from Sarah Feldman, jUStin!katKO, Stephanie Dickinson, Paul Hegedus, Mark Laliberte, rob mclennan and derek beaulieu, to name a few. We’ll be celebrating with music from Smithjosh, screenings of short film selections curated by Jonathon Ball (what, you thought he just wrote Horoscope Haiku?) and spectacular poetry and performance from former-Calgarian-now-Kamloopian David Bateman (author of Invisible Foreground, Frontenac 2005).

It’s Friday night, we’re literary, we’re going to out-party the neighbouring nightclub! Your $5.00 admission nets dANDelion fun and a limited edition chapbook (first 50 comers are the lucky ones). Those who snap up dANDelion 31.2 will be entered in a draw for fabulous literary prizes and the

~*Secret Grand Prize*~

We’re 30, but we’re spry! Come celebrate with dANDelion!

Can't make it to the event but NEED issue 31.2?
Contact: Jordan Nail, Assistant Editor
editors@dandelionmagazine.ca
(403) 220-4679

It's Probably the Best Translation I've Ever Done

2005-11-23T21:01:00.000-07:00

Try the Babelfish translator at the bottom of the sidebar! I love it!

Also-- Assignment Number 2 (wasn't I talking about feeling out of control? hmmmm...)

Watch Me and You and Everyone We Know if you liked Napoleon What's-his-name and/or Welcome to the Dollhouse... Except you can't watch it, because we have it from Roger's and it's overdue! Ha ha! (I promise to return it tomorrow.)

))< >((

Miranda July *so* looks like Jenny Conway. And the little kid? Andre Rodrigues. And they seem to share some personality traits/vocations with their doppelgangers too.

The Abyss. That's Right, the Abyss.

2005-11-23T20:27:00.000-07:00

Man, what a week. I've been having feelings of losing control. Then my tooth fell out. Really. Ok, technically a crown, but sort of creepy the way it coincided with one of the toughest weeks I've had, interpersonally speaking, for months. (Do you know what happens when your crown falls off? You, and by "you," I mean "me," are left with a peg-tooth. Arrr. Or like a Killer Whale. Yeah, like that. Bring me a sacrificial seal! And some chum!)

I love the I Ching. You can try it here but I really recommend getting the I Ching as translated by Carol Anthony.

Just thought I would post a mini-update.

The Artist Formerly Known as Don

2005-11-19T13:56:00.000-07:00

Paul and Cara and I went to an "Art Event" at the Untitled Art Society last night to meet up with Travis and his friend Don, I mean Ben. I guess we got there too late, because the party was over. Or had it just begun? Kiara has a studio there, and so the five of us hung out looking at Kiara's wonderful art and playing melancholy music on a Casio keyboard. Will try to post fun pictures of that later. I think the shots of tequila we'd had at the Grad Lounge and the Den made us a little footloose and fancy-free. Whatever that means.

Travis was grouchy because his bandage was overdue for a change. I smelled the bandage. He was also grouchy because he was hungry, and on our trek to the Stride Gallery for the opening that was happening there, Cara and I lost the Doodle, Smurphy, and Kiara to a pizza stop. Cara and I had a fun urban adventure walking past some cops and paramedics confronting someone drunk outside the Mustard Seed. Little did they know we were drunk too! Ha ha!

At the Stride, we barely kept the facade of reason in place. Narrowly avoided disaster when Paul tried to touch the art. Apparently Travis, Kiara and Paul went downstairs and got naked, or at least semi-naked, but Cara and I missed that because we were telling the story of the glove-- the Blue/Green (blue! green! blue! green!) rubber glove from Kiara's studio that Cara oh-so-elegantly wore while holding her Laphroiag and appreciating the art. Someone came up to us and asked about the glove. And so the Legend of the Glove was born. Will try to post some pictures of that too.

Tonight we're going to see the Harry Potter movie. Oh Boy! Will not post photos of that.

