Chris McPherson greets as Mary Kritz laughs.
There’s always loads to explore from poetry to punk, non-fiction to art pieces, handcrafted to materials, glossy to photocopy, kids books to magazines.
Liana Voia did 2-3 minute interviews with various people with booths at the fair. Here is the interview with McPherson who does poetry and fiction, and the interview with Kritz who makes books and teaches people to make books.

Around the corner Kimberley Dawkins was typing a poem for a dollar and selling copies of the Chrysalis Zine. Here’s her interview
It felt kind of weird not having a booth but going to and fro and chat and buy without having to watch for customers was nice too.

Matthew Thomson on his work, and that of Dinah Zeldin, Rian Desourdie, Instant Crimson, and Mandi Morgan, Guillaume Vallée of the collective Organes Variables.

Similarly visual, and also from Montreal, are books by Edition Trip with a mixture of visual art and graphic novels by > here’s the interview with Stanley Wany.
Also in from Montreal, Sheena Swirlz with zines on cycling and eating from Radical Montreal. (If I’d had the other bun, I’d have the 40 cents I was short for that one.

Also coming from away, the Buffalo people who were the featured readers in the pre-fair reading Jeannie Hoag and Brian Mihok representing SunnyOutside Press.


Local is In/Words. Watch the interview of Chris Johnson and J.M. Francheteau.

Jenn and Cameron of Apt 9 Press which has been going 5 years and feels like it’s always been there. rob’s press has been going 20 years.
At the other end of newness scale is R.M. Kozan whose Fresh Blue Ink is out its first publication. Andrew Simpson’s first book Versus the Neanderthals was on hand too of about 60 flash fiction/short stories.

Caroline Frechette of Renaissance Book Press has copies on digital or paper and was happy to sign a copy.

Jessica Bebenek of Grow and Grow who actually takes cash and credit. Most don’t and I didn’t notice until I was out of cash (again). I didn’t end up making it all the way around the room. I missed half a dozen tables including Sheree Bradford-Lea who does cartoons on various things, mugs and paper.
Arc was represented by various shifts of people but Monty Reid and Jenny Hayson for the interview. And Bywords Online literary Magazine. Here’s the interview with Amanda Earl of Bywords and AngelHouse Press.

Mandy DeGeit’s interview and her site.

Lydia Peever’s video and her press, NightFace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjim5nLT4-I”>Grant Wilkins on his handmade papers and letterpress at Grunge Papers.
Voia ended up taking more interviews than I did photos.
Kristin Groulx and John David Hickey with Groulx’s wares, Jennifer Arbour Saint-Saëns, Dalton Derkson and Hurtin-Crue Press. There was a kid’s books with a table was Charlie’s Sparrow and the Secret of Flight by David Anderson and Monica and the Giraffe by Chani and Monica Dumont from The Success Room.

Some small press loot including (at 10 o’clock) Drifting by Marco Fraticelli (Catkin Press, 2013) which I’ve heard about for it seems like a year already, but it’s been underway for 30 years. His sister Rina Fraticelli and he used found diaries from an abandoned house. The creative outcome for her was this BRAVO!Fact short film from a few years ago, Iron Hill. We’ll talk about that book on an upcoming Literary Landscape. It is published by a new Ottawa Valley Imprint, Catkin by Claudia Coutu Radmore
(at 12 o’clock) How to Love a Lonely Man by Rhonda Douglas (Apt 9 Press), Utensile Paradise poems by Richard Truhlar (1987 via Apt 302 Books), The Management Blues by Mike Montreuil (pictured). (at 4 o’clock) the exhibitor catalogue. (at centre clockface) a further last thumbnail picture show of fiction shorts from Adam Thomlison of 40 Watt Spotlight. Here’s Thomlison’s interview.
(at 6 o’clock) a handbound lovely notebook by Mary Kritz, a Crystal Though Which Love Passes, Glosas for PK Page by Jesse Patrick Ferguson (Buschek Books). Here’s the interview with John Buschek.
at 9 o’clock, iii by michael e casteels’ puddles of sky press. here’s the interview with Casteels who, below, is busily still assembling books whenever there’s a lull.


Packing up, cracking up, time to close the tables for another half year.
Thanks to rob mclennan of rob mclennan generalamazingness.

Literary Landscape this evening at 6:30 on CKCU fm online or off the air talks with the Spencer Gordon and John Buschek about Apt 9, Buschek Books and the Ottawa small press fair. A podcast version should be online within the hour after air time.

In Incitements (Gaspereau Press, 2011.), Sean Howard uses a cut-up method, making poems from three prose texts, demonstrating that it is not the source material or the process but the writer’s hand that creates the end result. 

Although the subjects of each base text are different, the effects of Howard’s poems are similar. The text plays differently in the real estate of the page in each section,  disassembling, leaping and controlling speed. On the surface, his first two sections seem to hold to one topic, natural history, while on the microlevel of sound, they veer all around. For example, “Understructure Cantos” is ostensibly about biology, habitat and species, but it is plundered for fragments and those fragments are then broken up, so that half to three quarters of the right margin consists of hyphenated words, syllables competing against the text.  “ XIII,” for example, reads as a series of hesitations: 

The rain’s ros-
ary. Algon-
quin, names as 
verbs. The calv-
ing bay. Heron: taut: 
shadow. Flesh-
eaten worms. Berr-
ied light. Floun.

The lines and stanzas break in mid-word, which troubles the text and slow the reading, yet to lineate conventionally would be to miss part of the exercise. Taking the words slowly prevents the reader from racing past. It makes strange, and new meanings surface from being buried in words. The first stanza quoted above, for example, invokes both “the rain’s rosary” and “the rain’s rose”; it is both images. Howard’s tousled form also results in a clustering, such as “shadow flesh.” Aloud, sounds can reconfigure themselves to the ear: some hook forward as phonetic phrases and some fall to lack of sense. Some, disconnected, evoke something that remains incomplete.

Incitments plays on some of the same ground as the title section of Donato Mancini’s Ligatures (New Star Books, 2005)—both look at the materiality of language, how embedded parts hinge together. Sometimes the fragments turn up intriguing parts, though it is a little like panning for gold. The ending of “XVIII” is striking: “Silence, / mother ton / gue.” The weight of the language is pulled out, seen, and the second half of the syllable, which is itself mostly silence, is the definition of silence, standing alone in its stanza without meaning, its diphthong split so it has no sound.

In the title section of the book, Incitements, the game changes considerably from natural history to human history, notably in Howard’s treament of postcards sent during WWII as a resistance campaign against Hitler by Elise and Otto Hampel. Using that story and Hans Fallada’s novel on the subject, the lessons of Nazism are re-filtered as poetry, “the führer! (stamping // on god’s spectacles)” or looking at “herculean effort / to maintain our passivity! (number- // ..less prisoners.) the executioner’s / assistants; all ages and // professions.” Bringing forward resistance to the current of our time seems timely.

Incitements is a complex read, the eye physically moving rapidly with the narrow columns of poems, or across gaps, while the mind’s eye flips back and forth among the layers of text. The text forces a slow read, or leads to a dizzy one.