Monday, December 25, 2017

Happy Holidays! Christmas and beyond,

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.

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?

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?!?!?

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,




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.