Ariel Gordon's Blog, page 27
November 3, 2014
Granola Belt-ing
* * *
So this will my last reading for a while, so it feels appropriate, somehow, that the Neighbourhood Cafe is just down the street from my house. Staggering distance away, I believe that's called.
I'm greatly looking forward to reading with Dave and Allan, to hearing what they've been working on, and, mostly, to sitting back with a cup of sweet milky tea and relaxing.
See you there?
My thanks to Bob Armstrong for including info about the event in his Paperchase column in the WFP. And, of course, to Julia Michaud of Instant Noodles Design for the poster.
November 2, 2014
Another Story
(Clockwise from top left): Ruth Roach Pierson & Dawn Kresan, Palimpsest poetry editor Jim Johnstone, host Blair Trewetha, Patricia Young, and myself at Another Story Bookshop in Toronto, ON.
* * *
So this was a good day. First, I had lunch with Jim Johnstone and fellow Palimpsest-ian poet Marc di Saverio, then we went and got ludicrous cake donuts from Glory Hole Doughnuts, then I met Edmonton poet Ella Zeltserman for tea, then strolled down the street for a Palimpsest-ian dinner at Workshop by Lattitude where I had the charcuterie platter, then there was the reading at Another Story Bookshop, then Beau's Lug Tread beer and folksinging down the street at Inter Steer.
And, after all that, I followed Google Maps home. Feeling a befuddled sort of midnight calm.
It was very nice to talk poetry/pears with Ella and first books/South Korea with Blair, who I'm hoping to interview for the blog...
November 1, 2014
Northern histories explored in tale of Arctic trek
Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon
Circling the Midnight Sun: Culture and Change in the Invisible Arctic
By James Raffan
HarperCollins, 472 pages, $35
Based near Kingston, Ont., James Raffan has built a career writing and lecturing on Canadian wilderness travel. He has written morWildwaters (1986), Summer North of Sixty (1990) and Bark, Skin and Cedar (1999), a cultural history of canoes.
e than a dozen books in this vein, including the bestsellers
In 2007, Raffan set himself a larger canvas, writing a biography of Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson's Bay Company from 1820 to 1860.
While researching that book, Raffan was intrigued to learn that Simpson had made an around-the-world tour in 1841-42, visiting the Arctic Circle in Russia. Later, Raffan was invited to attend a 2010 conference in Iqaluit on the issues facing the Arctic, whose delegate list was "heavily skewed towards non-indigenous men and women, like me, with addresses in the middle lattitudes."
After decades visiting the North, Raffan wanted to know how climate change and industry was affecting the land. But he also realized that many southerners knew nothing about the North, a point driven home when he saw tourists on weekend jaunts to Santa's Workshop theme parks in Finland and Alaska. He also noticed how fluffy polar bears had become the face of climate change for organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund.
As Raffan argues in his introduction, the North is more than Coca-Cola's advertising campaigns have made it out to be: "there are people who live in the Arctic, four million of them, in eight countries, speaking dozens of languages and representing almost as many indigenous cultures."
As such, Circling the Midnight Sun documents Raffan's three-and-a-half year circumpolar journey, visiting indigenous communities in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland.
But make no mistake. With the exception of a long and bone-shaking ride to visit a Siberian shaman, where the driver blasted Russian techno-pop and smoked incessantly, and a fishing trip in Iceland that includes dolphin, this book is not adventure travel of the traditional sort.
Raffan spends much of his time in the book in transit, to and from his home, to and from remote Arctic communities.
The majority of Circling the Midnight Sun's pages, in fact, are devoted to histories of the peoples he meets.
More importantly, it also details contemporary attempts by indigenous peoples to gain any kind of sovereignty over their traditional lands, given the influx of industry, the new shipping lanes from China, Singapore and Korea, and the changing winds of politics.
Along the way, Raffan meets with political leaders, reindeer herders, activists, spiritual leaders, museum curators, artists and engineers.
Thankfully, Raffan is a careful and sympathetic tour guide to all these varied communities. What's more, he always seems aware that his is the perspective of a white southerner, that there is more to knowing a place than canoeing its rivers, so he spends most of his time listening.
One of the most memorable moments in this book comes when Raffan is served baby horse in a Siberian restaurant.
When asked by the chef, Igor Makarov, if he likes it, Raffan says, "We have horses at home. My wife and daughters are competitive riders. They are horse-lovers. Horses are a big part of our family's life as well. But I'm not sure how they will react when I tell them that I enjoyed a meal of foal here in Yakutsk."
