Ariel Gordon's Blog, page 94

twig

eggs

All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. October 9, 2010.

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I really love stinkhorns. They're lurid. And they're reliable.

As in, they were practically the only mushrooms I could find in this fall's forest, which is soupy-wet in spots and bone dry in others.

(These are the 'eggs' from which the 'shaft' of the mushroom emerges...really.)

Reprint: Véhicule Press blog

Carmine Starnino posted the following recommendations to the Véhicule Press blog today. And I'm so so honoured to be on his list...

In anticipation of the GG shortlist announcement on Wednesday, I thought I'd take a moment to mention the Canadian poetry I enjoyed this year.

Excluded is The Crow's Vow, a Signal book and therefore, according to industry etiquette, not eligible for objective recommendation.

I would, however, like make a plug (plea?) for Michael Harris's Circus which, except for a few notices, has been roundly ignored. And I think that's just criminal.

I suppose I should also disclose that I provided blurbs for two books on this list (Patternicity and Complete Physical). But I don't see why that should make any difference. I blurbed them precisely because I admired them.

For and Against (Goose Lane), Sharon McCartney.
Patternicity (Nightwood), Jim Johnstone.
Bloom (Anansi), Michael Lista
Welling (Your Scrivener Press), Margaret Christakos
Tiny, Frantic, Stronger (Insomniac), Jeff Latosik
Hump (Palimpsest), Ariel Gordon
Complete Physical (Porcupine's Quill), Shane Neilson

hands and gnawed-off nipples

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If all goes well, I'll be halfway to Brandon by the time you see this.

And then onto Saskatoon, Regina, Ottawa and Toronto, where I'll read from Hump and tell my terrible story about the gnawed-off nipple (NOT mine), over and over.

I'm looking forward to hearing Jonathan Ball, John Toone, Tracy Hamon, Christine McNair, Pearl Pirie, Damien Rogers, and Melanie Janesse read along the way.

Do join me if you're in any of those cities and read this blog. Which is a pretty long long shot, I know, but...

Reprise: a walk in the park

I took Sally Ito's creative writing class at the Canadian Memmonite University on a rather buggy/mucky walk in Assiniboine Forest yesterday.

(I wore my new suede shoes. I drowned my new suede shoes. Which is only really me being punished for my must-look-like-a-writer vanity...so I can't complain.)



At various points, I stopped and 'fed' them information of various types - species lists, newspaper articles, the field guide entry for trembling aspen, gossipy stories about the forest perv, the sound of the forest itself - and then had them write for a minute or so.



Then we marched on. Sometimes I pointed out mushrooms or how the wild roses had gone scarlet in the meadow at the end of our walk.

Writing to this built-by-forest-ruining-delinquents tree-fort wasn't part of my plan, but when I peeked inside, I couldn't NOT have them write to what I found inside.



Thanks to Sally for inviting me to walk the forest, talking poetry, for money (!).

Thanks too to the 18 students in her class who played along and swatted and wrote and laughed at my naked-man stories.

And DEEP appreciation to the two students who went barefoot and handed the rest of their classmates across a slippery log in the middle of a puddle, mid-forest.

Fun!

Squash

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I saw this at Crampton's Market on the weekend and thought it was mostly perfect combination of image/text.

I bought a bright orange/red unlabeled one whose colour reminded me of the cardiac arrest of lobster mushrooms.

Speaking of the forest and what-one-might-find-there, I'm taking Sally Ito's creative writing class at CMU on a tour of Assiniboine Forest on Thursday. I'll be sure to point out the spot where the plane went down which created a suitable - if fleeting - habitat for a yearling moose and his mother.

I'll be sure to mention the snowmobile that prowled for unleashed dogs one winter afternoon and the man-naked-except-for-hiking-boots one day mid-summer.

Fun!

Reprint: 95 Books

From the 95 Books blog, in which the conceit is: "In 2006, George W. Bush read 95 books. We will do better."

Contributors include nikki reimer, Jonathan Ball, ryan fitzpatrick, melanie brannagan frederiksen, Claire Lacey, William Neil Scott, Natalie Zina Walschots and Meghan Doraty, among others...

94. Hump (Ariel Gordon)
A first poetry collection organized around the poet's pregnancy, Hump could move in a lot of lousy directions but Gordon reigns in the sentimentality as much as possible to...

moss/brown

twigged

moss/green