National Poetry Month : Sandra Ridley,

 

TWITCHCRAFT
—An excerpt

 

 

 

Unbidden, a spooklight, a nightmaker, he seems a nikin, a creature, a very soft creature—
his underness, an unkanny prank of second sight.

Yet a fake and a fetch. Riven with affliction, with ravenous crookedness.

Hush, hush.

And sudden, a hocus, a harum-scarum, we mark him as swithen.

So musky and sleek.

 

ò

 

As if he would terrify, and he is somewhat terrifying.

Thou seeist?

Yes, you saw.

 

ò

 

And suddenly he seems a trifle, a phanatic, a phrantic, a nullity, a mere nothing, a phantom appearing a
schismatic trick—

In foxsleep.

He seems a faltering, a mock, a folly under a dead eye.

 

ò

 

And he killed her it seemed, he was so close to killing her, he killed her, and what about your brother, yes, him too.

 We held our own.

 

ò

 

 

 

Sandra Ridley (she/her) is the author of four books of poetry: Fallout, Post-Apothecary, The Counting House, and Silvija. Work here is excerpted from a serial poem, “Twitchcraft,” which will appear in Vixen, a book forthcoming in the autumn of 2023 with Book*hug Press.

 

Amanda Earl on Sandra Ridley

Chaudiere author Amanda Earl has a new essay on Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley, posted today over at many gendered mothers.

rob mclennan at The Resonance Reading Series, October 4, 2016 (Montreal QC

rob mclennan reads at The Resonance Reading Series in Montreal on October 4 as part of a stellar line-up of poetry and prose. rob reads with Joni Murphy, Sandra Ridley, Joseph Denham, Owain Peach Nicholson and Kasia Juno.

Resonance Café
5175A Ave du Parc, Montreal, Quebec H2V 4G3
9-11:30pm
For more information, check out the Facebook link here.

Framework 2016 : Monty Reid, Pearl Pirie, etc.

Framework: Words on the Land is proud to announce its 2016 roster of writers:

Natale Ghent, Katherine Graham, John K. Grande, Helen Humphreys, Jonathan Kaplansky,  Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley, John Steffler, Alissa York, and  Pearl Pirie.
 
This summer, over the course of a late August weekend, ten writers will find themselves in the forest at Fieldwork near Perth, Ontario.

These writers will be presented with a simple wooden frame installed at their site - intended to suggest rather than proscribe perspective. For some, their frames may briefly supplant the computer screen as a form of illumination.  For others, the frame may provide a welcome focal point or a springboard for inspiration.

What they write from their designated sites will be read to a public audience from the intimate loft-space of a barn at Fieldwork on Sunday, August 21st at 3pm. 

Framework 2015 – our inaugural event - was by all accounts a resounding pleasure for both writers and audience members. Not a single intrepid writer came screaming out of the woods.  One writer even set up a bush cocktail bar at his site and wrote about it.  The public reading and discussion was captivating.  The writing was first class. Authors sold books. The weather was glorious. Framework now has a reputation to live up to.

Join ten writers this August 21 as they read from their weekend’s creative output and reflect on the experience of writing on the land.    

Tickets are limited and only available in advance through the OIWF. So be sure to purchase them early!
Fieldwork is very pleased to be presenting this event once again in partnership with the Ottawa International Writers Festival.

Since 2008 Fieldwork has presented unique site-responsive art installations in and around a farm field and forest. Both established and emerging visual artists have been featured.  Fieldwork endeavors to cultivate connections between people, art and nature and to encourage a wide-ranging pursuit of artistic expression that is rooted in the land.   Framework: Words on the Land is Fieldwork's first offspring and was designed to lure literature into the creative mix of their programs.

For further information on the project, and for ticket availability/purchase, click here.

 

Sandra Ridley includes Amanda Earl's Kiki on her BookThug’s Best Reads 2014 (Authors’ Edition) list

Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley, author of The Counting House (BookThug, 2013), included Amanda Earl's Kiki (2014) on her shortlist of "Best Reads 2014" over at BookThug. We completely agree! Thanks very much, Sandra!

Amanda Earl on Ampersand, a poetry workshops group

Amanda Earl posted a short write-up on her former poetry workshop, and of some of the successes of the individual members therein (including a number since involved with Chaudiere Books): Pearl Pirie, Roland Prevost, Marcus McCann, N.W. Lea, Christine McNair and Sandra Ridley (as well as a little shout-out to rob mclennan).

Pirie and Prevost on Petrie Island: rout/e

Chaudiere author Chris Turnbull recently posted that two further Chaudiere authors--Pearl Pirie and Roland Prevost--have poems posted ("5 Poets at Petrie Island") as part of her ongoing rout/e project, and she includes a report on such on the rout/e website. As she writes: "Poets David Groulx, Roland Prevost, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, and Blaine Marchand have poems appearing at Petrie Island as part of rout/e! The poems will be placed by Katherine Forster, Coordinator at Petrie Island, and Chris Turnbull, in time for Thanksgiving (Canadian). What a lovely display case the Petrie Island folks have built for their displays…The poems will be placed in these for discovery on self-guided walks…thanks, all, for participating." 

Pearl Pirie also posted a report (with photos) of the same on her own blog (from which this photo was lifted).

Amanda Earl interviewed by Sandra Ridley, Open Book: Toronto,

Chaudiere Books author Amanda Earl is interviewed by Ottawa poet and September writer-in-residence Sandra Ridley over at Open Book: Toronto on the use of pseudonyms.

