Bloggamooga

Donate to Sierra Club Canada in honour of Kathryn Marshall!

2012-01-15T23:01:00.003-05:00

After I saw this video, in which "Ethical Oil" spokesperson Kathryn Marshall accused Sierra Club Canada of being a puppet organization, when Ethical Oil itself is clearly backed by conservatives and oilies of all stripes, I decided to make a donation to Sierra Club Canada.

The nice thing is you can make your donation in honour of someone. I made mine in honour of Kathryn Marshall. Her email address is kathryn@ethicaloil.org I did, and I let her know in the comment box how grateful I am that she has brought so much attention to the excellent work that Sierra Club Canada is doing!

Nice term, "Ethical Oil." Sort of like "Humane Torture" or "Gentle War."

Perhaps you'd like to make a donation in honour of Ms Marshall yourself!

Over and out.

NEW YEAR POEM 2012

2012-01-01T23:56:00.002-05:00

MUSIC OR REPAIR

When I wake I am already
halfway to the park,
dressed for the cold. The elms
are trembling, the roads empty.
Cars have been uninvented.

Three birds are assigned to me: two are silent
and one fills the air with noise.
Clouds swoop like dark kites.
Telephone wires quiver and twang.

In the park,
everyone I’ve never seen before
is milling around.
A tuba lies in the crispy grass.
I also see a toy sewing machine.
Opportunities are abundant, but I can’t
decide which — music or repair.
As a result: tension.

(Tension is a good thing sometimes.
For example, you should stick it in art.)
I step carefully through
an expanse of discarded 1’s,
and where park becomes beach
I watch flocks of 2’s,
with their promise of grace,
glide across the frozen lake
toward me.

Stuart Ross
1 January 2012

10 poetry books from 2011 that flipped me out and one that doesn't exist

2011-12-30T18:37:00.008-05:00

I'm not going to claim that I read every damn poetry book that was released in 2011. There are a whole bunch I haven't even dug into yet that might've ended up in this list. There are a whole bunch I have read that just as easily could have been included. And, of course, I'm going to leave out books for which I had editorial responsibility — but you can check out the "a stuart ross book" titles for yourself here at Mansfield Press's snazzy new website.

What follows, then, are 10 perfect-bound books of poetry from 2011 that I'm sure glad were published. They're numbered, but in no particular order.

1. Fall Higher, by Dean Young (Copper Canyon Press)
2. How Long, by Ron Padgett (Coffee House Press)
3. Match, by Helen Guri (Coach House Books)
4. Destroyer and Preserver, by Matthew Rohrer (Wave Books)
5. By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959, by William Carlos Williams (New Directions)
6. From the Observatory, by Julio Cortázar, translated by Anne McLean (Archipelago Books)
7. The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan, edited by Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan (University of California Press)
8. You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, by Anna Moschovakis (Coffee House Press)
9. Novel, by bill bissett (TalonBooks)
10. Tres, by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Laura Healy (New Directions)

And what's coming up for 2012? I'm not sure what other presses are publishing, but I'm putting four poetry titles through Mansfield this spring that are pretty dreamy. How did I ever get in the position to work with such authors? to help such books into the world? such books that I wish I'd written? (Thank you, Denis De Klerck.)

In This Thin Rain, by Nelson Ball
Holler, by Alice Burdick
Sympathy Loophole, by Jaime Forsythe
What's the Score?, by David W. McFadden

There's another book I'd like to draw your attention to, though:

Oh There You Are, by Larry Fagin (Adventures in Poetry, or perhaps Wave Books, or maybe Coffee House Press, or possibly a resurrected Full Court Press or Siamese Banana Press)
Truth is, this book doesn't exist. Larry Fagin hasn't released a trade collection of poetry since 1978's appropriately titled (as it turns out) I'll Be Seeing You: Poems 1962–1976. But, judging from the generous sampling of his prose poems that appeared in the first issue of The Sienese Shredder back in 2006-07, a new book by Fagin would be pretty damn exciting.

To paraphrase and expand upon Kenneth Patchen, if you say you're a poet, and you expect people to read your poems, you better get out there and buy new poetry books. Even if it means skipping a few precious beers, or even a meal. Because if you don't, then you are a self-absorbed goof. Better yet, buy those books from an independent bookstore. Even if it means paying a bit more. if you absolutely can't afford to buy poetry books, team up with some friends and buy them cooperatively.

Have a good 2012.

Over and out.

Vancouverama

2011-12-02T18:06:00.006-05:00

[This entry is from December 2. I'm a lazy-ass, so just finished writing it now and posted it nearly a month late.]

At the airport in Vancouver, on my way home. Hadn't been here in a couple years, I think, and an invitation from the JCC's Vancouver Jewish Book Festival brought me back.

When I arrived on Monday, headed straight from the airport (on the snazzy new Canada Line rail service) to Mark Laba's place. Mark and I have known each other since we were about four years old. Mark's a literary whiz, and certainly a comedic genius. Why he has only one full-length book (the poetry collection Dummy Spit, from The Mercury Press) is beyond my understanding. So I continued my crusade, bugging the shit outta him to get a MS out there. He didn't seem perturbed. Mark spent about eight years writing an insane, surreal food column for The Vancouver Province. I think the editors finally read it a couple years ago, and then closed down the column, much to the dismay of probably thousands of fans of Mark's brilliant assault on restaurant reviewing.

George Bowering popped by Mark's place to pick up his copies of How I Wrote Certain of My Books, a wonderful addition to the "a stuart ross book" imprint that I put through Mansfield Press. It's George's 101st book. Or as his wife, Jean Baird, puts it, the first of his second hundred books. It was sort of an early birthday present for George, who turned 76 a few days later. George and I found a coffee place not far away and sat and talked about Audie Murphy and Stewart Granger for an hour. Well, cowboy movies in general.

The Festival generously put me up at the Rosedale on Robson, so this was probably my first-ever Vancouver visit where I stayed downtown. Spent several hours Monday wandering between grit and glitter. What a fascinating, weird city. It's also a city that has all sorts of personal resonances for me: the place I met the Pulp Press gang back around 1980: Tom Walmsley, Stephen Osborne, D. M. Fraser, Jon Furberg, and many others. I've also had a lot of writer friends land in Vancouver: Mark, of course, but also Clint Burnham, Brian Dedora (who finally came to his senses and moved back to Toronto this past year), Michael Boyce, and Laura Farina.

Tuesday I met up with Michael Boyce. We always have great conversations. Michael is the author of two novels from Pedlar Press: Monkey and Anderson. It's really pleasurable to have someone to discuss experimental fiction with — and someone who actually creates it. Michael and I met in Toronto in the early 1980s. I published his first work in a great little chapbook called Hit by a Rock. Brief prose pieces by Michael accompanied by line drawings by me. A Proper Tales Press product.

In the evening, I went to a weird Anvil Press launch: for Bob Robertson's Mayan Horror: How to Survive the End of the World in 2012. I hadn't heard of Robertson, who is apparently a CBC Radio personality. He was pretty darn funny. Headed out for some cheap-but-good sushi with Anvil's Brian Kaufman and Karen Green. We talked about publishing, digital books, Mark Laba, and my forthcoming poetry book, You Exist. Details Follow. The new Anvil catalogue has an early cover drawing for the book by Gary Clement, who did the cover for I Cut My Finger back in 2007. It's nice working with Anvil again.

Wednesday was a veritable festival of Clint Burnham, whose new scholarly work, The Only Poetry That Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing, was launch a couple weeks back. Clint and I also share both ECW and Anvil as publishers of our poetry books. The usual great tour of East Hastings and some art galleries with Clint, Chinese lunch at New Town with Clint and his partner, Julie, and a look at the Stan Douglas photo installation over the doors of the new Woodward fancy-arts-centre-gentrification outlet. Oh, and we popped by ArtSpeak, where I scored a few more copies of A City, Some Rain, a beautiful "shared" publication by artist Toni Latour and me.

Headed to the JCC in the evening for my first festival event: a reading/panel with Norm Ravvin, Roberta Rich, and Alexi Zentner, moderated by yamulka-topped academic Alex Hart, who was excellent. We four writers were a pretty eclectic bunch, brought together with little in common except that we'd all just published novels. But that became the interesting challenge of the evening: drawings lines from one of us to another. I got a great response from the audience, with far more laughter (as usual) than I'd expected, and afterwards had a pretty steady stream of buyers of Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew (from which I'd read) looking for signatures.

