for whatever it is you celebrate, might it be a good one, with the hopes of a peaceful (finally) new year.
Here is one of the pictures of the wee girls included in our Christmas card photo shoot this year.
Monday, December 25, 2017
Sunday, December 24, 2017
some (early) christmas : montebello,
Once again we went to Montebello as part of our Christmas activity with Christine's father and his wife, and Christine's brother's family, all piling into cars for the sake of big meals, fireplaces, swimming and other activities in the wilds of Quebec.
This is our fourth annual jaunt [see last year's post here], arriving mid-afternoon on the 16th (coinciding the drive with Aoife's nap) and leaving again some twenty-eight hours later. Whoooosh!
Rose ran around with her cousins, and went into the pool twice (at least), as well as going skating (far too briefly) outside with father-in-law and Teri (apparently Rose didn't want to fall). Rose dressed in pajamas that made her up like a toy soldier (she recently saw a version of The Nutcracker with Christine), and Aoife was a reindeer (which she ended wearing all of Sunday).
They opened gifts, hung out with gran'pa, coloured, and ran around a bunch. During one of Rose's swim-jaunts with Teri, Aoife (who wasn't feeling well, so got rather clingy) had a long nap that required my assist (I also had a long nap). Christine had a pedicure. We attempted to breathe.
They spent much time on the iPad (it helped keep them both from running off) (there's also a spelling game that Aoife is getting quite good at).
In the hotel, also, was a gingerbread house large enough that I could have stood up inside it. I mean, made of real gingerbread. Really?
This is our fourth annual jaunt [see last year's post here], arriving mid-afternoon on the 16th (coinciding the drive with Aoife's nap) and leaving again some twenty-eight hours later. Whoooosh!
Rose ran around with her cousins, and went into the pool twice (at least), as well as going skating (far too briefly) outside with father-in-law and Teri (apparently Rose didn't want to fall). Rose dressed in pajamas that made her up like a toy soldier (she recently saw a version of The Nutcracker with Christine), and Aoife was a reindeer (which she ended wearing all of Sunday).
They opened gifts, hung out with gran'pa, coloured, and ran around a bunch. During one of Rose's swim-jaunts with Teri, Aoife (who wasn't feeling well, so got rather clingy) had a long nap that required my assist (I also had a long nap). Christine had a pedicure. We attempted to breathe.
They spent much time on the iPad (it helped keep them both from running off) (there's also a spelling game that Aoife is getting quite good at).
In the hotel, also, was a gingerbread house large enough that I could have stood up inside it. I mean, made of real gingerbread. Really?
Labels:
Aoife McLennan,
Christine McNair,
Montebello,
Rose McLennan
Saturday, December 23, 2017
The Peter F. Yacht Club regatta/reading/christmas party!
lovingly hosted by rob mclennan;
The Peter F. Yacht Club annual regatta/christmas party/reading
at The Carleton Tavern (upstairs)
233 Armstrong Avenue (at Parkdale Market)
Friday, December 29, 2017
doors 7pm, reading 7:30pm
with readings from yacht club regulars and irregulars alike, including Roland Prevost, D.S. Stymeist, Faizal Deen, Chris Johnson, Amanda Earl, Christine McNair, Chris Turnbull (weather permitting), Frances Boyle, Anita Dolman and rob mclennan (and most likely some others).
readings! joyousness! possibly even cookies!
HOW COULD YOU SAY NO TO COOKIES?!?!?
The Peter F. Yacht Club annual regatta/christmas party/reading
at The Carleton Tavern (upstairs)
233 Armstrong Avenue (at Parkdale Market)
Friday, December 29, 2017
doors 7pm, reading 7:30pm
with readings from yacht club regulars and irregulars alike, including Roland Prevost, D.S. Stymeist, Faizal Deen, Chris Johnson, Amanda Earl, Christine McNair, Chris Turnbull (weather permitting), Frances Boyle, Anita Dolman and rob mclennan (and most likely some others).
readings! joyousness! possibly even cookies!
HOW COULD YOU SAY NO TO COOKIES?!?!?
Friday, December 22, 2017
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Chelsea Dingman
Chelsea Dingman is a Canadian citizen and Visiting
Instructor at the University of South Florida. Her first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to
win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). In 2016-17,
she also won The Southeast Review’s
Gearhart Poetry Prize, The Sycamore
Review’s Wabash Prize, and Water-stone
Review’s Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in Ninth Letter, The Colorado Review, Mid-American
Review, Cincinnati Review, and Gulf
Coast, among others. Visit her
website: chelseadingman.com.
