writersreadconcordia Literary Festivals, reading, Uncategorized

5pm Haunting / 7pm Reading

 

~*~* 5pm Library Building, 6th Floor, 1400 de Maisonneuve ~*~*

We talk about writing without respect to it as an embodied practice for some—always highly political and always highly personal. We talk about writing with a set of tools by which to understand it—tools that have turned into standards, and standards that have turned into lineages, and lineages that have turned into curricula.
We know that these lineages are haunted. We know there exists voices that are silenced, muffled, or unheard (They’re still there). How can a voice find itself when its has been relegated to echo? Do we care? (We should.)

“A Haunting” will address the question of what it means to occupy an already occupied space—in the context of ghostly stories, and in narratives of indigeneity and immigration. We ask: how do our bodies in the present interact with the ghosts of the future? How are we haunted by our voices, our silences? We explore the act of writing as possessive, an engagement with identity, history, language, and secrets mediated through the body in performance.

“A Haunting” will present the creative research prompted by these questions in the form of a performance-based ghost tour curated from local artists’ submissions.

FEATURED PERFORMERS:
Kama La Mackerel
Raïssa Simone
Tiffany Ashoona
Alisha Mascarenhas
Eli Lynch

FEATURED ARTWORK:
Cedar-Eve Peters (Painting)
Vanessa Dion Fletcher (Video)
Nam Chi Nguyen (Video)

“A Haunting” is presented in collaboration with Yiara Magazine and the Department of Art History at Concordia University.

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~*~* 7pm EV Building, room 1.605, 1515 Rue St. Catherine ~*~*

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Evie Shockley is the author of several collections of poetry, including A Half-Red Sea (2006) and The New Black (2011). In a review of The New Black for Library Journal, Chris Pusateri observed, ”Shockley’s irk incorporates elements of myth without being patently ‘mythical’ and is personal without being self-indulgent, sentimental without being saccharine.”

Trish Salah, born in Halifax, is the author of the Lambda Award-winning Wanting in Arabic and of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1. She is co-editor of a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, on Trans Cultural Production, and a member of the editorial boards of TSQ and Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently Salah is assistant professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University.

*~*~* The Co-op Bookstore will be selling books *~*~*
The Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore is pleased to offer a viable alternative to the corporate structure, putting students’ best interests above and beyond our own bottom line. As a not-for-profit alternative to corporate bookstores, we are conveniently located right on Concordia’s downtown campus at 2150 Bishop Street in Montreal. Offering both new and used books, in addition to a wide variety of artisan consignments, we also boast the largest selection of sex and gender studies titles anywhere in Montreal.

J. F. Clark poetry, reading, student driven, Suzanne Buffam, text

Damian Rogers is a Social Menace

Off the Page Festival welcomes Damian Rogers Thursday, November 3rd, in Concordia’s Grey Nuns Building (1175 Rue St Mathieu), room M100, starting at 7:30pm.

Damian Rogers is a social person. “I will talk to someone for hours, no problem. I’m good to talk, as they say,” Rogers recently told Trevor Corkum of 49thshelf.com. The same is true of her page. To read her books, Dear Leader (Coach House Books, 2015) and Paper Radio (ECW Press, 2009), is not at all like small talk. A testament to the absorptive power of her work is that hours of enjoyment will occur before one realizes the time. To finish her books poses the problem: what now? The solution is to re-read her work as if for the first time. As Rogers asks in “The Trouble with Wormholes” (Rogers, 23):

How many times must I learn the lesson of compression?
Let go of everything you know and start from scratch.

 

Damian Rogers’ work is menacing. Where her voice is accessible, her style, inviting, and her subjects, familiar, her themes challenge the reader’s sense of safety. Familiar objects – roller skates, pantsuits, soap dishes, and sweaters – lay alongside sensory descriptions of dreams, homes, and childhoods. Desires are addressed in association to these objects and sensations, such as the man and spider in “Poem for Love” who respectively “dreams of a red telephone that will only ring for him” or wishes for a “frame upon which to hitch his home” (Rogers, 48). Neither character will realize their desire. A common theme in Rogers’ work is, then, to remind us that life is a series of struggles wherein we often fail to reach our own desires. Life is gritty, we are imperfect, and we lack control to change course. To read Rogers’ work is to feel threatened by the reminder of what we don’t always see ourselves: That there is no escape from our imperfections but through catharsis. In this respect, Rogers’ work is as refreshing in its honesty and menacing in theme as it is creative in its composition. As she writes in “Storm” (Rogers, 18).

