Ariel Gordon's Blog, page 53

Reprint: Wine & Words scheduling

From Mel Marginet, a major domo at Theatre by the River:

"Look - it's Wine & Words @theatrebtriver! May not look like it yet... Scheduling #WpgTheatre"


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My poem "How to be Angry in Public" is in there, somewhere...

(The event is Saturday, April 13th.)

Reprint: Mythologies of Loss trailer

"Room invites you to celebrate women's strength, vulnerability, and wit this International Women's Day, as we launch our latest issue, 36.1, Mythologies of Loss, on March 8th.

Watch our 36.1 Trailer featuring Christa Couture, Sigal Samuel, Joy Kogawa, Sue Goyette and more!"



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After a session that involved my partner and I bickering about the backdrop for the video and my feverish daughter sighing dramatically in the background, I wound up contributing a thirty second chunk of my, "How to Tell if Someone is Dead."

(The poem will be in How to Pack Without Overpacking, my 2014 collection with Palimpsest. Which I'm trying to get out the door right now. Without much luck.)

Thanks to Rachel for her calm devotion to this issue...

Reprint: Word Ruckus 2013

So this came directly out of the (frenzied) brains of poet/prof/organizers Jake Kennedy and kevin mcpherson eckhoff. As such, I'm not going to do anything to it, except reprint it, because it makes me a little dizzy....:

Word Ruckus 2013: A Festival of Words & Community

On Saturday, March 23, 2013, from 4:00 pm to 1 am-ish, at the Laurel Packinghouse, Okanagan College, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, will present Word Ruckus 2013: A Hootenanny of Words & Community.

What is a Word Ruckus? According to the organizers an Okanagan College English professors, Jake Kennedy and kevin mcpherson eckhoff, “Word Ruckus is an all-ages literary shin-dig, a pay-what-you-can writerly free-fer-all, a poetic hoe-down and a magical linguistical brouhaha.” 

In other words, Word Ruckus is not your grandfather’s poetry reading.
 
This year, Word Ruckus will feature 14 professional writers reading from their poems, stories, novels, and plays. The event will also showcase “that poetry car” that everyone can cover in words, a Poem Maker Machine, Alphagetti short story/poem contests, Kids Giving Adults Famous Author Haircuts Extravaganza, affordable wine and beer, free books, kids’ & adults’ typewriter and art area, open-mic slots, and couches and chairs for poetic people to lounge on. 

This year Word Ruckus will also be announcing the winner of the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature.
 
In the early hours of the Ruckus—from approximately 4:30-7 pm—all of the programming will be child-focused and will then highlight the literary creations of some of the Okanagan’s most talented young teens. The Ruckus begins at 4:30 with a number of live-on-stage literary performances and improvisations of under-10s including “sound poem speed racing,” “interpretive poetry dancing,”
and “kids judge books by their covers.” The Ruckus will then feature performances from several Kelowna Secondary high school poets, too.
 
 Okanagan College professor and book-maker, Jason Dewinetz, and some of his Writing & Publishing Diploma students, will also be present to hand-set letters of words on a flat-bed letterpress.
The night will also include rad music from the WR houseband—Murmur—and of course the spectacular literary performances of Angie Abdou, Annharte, Arlene Bowman, Kathleen Brown, Hannah Calder, Mercedes Eng, Ariel Gordon, Aaron Giovannone, Claire Lacey, Dorothy Lusk, Muriel Marjorie, Cecily Nicholson, Al Rempel, and Laisha Rosnau. 

Finally, the night will conclude with an open jam and Word Ruckus’ traditional prank calls to famous Canadian authors.
 
This year, the fifth year in a row that this big literary party has been thrown, the organizers are expecting about 300 people to attend maybe, so reserve your couch through karma! 

Admission is like pay what you can-can! 
 

Lichens in winter

All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. March 2, 2013.* * *

So in the midst of day of crabby errand-running, I managed to negotiate a solo walk in the forest.

And, like last weekend, I managed to end the walk with snow up to my thighs. Even though I have snowpants, I somehow decided not to bring them with me.

I think the intangible but definite turn towards spring - something in the angle of the sun, maybe - has blinded me to the fact that there's still two to three feet of snow on the ground.

So part of me wants to trudge over to the spots that won't be as accessible when break up starts. Part of me wants to keep to the main paths, anticipating unearthing the waders from the basement for when break up starts.

And part of me is just glad to be walking now and get snowy if that means finding the few specimens a winter forest offers.

This patch of lichen on a stump on the tail end of the loop is one of my comforts while walking. So I was glad to see it again, even if it meant wading in up to my knees and being chilled during the rest of the walk.

Lichens in winter, part two

Word Ruckus

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So I'll be heading to Kelowna and Vernon in March to read from my Kalamalka Press chapbook, How to Make a Collage.

Here's the event poster for the Kelowna event, called Word Ruckus but also a "Community Literary Festival Hootenanny Show Event."

The Vernon reading, which will be part of the Vertigo Voices series, will also feature Gillian Wigmore, who I met aaaaaages ago at the Banff Centre's Wired Writing Studio.

