... and rob's workshop is back

rob mclennan says:

"If anyone is interested, I've just booked a series of dates for my new
seasonal poetry workshops at Collected Works Bookstore, Wellington &
Holland, Ottawa, happening on Wednesday nights: January 6, 13 and 27;
February 3, 10 and 24; March 3, 10.

$250 for 8 sessions.
7pm to 9pm.

for information, contact rob mclennan at az421@freenet.carleton.ca or 613
239 0337;

an eight week poetry workshop (spread out a little, for the sake of
scheduling), the course will focus on workshopping writing of the
participants, as well as reading various works by contemporary writers,
both Canadian & American. participants should be prepared to have a
handful of work completed before the beginning of the first class, to be
workshopped (roughly ten pages)."

The Malahat Review Novella Contest

The Malahat Review's just announced its 2010 Novella Contest. They say:

"The Malahat Review, Canada’s premier literary magazine, invites entries from Canada, the United States, and elsewhere for the Novella Prize. One prize of $500 CAD is awarded, plus payment at the rate of $40 CAD per printed page upon publication. Previous winning entries have also won or been nominated for National Magazine Awards for Fiction and the O. Henry Prize. The Novella Prize is offered every second year, alternating with The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize."

The deadline is February 1, 2010. So dig that novella out of the back of your files and dust it off! How often do novellas get to shine?

Awesome grafitti

This is outside Saint Brigid's, on the side of what used to be Our Lady School on Cumberland (and is now an abandoned hulk.) Something about it just makes me smile. Maybe it's the period after 'dang it.' Maybe it's the Canadian flag. I don't know. It's awesome. 

 

 

 

bill bissett at 70

... insofar as Lunarians mark time, that is.

 

 

The AB Series celebrated 70 years of bill bissett at the Mercury Lounge in the Market last night with mailed-in birthday wishes, a spellbinding performance by bill, a pinata shaped like a typewriter, cake, and performances by Kevin Matthews, Roland Prevost (with his musician hat on - I'd never seen him play his guitar before and I'm really happy that now I have), John Lavery and Luna Allison.  

It was a really good show/party. Even if it did run over time (which was to be expected) and so the last part of it was shared with the people who were coming in at the back looking for martinis and dancing. And what is it about bill that just makes you feel good?

Never heard him? Here are some audio files.

The first 30 people to arrive got loot bags, too - mine contained some poem leaflets, a Grab-a-Bubble bubble wand, some raisins and chocolates, a gorgeous transparency painted with the above graffiti image, and a little matchbox, elaborately printed, and labelled "Contains one word (min. 3 letters) as read in bill bissett's sublingual." So I opened it up when I got home. You slide the matchbox open, and mounted inside, against a striped paper background, is a little piece of what looks like wide shoelace, with the word 'singul' printed on it in block font. It has to be seen: it's just a beautiful little thing. I'll have to try and get pictures and post them. (Luna's word was 'xseptiyonal.')

My box was in a bag, too, that was printed with the number 27, which was the number of my gift bag. So now I'm wondering - are the numbers significant? Did you get one of these? What's your number and word?

(Note added later: some clips from the reading are up on YouTube now: click on the link and you can follow the sidebar to the rest of the poem and other reading goodness.) 

hapee berthday bill

Taken outside the Mercury Lounge in the Byward Market - on my cheapass cell phone camera - just before bill bissett's birthday reading tonight at the AB Series, which also featured performances by Kevin Matthews, Roland Prevost, John Lavery and Luna Allison. The graffiti was done by a local poet as a birthday gift to bill. I won't say who, as it might incriminate him/her, but I thought it was beautiful. Go take a look before someone manages to wash it off or it wears away.

(The words say: "days go / wher dew they go")

 

The Geist Postcard Story Contest
Due to popular demand, the 6th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest deadline for entries has been extended to January 15, 2010.

AND entrants who sent in their stories for the original deadline (November 1, 2009) are welcome to submit an additional entry at no extra cost.

Here is the info:

First Prize: $250
Second Prize: $150
Third Prize: $100
Honourable Mentions get swell Geist gifts

(More than one prize per category per year may be awarded: over the years, we've averaged 1 first prize, 1.4 second prizes and 1.6 third prizes.)
 
Send us a postcard along with a story that relates to the image. The relationship can be as tangential as you like, so long as there is some clear connection to the image or place.

Maximum length: 500 words, fiction or non-fiction.
Winning entries will be published in Geist and at geist.com.
Honourable mentions will be published at geist.com.

Enter today!

Under the Bridge

Link here to see the Wordle page.

