Ariel Gordon's Blog, page 16

Grape pick!

* * *

Last night's pick was the my third grape pick for Fruit Share in the five summers I've been volunteering.

The first was in my first year of volunteering. The grapes were on the roofline of a shed and we had four adults and three kids to pick a modest amount of grapes. It was great fun and a good introduction to Fruit Share.

The second time, the owner only called us in after the first frost had passed. So the grapes were a deep blue-black and the frost-scorched vines were like just-cooked spaghetti. You barely had to pull on the grape clusters at all...

This time, the vines were still green and I had to burrow under the leaves to get at the grapes. What's more, the grapes were inhabited by wasps, who you'd find with their head buried in grapes. I would tap clusters with my secateurs, hoping to shake free any wasps. I didn't get stung, which I think was luck more than prudence...

The homeowner's yard was wonderful, with a saskatoon tree, three cherry trees, a pear tree, and various other things, in addition to a veg patch and the grapes on the back fence.

The owner also had a poplar and oak seedlings growing, which was sort of neat.

My thanks to the homeowner and to Fruit Share. I think I'm going to make grape pie. M says he wants to make jam...

Essay in the Goose

* * *

So the first essay from my ms. focusing on Winnipeg's urban forest has made its way into the world, specifically in ALECC's critical/creative journal The Goose.

My abstract for the piece is as follows: "“Brushfire” concerns itself with how people use urban forests, from indecent exposure to poaching to teenage drinking party-bonfires that get out of control. Though it could be construed as a manifesto on walking-in-the-woods, it also touches on some of the conflicts inherent in urban/nature experiences."

In their Editor's Notebook, Lisa Szabo-Jones and Paul Huebener had this to say about my piece:

"Ariel Gordon’s darkly humorous creative nonfiction piece “Brushfire” illuminates the uneasy  existence of how we use natural spaces, and the transgressive behaviours that urban wild spaces evoke in local residents. Gordon reminds us that we enter these shared spaces each for different reasons, some less salubrious than others."

Also of interest is Deer in Their Own Coats by Daniel Coleman, about how "urban deer are requiring a renegotiation of settler-Six Nations relations in Hamilton, Ontario." There's also an entire section of Audioecopoetics.

I'd be remiss if I didn't also note that there's a review of Merle Massie's Forest Prairie Edge: Place History in Saskatchewan by Matthew Zantingh.

It's been great to get feedback from friends and colleagues about "Brushfire." It feels like I'm in dialogue with people around ideas of human/nature interactions, about public green spaces, and that's exactly what I've always wanted for my writing.

Writing on the Ridge

Rolla, BC. August 14, 2015. Photo by Melanie Siebert.* * *

Before heading out to Mayfield Lake in the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area, Donna Kane had organized a reading for us in Rolla, BC.

The reading featured myself, Melanie Siebert, and Gillian Wigmore, who drove up with 3/4 of her family from Prince George for the event.

We read on the deck at Donna's beautiful house. I started the evening in the dress the Internet had incited me to bring. I put on longjohns underneath, folded up to the knees so they didn't show under the hem of the dress. Then I went and got my denim shirt.

And then, just before the readings started, someone said to me: "You're shivering."

So I went and changed into more sensible clothes. And listened to Melanie and Gilly's readings with great delight.

When Donna introduced me, she said there was a lot of heat to my poetry, which I appreciated more given that I was wearing my coppery down vest and my cute-bum jeans.

And so I read Donna's neighbours and friends in the front rows, bundled into jackets and draped with blankets, but I also read to the troublemakers loitering to the rear of the crowd, who were crowing and gesturing with their drinks but also listening.

We went inside for Art Napoleon's set of originals and covers-with-Cree-translations, the audience sitting on the floor, jammed onto the couches, and perched on the chairs. And, after that, those that wanted to danced until 2 am.

I interspersed dancing-foolness with Perseid meteor shower-spotting out on the deck. And then we noticed that there were northern lights, so I bundled myself into a quilt and followed the group over to the horse paddock, where there was a minimum of light.

And then Donna's two horses arrived.

It was nearly a perfect day. (And I haven't even mentioned how we visited the ranch/studio of Emilie Mattson & also the Rolla Pub (shuffleboard! gin!), how I got to groom the big horse Riley, and my stints mooching rhubarb from Emilie & small delicious apples from Donna...)

My thanks to Donna Kane for the splendid organizing and hospitality and that turquoise quilt as well as the Canada Council for the Arts and EventHostBC for the funding to assemble us all there.

Bimblebox 153 Birds

In April, I saw an interesting call for submissions for poets and writers.

