writes.
Finally the return of Ottawa Small Press Fair, fall 2022!
It’s in room 203 of the Jack Purcell Community Centre (on Elgin, at 320 Jack Purcell Lane, Ottawa) on Saturday, November 12, 2022 from noon to 5pm.
I’ll be tabling and a new poem will be in the latest Puddles of Sky anthology and at the Apt. 9 table.
Ottawa Book Launch of “Sheets: Typewriter Works” (Invisible Publishing) by Cameron Anstee
With guest readers Monty Reid and Pearl Pirie
Hosted by Chris JohnsonWednesday November 2, 2022, 6:30pm
Perfect Books (258 Elgin Street), FreeCameron Anstee is the author of Sheets: Typewriter Works (Invisible Publishing, 2022) and Book of Annotations (Invisible Publishing, 2018), and the editor of The Collected Poems of William Hawkins (Chaudiere Books, 2015). He is the editor and publisher of Apt. 9 Press and holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Ottawa. He lives and writes in Ottawa on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg people.
Monty Reid was born in Saskatchewan, lived for many years in Alberta and Quebec, and now resides in Ottawa. His recent collections include Meditatio Placentae (Brick), Garden (Chaudiere/Invisible) and The Luskville Reductions (Brick) as well as the chapbooks Seam (above/ground) and The Nipple Variations (postghost). He has won a number of awards (Alberta’s Stephansson Award for poetry x3, National Magazine Awards, Arc Poetry’s Lampman Award, etc) and been short-listed for the Governor-General’s Award on three occasions. A longtime museum professional, he had long stints at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology and at the Canadian Museum of Nature. He was the Managing Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine for many years and has recently retired from his position as Director of VerseFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival.
Pearl Pirie is an Outaouais writer. Her collection footlights was a finalist for the Lampman Award and short and long listed for other awards. rain’s small gestures (Apt 9 Press, 2021), minimalist poems, is short-listed for the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize.
Sanita Fejzić is an editor, children’s writer, poet, playwright and point of a whirlwind. She did haiku for a while with KaDo. Way back was a regular at Tree and In/Words (and various things about town). At that tine she gracefully allowed me to publish some vispo in the form of The Union of 6 & 7 in 2014. (Impossibly long ago.)
Desiré in Three Brief Acts from battleaxepress was November 2016. That came with a CD song collaboration with the poems. I don’t know if she’d agree that she’s a polymath but she busts out in all directions of creativity.
PP: What have you creating lately?
SF: This is a busy period. I have been working on the production of a series of four short plays titled “Why Worry About Their Futures?” which foregrounds the kinds of multispecies futures we’re cultivating for our children. It will be directed by Keith Barker, who is one of the three playwrights, including Carol Churchill and me.
On the poetry side, I’m finalizing the edits of a collection, Refugee Mouth, which I’ve been working on for the last couple of years. This has been a labour of love, and for the last push, I’ve been collaborating with Chris Johnson, Arc Poetry Magazine editor and longtime friend (since our In/Words days at Carleton University). He’s been helping me with edits and a structural reorganization of the manuscript. I hope to send it out to publishers by December of this year.
December is also the deadline for me to submit my PhD thesis project to my committee, with the hopes of being a Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Studies by the Fall of 2023.
In the meantime, I’m wrapping up a past-apocalyptic short animated film that’s grounded in queer, eco-feminist future dreamings. My friend and collaborator Ambivalently Yours did the illustrations and animations, and we’re working on a graphic novel version of the film. Did I say this was a busy period?
PP: Heh, I think you may have mentioned something about that. Beautiful to see such a renaissance diversity. With all that going on, what’s life’s focus these days?
SF: Life’s been domestic wild as I travel the country of language, poetry and thinking. I had a baby last year, and she just started to walk a few weeks ago. My son started secondary school at de La Salle, specializing in music. He’s started playing the trombone, so that’s been part of my soundscape. I recently celebrated my 10 year anniversary with my wife, who’s back to work completing her PhD in Psychology at the University of Ottawa. Our hands are full, as are our hearts.
I have been juggling and playing the balancing act. Sometimes I fall and it hurts, but I always get up and try again. My list of gratitudes keeps growing everyday, and that’s been an important area of focus: to savour the moments.
PP: Indeed. Gratitude makes far more possible. I heard about your theatre production and book but what’s this forthcoming film?
SF: I’m excited to share the animated film I have been collaborating on with illustrator/animator AmbivalentlyYours and musician/soundscape artist Angela Schleihauf. Title and details will be released soon!
PP: Looking forward to news on that front. Out in digital land, what work can people read?
SF: Here’s a link to a cinepoem that will be forthcoming in a poetry collection titled Land Matters:
PP: Any author site, social media urls or things you’d like to plug?
PP: Thanks for sharing some of your extremely limited time to give people a sense of what to look forward to from you.
I’ll be periodically posting poems I’ve long loved, some love back to the 80s.
Maya Angelou’s lines On Aging frequent my head:
On Aging
Maya Angelou
When you see me sitting quietly,
Like a sack left on the shelf,
Don’t think I need your chattering.
I’m listening to myself.
Hold! Stop! Don’t pity me!
Hold! Stop your sympathy!
Understanding if you got it,
Otherwise I’ll do without it!
When my bones are stiff and aching,
And my feet won’t climb the stair,
I will only ask one favor:
Don’t bring me no rocking chair.
When you see me walking, stumbling,
Don’t study and get it wrong.
‘Cause tired don’t mean lazy
And every goodbye ain’t gone.
I’m the same person I was back then,
A little less hair, a little less chin,
A lot less lungs and much less wind.
But ain’t I lucky I can still breathe in.
Having decades of fatigue, I want too to be seen for my capabilities, not my shortcomings, what I succeed at, not what I’m presumed incapable of.