CFP for ACCUTE 2015: Making Contact: Circulating Small and Micro Press Poetry in Canada

Cameron Anstee (University of Ottawa) and I have put together a proposal for a panel at ACCUTE 2015 at the University of Ottawa. We are currently seeking abstracts (see the PDF below for full details) for a panel on the distribution of small and micro press poetry in Canada.

The deadline for abstracts is November 1, 2014 and submissions may be sent to martincj@ucalgary.ca and canst025@uottawa.ca

We look forward to seeing what people have to say on the topic! I have also included a link to the PDF at the bottom, in case the embedded document cannot be read.

~Colin






PDF of ACCUTE 2015 CFP

Indegogo Campaign for Vancouver DTES Writers

A note from Elee Kraljii Gardiner 

"Hi everyone,

I run a writing program, Thursdays Writing Collective, in Vancouver, and I’m wondering if any of you could help disperse some info. 

Every year we publish a book of our writing. The results are amazing - aside from reflecting in depth collaborations with writers and thinkers from all over, our books give participants a publishing history, a legit title to represent and sell at readings, and professional experience in the literary community. Most of you know the thrill of seeing your name in print and how transformative it is. When you’re dealing with systematic marginalization - which many DTES residents confront every day -  the chance to self-determine is critical.

We’re supported by Canada Council and SFU but grant changes mean we can’t get funding for a publication without ceding editorial control. We’re in the last 2 weeks of an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for our 7th book.  We are 69% funded.  If we don’t meet our goal we don’t get any money.

Would you consider sharing the info about our campaign with anybody you think might be able to contribute or further share it? It would be a tremendous help. 

Here is a link to the campaign page where you can see perks donated by Amber Dawn, Meredith Quartermain, Cathleen With, Alex Leslie, Betsy Warland, John Asfour, Arsenal Pulp Press, Clint Burnham and Heather Jessup. The writers have been incredibly generous in supporting us! 

Thursdays Writing Collective participants will be writing poems to - and using word prompts suggested by- donors. It will be really fun to see what that sort of connection produces.

On the Indiegogo page you can see the one minute videos that Fred Wah and Madeline Thien each made to endorse what we do. 

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/voice-to-voice-by-thursdays-writing-collective

Here is a link to Thursdays Writing Collective’s site:

http://www.thursdayswritingcollective.ca/

Finally, here is a link to our Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/thursdayswritingcollective?ref=hl

Thank you for reading this far - I know it is a hassle to click through and parse the pages but every click you make is literally changing someone’s life. 

Cheers!

Elee Kraljii Gardiner"

30 day challenge and Tumblr

I have decided to start blogging again, but not here, for the moment. That may change when I get my website up and running.

In the meantime, those who want to follow my 30 day yoga/reading/writing challenge (which starts tomorrow) can do so here.

Those who want to challenge themselves alongside me for the next month are welcome to do so and I will gladly follow you, that we may all be better kept honest.

Much love!
Colin

Canadian micro-press study approved for takeoff!

Micro-press Survey Recruitment Statement

As some may know, I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of English, at the University of Calgary. My doctoral research focuses on the impact had in Canadian poetry by chapbook and micro-presses and, in pursuit of measurable data regarding the publication of ephemeral poetic works, I am currently seeking the publishers of such works to take some time to fill out a survey on their publications.

In the project, I define micro-press as any press that typically prints runs of 100 copies of a work or fewer, that uses human, rather than predominantly automated or digital labour in production and printing of works (thus, not digital presses and so forth), and that does not assign ISBN numbers to publications. While there is no direct compensation for filling out the survey, this research may go a long way towards furthering awareness of the publications involved, while also contributing to a deeper body of knowledge regarding ephemeral publishing in Canada.

Participation in the research is voluntary and, if desired, can be kept anonymous. If you would like to know more about the research or would like to receive a copy of the survey to complete, please contact me at martincj@ucalgary.ca. If you are not involved in such a press but know someone who is, please circulate this call for responders to that person (or those persons, if that be the case) and invite them to contact me regarding the survey.

10 Things You (Actually) Need to Know Today

Leafing through my various news sources this morning, I keep seeing the standard story title "10 Things You Need to Know Today". The stories are full of such trite events and pseudo-news as Mitt Romney's spending a crucial second day campaigning in Florida, Obama is out-fundraising him, Truthers doubt the (independently verified) positive job numbers, there was a blown call in a baseball game.