The chef's answer encapsulates everything that Circling the Midnight Sun attempts: overcoming culture shock, deepening our ideas about indigenous peoples, and beginning a north-south dialogue.
"Here in Sakha, horses are sacred," replied Makarov. "They are a part of who we are. They have been a part of Sakha culture as long as anyone can remember. And, for my part, I can't imagine loving a horse and not eating them."
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon
Circling the Midnight Sun: Culture and Change in the Invisible Arctic
By James Raffan
HarperCollins, 472 pages, $35
Based near Kingston, Ont., James Raffan has built a career writing and lecturing on Canadian wilderness travel. He has written morWildwaters (1986), Summer North of Sixty (1990) and Bark, Skin and Cedar (1999), a cultural history of canoes.
e than a dozen books in this vein, including the bestsellers In 2007, Raffan set himself a larger canvas, writing a biography of Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson's Bay Company from 1820 to 1860.
While researching that book, Raffan was intrigued to learn that Simpson had made an around-the-world tour in 1841-42, visiting the Arctic Circle in Russia. Later, Raffan was invited to attend a 2010 conference in Iqaluit on the issues facing the Arctic, whose delegate list was "heavily skewed towards non-indigenous men and women, like me, with addresses in the middle lattitudes."
After decades visiting the North, Raffan wanted to know how climate change and industry was affecting the land. But he also realized that many southerners knew nothing about the North, a point driven home when he saw tourists on weekend jaunts to Santa's Workshop theme parks in Finland and Alaska. He also noticed how fluffy polar bears had become the face of climate change for organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund.
As Raffan argues in his introduction, the North is more than Coca-Cola's advertising campaigns have made it out to be: "there are people who live in the Arctic, four million of them, in eight countries, speaking dozens of languages and representing almost as many indigenous cultures."
As such, Circling the Midnight Sun documents Raffan's three-and-a-half year circumpolar journey, visiting indigenous communities in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland.
But make no mistake. With the exception of a long and bone-shaking ride to visit a Siberian shaman, where the driver blasted Russian techno-pop and smoked incessantly, and a fishing trip in Iceland that includes dolphin, this book is not adventure travel of the traditional sort.
Raffan spends much of his time in the book in transit, to and from his home, to and from remote Arctic communities.
The majority of Circling the Midnight Sun's pages, in fact, are devoted to histories of the peoples he meets.
More importantly, it also details contemporary attempts by indigenous peoples to gain any kind of sovereignty over their traditional lands, given the influx of industry, the new shipping lanes from China, Singapore and Korea, and the changing winds of politics.
Along the way, Raffan meets with political leaders, reindeer herders, activists, spiritual leaders, museum curators, artists and engineers.
Thankfully, Raffan is a careful and sympathetic tour guide to all these varied communities. What's more, he always seems aware that his is the perspective of a white southerner, that there is more to knowing a place than canoeing its rivers, so he spends most of his time listening.
One of the most memorable moments in this book comes when Raffan is served baby horse in a Siberian restaurant.
When asked by the chef, Igor Makarov, if he likes it, Raffan says, "We have horses at home. My wife and daughters are competitive riders. They are horse-lovers. Horses are a big part of our family's life as well. But I'm not sure how they will react when I tell them that I enjoyed a meal of foal here in Yakutsk."
The chef's answer encapsulates everything that Circling the Midnight Sun attempts: overcoming culture shock, deepening our ideas about indigenous peoples, and beginning a north-south dialogue.
"Here in Sakha, horses are sacred," replied Makarov. "They are a part of who we are. They have been a part of Sakha culture as long as anyone can remember. And, for my part, I can't imagine loving a horse and not eating them."
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
October 30, 2014
Art Bar Reading Series
(Clockwise from top left): Patricia Young, me, and David Zaretsky at the Art Bar Reading Series, held at the Black Swan Tavern in Toronto, ON.
October 29, 2014
Out-of-Town-Authors: Michael Crummey
Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon
Michael Crummey's fourth novel, Sweetland, was just nominated for a Governor General's Award for the Arts.
Born in Buchans, Nfld., a mining town in the province's interior, Crummey eventually left Newfoundland to pursue his education in Ontario and work abroad. His first novel, River Thieves (2001), published the year he moved back to St. John's, was nominated for the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Books in Canada First Novel Award while Galore (2009), was shortlisted for the 2011 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Crummey was in Winnipeg last week and managed to set aside some time for an interview.
his third novel,
Q: What do you want people to know about Sweetland?
