Ottawa fall small press fair

The pre-press fair reading was reasonably well attended with a couple dozen people.
Lisa Pasold — wonderful articulate lady — was reading from the start of her novel Rats of Las Vegas. (A compelling sounding book.) She also read from her chapbook, being signed below,
Michael Dennis (pictured) read from his recent Coming Ashore on Fire released this year, and his even more recent on being a dodo, also from Burnt Wine Press. (Both books we read samples from in one of my writing circles and I look forward to reading more of.) Here’s an excerpt from what he read, the first half of onions and pearls from on being a dodo,

to a starving man
a bag full of peals
is of much less use
than a bag of onions
take my friend Bob
being of farm stock
you’d expect him to know
the difference
between a peach
and a pear
a cow and a bull
the side of a barn door
to an open field
but Bob’s head
is under a different cloud
and what he sees
is anyone’s guess

Here, rob claiming it’s what the bio says. Maybe that was before Spencer Gordon read his long poem that was all one sentence on Miley Cyrus. Absorbing poem read as a southern character piece. Lovely.
Michelle Debarats (middle picture) read from new work, in her usual delightful turns. She promises it will see light of day some day. (Hopefully soon.)
Garry Thomas Morse (rightmost) read from his comic prose that seemed a hybrid of late night panacea ads and Fahrenheit 451, and some poetry.
rob read from the newest novel he’s started, although his most recent in print, missing persons, came back from the printers that afternoon. (And me already at chapter 24, halfway through.) Here’s an excerpt as the title character, at age 8, has run to the back forty for solitude or escape, p.10,

Lying on the cold ground, her fingers made tracks in the cracks in the earth. Her fingers wrote speech across the scars. She listened for birds, and for trucks. She listened for her parents to call out her name, for what would never come.

*
I’m surprised I took so few photos of the fair.
Increasing contrast and saturation and make it small… and the picture still stays blurry. Hrm. Harrumph.

There were between 2 and 3 dozen publishers this fall, a ring around the room and two rows up the middle.
Who all came? I seem to have picked up fewer flyers as well. Pah.
Lisa Pasad and Garry Thomas Morse had tables with their chapbooks and books.

AngelHouse and Bywords were represented. jwcurry with his room 302 books were there. There were a few new faces. I don’t recall the City of Ottawa setting up before. Tall Tails was there with issues 1-4, one themed around cats, another around beards.
There were a few new people, including this with Crossing Arcs: Alzheimer’s, my mother, and me and older titles going back to the 80s.

Bondi Studios made its first appearance with spine books and chapbooks. Claudia Coutu Radmore also had on hand Arctic Twilight [warning: link autoloads sound]. Here she and Mike proof a translation of a chapbook to French. (No rest for the productive!)
Burnt Wine Press and Buschek Books had a table near the in/words people and Apt 9. Another new enterprise The Workhorsery had a novel in a magical realism vein called “You and the Pirates”.
The freebie table had a few things, including this poem on broadsheet I put out a few copies of (and stuck back retroactively in my own blog archive).
Who else? Proper Tales and Mansfield Press, Chaudiere, above/ground. Ottawa Arts Review seems to still be chugging along.
Room was present in room. Grunge Papers has more handmade paper and letterpress items. Emergency Response Unit was on hand.
I tend to overlook the children’s titles and the school and business titles. And the graphic novels. And art cards, cartoons (probably the wrong word; not my forte), drawings, and paintings.
There were some art cards of pastels I meant to get to but each time I swung by, customers were chatting.
A lady with a vampire book seemed to be doing well. She gave a pithy pitch including testimonials of people missing a day of work or night of sleep reading the first two parts of her trilogy, or missing their Toronto subway stop or holding out on sex until the partner finishes the books, or needing to buy separate copies because of different speeds of reading. (Who *was* that costumed author?)