Just before the reading, I was astonished to see three quasi-cousins of mine waiting in the lobby for the event: Elise, Sandi, and Nanci. It's a seriously rare occurrence to have a relative of mine at one of my readings, so I was pretty thrilled. I get the feeling that what I'm doing is so foreign to my cousins, etc., that they keep their distance. But these three came to the reading, bought my book, and really enjoyed themselves! After the event was over, Clint and I went to an amazing place on Main for some food and drinks.

Thursday morning, I did a reading/Q&A/talk for high school students from King David High, which is just about next door to the JCC. I read a few poems, a quick story, and a chapter or two from SDJ, and the kids were really attentive and had some great questions. This was my second time working with students from King David; hope I'll see them again!

Had a real nice lunch with my cousin Sandi. It's always good to feel like I have family. Because I do. Sandi's daughter is co-owner of the Broom Co. on Granville Island. You want brooms, that's the place to go. Tell her I sent you.

In the afternoon I met up with Laura Farina, great person and wonderful poet, whose 2005 collection from Pedlar Press, This Woman Alphabetical, is dying for a follow-up. And from what I've seen of Laura's new poems, it's gonna be great. After that I hoofed it to the lounge of the Hotel Vancouver to meet with the documentary filmmaker Catrina Longmuir. I met Catrina a couple years back in New Denver, when she and fellow documentarian Moira Simpson were working on Telling the Stories of the Nikkei, a film that ND teacher Terry Taylor, a local marvel, made finally happen.

An evening with Mark Laba at a sort of surreal cook-off event that closed the Jewish Book Festival rounded off the trip.

Pretty eager to get back to Vancouver to launch my forthcoming poetry collection from Anvil Press, You Exist. Details Follow.

Over and out.

Mansfield Press Fall Launch Party

2011-11-14T01:16:00.003-05:00

For those in Toronto, I hope you can join me at the fall launch party for Mansfield Press tonight (Monday, November 14), 7:30 pm, at the Boat, 158 Augusta.

Among the four new releases are three appearing under my imprint, “a stuart ross book” — How I Wrote Certain of My Books, by George Bowering; Hooligans, by Lillian Necakov; and The Crystal Palace, by Carey Toane. The fourth new Mansfield title is Rishma Dunlop’s Lover Through Departure: New and Selected Poems. Necakov, Toane and Dunlop will be on hand to read, and there will be a musical set by my friend, singer-songwriter Ben Walker (who composed and recorded the Orphan’s Song CD, based on my poems), and there will also be a surprise reader. Hint: Wilbur Snowshoe.

I’ve been working with Denis De Klerck of Mansfield Press since 2007, and it’s been one of the most rewarding activities of my 30-something-year immersion in the literary world. In addition to the writers I mentioned above, I’ve been able to help bring into the world new books by Alice Burdick, David W. McFadden, Leigh Nash, Peter Norman, Natasha Nuhanovic, Jim Smith, Robert Earl Stewart, Steve Venright, and Tom Walmsley.

Meanwhile, Mansfield finally has a new website. Mansfield's publisher, Denis De Klerck, has all sorts of neat plans for it. Instead of the static thing it was, this site will frequently change, with new articles, videos, poems, and more added each week.

Oh yeah, and starting next Sunday, I'm touring for a few days with the Mansfield writers. Here are the details:

NOVEMBER 20, 7 PM, MONTREAL

The Mansfield Press Montreal Fall Launch, with readings by Rishma Dunlop (Lover Through Departure: New and Selected Poems), Marko Sijan (Mongrel), Carey Toane (The Crystal Palace). Hosted by Stuart Ross.
CFC
6388, St Hubert (enter through red door and go upstairs)

NOVEMBER 21, 7:30 PM, OTTAWA

The Mansfield Press Ottawa Fall Launch, with readings by Rishma Dunlop (Lover Through Departure: New and Selected Poems), Lillian Necakov (Hooligans), Marko Sijan (Mongrel), Carey Toane (The Crystal Palace). Hosted by Stuart Ross.
Raw Sugar Café
692 Somerset West

NOVEMBER 22, 7:30 PM, KINGSTON

The Mansfield Press Kingston Fall Launch, with readings by Rishma Dunlop (Lover Through Departure: New and Selected Poems), Lillian Necakov (Hooligans), Marko Sijan (Mongrel), Carey Toane (The Crystal Palace). Hosted by Stuart Ross.
The Grad Club
162 Barrie Street (upstairs)

Over and out.

Review from out west of SDJ

2011-10-29T12:38:00.003-04:00

This lovely review comes from the blog of Carrie Mumford. I'm surprised by how many of the reviews actually move me. I mean, partly because I'm giddy that someone liked my book, but also because of insights that may not have occurred to me. For example, Carrie Mumford declares Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew a book about mourning. Although it was written out of mourning, I don't think I'd seen it as a book about that. But it sure makes sense.

Phew! Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew by Stuart Ross is one heavy read. You wouldn’t expect an unassuming little paperback (only 175 pages, and smaller than your average book) to pack such an emotional punch, but this book made my heart heavy. That’s not to say I wouldn’t read it again though; Stuart Ross is a masterful writer and I very much enjoyed his poetic prose.

Here’s a description from the publisher, ECW Press:

Ben is a performance artist about to enter his forties. His father and mother are both dead, and his brother, Jake, is a lousy source of information. So when he begins to struggle with a particularly nagging memory, he doesn’t know where to turn. The memory: the assassination — by his mother — of a prominent neo–Nazi. …

Stuart Ross’s first novel is a blend of suburban realism and out–of–body surrealism. Read more…

To me, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew is about mourning. Mourning the loss of childhood, mourning the loss of two parents, and mourning the loss of a brother. The book is set in Toronto, and each chapter could almost stand as a short story on its own. Ross weaves these chapters together into an exploration of past where the lines between what really happened and what the narrator remembers are heavily blurred.

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew has one of the most memorable opening sentences I have ever come across:

“To its surprise, the bullet sailed out of the gun my mother clutched unsteadily in both hands, and a moment later the big man’s yellow hard hat leapt from his thick head, into the air.”

How awesome is that?! Beginning a novel from the perspective of a bullet, especially a bullet that is involved in an incident that haunts the narrator throughout the work, seems brilliant to me.

I’d recommend Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew to anyone interested in serious literary fiction, poetry (it’s very poetic), or a view of a Jewish childhood (fascinating).

Over and out.

Hands On Poems: A Critiquing Workshop

2011-10-20T16:45:00.002-04:00

It's been a busy workshop season for me. And there is still space available in a two-day critiquing workshop I’m offering at the end of this month, in Toronto, presented by Mansfield Press.

If you’re interesting in registering for it, please contact me very soon. All the information is just below.

And here are some comments from participants of a different workshop (Plotless Fiction) I led this past weekend:

• “Every part challenged me to try and do something I would not normally do. There is some very neat work lurking outside my comfort zone.”
• “Really terrific workshop — best 8 hours of the year!”
• “Thanks for the playfulness and restoring my sense of humour toward writing!”
• “Helpful strategies! I can already see how the approaches will help me break new creative ground.”’
• “I got a ton of new ideas from the writing and discussion, even above and beyond the strategies we used. Can’t wait to write more like this!”
• “A fine, inspiring workshop. It renewed my interest in writing’s possibilities.”
• “I loved the welcoming environment. I’m leaving with so many ideas.”
• “I find these workshops so productive. What a delight!”

HANDS ON POEMS: A CRITIQUING WORKSHOP

Saturday & Sunday, October 29 & 30, noon – 5 pm
Dupont/Symington area

Fee: $125 includes materials and light snacks.
Space is limited.

Prepayment guarantees your spot. To register, write Stuart at .

Poet and editor Stuart Ross leads a two-day workshop on critiquing poems. The ability to see what works and what doesn’t in one’s own poem is a crucial part of the writing practice. A writer can learn a great deal about editing and revising her own poems by honing her critiquing skills on the works of others. For this session, each participant will submit four to six poems in advance; the poems will be distributed to the participants before the workshop. Each day, poems by all of the writers will be examined and discussed. The critiquing will be punctuated by rapid writing projects that encourage new ways of looking at poetry.

