Showing posts with label Anita Dolman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anita Dolman. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 05, 2019

melting point : the chaudiere books transition,

Ottawa literary publisher Chaudiere Books announces with deeply mixed feelings that the wonderful Invisible Publishing has now taken over our backlist.

Join us on February 15th, 2019 for one last Chaudiere Books event and celebrate this transition as our books find their second home with Invisible. With readings by:

Anita Dolman
Amanda Earl
Jennifer Londry
rob mclennan
Pearl Pirie
Monty Reid
and Chris Turnbull

lovingly hosted by Chaudiere Books co-publisher rob mclennan
with appearances by co-publisher Christine McNair and Invisible Publishing’s Leigh Nash

Friday, February 15, 2019
7pm door / 7:30pm reading
Vimy Brewing Company
145 Loretta Ave N #1, Ottawa, ON

Originally co-founded in 2006 by rob mclennan and Jennifer Mulligan, the press published two dozen books over a ten year period. Christine McNair took over from Jennifer Mulligan as co-publisher in 2012.

A literary press focusing on poetry and literary fiction, Chaudiere Books produced first trade collections by Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie, Marcus McCann, Chris Turnbull, Meghan Jackson, Roland Prevost, Clare Latremouille and N.W. Lea. The press also published more established writers with trade collections by  Monty Reid, Anne Le Dressay, Michael Bryson, Joe Blades, Andy Weaver and Jennifer Londry. Chaudiere also produced important collected editions by John Newlove and William Hawkins, as well as several anthologies focusing on such varied topics as Calgary experimental writing, Ottawa poets, Ottawa fiction writers and the above/ground press twentieth anniversary. Throughout the press’ ten year history, important editorial contributions were made by other writers to our books. This includes Anita Dolman, Carmel Purkis, Robert McTavish, Cameron Anstee, derek beaulieu, and Sandra Ridley.

Several titles by Chaudiere Books were shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the City of Ottawa Book Award, and the Archibald Lampman Poetry award. Monty Reid’s Disappointment Island won the Archibald Lampman award in 2007.

We were lucky to have support from the Ottawa International Writers Festival throughout our history and the warm support of the Ottawa literary community. We are sorry to see this chapter end but are delighted that Invisible can take these these books forward.

Monday, July 06, 2015

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part four,



[Monty Reid talking to Amanda and Charles Earl at the combined AngelHousePress / Bywords.ca table] It might have taken a while (we were away for a bit), but here is some of the last of what I picked up at this past spring’s edition of the ottawa small press book fair!

See my prior reports here, here and here.

Ottawa ON: For some time now, Pearl Pirie has been producing small items through her phafours [see my Open Book: Ontario piece on such here]. New this time around are the tiny chapbooks not a woman by Kemptville poet Alicia Cumming, talking giraffes by Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, and glass studio by Ottawa poet Anita Dolman. As a publisher, Pirie has long had a good sense of the local, and previous chapbooks have featured work by an array of poets from the Ottawa area, including Phil Hall, Monty Reid, Gwendolyn Guth and Sneha Madhavan-Reese.

turning right

I was driving in rural Quebec
and looking for an old farmhouse
how many of them could there be

I had a house number
but no street or road name
I turned around a few times
and eventually
turned right into the laneway

imagine that

Given that the bulk of his three decades-plus of published writing hasn’t focused on such short pieces, one could argue that the eight short poems that make up Michael Dennis’ talking giraffes deserves attention for that fact alone. His poems have long dealt with a combination of observation and meditation, and these short pieces focus his gaze in curious ways. Composed as sketches, the lack of obvious endings in some of these poems are also quite interesting, allowing the poem to remain in the head, even after the final line. One of the most curious of the collection is the final poem, containing a wry humour (and even a slight sadness) that Dennis doesn’t often utilize. The poem reads:

beat humour

Richard Brautigan
was blowing pot smoke rings
at a bull’s eye on a poster
with a photo of Ezra Pound.
everyone thought it was funny
except Ferlenghetti, he never
laughed
at anything.

