K.I. Press's Blog, page 3
April 27, 2015
This torso was created in a 3D printer / and is made of...
This torso was created in a 3D printer / and is made of composite materials. / / It is a perfect replica. #poem #poetry #book #canlit #exquisitemonsters
April 23, 2015
#firstvine My #exquisitemonsters sketchbook
#firstvine My #exquisitemonsters sketchbook
April 19, 2015
Image
from page 310 of “Wunder, Wundergeburt und...
Image
from page 310 of “Wunder, Wundergeburt und Wundergestalt in
Einblattdrucken des fünfzehnten bis achtzehnten Jahrhunderts;
kulturhistorische Studie” (1921)
From Internet Book Images on Flickr’s The Commons. Contributing library: University of Toronto.
Monsters, Anyone?
I have a new poetry book coming out called Exquisite Monsters. I’m going to try to use my Tumblr to post stuff about monsters from out and about, and occasionally some of my sketches that go with the book. I’m not an artist, but I believe in my doodles.
I’m a big fan of archival images, so I’ll be doing a lot of my looking in archives, including Flickr’s clearing house of public archive imagery, The Commons.
April 11, 2015
Notes on AWP 2015 from a Canadian first-timer
In no particular order…
1. America: the service really is better, notwithstanding the grumpy man at the New York Times booth (Picture not available).
2. But all the medical ads are unsettling. Also, did you know the art gallery doesn’t allow guns on the premises? Now you do.
At the Walker Art Center, where there are no guns.
3. Okay: AWP. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the biggest writers’ conference in North America, with more than 500 sessions, 700 trade show exhibitors, and about 12,000 delegates; this year’s event was in Minneapolis, which is why I decided to go (it’s possible to drive down from Winnipeg). First thing that became obvious: the book fair (trade show) really is where it’s at. I mean, there were good sessions, and I wish I’d seen more of them, but there were really more opportunities to meet people and gather information in the book fair.
Random book fair picture
4. Do I need to declare free swag at the border?
Mostly free
5. At Canadian writing gatherings, I find people struggle to talk about poetry. It’s often not presented well; people make jokes about it; poets are a bit sheepish and self-deprecating and apologetic. Basically, poetry gets relegated to second-class. Not so here. There were featured poetry readings, poetry presses by the score, poets collaborating with museums and art galleries and film makers, and just a general attitude of respect for poetry that I don’t normally feel when writers get together. Or maybe I’m just totally insecure and imagining that.
Poetry.
6. And about collaboration: I saw so much of it! Maybe it’s just that the sheer size of the community offers so many more opportunities, but it was really inspiring. It makes me want to write proposals.
Edit
The Walker commissioned a collaborative novella about this Hopper painting, and published it on its website.
7. Memorable panel moment: to paraphrase panelist Roxane Gay, nothing “substantial” can be accomplished in a 600-700 word article whether on-line or elsewhere, and if you can’t read long articles, you should go “have a conversation with your God.”
Most of these contain more than 700 words.
8. Things I’d do differently if I came again: plan ahead and get a hotel near the conference centre so I can attend more events, and go to some of the social events to meet more people.
I did a relatively small amount of socializing.
9. I’ll be interested to hear how much business the Canadian presses did at the book fair. There were so few there! Is it always thus? Is it just not enough business to be worth the expense?
I may be biased because I’m a UBC student, but — Best. Canadian. Booth.
10. Last, there were a lot of regionally themed sessions at the event, but hardly anyone from Manitoba came down. It seemed a shame–there were sessions about North Dakota literature, so why not something about Canadian Prairie writers? Ah, well, that moment has passed, and the next conference is in L.A.
Ariel womanning the Brick Books table. Note the books by Winnipeg authors.
So, those are my ten disjointed thoughts about AWP. I’d like to go again some day–but probably not next year.
January 22, 2015
“I’m from the ’90s, and I’m a sucker for Puccini”: Q & A With Myself
Myself and I realized that we hadn’t posted anything for a while, so we sat down at our disorganized desk today to ask and answer a few questions. The theme: personal taste, naming the books, movies, TV, and music we’ve actually been into lately, because the actual titles can tell no lies.
Q: What happened to the other blog post you were working on about that play you went to see last term?
A: It’s gotten out of hand. I feel like I need to do scholarly research for it. Maybe some day I’ll release it.
Q: So this was the only lame thing you could come up with?
A: Apparently.
Q: What is the purpose of this Q and A?
A: You tell me.
Q: Um… okay. I’m trying to give readers an idea of my… your… our taste in movies, music, TV and books by listing stuff I/you/we having been consuming. Because people like reading about that stuff.