A: I'd like people to know the novel is based on an increasingly common situation facing small fishing communities in Newfoundland who find themselves in crisis as a result of the cod moratorium. In the most extreme cases, they are taking a government package to leave their homes as a group. Which, as you can imagine, is not a clean or simple process. I'd like people to know the gorgeous cover art is by a Newfoundland artist named Michael Pittman. Google the guy. Check out his website. I'd like people to know that the novel is funny in spots. Honest.
Q: You've spent much of your career telling the story of Newfoundland and Labrador in the midst of a resurgence of award-winning writing by Newfoundlanders and Labradorites. And yet, there are those 'Newfie jokes,' which seek to label residents as hopelessly and even deliberately backward/rural. And then there's your statement, midway through the second chapter of Sweetland, that says "Half the books supposedly set in Newfoundland were nowhere Queenie recognized and she felt insulted by their claim on her life. They all sounds like they were written by townies, she liked to say." So, what is it that you're trying to do with your books about aspects of Newfoundland and Labrador culture and history?
A: Jeez b'y. Where to start with that? There's an awful lot going on in that question. Part of what I've been trying to do from the time I started writing is to honour the world my parents were born into, and the world that existed in Newfoundland before their time. And, consciously or not, I think I have been writing about that world in order to refute the 'Newfie joke.' My sense of those people, of what they accomplished by simply surviving in those circumstances, speaks to a resourcefulness and ingenuity and stubbornness that is the polar opposite of the stereotypical Newfie (can I say here how much I despise that word and all it represents?). First and last, I am trying to write honestly about the place that made me what I am, to present it in all its glory and wonder and spectacular awfulness. But I've always struggled with a sense that, at best, my take on Newfoundland is an approximation of the real world. And I've read plenty of books about Newfoundland that aren't even that close. There's always some tension between the world as it is and the world as it's presented in any kind of art. Through Queenie's dismissal, I was wanting to give the people I'm supposedly representing in Sweetland a chance to give me and my book the proverbial finger.
Q: Sweetland is your 10th book in since Arguments With Gravity was published in 1996. What are your goals for your writing now, as compared to your first books?
A: To be honest, I can barely remember what my goals were for my writing when I first started publishing books. Getting a book published was the goal, I think. There was something so magical in the notion of having an honest-to-goodness, buy-it-in-the-store book with my name on it, that I never really thought much past that point. These days I feel like my goals are more about the kind of book I'm writing. I want to be constantly pushing myself beyond my limitations, to be a better writer at the end of a book than I was when I started it.
Of course, there's also the whole issue of what happens when the book is out in the world that I think about now. And my goal (it's more of a hope than a goal, I guess) is that the book does well enough that I won't have to get a job at a corner store to make ends meet.
Q: Have you ever been to Winnipeg? What have you heard?
A: I have been to Winnipeg at least half a dozen times for the writers' festival and other events. Love it here. In some ways I see a similarity to Newfoundland in the sense that people who don't know it often have a knee-jerk negative notion of the place. And underneath that stereotype is an incredibly rich cultural community. When I think of Winnipeg I think of great writers and music and movies, of Miriam Toews and David Bergen and John K. Samson and Guy Maddin and Maurice Mierau. And the cold. I think of the cold. There's no way around that.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon
Michael Crummey's fourth novel, Sweetland, was just nominated for a Governor General's Award for the Arts.
Born in Buchans, Nfld., a mining town in the province's interior, Crummey eventually left Newfoundland to pursue his education in Ontario and work abroad. His first novel, River Thieves (2001), published the year he moved back to St. John's, was nominated for the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Books in Canada First Novel Award while Galore (2009), was shortlisted for the 2011 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Crummey was in Winnipeg last week and managed to set aside some time for an interview.his third novel,
Q: What do you want people to know about Sweetland?
