Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part four, : Charlotte Nip, Jesse Eckerlin + Ayaz Pirani,

[left: Ken Norris + Jay MillAr in conversation ; see part one of my notes here; see part two of my notes here; see part three of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. I am frustrated I missed last weekend’s fair through The Ampersand Festival! But there will certainly be other fairs, I’m sure (and Christine did a fine job running proxy at the above/ground press table). And don’t forget the thirtieth anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair is November 16, yes?

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: The chapbook debut by Vancouver poet Charlotte Nip is Acne Scars (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), an assemblage, the author notes at the end of the collection, was a “decade in the making [.]” Nip’s poems offer themselves as a sequence of collage-sketches, observations, first-person commentaries and scattered lines, held together as a kind of scrap-book lyric accumulation. “Eliot said it was the cruelest month,” she writes, to open the poem “April,” “but he lied. It’s where I find / myself again, and again, and again. I never get lost because April / births like a malignant tumour. I turn 24.” There’s something intriguing about watching this particular emerging writer feel her way through lyric form, from first-person descriptive commentary and observation and staccato phrases, composing pieces leaning closer into prose poems, more traditional open lyric and even hand-drawn lines connecting thought to thought. Or, as the poem “Persimmons” begins:

we are
a soft bird
a man
with no taste

Montreal QC/Toronto ON: From Montreal poet Jesse Eckerlin, following We Are Not the Bereaved (2012) and Thrush (2016), comes ALMOST NOTHING (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024), a sequence of a dozen short, dense lyric bursts. The chapbook-length sequence opens with a couplet on the first page—“Fire in the province— // A car without brakes”—and continues along that same slow unfolding, offering precise and specific language. Each self-contained koan offers a sheen of haiku, composed of lines that might connect but on the surface seem, potentially, disconnected, allowing the reader to fill in certain spaces. “Chisels in my mouth,” the third page/section reads, “Extracting the wisdom teeth // Your lost disciple [.]” There is a certain clarity provided by these poems that is quite intriguing, offering small twists and turns, some more effective than others, but enough that I am intrigued to see what and where Eckerlin lands next.

Conversations like rooms

filled with empty music stands

Toronto ON: The latest from Tanzania-born and California-based Canadian poet Ayaz Pirani (an expat poet comparable to Ken Norris, who also spent years publishing predominantly or even exclusively in Canada while living and working in the United States), following the full-length poetry collections Happy You Are Here (Washington DC: The Word Works, 2016), Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets (Toronto ON: Mawenzi House, 2019) and How Beautiful People Are: a pothi (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as at least one chapbook, Bachelor of Art (Anstruther Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], is the chapbook NECROPOLISBOROUGH (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024). NECROPOLISBOROUGH is made up of eight short first-person lyric narratives, offering a plain speech of uncomplicated language woven through narrative wisdoms. “Even the ones I didn’t reach.” he writes, speaking of teaching and being taught, attempting to mentor and being mentored, across the poem “Beloved Infidel,” “Perhaps not reaching them / reached them and / was what they needed.” There’s a quiet power to and through Pirani’s lines, and one can’t help but be charmed by the opening line of “Smart Car,” that reads: “My car drove away honklessly / to live with another family.”

Camus’ Door

My door is plainspoken
without if or but
or doubt. No squeak or yawn.
Puritan by nature
my door is best wide open
or fast shut.
Ajar is too fanciful
for my door.
Door-pain is real
and there’s loneliness
finding yourself
two-sided. Grief too
in the phallic bolt.
My door hangs on
ancient purpose.
A look then a lock
between yes and no.
Swing then swing
between right and wrong
is my door’s fate.

And, according to the author biography at the back of this small collection, Pirani has a collection of short stories forthcoming with Gordon Hill Press, which is pretty exciting.

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part three, : Annick MacAskill + Jay MillAr,

[see part one of my notes here; see part two of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Hooray small press! And I’m hoping you caught that above/ground press was being represented yesterday in Mississauga, with Christine as table-proxy at the Ampersand Festival? She was also on a panel, discussing her brand-new book! Dang, I wish I could have been there.