A: Awesome. You know, you could adopt the double “I” pronoun like the angels in Angels in America.
Q: Um, or not. Have you been reading that lately?
A: How astute. Yes, I just did.
Q: What are you listening to right now?
A: You mean, right this minute? Hang on, let me check… it’s something from La Boheme.
Q: Tell me about when you went to see that opera last year.
A: One of the singers fell off a piece of set furniture and twisted his ankle or something. They improvised by having one of the other dudes sing two parts. Luckily, it was close to the end.
Q: What books are on your desk right now?
A: Writing Short Films by Linda J. Cowgill, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.
Q: What’s the last thing you bought on iTunes?
A: The HBO miniseries of Angels in America.
Q: What have you been watching in Netflix?
A: The Killing, the U.S. one, just started Season 2.
Q: Last feature film you saw?
A: The F Word. Canadian! No, wait. I watched Frozen (again!) with my daughter since then.
Q: Last time you went to a movie in the theatre?
(Tumbleweeds blow by for a second.)
A: Um… I think it was one of those Hobbit movies. The one last year, the second one. I think.
Q: Last album you listened to in its entirety?
A: The new one by The Decemberists.
Q: Last novel you actually finished reading?
A: I finished book two of the Karl Ove Knausgaard thing. But that’s only sort of a novel. Before that, I read David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. I thought it was delightfully weird.
Q: New releases you are looking forward to?
A: My friend Peter Darbyshire’s new book The Dead Hamlets, under his Peter Roman pen-name. I’m always a season behind on Game of Thrones because I don’t have HBO and prefer to get it legally. I’m number 24 at the library for pre-ordered Season 4! Waiting impatiently for whenever there are going to be new seasons of Orphan Black and the French zombie show Les Revenants (I think there was one of the latter, but I haven’t got my hands on it yet).
Q: What are the songs in the “Top 25 Most Played” list in your iTunes?
A: Ooh, that’s an evil question. There is no hiding there. Here it is:
Shot in the Arm – Wilco
Zombie – Cranberries
Loser – Beck
Boy in the Bubble – Paul Simon
La Boheme: O Mimi, tu plu non torni – Puccini
(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World – Nick Cave
Manic Monday – Bangles
Polyester Bride – Liz Phair
Billie Jean – Michael Jackson
It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine) – R.E.M.
Girls Just Want to Have Fun – Cyndi Lauper
Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana
Once in a Lifetime – Talking Heads
Bittersweet Symphony – The Verve
All I Really Want – Alanis Morissette
La Boheme: Si. Mi Chiamano Mimi – Puccini
Nothing Compares 2 U – Sinead O’Connor
9 to 5 – Dolly Parton
La Rondine: Chi Il Bel Sogno Di Doretta – Puccini
Tubthumping – Chumbawamba
Buffy Theme – Nerf Herder
What’s the Frequency Kenneth? – R.E.M.
Gianni Schicchi: O Mio Babbino Caro –– Puccini
Islands in the Stream – Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers
Carmen, Act 1: Près des Ramparts de Séville – Bizet
Q: What can we learn from this list?
A: I’m from the ’90s, and I’m a sucker for Puccini.
Q: Last thought?
A: Two of those songs were written by Prince. Who out there can name which two without the help of Google?
October 25, 2014
Writing Process Blog Tour
I recently got tagged in the Canadian Writers’ Writing Process Blog Tour, which has been going around for months. I was tagged by Ottawa writer Cameron Anstee. So, I’ve got four questions to answer:
1. What am I working on?
Well, this is awkward, because that was what my last post was about. But I’d say that of the things on my plate, the one I’m most interested in, and am the farthest along with, is the draft of the YA fantasy book about Shakespeare Land. I’ve got a massive backstory for Sycorax, who is so not dead. And, oh, Hamlet is the captain of a pirate ship (he took over the ship instead of returning to Denmark). A pirate airship.
