Framework 2016 : Monty Reid, Pearl Pirie, etc.

Framework: Words on the Land is proud to announce its 2016 roster of writers:

Natale Ghent, Katherine Graham, John K. Grande, Helen Humphreys, Jonathan Kaplansky,  Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley, John Steffler, Alissa York, and  Pearl Pirie.
 
This summer, over the course of a late August weekend, ten writers will find themselves in the forest at Fieldwork near Perth, Ontario.

These writers will be presented with a simple wooden frame installed at their site - intended to suggest rather than proscribe perspective. For some, their frames may briefly supplant the computer screen as a form of illumination.  For others, the frame may provide a welcome focal point or a springboard for inspiration.

What they write from their designated sites will be read to a public audience from the intimate loft-space of a barn at Fieldwork on Sunday, August 21st at 3pm. 

Framework 2015 – our inaugural event - was by all accounts a resounding pleasure for both writers and audience members. Not a single intrepid writer came screaming out of the woods.  One writer even set up a bush cocktail bar at his site and wrote about it.  The public reading and discussion was captivating.  The writing was first class. Authors sold books. The weather was glorious. Framework now has a reputation to live up to.

Join ten writers this August 21 as they read from their weekend’s creative output and reflect on the experience of writing on the land.    

Tickets are limited and only available in advance through the OIWF. So be sure to purchase them early!
Fieldwork is very pleased to be presenting this event once again in partnership with the Ottawa International Writers Festival.

Since 2008 Fieldwork has presented unique site-responsive art installations in and around a farm field and forest. Both established and emerging visual artists have been featured.  Fieldwork endeavors to cultivate connections between people, art and nature and to encourage a wide-ranging pursuit of artistic expression that is rooted in the land.   Framework: Words on the Land is Fieldwork's first offspring and was designed to lure literature into the creative mix of their programs.

For further information on the project, and for ticket availability/purchase, click here.

 

recent videos: Amanda Earl + Monty Reid,

The video of Amanda Earl's recent feature at The TREE Reading Series has been posted online. Also, the ottawa international writers festival has been posting a series of "talking about stories" posts, including one with Amanda Earl, and another with Monty Reid.

Chaudiere Books' 2015 Fall Poetry Launch! Londry, Turnbull, Weaver + Hawkins, November 28, 2015

The Writers Festival is pleased to be hosting a special Fall launch for Ottawa’s own Chaudiere Books!

Co-publishers rob mclennan and Christine McNair, have another great slate of books coming your way! Join us for readings and launches by Andy Weaver (this), Chris Turnbull (continua), Jennifer Londry (Tatterdemalion) and William Hawkins (The Collected Poems of William Hawkins).

The Bywords 2015 John Newlove Poetry Award Reading and Ceremony, October 26, 2015

Monday, October 26, 2015, 6:30pm - the Bywords 2015 John Newlove Poetry Award Reading and Ceremony at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, Maxwell's, 340 Elgin Street. Free! Join us for the launch of Heel by Matthew Walsh, the Bywords 2014 John Newlove Award Recipient. Featuring readings by this year’s honourable mentions and award recipient (to be announced at the reading), plus music by Marie-Josée Houle. This is a night to celebrate the fine poetry of John Newlove, a poet who lived in Ottawa for the last twenty years of his life. We are also celebrating Bywords.ca, which is in its 12th year, all the volunteers, contributors, readers, event organizers and others who ensure that the site provides poetry and information to help residents of Ottawa and environs to be part of our city's rich literary culture.

Contact Info: Amanda Earl, Managing Editor, Tel. 613-868-1364; e-mail: amanda@bywords.ca

John Newlove (1938-2003) was an award-winning Saskatchewan poet who spent his last years in the City of Ottawa. In 2007, Chaudiere Books published A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove, edited by Robert McTavish. Copies can be ordered directly, here.

Kiki in Wonderland: Amanda Earl,

Chaudiere Books author Amanda Earl is offering free copies (while supplies last) of the visual poetry chapbook to those who purchase her first trade collection, Kiki, at tomorrow night's launch (which also includes the launch of Roland Prevost's Singular Plurals and Monty Reid's Garden).

Kiki in Wonderland is a visual poetry interpretation of Alice, the first section of Kiki. Published by AngelHousePress in a limited edition of 50 copies, this chapbook will be offered free to those who pre-purchased Kiki (& bring the book to be signed at the launch) or who purchase Kiki at its Ottawa launch on Monday, October 27 at 8pm as part of the Ottawa International Writers Festival, Fox and Feather, 283 Elgin Street. See link here for further information on the event.