Halifax NS/Toronto ON: I was curious to engage with the carved lyrics of Halifax poet Annick MacAskill, her small chapbook five from hem (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), set as five short, sharp lyrics that each take as their jumping-off points opening quotes from Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 AD), as translated into English by MacAskill herself. “blazing in my marrow / laid down the quiver to / greed the god in long fa- / miliar grasses wet / before his carbon-grey,” she writes, to open the poem “Upon losing my gold star & being confronted / by Diana, I, Callisto, tell my story.” This isn’t the first time MacAskill has slipped into Metamorphosis, having done same through her Governor General’s Award-winning third collection, Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. The poems here are extended, nearly breathless, composed as short-lined single stretches of thought and utterance running down the length of a page. As the poem “Together together together together together / together” begins: “once just another girl / -friend the goddess cursed me / worse than mute stripped me of / my girl power gossip / my place in the gaggle / resented my prattle / garrulous once but trick / her so now only soak / up the words of others [.]” Whereas that collection moved through Metamorphosis as a way to articulate a particular loss, these poems are no less intimate through their own explorations, an unfolding of fathers, female relationships and love that teases at something far larger I look forward to seeing, once the larger shape of the narrative is published as a full-length collection. As the first third or so of the poem “The snake bites they sting, yes, but are not, / strictly speaking, the worst part of this” reads:

not my silken farewell
or the blush pinpricks so
faint the world could hear or
see through shade & fog me
like a token blotted
the end of it & I
slipping asked so faint too
his frame now & that lyre
almost but don’t fade those
songs mere aftershocks tin

Toronto ON: Given how many years I’ve composed birthday poems (including my own recent Gap Riot and № Press titles), I’m intrigued by Toronto poet Jay MillAr composing his own meditations on making the half-century mark through Offline: Fifty Thoughts for Fifty Years (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024), produced as #11 of Anstruther’s Manifesto Series. Composed with introductory paragraph and post-script, MillAr offers his thoughts on fifty numbered single-paragraph prose-commentaries, set as one thought immediately following another. There is a curious way that MillAr attempts to find ground through a suggestion of disconnect, even flailing, putting one foot down and seeing where the next might lead. Part five, for example, reads: “When I read older novels, the past has been filed into touchstones that are recognizable, almost orderly. Unlike the present, which is multifarious and unwieldy, overflowing. How will this mess be distilled and commodified by our collective memory fifty or a hundred years from now?” His is a pause, a checking-in, to see where he is at and how one might interact with cultural and temporal shifts, an introspection of and through time and space. “Can one live autonomously and independently off-grif in a major urban centre?” he asks, as part of the tenth section. MillAr muses on moments and movements, writing on agency, the long shadow of American culture and politics, community, seasons, literature, disposability, institutions, etcetera. There’s an anxiety here as MillAr works through where we’re at, and where we might be headed, slowly boiling to death (as a frog in a pot on the stove) in and through a sequence of situations that might not be okay. He offers no answers, but pushes the very question, and questions. As the essay, the prose-manifesto, opens:

A sensation brought on by the anxiety of our age rubbing up against the inescapable reality that I am quickly approaching my fiftieth birthday: I have lost the plot. The world, or at least the human world, since this has only ever been a human world to the extent that even the non-human things around us are still human, feels out of control. And so I find myself undertaking a retreat: I will turn away from the world into a series of texts meant to represent my thoughts summed up as a series of moments. Every time I have the urge to share something on social media, I will add it to this list instead. My hope is that these texts will become a pathway, pebbles, or crumbs by which I can engage with, and perhaps even to return to, the world. Thinking is a practice that requires patience while mastering fear.

 

ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one : Cameron Anstee + John Levy,

[see last fall’s similar notes here]