ABOUT STUART ROSS
Stuart Ross is the author of eleven books, including six collections of poetry, three of which were shortlisted for major awards: Farmer Gloomy’s New Hybrid (shortlisted for the 2000 Trillium Book Prize), I Cut My Finger (shortlisted for the 2008 ReLit Poetry Award), and Dead Cars in Managua (shortlisted for the 2009 ReLit Poetry Award). His short-story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog was shortlisted for the Alberta Publishers Award and the Alberta Readers Choice Award, and won the 2010 ReLit Short Fiction Award. His recent plotless novel, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, has received rave reviews in Canada and the U.S. Stuart has been teaching workshops across Canada for over two decades. He has edited poetry books for Mansfield Press (where he has his own imprint), Pedlar Press, ECW Press, BookThug, McGilligan Books, and Insomniac Press. Stuart is also the Fiction & Poetry Editor at This Magazine. His seventh collection of poetry is due out from Anvil Press in spring 2012.

John Robert Colombo!

2011-09-14T21:27:00.009-04:00

Had an excellent time at Wordstock in Collingwood last weekend, where I gave a one-hour seminar on self-publishing that went extremely well. Also was able to catch excellent readings and onstage interviews with Wayne Johnston and Camilla Gibb, as well as a great reading by Randy Boyagoda, who I hadn't been familiar with.

The nicest surprise was getting to see a reading by John Robert Colombo. Now, way back when I was about 14, I was a page at a library at Bathurst and Lawrence in Toronto. A fellow page, Annette, pointed out a poet who came in regularly. So I read a few of Colombo's books of that era: Neo Poems, Abracadabra, and The Great Wall of China. Next time he came into the library I introduced myself as a young poet and told him I liked his books. I guess he was the first "real writer" I'd ever met.

John suggested that what a young poet should do is apprentice an elder poet, so I took the job, and for the next few years I helped John put together his Concise Canadian Quotations (well, I snipped quotations from the big Colombo's Canadian Quotations and put them in enveloped]s divided by subject). I proofread a few of his poetry collections (I think The Sad Truths and Translations from the English were among them, and also a collection of translated Bulgarian poetry, perhaps called Under the Eaves of a Forgotten Village). I got to hang around the home office of an actual working writer, and he critiqued a pile of my teenage poems.

Through John, I also met another real writer: the science-fiction legend and anthologist Judith Merril. John loaded me up with all her anthologies and sent me off to her Ideas office at CBC Radio, where I photocopied all the text by her in the anthologies (introductions and prefaces and so forth). She was pretty intimidating, and smart and funny.

So right, back in Collingwood: I went to a small gallery on the main street and there was John, a little older (like about 30 years) but still the same John Robert Colombo. The gallery was packed and John was just beginning: "I don't do spoken word," he said, "and I don't do rap." And then he proceeded to read a whole set of unpublished poems he'd written since the beginning of the year. Many of them were aphoristic and philosophical; I could see heavy Eastern European influences that I never would have noticed as a teenager. John is a wit, a charmer and a showman, and the reading was absolutely enjoyable.

When he was done, I went over and introduced myself and he looked a little surprised. It had been a while.

Then both of us fled before the spoken-word event that was following in the same venue.

Over and out.

Workshop in Collingwood, new video

2011-09-09T08:43:00.002-04:00

On my way to Collingwood, Ontario, for a literary festival called Wordstock, where I'm doing a workshop tomorrow morning on self-publishing, one of my favourite topics — though one that's getting mighty muddied these days. While everyone's talking about eBooks, I'm going to touch on that, but concentrate on physical entities — books, chapbook, leaflets, broadsides, etc. That's still where my heart is.

In fact, I published a new chapbook just a couple weeks ago — a collection of poems about Cobourg, Ontario, accompanied by a reprint of a column of mine from sub-Terrain. Here I am reading from it:

Over and out.

Happy 97th, Nicanor Parra!

2011-09-05T17:05:00.006-04:00

Nicanor Parra, the Chilean anti-poet, turns 97 years old today. Back when I was a teenager, I came across a copy of the New Directions collection Emergency Poems. I had never heard of Parra, but, flipping through the book, I was blown away. And I never turned back. What Nicanor makes possible for poetry is remarkable.

Jim Smith, another poet who has been a huge inspiration to me, celebrates Parra with a new blog. Jim is probably the closest thing Canada has to a Parra — the boldness, the audaciousness, the directness, the humour, the refusal to compromise in either art or politics. If you don't believe me, have a look at this book of his I edited for Mansfield Press:

On September 17, Jim turns 60. And I sure hope he has at least another 37 years of poetry-writing ahead of him!

Happy birthday to both of 'em and thanks for all the poetry and the courage!

Over and out.

3 workshops in Toronto this fall!

2011-08-24T15:55:00.003-04:00

OK, this past weekend I gave my Plotless Fiction workshop for the first time. Full house. Waiting list, in fact. I was very pleased with it, and I got a great response from the group. So I"m going to offer that one again this fall, plus a return of my Poetry Boot Camp. And there'll be a new entry: a two-day session called Hands on Poems: A Critiquing Workshop.

All workshops are presented by Mansfield Press and held in the Mansfield office near Symington and Dupont.

Here are the details:

STUART ROSS’S POETRY BOOT CAMP

Saturday, September 24, 10am-5 pm (w/ 45-minute lunch break)
Symington/Dupont area
$80 includes materials and light snacks

Prepayment guarantees your spot.
To register, write Stuart at hunkamooga@sympatico.ca.

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!

COMMENTS ON MY PREVIOUS BOOT CAMPS:
– "I really enjoyed myself and felt like I got a lot done. I thank you very much for the stimulation & the relaxed atmosphere."
– "Yay! Excited to go back to trying to write poems. I have so many new things to try now. Thanks!"
– "I liked being exposed to the familiar in a new, fresh, creative way."
– "I most enjoyed the relaxed pace and the self-directed nature of the work."
– "The Boot Camp pushed me beyond my comfort zone in precisely the way that I hoped it would."
– "My favourite part was the variety of non-threatening strategies for writing."
– "Really informative, really helpful workshop. Great energy!"
– "Excellent overall. I got a lot of out of it. Money very well spent! I'd recommend it to others."
– "Very well-run, well-thought-out workshop! Thanks!"

* * *

PLOTLESS FICTION

Sunday, October 16, 10 am - 5 pm
Dupont/Symington area

Fee: $90 includes materials and light snacks.
Space is limited.

Prepayment guarantees your spot.
To register, write Stuart at hunkamooga@sympatico.ca.

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.

COMMENTS ON THE FIRST PLOTLESS FICTION WORKSHOP:
– “I loved this workshop! I’ll come to Part Two! I learned a bunch of refreshing tips and had a lot of fun.”
– “Enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere and non-judgmental approach to sharing.”
– “This was very helpful and lots of fun — your workshops always help me to get out of the box.”
– “Excellent teacher and encouragement.”
– “Great workshop — would like a Part 2.”

* * *

HANDS ON POEMS: A CRITIQUING WORKSHOP

Saturday & Sunday, October 29 & 30, noon – 5 pm
Dupont/Symington area

Fee: $125 includes materials and light snacks.
Space is limited.

Prepayment guarantees your spot.
To register, write Stuart at hunkamooga@sympatico.ca.

Poet and editor Stuart Ross leads a two-day workshop on critiquing poems. The ability to see what works and what doesn’t in one’s own poem is a crucial part of the writing practice. A writer can learn a great deal about editing and revising her own poems by honing her critiquing skills on the works of others. For this session, each participant will submit four to six poems in advance; the poems will be distributed to the participants before the workshop. Each day, poems by all of the writers will be examined and discussed. The critiquing will be punctuated by rapid writing projects that encourage new ways of looking at poetry.