We live in
the arteries
of a large
ugly animal
and I saw
it move.

 

Damian Rogers is the editor of The Walrus and Anansi Press, creative director of “Poetry in Voice,” and the literary curator and co-host of The Basement Review performance series.

Damian Rogers is a hell of a poet.

From Dear Leader:

POEM FOR DEATH

‘Politicians, in my eyes, ruin our best chances
of making this work,’ said the man running for mayor.

Once they wondered, ‘Where do we go from here?’
And here is as far as they got.

‘If I start freaking out over this spill, I’ll never stop,’
said the oil can. ‘I want to get back to my wife.’

‘You’re a prisoner,’ said the snow leopard to the bank teller.
‘You’ll be the last of our kind to be free.’

‘Let the world turn,’ said the witch,
‘as if it would do so without you.’

‘That feels amazing,’ said the rock ‘n’ roll victim,
as he bled from his head. ‘Do it again.’

What can I say? I can’t wait to meet the future beasts that keep
on knocking from the other side of that big red door.

Don’t miss Damian Rogers with Suzanne Buffam and Sarah Burgoyne.
7:30, November 3rd, Grey Nuns Building M100, 1175 Rue St Mathieu

Rogers, Damian. Dear Leader. Toronto: Coach House, 2015. Print.

– Johnathan F. Clark

 

J. F. Clark conversation, Literary Festivals, prose, reading, sound bytes, student driven, text

From the Archive: Francine Prose

Writers Read looks back at hosting prolific author, Francine Prose, in March, 2014, in Concordia’s Henry F. Hall building. Attendees crowded into the Hall conference room for a reading of Prose’s novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (HarperTorch, 2014), and later, a Q&A session with the Brooklyn native. Lovers is a multivocal series of epistolaries that spotlight Parisian lives during the rise of German fascism, and the impacts fascism had on various Parisian cultures. The innermost thoughts of Prose’s complex characters entwine to give a voice and face to a separate, abstract character – the motley cityscape of pre-war Paris.

Francine Prose released a new novel this month, entitled, Mister Monkey: A Novel.

As reviewed in the New York Times Book Review: “Expertly constructed, Mister Monkey is so fresh and new it’s almost giddy, almost impudent with originality. Tender and artful, Prose’s 15th novel is a sophisticated satire, a gently spiritual celebration of life, a dark and thoroughly grim depiction of despair, a screwball comedy, a screwball tragedy. . . . It’s gorgeous and bright and fun and multi-faceted, carrying within it the geological force of the ages. It’s a book to be treasured. It’s that good. It’s that funny. It’s that sad. It’s that deceptive and deep.” (New York Times Book Review, front cover review)

Listen to a clip of Prose reading from Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932:

 

– Johnathan F. Clark

 

J. F. Clark Literary Festivals, poetry, reading, sound bytes, student driven, text, Uncategorized

In with the New Shockley

Off the Page event:
November 4th, 7pm, York Amphitheatre, EV 1.605, 1515 Rue St. Catherine

Those who know Evie Shockley from her 2006 publication, a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), will know how her lyrical style contains themes of ancestry and racial identity which flow through contexts of modern existential threats. Shockley’s words are just as markedly sharp in her latest release, the new black (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2011), as she navigates through modern threats facing the lives of racial American-minority and feminist identities. Of the four suites of poems in the new black, it is striking to note how Shockley titles her suites – “out with the old,” “the cold,” and “out with the new” – to underline a treatment of black lives as casual commodities by a modern world, objectified and vilified by a modern American culture seeking to simultaneously appropriate and reprobate. Shockley’s strength in the written word parallels her strength in line presentation, whether it is the experiment of commixing and segregating connotative alliteration in “x marks the spot,” the barren feet tracking page to page in “the cold,” or the words that literally break off from their page and settle on the opposite side of the spine in “explosives.”

Take a listen as Shockley reads and discusses Ed Roberson’s “City Eclogue, Words for It,” and her own poem, “You Must Want This Lonesome.”

Off the Page 2016 welcomes Evie Shockley and Trish Salah to Concordia on November 4th.

– Johnathan F. Clark

 

J. F. Clark poetry, prose, reading, sound bytes, student driven, text

Submission Call, Off the Page Festival: A Haunting

We have seen ghosts—in the flickering of light bulbs, of the body, and in the persisting reverberations of history. We hear them with our mouths and pens; we write them into memory. Who are they? Do they hear us? What do they know?