Witha couple of poetry chapbooks to her credit, Anita Dolman’s poems are often constructed as straightforward narratives, but the ones I find far more intriguing are the poems carved and boiled down into sharp objects, such as the final two of her short glass studio. Containing five poems in total, glass studio contains a mix of densely-packed short lyric and more expansive narrative, with the final two pieces examples of her short lyric. Here is the final poem in her short collection, a poem that suggests far more than it presents:

Circumstance

She breaks the glass
just like that, a new night. Oh.
Where to begin now?

Ottawa ON: New from Amanda Earl’s DevilHousePress (an extension of her AngelHousePress) is infamous Toronto writer Tom Walmsley’s chapbook of short fiction, Valentines (2015). DevilHousePress, as editor/publisher Earl has described, deliberately exists for the purpose of publishing “transgressive” literature that pushes the boundaries, and Walmsley’s stories are a perfect fit for the series. Containing the stories “Eilidh” and “Women and Children,” the first story exists as an accumulation of short scenes that shift from troubling to contradictory, deliberately kept unclear and precise at once:

            I was too old when I was sitting on his knee. I shouldn’t have done it. I don’t think I knew all this would happen but maybe. Also that two-piece I wore at the cottage. There are a lot of things I could have done instead of what I did. He was around too much in the summer. Both of us. I don’t think you can start doing something and then stop just because you feel like it. He said that once. It’s true. She said I was a flirt. Probably I was even if I didn’t know it and maybe I did. I’m sorry they broke up. Last summer I shouted and screamed on the front lawn and I know that made a lot of trouble. I didn’t hear any fighting but he didn’t visit me in the basement again. Both of them I think were mad at me but they didn’t say anything. It was the winter. I thought it happened in summer because it’s summer now. maybe because most of it always happened in the summer. I had my ski coat on so it was winter.



Monday, October 20, 2014

The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, November 7, 2014: Baker, Dolman, Boyle, Currie + Ross

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

The Factory Reading Series

pre-small press book fair reading

featuring readings by:

Jennifer Baker (Ottawa)
Anita Dolman (Ottawa)
Frances Boyle (Ottawa)
Dave Currie (Ottawa)
+ Stuart Ross (Coburg)
lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, November 7, 2014;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

Jennifer Baker
was raised in Exeter, Ontario, where she divided her time between town and her grandparents' farm. She is currently a part-time professor and PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa. Her new chapbook, her first, is Abject Lessons (above/ground press).


Anita Dolman is an Ottawa-based writer and editor. Her poetry and fiction have appeared throughout Canada and the United States, including, most recently, in On Spec: the Canadian magazine of the fantastic, Grain, Bywords.ca, The Antigonish Review, ottawater and Geist. Her short story “Happy Enough” is available as an e-novella from Morning Rain Publishing (2014). Follow Anita on Twitter @ajdolman. Her second poetry chapbook is Where No One Can See You (AngelHousePress, 2014).

Frances Boyle [photo credit: John W. MacDonald] is originally from Regina, and maintains a yearning for both the prairies and the west coast where she lived for a number of years. She is the author of Light-carved Passages (BuschekBooks, 2014) and the chapbook Portal Stones, winner of Tree Press’s chapbook contest. Among other awards, she’s received the Diana Brebner Prize, and first place in This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt for poetry (with third place for fiction in the same year). Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Canadian and American literary magazines, both print and online, and anthologies on subjects from Hitchcock to form poetry to mother/daughter relationships. She serves on Arc Poetry Magazine’s editorial board.

Dave Currie’s Birds Facts is forthcoming from Apt. 9 Press, a sentence that fill him with bashful joy and quiet disbelief. His plays have been produced at the Ottawa Fringe Festival, Carleton University, Algonquin College and at small venues across the province. His origins in theatre transitioned into opportunities in television and film, most of which he accepted, performed adequately and then squandered.