Heart of a Champion

2005-11-16T10:37:00.000-07:00

The launch party for "Heart of a a Poet" is happening tonight in Toronto. I wish I could be there. I haven't seen the show yet-- I am supposed to receive a DVD of the one that features me, but it hasn't got here yet. The episode of "Heart of a Poet" that I am in airs on December 14th at 8:30 on BOOK TV.

I've seen pictures from the night Cara Hedley, Brea Burton and I read at Lexiconjury (which "Heart of a Poet" filmed) and my face looks freakishly pale from the make-up, though Cara kindly said that it looks like I have a perfect complexion. Which I don't. What I really want on DVD is the hours of footage they got of us three and Paul Kennett and Angela Rawlings fooling around. At one point, we were being interviewed in a park and Paul chased away some ravens or pigeons (can't remember anymore) that were chewing on a dead thing by impersonating a much larger bird. Ah, memories. Walking around Toronto with a camera on me and miked up for two days. Trying my hardest to memorize the 20 pages of text that Tina gave me that morning, failing, and disappointing her by admitting that I am not the kind of poet who knows her own work off by heart, but instead am the kind of poet who is based on the page and only performs with any panache at all through long years of practice. Filming a Tarot reading and a tea-leaf-reading in Angela's apartment, and making Tina happy again by having my chapbooks with me (so visual! perfect!) Sitting on Angela's rooftop after it was all over, drinking rum and gingerbeer at sunset, going out for dinner with no cameras, staying out and getting Bill Kennedy and Kyle Buckley into a salsa club, ending up somewhere else, going back to Angela's and talking the rest of the night until it was time to leave for the airport. The stuff we filmed at Coach House that probably will only make it in in snippets: me pretending to set type, Angela looking through the grimy window and me miming "Come in!" in an oh-so-natural way. The two-hour conversation with Alana Wilcox and hiding the mike in the flowers... I think we filmed me walking up to Alana's office and knocking on the door four times. Documentary.

The schedule for "Heart of a Poet" is here. I have to admit, I am disappointed that my publisher Coach House isn't making a bigger deal about it-- they have quite a few authors featured on the show (Coach Houseketeers Christian Bok, Sherwin Tija, myself, and I'm sure bill bissett's been published by Coach House, not to mention the show is hosted by Angela Rawlings, whose Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists is coming out in the spring), but it hasn't appeared on their mailbot mailout and isn't on their website. All publicity is good, no? It'd be nice to get a little more support. Small(er) presses don't have as much publicity power, I know, but that's why piggy-backing on other events seems so ideal to me. Well, that's what I think. If I had a publishing business. One day...

Other events I am missing: Shift & Switch launches in Vancouver, (November 26, 8pm, at The Helen Pitt Gallery 102-148 Alexander St.) and Toronto (November 29, 7pm, at Supermarket on Augusta Ave. in Kensington Market.) Sigh. I should have joined the League of Canadian Poets when I could afford the fee, then I'd be able to travel to do a reading now. I need to be better at planning ahead.

Drink Metaphorical Psycho

2005-11-14T11:35:00.000-07:00

The Natalie Walschots and Stephen Cain reading last night was good. I wouldn't have minded a third reader, but Stephen read a very lively selection, and read sections from the "American" and "Canadian" sections of his latest book, so there was a lot of variety. The first poem he read, "American Psycho," was making me feel alienated-- the language was, in a hard-to-pin-down-way, disturbing. Then Paul whispered to me that it was all taken from Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. Then, only then, did I finally understand. No, seriously though, it would've helped ease me into the reading to know that the poem was a treatment of American Psycho instead of wondering vaguely if Stephen Cain was a misogynist, or racist. The language was so borderline though, it was a question of tone almost, which made me squirrely. Squirmy. Cain later talked a little bit about his writerly process, and mentioned that he is a constraint-based writer, or at least wrote American Standard Canada Dry using different formal constraints, filters, translations.