Really? We need to know this stuff? What a load. It's thanksgiving this weekend and that seems to me like a reason to take a pause and consider what we actually need to know - some of it nice and some not so nice.

1) Thanksgiving is not a religious holiday. It's a historical one, wherein millions of people celebrate the moment colonial expansion hit the shores of North America. The fact that Canada doesn't even celebrate it on the same day as the USA should, of itself, be ample proof that this holiday isn't about the one great god but, rather, that it's politically motivated and expedient. Millions of Natives have good reason not to celebrate.

2) The people who really need a paid day off this Thanksgiving aren't getting one. They work at the grocery stores, the breakfast restaurants, the hotels, the janitorial services...they work harder, for less, than most of the people who're chewing on those dead turkeys this afternoon. What does that mean? It's not much of a holiday for many (perhaps most) of the people working and those of us being thankful for a day off should know this and, if we go to those restaurants etc. and make more work for people, we should thus tip accordingly.

3) Living in Canada is not necessarily a reason to be thankful - unless you're one of the people for whom the system works, who form the segment of society that can follow Stephen Harper's advice to invest when the economy tanks and hundreds of thousands of people lose their jobs and can't replace them, unless you're not one of the victims of Canada's (still enduring though, thankfully, less so) colonization and abuse of subaltern populations, unless you're one of the few women in Canada who earns above the mean for your industry...thankfulness is a kind of indolence. For too many, it's a self-satisfied solipsism that disregards what it means to pay homage to a debt owed. We need to know that, and examine ourselves accordingly to ask if there's more we should be doing to help people become truly thankful.

4) We should be thankful. Thankful to our parents, our families, our friends; to all the people who have made an effort at some time in our lives to make those lives better. We should be thankful, who can wake up in the morning, knowing that there are folks out there who love us unequivocally - not despite our flaws, but because of them; because of the things that make us the unique, whole people that we are. Being thankful means giving thanks: call your loved ones or visit them and let them know how thankful you are that they shape your lives.

5) We all see dead people. We can't, actually, give thanks to those who've died, no matter how we miss them and still feel that they somehow remain as part of our lives. Guess what? they do. We can't thank them in person, those parents and grandparents and mentors who've passed, but we sure can share them with the people we love; we can haul out those photo albums and stories of holidays past, and we can re-iterate the love they felt for us and, by so doing, share that love with the people we have chose as our own loves and lovers.

6) Wherever we are is just one small corner in a very big world. How do we contribute to that corner? For most of us, effecting real change on a global scale is unlikely and that's fine. Even the people who effect such change (and let us not forget how frequently it's for the worse) start in their small corner. How do we define our corners and our communities? How do we contribute to them? What are the things we do that might, whether credited or not, cause people touched by us to give some kind of thanks? We need to contemplate these things and learn to know them - only then, can we appraise their worth and continue to work upon them.

7) Raised in a Mennonite community, I've had humility hammered into me since birth. Well, I'm not really a Mennonite and I'm not really a humble person. I need to know this because knowing it means that I can learn what my true gifts are and make the best use of them possible. Today, we need to know who we are - not in relation to George Clooney or to any other celebrity whose omnipresence in our faces has more to do with contractual obligations to multinational "content" providers than to any actual personhood - but in relation to ourselves and those we hold dear, whoever they are. Understanding comes from solitude and contemplation and the increasingly rare ability to put our fucking phones away and turn off the ringers. We need to know silence, to know who we are.

8) Knowing this, we need to know that we don't need to know "why". Why? is both the most and least important question in our lives. Answering it often and of habit creates the critical minds needed to resist external programming, (assuming we answer it with honest intention), it helps us actually ratify our passions, our beliefs, and our actions with vision and with clarity. However, we don't need to know why. Knowing ourselves IS knowing why - and, with that in mind, we can plan our actions, we can sing our songs, and we can love our loves without a shred of doubt and with all of the selves that we have to muster. That's why.