The Bimblebox Nature Reserve, a 8,000 hectare property in the Desert Uplands Bioregion of Central West Queensland, Australia, was facing mining development in and around the reserve.

All photos courtesy Bimblebox Art Project.One of the projects they embarked on to help save the reserve was an art project where they looked for artist/poet/musicians to create artworks around each of the 153 species of birds that have been observed in the reserve.

While I'm not a birder or someone who writes deliberately about birds, some of the poems in my last book Stowaways, featured descriptions of birdsong as footnotes, mostly as a way to bring in more data about the world of the poem.

Intrigued, I had a look at the list of birds that hadn't yet been claimed. And they had a raptor left, the Brown Falcon (Falco berigora), which makes things much easier. I'm somehow not really a songbird person...
 
So I wrote/workshopped/recorded my poem and send it off, as did many other Canadian nature poets, including Yvonne Blomer, Jenna Butler, Jane Eaton Hamilton, Kerry Ryan, and Laura Lamont.

The project is now being exhibited at galleries all over Australia and project coordinator (and artist) Jill Sampson has posted some of the artworks to the Bimblebox website, with the following description.

* * *

"153 Artists created 153 artworks. 153 writers created 153 poems & prose. 153 musicians interpreted the written onomatopoeia and mnemonic notations for these birds creating 153 bird calls. This is Bimblebox 153 Birds.

Bimblebox 153 Birds was exhibited at the Impress Printmakers Studio and Gallery, Brisbane in May 2015. It was astonishing to see so many species of birds filling the gallery. Audio of the writers poetry & prose mixed with the musicians' bird calls played into the gallery. A listening station provided the opportunity to choose to listen through headphones to any of the audios by the writers and musicians. Also provided in folders were printed copies of the bird inspired poetry and prose.

Bimblebox 153 Birds was officially opened by Emeritus Professor Ian Lowe AO. Ian gave an inspired, informative, and entertaining opening address. Ian spoke to us about the global, national, local and personal cost of developing more coal mines and in particular what we risk losing by destroying the Bimblebox Nature Refuge for coal mining. Ian reminded us with his compelling insight and all-encompasing science that Climate Change is the great challenge to ongoing life on planet Earth, our home. Ian spoke about the myriad forms of life that make up the incredible biodiversity of the Bimblebox Nature Refuge and finished his address with a poem penned especially for this occasion."

* * *

My thanks to Jill Sampson for keeping all the artists and artworks untangled and to the members of the Electronic Garrett for their feedback.

Also useful was the internet, whose various birding sites helped me to 'see' the Brown Falcon.

Finally, here are the credits for the finished piece: "Brown Falcon, Poet Ariel Gordon, Musician Myf Turpin on piano. Compiled and mixed by Boyd." (Our piece is three-quarters of the way down the page...)

Another season in the burn zone

The clearing created by an old fire twenty years ago, whose half-burned logs somehow kept out the trembling aspen and most other colonizers, is nearly gone now. A 2012 brushfire ignited by an out-of-control bonfire mostly finished the job. I liked this clearing. We saw a lost pair of moose there once. And I used to photograph a colony of pixie cups and other slow-growing teeny-tiny lichens on a log halfway in. I also liked it because it was noticeably different than the forest that surrounded it.

I've been photographing the clearing as it recovers from the fire, so I can keep track of how it's changed.

Yesterday, it was full of tall grasses and aspen seedlings and cattails.

Weedy tea

* * *
The top photo is young Bee Balm, which apparently adds a bergamot flavour to tea. Though I mostly just appreciate their vivid and ragged purple. It "is common in moist open woods, along roadsides and in moist prairies."

The second is the flowering spikes of Common Burdock, which is often found growing "along river banks, disturbed habitats, roadsides, vacant lots, and fields." The young roots and purple/green stems can apparently be eaten and the leaves used to wrap food you want to cook in the coals of a fire, but mostly it's considered an invasive weed. The young plants are often mistaken for rhubarb, whose leaves are poisonous and whose red/green stems are delicious.

Scabrous

A wonderful lump

All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. July 24, 2015.* * *

I'm fairly certain that this mushroom is not a typical specimen. It looks more like a cancerous growth than a mushroom...

Which was sort of a theme for this hot buggy walk, which was flanked by garish lobster mushrooms (again, more like a tumour than anything else...) and featured moquitoes attempting every inch of exposed/covered skin. Which is to say: my hairline, the skin between my fingers, my shoulders, the backs of my knees.

I left the forest wearing a paste composed of sweat, mosquito spray, and sunscreen. My t-shirted shoulders and the legs of my shorts were festooned in mosquito carcasses and a few daubs of blood.