Ground Rules launch: a report,

On Saturday, December 7, 2013, we celebrated the publication of the first title in our Chaudiere Books re-launch at The Manx Pub. Thanks so much to David O'Meara and The Manx Pub for hosting the event, and Sean Wilson and the Ottawa International Writers Festival for their sponsorship, and ongoing support. Lovingly hosted by myself, we launched Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 [see ordering information here] to a packed house with readings by contributors Marilyn Irwin, Stephen Brockwell and Sharon Harris. We even had copies available of the limited-edition chapbook I simply began: above/ground press at 20 [an interview with rob mclennan] (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, August 2013), a lengthy interview with myself on the beginnings and history of the press that Cameron Anstee conducted [read an excerpt of such here], as well as the previous above/ground press anthology, Groundswell: the best of above/ground press 1993-2003 (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 2003).

Marilyn Irwin has been doing quite well lately, from her 2013 Diana Brebner Award win to poems in this year's issue of New American Writing. Part of her reading included a new poem longer than a single page (as she said during her reading, anyone familiar with her work would know exactly how shocking an idea like that is). Unfortunately, I couldn't get a good picture of her (but hopefully someone else did).

Stephen Brockwell, while reading from his reprinted chapbook, Impossible Books (the Carleton Installment), included in the new anthology, was good enough to read a poem in the anthology by Stephanie Bolster. Brockwell's chapbook was an earlier work-in-progress excerpt (one of two such fragments of the same work produced through above/ground press) from what has newly appeared as The Complete Surprising Fragments of Improbable Books through Toronto's Mansfield Press. Notice, too, if you skim the crowd behind this photo of Stephen Brockwell, you can catch glimpses of Brian and Pearl Pirie, Cameron Anstee, Ben Ladouceur, Christine McNair and Monty Reid, among others.

Toronto writer and artist Sharon Harris read from a scattering of works, including her "more fun with 'pataphysics," originally produced by above/ground press as an issue of STANZAS and reprinted in the anthology, as well as a number of pieces from a couple works-in-progress. Harris is originally from Sarnia, Ontario, and read a couple of poems composed on and around her hometown (including some stories that don't seem restricted to those from Sarnia, and could easily be Ottawa Valley stories).

Writer, book conservator, designer and new co-publisher Christine McNair, who is also my lovely wife, designed and produced the book (which is absolutely gorgeous). If you can imagine, two weeks plus earlier, she managed to approve cover stock for the anthology from her hospital bed in the midst of a thirty-seven hour labour. We were enormously happy that she was able to be on hand for the event with our other co-production, two-and-a-half-week-old Rose, making this the baby's first public outing (basically, her first non-baby outing) and first literary reading. We suspect there might be many more such readings in her future!

If you were unable to make the event, fret not; the entire reading was recorded, and will be posted come spring as part of the first Chaudiere Books podcast. Expect to see at least one more Ottawa launch with different readers around the same time, and schemes are cooking to see launches in Toronto, Montreal and even Calgary. Have you joined our Facebook group yet, to keep apprised of updates? And of course, we will be announcing our Indiegogo campaign in the New Year, as well as our 2014 forthcoming titles. Stay tuned!

book launch! Ground rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013

Produced to begin the re-launch of Ottawa literary publisher Chaudiere Books, co-publishers rob mclennan and Christine McNair invite you to the launch of Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013.

Co-sponsored by our friends at the Ottawa International Writers Festival and The Manx Pub, the event will feature readings by three of the book’s contributors: Sharon Harris (Toronto), Marilyn Irwin (Ottawa) and Stephen Brockwell (Ottawa). The event will be (lovingly) hosted by Chaudiere Books co-founder, editor and co-publisher rob mclennan.

5pm, Saturday, December 7, 2013

The Manx Pub

370 Elgin Street, Ottawa

Sharon Harris [pictured] is a Toronto artist/writer whose poems have been anthologized in The Broadview Introduction to Literature, The Last Vispo, and Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. She is the author of chapbooks from bookthug, In Case of Emergency Press, and above/ground, and her first full-length collection, Avatar, was published by The Mercury Press. She has written articles for Geist, The Globe & Mail, and Open Book Toronto;  is a past contributor to Torontoist and Word Magazine; and her work has been published in The National Post, dANDelion, The Capilano Review, Drunken Boat, The Volta, broken pencil, and Vallum. I Love You Toronto, her exhibition of photographs, appeared in newspapers, magazines, and on radio and television across Canada.

Marilyn Irwin’s work has been published by above/ground press, Arc, Bywords, and New American Writing. A graduate of Algonquin College’s Creative Writing program, she has three chapbooks: for when you pick daisies (2010), flicker (2012), and little nothings (2012). She won Arc Poetry Magazine’s Diana Brebner Prize this year.

