Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses (part three,

[the announcement and presentation of the annual bpNichol Chapbook Award]

See parts one here and two here. Might there be more? Probably, given how much I returned home with. I’m hoping soon to start making notes, as well, on some of the items I gathered at our more-recent ottawa small press book fair…

Toronto/Ottawa ON: From editor/publisher (and poet) Maureen Scott Harris comes Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s The Original Title (A Fieldnotes Chapbook, 2016), a gracefully-produced chapbook in a run of one hundred copies comprised of a short talk originally delivered as part of the fourth annual Joanne Page Lecture Series at Queen’s University in Kingston. As Harris writes in her “12 or 20 (small press) questions” interview: “Fieldnotes operates pretty much within the gift economy—chapbook authors get 10% of the print run. I try to recoup design and printing costs. If I do better than that the money goes towards the next publication.” An utterly charming essay, Hay speaks to drafts and regrets, and the elements that fall away from a novel during the revision and editing process. This includes elements that an author might still be attached to, such as the revelation that her novel Late Nights on Air had originally been titled The End of Shyness before shifting to Dido in Yellowknife, “and then Late Nights on Air after a friend told me everyone would call the book Dildo in Yellowknife.”

After finishing Late Nights on Air, I went to England for a month and while I was there the page proofs came to me. I went over them and it seemed I had constructed the novel out of four words. Lovely. Tease. Tender. Soft. And in that order I plucked them out of the book like unwanted hairs from a chin. Searching for alternatives to “tender,” I overused “soft,” then I plucked out an infinity of “softs,” for they had multiplied when I wasn’t looking. I replaced the “softs” with feathery, lush, altered, lingering, quiet, calm, warm. I could have built a nest with all those discarded softs.

            During that month I went several times to the British Library’s Treasures Room, and using headphones I listened to James Joyce’s odd little voice, light, boyish, insubstantial, reading from Finnegan’s Wake. Then to Yeats’s rolling delivery, repetitive, easy to parody. And to Seamus Heaney, a great natural reader. And to Virginia Woolf whose voice sounded surprisingly old, librarian-like, with a bit of a singsong to it. She talked about craftsmanship, about how every word is stored with the echoes of older uses. Just as each book, I’m suggesting, is stored with the echo of earlier intentions.

Calgary AB/St Catharines ON: From Calgary’s No Press comes Andrew McEwan’s Can’t tell if this book is depressing or if I’m just sad (August 2016), a small, hand-sewn chapbook produced in an edition of forty copies. McEwan’s poem is comprised of lines collected by a twitter-bot, @UN_REVIEW, which gathered references to “book” and “depressing,” suggesting prior machine-produced works such as Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler’s apostrophe (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2006) and update (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2010), allowing a machine to collect lines that then may or may not be further selected. A machine may have constructed this poem, but it was not, precisely, machine-made, given that McEwan gave the directions; think of all the painters who did the physical labour for Andy Warhol artworks, for example. That’s the same, right?

This book is depressing, from beginning to end.

This book is so depressing why do I keep reading it

This book is damn depressing

This book is actually depressing as hell, why did I have to choose this one

The fact I can’t get interested in this book is just depressing

This book is really depressing! I need to stop but I can’t

This book is depressing me. So close to the end… just gotta finish.

Given the potential infiniteness of such a project, might there be a larger version? But oh, the grief in seeing so many lines on Twitter about how particular books are depressing certainly weighs.

Stan Dragland: The Bricoleur & His Sentences

How to read a person? “Personalities are charted by naming objects,” says Michael Ondaatje. “That is, if you speak of a couple who have a John Boyle postcard taped to their fridge you are saying more about the couple and what they probably think than what might be said in five paragraphs on their political thought.” No reflection on what that Boyle card might be saying. John Boyle, ultranationalist visual artist, Hamilton, Ontario.

            For Mary Oliver, “dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person by his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me.” Duncan Campbell Scott says of his friend Archibald Lampman, though he wrote a couple of decent dawn poems, that he “saw mighty few sunrises.” His best sunrise poem, “A Morning on the Lievre,” came out of a camping trip with Scott, who I seem to hear banging on the fry pan and hollering “wakey, wakey! Rise and shine!” to rouse the bleary-eyed poet who is sullen with resentment until, parting the canvas flap with a testy remark on the tip of his tongue, he suddenly…! Mary Oliver is not dismissing the slugabed outright. I realize that. But suppose she and Archie had known each other. He would have been up at the crack far too seldom to share the gift she values so.