All of which sounds gross but it was glorious, even if the swarms of mosquitoes prevented me from taking very many photos.

In Conversation: GMB Chomichuk

Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION
By Ariel Gordon
GMB Chomichuk is a writer and illustrator, when not teaching art at St. James Collegiate and parenting his two boys. His work has appeared in film, TV, and books, comics and graphic novels. His slogan is: "Join the fight. Make comics!"
Mike Sanders photoChomichuk's latest publication is the graphic novel Infinitum, the first graphic novel published by speculative fiction stalwart ChiZine Publications.

Chomichuk took time away from researching Golden Age superheroes to answer questions about genre, making art and ego.

FP: Tell me about the pleasures of speculative fiction. What can you do in spec-fic that you can't do in regular fiction?
GMB Chomichuk: Well, I can write a time-travel noir story despite genre conventions and never look back. I can ask questions that are strange and give answers that are stranger still. I can do what I want. It's there in the title of the genre: I can speculate without limits.
FP: Infinitum is described as "time travel noir." How does it conform to conventions of film noir, i.e. Hollywood crime dramas of the '40s and '50s, and where does it modernize things a bit?
GMBC: For Infinitum, I had to make a choice. A choice about noir. The conventions of film noir were fabulous for comics: non-linear, stark imagery (and) convoluted plots that hinge on the bizarre. I had to make a choice, though. In most film noir, the woman is always the victim or the plot device. Women have almost no agency in film noir. That part I threw away. My hero and victim change positions a few times in the story. I changed the trope of the gritty narrator, made it into more of a Socratic dialogue. I left moments in the story that require you (to) flip back (to time travel within the book itself) to clarify. I didn't try to modernize anything, I just tried to make something that matched my current view of the world through the metaphor of comics.
FP: In your books, sometimes you're the writer, sometimes you're the artist, and sometimes you're both. Do you ever get your words confused with your images?
GMBC: Sometimes. But when that happens, I go with it. If an image carries me past the words, I try to leave them out. Usually I'm at work on multiple things, but I try to take on projects that are different in tone and scope so that working on one will give new perspective on another.
FP: You're a high school art, drama and English teacher when not making comics. Tell me how your two vocations are different and how they're the same.
GMBC: The jobs serve very different parts of myself. Lots of people think my role as a teacher is some sort of stopgap or 'have to' job. I could do full-time writing and illustrations, but then part of me would be missing. Teaching isn't about ego; you have to check ego and take on everyone else's needs. Creating stories is predicated on ego, the notion that you have something to say that others should listen to. I am better balanced because of those two daily vocations. No matter what the future holds for me, I hope there are classrooms.
FP: Your mother was dying as you were writing Infinitum. The book is many things: a doomed romance, a mystery, but also a wistful but loving meditation on memory. Tell me about your mom's influence on your thinking, on your work ethic, on your writing.
GMBC: My mother, Claudia, was the first person in my life to push the idea of publishing my fiction. She was a voracious reader and set that as an example. I wrote all the time and she would always ask quietly, with the leverage of a mother's tone, "When are you going to write a novel?" She always showed pride in my graphic-novel work but she'd ask about that novel. I've written several, but none that is ready. She was a teacher and a glass artist, but not at the same time. Standing in her studio now, surrounded by so many unfinished, fragile, beautiful things, I am determined to leave nothing out, nothing for later. To fill the hours of my life with more creation than consumption.
FP: What are you reading right now?
GMBC: Hundreds of Golden Age comics and all of H.P. Lovecraft as research, Howl's Moving Castle and The Peripheral for enjoyment.
FP: What are you writing right now?
GMBC: Not much. I just sent in a comics pitch. A project for the Make-A-Wish foundation, two kids' books, and a fighting monster comic, all created with Justin Currie. A film script and a cartoon pilot, plus a few other things. I just had the most wonderful creative meeting that may combine my teaching drive and my narrative drive into one project intended for students. At this exact moment, I'm doing the finishing touches on the art for Renegade Arts Entertainment's Underworld, written by Lovern Kindzierski (a surrealist monster-soaked mythological retelling of The Odyssey through the lens of 1980s Winnipeg) and writing dialogue for ChiGraphic's Midnight City (a nightmare fuel horror graphic novel set in the Golden Age of superheroes). And of course, a novel. It sounds like a lot, I know. But it's just one word at a time.

Talking Wild

* * *

If you're in/around Rolla (or Dawson), BC, this looks like it will be a nifty event!

It will feature Art Napoleon, Melanie Siebert, Gillian Wigmore and me and will be at poet/Writing on the Ridge organizer Donna Kane's house.