Stephen Brockwell cut his writing teeth in the eighties in Montreal, appearing on French and English CBC Radio and in the anthologies Cross/cut: Contemporary English Quebec Poetry and The Insecurity of Art (both VéhiculePress, 1982). George Woodcock described Brockwell's first book, The Wire in Fences (Balmuir, 1987) as having an extraordinary range of empathies and perceptions. Harold Bloom wrote that Brockwell's second book, Cometology (ECW Press, 2001), held rare and authentic promise. Fruitfly Geographic won the Archibald Lampman award for best book of poetry in Ottawa in 2005. His Complete Surprising Fragments of Improbable Books is newly out from Mansfield Press. Brockwell currently operates a small IT consulting company from the 7th floor of the Chateau Laurier and lives in a house perpetually under construction.

Working out of Ottawa, poet and publisher rob mclennan’s baby, above/ground press, marks a second decade of the production of broadsheets, chapbooks, magazines, and anthologies that trace out the best shapes of the best of contemporary Canadian (and, increasingly, international) poetry. From the span of that second ten of years, he has compiled this book of traceries: a selection of work by writers ranging from the likes of the late Artie Gold, and Robert Kroetsch, to the living derek beaulieu, Rachel Zolf, Eric Folsom, Natalie Simpson, etc., all collected here as representative of a decade’s aesthetic count.

                        from Gil McElroy’s “Introduction: An Integral”

Edited by rob mclennan, with an introduction by Gil McElroy, Ground Rules features writing from the second decade of one of the most active micro publishers in Canada, selected from a series of hundreds of publications lovingly edited, produced and distributed by editor/publisher rob mclennan. A follow-up to Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003), Ground Rules includes a wide range of work by Artie Gold, Mark Cochrane, Suzanne Zelazo, derek beaulieu, Stephanie Bolster, Amanda Earl, Nathanaël, Lisa Samuels, Rachel Zolf, Sharon Harris, D. G. Jones, Julia Williams, Eric Folsom, Gregory Betts, Natalie Simpson, Aaron Tucker, Monty Reid, William Hawkins, Emily Carr, Cameron Anstee, Helen Hajnoczky, Marilyn Irwin, Stephen Brockwell, Robert Kroetsch and rob mclennan.

Copies of the book will be available at the event. See the OIWF link to the event here.

Chaudiere Books: our rebuilding year,

Since Ottawa literary publisher Chaudiere Books was founded by Jennifer Mulligan and rob mclennan in 2006 the press has produced an impressive thirteen titles of poetry and fiction (including a couple of anthologies) by writers both emerging and established. Originally founded in part to advocate for the enormous amount of literary activity around Ottawa, Chaudiere has produced single-author titles by a number of locally-based writers including Nicholas Lea, John Newlove, Anne Le Dressay, Monty Reid, Pearl Pirie, Marcus McCann, and Clare Latremouille. Attempting to engage Ottawa writers in a conversation with writers across Canada, the press has also produced works by Meghan Jackson, Michael Bryson, and Joe Blades. Unfortunately, due to a series of life events and sundry other things, the press has been unable to keep to a regular schedule since 2010.

Co-founder Jennifer Mulligan officially left the press earlier this year to focus on her work in film and Ottawa poet, designer, and book conservator Christine McNair has stepped in to fill the role of co-publisher. With the assistance of Monique Desnoyers (web designer) and Stephen Brockwell (sage advice); we've been enormously busy over the past few months (apart from the fact that McNair and mclennan are expecting a child any day now) working towards a return to a proper publishing schedule, beginning with the publication of our first new title in December.

This is a rebuilding year for Chaudiere Books, and we will be announcing an Indiegogo Campaign in January 2014 which will feature a whole slew of incentives from our backlist; new and old limited edition rarities from writers both new and established; and a few surprises. The campaign will coincide with announcements of forthcoming titles and launches in 2014.

The first title of the official Chaudiere Books re-launch is Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013, edited by rob mclennan with an introduction by Gil McElroy. In many ways, Chaudiere Books has always been the trade extension of the chapbook publisher above/ground press and this title cements and even clarifies the associations between the two presses.

Ground Rules features writing from the second decade of one of the most active micro publishers in Canada, selected from a series of hundreds of publications lovingly edited, produced and distributed by editor/publisher rob mclennan. A follow-up to Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003), Ground Rules includes a wide range of work by poets Artie Gold, Mark Cochrane, Suzanne Zelazo, derek beaulieu, Stephanie Bolster, Amanda Earl, Nathanaël, Lisa Samuels, Rachel Zolf, Sharon Harris, D. G. Jones, Julia Williams, Eric Folsom, Gregory Betts, Natalie Simpson, Monty Reid, William Hawkins, Emily Carr, Cameron Anstee, Helen Hajnoczky, Marilyn Irwin, Stephen Brockwell, Robert Kroetsch and rob mclennan.

