Ariel Gordon's Blog, page 52
April 16, 2013
Say the Word
Back in March, I spent a lunch hour in the English department media lab, recording two poems at the invitation of Thin Air, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:
"The Winnipeg International Writers Festival is proud to present a new audio/visual poetry project called SAY THE WORD/DITES LES MOTS, celebrating National Poetry Month in April and tapping into the rich community of poets in Manitoba."
Other poets include Ted Landrum, Jeannette Timmerman, Madeline Coopsammy, Lise Gaboury-Diallo, Angeline Schellenberg, Katherine Bitney, Lindsey White, J.R. Léveillé, Joanne Epp, Lori Cayer, Kendra Gaede, Dennis Cooley, Chandra Mayor, Kate Vermette, Charlene Diehl, Laurent Poliquin, Maurice Mierau, Steve Currie and Steve Locke.
Happy National Poetry Month!
"The Winnipeg International Writers Festival is proud to present a new audio/visual poetry project called SAY THE WORD/DITES LES MOTS, celebrating National Poetry Month in April and tapping into the rich community of poets in Manitoba."
Other poets include Ted Landrum, Jeannette Timmerman, Madeline Coopsammy, Lise Gaboury-Diallo, Angeline Schellenberg, Katherine Bitney, Lindsey White, J.R. Léveillé, Joanne Epp, Lori Cayer, Kendra Gaede, Dennis Cooley, Chandra Mayor, Kate Vermette, Charlene Diehl, Laurent Poliquin, Maurice Mierau, Steve Currie and Steve Locke.
Happy National Poetry Month!
April 15, 2013
Manitoba Book Awards 25th Anniversary Pre-Gala Reading
When: Monday, April 22, 7:00 pm
Where: Ace Art (2-290 McDermot Avenue)
Cost: FREE
Please join us for a special evening of readings to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Manitoba Book Awards!
Host extraordinaire Ariel Gordon will helm an evening of pre-Gala readings by eight multiple award winners from the MBA’s first 25 years.
Our full roster of readers includes:
Lori Cayer, Simone Chaput, Ariel Gordon, Faith Johnston, J.R. Léveillé, Chandra Mayor, Larry Verstraete, Armin Wiebe
Free admission. Refreshments will be provided; bar by donation.
Don’t forget to join us at the 2013 Manitoba Book Awards Gala on Sunday, April 28 at the West End Cultural Centre (doors at 7:15 pm, Gala at 8:00 pm)!
* * *
This event will be great fun...it will also function as the launch of my Kalamalka Press chapbook, How to Make a Collage.
Yay! Fun!
Where: Ace Art (2-290 McDermot Avenue)
Cost: FREE
Please join us for a special evening of readings to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Manitoba Book Awards!
Host extraordinaire Ariel Gordon will helm an evening of pre-Gala readings by eight multiple award winners from the MBA’s first 25 years. Our full roster of readers includes:
Lori Cayer, Simone Chaput, Ariel Gordon, Faith Johnston, J.R. Léveillé, Chandra Mayor, Larry Verstraete, Armin WiebeFree admission. Refreshments will be provided; bar by donation.
Don’t forget to join us at the 2013 Manitoba Book Awards Gala on Sunday, April 28 at the West End Cultural Centre (doors at 7:15 pm, Gala at 8:00 pm)!
* * *
This event will be great fun...it will also function as the launch of my Kalamalka Press chapbook, How to Make a Collage.
Yay! Fun!
April 11, 2013
Reprint: How to Make a Collage
From the Kalamalka Press website:
* * *
Details on my brand new Kalamalka Press chapbook, How to Make a Collage.
Those of you hoping to get a copy will have to get them direct from me at any of the events in Winnipeg, Victoria, Vancouver, and Saskatoon, as apparently they're sold out.
I only have twenty in my cache, so I may have to come up with an elaborate rationing system to make sure I still have a few left by the time I hit Saskatoon in June. (By the light of the moon. With a bassoon.)
Yay! My thanks to Jake Kennedy, Kevin McPherson, Laisha Rosnau, Jason Dewinetz, the students of ENGL205, and, of course, to John Lent.
* * *Details on my brand new Kalamalka Press chapbook, How to Make a Collage.