2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Hmmm. I’m going to take this question to be referring to my work in progress, which is totally unlike anything I’ve written before (I’ve mainly published poetry). I don’t know for sure yet, but here’s what I hope. I did go on a YA reading binge for the project, and found that books in the small sub-genre of Shakespeare-related YA books tend to be romances. I found one that had both fantasy and romance elements, though I may have missed others. I wondered, why can’t I do a Shakespeare book for fantasy readers? There’s so much supernatural in Shakespeare. I’m still looking at a romantic sub-plot, but I’m pretty committed to avoiding a sunset-ending romance. My heroine is questioning her sexual orientation, for one thing, and I don’t intend for the outcome of that to be clear even to her by the end of the story
3. Why do I write what I do?
“Try everything” is my current writing motto. When I was a teenager, I wrote whatever I wanted: humour, plays, choose-your-own-adventure, audio plays, whatever seemed like a good idea at the time. Then somehow, I can’t even remember how, I ended up being a poet. Not that there isn’t a huge field to work in there – poetry is so vast – but I kind of felt hemmed in by my own work. Maybe I’m entering premature second childhood, but I’m trying to come back to a place of “anything goes” in choosing what I work on. Though I have a new book of poetry coming out soon, the writing of it goes back years. I am sort of trying to give poetry a rest for a while. Maybe it’s not just age: I think I can also blame this on teaching, which has made me think about many different genres and styles of writing in ways I wouldn’t have considered before.
4. How does my writing process work?
Oh, that depends. It has changed so much. My forthcoming poetry came about through the accumulation and filtering of fragments, but some of my earlier works were very “project” oriented, in which I’d set myself a number of poems to write about x, y, and z, and though I’d still filter some of it out later, it was through setting myself a structure that I was able to write those projects fairly quickly—at least, far quicker than the new book, which was a nightmare. I’m writing the first draft of this novel via an extensive outline (and using Scrivener), though I’m still expecting the revision process to be its own nightmare.
That’s all, folks. I’m tagging my friend and colleague, Winnipeg’s Sally Ito.
September 22, 2014
In Which I Do Actually Write Stuff
When you define yourself as a writer—or, I suspect, any kind of artist—no matter how awesome your day job is (mine sure is!), it can really bring you down not to have the time or energy to create. I went through a really low productivity period for a few years, partly because I spent some time on projects that were bogging me down, but also just because life caught up with me. I went and had a baby and got this fine new full-time teaching job at pretty much the same time. Both those activities are extremely time-consuming, not to say life-sucking, for the first 2 or 3 years.
So now that I’m experienced enough to not be so stressed out all the time about teaching, and my child is in school, I’m feeling much, much better, not only because it’s awesome to be able to sleep more than 4 hours at a time, but because of a great knock-on effect: I get to be a writer again. And I’m pretty sure I teach better, too.
I’m working on my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, on-line and in summers, from the University of British Columbia. Not only will this be a fine professional credential when I’m done, but it creates a double-whammy of productivity.
First, I have constant creative-writing deadlines to meet (the reason I always took creative writing whenever I could during my English degrees). Second, because it is a multi-genre program, I get to try out all sorts of writing forms that I have written in much or at all up until now. I see some of my colleagues in the program all nervous about having to take those required “second and third genres,” but not me! I’ll be happy if I can get through this degree never having taken a traditional literary fiction or poetry course. Not that I don’t have plenty, and I mean plenty, to learn in those areas, but that’s the jazz I studied back in the day. I’m all for trying out new things that I might not have done on my own. Also, I think it’s my age showing: I no longer have fear of trying stuff that I might not turn out to be any good at.
One of the outcomes of all this: lots of half-finished projects, which may just be a new kind of lack of productivity. But, eventually, I will have to finish at least one of them for my thesis. And I hope I’ll finish more, just because.
One thing I have finished is a short film script. (Since you asked, it’s about breastfeeding and the ghost of Pierre Trudeau.) It went through a massive rewrite because the early drafts were basically impossible to produce. It’s now a full third shorter, has half as many characters and locations, and is set in Canada instead of Cuba. Lesson learned, and I’ve now got someone interested in producing it, which is something I would never have predicted a few years ago. The script calls for plenty of nudity, so I will be too embarrassed to show it to people if it ever does get made.
I’m forty thousand words—all written this summer–into the first draft of a young adult fantasy novel. It’s about some students in a school play who go through a magic trap door into a land where Shakespearean characters run amok. I only found out after I started this that the trap door in Shakespeare’s Globe was known as the Hell Mouth. I am now totally channeling my inner Buffy. The draft contains a lot of teenaged girls in swordfights. I can no longer write it nearly at the pace I was during the summer, but this baby is, thanks to the guidance of the wonderful Annabel Lyon, very thoroughly outlined, and I don’t think I’ll lose the plot, literally or figuratively, even if I only write one scene a week. I have an earlier failed novel (first draft, for adults) in a drawer that will probably stay there, an unworkable blob. I am thoroughly converted to massive outlining. And I’m using Scrivener and loving it.
I’ve also got an outline and about half a draft of a graphic novel script for children (it’s about the WWII home front and the British Commonwealth Air Training Program), and I’ve got ideas and sketches for several other young adult and children’s projects that I’m tucking away for future use—all those thanks to a great course I took with the also wonderful Maggie de Vries last year.