1 - How did your first book
change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How
does it feel different?
My first
book allowed me to discover my voice as a poet. I don’t think we ever know what
kind of poet we are since that is always changing, but it allowed poetry to be
something more concrete for me. Having a book only feels different because
people are able to access my work without me being present, if that makes sense.
I still read and write everyday as though I hadn’t finished a book. I am always
working toward whatever poem is currently in my head.
2 - How did you come to
poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to
poetry by accident. I thought that I would be a prose writer. I was forced to
take a poetry grad class several years ago. Part way through the semester, I
realized that I would much rather play with a line in a poem for hours than
sustain a narrative over pages and pages. It seems to be the way my brain is
wired: I love language. To play with language all day is pure joy.
3 - How long does it take
to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly,
or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final
shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I write
very quickly and generate a lot of work. I tend to overwrite: for every poem
that I’m confident about, I generally wrote three poems to get there. I think
that’s because I’m not usually satisfied with the first thing I’ve written and
I obsess on one occasion until it comes out the way I want it to. I don’t set
out to write project books: I just write and gather the threads from my poems
later. I have written one project manuscript, but it was the most difficult
thing I’ve done because I had to map it out and it felt forced until I figured
out how to structure it and make it move like a book of poetry moves.
4 - Where does a poem
usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining
into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very
beginning?
A poem
begins with an occasion that demands to be written in most cases. Sometimes, it
begins with a great line that I can’t get out of my head. I usually hear the
music last and try to follow the sounds while I’m writing. I think this is
because I’m a visual learner. I’ve talked to several auditory learners who do the
opposite. I write whatever I want to write or research and then I look for ways
that the work fits together later. Usually, after writing thirty poems or so,
the larger threads start to emerge.
5 - Are public readings
part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who
enjoys doing readings?
Public
readings that I attend have been part of my process. I had not given many
readings before my book came out. I enjoy the poetry community at readings: I
love the questions about the work, talking about poetry and teaching, and
working with other writers. I love the way that builds community faster than
anything else I’ve been part of and poets are a really generous and supportive
group, for the most part.
6 - Do you have any
theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you
trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions
are?
I’m not
sure that I’m trying to answer any questions in my work. I tend to believe that
writing to those realizations is better fitted for creative non-fiction. In
poetry, we are writing out of the realizations that we already have. But, if
you are referring to the uncertainty in poetry, then I do write out of
uncertainty constantly. Unanswerable questions tend to be the ones that I
obsess over. In my work, these uncertainties cover so many things: life, death,
faith, love. Ordinary everyday questions, such as where the socks from the
dryer go. Political uncertainties, as have arisen in so many powerful poems in
the last year or two.
7 – What do you see the
current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one?
What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I often
go back to Anais Nin’s quote: the role of the writer is not to say what we can
all say, but what we are unable to say. I believe that it is even more
important for writers to say anything in the current cultural climate and for a
massive range of voices to be heard. We need to hear an array of experiences to
encourage empathy, but also to force people to take action and accountability.
A writer is a great tool. The written word is powerful and lasting.
8 - Do you find the process
of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I haven’t
worked with an outside editor. I have only worked with trusted readers. Trusted
readers are a staple for poets and an essential part of the process. I don’t
trade poems anymore, necessarily, but I definitely need someone who cares about
my work to read it when I think I have a manuscript near completion.
9 - What is the best piece
of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Writers
write. It’s not about awards and books. Shut out the noise and do the work.
10 - What kind of
writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a
typical day (for you) begin?
I begin
by reading. I love that part of the day. I read a lot in the mornings. I like
to write afterward. If I’m teaching early, I read and write when I get home. I
try to write everyday, though it’s not always work I polish. Just as an
exercise.
11 - When your writing gets
stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)
inspiration?
I read.
Essays. Poems. Interviews by other writers that might trigger something. Some
writers give such wonderfully lyric answers to questions that it makes me want
to write. I also turn to my life: occasions I have shelved in my brain for
later that I wanted to write. It might be something that I experienced, but
often it’s something that I witnessed. Sometimes, it’s even a movie or
documentary.
12 - What fragrance reminds
you of home?
Pine
trees. I grew up in the B.C interior. They were ever-present.
