Back from Vacation
I have an excuse for the web silence . . . and that excuse is called Mink Lake. Been at a cottage with no internet access for a whole week... what a strange and oddly liberating feeling. Although, I do admit to a massive indulgement in analog communications the day after I returned, in which I telephoned many family members, and started an actual paper letter. Back in screen mode now... but as a tribute to a lovely week spent in the great outdoors swimming, campfiring, guitaring, caving, whitewater rafting and watersliding, I'm going to post the schedule for A Company of Fools' Torchlight Shakespeare 2009. Much Ado About Nothing. One of my all-time favorite Shakespeare plays. Sheer fun in the outdoors, in honour of summer.

Not exactly words related but...

I've now got a savings jar going (metaphorically speaking) for the Folk Festival. Just saw the lineup. I want a pass. Don't expect to see me on the weekend of August 21-23. Unless you're in Britannia Park. In which case I'll share my sunscreen with you!

LiPS Finals

This shot is the "Ottawa Support" for the LiPS finals - judges Kevin Matthews, Greg Ritallin Frankson, John Akpata, Ikenna Onyegbula, Cathy MacDonald-Zytveld, and me, scorekeeper Ruthanne Edward, and host Rusty Priske.

I've been wrestling with computer issues so I wasn't able to write this yesterday, but... I got to be a "celebrity judge" for the Live Poetry Society slam finals. They're the rural slam that takes place in the Valley: I was a judge for the finals last year as well, and it's amazing to see what's happened in that community in the last year. Last year there was some great poetry - but it was clear that a lot of the poets were just starting out, just getting a feel for slam and how it works, and this year the finalists came out with vastly more polished and well-delivered poetry.

Being a judge is exhausting, and as Rusty Priske, who was hosting the slam, said, it's actually kind of ridiculous. How are you supposed to listen to a poem and then assign it a number? They tell you half the score is content and half is presentation, but then should I assign higher points when a poem speaks to me directly, or is about a particularly moving topic, or is particularly brave in its openness? Because a lot of the LiPS poetry is extremely brave and confessional. Should I take marks away because I don't think a lot of thought went into the structure of the poem? Well... I do, because I feel that what makes a poem a poem, and not a monologue or story, is structure and language. Rhyme, repetition, metaphor, craft. But it's damn hard to know where that line is.

The finalists: note the overwhelming female majority. Rare in slam.

A fascinating aspect of LiPS is that it's mostly women up there on the stage. Slam is heavily male-dominated, usually, but this community placed twelve finalists on the stage and only two of them were men. Maybe that's the reason that their collective voice seems to have developed in the personal and confessional mode. The majority of the poems Friday night were about the poets' own struggles with self-image, with abuse, with relationships, with mental health. The community seems to have embraced poetry as a way of giving themselves voices and speaking out about things that have happened to them, whether it's sexual abuse or depression or discrimination. They're powerful poems, and the support the poets get from the rest of the community is healthy and healing in more ways than one, I think. 

And how much of that is due to the phenomenal Danielle Gregoire? She moved out to Almonte, started a rural slam, and now look what's happened. She's just a Force For Good, that woman.

The LiPS National Team! Danielle K.L. Gregoire, Ken Kicksee, Tammy Mackenzie, Monica, and Emily Kwissa.

 

 

Broadcasting and Podcasting

My second ever episode of Literary Landscape is broadcasting tonight at 6:30 on CKCU (93.1 fm) - as long as I can manage to press the right buttons. . .

I'm also listening again to the Masterclass Series from the Writers Festival last fall, and working on posting them to the discussion board. Today, I've been listening to the class on emotion and form in poetry with Sonnet L'Abbe and Steven Heighton: interesting that both poets talk about using form to keep a rein on emotion, to keep it from getting trite or maudlin (Heighton says he can't write a good poem about his daughter without using some kind of formal constraint, and L'Abbe says the same thing about love poems in general... that they're the hardest kind of poem to write, and that they need to have some kind of form imposed on the feelings to keep them from getting, well, lame.)

I suggested the topic for this Masterclass, actually, because I'm interested in the way in which poetry (when it's good) can really get into the complexity of emotion, and the way in which so much bad, lazy, or sloppy poetry latches on to the simplest and most accessible emotions (love, anger, longing.)

With luck I'll have that up soon, and I can follow it with the rest of the Masterclass Series. I know this one is sixth out of eight Masterclasses from last fall, but I'm going to post the poetry one first because - ha! - I can. 

Busy busy...