Natalie's writing is more familiar to me-- the disorientation, the surprise I feel when I "get" one of the compositional tactics didn't happen for me listening to Natalie (I mean because it only happens once, right? I'm no longer a Walschots virgin). Interesting to think about the difference that familiarity with a body of work, its mechanics, makes. The juxtaposition of Natalie and Stephen for me was "successful" as an oral/aural pairing because of the familiarity/unfamiliarity dynamic. Plus, the show up at The New Gallery involved distillation and fish tanks, and, in honour of the fishies, Natalie read what I'm going to dub her "fish up the bum" poem. Fun! (You can get a reasonable fishsimile of the experience-- that is, the reading experience, not the fish up the bum experience-- by reading Natalie's NO Press chappie "Passion Play" while checking out Robyn Moody's Still.)

After the reading we went to the Drum and Monkey to Drink Canada Dry. I became loud and passionate about metaphorical mangy puppies. Sorry, Jordan Nail. I know you care about (metaphorical) mangy (sp?) puppies too.

Ok, so speaking of Bret Easton Ellis, I just read Lunar Park a few days ago. This is not an author I would normally read, but Paul wrote his MA thesis on American Psycho and Fight Club and so there are all sorts of books by coked up American authors lying about our place. Paul ripped through Lunar Park late into the night, and he laughed a lot at first and then became seriously freaked out. His range of reactions to the book, plus his conversations about it, convinced me to give it a read. I similarly raced through the book, reading until 4:00 in the morning. Lunar Park is a very interesting book-- in a nutshell, the narrator and main character is Bret Easton Ellis, and the book seems to be a reflective account of his life post-American Psycho and those other books he wrote that weren't quite as infamous. He becomes a family guy and tries to stop drinking and taking drugs. He begins to be haunted/stalked by his character Patrick Bateman/Christain Bale/his Father/himself as a younger man/a deranged copycat fan. The book becomes truly frightening, playing with horror conventions, playing with "authority," dealing with writerly responsibility, all in a package of narrative.

Ok, and guess what? There is a metaphorical mangy puppy in Lunar Park! How's that for a masterfully written blog entry! Do I know how to tie it all together or what?!

Um, anyway....

Read My All

2005-11-12T14:11:00.000-07:00

Just received an interesting email from Selina Chebib-- she's starting a reading series called Red Mile Revenge at Victoria's Restaurant. The first reading is December 6th (argh-- same night as Shift & Switch) but it'll be the first tuesday of each month. Maybe we'll pull our crowd from McNally that night when the reading is done and Jesse is trying to get us to leave quietly (never happens) and head over to Victoria's to end the night in style and hob-knobbing. Hob-knobbing sounds dirty and wrong somehow, and I think I should get back to the grant-writing I am supposed to be working on today and stop with the blog updates! Procrastination.... Long Live the &!!!

You Say And I Say &

2005-11-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

I just looked at the newly-completed Shift & Switch webpage. The design (web and book) is beautiful! The cover... I love it. I love the list of contributors and that the list is a list of links to websites-- lots of blogs...

Funny thing about S & S-- the mad ampersand-- when I was working with Jay MillAr and Alana Wilcox on A Painted Elephant, I had a lot of ampersands in the poetry. Alana eventually convinced me to change them to regular old ands, something to do with house style for Coach House more or less. But when I published part of that work in the Post Prairie anthology, I noticed I'd sent Talon a version from before the Great Ampersand Excision and the funny little glyph pops up again (careful readers will notice another difference-- I rewrote the end of one of the poems.) Anyway, I guess Mercury doesn't have a problem with ampersands (haha I just miss-typed that as "ambersands,"which sounds like a Las Vegas Casino for dissolute writers or something) which will be clear if you visit the site for Shift & Switch. I love the ampersand myself-- Long Live the &!!! Can't remember if any &s appear in the work I have in Shift & Switch-- stuff from Another Word for Pirate Treasure, or, The Booty.

The Calgary launch for S & S is December 6, which makes that a crazy week for events. The 9th is the dANDelion launch (can't wait to see the new issue) and there is a filling Station Flywheel reading that week too. Also derek's B-Day (December 7) and Julia's B-Day (December 10). Whew!

