Ariel Gordon's Blog, page 81
May 23, 2011
wilderness adventure
All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. May 22, 2011.
* * *
So we took the girl for a walk in the forest yesterday, promising her a 'wilderness adventure.' Which theoretically appeals to a nearly five year old more than 'a long walk.'
We had to modify our normal procedure - a hopscotching hike, both of us caught by different clumps of greenery/brownery - but it was So Very Good to have her along.
Because that means that she can come along the next time. And that there might be a next time very soon, instead of when we can somehow broker childcare. Which always takes longer and is more fraught...
Yay!
May 19, 2011
Out-of-Town-Authors: Robert J. Sawyer
What a WONDER-ful world
Sci-fi writer posits future where creativity is prized
Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon
The best gift for a writer launching his 20th book isn't a china place-setting or platinum cufflinks.
It's attending his reading and paying attention to what he or she is thinking and feeling, 20 books in...
Buying the book doesn't hurt either.
Missisauga-based science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer will be reading from Wonder, his 20th novel and the conclusion to the WWW trilogy, May 19 at McNally Robinson.
* * *
1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?
I love reading my work in public because the audience reaction is immediate. I wrote the chapter I will be reading at McNally Robinson almost eighteen months ago; to finally hear the audience respond to it, in real time as I present it, is wonderful. I approach public readings as performance; you'll never see me do one sitting down with my head buried in a copy of my book - I act the scene out, doing different voices for each character, and engaging with the audience; it's as much theatre as it is a reading.
2) What do you want people to know about Wonder?
It's the concluding volume of my WWW trilogy about Webmind, a consciousness that spontaneously emerged in the background of the World Wide Web; the three novels (the other two are Wake and Watch) explore whether humans can survive with our essential liberty, dignity, and individuality intact once we cease to be the most intelligent things on the planet.
3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?
I come to Winnipeg a few times each year; this is my third trip so far in 2011. The first was to speak at TEDxManitoba, and the second was just to hang out with some of the local science-fiction and fantasy writers, including Sherry Peters, Bev Geddes, and Chadwick Ginther. Winnipeg is a wonderful city and I'm always happy to return (and not just because McNally Robinson has a nice big photo of me on the wall).
4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?
I'm reading Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith Herman, as research for the novel I'm currently writing - my 21st - which is called Triggers, and deals with the nature of memory.
5) How long would science-fiction writers survive in a world where Webmind existed?
A very long time. The thing Webmind values the most is creativity: the spontaneous generation of the new and unpredictable; he prizes this because he's incapable of it himself. And so human artists of all types are cherished by him, and those who take the longest imaginative leaps - including science-fiction writers - are valued most of all.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
* * *
This article was originally published in the Winnipeg Free Press on Sunday, May 1.
Sci-fi writer posits future where creativity is prized
Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon
The best gift for a writer launching his 20th book isn't a china place-setting or platinum cufflinks.
It's attending his reading and paying attention to what he or she is thinking and feeling, 20 books in...Buying the book doesn't hurt either.
Missisauga-based science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer will be reading from Wonder, his 20th novel and the conclusion to the WWW trilogy, May 19 at McNally Robinson.
* * *
1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?
I love reading my work in public because the audience reaction is immediate. I wrote the chapter I will be reading at McNally Robinson almost eighteen months ago; to finally hear the audience respond to it, in real time as I present it, is wonderful. I approach public readings as performance; you'll never see me do one sitting down with my head buried in a copy of my book - I act the scene out, doing different voices for each character, and engaging with the audience; it's as much theatre as it is a reading.
2) What do you want people to know about Wonder?
It's the concluding volume of my WWW trilogy about Webmind, a consciousness that spontaneously emerged in the background of the World Wide Web; the three novels (the other two are Wake and Watch) explore whether humans can survive with our essential liberty, dignity, and individuality intact once we cease to be the most intelligent things on the planet.
3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?
I come to Winnipeg a few times each year; this is my third trip so far in 2011. The first was to speak at TEDxManitoba, and the second was just to hang out with some of the local science-fiction and fantasy writers, including Sherry Peters, Bev Geddes, and Chadwick Ginther. Winnipeg is a wonderful city and I'm always happy to return (and not just because McNally Robinson has a nice big photo of me on the wall).
4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?
I'm reading Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith Herman, as research for the novel I'm currently writing - my 21st - which is called Triggers, and deals with the nature of memory.
5) How long would science-fiction writers survive in a world where Webmind existed?
A very long time. The thing Webmind values the most is creativity: the spontaneous generation of the new and unpredictable; he prizes this because he's incapable of it himself. And so human artists of all types are cherished by him, and those who take the longest imaginative leaps - including science-fiction writers - are valued most of all.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
* * *
This article was originally published in the Winnipeg Free Press on Sunday, May 1.