            Once in my youth I sat in the Oyen, Alberta barbershop, waiting for my brush cut beside a dog whose voluble owner declared from the chair that he could tell everything he needed to know about a person by the way that person and his dog related to each other. The dog regarded me, assessing. No way was I going to reach out and attempt a pat, as I would normally have done. If that dog bit me, or even if it growled, my nogoodness would have been patent. Of course not reaching out will also have spoken. No doubt the man in the chair had my number. Two point six.

            Even casual reflection shows that the business of character, biography or autobiography, is a lot more complicated than a person might think. I got to thinking about this when Michael Ondaatje asked me to send him my bundle of sentences, because it’s personal and quirky and not meant to be shared without commentary. I began to think of it as a kind of postcard taped to the fridge. What would Michael and Mary Oliver and the barbershop dog make of it? I foresaw scratching of the dead. Then I began to think about the word “bricoleur” as regularly applied to me by Don McKay. Might it fit not only my gathering and making of odd things, but also my puddle-jumping mind? Does it describe me all too well? This is not modesty. I think better sideways or in circles than straight on, so I hand my best attempts to others then do what I can to fix the flaws they spot. Do not imagine that this comes direct from me to you.

I’ve always envied Stan Dragland’s ease with literary criticism; how he articulates the interconnectivity of reading, thinking, literature and living in the world in terms deceptively simple, deeply complex, and incredibly precise. I’ve envied his sentences, and how he connects seemingly unconnected thoughts, ideas and passages into highly complex and intelligent arguments that read with an almost folksy and deceptive ease (something his critical prose shares with the work of Dragland’s friend and colleague, the poet Phil Hall). For years, one of my favourite books has been his Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1984), a title I’ve probably read at least half a dozen times, even taking to travelling with it on extended tours. In Dragland’s new The Bricoleur & His Sentences (Pedlar Press, 2014), he provides an argument, including numerous examples, for better sentences through exploring a series of ideas and thoughts-to-conclusion, as he marks, remarks and works his way through varying degrees of Emily Dickinson, Walter Benjamin, Margaret Avison, Michael Ondaatje, Phil Hall, Northrup Frye, Elizabeth Hay, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Lisa Moore and Colleen Thibaudeau, all of which falls into his own argument of “thinking-in-progress.”

By the time she was asked to submit a collection of her writings to NeWest Press for its Writer as Critic Series, says Daphne Marlatt in her Preface, “many of the essays … had already been published and were being cited, even given back to me as dogma in interview questions. This ossifying of what had seemed very much in process was disturbing. For i thought of this writing not as a series of (position) papers in academic argument, but as essais, tries in the French sense of the word. Essaying even, to avoid the ossification of the noun.” I admire the book that became Readings from the Labyrinth for many reasons, one being that it manages to make a book enclosed within covers enact the fluidity of thinking-in-progress.

According to Wikipedia, “bricolage (French for ‘tinkering’) is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process.” I can’t imagine a better description for the literary criticism of Stan Dragland, a deeply committed reader, thinker and critic, and his opening essay, “Following the Brush” (from which the opening excerpt above is lifted), explores exactly the aspects of his criticism. As he writes further along in the same essay (providing such a self-description that might easily also be applied to Phil Hall): “Yes, I like to make things from found objects. I also like to find images and ideas. From the well of received knowledge come many such thoughts, because I’ve done some studying in my time and I’m no stranger to research, but also from happenstance. Starting out with an essay, I have no idea where it will take me, what it will gather in from which sources. Adventure!” I’ve always enjoyed how Dragland revels in the digression, and what compels about these pieces is in the meander, how Dragland manages to sway and ebb, traversing enormous distances in such short spaces, connecting everything to just about everything else, and impossibly cohering into a single argument about bricolage and sentences. The second two essays, “Anatomies” and “Rhetoric Revisited,” provide enlightening arguments on and around the work of Northrup Frye, including his influence on writing, thinking and teaching.