Tomorrow there is a reading at The New Gallery. Natalie Walschots and Stephan Cain. I like Natalie's work a lot, Stephan's I'm not really familiar with, so it'll be interesting to hear what he's got.

Neo Citran is Decidedly Wet

2005-11-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

The Calgary launch date for the Shift and Switch anthology is December 6. It'll be at McNally Robinson. A repeat of the Post-Prairie launch? Should be so fun.

McN-R is a great venue for a lot of reasons (you can buy drinks, coffee, food, books) but I feel a little bad sometimes about the way McN-R seems to have taken over as indie-bookstore-launch-site-of-choice since they came to town. Sure, they are independent, but they are also quite a large operation. Pages I love, but their space just can't compete for events (though it wins pants down in the browsing-and-friendly-people contest). Pages gives local authors a lifetime discount on books. McN-R gives free coffee tea or wine with invites. Pages usually serves free wine at events. Hmmm... I miss Books & Books. They took my first chapbooks on consignment.

In other news, we had ANOTHER mad party on the weekend. Paul and Chris had a joint B-Day party (some of the photos floating around are from that). P-Doody is now sick. We're committed to drying out for a few days, although technically, scarfing Neo Citran syrup is not dry.

In other other news, Cara is a-traveling. She'll be in Calgary on November 14th-- this from her:

Lil sister made an executive decision to screw Greyhound and their sleep-robbing, baby-crying, crazy-toothless-people, schizophrenic-driver, eau-de-B.O., bone-shaker marathons. Although I still support the idea that in order to defer becoming a grown-up, it is important to take the Greyhound as often as possible. It's like taking a youth serum, except different. Um, a slacker serum.

I bit the pillow and shelled out the extra thirty bucks (seat sales--hurray!) and bought me one of those there plane ticket thingies. The Cons (for example, the necessity of putting in my teeth and applying deodorant) did not beat out the Pros--which is that I arrive in Calgary, Alberta on Monday November 14th! And that I shall be the proud recipient of either a melee of pretzels and chips or a package of chocolate chip cookies! Either or. Do you get what I'm saying?--like, I get to CHOOSE.
Oh boy!

Other other other: may go to Jacqueline Honnet reading at Pages tonight with Julia. Julia took writing workshop with her, I went to school with JH's little sister way way way back-- like 15 years ago. I'm not in touch with anyone from my HS except Irene. So-- reading tonight, or Lost?

Other other other other: Paul's Spanish cousin is arriving tomorrow from Winnipeg (where he's been soaking up Canadian culture for a few months) to see how we live life out West(er). We're driving him to Banff so he can spend a few days with the lifers out there before he returns to Toledo or Barcelona or some such place. Nothing wrong with a Spanish cousin-- I'd like to go to Spain. Maybe we'll visit him and he'll drive us to Gibraltar.

post-post-prairie

2005-10-24T11:30:00.000-06:00

Who's feeling stunned? Alcohol-poisoned? Confused? Delighted? In love with Jordan Scott's memory for television and commercial jingles? In love with no-pants parties? In love with Jon Paul Fiorentino? Shocked for Larissa Lai's bad luck? Thrilled for Jason Christie's good luck? Shocked for Jason Christie's bad luck? In love with the Ship and Anchor for breakfast? Enamoured of Dennis Cooley's stay-out-ive-ness? Sorry for anyone who missed the Post-Prairie reading at McNally Robinson on Saturday night? Sorry for anyone who caught the Post-Prairie launch at the Wild Words conference the next morning at 9:00 am?

I need a few days to dry out.

Oh Cara!

2005-10-18T13:53:00.000-06:00

I had a dream last night that I was at Cara Hedley's cottage at Lake of the Woods and I was looking in her fridge. In her fridge were about 25 Japanese eggplants. In her freezer there were a whole lot of pancakes. Where is the cookie dough?