May 18, 2011
And one more...
My 'props' for my How to Write a Poem exercize, delivered twice today.[image error]
May 17, 2011
Alumna
So I read at my high school today, almost exactly 20 years after graduation.
All day, people kept saying how odd it must be for me, to be back...but I'm used to the idea that bricks and mortar lasts longer than people.
I think that's because I went back to the University of Winnipeg two times to take a course or two after I graduated.
But more than that, I even like the idea that a school is more than just the people that inhabited it at one time.
Because those people entrust it, bricks and mortar, to the next generation of students, the next generation of teachers.
And so it was good that I got to be a student at College Jeanne Sauve and it was good that I got to teach there, if only for a few hours, today.
Thanks to Mike McGovern for having me, thanks to the Grade 11 and 12s classes for having me, and thanks too to Diane Plamondon, my Grade 12 English teacher, for coming in to have tea with me.
I especially like that although she struggles with poetry, she's on her third bemused read of Hump.
All day, people kept saying how odd it must be for me, to be back...but I'm used to the idea that bricks and mortar lasts longer than people.
I think that's because I went back to the University of Winnipeg two times to take a course or two after I graduated.But more than that, I even like the idea that a school is more than just the people that inhabited it at one time.
Because those people entrust it, bricks and mortar, to the next generation of students, the next generation of teachers.
And so it was good that I got to be a student at College Jeanne Sauve and it was good that I got to teach there, if only for a few hours, today.
Thanks to Mike McGovern for having me, thanks to the Grade 11 and 12s classes for having me, and thanks too to Diane Plamondon, my Grade 12 English teacher, for coming in to have tea with me.
I especially like that although she struggles with poetry, she's on her third bemused read of Hump.
May 15, 2011
Out-of-Town-Authors: Tomson Highway
The true NORTH
Most haven't seen this side of Manitoba
Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon
Thomson Highway, a member of Barren Lands First Nation in northern Manitoba, is the beloved author of plays, novels and children's books.
In recent years he's also started writing and performing music, what he dubs "Cree cabaret."
The University of Manitoba's Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture is sponsoring a performance by Thomson at Aqua Books on Thursday.
Emma LaRoque, Neal McLeod and Duncan Mercredi will also appear as part of a bill called Cree Stories.
* * *
1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?
A writer's life is so solitary - and I love it, the solitude - that he has to break away from that solitude every once in a while and surround himself with people or he'd go crazy. So performing my cabarets does that perfectly.
I generally do a series in October, just before my partner and I leave for our winter home in France - and then in May, just before we come back to our summer home in Canada. It's the perfect balance, i.e. between the solitude that I love (in beautiful surroundings, in both countries) and the people whom I love just as much, i.e. my friends who, in essence, are the people who read my books, and love them.
2) What do you want people to know about your writing?
I want people to know that I write well and that that writing comes from northern Manitoba, and I mean the real north, where I was born and grew up, i.e. the Manitoba-Nunavut border area (near Saskatchewan), a part of the world that nobody - and I mean NOBODY, except for those of us who come from there - has ever seen, a part of the world that is so beautiful and so untouched you would cry if you were ever to see it.
Thousands of lakes, for one thing, lakes from which one can still drink the water. By comparison, Winnipeg, to us, might as well have been Rio de Janeiro or Antarctica, it was that far south of us.
3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?
Will this be my first time in Winnipeg? Good grief, woman, I went to high school there, as well as my first two years of university. I mean, I may not live there but I AM from Manitoba.
4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?
I am just finishing reading The Magic Mountain by German novelist Thomas Mann, in French translation, a brick of a book with the highest level of French possible, sentences an entire page long, like Proust!
What am I writing? A sort of Survival, except that mine will be the native version, i.e. an assessment of the impact of native literature on Canada since its birth some 30 years ago, in English, in French, AND in a few Native languages such as my native Cree.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
Most haven't seen this side of Manitoba
Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon
Thomson Highway, a member of Barren Lands First Nation in northern Manitoba, is the beloved author of plays, novels and children's books.
In recent years he's also started writing and performing music, what he dubs "Cree cabaret."The University of Manitoba's Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture is sponsoring a performance by Thomson at Aqua Books on Thursday.
Emma LaRoque, Neal McLeod and Duncan Mercredi will also appear as part of a bill called Cree Stories.
* * *
1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?
A writer's life is so solitary - and I love it, the solitude - that he has to break away from that solitude every once in a while and surround himself with people or he'd go crazy. So performing my cabarets does that perfectly.
I generally do a series in October, just before my partner and I leave for our winter home in France - and then in May, just before we come back to our summer home in Canada. It's the perfect balance, i.e. between the solitude that I love (in beautiful surroundings, in both countries) and the people whom I love just as much, i.e. my friends who, in essence, are the people who read my books, and love them.