So I'm as pleased as punch to be reading with her. And, also, that I'll get to know Laisha Rosnau, jake kennedy, and kevin eckhoff mcpherson, who've acted as jurors/editors/organizers on this chapbook, a bit better...

Yay! Fun!

Getting Paid in Pie!

Strawberry-rhubarb payment-in-kind!

From Julia Michaud of Instant Noodles for lit-flavoured ad copy...and I didn't just get a picture of a pie, I got the pie itself! (It was on the porch yesterday morning when I went out to get something...)

What we see, or miss, when out in the world

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

On Looking : Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes  
By Alexandra Horowitz
Scribner, 320 pages, $30

NEW YORKER Alexandra Horowitz is a psychologist with a PhD in cognitive science. She's studied rhinoceroses, bonobos and humans, but it was when she turned her attention to dogs, specifically to her own dog Pumpernickel, that she found her niche.

The result was the international bestseller Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know (2009), which combined Horowitz's observations of her pet with current research.

Her intriguing followup is about what humans see - and what we miss and why - when out in the world.

Horowitz begins On Looking by walking around her own block and describing what she sees. She then retraces her steps with a variety of experts, including a geologist, a sound designer and a blind person, as well as with her dog and infant son.

One of the problems with the book is that the conceit she sells early on - to the extent that she uses quotes from her initial essay as epigraphs for the essays that follow - is flabby.

While three of the chapters stay close to home, literally walking the walk, other chapters adapt themselves to Horowitz's companions' areas of interest. So we loiter downtown for our walk with the font nerd and experience the crowds of Broadway with the urban sociologist but also travel to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

And so readers lose the baseline of the original itinerary, trading the intimacy of Horowitz's block for Anytown, U.S.A.

And while Horowitz is an eloquent and affable host on these walks, she sometimes veers towards the precious, confiding in a footnote, for instance, that her footnotes are nowhere near as surprising and original as those of Oliver Sacks.

More troubling is her apology for using technical terms in this excerpt from her walk with Sidney Horenstein of the American Museum of Natural History: "One risks, in writing about geology, numbing one's readership with the terminology. Schist, gneiss, phyllite; metamorphic, sedimentary, siliciclastic, schistosity. It can be dizzying. I sympathize. I hear 'Paleozoic' and I nearly drop right into a deep sleep."

It is counter-intuitive, almost bewildering, to hear a scientist apologize for talking science. Isn't that why we read books of popular science?

In addition, U.S. publisher Scribner has chosen to include some of the Horowitz's line drawings with the text, but their postage-stamp size means that they're too small to be of any real use as illustrations. And while it is lovely to see the paintings that came from Horowitz's walk with artist Maira Kalman, the two colour plates seem somehow out of place.

These quibbles aside, On Looking is a quietly illuminating study of how human beings process all the information available to them when doing something like going for a walk. Particularly interesting is Horowitz's analysis of how expertise changes the brain.

Of course, the answer to the question "How do I keep myself from missing things?" is "You have to spend time looking!"

But just as being able to guess the murderer halfway through a mystery isn't always fatal, it doesn't matter here either, because Horowitz reminds us of the specific wealth of what there is to see: animals and rocks and buildings and people, smells and sounds and textures.

Finally, as non-fiction devotees know, one of the pleasures of the genre is that even though you might not be wholly persuaded by the main thesis, you're certain to pick up nuggets of useful and novel information.

Like the notion that typhoid is supposed to smell like "freshly baked brown bread," and that rats produce a particular sound "to accompany pain or social defeat, and oddly, ejaculation."

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

Ad copy

So Julia Michaud, the designer that I worked with on the JackPine chapbook How to Prepare for Flooding, will have an ad for her company Instant Noodles in the next issue of Winnipeg lit-mag Prairie Fire. 

(Julia has done a pile of work for PF, including a poster or two for their annual contests.)

Anyways, she wanted good tag lines, given that the readers of PF are among the literati...

...so she polled all the smart asses on her friends list on FB.

This one was mine but also in the running were:

"You CAN judge a book by its cover" by PJ Burton, frontman for Chocolate Bunnies from Hell

and

"We don't do noodles. You don't do design. (Let's each do what we're good at)" by Perry Grosshans of THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival.

I've always wanted to write ad copy! (Not really, but it is nice to work with Julia again, if only fleetingly...)

Wine & Words

Kit Pearson, Waubgeshig Rice, Ellen Peterson, Sally Ito, Warren Cariou, Susie Moloney, Chandra Mayor, Michael Minor, Katherine Thorsteinson, K.I. Press, Kim MacRae, Ariel Gordon, Joanne Epp,
Teresa-Lee Cooke, Breanna Muir, Kendra Jones, David Alexander Robertson, Julienne Isaacs,
Talia Pura, Clare Murphy...

...Being the list of writers whose works will be featured at Theatre By the River's Wine and Words event, April 13th at Gurevich Fine Art.  

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For my third kick at the Wine and Words cat, I submitted my poem "How to Be Angry in Public." 

It's got a shouting match in the middle of it. And swearing. And violence against windows and garden vegetables.

So...completely par for the course.