 I found a website that takes chunks of text and makes these fascinating collages/word clouds out of them. I couldn't resist plugging in a very short short story I wrote at the Dusty Owl Play Date a while back and was particularly pleased with...

Doing this kind of thing can be a mindless exercise along the lines of flipping through photos of yourself in your Facebook gallery, or it can give you some ideas. In this case, I think the image I got gives me a strange disjointed look at the story's atmosphere. It's like an automated version of the exercise where you cut up the words of a text and reshuffle them: which I've tried, like meditating, without ever getting to something I'd call enlightenment. Maybe you just need to take more time doing it, or maybe I'm a slave to syntax. In any case, this little applet does remove any compulsion to make sense out of words and shows me a bit about how I went about building the story's feel. 

And it looks cool. 

Call for Submissions

I've decided to start reposting calls for submissions etc here, so keep an eye out for more of them to come!

Vagina Dentata, the Carleton-born feminist mag, is looking for submissions. You don't have to be female to submit, but check them out for the kinds of stuff they want.

They say: "The submission deadline for the next issue of Vagina Dentata has been extended to November 1st. Continue sending your poetry, stories, articles, and artwork to vaginadentatamag@gmail.com. Thanks to everyone who has already submitted something!"

What I'm Reading

Okay, okay, I could be reading all kinds of stuff in preparation for the Writers Festival. All kinds of stuff that I don't actually have time to read because I'm busy preparing for the Writers Festival. I could be reading Linden MacIntyre's The Bishop's Man (which is sadly, oddly, topical right now.) I could be reading Where Am I? by Colin Ellard and getting my inner neuroscience nerd psyched. I would be reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries if the office had a copy yet.

But I could not resist. Dracula: the Un-Dead, by Dacre Stoker. Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew. (And Ian Holt, who doesn't seem to get much of the press attention.) It came in two days ago, blood-red cover and all. 

I started out sort of amused at the 25-years-later state of the main characters (Dr. Seward's a crazy morphine addict running around hunting vampires, Harker's a drunk, Mina just hasn't aged much a la the One Ring and is still carrying a torch for Dracula, and their son is dreaming of a career in the theatre while being forced through law school, and has never been told anything about the whole vampire incident his parents went through back before he was born.) All that's kind of entertaining, in the same sort of way that Anno Dracula was. I could even deal with the bits with our (apparently) new vampire foe, Elizabeth Bathory, although something bothers me about a Dracula sequel where you get to see the inner thoughts and memories of the vampire. Ah well.

But now, a few chapters in, I've just been completely blindsided by the sudden appearance in the narrative of Bram himself, and a theatrical production of the novel Dracula. What the...?

Quincey Harker (you may or may not recall, depending on your nerdiness, that the Harkers named their first son after Quincey Morris, who dies in the final battle of Dracula) runs into Bram Stoker in a theatre in Paris, points out that his parents are Jonathan and Mina Harker, then goes off and gets a copy of the novel and is only slightly disturbed by the fact that it's all about his parents - he's more interested in playing the part of his father in the production. And then we go back to vampires stalking the streets. 

Lesbian vampires, of course. I guess I was expecting that. 

I'm just confused enough by the weird metafictional quality of the Bram character that I think I've got to read on - something really interesting might be going on here... or it might be a driverless-ghost-carriage-wreck waiting to happen. We'll see.

Baned Books Week - Last Day!

Here's the last random post from the Banned Books Week map:

Full-screen

 

It's been interesting posting these: more because of the memories that they've brought up for me, since most of these cases involve books in schools, where people have the impression they should be able to control what other people read. Parents that don't want their children reading books with dragons in them think that they have the right to tell all the other kids in the class that they shouldn't read books with dragons in them. And there are whole committees and procedures that school boards set up in order to validate those parents and "give it due consideration." There is a complaints process, and therefore there are complaints. Chicken and egg? Who knows?

I'd like it if the ALA's map covered other cases outside the schools and libraries - like what about books stopped at the border between Canada and the USA because of content (as happened to Little Sister's bookstore in Vancouver, which had a shipment of books held at the border, because of charges that the books were pornography)? I think that counts. 

As a parting note - look for an article coming out in a couple of weeks by Cory Doctorow about sex in teen novels. (Google it, I don't remember the title or where it's being printed.) He mentioned it at one of the schools we visited this week, when someone asked if he'd ever had complaints about his book Little Brother. He told them that yes, he had - a parent had complained because the main character loses his virginity (and "nothing bad happens as a result.") 

Oh, yeah, that's what you want to be teaching kids: that sex inevitably ends in suffering. That'll arm them for their future lives and relationships. Personally, I think Marcus and Ange (the kids in Cory's book) are a great model of a healthy, functional, equal, respectful, mature partnership.