2) What do you want people to know about your writing?
I want people to know that I write well and that that writing comes from northern Manitoba, and I mean the real north, where I was born and grew up, i.e. the Manitoba-Nunavut border area (near Saskatchewan), a part of the world that nobody - and I mean NOBODY, except for those of us who come from there - has ever seen, a part of the world that is so beautiful and so untouched you would cry if you were ever to see it.
Thousands of lakes, for one thing, lakes from which one can still drink the water. By comparison, Winnipeg, to us, might as well have been Rio de Janeiro or Antarctica, it was that far south of us.
3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?
Will this be my first time in Winnipeg? Good grief, woman, I went to high school there, as well as my first two years of university. I mean, I may not live there but I AM from Manitoba.
4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?
I am just finishing reading The Magic Mountain by German novelist Thomas Mann, in French translation, a brick of a book with the highest level of French possible, sentences an entire page long, like Proust!
What am I writing? A sort of Survival, except that mine will be the native version, i.e. an assessment of the impact of native literature on Canada since its birth some 30 years ago, in English, in French, AND in a few Native languages such as my native Cree.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
Out-of-Town- Authors: Tomson Highway
The true NORTH
Most haven't seen this side of Manitoba
Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon
Thomson Highway, a member of Barren Lands First Nation in northern Manitoba, is the beloved author of plays, novels and children's books.
In recent years he's also started writing and performing music, what he dubs "Cree cabaret."
The University of Manitoba's Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture is sponsoring a performance by Thomson at Aqua Books on Thursday.
Emma LaRoque, Neal McLeod and Duncan Mercredi will also appear as part of a bill called Cree Stories.
* * *
1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?
A writer's life is so solitary - and I love it, the solitude - that he has to break away from that solitude every once in a while and surround himself with people or he'd go crazy. So performing my cabarets does that perfectly.
I generally do a series in October, just before my partner and I leave for our winter home in France - and then in May, just before we come back to our summer home in Canada. It's the perfect balance, i.e. between the solitude that I love (in beautiful surroundings, in both countries) and the people whom I love just as much, i.e. my friends who, in essence, are the people who read my books, and love them.
2) What do you want people to know about your writing?
I want people to know that I write well and that that writing comes from northern Manitoba, and I mean the real north, where I was born and grew up, i.e. the Manitoba-Nunavut border area (near Saskatchewan), a part of the world that nobody - and I mean NOBODY, except for those of us who come from there - has ever seen, a part of the world that is so beautiful and so untouched you would cry if you were ever to see it.
Thousands of lakes, for one thing, lakes from which one can still drink the water. By comparison, Winnipeg, to us, might as well have been Rio de Janeiro or Antarctica, it was that far south of us.
3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?
Will this be my first time in Winnipeg? Good grief, woman, I went to high school there, as well as my first two years of university. I mean, I may not live there but I AM from Manitoba.
4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?
I am just finishing reading The Magic Mountain by German novelist Thomas Mann, in French translation, a brick of a book with the highest level of French possible, sentences an entire page long, like Proust!
What am I writing? A sort of Survival, except that mine will be the native version, i.e. an assessment of the impact of native literature on Canada since its birth some 30 years ago, in English, in French, AND in a few Native languages such as my native Cree.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
Most haven't seen this side of Manitoba
Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
by: Ariel Gordon
Thomson Highway, a member of Barren Lands First Nation in northern Manitoba, is the beloved author of plays, novels and children's books.
In recent years he's also started writing and performing music, what he dubs "Cree cabaret."The University of Manitoba's Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture is sponsoring a performance by Thomson at Aqua Books on Thursday.
Emma LaRoque, Neal McLeod and Duncan Mercredi will also appear as part of a bill called Cree Stories.
* * *
1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?
A writer's life is so solitary - and I love it, the solitude - that he has to break away from that solitude every once in a while and surround himself with people or he'd go crazy. So performing my cabarets does that perfectly.
I generally do a series in October, just before my partner and I leave for our winter home in France - and then in May, just before we come back to our summer home in Canada. It's the perfect balance, i.e. between the solitude that I love (in beautiful surroundings, in both countries) and the people whom I love just as much, i.e. my friends who, in essence, are the people who read my books, and love them.
2) What do you want people to know about your writing?
I want people to know that I write well and that that writing comes from northern Manitoba, and I mean the real north, where I was born and grew up, i.e. the Manitoba-Nunavut border area (near Saskatchewan), a part of the world that nobody - and I mean NOBODY, except for those of us who come from there - has ever seen, a part of the world that is so beautiful and so untouched you would cry if you were ever to see it.