Northrup Frye was the eminence grise at Western when I arrived in 1970. First-year courses were all supposed to be based on Anatomy of Criticism. Stingle and Hair had been students of Frye (Dick once told me that not even Frye was spared that demoralizing undergraduate question, “will this be on the exam?”), as had James Reaney and other poets like Ronald Bates, George Johnston, Margaret Avison, Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee and Jay Macpherson. Hugh Kenner also. At Reaney’s invitation, Frye once came to address another team-taught class of which I was a member, this one called Canadian Literature and Culture. After his interesting talk, the first question from the audience was, “Where were you educated?” It was hard to see where the questioner was coming from with that one, but Frye was ready. “At the University of Toronto and Oxford University,” he said, “which means that I’m fundamentally self-educated.” Laughter.

Dragland has obviously been accumulating sentences for some time, and the first half of the collection is made up of essays (three, to be exact), before sections containing dozens of sentences on sentences, before the book ends with notes, further reading and acknowledgments. Begun as a list of quotes that slowly morph into an argument, the sentences that make up the three sections of quoted material are excised from a variety of writers’ works, including George Orwell, Daphne Marlatt, Phil Hall, William H. Gass, Virginia Woolf, Charles Bernstein, Robert Bringhurst, Herman Melville and E.B. White, among others. He gives examples of different sentences that work, and placed together in structural groups, to help illustrate his argument on the how and the why of sentences, including this short excerpt from Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s novel, Alone in the Classroom (McClelland and Stewart, 2011):

A sentence bears the weight of the world. The emotional girl set about baptizing her child. Tess took her dying baby from her bed in the middle of the night and christened him in the presence of her small and sleepy brothers and sisters. Words weigh nothing at all, yet they carry so much on their shoulders over and over and over again.

en route : Ottawa's Literary Scene Stacks Up

An article on Ottawa literary stuff by the talented and generous Noah Richler has appeared in En Route magazine, with mentions of myself, Elizabeth Hay, The Factory Reading Series, The Manx Pub, Raw Sugar Cafe and David O'Meara. Despite the suggestion that I recommended Bridgehead, I in fact recommended Second Cup, where I've sat most mornings for more than a decade. A fine article and an appreciated spotlight. Most likely on newsstands now!

Paige Ackerson-Kiely, My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer

In her second trade poetry collection, My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2012), Vermont poet Paige Ackerson-Kiely adapts the narratives of explorer Robert Peary (1856-1920) and Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s (1888-1957) memoir Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure (1938) into a striking and unbelievably powerful collection of prose-poems. Robert Peary (in Ackerson-Kiely’s own notes) “was a U.S. explorer who claimed, April 6, 1909, to have reached the Geographic North Pole, a claim oft disputed. Peary made many expeditions to the Arctic, and famously brought several Inuit to the U.S. where, lacking immunity, most died.” Arctic exploration is something that bubbles to the surface of literature every few years, including by Kingston writer Steven Heighton writing of an earlier, failed expedition in his novel Afterlands (Knopf, 2005), or Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay referencing fragments of the same in her Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (New Star Books, 1993). The mystique remains, despite post-colonial stirrings that might render such interests obsolete. The north remains, and by contemporary writers, at least, remains predominantly unexplored.

The Pittance

On my pittance of I’ll do you if you do me, I have been strict in my stillness. It is a matter of indecent accrual, stacked upon, a compost of googolplex that the world should be mine for this pale, shivery packaging. If you love me I will love you back. spoiled dogs do not strain forward out of love, but for continued spoilage: Eventually you end up at a destination derived from the cartographer’s immeasurable desire for one true proportion. His cold-cracked hands lifting a camisole of cloud, sky behind mocking the bar’s neon invitation to drink a specific drink. Though we felt the same long night thirst, while those dogs worked so hard I continued to whip them.

Less a framing than a trace, a thread or perhaps echo, My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer uses the foundation of arctic exploration as part of a larger canvas, highlighting a series of tensions held so tight they can’t help but cut directly into the skin, densely packed as so few prose poems have ever done before. Is her “love” one also nearly-lost, or frozen in a desolate, unforgiving landscape, or is her “love” changed by the experience, finally returning home from desolation to a confused familiarity? Ackerson-Kiely’s language itself is one of longing, loss and exploration, striking wild in a variety of directions, stock-still enough to articulate the previously unseen, and never-known. Ackerson-Kiely’s poems explore waitress and explorers, love’s poor judgments, heartbreak and family (the poem “Notes for a Daughter Learning to Swim” is a particular highlight, and a rare piece referencing family life) and the equal possibilities and limitations of what the language will allow.

Numbers are Many, Words

Are Limited

How many times we did it.

How many nouns we can replace with it.

