Shooting Angels at the Dusty Owl
Topic: readings
It's too bad it was dark, rainy, and miserable outside yesterday - it made for a very quiet Dusty Owl. It was also not our regular night, and I think not enough word had gotten out (partly my fault: it was Thursday before I had time to send out the announcement.) But the reading was warm and fun, and I think the small crowd and grey day made for a more laid-back atmosphere.

Interesting, though, having a large collection of the Sasquatch regulars coming out to the Owl. It's a whole different vibe- you could feel that they were expecting a pre-prepared introduction from Steve, and after the reading Mary Lee asked if there were any questions. (There were; one person asked if she ever had younger people ask about the political events in the book, since they happened ten years ago, and then the second question was from a fifteen-year-old asking about the political events in the book....)

The reading itself was entertaining. Mary Lee Bragg's novel, Shooting Angels, was published last year, and I've heard sections of it before. Keep meaning to buy it and being broke when she has it for sale. She has a great ear for dialogue, coming out with snappy, funny, true-to-life conversations that sound familiar. (I also particularly admire her ability to deliberately write bad poetry - tougher than it appears.) The incidental descriptions, however, fall a little flat sometimes (I especially found myself caught out by whether a child's lips would "part slightly in a pout" - wouldn't they close in a pout? It bothered me because it made the phrase sound . . . unconsidered.)

And there was a kind of ... slyness in the way she opened with a reading from her gardening journal - which I'm not really qualified to judge, since I know a lot of people write about gardening, and I really don't get it - long botanical lists of flower names don't really grip me, but as a meditative, localizing device I'm sure it can be effective. It would just have to take a really original tack on the theme to grab me. In this case, the bit where I started really listening was the section describing the provenance of a particular rhubarb plant, which had, by various complicated paths, made its way to Ottawa from Wyoming or somewhere, and involved a really quite dramatic real-life murder story.

But there seemed to be a point to the long descriptions of hostas and violets and snapdragons in this case - she seemed to be lulling us into thinking that she was just reading a puttering-in-the-garden meditation on the seasons, like a lot of others, and then sucker-punched us with the last entry, made on September 11, 2001, where the home-bound, local, complacent journal is suddenly derailed by world events, much like the main character of the novel.

Anyway. She got laughs with the down-to-earth tone of the novel, and its oddly-amused-and-yet-somehow-appalled take on the Language Issue, and the Quebec referendum, in the mid-90's. My favorite part of the whole book, so far, is when the protagonist, newly returned from Bosnia, rounds on his new tenant for saying that the exodus of Anglophones from Montreal is "ethnic cleansing."

The open mike afterwards was short - four readers - but sweet, with a couple of poems by Kevin Matthews, who I am always happy to hear read - I'm not even tired of "The Love Song of Roy G Biv" yet, and that's his most popular poem. Jim Larwill also brought out a couple of sonorous poems. Both of those guys are doing things with sound that I think people should pay attention to. They listen for assonances and internal rhymes, repetitions of sounds, and they both pay attention to the voice, and to the performance. Jim's old guard, Kevin's new guard. I was happy to see them both on the same stage. There was also a reading by Paul Leroux, from an online blog-novel, at http://thehandsIlove/blogspot.com... I have yet to check that out. I've seen him around though - his T-shirt says "Meet The Author" and his website on it in prominent letters, and he wears it to all kinds of literary events. Which I think is pretty cool.

Yup, that and a magic trick pretty much rounded out the night...

Ever notice something you never noticed before. . .
. . . and all of a sudden it becomes a predominant theme in your life? This only adds to my delusion that I'm a character in someone's RPG and the Game Master repeats himself a lot...

I woke up this morning to an interview on CBC with the late Ninjalicious' wife (who also wrote the obit I read earlier this week.) I'm only sorry I'm just discovering this guy's work two months after his death. But I think I need to get hold of a copy of his book, Access All Areas. When I get it, I'll review it, how's that?