Those of you hoping to get a copy will have to get them direct from me at any of the events in Winnipeg, Victoria, Vancouver, and Saskatoon, as apparently they're sold out.
I only have twenty in my cache, so I may have to come up with an elaborate rationing system to make sure I still have a few left by the time I hit Saskatoon in June. (By the light of the moon. With a bassoon.)
Yay! My thanks to Jake Kennedy, Kevin McPherson, Laisha Rosnau, Jason Dewinetz, the students of ENGL205, and, of course, to John Lent.
April 5, 2013
Wine & Words POSTER
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Buy your tickets now or forever be Wine & Word-less!
(Me and my "How to Be Angry in Public" are included in the everloving "and More!" category...)
April 4, 2013
Books! For me!
As I've mentioned in this space previously, I had the great good fortune to work on my upcoming Kalamalka Press chapbook with a bunch of writers whose work I admired.
And then there were the come-from -away readers also performing at Word Ruckus and Vertigo Voices.
So it should go without saying that my 'soft launch' of the chappie last week in Vernon & Kelowna saw me accumulating quite a stack of books to bring home.
Jake Kennedy's How to do Typing
Laisha Rosnau's Notes on Leaving
Al Rempel's This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For
Hannah Calder's More House
Jason Dewinetz's moving to the clear
David Pitt-Brooke and Christine McPhee's Accommodation: A Dialogue of Culture and Nature
After spending a bit of time with their authors I'm looking forward now to spending time in the books.
I also picked up some of the weird books piled on the floor at Word Ruckus. And hauled them home. And will therefore learn about The Horse Through the Ages, All About Ferrets, and Evergreens through seventies-tinted glasses.
* * *
In other Kalamalka Press chapbook news, I will be hosting/reading at the MWG Book Awards Anniversary Reading on April 22 at aceartinc (2nd Floor, 290 McDermott Ave).
The event will feature multiple MBA-winners, including Lori Cayer, Chandra Mayor, Faith Johnston, J.R. Leveille, Larry Verstraete, and Armin Wiebe. (And one or two as yet confirmed others...)
It will also function as a How to Make a Collage launch. Because I've got a chapbook to launch. And don't feel like organizing an additional event. Just to launch it.
Yay! Fun!
And then there were the come-from -away readers also performing at Word Ruckus and Vertigo Voices.
So it should go without saying that my 'soft launch' of the chappie last week in Vernon & Kelowna saw me accumulating quite a stack of books to bring home.
Jake Kennedy's How to do Typing Laisha Rosnau's Notes on Leaving
Al Rempel's This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For
Hannah Calder's More House
Jason Dewinetz's moving to the clear
David Pitt-Brooke and Christine McPhee's Accommodation: A Dialogue of Culture and Nature
After spending a bit of time with their authors I'm looking forward now to spending time in the books.
I also picked up some of the weird books piled on the floor at Word Ruckus. And hauled them home. And will therefore learn about The Horse Through the Ages, All About Ferrets, and Evergreens through seventies-tinted glasses.
* * *
In other Kalamalka Press chapbook news, I will be hosting/reading at the MWG Book Awards Anniversary Reading on April 22 at aceartinc (2nd Floor, 290 McDermott Ave).
The event will feature multiple MBA-winners, including Lori Cayer, Chandra Mayor, Faith Johnston, J.R. Leveille, Larry Verstraete, and Armin Wiebe. (And one or two as yet confirmed others...)
It will also function as a How to Make a Collage launch. Because I've got a chapbook to launch. And don't feel like organizing an additional event. Just to launch it.
Yay! Fun!
April 3, 2013
Poetry in Voice
* * *
So last week, before I left for Kelowna and Vernon, before I came home and celebrated my 40th birthday, I spent part of a day acting as an Online Semifinals Judge for Poetry in Voice.
The Scott Griffin-founded Poetry in Voice is a recitation contest for Canadian high schools.
My duties as one of twenty-two Online Semifinal Judges involved first reading - and then listening to videotaped performances of - a selection of poems.
Some of the poems were canonical, some were contemporary. But it was a pleasure to spend time with them AND with the students who'd chosen them to recite. It was hard but also joyful work, if that doesn't sound COMPLETELY LAME.
