Chaudiere Books author Nicholas Lea reads on November 4 in Ottawa

Chaudiere Books author Nicholas Lea gives a rare reading as part of the fall 2011 edition of the ottawa small press book fair pre-reading, launching a new chapbook with The Emergency Response Unit. He reads with Leo Brent Robillard and Lillian Necakov at The Carleton Tavern, 223 Armstrong (at Parkdale), Ottawa on Friday, November 4, 2011. Doors at 7pm, reading at 7:30. For more information, check here.

Pearl Pirie on Monty Reid's "You Are Here," Ottawa literary mapping tour/project

Pearl's note on a new project hosted by The TREE Reading Series is now up at Local Tourist Ottawa.

Ottawa X-Press: best of Ottawa 2011: Marcus McCann's Soft Where (?)

It's good to see one of our books (again) in Ottawa X-Press' "Best of Ottawa" readers poll, his Soft Where listed in the "Best Work of Fiction/Non-fiction/Poetry by Local Writer" category, despite the fact that the book came out in 2009, and the fact that he's lived in Toronto for at least a year. Um, hooray! It must mean good things about how he and his work are seen in Ottawa, yes? Here's the entire list:

Best Work of Fiction/Non-fiction/Poetry by Local Writer
Alone in the Classroom, by Elizabeth Hay
Girl Unwrapped, by Gabriella Goliger
An Open Door in the Landscape, by Elisabeth Harvor
End of Days, by Max Turner
The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds, by Eric Enno Tamm
Soft Where, by Marcus McCann
Other 

interview with Marcus McCann at MyGSA.ca

Marcus McCann is a poet and journalist. He grew up in working-class Hamilton. From 2006-2011, he worked in various capacities at Xtra, eventually becoming the managing editor of both the Toronto and Ottawa editions. He recently left Xtra to begin law school. He's the author of one book of poems, Soft Where, and eight chapbooks. He was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert and Robert Kroetsch awards, and in 2009, he won the John Newlove Award. His second full-length book will be released in the spring of 2012.



Interview with Marcus McCann (read original post with links here)

What inspired you to become a writer?  At what age did you begin and what was your first published piece?
When I was a teenager, the Hamilton school board tolerated a little program run out of the back of the trunk of one of the English teachers, Meg Young. It was called the Student Literary Association; basically, it was a group of wayward, socially awkward teens who met twice a month in the basement of the Board of Ed building downtown. It was great. I met older teens who were also writers — Aidan Johnson, Marissa Achong, Julie with the monster Doc Martins, a guy named Nick who introduced us to the music of David Byrne… it was very important for me to have a network of young writers I could talk with. Anyway, I’m pretty sure my first published poetry was in the SLA’s annual anthology, circa 1997.

Partially thanks to the SLA, poetry became an obsession in my later teen years — when I was 17 or so, I gave up reading novels, because I thought that they couldn’t be art. Poetry, that was the one true art form. *Cough* My views have softened since then.

Could you tell us a bit about your writing process?  Do you have a favourite place where you write?  Do you need certain books/snacks/hats/animals/etc. with you?  Do you prefer well-lit rooms with lots of windows, or darkness with ridiculous amounts of candles and incense?  Are you a creature of routine (up at 6a.m., writing until noon when you break for a light lunch of arugula salad with a warm honey-dijon vinaigrette) or do you thrive on spontaneity and spend your writing time on the move from one greasy spoon to the next?

Before I get too caught up in my day – checking my Facebook and email, reading the news, what have you – I try to set aside at least two hours for reading and writing poetry, usually with my morning coffee. In my practice, I consider reading — reading deeply, trying to understand the mechanics of a poem, especially contemporary poetry — to be the same as writing. I try to save rewrites and fiddling with poems for after that.

What books are you reading right now and which authors do you love? What book have you read as an adult that you wish you had read when you were young?

Poetry books I’m reading right now: Robert Earl Stewart’s Campfire Radio Rhapsody and Craig Poile’s True Concessions.

Great books by contemporary Canadian poets, which I wish had been written when I was younger: Ken Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht and Margaret Christakos’ Sooner. They’re both master classes in what a poem can be. Intimidating stuff. Oh, and Sina Queyras’ Expressway, which for me, is one of the few book-long poem projects that has resonated with me. Those three books are essential reading from the last 10 years.

And if you’re a gay guy writing about gay male experience, read Mark Doty. He’s the finest poet of the gay male experience writing today, probably. Or maybe Carl Philips is.

Do you find that being both a poet and a journalist is a complex experience?  Do you feel the world exists dramatically differently through the lens of a poet vs. a journalist?