I'm now fascinated by this Urban Exploration thing, too. Sounds like I've unwittingly done a little in my time, but not for a while and not enough. Check out the Urban Exploration Resource forum here. And Infiltration's webpage is a great place to start... look here.

triple take on a doublethought
Now Playing: Rob Zombie
Topic: publishing
I posted the last entry on my online writers group and got this response from my friend Christopher. I really liked it, thought I'd share. I asked him if that was okay.

- triple take on a doublethought -

"Honest publishing comes in all shapes and sizes. from glossy coffee table books, and leather-bound bookshelf filler to a single sheet of paper folded in half. An ISBNumber doesn't make it good. Staples rather than stitching and glue doesn't make it bad. The thing that it is, is honest! You know what you are holding in your hand.

"A self-published zine that looks like some starving artist had something to say and wanted/needed to share it is not 'vanity press'. There is no deception. It is what it is.

"A glossy stitched hardcover book has, by virtue of the production value/cost, gone through several edits and rewrites (if a single piece) or some form of adjudication (if a collection). The annual anthology available from Poetry.com is not such a thing. It is vanity press of the worst kind, as it is not even honest enough to call itself that.

"Putting the Dusty Owl brand on something you don't like, or wouldn't have published without pressure feels dishonest. People who claim to be published, rather than self-published are trying to impress/deceive. (unless they are in fact published and paid for their contribution)...

"I'm thinking as I type so I haven't got it all worked out...but perhaps there are 4 types of publishing.
the contributor is paid/rewarded by the publisher (commercial press)
the publisher is paid/rewarded by the writer (vanity press)
the artist and publisher co-operate without payment (small press- i.e. Dusty Owl)
the artist and publisher are the same person/group (self press)

"I think you are on the right track there at the end K8. Its not how many have you printed - its how many have you sold.

"my two cents"

I'm Doublethinking!
Topic: publishing
I picked up the latest copy of Broken Pencil this evening when I got home, and started flipping through it. I got as far as the in memoriam to Jeff Chapman, AKA "Ninjalicious," the founder and editor of Infiltration, which was touching and in a way inspiring - this was obviously a guy who thought originally and clearly about things, who struck out on his own with confidence, and who managed to do a lot in only 31 years. So I'd managed to read 3 pages, including the opening letters to the editor from passionate zinesters, and I got hung up on the sentence, "Jeff [Ninjalicious] was a true independent in every sense of the word. From his free-thinking spirit to his enthusiasm for self-publishing, Jeff made the world his own..."

Here's my disconnect; I admired that, and I thought of my own friends who self-publish, my efforts at indie publishing, all the fun I had at CanZine being around people who were making their own art and promoting it. And then I hit a mental roadblock; a conversation I had with my father a year or two ago about what constitutes a 'published author,' or, in the context of a poetry competition, a 'previously unpublished poem.' My problem at the time, I think, was that I didn't know - if I put a poem up on my website, have I disqualified it from competition? But we'd scoffed, in probably very superior manner, about people who said, in a CBC interview about How To Get Published, "It's SO easy to get published. I've published a whole BUNCH of poems. You just go on line, get a website, and put them up!" I laughed at those people. I said, "that's not really published." I don't print my own work in Dusty Owl Press, because I don't feel it's quite.... right.... to print my own poems in the zine I edit. And the stories I self-publish are only created for friends. I never intend to sell or distribute them.

I admire the zinesters who are out there creating their own fold-and-staple literature and art, like Paula Belina and Streeteaters in Montreal, or Nekusis Distro here in Ottawa. I really admire the Jim Munroes, Hal Niedzvieckis and Jeff Chapmans of the world, who 'make it' from the springboard of DIY, and stick with the culture instead of going corporate. And yet I joke around with my friends that "self-publication" is our new euphemism for "masturbation." As in, "self-publication in public? Isn't that a crime?..." I get upset with authors who decide that Dusty Owl is a vanity press, use our logo to disguise the fact that they're really self-publishing.