9) We need to know fiction. Too many people today confuse it with fact and vice versa. With Point 1 still in mind, I cannot help but remember that Saint Augustine, the founder of biblical exegesis, frankly stated that Christ spoke in parables and that the bible was analogic. That means, it stated greater truths about the being of mankind by not stating literal truths - in much the same way that poets do. For every single man and woman on earth who thinks that they need to read religious text literally I can only say this: stop it. Read those beautiful poems for what they are and understand that our language always and must be metaphoric. We all need to know a good story and to understand that it's just a story.

10) We need to know each other. We won't have much to be thankful otherwise. So, stop reading and jump on your bicycles or pick up your phones or say hello to the neighbor in your condo building or do whatever you need to do to create the outreach that is this lived experience. Happy Thanksgiving, people.

Buggered Seasons

Fall's an interesting time when yer working in academia. It brings new students, new committees, new perspectives on old work - even new peers and office mates and, of course, a huge pile of new work. In Calgary, the weather is typically lovely in the fall; with hot sunny days and crisp nights that beg for bike rides and glasses of wine with friends.

Fall, in other words, is my spring. It's a time of rebirth and a renewed focus on my work. Typically, I suffer in the spring months. My allergies flare up, my deadlines loom, the schizophrenic weather patterns wreak havoc on my commute (typically by bike) with alternating rain and freeze patterns that turn the roads into shuffleboards of death. Melting snow reveals gravel and garbage, I suddenly realize that I packed on 20 lbs over the winter, and I freak out about whether or not I'll have work and income over the summer.

Spring usually feels like the grim knell of death, accompanied by relentless prairie wind and ominous skies.

So far this fall, I've attended five readings of one kind or another (participated in one as a performer), have completed new poetry for the first time this year, actually started work on the significant components of my dissertation that should have been well under way in the spring, and have begun to consider some dim glimmerings of hope for a future that extends past my PhD studies.

What, then, is the deal with literary spring? While I understand that it's not actually predicated upon my own experience, the chorus of evocations towards spring that echoes through the millennia overwhelmingly drowns those few (I'm thinking of Thomas King's marvellous treatment of spring as an ominous harbinger of wind-born depression in Medicine River) voices that seem in accord. Perhaps, my feeling is just that - mine. Perhaps it's an Alberta thing, borne by the beautiful and sunny Indian Summers we experience here. Perhaps it's even a Canadian thing - many of our cities are toilets in the spring (I'm looking at you, Montreal) and downright magical in the fall (I'm looking at you, Montreal).

At any rate, I think it's high time to recognize that, north of the 49 anyway, we've been getting our seasons wrong. It's time to stop thinking like American farmers and imagine rebirth in new ways, that don't have to do with raising high-fructose corn syrup and potato chips. We can see rebirth as a human, a social thing that need not be disassociated from the environment but may also have inspiration there.
Bugger spring, it's fall - a friend is singing tonight at Cafe Koi, it's Nuit Blanche tonight across the country, and I think it's time to celebrate some new beginnings.

Mother's Day and the Alberta Death Sentence

It's Mother's Day and for me, living in Alberta, that's a reminder of the way that my 44 year old mom died here during the Klein Revolution of the 90s. As the provincial government slashed healthcare expenses in order to remain, as they called it, fiscally responsible, people suffered and died. While under care and direct supervision in hospital for Aplastic Anemia, my mom suffered not one but two strokes as side effects of her treatment. The strokes went un-diagnosed and it wasn't until 8 months later that she got an MRI which showed the brain damage. It was, of course, months too late for any treatment or rehabilitation of the damage.

She changed hospitals once she had been bankrupted and the insurance company withdrew benefits and, under care in the new facility, contracted the flesh eating bacteria that actually killed her. The medical system in Alberta at that time was simply not staffed and equipped well enough to provide real care.

Looking at the landscape now, we see lots of writing on how the situation in Alberta has improved. That's a lie. Per capita healthcare spending has still not reached the levels of the 80s and a friend's recent trials highlight the lack of progress we see here. She's been ill all winter and finally, at the beginning of May, got to see a specialist who told here there's a good chance she has Multiple Sclerosis. He then scheduled a follow-up appointment for September, five months away.

My friend is lucky. She was born in Quebec. She went back three days after the specialist's appointment, had an MRI that exposed the brain lesions causing her suffering two days later and, less than a week after her diagnosis, is now under treatment. Less than a week. There are many people who say that Alberta's stance on healthcare, on the environment, on collecting taxes from corporations to pay for social programs, is an embarrassment.