No more so, probably, than being a poet and a student, or a poet and an academic, or whatever. Poets have day jobs. That’s the reality. The essential question is one of, “when will I find the time?”

You published a large number of chapbooks before coming out with your first full-length poetry collection, Soft Where. Can you tell us a bit about your experience working with smaller independent presses and why you decided to focus on writing chapbooks?

How did it start? I went to dozens — literally dozens — of readings in Ottawa, some given by established poets, some given by emerging poets. I didn’t go to hock my own work; I went because I was interested in what poetry was being produced. Some of the readings I liked, some I didn’t. But I almost never, ever regretted going to readings.

I submitted poems to magazines — and got lots of rejections. At first, my acceptance rate was about 3 percent, meaning that for every 30 poems I sent out to magazines, one was accepted. It gradually improved. I took writing workshops — an early one with rob mclennan was especially helpful — and volunteered with a couple of local literary magazines, Bywords and the now defunct Yawp.

Out of that atmosphere of cross-pollination, my first chapbooks came to be. Heteroskpetical, with mclennan’s above/ground in 2007. Petty Illness Leaflet and the collaborative Basement Tapes with my own short-lived imprint, The Onion Union. The Tech/tonic Suite with Alberta’s Rubicon Press, which was the result of winning their annual chapbook contest. And Force Quit, from Toronto’s The Emergency Response Unit, thanks to connections I’d made in the small press world with Andrew Faulkner and, later, Leigh Nash.

Both magazine publishing and chapbook publishing were ways of testing myself and my poems. If anyone bought all of my chapbooks up until that point, then Soft Where, my first full length collection, would have had very little new to offer them. Some pieces had been published at least twice by then, first in magazines, then in chapbooks, before they were published in Soft Where. I’ve had a couple of very lucky breaks in my writing life, but micropresses, chapbooks and literary magazines were — are — essential to my development as a poet.

Between Soft Where and my second book, The Hard Return (which is coming out next spring with Insomniac) I did two additional chapbooks, Town in a long day of leaving (above/ground) and The Glass Jaw (Bywords), which, among other things, shows that chapbooks aren’t just a stepping stone to full-length book publishing, but are an end in themselves.

As a writer, do you feel that being openly queer has had any direct or indirect impact on your writing career and your success?

Let me start by saying this: if you’re a young queer writer, you have a long and proud history of queer poetry to draw on. It is a rich font of material, as deep and broad a poetic folio as any in the history of humankind. And living in the 21st century, you have unprecedented access to it. Saphho. Constantin Cavafy. Edna St Vincent Millay. Gerald Manley Hopkins. Hart Crane. Elizabeth Bishop. Gertrude Stein. Rimbaud. Verlaine. WH Auden. Thom Gunn. Frank O’Hara. Allen Ginsberg. John Ashbery.

And that work continues today. Some of the most celebrated poets of the last decades in Canada — Daphne Marlatt, Erin Moure, John Barton, Margaret Christakos, Nathalie Stephens — are queer. And queer poets are poised to be the leading figures of the next generation: Jen Currin, Anna Swanson, Trish Salah, and so on. Distinctive Canadian queer voices? RM Vaughan. Sky Gilbert. Billeh Nickerson. We cover the gamut.

So if you’re worried that you can’t be gay and a poet, don’t be. If you’re worried that you can’t express your sexuality — in all its butt-fucking and pussy-licking specificity — don’t be. If you’re worried that you can’t express your gender(s), don’t be. There is a place for you in Canadian literature.

I’ve noticed that many writers have work that revolves around particular obsessions.  Do you find you have specific topics, themes or issues that you keep coming back to as a writer?  If so, how does this impact your writing process?

Yes! Technology. Urban space. Sexuality. Writing and textuality. Consumer and popular culture. I will probably circle around these themes over and over again, my whole life. I think the best thing to do is embrace it and push it to the limit.

If you’re always writing about, love, say, maybe you should ask yourself, “Have I written about this from every angle? From the point of view of the lover, the object of affection, the scorned lover, a person who is not in love, a person who is in love with two people? Have I tried talking about love using a sonnet, a cento, a glosa? Have I written a poem about romantic love, filial love, paternal love, agape? Have I examined lust?”

Describe your favourite meal the way you’d describe it in a poem.  We’re curious!

Frosting like epoxy, caulking,
shaving cream we drew tidings on,
then ate. The greedy treat sparkled,

it came on springy, infringed.
Our portions were bricks and mortar.

Gastrics unglued us; we were glass-eyed,
weepy, docile. Sugar hormones
clung uneasily to duty.

