I’m back hosting more poets at Literary Landscape on June 4 with Rachel Eugster who has a fringefest play Whose Aemelia? about medieval poet, Aemelia Lanyer. June 25th is with Bren Simmers of Hastings-Sunrise. July 16th I’m talking with Rita Wong about her new book undercurrent (Nightwood, 2015).
Also, we’re rattling the bushes for sound bites of memories of 18 years of Literary Landscape. What do you remember?
Round Up
AllLitUp haas posted a Writer’s Block Interview with me today. Check it out.
Oh, all the albums of events — A B Series, photos from Authors from Indies Day at Beechwood, photos from Writers Fest, spring 2015, from Tree’s 35th anniversary party readings, from BookThug launches, from old computer of West Fest and writers fest 2004.
Hear that? The emu of a laptop sounds like it’s out of breath.
My hard drive failed during the last 95books cycle and now my battery is claiming near-death. Still, faster than handwriting you all…
Been a while since my my last post but soon(ish) books 31-50 of reading in 2015. Good intentions to blog that and all the recent readings.
Synthesis takes more energy than letting new wash over you. To absorb is a step, to reply another, to say something more, well…
But it’s almost the end of launch season. There will be cake & radishes tonight in Quebec And, yahzee, I got my writer theme music onto my phone & it plays. Maybe I don’t have to fogie on back to gramophone land.
Want more literary? Literary blogs in Ottawa, part 1, the mclennan empire, and Literary blogs in Ottawa, part 2, more people.
What to do with the thoughts that fit no where? They get divided between the sheep of tweets and the goats of poems. Like, finding the 100-page manuscript of homemade aphorisms I typed in high school. How does that fit.
Or how it seems a comic simulacrum of a symbolic knell when I search for a word like “joy” or like “love” in a document & get no results.
Okay, off we go…
Blogging a Voice
If you never risk speaking in public, to a public, then you may feel safe in your practice, but you may also feel alone and anonymous and mute. You might also not have a critical voice. It’s like not voting. And if you don’t vote you’re a hypocrite to complain about the outcome. If you don’t like the paucity of women taking up critical public space and you yourself take no risk to speak out, you are part of the problem.
Sina Queyras at the Poetry Foundation on blogging and publishing.
there are many more terrible blogs than there are good ones, but there are good ones, so many good ones. And what I mean to say, I think, is that there is something inherently womanly about blogging as I’ve come to understand it. Not just, of course, because it’s the latest in a long line of endeavours in which women have partaken in involving unpaid labour and undervalued craft. Or because the anonymity offered by blogs also offers a spectacular forum for women at their very bitchiest, though that’s a part of it too. But rather that the community-making that’s so essential to blogging seems like the kind of thing women have always been doing, whether historians saw fit to include it in the official record or not.
Kerry Clare on “the womanly art of blogging at Literary Women
A B Series, Literary Landscape, Literary Landscape, Prose in the Park
This Thursday the 14th I’ll be reading with BC poet Colin Browne. That will be at 8pm at Ottawa Art Gallery Arts Court. Of course I understand if you want to go to David Dollin’s celebration of life instead. I have no plans to read my own material in Ottawa again until Sawdust in December.
Browne’s a rare out of towner, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, nominated for the ReLit Award, co-founder of the Kootenay School of Writing, he’ll also do a matinee on the 15th from 4-6pm. These in depth small group times with poets can be fabulous. It’s also free, thanks to funding bodies.
Before then, on Thursday, from 6:30to 7pm I’ll be on 93.1fm on CKCUfm talking with David O’Meara about poetry as a sneak peak to his reading with Sawdust Reading Series on the 20th. That will be David O’Meara, Kiera Sandrock, and Jeff Blackman. Jeff Blackman won the blind poetry competition for the month. Kiera Sandrock won 2nd place in the nationals for the Poetry In Voice recitation competition. Details of those Pour Boy poets:
David O’Meara lives in Ottawa, Ontario. He is the author of four collections of poetry, including Storm still (McGill/Queens, 1999), The Vicinity (Brick Books, 2003), Noble Gas, Penny Black (Brick Books, 2008) and a play, Disaster, nominated for four Rideau Awards. His books have been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the ReLit Prize, the Trillium Book Award, the Ottawa Book Award and he has won the Archibald Lampman Award three times. His poetry has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, quoted in a Tragically Hip song, and used as libretto for a pastoral cantata for unaccompanied chorus, written by composer Scott Tresham. His most recent book is A Pretty Sight (Coach House Press, 2013) won the 2014 Archibald Lampman Award and the Ottawa Book Award. He is director of the Plan 99 Reading Series, was a founding director and Artistic Director for VERSeFest (Canada’s International Poetry Festival) and was a jurist for the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is listed in the Canadian Who’s Who (University of Toronto Press).
Kiera Sandrock is the 2nd place winner of the national Poetry In Voice competition. She is a grade twelve student at Canterbury High School. She has enjoyed writing as a hobby since she was seven, and has been enrolled in Canterbury’s literary arts program for the past four years. Poetry has always had a special place in her heart. Kiera also loves nature and science. She is excited to be studying biology at the University of Ottawa next year.
Jeff Blackman lives and writes in the same place (Ottawa). Over the last year he’s performed in Montreal, Toronto, Peterborough and Kingston as part of the Accord of Poets tour in promotion of the anthology Five (Apt. 9 Press). His poems have recently appeared in Blacklock’s Reporter, Bywords, and the Steel Chisel, and one’s forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2015 (Tightrope Books). Jeff also self-publishes and sometimes self-deprecates via his blog
In June, my Literary Landscape show will be with Rachel Eugster who is the playwright of Whose Aemilia?, which will premiere at the Ottawa Fringe Festival in June. She is one of the first and best known of female medieval poets, writer of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. That’s June 4th.
She’ll also be at Prose in the Park, June 6th at Parkdale Park. 150 authors, 11 panels from 11am to 6pm.
David Dollin
David Dollin: A Celebration of Life
Thursday May 14th, 2015 5 – 8 PM
Christ Church Cathedral Hall
Those of you who have been part of our writers festival community for many years may have noticed an absence in our bookstore this spring. Our bookseller, David Dollin has been a member of our festival team and family for over decade, and it is with heavy hearts that we announce his passing on May 1st after a short battle with cancer. Our thanks go out to Nicole, Heather and Joshua for helping us through the spring festival, along with our heart-felt condolences.
At David’s request, we will be honouring him this Thursday evening and would like to extend the invitation to anyone who knew him. In lieu of flowers, a donation to the Salvation Army or The Ottawa General Chemotherapy Unit would be greatly appreciated.
David Dollin: celebration.