You say fulcrum; I say plinth.

We better call the calling off: Off.

Your special note cards full of sums.

What real estate is worth when you rent it out.

If my embarrassment raised up as a hair

on the hackles of a jackal. No—

if each jackal, crouched under this charming sun

could describe my ear, warmed

only by your swarthy breath—

as often as I could say:

I want you. Is never

enough.

Several poems here also respond to the work of artist Adie Russell, originally collected into a small collaborative chapbook, This Landscape (Argos Books, 2010), and the poem “Book About a Candle / Burning in a Shed” appears to be a companion poem to her chapbook of the same name, a collection of prose-poems published by above/ground press in 2011.

Book About a Candle

Burning in a Shed

One time in a shed a candle burned.

My thoughts were with the window

looking out over the dark yard.

I know it isn’t much—

the light inside just strong enough

to illuminate nothing really out there.

I snuffed it. The shed continued to contain me.

If you toss a penny on the ground eventually

the ground will gather the penny into itself:

No imagined bank for saving poor white girls

on the sawdust-covered floor where he

traced his finger under the waistband so lovely

I paid him back by keeping still.

Ottawa International Writers Festival spring festival line-up now online;

including pre-festival events with Etgar Keret + Andy Lamey, and festival events with Elizabeth Hay, Clark Blaise, Alissa York, Joel Yanofsky, Michael Winter, Pearl Pirie, Michael Blouin, Gillian Sze, Robert Pinsky, Steven Hayward, Sharon Thesen, Ken Babstock, Matt Rader, jwcurry's Messagio Galore, Mike Carey, Andrew Pyper, Rob Winger, Sandra Ridley, J.M. DeMatteis, Madeleine Thein, Hisham Matar, Michael V. Smith, Sylvia Tyson, David Adams Richards, Timothy Taylor + Johanna Skibsrud (among others), here.

the ottawa international writers festival 2010 fall edition, october 20-26

The fall edition of our own little writers festival starts Wednesday night, with venues in and around Ottawa South, and authors including Kenneth J. Harvey, Michael Cunningham, A.J. Somerset, Joshua Ferris, Sheila Heti, Ken Sparling, Tariq Ramadan, Lisa Foad, Amber Dawn, Peter Robinson, Charlotte Gray, Roy MacSkimming, Alison Pick, Kate Pullinger, Marcus McCann, Merilyn Simonds, Wayne Grady, John Lavery, Sandra Ridley, George Murray, Peter Norman, Alexander MacLeod, Elizabeth Hay and plenty of others. Check out their website for event and ticket information www.writersfestival.org; see you there!

the new quarterly #110

I’ve been reading through the most recent issue of The New Quarterly lately, another in the shortlist of Canadian literary journals I’ve become rather fond of, with the benefit of the fact that my girlfriend is a subscriber, featuring impressive new works by Elizabeth Hay, Soraya Peerbaye and Asher Ghaffar. I’m always amazed at just how much I like in each issue, reminded of just how much many literary journals don’t really appeal to me these days. There was even this poem by Patricia Young, in the midst of six others of her works.







Over Lunch I Ask Three Friends What Their
Mothers Said To them About Sex

It was a funny way for God to arrange things.

Would you like to see my diaphragm?

Here’s the book on chickens. (Patricia Young)

Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay has an interview in this issue, conducted by Hannah Albert, alongside two creative non-fiction pieces, a form I’ve longed for her to return to. Her “city as redhead” essay on Ottawa is one I’ve been fortunate enough to already read, submitted to Chaudiere Books some time ago for an anthology of Ottawa writers writing on parts of their city (the book is still building, currently). In the interview, she talks further on her part of our shared city:

My children hate Ottawa. I defend it, sometimes tepidly. I’ve never fallen in love with Ottawa. I am fond of it. One longs to fall in love with a place. My children would say I’m settling for too little and they may be right. I am comfortable here and there are views that soothe and delight me. If you stand on Pretoria Bridge and look down the canal in the winter, you could be in a painting by Breughel. Close to Ottawa, very accessible, are lovely woods and fabulous swimming lakes. And the city itself is fairly slow-paced and relatively quiet, which suits me. Also, history-filled.

A few years ago, before she relocated to Toronto, poet Soraya Peerbaye took a poetry workshop I was running at Collected Works. She was already well-developed in her craft, and needed (I thought) someone outside of her immediate circle to tell her how good she already was.