Ottawa ON/Kentville NS: It is good to see a new publication by Ottawa poet Cameron Anstee, who is famously working at his own pace, in his own time [see my review of his second collection here], and good to see a chapbook of his produced through Gaspereau Press: Sky Every Day (2024), produced as Devil’s Whim Chapbook No. 53. It is almost a surprise to think that Anstee hadn’t published with Gaspereau prior to this, as there does seem a similar aesthetic of tone, of production, between the two (remember Anstee’s work through his own Apt. 9 Press, for example). Across seventeen poems in this very lovely chapbook, Anstee extends his exploration of poems that take up the smallest space possible, yet each one packed with enormous resonance and scale. One can point to the work of the late Nelson Ball, titles by Mark Truscott or certain works by the late Toronto poet bpNichol, but Anstee is working something entirely evolving into his own direction with these pieces. There are echoes of Ball’s attentions to nature, but one that blends Nichol’s own attentions to pure language, somehow meeting in the middle, establishing the stretch of his own, ongoing space. Anstee’s poems are aware of physical space, of physical place and of a space of attention that wraps itself around all the above. There are enormous amounts that go into these poems, and one could spent hours, not lost, but comfortably settled into a suite of curiosities, within them.

AUBADE

sun
spilt

 

Jay MillAr of Bookhug Press, hiding underneath his table,

Cobourg ON/Tucson AZ: It is very nice to see a new chapbook by Arizona poet John Levy [see my review of his recent selected here] through Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press, Guest Book for People in my Dreams (2024). It is interesting in how Levy returns to composition-as-response, directly riffing off or responding to particular poets or particular lines, sentences or phrases, allowing for a wider opening of where it is his own lines might extend. “That’s something to look forward to,” the sprawling opening sentence of the prose poem “Sisyphus at Noon” begins, “no shadows, though it was marvellous before noon and afterwards, finding all sorts of colours in even the smallest shadows he rolled the boulder past—a pebble’s oblong shadow with blues and greys (a little yellow at one edge), or a dead bird’s longer wider shadow with a greenish-grey stroke close to the feathered rise of folded wings.” Each meditative poem begins with a line or a thought or a moment and then furthers, the poet working one step and then a further step, curious to see, it seems, where it all might end up, as eager to discover as the reader. Produced in an edition of 150 copies, you should certainly try to pick one up from Stuart Ross when next you see him.

Poem Beginning with a Sentence
by Elizabeth Robinson

The essence of nature is to be always borrowing.

I borrow my thoughts and rarely repay anyone or
anything, it’s part of my nature, is second nature

and third, and so on. Always, so on. There’s no Polonius

telling me what to do—or instructing nature
to stop lending nature more nature. Dust

lends dust to the dust

that is always borrowing and returning the dust.
Bats chase bugs at dusk, what isn’t

dust at the moment

is taking its time.

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Feld, Campos, MillAr, Samuels, Lor, Bowering + hanna,

Anticipating the release next week of the twenty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the twenty-sixth issue: Kate Feld, Isabel Sobral Campos, Jay MillAr, Lisa Samuels, Prathna Lor, George Bowering and natalie hanna.

Interviews with contributors to the first twenty-six issues (over one hundred and seventy interviews to date) remain online, including: Jill Magi, Amelia Does, Orchid Tierney, katie o’brien, Lily Brown, Tessa Bolsover, émilie kneifel, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Guy Birchard, Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri, Ava Hofmann, Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese, Dale Tracy, Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett, Julia Drescher, Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey ,Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming twenty-eighth issue features new writing by: MLA Chernoff, Geoffrey Olsen, Douglas Barbour, Hamish Ballantyne, JoAnna Novak, Allyson Paty and Lisa Fishman.

And of course, copies of the first twenty-six issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press 2021 subscriptions! We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

I Could Have Pretended To Be Better Than You: New & Selected Poems by Jay MillAr

            Lyn Hejinian says writing is an aid to memory, and I can’t help but see a world around each poem that no one reader could possibly know. For instance, the basement apartment Hazel and I rented on Northumberland Street, or thoughts that bubbled up while I was hiding out in the stacks of the Scott Library at York University, or poems I continue to associate with the blue Norco bicycle I rode everywhere in the 1990s. Even a poem written while sitting in the back seat of a car as we drove north with friends to go camping at Arrowhead Provincial Park has shadows that are important, but more to me than anyone else. I mean, there is the poem for all to see in their own way, but to have an opportunity to revisit moments from my past that would have been completely forgotten without the poem is truly a gift. Hence the cliché of surprise. Surprise! Tim has done his homework – some of the poems in this volume were published in editions of as few as ten copies. even I – the author of these poems – had forgotten about some of them until now, and until working on this volume with Tim I had a habit of imagining my oeuvre as only a handful of poems, self-categorized greatest hits. Very few of those poems are actually in this collection. (Jay MillAr, “Author’s Preface”)