“Working out of Ottawa, poet and publisher rob mclennan's baby, above/ground press, marks a second decade of the production of broadsheets, chapbooks, magazines, and anthologies that trace out the best shapes of the best of contemporary Canadian (and, increasingly, international) poetry. From the span of that second ten of years, he has compiled this book of traceries: a selection of work by writers ranging from the likes of the late Artie Gold, and Robert Kroetsch, to the living Derek Beaulieu, Rachel Zolf, Eric Folsom, Natalie Simpson, etc., all collected here as representative of a decade’s aesthetic count.”

                        from Gil McElroy's “Introduction: An Integral”

The Ottawa launch of Ground Rules is scheduled for Saturday, December 7th 2013 at The Manx Pub and is sponsored by the Ottawa International Writers Festival. Lovingly hosted by rob mclennan, the event will feature readings by three of the book’s contributors (to be announced over the next couple of days). Watch for details via the Chaudiere Books blog, as well as our Facebook page!

lovingly,

Christine McNair and rob mclennan

publishers

a new poem by Marcus McCann,

Marcus McCann has a new poem, "Cover Letter" (which he read last year at The Manx Pub as part of the ottawa international writers festival) online in the new issue of The Puritan.

"Cover Letter" Marcus McCann at The Manx, Ottawa International Writers Festival, Oct 28 2012

The Ottawa International Writers Festival has just posted a fraction of Marcus McCann's reading at The Manx Pub, October 28, 2012. One of the finest readings I've seen in some time.

Pearl Pirie in St. Catharines + Marcus McCann in Ottawa: some reports,

Pearl Pirie [photo credit: Ryan Pratt] read in St. Catharines, ON at the Grey Borders Reading Series recently, and Ryan Pratt was good enough to post a report on the ottawa poetry newsletter blog. Pirie posted her own report as well, on her own blog. Back home, Marcus McCann read at the Manx Pub over the weekend, as part of the ottawa international writers festival, and Amanda Earl posted her report of such, here.

2012 bywords John Newlove Poetry Awards

bywords John Newlove Poetry Awards
Hosted by Amanda Earl
the ottawa international writers festival
Friday, October 26, 2012
Free event [more info here]
Knox Presbyterian Church • 120 Lisgar st. (at Elgin)
6:30pm

Join host Amanda Earl for the launch of Miss Canada (International) by rob mclennan, the 2011 recipient of the John Newlove Poetry Award. Featuring readings by this year’s award recipient (to be announced at the reading) and honourable mentions, plus music by Neil Gerster!

The award is named for the late Saskatchewan poet and Chaudiere Books author John Newlove, who died in 2003. Newlove spent his last seventeen years in Ottawa, as he liked to say, "for his sins."

Chaudiere Books published his selected poems, A Long Continual Argument, edited by Robert McTavish, in 2007. Copies will be available at the reading, and a copy is presented annually to the winner of the John Newlove Award.

Marcus McCann reads at the ottawa international writers festival, October 28 2012

Chaudiere author Marcus McCann launches his second collection, The Hard Return (Insomniac Press, 2012) at the ottawa international writers festival as part of the Plan 99 Reading Series at the Manx Pub alongside Nyla Matuk and Matthew Tierney on Sunday, October 28, 2012 at 5pm.

Lovingly hosted by David O'Meara.

Chaudiere Books author Pearl Pirie at the Ottawa Festival, May 1, 2011

Pearl Pirie reads alongside Gillian Sze and Lorna Crozier at the spring edition of the Ottawa International Writers Festival; the poetry cabaret is hosted by Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley; details at the festival website, here.

Chaudiere Books author Marcus McCann reads at the 2010 John Newlove Poetry Awards

Bywords' 2010 John Newlove Poetry Award Reading at the Ottawa International Writers Festival
Southminister United Church, 15 Aylmer
Monday, October 25, 2010, 6:30 pm- a free event
contact: amanda@bywords.ca

Launch of The Glass Jaw, a poetry chapbook by Marcus McCann, the recipient of the 2009 John Newlove Poetry Award. With readings by this year's honourable mentions and award recipient to be announced at the reading, and music by the Companionship Registry.

The annual John Newlove Poetry award, launched in the fall of 2004, commemorates the honest, poignant and well-written poetry of John Newlove, an Ottawa resident for almost twenty years and poet who died in 2003.

Amanda Earl
Managing Editor
www.bywords.ca