ABOUT STUART ROSS
Stuart Ross is the author of two collections of short stories, a novel, and two collaborative novellas. He has also published six books of poetry, including Farmer Gloomy’s New Hybrid (shortlisted for the 2000 Trillium Book Prize), I Cut My Finger (shortlisted for the 2008 ReLit Poetry Award), and Dead Cars in Managua (shortlisted for the 2009 ReLit Poetry Award). His short-story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog was shortlisted for the Alberta Publishers Award and the Alberta Readers Choice Award, and won the 2010 ReLit Short Fiction Award. His recent plotless novel, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, has received rave reviews in Canada and the U.S. Stuart has been teaching workshops across Canada for over two decades. He has edited poetry books for Mansfield Press (where he has his own imprint), Pedlar Press, ECW Press, McGilligan Books, BookThug, and Insomniac Press. Stuart is also the Fiction & Poetry Editor at This Magazine.

Over and out.

PLOTLESS FICTION: another new workshop

2011-07-21T10:28:00.003-04:00

It was very exciting putting on an all-new, all-day workshop the other week. I had a full house for Walking the Poem. So I'm inspired to create another new workshop I've been mulling over for a couple of years.

PLOTLESS FICTION
A Workshop with Stuart Ross

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.

Sunday, August 21, 10 am - 5 pm
Dupont/Symington area

Fee: $90 includes materials and light snacks.
Space is limited.

To register, write
hunkamooga@sympatico.ca

Stuart Ross is the author of two collections of short stories, a novel, and two collaborative novellas. He has also published six books of poetry, including Farmer Gloomy's New Hybrid (shortlisted for the 2000 Trillium Book Prize), I Cut My Finger (shortlisted for the 2008 ReLit Poetry Award), and Dead Cars in Managua (shortlisted for the 2009 ReLit Poetry Award). His short-story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog was shortlisted for the Alberta Publishers Award and the Alberta Readers Choice Award, and won the 2010 ReLit Short Fiction Award. His recent plotless novel, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, has received rave reviews in Canada and the U.S. Stuart has been teaching workshops across Canada for over two decades. He was the 2010 writer-in-residence at Queen's University.

Word of this workshop went out just a few days ago, and already it's nearly half-full.

Over and out.

Chapbook Market buys, poems got walked

2011-07-12T09:19:00.003-04:00

Back now from a very busy, very productive five days in Toronto. One of the highlights was Saturday's Meet the Presses SCREAMING Chapbook Market at Clinton's Tavern. I think this was likely the first all-chapbook market in Canadian history! And it was a great time. Attendance was pretty good — I'd estimate about 100 people came through. We could have done a better job with signage out front, though: we need to get a proper sandwich board to put on the sidewalk and on the morning of the market poster all along Bloor Street with "TODAY!" signage. We did a pretty good job, though, with pre-day publicity: Tweeting, FBing, emailing, blogging, and postering.

By the middle of the afternoon, Clinton's was teeming shoppers, and the 18 participating presses made for one of the most exciting assortments of small press stuff I've ever seen. The difference between this event and the regular Indie Literary Market we've put on in the past, is that there was pretty much zero stuff here that could be found in a bookstore.

I wish I could have bought something from every table there, but I still managed to get some very exciting material:

ANGELHOUSEPRESS (Ottawa)
over my dead corpus, by Pearl Pirie

APT. 9 PRESS (Ottawa)
Exit Interviews, by Jim Smith

BOOKTHUG (Toronto)
Form, by Mark Truscott
Ten Random Poems from Demtened, by Jay MillAr

FIELDNOTES (Toronto)
YesNo, by Beth Follett

GESTURE PRESS (Toronto)
Swing Rhythms, by Nicholas Power

HORSE OF OPERATION (Toronto)
Abraxia, by Graeme Clarke
Expense Account, by Caroline Szpak
Where Punknames Come From, by Martin Hazelbower

JUNCTION BOOKS (Toronto)
Set a Compass upon the Face of the Depth, by Carleton Wilson

SERIF OF NOTTINGHAM (Hamilton)
The Saxophonists' Book of the Dead, by Gary Barwin
what happened was: he flew, by Ally Fleming

SUNNYOUTSIDE (Buffalo)
The Morning Light, by Jason Heroux
The Really Funny Thing about Apathy, by Chelsea Martin
Rumble Strip, by Jason Tandon
What to Tell the Sleeping Babies, by MRB Chelko

THE EMERGENCY RESPONSE UNIT (Toronto)
Stowaway, by Carey Toane

Cameron Amstee of Apt. 9 Press did a small second printing of 10 copies of my I Have Come to Talk About Manners, and I think those pretty much sold out. And, of course, I think any new Jim Smith title is a huge thing to celebrate in this country's literature, so kudos to Cameron for Exit Interviews.

It was very exciting that Gary Barwin, after 25 years of self-publishing through his Serif of Nottingham Imprint, chose Ally Fleming's fabulous work to publish as his first-ever non–Gary Barwin title.

Horse of Operation is one of the best publisher names I've ever heard, and their small collective creates very eclectically designed publications: from punky and messy to tidy and classy.

It was a thrill to see the work of Sunnyoutside, David McNamara's press out of Buffalo, and he too is eclectic: amazing that the same press puts out work by Jason Heroux and Chelsea Martin!

I released two new publications for the occasion: Ladies & Gentlemen, the Solar System, a short story by me, and Teeth, Untucked, the first poetry chapbook by Nicholas Papaxanthos, who is a crazily talented, very young writer who I met during my residency in Kingston this past fall.

Definitely looking forward to another chapbook market sometime in the future. For the moment, we at the Meet the Presses are just beginning to cook up something else new for the fall.

•

Had pretty much a full house for my Walking the Poem workshop in the Mansfield Press office on Sunday. This was a full-day version of a three-hour workshop I ran in Cobourg a couple months back. Sunday's session took an awful lot of stamina — the big challenge was pacing things, because it was as intense as it was fun. I seem to have great luck with the makeup of my groups, and this one was no exception. Everyone read at least a few pieces over the course of the day, and no one was without some really exciting moments in their work. By the end of the day, it felt like we'd been working together for months, the chemistry was so good in the room.

A couple of people suggested a two-day workshop would be in order. So I'm working on this idea. Wondering, though, if I could get enough people willing to pay, say, $150 for a full weekend. It'd be an amazing workout, and we could accomplish so much. Details of the two-day to come.

Over and out.

Meet the Presses SCREAMING Chapbook Market

2011-07-06T19:52:00.006-04:00

Very excited about the new Meet the Presses venture — is it the first chapbook market ever in Canada? I dunno, but it's going to be a lot of fun. This is a project we've wanted to produce for a long time. For me, the chapbook is the heart of the small press.

I'll be there with an array of Proper Tales chapbooks from the recent and distant past, as well as two new items — a fiction chapbook by me called Ladies & Gentlemen, the Solar System, and a first chapbook, Teeth Untucked, by Kingston poet Nicholas Papaxanthos.

Over and out.

WALKING THE POEM

2011-07-01T10:04:00.001-04:00

Last call for my new poetry workshop in Toronto!

STUART ROSS'S
WALKING THE POEM

Write in ways
you’ve never
written before!

Poet and writing teacher Stuart Ross offers a relaxed, supportive workshop for poets at all levels. Walking the Poem focuses on creating new work and exploring the possibilities of those texts, as each poem multiplies and mutates.

Sunday, July 10, 10 am - 5 pm
Dupont/Symington area, Toronto

Fee: $80 includes materials and light snacks
Space is limited. To register, write
hunkamooga@sympatico.ca

COMMENTS ON MY PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS:

"I really enjoyed myself and felt like I got a lot done. I thank you very much for the stimulation & the relaxed atmosphere."

"Yay! Excited to go back to trying to write poems. I have so many new things to try now. Thanks!"

"I liked being exposed to the familiar in a new, fresh, creative way."

"Just what I needed!"

"I most enjoyed the relaxed pace and the self-directed nature of the work."

"The Boot Camp pushed me beyond my comfort zone in precisely the way that I hoped it would."

"My favourite part was the variety of non-threatening strategies for writing."

"Really informative, really helpful workshop. Great energy!"

"Excellent pacing! The day passes quickly — it really is a boot camp!"

"You always get such interesting characters attending your workshops!"

"Excellent overall. I got a lot of out of it. Money very well spent! I'd recommend it to others."

"Very well-run, well-thought-out workshop! Thanks!"