See my problem? I'm stuck, between my academic, hardcover, English-major upbringing, in which you're not published until some governing body has seen you, sniffed you, and deemed you worthy - and the organically growing, ephemeral, beauty-in-the-moment world of indie publishing, where official adjudication = subjugation to the Powers That Be and their Agenda.

Unlike my split between spoken word and page poetry (I think it really helps you cross from one to the other if you stop trying to think of them as the same animal) this one may have to be resolved. It seems clear that some indie books and zines can make it across the divide, get published with a wide enough distribution and publicly-appealing enough design that they can be judged by the opinion of the marketplace. But that usually involves a Canada Council grant, which are tough to get. (Nice work if you can get it though!) And whether or not the book looks 'professional' also starts to jar with the prevailing aesthetic at most zine fairs, where the more scribbled, Scotch-taped and india-ink-blotched a publication is, the less it bows to the pressures of *ahem* Convention (and therefore the more virtuous it is.) Maybe my line is, if you're willing to starve on it, fine, but to live on your work the public's gotta buy it, and for the public to buy it, it helps to have someone In Authority sniff it and pronounce it good.

Maybe the trick is to have the authority come from the sheer fact that people like it, buy it, and recommend it to their friends. "Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some... farcical aquatic ceremony!"

Hotel CanZine 2005
Now Playing: Schenkerla Rauchbier, CBC
Topic: craft and zine fairs
My second year at Canzine, and it still wipes me out and blows me away. . .

CanZine is held at the Gladstone Hotel, which is under reconstruction right now and the oldest still operational hotel in Toronto. Last year it was the sort of run-down and bedraggled old dame that I thought you only ran into in atmospheric movies; crumbling, with peeling paint on the antique mouldings and creaking floors. This year, the antique mouldings are still there, but they're cleaner, and they've redone the front room and apparently gotten designers in to redo all the houses in various Trading Spaces-esque 'edgy' designs. But the back room is still full of exposed pipes and brick, giving it this strange industrial feel. The bar to the left of the door (where we finally found a spot) was clean, airy, and full of warm wood and brick colours. Then again, it was warm already - that many people in the room. . .

CanZine is hosted largely by Broken Pencil Magazine. Last year it seemed a little better organized; the tables were assigned then, so we didn't wind up roaming the first floor trying to find a table and eventually being handed a table twice the size of my keyboard tray (Steve went off and found another table that we could drape our cloth over: it was partly that we paid the same as everyone else, so we ought to have had the same 4-foot table space, and also partly that we had brought stuff from rob mclennan, Bywords, and Capital Slam, and sort of wanted to have room for them on the table.) And to be fair, when the tables were assigned last time we had less space.

But, despite the small table space, and the less-than-prime spot in the entry between the main room and the bar, we had a good time.

This is a massive event. The entire bottom floor of the Gladstone was taken up with the vendor tables - selling books, comix, zines, pins, shirts, CDs, art, you name it. Saw a couple of friends from Ottawa at some of the tables. They had "artist rooms" upstairs, where larger organizations like No Media Kings and Infiltration were holding their events. Check out their sites - both these groups really caught my eye this weekend and their sites are amazing. Infiltration, in particular, had put signs up all over the event stating "Do Not Go To Room ___" and had posted "Security Guards" outside their room, with a whole bunch of "Keep Out" and "No Trespassing" signs, so you had to go past them to get to their room. I thought it was wonderful. Infiltration is a "zine about going where you're not supposed to go." Sounds like a really cool idea (I'm always into going where I shouldn't go... why do you think I walk down dark alleys at three a.m.?)

I got to sit in on one of the panel discussions No Media Kings was hosting, on collaboration; a few neat ideas bouced around. Besides, I got to talk to Jim Munroe, who I first encountered when I read his novel Angry Young Spaceman, which I'm going to have to write something about soon. And he let me pay for my books partially in TTC tokens! (Always a sign you're dealing with a professional artist... when things like money... bus tokens... food... are valid currency. I like that way more than paying some huge distribution company!)