A: I'd like people to know the novel is based on an increasingly common situation facing small fishing communities in Newfoundland who find themselves in crisis as a result of the cod moratorium. In the most extreme cases, they are taking a government package to leave their homes as a group. Which, as you can imagine, is not a clean or simple process. I'd like people to know the gorgeous cover art is by a Newfoundland artist named Michael Pittman. Google the guy. Check out his website. I'd like people to know that the novel is funny in spots. Honest.Q: You've spent much of your career telling the story of Newfoundland and Labrador in the midst of a resurgence of award-winning writing by Newfoundlanders and Labradorites. And yet, there are those 'Newfie jokes,' which seek to label residents as hopelessly and even deliberately backward/rural. And then there's your statement, midway through the second chapter of Sweetland, that says "Half the books supposedly set in Newfoundland were nowhere Queenie recognized and she felt insulted by their claim on her life. They all sounds like they were written by townies, she liked to say." So, what is it that you're trying to do with your books about aspects of Newfoundland and Labrador culture and history?
A: Jeez b'y. Where to start with that? There's an awful lot going on in that question. Part of what I've been trying to do from the time I started writing is to honour the world my parents were born into, and the world that existed in Newfoundland before their time. And, consciously or not, I think I have been writing about that world in order to refute the 'Newfie joke.' My sense of those people, of what they accomplished by simply surviving in those circumstances, speaks to a resourcefulness and ingenuity and stubbornness that is the polar opposite of the stereotypical Newfie (can I say here how much I despise that word and all it represents?). First and last, I am trying to write honestly about the place that made me what I am, to present it in all its glory and wonder and spectacular awfulness. But I've always struggled with a sense that, at best, my take on Newfoundland is an approximation of the real world. And I've read plenty of books about Newfoundland that aren't even that close. There's always some tension between the world as it is and the world as it's presented in any kind of art. Through Queenie's dismissal, I was wanting to give the people I'm supposedly representing in Sweetland a chance to give me and my book the proverbial finger.
Q: Sweetland is your 10th book in since Arguments With Gravity was published in 1996. What are your goals for your writing now, as compared to your first books?
A: To be honest, I can barely remember what my goals were for my writing when I first started publishing books. Getting a book published was the goal, I think. There was something so magical in the notion of having an honest-to-goodness, buy-it-in-the-store book with my name on it, that I never really thought much past that point. These days I feel like my goals are more about the kind of book I'm writing. I want to be constantly pushing myself beyond my limitations, to be a better writer at the end of a book than I was when I started it.
Of course, there's also the whole issue of what happens when the book is out in the world that I think about now. And my goal (it's more of a hope than a goal, I guess) is that the book does well enough that I won't have to get a job at a corner store to make ends meet.
Q: Have you ever been to Winnipeg? What have you heard?
A: I have been to Winnipeg at least half a dozen times for the writers' festival and other events. Love it here. In some ways I see a similarity to Newfoundland in the sense that people who don't know it often have a knee-jerk negative notion of the place. And underneath that stereotype is an incredibly rich cultural community. When I think of Winnipeg I think of great writers and music and movies, of Miriam Toews and David Bergen and John K. Samson and Guy Maddin and Maurice Mierau. And the cold. I think of the cold. There's no way around that.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
October 28, 2014
Kitchener/Waterloo Reading
(Clockwise from top left): Tanis MacDonald, me, Sonnet L'Abbe at the Kava Bean Commons in Kitchener, ON.
* * *
A few pics from Saturday night's reading in Kitchener/Waterloo, which I think should be called Kitchoo to eliminate any confusion. Waterer?
I had the great good fortune of having the support of Clare Hitchens of WLUP, who was the one who suggested I add a K/W reading to my itinerary in the first place and then found me a place to stay. Tanis and Sonnet then agreed to be added to the bill.
Unfortunately, we had to switch venues five hours before the event. But with Clare's help, we managed to find a great alternate, the Kava Bean Commons, whose manager not only agreed to re-open at 6:30 pm (after closing for the day at 3:00 pm) but who was both cheerful and appreciative whilst doing so.
I'm so very glad that we didn't just cancel the event. I would have felt so...forlorn. Instead, I got to meet other poets and be in community. Which is best-case-scenario for a bookish person...
October 27, 2014
sunshot
All images from Point Pelee National Park, ON. October 23, 2014.* * *So poet/publisher Dawn Kresan took me to her local, Point Pelee National Park, which included a boardwalk/marsh walk, a forest walk, and a beachcomb.
Beyond the marsh portion of the walk, we had the place largely to ourselves. And it was good to walk & talk poetry, to point out mushrooms, to kneel on the beach and look at stones.
I found any number of bones on the beach in addition to all the plastic junk. So much plastic junk.
And then we rushed home, driving in and amongst all the farms and greenhouses and farm stands, back to Dawn's, where we changed into outfits suitable for the BookFest Windsor event, and that was that for my time in Windsor.