It isn't. It's a threat. My friend said, when she left, that she cannot feel safe here. How could she? The administration in Alberta is a sociopathic enterprise that treats corporations better than it does citizens and people who aren't even citizens receive what might actually be called psychopathic treatment. A sovereign nation like, say, China can invest directly into our resource development and have the option of paying tax. How often do these sovereign entities actually pay? Never. Why would they? They don't live here and don't need the money to live healthy, fulfilling lives.

Write your MLAs. Pressure them to start collecting taxes from corporations and sovereign entities at the same level they do citizens. Pressure them to put that money into healthcare, into education, into the arts and social programs that make life possible and desirable. The myth of conservative fiscal responsibility is a lie and a threat to their social responsibility. It must stop. Whose mom will die next?

Review of Ash Rizin

So I went to see Ash Rizin on Saturday night, a Hip Hop Opera, or perhaps "hip hopera" put on by the ATP at the Martha Cohen Theatre. Frankly, the show was hit and miss. Some things were very good: the writing is strong, the use of technology to create graffiti onstage was clever and interesting, and the music mix was fantastic. The story's a hiphop tale from the generic Canadian suburbs and while the Eastside vs The Park gang thing gets a bit over the top, it never loses sight of its setting or audience. For that reason, the problems with authenticity and talent really stand out. The show's badass couple, Dosha and Gat (played by Allison Lynch and Kyle Jespersen) are great: over the top, talented - Lynch is a hell of a singer and Jespersen's rapping never takes him out of character - and entirely believable but the star characters Ash, Clean and Dee (played by Aaron Hursh, Ksenia Thurgood, and Luc Roderique) don't come off so well. Hursh and Roderique do a reasonable job of rapping and their acting...well, it's not great but not terrible. I never really felt these characters come to life but they weren't actively bad either. But, in a city like Calgary where there is so much good hip hop and rap talent, I cannot understand why ATP would use actors to rap and not the other way around. The music drives this show and the performers are clearly not musicians. Hip hop is decades old and most of the audience probably knows what the real thing looks like. The director and casting director really shouldn't have tried to fake it with actors and amateurs: the freestyle scene between Ash and Clean was so obviously not freestyle that I could only squirm and wish some of the people around town who can actually do that stuff were there doing it. To top it off, Thurgood's character Clean was an awful casting choice. Her singing was weak and was more jazz than hiphop, her rapping sucked more than the role allowed, she danced like a weird white girl who doesn't actually listen to this music, and she was so obviously too old to play a chickeh working at the mall while trying to make good that her character appeared ridiculous. By the end of the show, the only character who actually came off as authentic was Mike Wasko's evil aryan bastard Angel. Singing a metal song about how much he hates hip hop, he makes the clear statement to the audience that everyone's posing but him. Given that this is a hip hopera, the fact that only the hard rock character actually lives up to his place in life seems to undermine the whole point of the show. These problems with authenticity and performance also get troubled in spots by lazy stage management: the characters, in some of the most emotionally loaded scenes, have to wander on and off with no change in sound or lighting, thus losing any punch their performances might have given. The show has potential and I won't tell people not to go...but to ATP and friends all I can say is next time, use the real deal and quit acting so fucking much. Theatre only gets good when people forget that it's theatre.

filling Station Subscription Sale

filling Station Magazine is having a subscription sale. Subscriptions for three issues runs $17 (you pretty much get a free issue at that price) and you can buy gift subscriptions for just ten bucks. Go to http://www.fillingstation.ca/ for more information and to order online through Paypal.

Honest Graphics

This one's for my COMS 363 students who've had to do the "analysis of a graphic" assignment. Enjoy.

Western thinkers might do well to recall where their empirical science originated. Slavoj, the world demands better of you than this.

Food for thought: here

Wasting and Wanting

Recently, my darling dear had occasion to comment on my habit of reheating day-old coffee in the microwave while brewing a fresh pot. She asked if it's because I like the stuff. No, not really. She asked whether I do it to save money. Well no, I responded, I'm making a fresh pot after all. Ahhh, she said. So it's because you don't want to waste anything, waste not want not, hey?