At some point during the afternoon a group of people paraded through the room carrying some sort of Green Man made of moss and sticks on a canvas bier. While I didn't really catch why they were doing it, I was automatically reminded of the Corn King and all the other year-end ritual sacrifices that happen all over the world. And I got a picture of them. It was a cool example of the energy that seemed to be just spilling all over. People trading their work, selling it, talking about their ideas, arguing for urban culture and subculture, creating art. In a really grreat space. They're talking about taking CanZine out of th Gladstone as it grows: I hope not. But, even if they move it, we'll be back...

Home Again Home Again Jiggety Jig. . .
Now Playing: tea; the Kama Sutra soundtrack; heavy eyelids.
Happy Halloween. Happy New Year, at least to the ancient Celts.

It's nearly nine o'clock. I should have been home about three hours ago - what you get for getting complacent about the speed of the TTC and your own ability to find the Greyhound station from Dundas subway stop. Missed the 11:30 and had to wait around for the next bus at 2:30. However, I got to do it while reading An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, which is Jim Munroe's latest book and a lot of fun, so I didn't mind. And I'm home now.

I've been in Toronto for the last three days or so. Sunday was CanZine at the Gladstone Hotel - for which Steve came up on the redeye bus the morning of, leaving Ottawa at midnight and arriving in Toronto at 6 in the morning, giving him time to go to church, eat breakfast and meet me at the fair (we walked in within a minute of each other, I think.) He's certifiable. I mean that in the nicest possible way, of course. We shoved a couple of tables together at CanZine so we'd have space, and sold a few books - and one copy of the Capital Slam collection, although to our utter dismay we later discovered that what we'd sold was in fact the empty case of the copy we'd opened in order to let people listen to the CD.

By the way - if you've Googled "Capital Slam" because your CD wasn't in the case, and by some fluke found this entry - my deepest, deepest apologies. Post a comment or get in touch with me through Dusty Owl (www.dustyowl.com) and we'll send you your CD with our heartfelt contrition. I blame the heat and the sensory overload at Hotel Canzine.

The CanZine experience is draining and entertaining and overloading and inspiring all at once - I only got to attend one of the panel discussions being held in the No Media Kings room, but I did pick up two of Jim Munroe's books (he started No Media Kings, publishes his own books, and does an awesome job with them. Besides the fact that I was handed Angry Young Spaceman, his second book, by a friend of mine who taught in Japan with me, and I promptly recommended it on my Japan website as required reading for anyone going to teach in Asia.)

The energy at CanZine is impressive. It might be partly due to the crowded conditions - it's a cramped market-day sort of feel, with people packed in (as we were) and sprawling into the connecting hallways. People come from all over - I saw a couple of groups from Ottawa, and ran into one more artist from town who had been at the Toronto Small Press Fair the day before and was now shopping at this one. I'll write more about it, though, when I have my pictures uploaded and I'm not exhausted from a long weekend of talking and reading and thinking and reacting and generally having a great time. I took notes. I took pictures. I'm trying to do it justice.