“A Haunting” will address the question of what it means to occupy an already occupied space—in the context of ghostly stories, and in narratives of indigeneity and immigration. Canadian-Trinidadian writer Dionne Brand compares her practice to the act of “unforgetting”—of re-engagement with legacies of colonial trauma as they have manifested themselves in the present. How do our bodies in the present act as the ghosts of the future? Are we haunted by our perpetuation of colonial legacies, our voices, our silences? Who and what is implicated?

With our feet on Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) territory, Off the Page invites writers and artists—with priority given to the voices of Black, indigenous, and/or writers of colour—to make words, sounds, songs that manifest their ghosts. Successful submissions may engage historical and generational traumas; they may explore or in fact embody resistance. This event sees writing as possessive, an engagement with identity, history, language, and secrets mediated through the body in performance. Submissions may include, but are not limited to, spoken word, dance, music, theatre. Collaborations between writers and other performance artists are especially encouraged.

The selected works will feature on November 4th, 2016 and lead audiences through a performance-based ghost tour that explores decolonization through haunting. Works must be received by 11:59 PM, Monday, October 24th through this form: https://goo.gl/forms/FoRLb7JuTl1yuu9m1

J. F. Clark poetry, prose, reading, sound bytes, student driven, text

Submission Call, Off the Page Festival: A Literary Wake

Are you, or is someone you know, a writer living in or near Montreal and looking to read work to an audience? Would you like to know what that work would sound like as re-imagined by a live band?

Learn more and apply to perform here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeWJ5mQgUWF-wRJPeV84xBUx0RnjB-oRQDYHKhQ98YOpoo1Tw/viewform

About the event:
“What Remains: A Literary Wake” is a literary performance of selected works and experimental rock/electro adaptations that address the Frankensteinian aspect of reanimating the musical orality of the printed word.

We’re looking for artists willing to perform short works of poetry and micro-fiction that deal with notions of sonic haunting, literary decomposition,ephemeral/electrical embodiment, and/or forms of death. Artists must also be willing to recite their piece in the dark.

Think you have a similar theme that might relate? We’d love to hear from you!

We’re not posting the venue location for now. Our aim is to collect submissions for the event.

If you have any questions, contact us at literarywake@gmail.com

writersreadconcordia student driven, text, Uncategorized

Curating & Archiving the Literary Event

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L-R: Casey Plett, Sadie Laett-Babcock, Tanis Franco, Zoe Whittal, Kai Cheng Thom. A Queer is a Queer is a Queer: Breaking Standard Narratives in Queer Poetics and Prose, a panel moderated by Eli Lynch on March 19, 2016.
(Photo: Surah Field-Green)

In March 2016, students at Concordia with Writers Read put on Off The Page and hosted writers and artists like Jordan Abel, Sonnet L’Abbé, Aisha Sasha John, Casey Plett, Anne Boyer, Ben Lerner, and more. If you are a student at Concordia University (or another Quebec University) and interested in participating in the making of this festival for course credit you can write a short letter of interest to Sina Queyras to apply to enrol. Full details are on the English Department website. We are looking for students from all disciplines to work on various aspects of each event from poster design and social media & promotion, to curation.

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Jordan Abel, Sonnet L’Abbé (Iconocide Panel moderated by Colin Fulton), March 18, 2016

Course Description

This course will introduce modes of literary production including curating a reading series, introducing readers, archiving literary recordings & ephemera, writing critically, designing and maintaining a literary blog, design proof & publication. If you enjoy Writers Read, Off The Page, and Synapse, you might enjoy taking this course on Literary Production Curating & Archiving. We’ll be designing a new reading series from the ground up as well as working on planned Writers Read events. We’ll also be developing our online presence, so you’ll have an opportunity to develop web-content, learn to use social networking, literary promotion etc. It will be a lot of hand-on work, both behind the scenes and at events. Students will learn to vet material, choose readers, write introductions, and deal directly with writers. It will also be a lot of fun. If you are interested in literary promotion, curation, editing, and developing a literarily community, this course is for you.

 

 

writersreadconcordia student driven, Uncategorized

Kailey Havelock in Conversation with Editors Talking Editing

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The Off the Page literary festival presents Editors Talking Editing: The Other Side of Submittable, a discussion among editorial alumni of Concordia University’s Headlight Anthology and Soliloquies Anthology. Taking place March 17-19, Off the Page will feature readings by Ben Lerner, Anne Boyer, Jordan Abel, and Sonnet L’Abbé, and an array of panels on all aspects of literature.

