interviews, poems online ; upcoming readings in Toronto, Kingston, Calgary;
+ 30 years of the ottawa small press book fair,
I know you love when I post these updates. Why is it cold outside? Why is it warm? Has anyone seen snow? There have been some amazing clouds lately, although I don’t know if this is due to errant weather making further trouble down the road. Is everything askew? Probably. You should take some time to look at the clouds.
I was interviewed recently by Ivy Grimes, for her clever substack. She’s interviewed a whole ton of folk over there, so be sure to check out her archives. And you saw that Stan Rogal interviewed me for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, yes? I had a recent poem up at Amsterdam Review, and a section of “the green notebook” up at Annulet. I have a poem, also, in Allium, A Journal of Poetry and Prose. I should probably be sending more work out, but there’s been less of that lately, between my attentions around the works-in-progress “the green notebook” and “the genealogy book.” I’m hoping once at least one of those projects is off my plate I can start focusing again on poems, as well as that novel-in-progress I keep referencing (some of which furthers threads from On Beauty, by the way). Oh, and did you hear I’m going to be interviewed by Alan Neal for CBC Radio Ottawa’s All In A Day on Tuesday afternoon? We’re taping around 2pm due to my schedule collecting our wee monsters from school, so I don’t know yet what time my segment will air. The show runs from 3-6pm EDT, so you can attempt to catch live, or check the website after to catch it recorded.
You know about the ottawa small press book fair coming up, yes? Thirtieth anniversary! Saturday, November 16 at Tom Brown Arena, noon to five pm. I co-founded the event with James Spyker back in 1994, if you can imagine, and kept it going after he moved to Toronto (not long after that first event). Did you know he’s attending the fair this time around, most likely the first time since the 1990s? This will most likely be the largest fair-to-date, if you can imagine. We’re also hosting our usual pre-fair reading, over at Anina’s Café in Vanier. David Scrimshaw was even good enough to post a video recently that he’d produced for Rogers 22, a short news item on the second edition of the ottawa small press book fair, back in September 1995: you can see a brief interview with a very-young-organizer-me, as well as with Victoria, British Columbia poet John Barton, back when he was still in Ottawa and co-editing Arc Poetry Magazine. Gadzooks.
Christine is reading in Toronto TONIGHT, as part of the Book*hug Press launch, and in Hamilton on Thursday, November 7, as part of a further Book*hug launch, which has me a few days solo with our young ladies, which is fine. I’m also heading out Toronto way on Friday morning, as Christine and I will meet up for an event I’m part of on Dundas Street West on Friday, November 8, reading to help launch a small handful of new letterpress items published by someone editions (including something of mine) (I’ll also have a handful of copies of my short story collection on hand, if you want a copy). Christine even has a clever graphic she made up with all of her events, some of which I’m part of, even. Oh, and Christine and I read in Kingston on Sunday, November 17 with Alison Chisholm as part of the Drift/Line Series, which I’m looking forward to, lovingly hosted by poet Wanda Praamsma. Do you know her work?
SAVE THE DATE(S)! We’re running a VERSeFest mini-festival, “Fall into VERSeFest,” from November 28-30, building on some of the momentum we had from the spring, so you should keep an eye on that. Readings and performances this fall include Manahil Bandukwala, Alice Burdick, Stuart Ross, Veronique Sylvain, Stephen Collis, Chuqiao Yang, Armand Garnet Ruffo, Erik Lindner, Faith Paré and Chimwemwe Undi, among others! It will be amazing. Alice Burdick is even conducting an in-person poetry workshop (which you should register for, if you are around)! The whole schedule should be online in a day or two. Watch for it!
Oh, and I’m (still) offering my poetry manuscript editing services, if anyone is so inclined. And above/ground press is currently offering 2025 subscriptions for chapbooks? Mostly single-author poetry titles, including the print quarterly Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], as well as an array of prose chapbooks the press has been producing lately.
I have two small books forthcoming that I haven’t told anyone about yet, by the way—a small poetry title, Snow day, as well as a book-length essay, a river runs through it: a writing diary, on working the Covid-era collaboration with Denver poet Julie Carr [I posted various sections of the essay-in-progress across earlier parts of this same substack, as I’m sure you recall]—both of which will be appearing with Brooklyn publisher Spuyten Duyvil. They’ve published two further poetry titles of mine as well—How the alphabet was made (2018) and Life sentence (2019). Small, secret books. I mean, how many will read this update all the way to the end?