You are sure of nothing except lunar phases, and rainfall.

The transcript ends at the edge of the eelgrass meadow:
you measure the exact salinity; the mineral composition,
from the water you take from her, against

a thin white line hemming a girl’s jacket.

Everything resists interpretation.

You read silt, how it accumulates on the green blade,
the side sheltered from the current. (Soraya Peerbaye)

It’s very good to see her moving out into further publishing, with already a few significant publications, from TNQ to Red Silk, as well as a first poetry collection forthcoming from Goose Lane Editions. When might this book finally appear? She is included in the current issue alongside Joan MacLeod and Heather Spears, each writing about the murder of BC teen Reena Virk, from Heather Spears’ poems, a section of the play The Shape of a Girl by MacLeod, and excerpts from Peerbaye’s “Tell.” As she writes in her part of Grace Johnstone’s interview/article “Writing Against Absence”:

Soraya: I am reading other writers who have responded to that question [of witnessing and the artist’s responsibility to the historical record] through their life’s work, and I don’t feel I can add to their profound insight. The only thing I can say is that the “historical record” is a tricky concept. It is not neutral; it comes from a particular morality. In [relation to the story of Reena Virk’s death], I feel a responsibility to the transcript—to the record of the witnesses’ words—whether they lied or told the truth, whether they remained silent.

I won’t write out the whole piece, but Asher Ghaffar’s poem “The Master Bedroom” is magnificent, and worth the price of the issue alone. Listen to this, stanza four of five:

He is getting married, so the painters
arrived, or his mother is getting married
because she is arranging his marriage.
He is already married to the walls
they’re scraping. His mother is getting
married without his consent and he is being
scraped without the wall’s consent.

The issue also begins with an appeal to write to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Hon. James Moore, to keep literary journal funding going, and journals themselves alive. Even if you don’t care for some of these magazines specifically, you should do this.

Further reading: Friday the thirteenth

1982 was the year when snow barely fell in Toronto. We were entranced by the lack of it.

On the night of December 3rd I was in my office on Markham Street tossing black olive pits out the wide open window into the matching black warmth. It was +20 Celsius. After the olives I ate sunripened dates. Then figs. Anything dark and warm against the thought of snow.

Snow fell on December 20th and melted by Christmas. Christmas eve was the warmest on record, and so was Christmas day. A six year old girl walked around in bare feet looking at Christmas lights.

That year I lived near Marshall McLuhan’s house, a big gray mansion next to a pond, where he dreamed up his ideas about hot and cool, or so I like to think. the house was in Wychwood Park, a hillside retreat founded in 1888 by a spice merchant who came home every night from his Pure Gold Manufacturing Company smelling of cinnamon and thinking of Cathay.

In Toronto we know about cold and long to be warm. McLuhan, for instance, fell in love with a southern accent.

‘Mississippi,’ the neighbour said. ‘I think she’s from Mississippi.’

Listening to his wife did McLuhan think about heat?

The hottest thought I had was New Orleans.

Porous is a word that keeps repeating through Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s first book, Crossing the Snow Line (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1989), a book I recently borrowed from the Ottawa Public Library, and I would similarly describe the book as a whole as the same, unable to specifically clarify it between stories (as the cover would tell us), novel or memoir, working through a lush and direct kind of liquid prose. Where are the divides we would usually expect? It’s part of what attracts me to Hay’s earlier writing, and I admire (and am envious of) the porous nature of this small collection, and the books that followed, from The Only Snow in Havana (1992; Toronto ON: Cormorant Books, 2008) and Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1993).

Art should never shift for the sake of public taste, but I’ve always felt a deeper kinship with her earlier works where this porousness exists, before shifting her prose into more traditional fiction, following her first three books with her Governor General’s Award shortlisted collection of stories, Small Change (Erin ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 1997), and the three novels that came after that. I even published one of those stories, originally, in Missing Jacket, a writing and visual art magazine I once produced, back in the mid-1990s. What is it about early Elizabeth Hay and the porousness of writing love, geography, Canadianness and snow?

Some people are porous, snow without a crust: everything sinks in, all the visitors, all the noise.

Porous, yet I absorb so little.

Last night I dreamt I was standing in a woods and a caribou with magnificent antlers stepped through the trees. A hunter followed the caribou. When I caught up with them the hunter had wound heavy wire around the caribou’s neck and pushed silver studs into its flesh.