Yes. She got me dead to rights. I can't bear to throw out anything that might still be used or consumed. I suppose I live up to the frugal Mennonite stereotype, even though I'm long past identifying as a Mennonite. But the term 'waste not, want not' got me thinking. I'm willing to bet that many people don't actually know what that phrase means. I've no doubt my darling, an expert grammarian and adroit user of the English language, has a clear understanding of the verb 'to want' and its etymology, but I clearly remember a time when I did not - and it wasn't so long ago.

I imagine when Poor Richard spit the little aphorism out, folks who read it - and enshrined it in our vernacular - understood it clearly. If you don't waste, you won't want. That is, you won't lack, or go without. A good Puritan sentiment, that. Be frugal, save and recycle and reuse and you'll never starve or suffer wanting of life's needs. Somewhere along the line, though, those needs became desires. I imagine that happened when North Americans conceptually lost the definition of the word 'need' and it's closely related pal, 'lack'.

Let's face it (another fun term, perhaps for another time). Those of us reading and writing these blogs don't know a thing about need. We didn't settle the savage land and we're not the people displaced by those setters. We didn't make it through world wars and great depressions - though some of us may have seen our nest egg get devalued during the last recession and have decided to work a few more years to ensure we get to keep that cozy retirement villa in Arizona or Nelson or wherever. We truthfully want nothing to ensure our continued survival.

Yet we keep using that term - waste not, want not - as though it still has relevance. Ask people what their wants are and you'll doubtless get an exhaustive litany of items and ideas, because we want lots of stuff. The word no longer means lack, though that's rather invisibly implied, but rather it means desire. I may not need that bag of chips or that deep tissue massage or that 1982 Porsche 911 (Targa, of course, with the off-white paint) but I sure want them.

So what do we mean when we use the phrase? I can't reasonably say that since I failed to waste a Porsche, I must not want one. That makes no sense whatsoever. Or, if we play with the negative form of the phrase, my wasting of food means I actually want that kind of food. While there may be some truth to that, that I fail to use what I desire implies that I'm wasteful and can afford to be, because I want not - I'll drink a cup of the fresh coffee too. Truthfully, I really have no needs that can't be easily met and I'm happy as long as I continue to consume, whether I need to or not. There's a lot of slippage in a term like this, a phrase we've used so long that even when its key words change meaning and its context becomes irrelevant, we continue using it.

My previous understanding of the phrase - one that a cursory search of its use online confirms as fairly prevalent, at least among the internet blogging and tweeting crowd - was simply, that if I waste it, I don't want it. Usually, the term comes flying out when the 'it', whatever it is, should, in fact, be wanted or desired. The term has evolved from its original context as an aphoristic truism, a cause and effect bit of wisdom that we can adopt to better manage our lives, to a sardonic prediction of future dissatisfaction; a snide statement that someday the waster will desire the wasted stuff and there won't be any left around.

I suppose that's ironic. Once more our language proves we've devolved into facile whiners regulated by our desires rather than any legitimate needs. We envy each other and curse people for throwing away that which we didn't actually want, ourselves, anyway - blighting those wasters with a future of unsatisfied cravings that we hope they yearn for so greatly that they read those aches as needs. This, of course, is how we form fetishes and let's face it: fetishes fuel North America in ways we can no longer wean ourselves from.

This saddens me, while at the same time, leaving me with a sense of personal gratitude. I'm saddened because I'm clearly entrenched in a society that suffers a significant psychological illness - one that no longer even understands the words it utters and uses that misunderstanding to lash out at its own members while it consumes at a rate it understands to be unsustainable. I'm grateful because, when I drink that bitter cup of day-old coffee while the fresh pot brews, I do so knowing that my darling understands that my frugal soul just wants to ensure I get an extra cup of coffee in the morning.

Child bride dies of internal bleeding in Yemen

Child bride dies of internal bleeding in Yemen

Aren't we glad we no longer need feminism?

loss

sometimes i think
of loss. not lost opportunity,
no - my faith precludes that
sort of thing. i never lose cuff-
links, wallets, travel mugs, passports.
can't lose what i don't have anyway.
i thought i lost a car once - my first porsche -
but i found i just lost the car.

a couple of times i lost races but
won them later so that's okay. a person
told me i lost my mind but that never happened.
i frequently lose my cool, having never had it.

sometimes, in the spring, the muck,
i think about loss. another, a love, a life
less loss, though i also miss Johnny Cash.
i lose friends all the time. hope, they call
that. a friend lost her mom.
and i cant find the
words for that.
sometimes i
don't think
about
loss

Free Exchange Fundraiser!