Oh boy, soon Cara Hedley (lil sister) will be coming to Calgary-- to stay? She just isn't sure. She is having the same problem as I am-- the post-MA-ennui.

Also returning soon will be Jordan Scott. Oh boy! I think all my friends should live in Calgary until I leave for Australia, at which point they should all come to Australia, only not competing with me for the same scholarships.

Two Dogs Enter One Dog Leaves?

2005-10-18T13:39:00.000-06:00

"Cool Cats and Hot Dogs Poetry Night"
Wednesday, October 26, 7:30
Tubby Dog
103 1022 17th Ave SW

This is for the annual CJSW Funding Drive. I'll be reading as a two-woman-TWAT Team-- Brea Burton and I are reading our pirate poems. I think, when it is just Brea and me, it'll be the TWATs, and when Cara is reading too, we are TEAM.

Also reading: Samuel Garrigo Meza of Single Onion fame, Ali Riley, and the lovely Andrew Wedderburn. Ali Riley is lovely too. As is Samuel. I think the only dogs will be the kind they serve with fried eggs, wasabi, etc. Boy, those gourmet hot dogs are a little weird.

Prairie Writing

2005-10-18T13:36:00.000-06:00

one-man-band
steal the show and tell

our buffalo bill:
extinction

spaghetti-o
western

alienation has nothing on
the exquisite embarrassment teenagers invented

my own city my nation
alien

I submit: Calgary is a hell of a place to be 14

Saint Ampede’s
undeniable Clydesdale plod
salt water taffy tears of a rodeo clown

say "Wool-in-gong" not "Wall-en-gong"

2005-10-18T13:06:00.000-06:00

On Sunday evening I met up with Shady Cosgrove to chat about the University of Wollongong Creative Writing PhD program. She is a professor of Creative Writing there, and has been here in Calgary for about a month on an exchange-- Nicole Markotic went to represent the U of C's writing program over in Wollongong. Shady was also doing a reading that night, along with Robyn Read and Caleb Zimmerman. (If Robyn Read ever appears on the same bill as Christian Bok, I hope she's listed first so that is says "Robyn Read Christian Bok." They'd get a very different audience I bet. Ha ha.)

The University of Wollongong (UOW) sounds great. Shady's partner mentioned the word means "place of surf" and that it is right on the beach. The city is small (200 000, Saskatoon-sized as Paul pointed out-- though I am sure he meant the city and not the berry ha ha) and Shady made a point of mentioning that readings, community happenings etc. aren't as common in Wollongong as they are in Calgary, but it makes sense-- a much smaller pool of audience members to draw on as well as fewer writers. I always get a little misty-eyed when people praise the Calgary writing scene and the energy and support we have for each other. Maybe that's to do with the fact that I so rarely hear positive things about Calgary from people from elsewhere otherwise.

I have to love my hometown-- I can't help it. Maybe that's one of the reasons I try so hard to be a writing-scene-booster-- but the problem with that is that there are always things I miss, and then I feel guilty. Shady, Robyn and Caleb's reading was a great one to not miss-- I met three new writers and the readings were terrrific. Caleb's was first. He described it as a children's story, which made me think he'd have a lot in common with Andre Rodrigues, but as he read, I thought maybe Chris Ewart should meet this guy. Robyn read second, and her story had a little in common with writer XXXXX XXXXX, but was a lot funnier, and a lot more fun. Shady read a non-fiction bit about a trip to Graceland-- that in itself was unusual-- who in Calgary writes non-fiction that reads like a story? I can't think of anyone... But maybe I missed them reading last night. Now I feel guilty.

The University of Wollongong is on the top of my list. The University of Queensland in Brisbane also looks good. I'll keep you masses of people reading this informed of my progress researching programs and funding.

2005-10-17T11:41:00.000-06:00

dANDelion's New Web Page

Who is Cowboy Poetry?