This year, I’m supposed to write a play (just started—my workshop has several experienced actors in it, and they’ll tell it like it is!), and in January I’m planning on taking a comics course – in which I will actually be required to draw. After that, I’m hoping to do a non-fiction course and a full-length screenplay course, depending on availability.
One other project I’ve actually finished, completely independent from my MFA courses: the poetry book, my fourth (fifth if you count the first one that stayed in a drawer), that I’ve been working on v e r y s l o w l y for the last something like eight years. I’m calling it Exquisite Monsters, and it is due out in 2015 from Turnstone Press. Looking forward to working with the great Dennis Cooley, who’ll be the editor for the press. I worked with Dennis a long time ago at the highly recommended Sage Hill, before my first book was accepted for publication, and while I was working on new poems that would become my second book, Spine.
So if you haven’t noticed, I’m really positive and cheerful about writing right now. I don’t know how many of those projects I’ll ever finish, but having them all there puts me in a place I really like to be: a place crowded with ideas.
May 26, 2014
The Final Frontier
What I’m talking about is SPACE.
Somewhere along the way, someone took my space from me. Okay, everyone took my space from me. I didn’t have it for very long, and I miss it so.
I remember as a child, how I longed for my own room. Do kids even share bedrooms these days? It seems like you aren’t middle-class enough if you don’t have more bedrooms than people in your family.
I shared a bedroom with my little sister. The room was one of the many additions my dad had built on to the house. It didn’t have a door. There was a curtain, a home-made one, of course, on a home-made curtain rod, which it seems may have been a broom handle at one time.
It was a big room, but as a girl approaches adolescence, a girl wants her own space. Finally, my parents let me move upstairs, to the cold, cold upstairs, with an electric blanket. The two rooms up there had been vacated by my older sisters some years before, and were just full of storage. We piled all the junk into one room, and I got the other.
It was heaven. Even with the shivering, the mice, and, in summer, the 3:00 a.m. birds singing in the tree right outside the window. I stayed up late doing awesome school projects with popsicle sticks, taping songs off the weekend hit countdown on the radio, and worrying about adolescent stuff in private. Sometimes I stayed up as late as ELEVEN O’CLOCK!!! I’d have stayed up later, but my mom came upstairs and made me go to bed.
This arrangement lasted for two years, until my mom got a job in the next town over, and we decided to get an apartment there for during the week instead of commuting. We liked the idea of going to a bigger school—plus there was no way we were living all week with just dad, who cooked, among other disgusting things, spaghetti chopped up in little pieces because he thought it was easier to eat that way.
And then my older sister and her new baby (who now has a math degree—hi, Suz!) moved back home and decided to join in the fun. So, it was now dad, with his poor cooking skills, alone in the big country house, and us five gals in the two-bedroom apartment laughing it up. It was the kind of apartment building where you tried to ignore the blood smeared on the hallway walls on Sunday mornings.
Here’s a capsule life story told in terms of when I did and didn’t have to share a room. There were ups and downs. My parents went back to school and we moved into family student housing (my sister and I were both teenagers by then, so this was definitely a down); they bought a house and renovated the basement, where I got to live alone in university (up!) briefly, until said older sister (now with two kids) needed to join me. I still had my own room at this point, but someone had measured wrong when renovating, because there wasn’t room for a wall in-between the closet to one room and the closet to the next room, which resulted in a toddler and a preschooler emerging from my closet at any time with no prior warning. AND ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS MAKE OUT WITH MY BOYFRIEND.
Grad school brought with it the best “up” years in terms of personal space, as I made enough in scholarships to live alone most of the time. Early working life in Toronto, not bad, own room and only a small war with mice and with cockroaches along the way. Even once I moved in with someone (whom I eventually married), I had a little office of my own to work in. And at work? I had my own office at almost every one of my significant jobs until… 2008.
That’s when I started teaching. And got pregnant. And now I have a cubicle, a house full of stuff and rooms and not a stitch of private space anywhere.
Woolf said you needed money and a room of your own in order to write. I think we can translate money as “time,” which anyone who’s every applied for a project grant knows.
This is all to say that one of my many, many, unreasonably large number of goals for the nine weeks of relative calm I have this summer, is to set up better what personal space I have in my own home. I might try the old “make a wall out of bookshelves” trick – goodness knows I have enough books. Or maybe I could use a sheet and an old broom to make a curtain between two pieces of furniture and hang up a “Stay Out – Mommy’s Space!” sign. I don’t know.
But I’m adding it to my to-do list.
