2 workshops in Toronto this weekend!

This weekend, I'm offering my two most popular workshops in Toronto: my Poetry Boot Camp and Plotless Fiction. Still a little space in each, so drop me a note at razovsky [at] gmail [dot] com if you're interested in attending.

STUART ROSS’S POETRY BOOT CAMP

Saturday, June 2, 10 am - 5 pm (w/ 45-minute lunch break)

Christie/Dupont area

$90 includes materials and light snacks

Prepayment guarantees your spot.

To register, write Stuart at razovsky@gmail.com.

A relaxed but intensive one-day workshop for beginning poets, experienced poets, stalled poets, and haikuists who want to get beyond three lines. Poetry Boot Camp focuses on the pleasures of poetry and the riches that spontaneity brings, through lively directed writing strategies and relevant readings from the works of poets from Canada and abroad. We’ll also touch on revision and collaboration. You will write in ways you’d never imagined. Arrive with an open mind, and leave with a heap of new poems!

PLOTLESS FICTION 

Sunday, June 3, 10 am – 5 pm (w/ 45-minute lunch break)

Christie/Dupont area 

Fee: $90 includes materials and light snacks. 

Prepayment guarantees your spot. 

To register, write Stuart at razovsky@gmail.com. 

Fictioneer and writing teacher Stuart Ross offers a relaxed, supportive workshop for writers at all levels. Plotless Fiction explores the possibilities of fiction beyond the constraints of narrative and the artificiality of plot. In this hands-on session, you will be introduced to writers from around the globe who push against the definitions of the story, and you will produce a half-dozen or so of your own short works, using a variety of enjoyable, challenging writing strategies.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR: Stuart is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently You Exist. Details Follow. (Anvil Press), but also including the acclaimed I Cut My Finger (Anvil Press) and Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (ECW Press). His second story collection, Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, earned positive reviews across the country, went into a second printing after only two months, and won the ReLit Prize for Short Fiction. His plotless novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew also won great critical acclaim. Stuart is editor for Mansfield Press, where he has his own imprint, and Fiction & Poetry Editor for This Magazine. He also writes a regular column — “Hunkamooga” — for the literary magazine sub-Terrain. In fall 2010 Stuart was Writer in Residence at Queen’s University in Kingston. For nearly 25 years, he’s led workshops in fiction, poetry, editing, and memoir across Canada.

Over and out.

YE.DF. reviewed in Winnipeg Free Press!

I've been a little antsy about whether my new poetry book, You Exist. Details Follow., is going to get reviewed. So I was happy to see it looked at as part of a group review in the May 26 edition of the Winnipeg Free Press. The reviewer is Jonathan Ball. I really like that he talked about my poem "Time."

You Exist. Details Follow (Anvil, 120 pages, $16), by Cobourg's Stuart Ross, is filled with fresh, stunning images: "a pale flower / that cares about bombs." Ross is always smart, strange and hilarious, while still conveying emotion. Laments that "I didn't know how to walk / in the valley of too many shoes" and observations that "They were in their world, / where nothing was weird" are both clever and affecting.

Other moments with less pathos still build strange characters: "A dog barked at me. / Who is in that dog? / Who is telling me something / from inside a badly sewn dog suit?"

The short poem Time best blends Ross's interests in junk culture and existential questions, allowing him to reflect on matters as weighty as "time" through considering some generic, campy, sci-fi time-travel flick. "A brave crew? Strange place? / Prehistoric gals? Sue me. / Tell me where all past years are. / It's about dinosaurs vs. astronauts. / It's about their fate."

Will there be other reviews? Will my book get clobbered?

Over and out.