2005-10-15T17:02:00.000-06:00

Cowboy Poetry wears a Saint Ampede buckle
polishes it every night by candlelight

bow leg barrel ride
legs buckle at the 8-second mark and bunny belts

I’m not saying Saint Ampede’s Virgins aren’t
but he’s got his pride

I mean like a lion does
Saint Ampede’s Princesses and Queen and the Young Canadians

and it’s immaculate: every year Saint Ampede fathers
Cowboy Poetry

and we all celebrate with breakfast
flap that, Jack. Saint Ampede is all around us

the motherfucking King of Heaven
the Patron Saint of Calgary

My Five-Year Anniversary

2005-10-15T16:08:00.000-06:00

I've joined the Board of the dANDelion Magazine Society as a "Director at Large." I've been involved in some capacity or other with dANDelion since the English Department at the University of Calgary took over the operation of the magazine in 2000. At that time, I was in a creative writing course run by Fred Wah, and along with the other members of the class including Trevor Speller, Lindsay Tipping, Natalie Simpson, Tillie Sanchez and Darren Mathies, we made up the "Editorial Collective" for the first U of C-produced issue. Truth be told, Fred did most of the selecting. I solicited artwork from Tomas Jonsson and it ended up on the cover, though-- Tom is now curating at The New Gallery.

Trevor, Lindsay, Natalie, Tillie, Darren and I were the "PHU Collective" at that time, and published two issues of Phu Online. Our activities consisted mainly of staging science-themed poetry readings, wearing jumpsuits and drinking beer at Ming or the Grad Lounge.

Anyway, my involvement with dANDelion resumed in 2002, the summer I returned to Calgary to begin my Graduate Degree. I helped then-Assistant Editor derek beaulieu with a reading featuring Chris Dewdney, Wayde Compton, Ryan Knighton and Prize Budget for Boys (a bit of a sausage party, but a good time). In the fall I became Ass Ed. The following year I was Editor. In those two years, we had some amazing readings and put out issues I am really proud of, especially the "Disaster!" issue, which was a collaboration with TRUCK and won an AMPA Award for cover design. I also started the proud now-tradition of publishing dANDelion chapbooks featuring members of the Editorial Collective, which current Editor Natalie Walschots is, I am glad to see, continuing.

I love editing, and I miss doing that job, but I am looking forward to doing some of the more administrative jobs for the magazine as a Board member. We'll be applying for a Canada Council "Flying Squad" Grant, and you know, after three years of writing abstracts, proposals, and grant applications for myself, I think I am getting pretty good at writing that kind of document. It's all bullshit-and-fluff-- and requires a lot of creativity. Kind of like writing blurbs, I think. There is a funny bit in the new Matrix magazine, an excerpt from Brian Joseph Davis' Portable Altamount, called "Jessica Simpson's Grant Application" that makes use of phrases like "notions of fate and mortality" and "a new language of material skills." Ha ha ha :)

Well, dANDelion is supposed to have a new website up soon. That'll be nice. Since this whole post was kind of about me practicing putting links in my text, it would've been a nice end to the post to have a link.

CFP: Extreme Write

2005-10-13T16:09:00.000-06:00

Hey all you formally innovative Calgarian writers-- I am putting together an anthology of essays and creative writing from Calgary's oh-so-exciting creative writing scene and I am calling it "Extreme Write" (clever huh? Paul and I came up with that). If you have an essay or thesis excerpt or etc. that addresses avant-garde writing in Calgary, send it to me!

This is all part of my scheme to become a contributing member of society. do you think it is a good idea?

from Cowboy Poetry, St. Ampede and The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth

2005-10-13T15:01:00.000-06:00

Wonder Woman’s got nothing on
Cowboy Poetry’s lasso

he’s got this trick with a rope
he’ll dog-leg, he’ll hog-tie, spit on his hand spit in your eye

there’s a tear in my beer
for my Wonder Woman Underoos

Cowboy Poetry’s lariat and bolo
chaps and 10 gallon uniform his every move

meanwhile I’ve got my Wonder Woman panties in a knot
to dog-collar Cowboy Poetry

steal his pearlized snaps and
dog-tag him for the feedlot