The semifinalists will apparently be announced tomorrow. Go high school poetry reciters! Go poets!
(I had to write/memorize a short speech every year during my elementary/junior high in French Immersion. It was my worst school experience, beyond being painfully shy.)
(I had to recite a poem a few years ago in Catherine Hunter's Poetry: Creative Writing class at the U of Wpg. I read an angry mothering poem by Louise Gluck...with my eyes closed. And didn't mind a bit.)
* * *
English-language recitations will be judged by Stephanie Bolster, Alice Burdick, Brad Cran, Michael Crummey, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Tracy Hamon, Ariel Gordon, Susan Holbrook, Gillian Jerome, David O’Meara, Stuart Ross, Carmine Starnino, Rhea Tregebov, and Zachariah Wells.
French-language recitations will be evaluated by Yves Antoine, Éric Charlebois, Rino Morin Rossignol, Jeanne Painchaud, Swann Paradis, Aurélie Resch, and Gaston Tremblay.
March 27, 2013
Ruckus-ing!
(clockwise from left) Chestnuts from Jake Kennedy's yard in Kelowna, a bone bone-folder and a plastic bone-folder from Jason Dewinetz' letterpress bunker in Vernon, ENORMOUS rosehips from an ENORMOUS old rosebush on the Bishop Wild Bird Sanctuary aka Laisha Rosnau's yard in Vernon, and a wooden type block from the letterpress demo at the Word Ruckus in Kelowna.
* * *
I just got back from two readings in BC's interior to celebrate my upcoming Kalamalka Press chapbook, How to Make a Collage.
In addition to the readings, one of whom was with a pile of people and the other of which was with Gillian Wigmore, who I met years ago at the Banff Centre and who has done some pretty marvelous things since then...
In addition to the readings, I ALSO got to spend time with each of the people who contributed to the chapbook: the judges (organizers/editors/emcees) who selected it, the designer/students who 'set it in metal,' and the man it was named for...
And it was SUCH a goddamn pleasure.
More later, but for now: Yay! Fun! (And, always, thank you...)
March 26, 2013
McAdam rises to challenge of species barrier
Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon
A Beautiful Truth By Colin McAdam Hamish Hamilton, 304 pages, $30
ONTARIO literary writer Colin McAdam's compelling third novel manages to be both violent and loving, eloquent and non-verbal. Which is apt for a book that features an ensemble cast of humans and chimpanzees.
Those readers shuddering at the prospect of another "animal novel" can rest assured. Like Newfoundlander Jessica Grant in 2009's Come, Thou Tortoise, and Toronto's Barbara Gowdy in her 1999 elephant novel The White Bone, McAdam rises to the challenge of writing across the species barrier, where before he'd settled for crossing class lines and the gender divide.
Structurally, A Beautiful Truth is a Canadian Museum for Human Rights whereas his previous books, Fall (2009) and Some Great Thing (2004), are roomy houses.
Rather than two or three main characters, for instance, here there are almost a dozen major and minor characters. The humans include Walt, a developer who adopts a baby chimp, David, a scientist conducting ape research, and Mike, an ambitious local politician who has an instinctive dislike of chimps.
The first half of the book is largely spent in the humans' heads, mostly with the easygoing Walt, as is evidenced by the novel's plummy opening sentence:
"Judy and Walter Walt Ribke lived on 12 up-and-down acres, open to whatever God gave them, on the eastern boundary of Addison County, four feet deep in years of rueful contentment."
McAdam has the childless couple rationalizing their decision, first, to import an exotic animal, and then, a dozen years later, dealing with the inevitable results.
By the time we're two-thirds of the way in, McAdam is narrating almost entirely from the point of view of the chimps, who are housed in different sections of a biomedical facility.
And as one of them, Looee, is dosed with antidepressants and anesthetics, and exposed to a variety of illnesses, we know there is no going back for either Walt or Looee.
The narrative complexity doesn't detract from McAdam's biggest strength: portrayals of ardent but bashful men who find themselves on the cusp of, and then in the middle of, episodes of violence.
And, like his previous novels, A Beautiful Truth is difficult but not dreary, because McAdam always carefully acknowledges that consensus and communion are possible.