MY BIO:

I am the author of six full-length poetry collections, including the acclaimed I Cut My Finger (Anvil Press) and Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (ECW Press). My 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. I'm Poetry Editor for Mansfield Press and Fiction & Poetry Editor for This Magazine. I also write a regular column — "Hunkamooga" — for the literary magazine sub-Terrain. In fall 2010 I was Writer in Residence at Queen's University in Kingston. This spring, ECW Press released my novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. For nearly 25 years, I've led writing workshops and I've brought my popular Poetry Boot Camp to venues across Canada.

Over and out.

Tour notes...

2011-06-22T09:09:00.002-04:00

The SDJ/Mansfield tour has had some great moments, but it hasn't been without its twists. Yesterday, Marko Sijan had to suddenly leave the tour to be with his family in Windsor. This was after a magnificent reading the night before in Toronto, at the Magpie. Marko entirely took on the persona of his character Gunther, beautifully displaying the contradictions of a seemingly intelligent and eloquent racist/misogynist. Particularly chilling were Marko's grins and chuckles at some of the most harrowing moments.

It's been just fantastic to hear him read from his novel, Mongrel. I had hoped for another three excerpts this week during the tour. For now, our thoughts are with him.

Robert Earl Stewart also gave a masterful reading from Campfire Radio Rhapsody. He's quickly hitting his reading stride with this book.

The Toronto stop was the one place that I wasn't launching on this tour: it was strictly a Mansfield Press event. So that meant I got to just sit behind the book table and enjoy, between brief bursts of being host. The Toronto reading also featured guest appearances by Peter Norman and Amy Lavender Harris. Great to hear both of them read again.

Last night brought Bob and I to Kingston, and it was great to go back to the city where I was writer-in-residence last fall. We had a fantastic crowd upstairs at the Grad Club. In a last-minute recruitment, Lachie MacDonald opened the evening with four or five original songs. This guy is such a great storyteller, such a great singer.

Here he is with his band Horses:

After Lachie performed, Jaime Forsythe read from her recent poetry. A quiet and powerful reading. Such strange and beautiful poetry. I can't wait to begin working on her debut with Mansfield Press in 2012!

Again, a great reading by Robert Earl Stewart, who totally commanded the room. And then I read three chapters from SDJ, at least one of which I'd never read aloud before. It was a bit of a sombre reading on my part, but I got an enthusiastic response.

So many great friends in the crowd. And a nice gathering at the Mansion afterwards. I hate to have to leave Kingston right away.

But Bob and I are hitting the road for Montreal in a couple of hours. We'll read tonight at Drawn & Quarterly, joined by poet Priscila Uppal, whose Winter Sport: Poems came out with Mansfield last year. I'm a little anxious about tonight, because Montreal is Marko's town, and Marko won't be there. We'll hope for the best.

And we're thinking of Marko.

Over and out.

SDJ reviewed in Globe & Mail!

2011-06-22T09:04:00.002-04:00

Very excited to see Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew reviewed in the Globe & Mail! After the early review in the Winnipeg Free Press, I was starting to think the book was going to be otherwise ignored by the dailies.

This is a really nice review, too. One of those reviews that points out a thing or two I missed about my own novel.

Trapped in a Venn diagram

REVIEWED BY A.J. LEVIN

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Jun. 20, 2011 6:00PM EDT

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, by Stuart Ross, ECW Press, 178 pages, $19.95

Part Guy Maddin, part Marc Chagall, part Kurt Vonnegut, all Stuart Ross, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew follows the musings of antihero Ben. A performance artist raised in the 1960s along Toronto's dreary Bathurst Street, Ben muses, in a series of short, scene-like chapters, on the love, hate, kitsch, humour, violence and loss that is his biography.

While unreliable witness Ben is depressive and broods on the thin veil that separates life and death, the somberness is undercut by puns and Ross's trademark surrealism. The past is also as fluid and every bit as immediate as the present, making the work both nostalgic and anti-nostalgic.

Known mainly as a poet and as a small-press publisher, Ross previously collaborated on two novels, and has written short fiction. Both as novel and in its subject matter, this one might seem a departure for Ross, but his 2001 poetry collection Razovsky at Peace also featured a mourning Ben, Hebrew for “son,” with grieving son being both Bens' primary roles.

Surrealist though Ross is, what seems a nonsensical title for the book is surprisingly apt. Ben is stuck in the middle of a Venn diagram: The three rings are ambivalent nature, played by dragonflies that both eat mosquitoes and claw into the young Ben's flesh; equally ambivalent humanity, as in Ben's Jewish family, who are all gone, in different ways; and violence and hatred.

Nature can be just as destructive as people: A friend's mother is limbless; Ben's parents both die of cancer; and his brother, Jake, suffers a case of amnesia straight out of Oliver Sacks. The title alludes to violence in the form of snowballs that anti-Semites threw at Ben's mother when she was 4, a violence in which both humanity and nature partake, though a cartoonish one. Yet the book is framed by Ben's mother – maybe – shooting an Ernst Zundel-like character. Hatred and violence … snowball.

The novel challenges our perceptions from the start, and also asks tough questions. It's one of Ross's endearing qualities that his humour carries moral authority, as in when Ben recalls playing with toy soldiers, then reflects, after watching battle coverage on CNN, “Real soldiers don't have plastic bases on their feet, which is why they fall down a lot.”

So while loss is filtered through Ben and his family, it's part of a larger vision. And because in Ross's (and Ben's) universe, reality and fiction are blurred, loss is not irrevocable. The death of Kim Novak's character in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is every bit as real to Ben as that of his parents. Novak the actress is alive, but is it Novak or her dead character, Madeleine Elster, who meets Ben in a doughnut shop?

While the ending runs long — Ross goes on for several pages on how difference-making is the enemy of art — Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew succeeds not only because of Ross's distinctive style, but also because he can think and feel with the best of them, and shows maturity of vision without sacrificing the childish sense of play and absurdity his readers expect from him.

As a teenager, A.J. Levin, the Winnipeg-based author of Monks' Fruit, thought Bathurst Street was already several decades in the past.

Over and out.

Tonight: Toronto! Tuesday: Kingston! Wednesday: Montreal! Thursday: Ottawa!

2011-06-20T08:01:00.004-04:00

Nice crowd last night in Windsor at Milk for the opening night of the mini-tour featuring the two new Mansfield Press books and my own Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. I've heard Robert Earl Stewart read several times before, and he's really good, but I had never yet heard him read from the new book, Campfire Radio Rhapsody. It's a dark collection of poems, but from the stage Bob eked out some great humour among the chilling moments. And, though I have read Marko Sijan's novel, Mongrel, about half a dozen times (in the course of the editing and proofreading processes), I'd never heard him read a single word of it aloud. He, too, was fantastic.

I read three short chapters from Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, one of which I haven't read from yet. It's going to be fun this week reading from different parts of the book I haven't yet uttered aloud.

Opening the evening was Bob's bandmate in Waker Glass, a singer/guitarist named John Pilat, and he was excellent. Mostly originals, plus a very nice cover of "Suzanne." (The Leonard Cohen song, not the Randy Newman song. Though I would love to hear him sing Cohen's "Suzanne.")

Tonight at the Magpie in Toronto, I'll just be doing hosting duties, as it's strictly a Mansfield event. It's late in the launch season, but we're hoping for a good crowd. Marko has a lot of friends in Toronto who have been dying to read this legendary novel (read about its publishing trajectory in the new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries), and Bob has already built a good Toronto fan base based on his first collection, 2009's Something Burned Along the Southern Border.

Tuesday morning we'll head to Kingston, where we're reading upstairs at the Grad Club in the evening. I'm really looking forward to seeing a lot of the people I met during my stint as writer in residence at Queen's University last fall; that gig was among the great highlights of my writing life. Marko, Bob, and I will be joined there by Jaime Forsythe, who's an amazing poet and whose first collection will come out with my Mansfield imprint in 2012. Here are three poems by Jaime.

The tour continues later in the week with stops in Montreal and Ottawa.

Over and out.

Sunday: Windsor! Monday: Toronto!