This limbo of not belonging. Worse than not belonging – resistance to belonging. I buy a Spanish newspaper and don’t read it. I just don’t want to.

I told the Bolivians who came to visit about winter in Yellowknife – four hours of
daylight, frostbitten skin, white and hard. The way they listened! ‘Does anything grow?’ they wanted to know.

‘What do you miss?’ I asked them.

‘Intimacies,’ they answered. ‘Mexico City is a place that encourages many friendships, few intimacies. It’s so hard to get across the city to visit people.’

I’ve never seen them again.

Another Friday the thirteenth in the space of a month, and I spend most of the day reading, moving through Elizabeth Hay, moving through Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited (New York NY: New Directions, 1986), The Art of Desire: The Fiction of Douglas Glover, ed. Bruce Stone (Ottawa ON: Oberon Press, 2004) and Travels with Virginia Woolf, ed. Jan Morris (London: Pimlico, 1997). Just what is it I’m looking for? Years ago, this was the day that my ex-wife and I had decided our anniversary, another Friday the thirteenth, and coming up faster than I can keep track.

The Woolf book, found second-hand a few days earlier, compiles essays, letters and journal entries into a book of what could otherwise be “travel writing,” thinking about my own journeys forth into further creative non-fiction (McLennan, Alberta), whether back to Edmonton in the bare space of weeks, or an extended upcoming Toronto stay. In a letter to Ethel Smyth from June 26, 1938 (three years to the day before my father was born), for example, Woolf wrote of visiting Hadrian’s Wall:

We were 2 days on the wall: lay on top of it the one hot day; and saw the landscape that to me is the loveliest in the world; miles and miles of lavender coloured loneliness, with one thread white path; dear me, were I a writer, how I could describe that: the immensity and tragedy and the sense of the Romans, and time, and eternity; and then the wild white hawthorn, and the sheep cropping, and 3 little white headed boys playing in a Roman camp.

How she says, were she a writer? As a bookmark, using a postcard the poet Phil Hall sent but a month ago from Bali, on a side-trip from Australia.

Now that I’ve got my second novel off to the publisher (waiting just on her edits), the past few days thinking more about Don Quixote, how my version might work how many other threads of the entire world; working in my own commentary on how cities are made, cities are built, and the city of Ottawa itself, writing:

Every city constructed out of a series of markers, of landmarks, but what happens to a city when it is constantly in danger of losing? What happens to memory when a city is constantly new? There is nothing to hold on to, there are no regulars to keep the rent in your restaurant. There is no heart, no soul, no loyalty. When a city is constantly new, it runs the risk of losing all meaning.

Why is it, no matter where I look, I can’t find a single copy of the original? I picked up the Rexroth because of what he wrote about Don Quixote, including this lovely ending to his little essay:

There are any number of editions of Don Quixote in paperback and hardcover. If the newcomer to the novel only had time and patience enough, he would be well advised to read and compare more than one translation, classic and modern.

There are, indicentally, a number of anthologies of the critical literature on Don Quixote that make fascinating reading, not least for their amazing disparity of interpretation. Were it not that my interpretation would then seem unduly flattering to myself, I would say that every man finds himself in Don Quixote, as Don Quixote finds himself in his adventures and as Sancho Panza is never lost.

I pick up the Rexroth for the same reason as I pick up Glover, working through further what he wrote about the novel himself, and the book-length essay on same I can’t find in my little apartment. Is this all about working to find one’s self, working back from the point of being lost? I am thinking about Toronto, I am thinking about travel. I am thinking about Edmonton. I am thinking about Don Quixote. Or, as Toronto writer Ken Sparling wrote in his For Those Whom God Has Blessed with Fingers:

You can’t go home. I am home. You can’t go home even when you are home. You’re never home. When were you ever home? Home captured you one moment. Maybe when you were little. It got you. This idea of home. And now you know about it because you can’t go there. It’s that place you can’t go to. You can almost go there. You get closest when you’re furthest away. Like calculus. You get further and further close. The other side of the planet. The moon. Finally, the true reason for travelling to the moon. To go back home. To go back. Whatever is back. Maybe abuse is back. Maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s so much love it becomes abuse. You go back. Breaking free is considered something of an accomplishment. But then, accomplishment. Trap. You get the picture.