Chris Turbull's rout/e is now online,

Expanding from a printed occasional, Chaudiere Books author Chris Turnbull's rout/e project is now online, with contributions from Jamie Reid, angela rawlings, derek beaulieu, George Bowering, Steven Ward, Sandra Ridley, Monty Reid [his contribution, pictured], Amanda Earl, rob mclennan and Pearl Pirie. As she describes the project:

rout/e started out as a trail underfoot, a bike path, a desire trail, a road, a creekbed, a contour line. The terrain shifts: rocky, swampy, soft, well marked, barely visible, wet, foggy, insect-heavy~

rout/e ran from 1996 to about 2005, often in small runs of 50 or less, with sporadic timing. The last printed issue was designed to be recombinant, recycled -poems placed in old art magazines that were mailed to me by contributors.  I switched up the magazines and resent them with poems in them. The idea was for the poems to keep moving – a sort of kinetic notion – for the contributors to send them on again. I don’t think this happened, but the idea had been cycling around for awhile to get the poems in view in a larger sense than through a booklet form. Not inclined to spend a lot of free time online, I decided to transport rout/e into a footpress project, and started to do so in 2010/2011. In the gap years between 2005 and 2011 I was busy enough with other life things to just let the idea sit.

I’ve done quite a bit of walking while travelling, as well as locally as part of the everyday. I’m often delighted by the number of text-based materials I find on trails and routes – stonework, markings, the messagings of one sort or another. Materiality, shape, space, surfaces, page(s). Multiplied. In 2010, when more firmly considering developing footpress, I asked a number of poets if I could post their poems on trails…and the first manifestation of the footpress was a sort of ‘nature note’ mockup – poems placed under plexiglass on plywood and posted with 2×1’s on the trails. These worked very well, though some were paintballed and some were taken or re-posted elsewhere, or otherwise subject to human or animal activities. This format is ongoing, with a new series emerging in summer/fall 2014.

The next version of rout/e will be a large poetry installation at Baxter Conservation Area, placed as a panel in a solar array. This will be completed by early September, and will feature work by derek beaulieu and sound by Fiddlehead Soup.

Afterward & with…. rout/e can map itself. Perhaps I might return to a more traditional form of small press publishing at some point – chapbook style or broadside, for example — at the moment the installations are a change of pace and offer some unusual reading spaces for others who might walk the trail. The writing is situated in place; it occupies the page, a surface, within spaces of their own re-occuring design.

Chris Turnbull's first trade book, Continua, will appear with Chaudiere Books in 2015.

Pearl Pirie reads as part of Poetry Month at the Ottawa Public Library

Ottawa Public Library National Poetry Month Reading
Main Branch

Monday, April 14, 2014 - 7:00pm
Celebrate National Poetry Month with readings by acclaimed Canadian poets Pearl Pirie, Chris Jennings, Sandra Ridley and Deanna Young. Offered in partnership with VERSeFest.

Ottawa's Robert Kroetsch shortlist -- Pirie, McNair + Ridley/Earl - at the TREE Reading Series

The four Ottawa-based authors of the three (including the winner) of the nine titles shortlisted for this past year's Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Writing read as part of the next edition of The TREE Reading Series. Tuesday, August 23, 8pm at the Arts Court feature Chaudiere Books author Pearl Pirie (who won this year, with her award-winning manuscript appearing any minute now with Snare), Christine McNair (whose shortlisted title is forthcoming with BookThug in spring 2012) and collaborators Sandra Ridley and Amanda Earl.

new Pearl Pirie poems as part of SPAO's Call and Response

CALL AND RESPONSE

Poetic responses to photographs in the Red Wall Gallery.
at the School of Photographic Arts: Ottawa
Curated by: rob mclennan

Ongoing: August 5th, 2011 to July 31st, 2012

First Response
The Walls of Jerusalem; selected poems and process notes.
Writer: Pearl Pirie
Exhibition: Cities of Stone - People of Dust by Leslie Hossack
Vernissage: Friday August 5th, 2011, 18:00 - 21:00
On View: August 5th - September 2nd, 2011

The CALL AND RESPONSE project engages two creative communities in a year-long exchange of images and words. Artists showing work in the Red Wall Gallery will have their photographic statements poetically responded to by writers curated by rob mclennan.

This interaction can be experienced as poetry and images come together in the Red Wall Gallery for the duration of each exhibition. There will also be scheduled readings, and a poem/image card for each pairing, as well as the inclusion of selected images and poems in the next edition of Push/Pull magazine.

The Red Wall Gallery is located in SPAO at 168 Dalhousie, at the corner of Bruyère, in the Byward Market. Viewing/reading hours are from Monday to Friday 10:00 -18:00, and Saturdays from 10:00-15:00.

Future shows will have responses by Ottawa poets Monty Reid and Sandra Ridley.

For more info contact: 613.562.3824 or info@spao.ca

Chaudiere Books author Pearl Pirie at the Ottawa Festival, May 1, 2011

Pearl Pirie reads alongside Gillian Sze and Lorna Crozier at the spring edition of the Ottawa International Writers Festival; the poetry cabaret is hosted by Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley; details at the festival website, here.

2 new Pearl Pirie / been shed bore mentions

including a review by Sandra Stephenson, and a recommendation by Sandra Ridley on the Advent Books Blog.