2011-06-18T10:24:00.004-04:00

Great day in Toronto yesterday. Luncheon for the Trillium Awards, where Mansfield poet Peter Norman was shortlisted for the poetry prize for his At the Gates of the Theme Park. Well, he didn't win, but the prize went to another great poet with a great first book, Jeff Latosik author of Tiny, Frantic, Stronger. Dani Couture was also on the short list with her fantastic second collection, Sweet. Meanwhile, over in the main prize, buddy Paul Vermeersch was shortlisted for his mighty fine fourth poetry collection, The Reinvention of the Human Hand, but the prize went to another friend, the sublime Rabindranath Maharaj, for his novel The Amazing Absorbing Boy. Robin read from that book in my Real Resident Reading Series at Queen's this past fall and it was a brilliant reading. I'm real happy for him.

Last night was the launch of the latest issue of Taddle Creek, which is packed with great writers, and I was happy to join the festivities at Jet Fuel, where I got to see lots of great friends, some of whom I hadn't seen in ages.

Tomorrow morning, hitting the road (well, the railroad tracks, actually) for Windsor, for the first stop in the five-city tour I'm doing with Mansfield authors Robert Earl Stewart and Marko Sijan.

And then on Monday, we're piling into Bob's four wheels and heading to Toronto for the Mansfield launch, which'll also feature readings by Amy Lavender Harris and Peter Norman. This'll be the only tour stop where I'm not launching Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, because I already launched it in Toronto last month. I'll be hosting, though. Road trip!

Over and out.

Another batch of chapbooks from Apt. 9 Press!

2011-06-17T00:13:00.003-04:00

I meant to write about this a couple months back, when the package arrived.

Young poet and publisher Cameron Anstee is doing some brilliant and energetic things up in Ottawa. He's sent me a fabulous and eclectic bunch of beautiful designed chapbooks he's released through his Apt. 9 Press.

eating thistles, by Peter Gibbon
The Delicious Fields, by Jeremy Hanson-Finger
Sweet & Sour Nothings, by William Hawkins
Accidentals, by Claudia Coutu Radmore
Site Conditions, by Monty Reid

Cameron also tucked in a copy of a chapbook-length poem by himself, She May Be Weary, from St. Andrew Books. Not sure if this is one of his own imprints, or whose. It's a nice piece, though, and Cameron's writing seems to be getting more focussed and less in the realm of abstraction.

He will be selling his stuff at the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair and at the Meet the Presses Screaming Chapbook Market on July 9, at Clinton's Tavern in Toronto.

Most exciting to me is that on the evening prior to the Ottawa fair, Cameron is launching a new chapbook — Exit Interviews, by the great Jim Smith. Details on this launch/reading on Cameron's site. This will be Jim's first publication since 2009's Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems, which I acquired and ushered through Mansfield Press. If you haven't read that book, and you care about Canadian poetry, for fuck's sake, get a copy. It's brilliant. You will never read anything like it again here in Canada.

Hats off to Cameron Anstee. He's doing great things for us.

Over and out.

A really lovely review of SDJ. Who are these people?

2011-06-16T23:15:00.001-04:00

This actually made me weepy. Thank you, whoever you are.

Over and out.

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew mini-tour — and other stuff

2011-06-15T21:37:00.004-04:00

On Sunday, I head to Windsor to kick off a five-city launch tour with the spring 2011 Mansfield authors, Marko Sijan and Robert Earl Stewart. I'm very excited to hear both of them read from their new books, the novel Mongrel and the poetry collection Campfire Radio Rhapsody respectively. These are the four and fifth books to bear the logo of the "a stuart ross book" imprint.

We're travelling from Windsor to Toronto, Kingston, Montreal and Ottawa, and I'll be launching my novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew in all but Toronto (where I already launched in May). We have some great guests joining us along the way, including Jaime Forsythe, whose first book of poetry (still untitled) will be released by Mansfield through my imprint in 2012.

In the meantime, this week the winners of the Trillium Book Awards will be announced. Up for the poetry prize is Peter Norman, whose first collection, At the Gates of the Theme Park, I acquired for Mansfield last year. He's a fantastic reader, a really adventurous poet, and I'm mighty happy for him.

In other, more New Yorky news, on Monday I took part in a snazzy shindig at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The event was called Spontaneity: A New York State of Mind, and it was curated by my old friend Jim Shedden in conjunction with the exhibition of Abstract Expressionist paintings on loan from the MOMA. The event featured jazz music, dance, and poetry. Lynn Crosbie and I provided the poetry (actually, Lynn provided a bit of comedy, too, via Lenny Bruce). I read works by Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Eileen Myles, and I snuck in a quick Joe Brainard poem at the last moment. I got tons of great remarks by audience members afterwards, including a few who wanted details about the poets I read from.

On the topic of Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, its reception has been interesting. Everyone says that short-story books don't sell, and it's novels that everyone wants. But my 2009 story collection, Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, got tons of reviews in its first few months of publication. SDJ has managed a single review in a daily — the Winnipeg Free Press — and a couple of reviews in U.S. trade mags and on blogs. Could be that it's just off to a slow start, review-wise. And I'm not complaining: I've been incredibly fortunate when it comes to reviews. I know some brilliant writers whose books have gotten either no or very little notice.

I agree with the excellent folks who put together this manifesto in celebration of the short story. But I'm still hoping for more reviews of SDJ!

Over and out.

New workshop in Toronto!

2011-06-07T16:10:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago I tried out a new workshop in Cobourg. It was just an afternoon session, called Walking The Poem. It went really well, but I felt that the concept need a full day. So I've scheduled a full-day version of Walking The Poem for mid-July in Toronto. Here are the details:

STUART ROSS'S
WALKING THE POEM

Write in ways
you’ve never
written before!

Poet and writing teacher Stuart Ross offers a relaxed, supportive workshop for poets at all levels. Walking the Poem focuses on creating new work and exploring the possibilities of those texts, as each poem multiplies and mutates.

Sunday, July 10, 10 am - 5 pm
Dupont/Symington area, Toronto

Fee: $80 includes materials and light snacks
Space is limited. To register, write
hunkamooga@sympatico.ca

The starting points for some of the work in this workshop will be strategies I've used in my Poetry Boot Camps. But we'll take those and really run with them here. I think this is going to be a sort of fun and exhausting experience!

Over and out.

Jewish Toronto, John Lavery, and poem-mutation

2011-05-29T00:28:00.003-04:00

Amy Lavender Harris is writer-in-residence at Open Book Toronto this month and she's written a very thoughtful and thought-provoking piece around my novel, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. I like this bit, where she explains the book's title:

And this is the problem at the centre of Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, whose title alludes to three pivotal circumstances that seem to define its protagonist's life. His mother, a young child growing up in pre-War Toronto, pelted with snowballs for being a Jew and eventually seeking vengeance; her son, trembling and terrified of a dragonfly that lands on his knee, his flight seeming to foreshadow a life of passivity and retreat; and the question of his own Jewishness, summed up in an essay written for school, in which Ben writes, "you really have to struggle to be Jewish so you really believe in it."

She talks also about "Holocaust envy" and about other Jewish Toronto books. Always, I am grateful when people spend time thinking about my writing.

*

On Sunday I'm headed to Ottawa for a memorial tribute to John Lavery, who died earlier this month after, as they say, a long battle with cancer. It's still a strange feeling to wake up in the morning and remember that John is no longer in this world, though he's certainly in the thoughts of so many people. The tribute takes place from 4 to 6 pm at the Manx Pub on Elgin Street, and will be hosted by Ottawa poet David O'Meara. Many of John's colleagues will be there to read from his works, and say a few words about him.

*

On Saturday, I ran my first writing workshop in Cobourg. A half-dozen of us crammed into a tiny study room in the Cobourg Public Library for a new session I called Walking The Poem. It was a great and eclectic group, with three Cobourgers and two people who drove in from Kingston. I got a lot of writing done, and so did they, and along the way we tried out some really fascinating approaches to poem-mutation.

Over and out.

The night of 1 million events

2011-05-25T12:21:00.003-04:00

Headed into Toronto yesterday to meet with some friends and to catch some evening literary events.