We were woozy, our enamels burned.
Already gluttons, nodding

like loose buttons on a sock puppet,
mmm, good, yes. We licked the tips, sighed
and crashed like an Excel spreadsheet,

yeah, it was perfect, or close to,
or who cares if it was perfect.

Do you find you are impacted by place?  Does an urban space provide you with a lot of material for your writing? Have you lived/traveled outside of Canada and have those places/spaces influenced your work?

Yes, in terms of urban space. I find a lot of poets who live in cities still resort to poems about birds and wheat fields. Why is that? I write poems about cell phones and puffy coats and apartment towers because for most Canadians, that’s more likely to be an image they can conjure in their heads, compared to a red-throated lorikeet or a creeping thistle, or whatever.

What was the best advice you’ve received as a writer and what advice would you give to young writers who are trying to get published?

Read way more poetry than you write. Read deeply. Read classic poetry. Read Canadian poetry. Read contemporary poetry. Read queer poetry. Read, read, read. Every library in the country is full of poetry books just waiting for you.

And write way more than you publish. I know writers for whom the business of writing — networking, trying to get published, self-promotion — has crowded out actual writing. They will never be great poets. Pour your attention into writing the best poems you can, and when you’re tired and bleary eyed, use those parts of the day for trying to get published.

Joe Blades' Chaudiere Books launch, October 27, 2011; Fredericton NB

27 October, Thursday, 7 pm.
@ Westminster Books,
445 King Street,
Fredericton, New Brunswick
Tel 1-800-561-READ to order autographed books.

Tristis Ward launching Bones of the Magus: All that Remains (Broken Jaw Press)

& Joe Blades (photo by Sophie Lavoie) launching Casemate Poems (Collected) (Chaudiere Books)

new interview with Marcus McCann at MyGSA.ca

An interview with Marcus McCann as "Aquarium's feature Queer writer" at MyGSA.ca

Monty Reid reads Sunday, September 25 at Sasquatch (Ottawa)

Ottawa poet and musician Monty Reid reads as the feature at Sunday's Sasquatch Reading Series.
2-5pm, Royal Oak Pub, 161 Laurier Avenue (basement)
Open set + featured reader(s).

Pearl Pirie reads in France, Sept 20, 2011;

to launch her new chapbook with Corrupt Press;

Chaudiere Books has moved!

please address all mailings, cheques, requests and communications, effective immediately, to:



Chaudiere Books
402 McLeod Street #3
Ottawa ON Canada
K2P 1A6

Pearl Pirie responds to a Gregory Betts essay;

On her blog, Pearl Pirie responds to (among other things) an essay by Gregory Betts, recently posted in the third issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry + poetics.

Monty Reid (workshop + reading) with George Amabile at the TREE Reading Series, Ottawa, October 11, 2011

George Amabile + Monty Reid
Tuesday October 11
Arts Court, 2 Daly Avenue, Ottawa

6:45pm Free Workshop
Monty Reid on You Are Here

In this series of 4 workshops, we will explore the spaces in and around Arts Court, the end result being a collaborative digital map with poems.

8:00pm Readings
Dead Poet Reading, Open Mic and Featured Reader(s).

George Amabile
Published in over 100 anthologies, magazines and journals, George Amabile is also the author of 7 books.

Monty Reid
Monty Reid's Disappointment Island won the Lampman-Scott Award for poetry, and he is also a 3-time winner of Alberta’s Stephansson Award for Poetry.

Chaudiere Books author Marcus McCann reads at Toronto's Pivot Reading Series with Richard Krueger + Ralph Kolewe, Sept. 21, 2011

The Pivot train has started, and there’s no getting off, Toronto. Join us on September 21 for readings from three fantastic man-poets, Ralph Kolewe, Richard Krueger, and Marcus McCann. As always, at the Press Club, and as always, doors are at 8. Your gracious host is Elisabeth de Mariaffi.

Pivot Readings at the Press Club
Featuring Ralph Kolewe, Richard Krueger, and Marcus McCann

Wednesday, September 21
The Press Club
850 Dundas Street West, Toronto
8 PM
PWYC 

Ralph Kolewe lives in Toronto. He is co-editor of InfluencySalon.ca, the online iteration of Influency: A Toronto Literary Salon. He makes his living as a software engineer. He takes photographs, which have been shown in various venues (you can see some of them online here), and has recently begun to admit that he also writes poems (some of which you can read here).

Richard Krueger grew up in Prince George, British Columbia, where he eventually received his Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Northern British Columbia in 1999. He was winner of the inaugural Barry McKinnon Chapbook Prize in 2006. The Monotony of Fatal Accidents, released this fall with BookThug, is his first book of poetry, though many of the poems that comprise it previously appeared in chapbook form.