13 - David W. McFadden once
said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence
your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I love
history, nature, and science. I love to incorporate all of those things in my
poems, depending on what I am writing. The various landscapes that my speakers
move through are so important in terms of informing their inner landscapes, so
nature is prevalent. I’ve written a whole manuscript concerned with history:
the emigration of Ukrainian citizens to Canada in the second wave (1924).
Landscapes play a large role in those poems also. I just finished a manuscript
about infertility and stillbirth, in which I used science-based research.
14 - What other writers or
writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Writers
I’ve worked with who are essential to my work are John A. Nieves (my most
trusted reader) and Jay Hopler (all-round genius human). Traci Brimhall is
another writer that I worked with on my thesis and she taught me quite a few
things in a very short time. Heather Sellers has been a wonderful resource for
both writing and teaching. Outside of my work, my cohort at the University of
South Florida is amazing: I learn so much from simple discussions of writing.
15 - What would you like to
do that you haven't yet done?
Write the
poem that I want to write. That sounds strange, but I feel like I will forever
be writing toward that elusive poem that I feel is successful, but is not
possible because there is no ceiling in writing. Writers spend our lives
writing to get better at writing. Or to write something different than we’ve
already written, while acquiring new skills.
16 - If you could pick any
other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you
think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I think I
still would have been a teacher. I love it. It is really rewarding to work with
the students that I have had the opportunity to work with.
17 - What made you write,
as opposed to doing something else?
I tried
doing other things for a long time. I changed my undergrad major many times. I
kept coming back to writing because it’s what I love. I want to spend my life
this way. I can’t imagine not reading and writing anymore, even if it is just
for myself.
18 - What was the last
great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: I
just finished Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle and I was stunned by it.
Film: I
have young kids, so my husband and I don’t usually get to watch films anymore.
We watched Gifted as a family recently and everyone enjoyed that.
19 - What are you currently
working on?
I am
currently doing research on traumatic brain injury and writing poems that are
concerned with memory: what we can live with remembering, what we can’t live
with remembering, what we cannot remember & how to live with that. Brain injury
is something that hasn’t been written about enough and it affects many people
in my husband’s former profession, so I feel a sense of urgency about it. I’m
just writing to see where that takes me right now.
Thursday, December 21, 2017
Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses’ Indie Literary Market (part four,
[Hazel Miller and Gary Barwin announcing the winner of the 2017 bpNichol Chapbook Award] Further to my previous set of notes (and, see, I’m writing about the ottawa small press book fair as well), here are a few more items I picked up at the most recent
Indie Literary Market:
Toronto ON: Anstruther Press’
chapbooks are becoming increasingly known for their lyric, narrative precision,
as well as focusing on producing only a couple of titles per year, most
recently Krischan Stotz’s Brother Magnet
(2017) and R.P. LaRose’s A Dream in the Bush (2017). Krischan Stotz, according to the bio, is “a young gay Canadian
writer who lives in Berlin as a freelancer,” and at the back of Brother Magnet is a sequence of seven
short lyrics composed in tight lyrics with the energy of a tightly-wound steel
cable:
(II)
A painting I’d like to see: a young man, any young
man,
his face the face of an eternal child with his
father
at midday walking the red-brown bars while I,
who myself am in the painting run past them,
the pressure of my feet causing the sand to
liquefy,
alerting a razorfish who, digging to safety ejaculates
a thin spout of water that the young man
flings himself to dodge, with a half-smile,
seemingly aware of the humour like a magnet
between us—
look at him—and all the while his father
notices nothing,
neither the clam nor the boyish brink I’ve come
to
in his presence, a brink I’d like to push the
son past,
but for the posture of his dad, who looks
straight ahead
and keeps walking. So I run, back tensed and
stomach
coiled.
LaRose’s
A Dream in the Bush engages with the
land and landscape, one that doesn’t live separate or passively distant from the
narrator, but part of his own internal landscape. As he writes in the poem “Under
the Snow”: “What’s outside the bedroom window / looks inside.” There are some
really striking lines in LaRose’s poems, one that make me pause, or even stop
dead in my tracks, including this little sequence from the poem “Some Words
Held in a Love Poem”:
Women and men exist but
only in sentences.
We
could be words in those sentences.