... I'm doing a five-class session on graphic design with a couple of grade 6 classes at Vincent Massey this week and next (using Photoshop to make ad posters: it's part of the media literacy curriculum.) I must say that Vincent Massey, to follow up on my previous post about visiting schools with children's authors, is on the 'good list.' This is a school that, as far as I can tell, innovates, encourages, and integrates - and that has had a number of artists visit as part of the Learning Through The Arts program, which is how I wound up there. I'm always happy to bring authors to Vincent Massey, and now to work there. Partly, their commitment to accessibility impresses me. Each time I bring an author there, they have sign language interpreters ready to translate the reading and the question period, for the handful of hearing impaired students in the room. 

Also... my second ever installment of "Literary Landscapes" will broadcast tomorrow at 6:30 PM on CKCU 93.1fm. I'll be talking to Mark Frutkin and Michael Blouin about their upcoming appearances at Westfest. 

Speaking of which, are you going? The literary reading will be at 1:00-2:30, featuring Mark Frutkin, Michael Blouin, Priscilla Uppal, Saleema Nawaz and Nichole McGill. There's also a spoken word showcase from 2:30-3:30, featuring Luna Allison, Marcus Jameel, Shannon Beahen and Matt Peake. Love Westfest. Love the celebration of the local. Love that someone's got a festival all about how cool Ottawa is as a city, not just as a national capital.

If you're NOT going to Westfestlit, then maybe you want to go to the Library and Archives Canada to join the Canadian Book Binders and Book Artists Guild for their Book Arts Show and Sale.  It starts at 10:30 AM and goes till 4:00, and features talks and presentations on things like bookbinding, paper making, calligraphy, gold leaf, wood engraving,  book history and book collecting. Bookbinding is an awesome ancient art. There's just something... monkish about it. I'm a fan.

Or maybe you're still tied up with the world class theatre going on at Magnetic North, lots of which I'm missing because I'm manning the book table for Playwrights Press. Ah, the hectic life of the jack-of-all-trades.

Aaaaugh!
Paul Dutton, founding member of the Four Horsemen and legendary sound poet, is reading for the AB Series this Saturday and Sunday and I won't be able to make it because of a craptastic lineup of other things I absolutely have to do... so if you can make it in my place, you totally should.

Good Silly Fun

I've been meaning to write about my weekend ever since, well, since the weekend, and the fact that it pretty much IS the weekend again should be an indicator of just how busy I've been, and how little time I've had to sit down and write about how entertaining it can be to eat jambalaya and watch someone die.

I got invited to the Eddie May Murder Mysteries 25th Anniversary party last Friday. Did you know there was an ongoing murder mystery dinner theatre in Ottawa, much less that it had been running for 25 years? I had been aware of the former... but not the latter. I guess I'd assumed that Eddie May had started up fairly recently, along with a lot of the other fun performances that you can find around town. 

But here it is and here it's been, and I'm really glad that I've finally had a chance to go and see it. I brought a mystery-loving friend along to see if she could figure it out, since my mystery experience is limited to The Murders in the Rue Morgue and a few "How to Host a Murder" games when I was a teenager. (Our table were dead wrong about the murderer, incidentally, but not so wrong that we gained any public ridicule for it.)

It's dinner theatre. No, you're not looking for nuanced acting, this is broad caricature. The actors are working throughout a room, to an audience full of people who are busy eating and drinking and not thinking about this as theatre. Their job is to get the audience to have fun - and that means bringing them into the action, to a greater or lesser degree depending on how comfortable they are with it. Giving them the licence to interact with the room (because to figure it out you do need to go talk to the characters, and pick up the evidence and poke at it - and you need to feel like that's okay.)

It's also really hard to resist mobsters in brightly coloured suits, musical numbers, and the opportunity to match your heckling wits with the cast ... with the number of theatre people that were in the audience the night I was there, the banter was particularly good. By the time we got to the 'unveiling the evidence' scene at the end, a lot of the audience were more than willing to call out their guesses and theories, and spar with "Seamus." (Does it help that dinner comes with wine? Indubitably.)

Yeah, it's good silly fun. People get shot, and then they serve you your dinner, and then the suspects make the rounds and talk to your table and joke about the fact that you're munching away when someone just got shot. There's a hilariously protracted death scene complete with a lot of spouting blood (don't wear your favorite silk shirt if you're going to be sitting in the middle aisles.) There are musical interludes, and treachery enough to keep anyone gleeful. You get to speculate away, question the actors, and play along. You can poke over the physical evidence and try to grill the gangsters - in fact, it's best if you do. You'll miss out if you just go to eat dinner, sit back and watch... get in and play. There should be more opportunities like this for everyone to just play.

