The A B Series had two events back to back on the 20th at the Ottawa Public Library.
Richard Van Camp has a glowingly positive energy, on stage and off. He gave a wonderful performance, sharing stories and books.
A a proud member of the Tlicho Dene, he is the author of 12 books in various genres.
His two latest releases are his new short story collection, Godless but Loyal to Heaven (Enfield & Wizenty) and his baby book, Little You (Orca Book Publishers).
He shared some of his stories for wee children reaching forward. For one story of welcoming baby to the world the audience was invited to chant along a refrain of heya-hey. He writes for various ages including making a comic book called Path of the Warrior. It was a response to native youth being recruited into gangs. 20,000 copies were distributed for free in B.C.
He shared stories reaching back from his elders and stories about his grandparents in particular. In the right to the right, he holds up a photo of his grandmother. She was what we don’t have an exact equivalent of down south. We have midwives but not death comforters who can go around the community and aid with that transition for the dying and their families.
He talked about his community and the north and its changes. Climate change is visible within our lifetime with coyotes, magpies and hummingbirds going further north and changes among walruses. Walruses are known for hunting in pairs or teams or eating clams. Now the walruses are going rogue and hunting seals. He pointed out human role in making things better for various kinds of animal-people. For example, in Taiwan, the butterfly migration is helped from top-down. Butterflies in taiwan are noticed, theirs being the second largest migration to that of the Monarchs from Canada to Mexico. They Shut highway lanes and shone UV lights to try to save the butterflies from collisions during peak migration. Loyalty and respect that extends past mere humans is a beautiful thing.
He said that each kind of animal people, bear-people, dragonfly-people, butterfly-people each have a gift. Each person also was born with gifts, or capacities, and it’s your job in life to discover what they are to cultivate them and share them.
His gift is being a listener and storyteller. He has a story he tells that is only 4 lines. He has travelled for years around North America and says if you can repeat back these 4 sentences he’ll give you a free book. In all that time only 2 people have been able to listen and remember and do it. They have the gift.
His novel, The Lesser Blessed, recently became a motion picture with First Generation Films. It made a southern premiere at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. That movie version of his book is coming to Victoria Island as an open air viewing July 28th. Next week his short story is coming as a play to the NAC.
Margaret Christakos was next up. If you don’t know her work, here’s an overview:
Margaret Christakos has been a worker in the field of letters. She has been working on a variety of fiction and poetic projects this past year and conducted research in Greece and England in fall 2012 on a Chalmers Arts Fellowship. A new poetry collection called Multitudes will emerge from Coach House in fall 2013.
Her most recent publication is the BookThug chapbook The Chips & Ties Study (2012), from a longer ongoing composition called Tumultétudes.
Her publishing history of 9 books includes Welling (2010, A Globe 100 Book), What Stirs (2008, a Pat Lowther Award nominee), Sooner (2005, also shortlisted for the Lowther), and Excessive Love Prostheses (2002, winner of the ReLit Poetry Award). Other chapbooks include Adult Video (Nomados), My Girlish Feast (Belladonna) and Something Inside Me (In Case of Emergency Press).
Since 2006 she has curated and facilitated Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon, and has nurtured the online magazine InfluencySalon.ca.
She teaches creative writing and poetry part-time at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies and works on occasion as Associate Faculty with the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA program.
She read from The Chips & Ties Study and Sooner. In the former, she started with “wherein I wandered lonely as a crowd”. Later in the poems in a Betty Boop Marilyn Monroe [thanks Amanda] rhythm of the song, “I want to be owned by you, by nobody else but you.” Then she switches to a refit of “Do You Hear What I Hear” to switch the old god of God for the new god of commerce and acquisition, that is, “Do you own what I own? A car, a car, shining in the…”
The series of ephemeral linked chapbooks explore identity of crowd versus individuals, group culture at the level of one. Pieces of things that feel “poetic”, whatever that would be, are interrupted with “found” language, banal public conversational chatter that leaks in on public transit interject into the body of the poem. It asks what is public? What is private?
She read from her new material from Multitudes too which remixes the cliche expected in a similar vein as well and mixes with a jaded wit, for example “a poetics of observation wins awards”. She shared a new poem which I think is also from Multitudes on sexting. It begged to have the reader/listener consider, What is the difference between virtual contact and physical contact? “push words into a body. they form a column or a spiral.[…]push words into a mouth. does it form into a tongue or jetty? […] are words the body or the threshold?”
She goes to the contemporary as well and the situation of the Vancouver hockey riots where people were encouraged as a group to rat out on individuals seen misbehaving in footage. What does our modern era do to our language and our character and connection? What choices are we making? What are its implications and fall out?
Stephen Collis is in from Vancouver just back from a stop in Montreal.
Stephen Collis is the author of five books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize winning On the Material (Talonbooks 2010) and three parts of the on-going “Barricades Project”: Anarchive (New Star 2005), The Commons (Talonbooks 2008), and To the Barricades (Talon, 2013).
An activist and social critic, his writing on the Occupy movement is collected in Dispatches from the Occupation (Talonbooks 2012).
Collis is also the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions 2006), as well as the editor, with Graham Lyons, of Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation (Iowa University Press 2012).
He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University, where he was a 2011/12 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow.
Stephen Collis was doing his Ottawa launch of “To the Barricades”. His poems were also didactic of a sort and questioning the choices we make in aggregate by our compliance with the war machine of nationhood. Oh how lovely it may be should we get past this idea of human nation as such a primary thing.
I find intriguing but I’m not sure I fully understand a statement he made at the start about looking not just at what past we can bring to our present and future but what we can take of now to give to the past.
His poems are about upending our status quo. For example, We will sing swords into songs…animal revolution…air strikes are unsustainable…profit and equities are unsustainable…come revolution as sensuous animals we will begin to be born.
He raised the question of what would constitute the next revolution that would be meaningful? The next revolution is culture, teaching what we can not do based on the feedback of what we know will be the consequences. There’s no other out there, only an us. Any death diminishes me. “A seal’s death diminishes me.” We are interconnected.
He opened another poem with an epigraph by George Oppen wrote in a notebook “I choose to believe in the natural consciousness, I see what the deer see.” It continues as meditation on forming a new way to live as a predator and to also see as the deer sees. “How does a predator become a trustee?”
Another poem addresses the constancy of protesters and their placards “is it just your profession to be in the street?”, with a basement full of placard supplies and bullhorns at the ready for the next thing to protest? At the same time he admits it’s past time to speak up for the world we need to live with big money “about to throw their harpoon of climate at us”. A beautiful circle of serendipity with mention of seals and the opening talk of Richard talking about climate change trends.
The next Max Middle production is also at the Main branch of the Ottawa Public Library. A B Series on April 24th, 7pm will have National Poetry Month readings by Stephen Brockwell, Christine McNair, David O’Meara, Peter Richardson and Sandra Ridley.
The next Richard Van Camp event in Ottawa is in a few days – April 28th at 8:30pm at the NAC Fourth Stage with I Count Myself Among Them. It is part of Northern Scene, Literature and Storytelling and is $12 or included with a Writers Festival pass. It is a play about one Dogrib man’s journey from his criminal connections with drug dealing gangs in B.C. to his own spiritual awakening. It is hosted by: Shelagh Rogers and written by Richard Van Camp, featuring a sound effect team and actors including Craig Lauzon, Chris Cound, Russell Bull, Leela Gilday.