Ravenswing, October edition
Now Playing: still raining
Topic: craft and zine fairs
Went to the Ravenswing Craft and Zine Fair yesterday at the Jack Purcell Centre. I'm usually there with two different hats on - one selling handmade jewelry, with my friend Carolyn, as Gandalf's Granddaughter, and the other selling books at the Dusty Owl table. I share the Dusty Owl table with Urban Grove, Cathy MacDonald-Zytveld's mixed-media, linocut prints, and 'Naughty Soap For Your Dirty Body.' I think this is emblematic of Ravenswing's whole ethos, really - the longer I participate in the sale, the more people I start realizing are connected in ways I didn't know. I think it was the second or third Ravenswing that I came in and started setting up and realized that two tables down was the sister of one of my oldest friends (I met him, gleep, maybe 13 years ago back in Fredericton, NB.) I had no idea how she would have found Ravenswing, but she did. The next show found her daughter also manning a table - she knew another of the vendors and didn't know that I was involved. This week Aiyanna appeared at a table - we met her through Dusty Owl's participation in the Pride parade. The network of connections in this show are wonderful. I like to think it binds the crafting community in Ottawa tighter. Ravenswing really tries to be co-operative - although it's run largely by Uncle Zio and Festrell, we've set up an online group so the participants can help shoulder some of the work, and it's growing. I was particularly happy to see a table featuring gorgeous fused and dichroic glass - brought the feel of the whole show up a notch. Although, personally, I still like Queenie Tyrone's "Bondage Bitches" - Barbies which have been duct-taped, repainted and punctured into budget, back-alley "Living Dead Dolls". (Should probably add a '(tm)' or two there, shouldn't I?) One of those cool things about Ravenswing - you're not just going to find your usual craft sale wares.

The traffic was pretty good, too, considering the Jack Purcell Centre's under construction. Sales are still slow, though (I made a whopping $5 for one of my pendants all day) but that doesn't really bother me. I like the chance to talk to other crafters and writers and zinesters, and there's usually a DJ playing cool tunes and an open mike for poetry and music. Now we just need to get the word out there for the November show - try to snag the Christmas shoppers out there looking for original stuff.

Happy Birthday, Capital Slam!
Now Playing: Coffee, Dead can Dance, light rain
Topic: slam
Friday night was the first anniversary and the official opening bash for Capital Slam. It's astounding, heartening, and possibly just a little intimidating that a series that started just a year ago can pack a pub the size of the Gap of Dunloe on Bank so full that latecomers were stuck standing at the back by the merch table. On a Friday night. On Bank Street. An entire pub, packed to capacity, tuned in on a stage with a poet on it. It's a surprising achievement.

One of the great advantages of having the place packed was that by the time I got there, ten minutes before the show, there were no unoccupied tables. So you have to pick a table and sit at it, and you have a chance to meet people you might not otherwise have spoken to. And everyone had come out of the woodwork - with university back in session, and the fall season in full swing, there was a real sense of "hooray, slam's back!" Luckily, with the usual crowd of regulars at Capital Slam, your randomly selected tablemates are usually friendly. I was glad to get a chance to finally meet both Matt Peake and Owen Hewitt, who were both on the 2004 competitive team, and to talk to Eric Rosenhek, who hosts the Thursday Special Blend on CKCUfm.

For anyone who hasn't been to a poetry slam - these events are astounding. At least, I usually find them astounding. For one thing, having survived high school poetry class where they did their best to grind poetry into a dry, dusty pulp that sticks to the roof of the mouth, it's wonderful to see people - quite a few of them still in high school - having so much fun with it.

And it's fun poetry - not always technically interesting, but usually exciting. The slam works like this: there's an open mike with a handful of poets who want to read but not compete. Then there might be a featured reader, and a break, and then the slam, in which the poets who want to compete get up and have three minutes to strut their stuff. The time limit and the competitive spirit call for poems that are punchy, emotional, often incendiary or sexy or funny or all three at once if you can handle it. The judges have to be swayed to the high score, and generally the more fun they have the better. (Downers often don't score well, as Owen Hewitt found out in round one with his wake/elegy to his cousin Sandy.) Then there's a break, and maybe a second feature, and then the top-scoring five poets duke it out with a second poem. Then the prizes are handed out, everyone grabs a last pint, and the show's over.

