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.

Monty Reid reads October 23 at Storyfest 2014, Hudson QC

Chaudiere Books author Monty Reid launches Garden as part of Hudson, Quebec's Storyfest 2014. He reads alongside Stephanie Bolster and Arleen Paré on Thursday, October 23, 2014 at Mlle. Clifford's Floral Emporium and English Tea Room, 60 Rue Cameron, Hudson QC at 7:30pm. Tickets for the event are $15. 

Other authors performing as part of this year's Storyfest include Margaret Atwood, Graeme Gibson, Merilyn Simonds, Peter Behrens, Michael Winter and Kate Pullinger. For ticket information, including information on festival passes, click here.

Chaudiere Books Launch with Roland Prevost, Amanda Earl and Monty Reid

Chaudiere Books Launch with Roland Prevost, Amanda Earl and Monty Reid
Hosted by rob mclennan
Ottawa International Writers Festival

Monday October 27, 8pm
Free event
Fox and Feather, 2nd Floor • 283 Elgin St.
For further information on this event, and other events in this year's Ottawa International Writers Festival, click here:
     
Ottawa’s Chaudiere Books was recently relaunched by rob mclennan and new co-publisher Christine McNair, and the Writers Festival is proud to be launching their 2014 poetry titles.

A riotous assemblage of long poems focusing on the crazy years of 1920s Montparnasse—a melting pot of artists and poets. Amanda Earl’s Kiki plays with language and form, taking the familiar first-person format of journaling to streams of language to snippets of visual imagery to present the wildness of those years, focusing on the persona of Kiki de Montparnasse, a maverick who—much like the poems presented here—cut across intellectual and artistic boundaries. Sexy and smart. Read more... 

An incisive and playful first book exploring language and space, Singular Plurals presents us with fictive—often surreal—images encapsulated in text that is layered in meaning, playful with language and polyphonous in tone. The poems explore the irregular spaces and tangential lines that separate and connect us, sometimes by gazing from a great distance, then zooming in for the close-up shot. Roland Prevost is a winner of Bywords’ John Newlove Poetry Award and a self-described “explorer of here/now’s edge.” Singular Plurals is his first full-length book of poetry. 

Garden is a cycling and recycling meditation on the garden, its edges and ecologies, throughout an entire calendar year. Award-winning poet and under-performing gardener Monty Reid explores and reinvigorates the possibilities of poetic meditation over twelve full months of his home garden in Ottawa’s east end.

our three fall poetry titles are available for pre-order!

Our three fall poetry titles -- Amanda Earl's Kiki, Roland Prevost's Singular Plurals and Monty Reid's Garden -- might all be in-hand (and they're GORGEOUS), but it will still be a couple of weeks before they're available in stores, so we thought we'd offer a pre-order sale! Until October 1st, we're offering each of these titles for $17 each (not including shipping, obviously). Add $3 per title for shipping, with an extra $3 to the total for American orders, and $6 to the total for International orders (see how easy that is?). Simply utilize the paypal donate button, and tell us which title or titles you wish us to send you. Or perhaps you want all three?

 
Be sure to check out the links to their books for information and a bunch of bonus materials! And of course, review copies available upon request: simply email rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com

Canadian Writers Blog Tour: Amanda Earl and Anita Dolman

Chaudiere authors Amanda Earl (Kiki) and Anita Dolman (Decalogue: Ten Ottawa Poets) both participate in the "Canadian Writers Blog Tour" over at Amanda Earl's blog, in which they both discuss current projects and possible future directions.

Indiegogo thanks!

Incredible thanks to all who supported our Indiegogo Campaign, whether through direct contributions or forwarding information on our beloved campaign. We're enormously grateful to everyone who helped not only make our goal, but even slightly beyond it! It is incredibly gratifying to know that, during this period of rebuilding, we have such wide support from literary communities in Ottawa, across Canada and even in a couple of other countries. And the best part was knowing that most of the perks folk were interested in were our books themselves. We're just starting to begin the fall season of new titles by Amanda Earl, Roland Prevost and Monty Reid, and will be announcing soon information for launches, as well as working away to confirm our full 2015 list.

As promised, we thank those who chose our "everlasting gratitude" perk: Ben Ladouceur, Craig Calhoun, Elaine Nobbs, Karin McNair and Rob Fairchild, as well as a small handful of those who wish to remain anonymous (we know who you are).

We'll be announcing very soon pre-order information for our three fall poetry titles, but until then, we can announce our two spring titles: The Collected William Hawkins, edited by Cameron Anstee, and a second poetry title by N.W. (formerly Nicholas) Lea!

fall fiction event: rob mclennan reads with Marguerite Pigeon and Christian McPherson

Fall fiction fans, come join us Tues. Oct 7th, at Pressed Urban Bar (750 Gladstone Ave., Ottawa) for an evening of short and long fiction, as Marguerite Pigeon lands from the West coast with her first collection of stories, Some Extremely Boring Drives (NeWest).

Ottawa writers Christian McPherson and rob mclennan assist, as McPherson samples his mad-funny novel Cube Squared (Nightwood) and mclennan reads from his first book of short fiction, The Uncertainty Principle: stories (Chaudiere).

Tuesday, October 7, 2014
doors 7:30pm, readings begin at 8pm
Pressed (Urban Gourmet Sandwich Bar)
750 Gladstone Ave., Ottawa

Pearl Pirie interviewed at Poets Touching Trees

Pearl Pirie recently responded to interview questions over at Poets Touching Trees. Not that long ago, rob mclennan also answered questions through the same series, as did a whole slew of others. Who might be next?

Indigogo Crowdfunding & an interview with Chaudiere Books

The website OttawaWrites (who interviewed publisher rob mclennan recently in one of their earlier podcasts) posted some of the text of same in a recent post to help the last few percentage points of our great Indiegogo Campaign. Thanks, much!

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.

At the Desk: Pearl Pirie

Pearl Pirie recently had a short piece posted as part of the "At the Desk" series over at Open Book: Ontario. And did you know she has a BookThug title forthcoming? Much congratulations!

Chaudiere Books indiegogo campaign: new perks by Bolster, McNair and The Complete William Hawkins!

There are less than two weeks left in the Chaudiere Books Indiegogo Campaign, and we've added a whole slew of new perks! You can pick up two signed above/ground press chapbooks by Stephanie Bolster (including her out-of-print first solo publication, Three Bloody Words from 1996), a complete run of the long poem magazine STANZAS (1993-2006) [see the bibliography for such here], the possibility of having your own single-page letterpress broadside printed by Christine McNair, or even participation in her upcoming bookbinding workshop! Also, you can pick up copies of two works by Ottawa poet and musician William Hawkins, including Dancing Alone: Selected Poems 1960-1990 (Broken Jaw Press, 2005) and our newly-announced forthcoming critical selected, The Complete Poems of William Hawkins (Chaudiere Books: spring 2015), edited by Cameron Anstee! As well, there are still copies left of the documentary on John Newlove, signed works by Griffin Prize-winning poet David W. McFadden and a wide array of subscription packages for Chaudiere Books and above/ground press. We've already announced the publication of Chris Turnbull's Continua for 2015, but watch for an announcement soon for our other forthcoming titles!