Ottawa Inuit Photovoice Exhibition

This Monday at Umi Cafe, there will be a showcase for the Ottawa Inuit Photovoice Project. This is a project that I helped out with at the Ottawa Inuit Children's Centre this spring... and it was a lot of fun. Photovoice provides cameras and workshops in photojournalism to communities around the world, creating a massive database of the experiences of people from every walk of life.

This event will celebrate the photography and writing created as part of the Photovoice project by a group of Inuit families from Ottawa. Plus, there will be snacks, and drum song, poetry, and spoken word performances by local artists!

 

 

One seriously cool kid...

I just found this question on Yahoo! Answers: a student at an apparently excessively strict Catholic school reacted to a list of banned books by bringing the books in question to her school and setting up a lending library out of her locker. It all started with Catcher in the Rye (what IS it about that book that gets it repeatedly tossed to the censorship wolves, anyway? I remember eagerly reading it when I was in high school hoping there would be something really exciting about it. Something ban-worthy. Got to say, my hopes of transgressive thrills were dashed.) Anyway, apparently a fellow student of hers asked to borrow her copy, because it was on the list.

You know where this goes: All the banned books suddenly became terribly interesting to a whole group of kids who might otherwise not have bothered to read anything at all. Suddenly they all wanted to get their hands on a copy of Paradise Lost, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Evolution of Man, His Dark Materials, Animal Farm, Bridge to Terabithia, and the Canterbury Tales.

So, this brave, smart kid took over the empty locker next to hers, and started a lending library.

And now there are dozens of kids busily reading classics, because they were told not to. I'm almost hoping the lunatic list (she posts some of the titles that are banned in her question, and it boggles my mind) was a ploy by the school, some kind of reverse psychology. I'm afraid, though, that it probably isn't.

Ravenswing 2009

Maybe I'm biased, because I've been going to Ravenswing since it was a once-a-month craft & zine fair in a smallish room at the Jack Purcell Centre, but I still think Ravenswing is astonishing.

From virtually nothing, Sean and all the other people that have gravitated towards the Ravenswing collective have created something that grows visibly every year, that gets better and better, and that hasn't yet lost its totally refreshing anti-corporate, local, indie, DIY feel. Ravenswing is a carnival: diverse, colourful, celebratory, and playful.

The crowds at this year's fair were easily double that of last year. And people have begun to realize that you can come and just hang out in Minto Park that day, catch the bands, do some workshops, and stroll around talking to the artists and crafters. This year, too, the organizers scored a stage, which really enhanced the sense of 'occasion' and brought more people up to the stage to listen to the bands. As usual, the bands ran a little later than the printed schedule, so that the last band went on at 4:00, when the fair was officially supposed to be wrapping up... but everyone still had their stuff out and no one seemed eager to leave. It was just too nice to be in the park with all the cool people. 

Girls on roller skates handing out the program, too? NICE touch.

I was broke at this year's fair, so I only walked out with a couple of things. One gem was a stunning photograph by Ian McPhail of a statue in the Art Gallery (she's either Roman or a Baroque copy, I think) which also came with a great story about how he managed to get a camera into the gallery and get the shot in the first place. 

Another good one was Paula Belina's zine/comic about being in Oregon on Election Night 2008, with nifty complex art and a tone that totally captured the crazy swell that happened to a lot of people that night, from semi-cynicism to an outburst of collective, charged celebration that - in her story - had people dancing into the intersections on the "walk" cycles in Portland, for hours. (She threw in her one-pager mini-zine on how to cross the border, too.) She's looking for other people's election  night stories - send them to funisfreepress@gmail.com.

I also had very little to sell this year, so I was free to ditch my table and go off looking for workshops to get involved in. I sat in on the prayer flags workshop (a little explanation of what those colourful flags are that you see hanging around people's houses, the Buddhist temple on Heron, and Crystal Dawn, plus a lot of time to cut out and design your own, nontraditional prayer flags: mine involved a few Norse runes and some gorgeous copper-coloured fabric paint.) I also had been looking forward to the breaking/locking dance workshop for days, so I had to join that one: my legs still hurt from the crouch-squat pose... must dance more!)

I was happy to see more than just jewelry and clothes at the sale too - nothing against jewelry and clothes, that's what I brought, but having Rockalily Burlesque there with their pasties and hula hoops was a nice touch. The same with the Henna tent and the table selling all-natural makeup.

And if this year was this good... how awesome is next year's Ravenswing going to be?