He has even invented a word for the experience of these states, used in the chimp sections: "oa."
It is this kind of inventiveness with language, as well as McAdam's use of short, one-paragraph sentences, mimicking the keyed-in exchanges between researchers and subjects, that makes these sections especially effective.
McAdam has drawn on the results that came out of the first ape studies in 1960s and '70s, specifically the Nim Chimpsky and Washoe Projects. He also spent time observing apes at the Fauna Foundation, a Canadian chimpanzee sanctuary based in Chambly, Que.
Are there beautiful truths at the centre of A Beautiful Truth?
Many of us know that it is dangerous to try to make a child out of a chimpanzee. But what does it say about us that, like Walt and Judy, many pet owners describe themselves as "parents," and that doggy daycares cost more than human ones?
What does it say about us that we confine our closest relatives to zoos and research facilities?
Finally, what does it mean to be human? Are language and functional vocal cords the only things that separates us from dolphins and elephants?
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon
A Beautiful Truth By Colin McAdam Hamish Hamilton, 304 pages, $30
ONTARIO literary writer Colin McAdam's compelling third novel manages to be both violent and loving, eloquent and non-verbal. Which is apt for a book that features an ensemble cast of humans and chimpanzees.
Those readers shuddering at the prospect of another "animal novel" can rest assured. Like Newfoundlander Jessica Grant in 2009's Come, Thou Tortoise, and Toronto's Barbara Gowdy in her 1999 elephant novel The White Bone, McAdam rises to the challenge of writing across the species barrier, where before he'd settled for crossing class lines and the gender divide.Structurally, A Beautiful Truth is a Canadian Museum for Human Rights whereas his previous books, Fall (2009) and Some Great Thing (2004), are roomy houses.
Rather than two or three main characters, for instance, here there are almost a dozen major and minor characters. The humans include Walt, a developer who adopts a baby chimp, David, a scientist conducting ape research, and Mike, an ambitious local politician who has an instinctive dislike of chimps.
The first half of the book is largely spent in the humans' heads, mostly with the easygoing Walt, as is evidenced by the novel's plummy opening sentence:
"Judy and Walter Walt Ribke lived on 12 up-and-down acres, open to whatever God gave them, on the eastern boundary of Addison County, four feet deep in years of rueful contentment."
McAdam has the childless couple rationalizing their decision, first, to import an exotic animal, and then, a dozen years later, dealing with the inevitable results.
By the time we're two-thirds of the way in, McAdam is narrating almost entirely from the point of view of the chimps, who are housed in different sections of a biomedical facility.
And as one of them, Looee, is dosed with antidepressants and anesthetics, and exposed to a variety of illnesses, we know there is no going back for either Walt or Looee.
The narrative complexity doesn't detract from McAdam's biggest strength: portrayals of ardent but bashful men who find themselves on the cusp of, and then in the middle of, episodes of violence.
And, like his previous novels, A Beautiful Truth is difficult but not dreary, because McAdam always carefully acknowledges that consensus and communion are possible.
He has even invented a word for the experience of these states, used in the chimp sections: "oa."
It is this kind of inventiveness with language, as well as McAdam's use of short, one-paragraph sentences, mimicking the keyed-in exchanges between researchers and subjects, that makes these sections especially effective.
McAdam has drawn on the results that came out of the first ape studies in 1960s and '70s, specifically the Nim Chimpsky and Washoe Projects. He also spent time observing apes at the Fauna Foundation, a Canadian chimpanzee sanctuary based in Chambly, Que.
Are there beautiful truths at the centre of A Beautiful Truth?
Many of us know that it is dangerous to try to make a child out of a chimpanzee. But what does it say about us that, like Walt and Judy, many pet owners describe themselves as "parents," and that doggy daycares cost more than human ones?
What does it say about us that we confine our closest relatives to zoos and research facilities?
Finally, what does it mean to be human? Are language and functional vocal cords the only things that separates us from dolphins and elephants?
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
March 20, 2013
Vertigo Voices poster!
* * *
I do so love optical illusions. When they don't give me migraines, that is. (I'm not joking. If I'm pre-migraine, shirts with optical illustion-y patterns hurt.)