Thousands of lakes, for one thing, lakes from which one can still drink the water. By comparison, Winnipeg, to us, might as well have been Rio de Janeiro or Antarctica, it was that far south of us.
3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?
Will this be my first time in Winnipeg? Good grief, woman, I went to high school there, as well as my first two years of university. I mean, I may not live there but I AM from Manitoba.
4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?
I am just finishing reading The Magic Mountain by German novelist Thomas Mann, in French translation, a brick of a book with the highest level of French possible, sentences an entire page long, like Proust!
What am I writing? A sort of Survival, except that mine will be the native version, i.e. an assessment of the impact of native literature on Canada since its birth some 30 years ago, in English, in French, AND in a few Native languages such as my native Cree.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
May 13, 2011
Hands on: Barbara Nickel
* * *
Barbara Nickel's fingertips on ends of pages as she flipped between poems marked by large post-its. As she stuck and unstuck the post-its while she pre-ambled the poems.
Barbara's fingers as she raced over to Margaret Laurence's angel* and slipped them into the angel's papier-mache ones when asked to pose for this portrait.
And, more distantly, the idea of Barbara's fingers on the bow of a violin, suggested by her "Sestina for a Sweater." Which was the second poem she read last night.
* * *
Barbara Nickel's second collection of poetry, Domain (House of Anansi), was listed in Quill and Quire's Best Books of 2007. Her previous collection of poetry, The Gladys Elegies, won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Notre Dame Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Ireland Review, The Malahat Review, The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry, and The Walrus, and she is a winner of The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. Barbara is also an award-winning author of books for children; her novel Hannah Waters and the Daughter of Johann Sebastian Bach was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and won the B.C. Book Prize. A new picture book in verse is forthcoming in 2013. She lives and writes in Yarrow, B.C.
*
Aqua Books has a prop from the film version of The Stone Angel, produced by Winnipeg's Buffalo Gal Pictures. Apparently, four angels were produced for the film.
May 10, 2011
Two poems
Prairie Fire solicited poems to go with my appearance at their Speaking Volumes gala...that in turn was prompted by my Most Promising win at the 2010 Manitoba Book Awards.
They published How to Connect with Your Father and How to Connect with Your Step-Father.
This is only my second poetry appearance in PF. And the first appearance of the Edison poems anywhere.
Beyond that, I GREATLY enjoyed reading the suite that these two poems came from at Speaking Volumes, even if reading them made me a little verklempt.
* * *
Prairie Fire Magazine
Spring 2011
Vol. 32, No. 1
Table of Contents
Charlene Diehl Michael Van Rooy: 1968–2011
Ariel Gordon Two Poems
Graham Hillard We Will Not All Sleep, But We Will All Be Changed
Dennis Cooley Five Poems
Eliza Robertson Thoughts, Hints and Anecdotes
Concerning Points of Taste and the Act of Making One's Self Agreeable: A Handbook for Ladies
Richard Scarsbrook Two Poems
Rebecca Rosenblum Dream Big
Charmaine Cadeau Twice as likely
Roy Wang Norman and the Swan
Shawn Riopelle Yellow Bird
Gwen Anderson Except That You Bless Me
M. Travis Lane Practical Meditation
Neile Graham Put Out The Light
Josiah Neufeld Father Issa
M.E. Csamer Painting at Versailles
Jim Johnstone Yield your wings to the furies
Jared Harel The Bright Side of Nuclear Winter
Antony Christie grey wolf in the stubblefield
They published How to Connect with Your Father and How to Connect with Your Step-Father.This is only my second poetry appearance in PF. And the first appearance of the Edison poems anywhere.
Beyond that, I GREATLY enjoyed reading the suite that these two poems came from at Speaking Volumes, even if reading them made me a little verklempt.
* * *
Prairie Fire Magazine
Spring 2011
Vol. 32, No. 1
Table of Contents
Charlene Diehl Michael Van Rooy: 1968–2011
Ariel Gordon Two Poems
Graham Hillard We Will Not All Sleep, But We Will All Be Changed
Dennis Cooley Five Poems
Eliza Robertson Thoughts, Hints and Anecdotes
Concerning Points of Taste and the Act of Making One's Self Agreeable: A Handbook for Ladies
Richard Scarsbrook Two Poems
Rebecca Rosenblum Dream Big
Charmaine Cadeau Twice as likely
Roy Wang Norman and the Swan
Shawn Riopelle Yellow Bird
Gwen Anderson Except That You Bless Me
M. Travis Lane Practical Meditation
Neile Graham Put Out The Light
Josiah Neufeld Father Issa
M.E. Csamer Painting at Versailles
Jim Johnstone Yield your wings to the furies
Jared Harel The Bright Side of Nuclear Winter
Antony Christie grey wolf in the stubblefield