It is a strange thing to see poets of my generation (especially those slightly younger than I) begin to release volumes of selected poems (Derek Beaulieu had one a while back, for example, as has Rachel Zolf), and the latest I’ve seen is I Could Have Pretended To Be Better Than You: New & Selected Poems by Jay MillAr, edited and with an afterword by Tim Conley (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2019). Given I had attempted an essay on MillAr’s work some time ago [see it here at seventeens seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics], I was curious to see editor Tim Conley’s selections, as well as his framing for Jay’s work as a whole. Given the extensive publishing and self-publishing MillAr was involved with throughout his twenties (his Boondoggle Books, which morphed into BookThug and eventually Book*hug, is roughly the same age as my above/ground press), it is fascinating to see the wealth of early material collected here, as Conley himself suggests that the book isn’t meant to be built as a “greatest hits,” but “as a cross-section of an oeuvre still growing.” The nearly two hundred pages of I Could Have Pretended To Be Better Than You is broken up into three distinct sections—“Part One: The Years of Stitches and Staples (1992-1999),” “Part Two: Seriously Taken (2000-2014)” and “Part Three: New Poems (2014-18).” Editor Conley offers that:

[…] MillAr’s poetry is a kind of sustained consciousness of how movement an inertia are simultaneously experienced, the one an illusion of the other.

Time, one of his most habitual themes, is what underwrites this consciousness. When his poems give dates, they are often jokes, and even when not they are receding, not specifically coming into view. In all of his poems the forward momentum neither abates nor pretends that it could.

Given Conley’s argument that MillAr’s work is engaged with time, the structure of the book—through different time periods of his work—is a curiosity. As Conley writes, further in his “Afterword”:

            While his poems are everywhere explorations of demotic language, MillAr is less interested in representing speech than in representing thought processes, how our minds shuffle, leap, or tumble through the passing of time. This is not to say that the poems aren’t ready to be read aloud: that’s part of the play, a sense of play that invites the reader to play, too. MillAr is suspicious, to say the least, of wit that is not part of a shared conversation, and any persona he adopts comes with its own self-deflation mechanism.

This volume does provide a fascinating overview of MillAr’s work, one that has long worked diligently to explore form and structure, willing to move out entirely across his reading interest, through whatever might have moved across his attention at any particular moment. While Conley might suggest that all of MillAr’s work is engaged with time, the immediacy of his explorations in form suggest he is also, concurrently, a writer very much engaged in the moment he is currently in, over, say, a writer of books, seeking to look too far ahead; MillAr, through this selection, is shown as a composer of individual poems and sequences over that of a poet such as Stephen Cain or George Bowering, for example, utilizing the poem as a means in which to compose book-length projects.

Morning Sky

Strange unpronounceable red outside

of the birds (Erik Satie was of

the birds, knew the plenitude of

clouds) wakes with a mysterious roar

the sun shoots out rays of red, orange,

blue &gold, & we are told our size,

somewhat larger than a squirrel

far less interesting than our own train

of thought speaks directly out of (time)

gathering a language no one tried to

learn (Erik Satie knew the lurch and

stretch of time) makes us so very small

just to wake us, just to make us small, “we

lay at the bottom of a strange ocean, in bed

where the trees were pure sexual beings, swaying

in our heads & your breath was the smell

and Satie was the sound of the sky, slow

moving, promising whatever came to mind”

What becomes interesting through the process of this collection is in seeing a poet who not only refuses to be a fixed point—as soon as an image of what kind of poet Jay MillAr is begins to take shape, it immediately shifts—but his seeming complete lack of interest in such an approach. His is a poetics that is constantly moving, shifting and taking in new information, influences and approaches. One could even say this approach is also what fuels his publishing, refusing the fixed, unchanging point, one that aims for exploration as well as excellence, and one that is constantly reaching towards the immediate moment, before turning towards whatever comes next.

the week we went all over Toronto;

For the sake of Christine's work, we were the entire last week in Toronto, which meant Rose and I wandering for the sake of wandering, and visiting as many people as possible, from our hotel on Jarvis, right across from Allen Gardens. We drove in on Sunday, and starting Monday, Christine would disappear every morning just before 9am. Our days usually involved leaving the hotel first thing, ending up back around noon for lunch and nap, and out again by 2pm for another few hours (which meant we were most often crashed by 5pm). We were in visiting mode: a variety of folk I had been wanting to see for some time, all of whom I would have pre-baby not gone to see for the sake of work. Work! Work! Work! It gets in the way, sometimes.