He is currently working on a new play entitled “Clone-Hitler Goes To The Beach” set to be performed in 2015 and a film script simply entitled “Women.” His fiction will be available in magazines – some day.

Dave Currie is not now nor has he ever been a dog.

Stuart Ross published his first literary pamphlet on the photocopier in his dad’s office one night in 1979. Through the 1980s, he stood on Toronto’s Yonge Street wearing signs like “Writer Going To Hell,” selling over 7,000 poetry and fiction chapbooks. He is a founding member of the Meet the Presses collective, and is editor at Mansfield Press. He is the author of two collaborative novels, two story collections, eight poetry books, and the novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. He has also published an essay collection, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer, and co-edited Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament. His most recent poetry book is Our Days in Vaudeville (Mansfield Press), collaborations with 29 other poets from across Canada. Stuart has had three chapbooks published this year: Nice Haircut, Fiddlehead (Puddles of Sky Press), A Pretty Good Year (Nose in Book Publishing) and In In My Dream (Bookthug). Stuart is a member of the improvisational noise trio Donkey Lopez, whose first CD is Juan Lonely Night. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

[And don’t forget the 20th anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair, being held the following day at the Jack Purcell Community Centre]

Saturday, September 20, 2014

OTTAWA LIT: FALL 2014 PREVIEW

My piece on fall 2014 Ottawa lit, in which I took recommendations from and for Frances Boyle, Jesslyn Delia Smith, Cameron Anstee, Deanna Young, Sandra Ridley, Phil Hall, Chris Johnson, Anita Dolman, James K. Moran, Kate Heartfield, Monty Reid, Amanda Earl, Roland Prevost and a bunch of others, is now posted over at Open Book: Ontario.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

above/ground press twenty-first anniversary reading and launch: Jason Christie, Anita Dolman + Andy Weaver,

above/ground press twenty-first anniversary reading and launch

with readings by:
Jason Christie (Ottawa)
Anita Dolman (Ottawa)
+ Andy Weaver (Toronto)  [pictured]

Thursday, August 14, 2014
7pm door / 7:30pm reading
Raw Sugar Cafe
692 Somerset St W, Ottawa
lovingly hosted by rob mclennan


$6 at the door / includes a copy of a recent above/ground press chapbook, or a copy of either the first or second issue of the new poetry journal Touch the Donkey!


for author bios and a slew of links, click here.

Thursday, May 01, 2014

National Poetry Month: Chaudiere Books,

In case you might not have noticed, April was (supposedly) Poetry Month, and to celebrate such, Chaudiere Books posted new poems by Chaudiere authors and friends of the press alike all month on the blog, with a new piece posted roughly every second day. There are now new poems on the site by Amanda Earl, Roland Prevost, Gil McElroy, Rhonda Douglas, Anita Dolman, Marcus McCann, Eleni Zisimatos, Pearl Pirie, derek beaulieu, Karen Massey, myself, Helen Hajnoczky and plenty of others.

Watch for our spring Indiegogo campaign! You can join our facebook group to keep track, or even join us on twitter @ChaudiereBooks.

Sunday, December 01, 2013

grain magazine 41.1: home-myths



My artistic practice is and always has been based on the creation of fictive characters who perform distilled psychological, social and experiential narratives in painting tableaux, drawing, and painting-based installation. Central themes that have occupied my work have included issues of desire and sexuality, gender identity, intimacy, and relationships to self and other. Over the past number of years I have worked in thematic series, beginning each with a conceptual framework and then allowing an intuitive and improvisational layered painting process to determine the eventual form and content of the work. In this way, my process has the quality and sensation of being a director, writer, casting agent, costume and set designer, for a compressed film or fiction that slips and glimpses, and that occupies a single field—yet remains unfolding. (Eliza Griffiths)

It’s great to see the work of former Ottawa visual artist Eliza Griffiths featured in the new issue of Grain magazine, subtitled “home-myths” (a detail of her "Love Story/Fear Eats the Soul (after RWF)," 2013, is reproduced on the cover). Griffiths was one of the early members of The Enriched Bread Artists collective over on Gladstone Avenue, and I featured her work in an issue of Missing Jacket magazine back around 1996. There is something about her work that has always been quite striking; able to paint variations of similar faces, and yet, each managing their own personalities. As always, the details are deepest in the eyes, becoming more ghost-like as the image ripples outward. The characters she paints exist almost entirely within the scope of the face, and she manages to create real people we haven’t yet met.