This evening's first feature was a poet called Katalyst, a member of the Kalmunity Vibe Collective, a group of artists creating "live organic improv" in Montreal (they look really interesting). She brought along a trumpet player, Jason "Blackbird" Selman, and as far as I can tell, most of their set was, if not completely improvised, then formed and framed on stage. I think that the most improv part was the more 'talky' segments between poems, but even those were rhythmic and aware of the sound. The connection between music and poetry is made absolutely clear when you bring a musician up there to perform, and Katalyst and Blackbird did some really neat trading off of rhythms, picking up on each other and doing counterpoints. It starts really bringing home that parallel I thought of when I first discovered slam, between spoken word poetry and jazz. (I also really enjoyed the spoken piece that Blackbird performed - a very angry poem spoken in a voice like a quiet grave.)

The slam was as fun as ever - a lot of new poets who hadn't been up before. Like I said, often slam poetry isn't technically interesting, and falls more into the category of dramatic monologue - which isn't a negative observation, by the way. And sometimes the technical stuff is so intricate and speeds by so fast that you wish you could learn to listen faster. The slam had the usual wild range of styles, from Steve Sauve's humourous monologues to a classically hip-hop piece by Toronto's Tommy Buick, to Ritallin's rhythmic virtuosity (is that an unspoken samba beat he's usually got playing under the words?) and Owen Hewitt's toast to his cousin. I think the nicest surprise was Jim Thomas, a poet from the UK who's apparently going to be moving to Ottawa this winter - keep an eye out for him. Big guy, looks just a little like Tim Currie, British accent. Going to be a really interesting new voice in the mix - I loved his piece in which he confessed that he was an (insert deep and ominous voice here) android - and has apparently been hosting slams in Oxford with a group called Hammer and Tongues, who look a little like the Ottawa crowd.

The second feature of the night was Brendan McLeod, from Vancouver, who was a lot of fun. Definitely a contrast to Katalyst, in that he wasn't as much focussed on rhythm and more on surprising images and impact of his performance; he bent his voice and gestured and moved around the stage and ranted and speedtalked, and got wholly wrapped up in passionate delivery. (In particular, I couldn't tell if he really got choked up at the end of his furious poem about high school shootings, but the emotion in his voice certainly locked me in.)

And then there was the final slam - in which I was pretty happy to see the top marks taken by Festrell, a young and original writer. I've known her for a year or so, and both her writing and her presence in the scene have just been skyrocketing. Her performances are usually much quieter than most of the others, and yet when she started her first poem, the whole bar shut up to listen. It was eerie. Festrell also runs Nekusis Press and co-runs the Ravenswing Craft and Zine Fair.

And after that there was nothing for it but to eat the last of the delicious Capital Slam birthday cake, and start slowly trickling out (when I left around 1:00 a small core of the Capital Slam collective was still in the corner with a pitcher... but I had a bus to catch.)

If, on a Friday night, you see a huge crowd of people spilled out onto the sidewalk outside the Gap of Dunloe, rivalling the crowds standing outside Barrymore's Music Hall, then it's probably Capital Slam between rounds. Walk in, grab a drink, and find a seat. You won't regret it.

And Now For A Brief Introduction, Handshakes All Around
I suppose an introductory entry is in order. . .

This is meant to be sort of a foray for me into criticism, community, support for my local lit and art scene, and also hopefully a means of developing my own personal poetics. I am a poet, and editor, living in Ottawa and slowly but surely carving myself a niche in the amazing scene here. I run an indie press, Dusty Owl Press, and help organize and run the Dusty Owl Reading Series. I also maintain their website.

Ottawa's lit scene is booming, especially of late. One of the things I have noticed and been really pleased by is the fact that the new, young, zinesters, poets, artists and writers seem to be working for community, mutual support and encouragement, and eclecticism. The page poets and spoken word poets go to the same events and listen to each other, the prose writers and the sound experimentalists rub shoulders on student radio, post-goth queer erotica and Ian-Fleming-drenched neomedievalism (not kidding, true story, really) wind up at the same small press fair table. At least, that's been my experience so far, helped along by the fact that Dusty Owl as a group just love that kind of stuff and encourage it as much as we can - and so we meet and collaborate with people who share that opinion.

And - I want to do my part to help share this great scene with people, let them know what I see happening. We'll see how it goes.