Before this trip, all I'd known of Allen Gardens before this was from Lynn Crosbie, the poem "Alphabet City" from her selected poems, Queen Rat (Anansi, 1998), that includes:

We walked to Allan Gardens, and disagreed some more. Daniel's writing

is economical and pure, I said. I thought he gave up after writing poetry,

he said. He said some other things, and I didn’t see him again. I did not tell

him that the last time I saw Daniel he told me he had spoken in his sleep.

He said: I hate lyrical poetry:

Monday, June 22, 2015: We began our day heading east on the Dundas Streetcar towards the Danforth area, visiting poet Hoa Nguyen over at the house she shares with Dale Smith and their two sons. She made us smoothies (which Rose refused to touch), and I envied their garden. Apparently they were hosting a reading on Friday night in their living room, but there was no way we could make it (Christine and I read there moons back, when we were just pregnant enough to know, but not enough to start admitting). We gossiped about more than a couple of folk (including a particularly cranky American poet we both know), and Rose tore her way through much of the house (discovering some toys in one of the upstairs bedrooms). We talked about poems, and the speed one begins to write once the distraction of children appear. Everything takes so much longer to attempt, if at all. We spoke of the workshops she's been doing lately, both in person and online (check her website for information; they are pretty cool).

In both directions, the streetcar showed us a part of the city I hadn't really known about (including a very cool train station on Dundas East converted into bicycle rental), and Rose fell asleep on the ride home (see photo of such, above).

The afternoon included some time across the street from our hotel (where I discovered both playground, and the fact that we were at Allen Gardens). Rose took some time to chase some of the pigeons before allowing herself to enjoy the small playground. Brand new, it would seem, the playground, and even labelled for children from 2 to 6; impressive! The sky was clear marble blue. From Gardens, we made our way north to visit father-in-law, way up at Yonge and Shepard, where Christine met us for dinner.

And what was that industrial building behind the swings? Intrigued; wish I'd time to better explore.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015: We spent our morning at the offices of the Literary Press Group and LitDistCo (who distribute our Chaudiere titles) visiting everyone there, who were kind enough to gift the wee lass a colouring book, a storybook and various other items. We were even able to see poet Chris Chambers in his offices right next door, as part of Magazines Canada. Did you know he finally has a new book of poetry?

Post-nap, our afternoon took us west to the home of Sharon Harris and Stephen Cain. I can't believe it has actually been five years since I helped move them into that house. Rose laughed and laughed, and Sharon presented her with a full plate of blueberries (I'm surprised Rose left any for them).

I asked Sharon about the two manuscripts she's been working on, and found out that Cain has a new book forthcoming with BookThug. Cain also mentioned that Allen Gardens houses (somewhere) a plaque for Milton Acorn, which we couldn't quite find (I should have attempted to look it up, but never managed to remember). After her first few minutes of hesitation, Rose began pulling on Cain to walk through the house, the back yard and a variety of other places, over and over and over. Hand, she says, reaching up.

On the way back, Rose and I caught some buskers in the Yonge/Bloor subway playing a variety of music (she responds very much to music), including an accordian player who noticed her watching, and switched to performing some kids songs. Lovely!

In the hotel, Rose doing laps around the room even as late as 10pm. Our lack of usual routine on this trip has certainly worked to her advantage (if not ours). But oh, how she slept...

Wednesday, June 24, 2015: Our morning began, once again, at the playground at Allan Gardens before heading west once more for the sake of some book-purchase, and a lunch over at Future Bistro (the former Future Bakery) on Bloor West, right by Brunswick Avenue (see a post I wrote on such in 2010; and a poem composed there a year or so later). Impressively, she ate far more of the fruit than the home-fries. I've been going to Futures for twenty years now, as my usual go-to spot to spend a couple of Toronto hours writing and what-not. I might not have been able to get any work done, but Rose did sign a birthday card for her Gran'pa McLennan, and a variety of postcards for others.

