Event: The Bare Bones of Mystery Writing with Barbara Fradkin
What: Workshop
Start Time: Sunday, November 29 at 1:00pm
End Time: Sunday, November 29 at 4:00pm
Where: 690 Somerset St. W
This informal, interactive workshop will examine the enduring power of the mystery novel, in all its guises. There are four magical ingredients of writing crime fiction that thrills, provokes and inspires the reader — good writing, vivid characters, exciting plot and perfect setting. Examples and exercises for each will be discussed, as well as tips on how to create engaging sleuths and credible villains, how to develop tension, conflict and pacing, and how to interweave subplots, plant clues and sprinkle red herrings. Questions about markets and publishers will also be addressed.
Barbara Fradkin is the author of the award-winning detective series featuring the quixotic, exasperating Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green, whose passion for justice and love of the hunt often interfere with family, friends and police protocol. There are currently seven novels in the series, including the newly released This Thing of Darkness, as well as Honour Among Men and Fifth Son, both of which won Arthur Ellis Best Novel Awards from Crime Writers of Canada. She has also been nominated four times for the Arthur Ellis Award for her dark, compelling short stores, which haunt numerous magazines and anthologies such as the Ladies Killing Circle series.
$15 tickets available at Sushi 88!
For more information: www.dustyowl.com

Sasquatch presents on Sunday, November 22nd, at 2pm sharp: Asoka Weerasinghe.
Originally from Sri Lanka, Asoka Weerasinghe is an award winning published poet. The author of 16 collections of poetry among the poetry awards he has won the Manifold Poetry Award (UK), Welsh University Eisteddfod Poetry Award, Government of Newfoundland & Labrador Arts & Letters Gold Medal for Poetry, Sri Lanka State Award for Poetry and the Ottawa Civic Appreciation Award for Arts and Culture 2003.
His poetry have been published in England, Wales, US, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Germany, India and Canada. He was the Co-founder of the Gloucester Spoken Art Poetry & Storytelling Series (1995-2007) and was a guest poet at Austin (Texas) International Poetry Festival in 2001. In May this year, he received the Outstanding Asian Canadian Award, “Honouring the Pioneers” from the Canadian Multicultural Council Asians of Ontario.
He will also be reading from the manuscript – MEMORIES which will be published in 2010.
Location: Downstairs room, Royal Oak II, 161 Laurier Avenue East, Ottawa. Fine food to be had and fully licensed. Starts off with an “open mic.”
Admission free.

Sugar Mule has a Canadian issue edited by Susan McMaster. It launched this week online with contributions from Dave Margoshes, Katia Grubisic, Penn Kemp, Kate Eichhorn, Lorna Crozier, Mary Ann Mulhern, Jan Conn, Maureen Scott Harris, Sylvia Adams, Susan McMaster, Marty Gervais, Ronnie R. Brown, Alice Major, Colin Morton, Rachael Simpson, Betsy Struthers, John B. Lee, Monty Reid, Blaine Marchand, Marilyn Gear Pilling, Carolyn Smart, Ben Ladouceur, Roger Nash, Mary Lee Bragg, Terry Ann Carter, Peter Gibbon, Roger Bell, Grant D. Savage, Dean Steadman, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Amanda Earl, Cameron Anstee and Jeremy Hanson-Finger.
Hardscrabble: A little magazine of poetry, edited by Stuart Ross, launched in chapbook form this week with contributions from Nelson Ball, Alice Burdick, Loren Goodman, Susan Kernohan, David W. McFadden and Hugh Thomas.
Audio of Ottawa launch of Track & Trace.
And elsewhere, this postcard haiga is cute.

Max introduced Joe Rosenblatt Nov 13th at the at artist-run Gallery 101. (Art in the background is by Roger Crait.) From youtube, here is one poem from the reading.

About 35 attended this AB Series event. Joe Rosenblatt has been publishing poetry for over 40 years. Prof. Alfredo Rizzardi, translator of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.C.Williams and Irving Layton, published his Madre Tentacolare (Tentacled Mother). Rosenblatt had a few copies for sale of his Mental Moonlight, a CD of his poems against the “quirky contrapuntal music” of Anna Baignoche.

