Sunday, June 24, 3 pm, The Elmdale House Tavern
The Dusty Owl Reading Series – Pilgrimage
If you’ve ever spent any time around the Zytveld’s, the hosts and founders of The Dusty Owl Reading Series, chances are good – very good in fact – that you would have heard them going on (and on) about The Beats, City Lights Bookstore, Haight Ashbury, and San Francisco. …This fall they plan to spend Halloween in The Castro. But to do that they need a little help from their friends.
In order to celebrate the 16th year of Dusty Owl and the fact that Cathy is actually going to see a second ocean for the first time they both invite you to spend an afternoon with the Owl. They will be reading from stories and poems, both old and new. See the Owls strut their stuff. Poetry goggles are a must – because words… are… dangerous.

Steve and Cathy begoggled.

Guest hosts wear the goggles too.
Steve Zytveld, in addition to hosting The Owl for the past 15 years has been an active member of the Ottawa arts community and the labour movement. He’s presently studying at Saint Paul University.
Cathy MacDonald-Zytveld has recently taken over the hosting duties of the Owl. She too has been an active member in the Ottawa arts community, as well as working on publicity for various events and bands.
Do you write with all your soul to create beautiful poetry or insightful stories? Do you sing or play an instrument in a way that would make the sirens pause in their song? Stay for the Open Set and share your work.
Admission is free. Donations to run the Zytveld’s out of town will be lovingly accepted.

Livejournal importing made easy. No kidding. When I came over I was manually copying and pasting posts to WP until I got bored. The importer went back to 2005, 400-odd posts in seconds. Crazy-good.

June 22, 2012, 7pm
Call and Response, SPAO
Season-end reading with the participants of the year’s ekphrasis photography-word project at SPAO’s Red Wall Gallery, 168 Dalhousie Ave, Ottawa. Readings by Pearl Pirie, Amanda Earl, Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley, Christine McNair, Claudia Coutu Radmore and rob mclennan.
June 25, 2012, 7-9pm
The Relaunch of The Muses Reading Series
Elmdale Tavern, 1084 Wellington Street West, Ottawa. With poetry by Pearl Pirie and music by the percussion group Kunundrum. Donations support the Peace and Environment News, a community newspaper based in Ottawa.

Standing out online lately: looking inside letters at their spine and guts, Jennifer Egan’s Blackbox and write to MP about cuts.

Mail! The shadow on the lower half of the page is a sparrow flying over.
Bafter C came and I’m in the same issue as Steve Venright. How cool is that? Who’s this Helen White person? That’s intriguing work, working levels. And the second path crossing since her vispo chapbook came north with Dan Waber in April. I wonder when I notice someone’s writing how many times I’ve seen it without “noticing” before it started to sink in.

I got my chair back from neighbourhood cat aka, seat-snatcher. (Ah, but what a purr. If I take to wearing black, it’s not mourning but hair-camouflaging.) Looking down I see my magnetite bracelet has picked up a thing. From where? The bus? Bedside table? How long have I been wearing that bonus chain?
Sitting eating with Robyn Sarah’s Digressions, Pardon Me, p. 24

Because I do not have to mend it and because you do not seem to mind wearing it with a rip in the sleeve, your jacket is becoming a kind of statement to me of all that does and does not exist between us including about what you do not know about what I feel about you wearing it with a rip in the sleeve […] you are doubtless not thinking about. Besides there is always the danger that the mention of a rip in the sleeve might be interpreted as an offer to mend it, a desire to mend it, or a wish to see it mended. That is not what I meant at all; that is not it, at all.

It is a kind of head-expanded freedom, this state of being in choice, this state of not being impelled, freely associating and not compelled to react. Acts untethered. A mini mardi gras. Not needing to look after someone else because they an look after themselves and/or it is not your job.
And rereading bits of Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Sand, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. A mayfly landed on its page. As I arrived at The Night of the Gifts, when “a little mongrel ith yellow fur ran up barking to greet me”, a yappy dog started up nearby. Love it when the world and words collide by random chance like that.