The first days of festival, Ottawa;

[two festival staff working the bar, including Kathryn Hunt, on the right] So here we go again, the Ottawa International Writers Festival, which started on Saturday morning with a small press book fair (specific to Ottawa publishers), co-hosted by the Ottawa Independent Writers and myself, the small press action network – ottawa (SPAN-O, cleaning out yr literary clogs since 1996; host of the ottawa small press book fair, invented way back in 1994). Book fairs are always fun, and many of the usual suspects showed up, including jwcurry, Buschek Books, Griddle Grin Productions, In/Words, The Ottawa Arts Review, Bywords, Dusty Owl Press, Penumbra Press, The Puritan (even though they now live in Toronto), and the University of Ottawa Press, as well as numerous tables by members of the OIW. We did well enough, I think, and I used it, in part, to promote the proper larger fair happening in less than a month, which none of the OIW seemed to have even heard about (they have their own fair happening in early November at Billings Bridge).

[John Flood, Penumbra Press] After the fair itself, there was a meet and greet of some sort, where various “movers & shakers” of the community got up to talk about what it is we do, are doing, etcetera. I think we all completely disagreed with what the fellow running OIW said, including suggesting that publishers weren’t respectful enough of the materials coming in, etcetera; why turn an author against publishers? According to him, a publisher wasn’t respectful of a manuscript unless they actually read the complete manuscript, and should offer suggestions instead of simply arbitrarily turning the thing down. Geez, who has the staff or the time for that? And if you can’t tell a manuscript doesn’t appeal in the first twenty pages or even forty, then the last page isn’t really going to change your mind, I’d think. There was also the conflict of his suggesting he was a promoter of general Ottawa writing and Ottawa writers, when this is the first time we've seen him at an event, in the twelve years of festival (he doesn't come out to anything of ours, either); why not just admit that he's only interested in what members of OIW do?

[Sean Wilson, Festival Director, enjoying a Beau's] John Flood and John Buschek addressed such pretty well, about the possibilities of time, and just how many manuscripts they receive in a year, and other things like that (Jennifer and I even spoke on Chaudiere, and myself, later on, on above/ground press, The Factory Reading Series, the small press book fair, ottawater, etcetera; I ran out of time well before I ran out of subjects, so left a whole bunch of stuff out). Still, Flood, and later, Steve Artelle, both sounded like they were running for office. When Steve Zytveld was talking, I think I yelled “four more years!” or somesuch from the back of the room. Ah, festival. It was still an interesting idea, various of us talking about what and why that we do, for the sake of those in the audience who wouldn’t have known; Sean Wilson said it was a response to various phone calls he’s received over the years from writers who want to get published, know how to get published, so I think the evening accomplished everything it set out to do, whether or not any of us thought the whole thing dopey completely irrelevant.

[poet and Arc magazine editor Peter Richardson, preparing their table] I’m glad that the Ottawa Book Awards is now part of the writers festival, making it feel like a real event, and not what it used to be, back in the mid-1990s, as part of the Ottawa Valley Book Festival, or whatever it was called. A horse with three broken legs, while the sign at the front offered free pony rides. Elizabeth Hay, of course, won the Ottawa Book Award for her Late Nights on Air (2007), and Shane Rhodes won the Lampman-Scott award for The Bindery (2007). I admired greatly that Shane Rhodes said he would donate half of his prize money for aboriginal causes, for the sake of what damage poet Duncan Campbell Scott did as Minister of Indian Affairs (residential schools started under his watch, for example). A good idea and a great gesture. Still, apparently with the conflict of Arc Poetry Magazine running the award, editorial board member Rob Winger didn’t feel it appropriate to let his book even be part of such, and editor Anita Lahey did the same last year; what happens when a good percentage of poetry books by Ottawa-based authors aren’t put forth for the sake of conflict? It no longer becomes an award of whatever one thinks of as being “best” (an arbitrary term at best, I admit); is there someone else around that could take this award on? Should the festival itself take it?

related links on the festival (so far): Amanda Earl, Charles Earl, etc;

Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay wins the Giller Prize

Easily one of the nicest writers around (even nicer than Andrew Pyper, if you can imagine), Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay won the Scotiabank Giller Prize last night in Toronto, for her third novel, Late Nights on Air (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2007). Wonderful, and so well deserved! But does this mean, with two GG nominations sans win (so far), and now a Giller under her belt, I can't call her "GiGi" anymore?




See my "12 or 20" interview with Elizabeth Hay here.