Join us for a FREE PARTY in support of the UofC English grad. students'
Free Exchange Conference!

Live Music by the Ogden Owls
DJs Chris B & Arlen

Saturday February 13th @ 8pm
Hillhurst Sunnyside Community Centre
1320 5th Avenue NW
Walking distance from Sunnyside Train Station

$4.00 Beer & Wine
donations welcome at the door

Join the Facebook event & help us spread the word:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=281549791777&ref=ts

Free Exchange is an annual graduate student conference organized entirely
by graduate students at the University of Calgary Department of English.
Founded more than fifteen years ago, it has grown to attract participants
from across Canada, the United States, and elsewhere in the world. Due to
the current economic climate, it has become the responsibility of students
to raise much of the funds necessary for hosting Free Exchange. If you are
interested in supporting this conference, but are unable to attend our
fundraiser party, please feel free to contact conference organizers Carmen
Derkson and Colin Martin at freeex@ucalgary.ca. Visit
http://english.ucalgary.ca/FreeExchange for more details.

Harper's Penis Tastes Salty

As many of you know, I'm the president of filling Station magazine. Over the last 15 years we've published - often for the first time - pretty much every major poet working in Canada today and a damn good selection of the prose writers and visual artists.

We don't meet these criteria. And we apparently don't publish enough work about beef insemination. Too bad for us. Follow the link, read the article, shit on your Conservative MP's porch.

call for work

NōD Magazine [Poetry – Prose – Visual Art]

Call for open submissions

Issue 11 / Fall 2009

Deadline: Oct 31

E-mail: nodmagazine@gmail.com

mail: NōD Magazine
c/o Dep’t of English
University of Calgary
2500 University Dr NW, T2T 1N4

NōD, creative writing publication of the University of Calgary undergraduates, is looking for innovative works of poetry prose or visual art for its eleventh issue. Works from undergraduate students and also the community are eligible for publication.

New this year: NōD magazine is looking for submissions of 50-100 words for a feature on NUTV (UofC's on campus television). Eligible entries are selected monthly from the open submissions and will show regularly during the chosen month. Eligible entries are also featured in the Magazine.

fS Call!

Call to Artists – filling Station Magazine

filling Station Magazine, now in its 14th year of publishing, is a Calgary-based, nationally-distributed literary and arts magazine. A non-profit, it is completely run by volunteers from the community invested in bringing great writing and art from Calgary and area into the national spotlight.

Both emerging and established artists are invited to submit images of their art, or articles, statements, rants and manifestos about art accompanied by images, to our Fine Arts Editor for consideration in upcoming issues of filling Station. Submissions can include visual art, photography, documentation of artworks and events, photo essays about arts events, happenings and more.

Successful contributors receive:
1) a one year (3 issue) subscription to filling Station Magazine
2) two complimentary copies of the issue in which you submission appears
3) exposure to readers across Canada
4) a new line on your CV
5) our everlasting good will

filling Station receives First North American Serial Rights, meaning it appears in our magazine before any other publication. The artist retains all other rights.

How to Submit:

Images may be sent in low (email-able) resolution to Debbie.lee Miszaniec at finearts.fs@gmail.com If selected for publication, the editor will arrange with you to receive high resolution files of images in 300 dpi or higher. Images appearing within filling Station’s pages would be black and white, but colour versions can be made available on our new website at www.fillingstation.ca Also, images selected to appear on covers would be published in colour.

Please include with your submission a short bio or artist’s statement, your mailing address, and your email address in the body of your email.

filling Station publishes 3 issues per year; therefore, please allow up 0-4 months for reply.

About the Fine Arts Editor:
Debbie.lee Miszaniec is an artist living and working in Calgary, Alberta Canada. In 2008 she completed her BFA in painting with distinction at the Alberta College of Art + Design. Further information about her work can be found at www.debbieleemiszaniec.com

Student Unemployment

The hole is getting deeper and deeper. When will our elected representatives start addressing the problem of class education barriers with a productive response?

Never, under the current administration.