It was a crazy night. Leigh Nash and Ken Sparling were reading in Lillian Necakov's great Boneshaker Reading Series at the St. Clair/Silverthorn Library; Elyse Friedman, Pasha Malla, Michael Winter and Julie Booker were reading short fiction at an Anansi event at Sneaky Dee's; Rachel Zolf was reading at the usually bland and open-mic-plagued Art Bar Reading Series at Clinton's; Paul Vermeersch was hosting the Insomniac Spring launch at Magpie, featuring old friend Stan Rogal, new friend Mike Spry, and a poet named Sam Cheuk; and Jay MillAr's BookThug was launching about three hundred new titles at The Supermarket in Kensington Market.

I had hoped to get to four of the events, and then whittled my aspirations down to three, and wound up making it to two.

Saw lots of great people and one fuckin' dink.

Here are the books I wound up buying yesterday evening:

Dance, Monster!, by Stan Rogal (Insomniac)
Distillery Songs, by Mike Spry (Insomniac)
The Obvious Flap, by Gary Barwin & Gregory Betts (BookThug)
Killdeer, by Phil Hall (BookThug)
I Can Say Interpellation, by Stephen Cain & Clelia Scala (BookThug)
The Coming Envelope Issue 3, edited by Malcolm Sutton (BookThug)
Instructions for Pen and Ink, by Edward Nixon (Cactus Press)

Here are the inscriptions that appear in the books, censored to protect the signers:

"Over all the years, thanks pal!"

"I can say…thank you & best wishes. With admiration"

"With grateful thanks (there is no shuttle bus)"

"Obviously!"

"Without your support of [censored], I don't think this would have made it into print. Thank you so, so much."

"the osteo pathic flipper thanks Stuart!"

"Thanks for coming to the Launch. All best [censored] with admiration."

"[a drawing of what appears to be a hand poking out of a long sleeve and perhaps with a bullet hole or nail hole in the palm]"

Over and out.

WALKING THE POEM: A poetry workshop in Cobourg

2011-05-20T13:17:00.001-04:00

I'm taking the plunge and leading my first workshop in Cobourg. It's a new workshop, with elements of the Poetry Boot Camp, but an opportunity to dig deeper in the poems and see what can be done with them through various writing strategies.

WALKING THE POEM
Saturday, May 28, 1-4 pm
Cobourg Public Library, 200 Ontario Street
Group Study Room (2nd floor)

Stuart Ross leads a relaxed, supportive workshop for poets at all levels, focusing on creating new work and exploring the possibilities of your own texts.

$45 registration required. Write hardscrabble@bell.net

Please pass it on to anyone in the Durham or Northumberland area. Thanks!

Over and out.

Good night, John Lavery.

2011-05-08T21:58:00.001-04:00

JOHN LAVERY
31 December 1949 – 8 May 2011

"learn to live without, learn to live within"

New venue for ECW launch party next week!

2011-05-06T07:41:00.005-04:00

OK, so mere hours after the ECW Spring Literary Party was announced a few weeks back, the venue closed down. The party was quickly relocated, over to the brilliantly named No One Writes to the Colonel (I guess they didn't want the word Cholera in their name) on College Street.

Have I already griped enough about getting to read for only three minutes? Probably not. Don't forget, for a modest fee I will also come and do a reading in your living room.

Here's the updated poster for the launch of my novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, plus books by several other esteemed writers who ECW is publishing this season:

Over and out.

A Renga for Japan

2011-05-05T12:28:00.004-04:00

I recently took part in an intriguing project. Twenty-seven poets were asked to contribute towards a renga to show support for the people of Japan and to raise money for Second Harvest Japan.

The project was coordinated by Sachiko Murakami, a member of the Toronto to Japan collective, a fine poet, and a host of the Pivot Readings at the Press Club series in Toronto.

After the renga was completed (I wrote the penultimate lines, and Larissa Lai finished the poem), Sachiko did the almost-impossible and got each contributor to submit a video reading of her/his lines. Here is the result, including lines by Paul Vermeersch, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, Carey Toane, Jake Mooney, and many others. It's called Another Spring: A Renga for Japan:

To support Second Harvest Japan, you can buy a broadside of the entire poem. The broadside was designed and produced by The Emergency Response Unit, Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner's wonderful small-press publishing house.

Here's the info.

Over and out.

Launch info, plus the fall Mansfield books revealed at last!

2011-04-27T11:49:00.003-04:00

The Cobourg launch for Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew was a success. The Human Bean was filled past capacity, and in addition to the locals (many of whom I didn't know), people came from Toronto, Whitby, Belleville, and Kingston. ECW editor Michael Holmes hosted, and he made me nearly weepy with his extremely generous words. I mean, ECW and I have had a relationship not without its bumps, but this experience of being back has been great. SDJ is my fifth book with ECW.

Shannon Siblock sang five original songs at the launch: his first public performance in many years. He's got this sweet and plaintive voice, and, as Ben Walker pointed out, he ends his songs perfectly: when there's nothing more to say, he stops. I had asked him to play one of the songs mentioned in the novel, but he wouldn't tell me which he'd decided on. Turned out to be "Eternal Flame," which, previous to last Thursday, I would never have imagined being sung by a male voice. Shannon did a great job all-round.

Steph from Bella's Bookshelves wrote a very thoughtful review of both the book and the launch. I met Steph last December when she came to the Grad Club in Kingston for my Real Resident Reading Series (man, I miss those days…) — an installment featuring readings by John Lavery, Anne McLean, and me, and music by Ben Walker. By coincidence, Steph wound up proofreading SDJ for ECW Press (and she made some great catches!).

In other news, it was a bit of a crazy weekend as I scrambled to finalize the "stuart ross book" selections for Mansfield's fall 2011 season. Already in the works was a brilliant and utterly entertaining quasi-memoir by George Bowering, called How I Wrote Certain of My Books, a nice spin on Raymond Roussel's book of the same title. To that, we're adding the debut poetry collection by Carey Toane — a fascinating and eclectic book called The Crystal Palace. Carey has been in Brooklyn for most of the past year, but before that she was very active in Toronto, doing a great hosting job on the Pivot at the Press Club Reading Series, acting as an operative on the Patchy Squirrel Lit-Serv, and collaborating with Elisabeth de Mariaffi on the Toronto Poetry Vendors project. As well, I'm really pleased to be edited Lillian Necakov's fifth full-length poetry book (and her second with Mansfield), Hooligans. Lillian's been steeped in mathematics and science reading the past few years, and the way she blends these new influences into her often-surreal poetry is fascinating. Rounding off the Mansfield fall list is a book that publisher Denis De Klerck is putting through, Lover Through Departure: New and Selected Poems, by Rishma Dunlop. I haven't read that MS yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

A final note: there is still some space around the table for Saturday's Poetry Boot Camp in Toronto. If you're interested, or know someone who is, I can be reached at hunkamooga [at] sympatico [dot] ca.

Over and out.

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew — the Cobourg launch! the Toronto launch!

2011-04-20T18:18:00.005-04:00

OK, I'm breaking the champagne bottle over the bow of my novel tomorrow. The first launch of Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew is happening in Cobourg, at 7 pm at the Human Bean on King Street West. ECW editor Michael Holmes is coming to town to host the event, and local singer-songwriter Shannon Siblock will be doing four or five songs. I'll read for about 15 or 20 minutes. I think it's going to be pretty full-up at the tiny Bean.

Then, on May 11, ECW is holding what it calls its Spring Literary Party. Seven books will be launched. Along with mine, there'll be titles by Frank Davey, Gil Adamson, Tony Burgess, Gillian Sze, Jonathan Bennett and Natalee Caple. Darn nice company.

Back when I did poetry books with ECW in the last decade, I used to grumble at the six-minute time limit at ECW launches. For this event, we each get three minutes (180 seconds!). So I'm hoping some series in Toronto will invite me so I can read more substantively. ECW likes their launches to have the emphasis on the "party" aspect. Fair enough!

Hoping also to launch the book in Windsor, Kingston, Ottawa, and Montreal, perhaps with the spring titles from Mansfield. And then I'll be heading out to launch in Vancouver — maybe in Clint Burnham's backyard — and in New Denver.

But I don't think it's a very good book. It's too literary.

Over and out.

A Poetry Boot Camp on April 30 … and typesetting the Mansfield spring list

2011-04-17T04:42:00.005-04:00

I haven't done a workshop in Toronto in ages. Feels like ages. Certainly not this year. Was it last summer I last led a workshop there? Last spring?