Held to each other
semantics and grammar
Toronto ON: Jeff Kirby [who reads in Ottawa for TREE in January 2018], the proprietor
of Toronto’s already-infamous poetry-only bookstore, Knife|Fork|Book, has started producing small chapbooks, and one of his first [I reviewed his Dale Smith title here] is his own She’s Having A Doris Day (2017), following on the heels of his earlier chapbook-length poetry
titles: Simple Enough, Cock & Soul, Bob’s boy and The world is
fucked and sometimes beautiful (1995). The simplicity and grace of the
design of this small title is quite striking, and the poems within are lyric
narratives that play with the gleefully positive imagery of iconic American
actress Doris Day against the darker impulses that coincide with such a simple
version of American life. There is a playfulness here, even through a
thinly-veiled rage; these are poems that proclaim a victory through perseverance,
survival and a refusal to not exist loudly and joyously, as he writes to end
the poem “ADAM’S FEET”:
I left America
I knew I had no future
that Americans mean it when they say
“Love it or leave it”
that Nancy’s Ronnie and his kind wilfully
turned left us to die
and I ill.
A nancy boy. A faggot.
One. Glorious. Flaming. Faggot.
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
Jaimie Gusman, Anyjar
Factoid (2):
shallow water blackout
can occur in a waterbed
on a rocky surface
i.e. a coral reef
i.e. the moon ponds of the moon
or imagine your sister
went diving with her father
and almost drowned
had an anxiety attack
imagine the fish were hysterical
as she moonwalked
the ocean floor
not with a dance instructor
or your father
with a man no one knew
when the story was replayed
your father was on the deck
absently thinking
about fishing
about how many hooks
were left in the tackle box
there are as many as 3000 lines
in any given ocean plot
I’m
finally getting into Hawaii poet Jaimie Gusman’s first full-length collection, Anyjar (San Francisco CA: Black Radish
Books, 2017), a mix of structures around the first-person lyrics that play with
the image of the jar, from Wallace Stevens’ poem “I placed a jar in Tennessee”
to John Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and beyond. In an interview posted a while back at Queen Mob’s Teahouse,
conducted by Timothy Dyke, Gusman speaks to the image of the “anyjar,” writing:
“Anyjar has really been a manuscript
about inquiry. I’m not really sure that Anyjar stands for any one thing. Like
you say, Anyjar is a ‘slippery and elliptical focus’ making it, as a character
or a symbol, very malleable. Unreliable, even. The poems struggle to define the
Anyjar, yet the poems are bound by its presence. For me, the Anyjar is a way
for the speaker to measure her mourning against her existence. It is a
container for the uncontainable.”
For
Gusman, her “anyjar” as a focal point contains multitudes, from memoir-ish
narratives and short scenes to lyric sequences that write on jars, the body, family
reminiscenes and just about anything a jar might contain. The blend of styles
and subjects are an intriguing mix (although some of the more sprawl-y poems
tend to get away from her a bit; the prose-poems remain the strongest pieces in
the collection), and the through-line of the “anyjar” manages to hold the collection
together quite well. I’m a big fan of collections composed and/or compiled as “catch-alls,”
which make me wonder what direction she might move for any subsequent
collections. Catch-alls as well, or structures held together in different ways?
And like
MAGIC Anyjar is Gone
Forgive me, he says, I took the
Anyjar and buried it in snow until part of the glass froze and then I tried to
break the Anyjar apart with an ax that was underneath the kitchen sink, which I
discovered when rain caught the slate-stick and with one, two, twenty smashes
the Anyjar wouldn’t budge, which meant that the ax wouldn’t do so I went to the
bedroom where I found a chain-saw, revved the engine like a quake of earth and
sawed the hell out of the Anyjar, but what happened next was disappointing
because nothing shattered except my right knuckles and all bloody and in a bad
mood I called a friend to help and the friend said I’ll do anything I can do anything to help a friend so the friend
came over with very new rubber gloves and twisted the Anyjar until the friend’s
hands looked like new hands but of course we thought if the new hands wouldn’t do,
any other hands would surely fail to open the Anyjar, so then I thought extremely
hard about everything and we began to make a catapult from space and flung the
Anyjar into the air but it boomeranged right back only to hit the friend in the
anything-but-good eye so I ran to get some frozen peas and a patch, and then I got
tired so I suggested that maybe the best thing to do was to go get a blanket
(take the one the dog sleeps on) and drape it over the Anyjar and just like
that I sighed and the Anyjar disappeared—so
forgive me he says sorry again, it
could be anywhere.
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