Happy World Poetry Day! Our fourteenth annual edition of VERSeFest, Ottawa's International Poetry Festival, begins tonight, running through until Sunday. See the full schedule here. In case you hadn't caught, a variety of interviews with readers for this year's festival have been posting over the past couple of weeks over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. Conyer Clayton : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Chris Turnbull ; rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Klara du Plessis ; Manahil Bandukwala : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Laila Malik ; rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Jason Christie ; Margo LaPierre : 2024 VERSeFest interviews : Sandra Ridley ; rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi ; Amanda Earl : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: AJ Dolman ; we are hoping to see you! Of the four nights, be aware that the Saturday night show is ticketed, and bring cash for books! All books/chapbooks will be supplied by the authors. Huzzah!
Showing posts with label Anita Dolman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anita Dolman. Show all posts
Thursday, March 21, 2024
World Poetry Day : VERSeFest begins tonight! and interviews w Turnbull, du Plessis, Malik, Christie, Ridley, Mohammadi + Dolman,
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!
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:
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]
The Factory Reading Series
pre-small press book fair reading
featuring readings by:
Jennifer Baker (Ottawa)lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Anita Dolman (Ottawa)
Frances Boyle (Ottawa)
Dave Currie (Ottawa)
+ Stuart Ross (Coburg)
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.
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.
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
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.
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