The issue themes around a fairly familiar trope – the idea of home, and the myth-making that can’t help but occur. “We mythologize our past,” editor Rilla Friesen writes in her “Editor’s Note.” It harks back to a line from John Newlove, in which he reminded us that the past is, indeed, a foreign country. As Friesen writes: “The works in ‘Home-Myths’ each have a different balance of geography/love. If there is no fixed home place, the need for love is increased.” I’m uncertain I agree with her thesis—she should read the piece Yann Martel wrote, “Philadelphia Green Blue – Musings on the Meaning of Home,” from the anthology Writing Home: A PEN Canada Anthology, ed. Constance Rooke (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1997). Home is simply an idea, and to have no specific sense of home does not necessarily make one groundless. Still, there are some impressive pieces in this issue, from the short, descriptive lyric of Anita Dolman, the myth-lyric of Jessica Bebenek, and the two historical/myth lyrics by Catherine J. Stewart. There are pieces here on Snow White, Daphne and Apollo, weddings, Lamborghinis, Mahler, Freud and Nazis, millennials, and various incarnations of what could be called home.

Galena

Claim staked in 1883—
Jubilee Mountain marked,
measured, owned.

____

Over 70 years, Galena ore—
silver, lead, zinc—clawed out
of the mountain, ballast
shipped out of the valley.

____

Barite, white dust dredged
from the tailings ponds, rose
from the ore trucks and settled
into the clothes hanging on the line. We
wore it to school, basketball games.
We danced in it.

____

The ducks we plucked
on the hillside, breasts filled
with shot made from Galena ore,
lead finding its way home (Catherine J. Stewart)


Thursday, July 25, 2013

On Writing : an occasional series

Back in April, I happened to catch (thanks to Sarah Mangold) the website for the NPM Daily, and absolutely loved the short essays presented on a variety of subjects surrounding the nebulous idea of “on writing.” I would highly recommend you wander through the site to see the pieces posted there.

Inspired by those pieces, I decided to curate an occasional series of the same over at the ottawa poetry newsletter, and have since posted five short essays by Ottawa writers on the nebulous subject of “On writing,” with a new essay scheduled to appear every week or so. Given the nature of the ottawa poetry newsletter, I’ve been focusing on poets who are either current or former residents of the City of Ottawa, but am open to considering further pieces. Over the next couple of weeks, watch for new essays in the series by Faizel Deen, Pearl Pirie and Colin Morton.


Here are links to the first five, already posted:

On Writing #5 : Who knew?
Michael Dennis

On Writing #4 : On Process
Michael Blouin

On Writing #3 : On writing (and not writing)
rob mclennan

On Writing #2 : Community
Amanda Earl

On Writing #1 : A little less inspiration, please

(Or, What ever happened to patrons, anyway?)
Anita Dolman



Sunday, March 31, 2013

new from above/ground press: new titles by mclennan, Sand, Gelèns and Lindner + O’Connor, and The Peter F Yacht Club,



Trace,
rob mclennan
$4

A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost Its Puff
Kaia Sand
$4

Two Dutch Poets: Hélène Gelèns and Erik Lindner
translation by Anita Dolman
$4

damascene road passaggio, selections
Wanda O’Connor
$4

The Peter F Yacht Club #18
VERSeFest 2013 special!
$5

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2013
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print). And don’t forget, 20th anniversary/2013 annual subscription, still available!

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.