Marcus McCann is a poet and journalist, the author of Soft Where and eight chapbooks, most recently The Glass Jaw and Town in a Long  Day of Leaving. In Ottawa, he was the artistic director of the Transgress festival, facilitator of the Naughty Thoughts Book Club and a host of CKCU’s Literary Landscapes. He was the managing editor of Xtra in Toronto and Ottawa until this summer; this month [September], he started law school at U of T. His next full length collection, The Hard Return, will be released in April with Insomniac.

--
Pivot Readings at the Press Club
pivotreadings.ca
@PivotReadings

Every other Wednesday at the Press Club in Toronto, we present the writers breathing life into Canadian literary culture. Established and emerging, time-tested and fresh; we're what's happening in literature, right now. Your hosts are Elisabeth de Mariaffi and Sachiko Murakami.

a new interview with Pearl Pirie, by Sean Moreland

is now on-line, as part of the third issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry + poetics, edited by rob mclennan.

Chaudiere Books' "Decalogue" moving sale!

To celebrate our recent move, and to make space for upcoming new titles, we're moving both of our Decalogue titles for half-price until the end of September: $10 instead of the retail $20.

The "Decalogue" series was built as a series of ongoing conversations, featuring ten Ottawa writers per volume, and Ottawa-specific artwork by a local artist on each cover.

Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets
edited by rob mclennan; with Stephen Brockwell, Michelle Desbarats, Anita Dolman, Anne Le Dressay, Karen Massey, Una McDonnell, rob mclennan, Max Middle, Monty Reid and Shane Rhodes.
for more information on the book and/or authors, check the link here.
$10

Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers
edited by rob mclennan; with Emily Falvey, Matthew Firth, Gabriella Goliger, Alison Gresik, John-James Ford, Clare Latremouille, John Lavery, Nadine McInnis, rob mclennan and Ian Roy.
for more information on the book and/or authors, check the link here.
$10

For orders, add $5 for mailing. Paypal available via www.robmclennan.blogspot.com
or send cheques payable to rob mclennan, c/o 402 McLeod Street, #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6

new Pearl Pirie chapbook by Corrupt Press, France!

Chaudiere author Pearl Pirie has gone across the ocean to launch her newest chapbook, Mammals of Hoarfrost, now available from French publisher Corrupt Press. As well, be sure to catch her "call and response" poems up at SPAO's Red Wall Gallery, 168 Dalhousie Street, Ottawa, until September 22.

Poem by Joe Blades up on Liptstick Press' Poems for Jack Layton‏

a new poem, "just jack" by Chaudiere Books author Joe Blades, now online at the Lipstick Press blog as part of an ongoing series on/for the late Jack Layton.

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.

Amanda Earl on Pearl Pirie's "call and response"

Amanda Earl's report on Leslie Hossack's photography exhibit "Cities of Stone, People of Dust" and Pearl Pirie's poems in response.

Monty Reid participates in Wakefield, Quebec's Wakefest 2011

On Sunday, August 28, Ottawa poet Monty Reid will be reading as part of Wakefield, Quebec's Wakefest, in the "Plan 99 North Reading Series" at The Kaffé 1870 Pub, alongside Gil Adamson and Bruce Taylor, with another reading held the previous day featuring Pasha Malla, Iain Reid and Kevin Connolly. The readings each day run from 2:30pm to 4:00pm. For further information, check out the article in The Ottawa Citizen, or the Wakefest homepage.

Michael Bryson's short story collection playlist, by Dani Couture

is now up on Dani Couture's blog.

Whether I write with the music on or the music off, there’s always a tune in my head. Often the song in my head will tell me what I’m thinking. I’ll find myself repeating “A Day in the Life” by The Beatles, for instance, and only then realize that I’ve been reflecting on a particular headline that I read on the way in to work: “I’ve read the news today, oh, boy.” My subconscious seems to transport messages to me through music. Of course, I also have an affinity to certain lyrics, certain phrases, certain rhetorical approaches: “Poets, priests, and politicians/ have words to thank for their positions,” sang The Police. That’s one of my favourite lyrics; it’s clear about the lack of clarity that can be provided by language (“Who’s Zoomin’ Who?” as Aretha Franklin said). You can see this theme in many of the songs on my list. Also, I dig the 2/4 beat, so the first song on the list was a natural. It’s very hard for me to select a 15 song list, so I’ve cheated a bit. As Janis Joplin said, “I’m ready, man!”