Former student editors Chalsley Taylor, Domenica Martinello, Geneviève Robichaud, and Larissa Andrusyshyn discuss their undergraduate and graduate publishing and editing experience and their current work in the industry, from editing to managing to writing and more.

Join us on Thursday, March 17 at 4PM for an engaging discussion on publishing and editing, moderated by student organizers Kailey Havelock and Karissa LaRocque. Find the most up-to-date information on Facebook, Twitter, or soliloquies.ca.

Editors Talking Editing: The Other Side of Submittable

Kailey Havelock: In an increasingly digital world, what do you envision as the future of publishing? How does the job of the editor change when computer programs can do so much now, and what potential might this change open up? Do you think publishing will move to the web exclusively, or will literary publications stay in print?

Chalsley Taylor: Digital applications provide vital support, but it falls to our human editors to to source and curate creative work. That said, the more digital publishing tools we have at our disposal, the more possibilities we create for ourselves. I don’t believe the rapid growth of digital publishing means the extinction of print media. Print offers us the physical object we can’t (as of yet) get digitally; however, the standards for that physical object are higher now, in terms of aesthetic appeal, singularity, etc. Likewise, digital publications have the capacity to incorporate a greater variety of media than print can manage.

Domenica Martinello: The future of publishing is hybrid and finely curated. Print will never die, nor will the Internet. Digital spaces have destabilized some of the old guard’s print oligopoly—suddenly there’s this breathing room for risk and innovation, for interdisciplinary and multimedia work, for more fragmented tastes. At the same time, the unfiltered glut of “stuff” produced online makes the physical print journal just as refreshing and valuable as ever. It could be the Gemini in me, but: If editors can harness both the immediacy of the digital (through social media, an online supplement, a blog, etc.) and the intentionality of a well-crafted, thoughtfully curated print journal, they’ve found the sweet spot.

Geneviève Robichaud: I have just spent the morning enveloped in the task of writing about a book of which there is none—Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet—and so I feel compelled to answer that, while I cannot imagine addressing the question of the future of publishing, I am interested in works that move beyond the print and digital binary. Performance lectures, for instance, are a way to open the dialogue to a range of ways the sovereignty of the book gets tested, elasticized. Of course, there are several others… many of them located in a combinatory practice that extends beyond a single discipline or medium.

Larissa Andrusyshyn: I do think publishing will see an increased presence on the web. But I don’t think books or literary magazines will disappear. The feel and smell of a book, the place it has on a bookshelf, nothing will change that. But think of how accessible our work can be now, with a smartphone in just about anyone’s pocket; we have an opportunity to reach a diverse audience, more than ever before. But the job of an editor does not change that much. Computers are still hugely fallible, especially when it comes to poetry (layout and playing with syntax), and I don’t foresee a program that can make critical editorial suggestions to an author appearing in the near future. The editor will still curate the publication. They organize the other editors and designers and have the duty to maintain the tone of the magazine and the direction it will take going forward. Also, if there ever was a computer program that would secure funds, organize launches, and do our grant writing for us, well, I’d be plenty surprised. This is the realm of humans, and always will be.

Panelists

Chalsley Taylor spends her time in Montreal, working towards an MA at Concordia University. Her research and creative interests centre around race, second generation identity, and the politics of place. Currently, Chalsley is the photography editor and art director at carte blanche.

Domenica Martinello is a Toronto-based writer originally from Montréal, Québec. She is the head of publicity for the literary journal The Puritan, and interviews editor for CWILA: Canadian Women in Literary Arts. In Fall 2016 she will begin her MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Geneviève Robichaud is a PhD candidate in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at the Université de Montréal. She was an editor for Lemon Hound, Headlight Anthology, Matrix Magazine, Soliloquies Anthology, and most recently for The Town Crier. Her prose has recently appeared in The Capilano Review, Lemon Hound, The Puritan, and Two Times One from the Jan van Eyck Akademie.

Larissa Andrusyshyn’s first poetry collection, Mammoth (DC Books, 2010), was shortlisted for the Quebec Writers’ Federation First Book Prize and the Kobzar Literary Award. Her poems have been long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for Arc Magazine‘s Poem of the Year and the 3macs carte blanche prize. Her second collection, Proof (DC Books), was released last spring. She is the reviews editor at Matrix Magazine and she facilitates creative writing workshops in Montreal.


Kailey Havelock in Conversation with Editors Talking Editing was originally published by Soliloquies Writes.

For more insights from our interview guests, join Headlight Anthology and Soliloquies Anthology at the Editors Talking Editing panel at the Off the Page literary festival on Thursday, March 17.