Rosenblatt read in part from Dog, the collaborative book of sonnets on dogs with Catherine Owen (Mansfield, 2008) as well as a few other collections and took requests. There was a pattering of chuckles throughout and people and healthy applause. A lot of happy campers. It was interspersed with a lot of anecdotes of the origin of the poems and protest for freedom to read poetry in the park in Toronto, (achieved, sort of, with official permission in advance). Previously only preachers were allowed to do public gatherings in Sunday parks.

The next night, in Quebec, was a collaborative reading with his French translator, Andrée Christensen. This is at the coreading of ‘Parrot Fever / Le perroquet fâcheux’ (Les Editions du Vermillon) at the AB Series Nov 14. (Art in the background is by Isabelle Dubois.)
He expounded, theatrically dramatically in his deep voice then she would read the translations in her musical lilt. He also read from his other works.

Joe Rosenblatt and Andrée Christensen in the Alliance Francaise Gallery where her collage art is on exhibit in November.
She translated to French his book Parrot Fever into Le perroquet fâcheux in 2002 by email correspondance, but this was their first face-to-face meeting.

Vermillon is publishing English Canadian poetry for the French market, including Lorna Crozier, Nadine McInnis and Archibald Lampman.
Andrée Christensen is the recent author of Depuis toujours, j’entendais la mer, her first novel and a Trillium Award finalist. She has published 11 collections of poetry, a narrative history, five literary translations, and five livres d’artiste in collaboration with artists from Ontario and Quebec.

Monty Reid read new poems from his wonderful parasite poem series which describe the lives of some of these thousands of species of the microcosms inside our bodies.
He also read from what he never reads from because he says the poems are too short, Sweetheart of Mine (BookThug) [spun from Bluegrass songs] and from Dog Sleeps (NeWest Press) because the poems are too long. (He excerpted the life of vignettes with the house dog.)
After one fun expansive intro by Rod of Monty, Monty gave a comparable one of Lisa.
Lisa Robertson read from the accumulation of The Men (BookThug) and then a couple long poems from Magenta Soulwhip (Coach House) and a shortie to finish off before the discussion. She talked in aside about how in Vancouver, the houses aren’t insulated so you can put your ear to the underside of the roof and it is as if the rain falls directly on your ear.

This was the first in the new Tree format where a reader gets to choose who to invite to read with and their readings are followed by a onstage chat with an open Q&A.
Since it was filmed, in a week or two, the video will be put online. For now, for me, some things stood out. One thing was Robertson putting her finger on this: “the longer I write, the more inexperienced I feel as a writer.” Well-put I thought, of that humbling process. It seems to be a common by-product of doing this craft. Many people write the same poem repeatedly. She wants instead to reinvent.
They were asked why both of them seem to constrain themselves to the real? Neither felt they did. Debbie: An Epic was a spoofed lark of the epic. Robertson said she was working with what is known and “tilting the frame of everything”.
Once one is writing from the perspective of the microscopic scale, it can’t exactly be direct perception. Or as Monty put it, “there is not much difference between the radically speculative and the radically empirical”.
They spoke of Stacy Doris’ concept of delusional space, both social and aesthetic, in which we write.
Robertson mentioned she has returned to reading Shelley and how he saw imagination as tool for political transformation.
Rod Pederson asked about her being an academic writer. Reid pointed out how philosophy happens in academic circles but there is not a monopoly only there. She said although she writes about concepts, exploring ideas she doesn’t come from Academia. She worked from grass roots, learning of feminist and anti-racism discourses and this led to thinking and reading of philosophy, such as the ideas of Lucretius‘ On the Nature of Things and questions surrounding intentions. Poetry was made as a product of thinking and playing. Her books were made for herself and her immediate peers such as Christine Stewart, Catriona Strang and The Gig of print came as a separate thing.

Some book buying after the readings. In this case Cameron Anstee gets a signature from Lisa Robertson.
Anstee had on hand and was selling chapbooks from his Apt. 9 press of Monty Reid’s newest ‘A Poem that Ends with Murder’. Other titles of his Apt. 9 include:
Guzzles / Justin Million
Rest Cure / Sandra Ridley
The Argossey / Ben Ladouceur
[and upcoming, in time for the Ottawa fall small press fair] TWO BOYS carrying a box through a field .going somewhere / Michael Blouin
Facebook claims that this is a link to the album of about 20 photos of the reading.