Oh, how I miss Book City on Bloor West.

Later in the day, finding out an Ottawa friend of mine was, at the same time, right across the street having a lunch meeting at the old By The Way Cafe. How random is that?

She was asleep, of course, before we returned to our hotel.

Our post-nap visit went a bit north, over to where the incredibly patient Lola Lemire Tostevin lives, spending some time visiting with her and her husband, who generously presented Rose with some animal masks and a big book of stories, along with some paper to colour on. I was able to hand over her contributor copies of Touch the Donkey #6 weeks before it releases (mid-July), as well as a mound of other items I've been working on lately.

I think Rose was more worked-up than normal, and even I was beginning to wear down from her tearing around, and guiding her husband out to the garden multiple times (much the way she led Stephen Cain around), and into their front room. Rose only calmed once she and Lola began colouring.

We spoke of writing and publishing, and the madness of industry. Literary publishing, I've decided, is like a bumblebee; it just shouldn't fly, and yet does. She has a collection of essays forthcoming with Teksteditions this fall, which everyone should keep an eye out for.

On the way back to the hotel, a brass band performing at the corner of College and Yonge Street. I was thinking that Rose must think Toronto is magical, given all the buskers and live music she's been aware of. We never wander into the places such is played back at home.

Thursday, June 25, 2015: We began, once more, by heading west, but this time along Queen Street by streetcar, for the sake of Type Books. We were a bit early, only to discover a park and playground just by, at Trinity Bellwoods. Unlike the one near our house, this park was packed full of kids and parents and running around. She ran up the structures and ran across, but turned around (as per usual) at the top of the slide, for the sake of climbing back down the steps (she hates slides, for some reason).

Afterwards, we stopped briefly at the Japanese paper place that Christine likes, and made it finally into Type, where we saw that Derek McCormack was working. Did you know he has a book out this fall with Semiotext(e)? Extremely cool. Rose admired the books and the typewriters and the multiple ramps throughout the store. I picked up a book for her (after she had pulled down about a dozen or so from the shelves). Best I didn't get anything for myself, really. Not that she gave me much chance to look.

We had lunch at College Square with a Tim Hortons card Christine had passed along. Since they hadn't highchairs there, I sat her in a chair like a big girl. Later, a woman with her teenaged daughter in tow complimented us on our comfort with her in a big chair, given how small she is. She was fine. Much muffins were eaten (she won't eat the sandwiches).

Post-nap, we met up with Mark Goldstein right by our hotel (apparently he lives two blocks away, with bill bissett between us). We were nearly running late, so had to slip Rose into the ring sling while she still slept (after a two-hour nap). She woke in the hallway of our hotel, and wrote postcards at the coffeeshop while we waited. Given she was wiggly once he arrived, we return to Allen Gardens, where, of course, she immediately made friends with some kids on the bouncy-see-saw thing (of course). They were bouncing and laughing and letting go occasionally (wasn't sure what I thought of that). And the kids didn't mind; it actually gave Mark and I a chance to talk about various things, including poems, screenwriting and birth-mother stuff (he's been instrumental in talking me through some of my experiences over the past year or so). Did you know he's another book forthcoming with BookThug? Very nice. He is such good people (even though he's cat-allergic and can't come over to our house).

Friday, June 26, 2015: We checked out of the hotel, and Christine went for her last morning of work, and I headed off to see Jay and Hazel MillAr, en route to father-in-law's house. Given we haven't a clue where our GPS disappeared to, I was amazed I managed to drive over without getting lost (there are parts of Toronto I know a bit, but mostly I've no idea), wandering the further-west of St Clair and Runnymede. Hazel made muffins and Rose was barely contained, managing to run and run and eat and run. And they were kind enough to pass along a BookThug totebag! We spoke of poems and pianos, and children and baking.

After, we drove up to father-in-law's house, where she slept and she slept, and waited for Christine to return. We were a night there, before heading off to Woodstock, Ontario for some further adventures...