So I'm scheduling a Poetry Boot Camp for April 30. I pretty much always fill up my Poetry Boot Camps, but my presence in Toronto is a lot less these days. My Patchy Squirrel Lit-Serv lands in Toronto every week, but I no longer do. So it'll be interesting to see what happens.

Here are the details:

STUART ROSS'S POETRY BOOT CAMP

Saturday, April 30, 10am-5 pm (w/ 45-minute lunch break)
Symington/Dupont area
$75 includes materials and light snacks

Prepayment guarantees your spot. To register, write Stuart at
hunkamooga@sympatico.ca.

BOOT CAMP DESCRIPTION
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!

COMMENTS ON MY PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS:

"I really enjoyed myself and felt like I got a lot done. I thank you very much for the stimulation & the relaxed atmosphere."

"Yay! Excited to go back to trying to write poems. I have so many new things to try now. Thanks!"

"I liked being exposed to the familiar in a new, fresh, creative way."

"Just what I needed!"

"I most enjoyed the relaxed pace and the self-directed nature of the work."

"The Boot Camp pushed me beyond my comfort zone in precisely the way that I hoped it would."

"My favourite part was the variety of non-threatening strategies for writing."

"Really informative, really helpful workshop. Great energy!"

"Excellent pacing! The day passes quickly — it really is a boot camp!"

"You always get such interesting characters attending your workshops!"

"Excellent overall. I got a lot of out of it. Money very well spent! I'd recommend it to others."

"Very well-run, well-thought-out workshop! Thanks!"

MY BIO: I am the author of six full-length poetry collections, including the acclaimed I Cut My Finger (Anvil Press) and Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (ECW Press). My 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. I'm Poetry Editor for Mansfield Press and Fiction & Poetry Editor for This Magazine. I also write a regular column — "Hunkamooga" — for the literary magazine sub-Terrain. In fall 2010 I was Writer in Residence at Queen's University in Kingston. This spring, ECW Press released by novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. For nearly 25 years, I've led writing workshops and I've brought my popular Poetry Boot Camp to venues across Canada.

Know anyone who might be interested? Please help spread the word!

Meanwhile, in the next 48 hours, I hope to finish typesetting the second of the two Mansfield Press spring releases, both of which will appear under my "a stuart ross" imprint.

I've already completed the typesetting on Robert Earl Stewart's second collection of poetry, Campfire Radio Rhapsody. It's following quickly on the heels of his first collection, Something Burned Along the Southern Border, which came out in 2009, but Bob is a very fast writer and a very good one. The new book has a very different tone than the first: and it's better, which is saying a lot. This is a dark book — sometimes darkly funny, too. Bob has been working on a novel for many years now, and I'm really curious about that. How does a guy who writes poetry like he does write fiction?

The book I'm wrapping up on the typesetting on now is Marko Sijan's first novel (and his first book), Mongrel. I guess I've read this about five or six times now. It still shocks me. I'm very curious to see how this book is received. And whether he'll have his key to Windsor (where he grew up and where the novel is set) taken away from him. Marko has a personal essay in the just-new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries; therein he tells the sordid and sorta jolting story of Mongrel's genesis, in particular its near-publication about a decade ago by the then-soon-to-be-defunct Gutter Press. It's almost as shocking as his novel.

I'm really proud to have a hand in getting these books into the world. There will be a Toronto launch for these two titles, and launches in Montreal and Windsor as well. Maybe Kingston. Maybe Hamilton. Maybe even Cobourg.

Over and out.

One star is golden! I'll win the Griffin!

2011-04-05T14:07:00.003-04:00

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew earned one out of five stars on someone's review blog. She says she was unable to write her own "synapsis" of the book, which she found to be a "mis-mash of scenes" ("Some of which don't even make any sense on their own, let alone taken as a whole with the others.")

This might be the best review I'll get — she gave five stars out of five to Stieg Larsson, Robert Sawyer and John Grisham, so obviously I'm doing everything right!

Incidentally, the nominees for the 2011 Griffin Prize were released today. I must reveal that I wrote all of the nominated books, under various pen names. I will accept the award not for myself, but for the employees of Burma-Shave.

Over and out.

Jonathan Ball on SDJ

2011-04-02T12:27:00.004-04:00

First daily-newspaper review of Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. And it's Jonathan Ball in the Winnipeg Free Press. Very interesting take on the novel's narrative perspective.

Compelling, but not as good as it should have been
Reviewed by: Jonathan Ball

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew
By Stuart Ross
ECW, 168 pages, $20

THIS tiny literary novel, the first for Ontarian Stuart Ross, explores how the historical trauma of the Holocaust has destroyed the normal processes of cultural memory.
It is tame compared to Ross's previous book, the 2009 short story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. That's not to suggest that Ross, a well-known small-press editor and the author of several books (mostly poetry), hasn't produced a moving and funny novel.

It's just that he's not extending his talents to their limit.

The protagonist and narrator is a Toronto Jewish performance artist now entering his 40s. While reflecting on his life, Ben snags on a childhood memory, his terminally ill mother's assassination of a neo-Nazi leader.

As Ben circles this memory, attempting to square it with other memories of his mother and life, Ross presents his narrative in short, fragmentary chapters that often read like mini-stories, whose interconnections are more thematic than plot-based.

The assassination itself opens the novel. Unlike other poets-turned-novelists, Ross understands the power of both poetry and clear prose. The first sentence is a good example: "To its surprise, the bullet sailed out of the gun my mother clutched unsteadily in both hands, and a moment later the big man's yellow hard hat leapt from his thick head, into the air."

It's the bullet that's surprised, the hard hat that leaps — the objects themselves, the whole world of the memory, taking on life. The child's perspective is tilted in, rather than poured, with "the big man" — Ross resists the temptation to revel in the child's perspective through clunky, condescending stream-of-consciousness, the bane of lesser authors.

When Ross does inhabit the child's voice more fully, he manages it well. Pontificating upon a catfish, the child Ben notes its silent swishes through an ice-cream container: "That's what made it like a cat — the silence and the whiskers."

At stake in Ross's story is not solving the mystery of whether or why Ben's mother killed the neo-Nazi, but how the trauma of the Holocaust is played out in the lives of those with generational ties to the tragedy.

Often, Ben returns to a memory not his own, but his mother's — having snowballs hurled at her as a child because she was Jewish. "What were those snowballs thinking as they flew towards her little curly-haired Jewish head? Was this why their flakes had floated down from the sky like ashes?"

Ross's writing compels, but his story doesn't cohere or build, because the novel lacks shape. Its formal approach — a story told in disjointed fragments of memory and dream — is unmotivated.

Ben has a brother, Jake, who is unable to hold onto or summon his memories due to a medical condition. Instead, they surface with seeming randomness.

Why isn't Jake the main character, the one circling these memories and suffering their impositions, from his inability to truly recall, manage or lose them?

This shift would give Ross's structure more meaning and allow him to pace the novel to the rhythms of Jake's condition.

Jonathan Ball teaches English at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of two poetry collections, the second, Clockfire, recently shortlisted for Manitoba's Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for poetry.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 2, 2011 J9

Over and out.

gnat poe moe

2011-04-01T22:06:00.002-04:00

A person said it's National Poetry Month.

I said, "Go read Bill Berkson. Go read Bill Kushner. Go read bill bissett. Go read 'Buffalo Bill' by E.E. Cummings."

Plus write some stupid poem and title it "Stupid Poem."

Over and out.

CloClo

2011-03-18T15:22:00.002-04:00

I wrote a story featuring this guy. I wrote it a year or two ago. I am obsessed by him. I will write more stories that feature him.

Over and out.

Another review for SDJ

2011-03-18T08:45:00.003-04:00

My novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew has received a second review from an American trade journal. This time it's Booklist. I'm especially happy because the reviewer also liked Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop's Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, translated by my friend Anne McLean.

Ross, Stuart (Author) Apr 2011. 168 p. ECW, paperback, $17.95. (9781770410138).

Poet and avant-garde short-story writer Ross turns to the novel to explore, among other things, notions of Jewish identity and the loss of one’s parents. At first glance, this is a mystery of sorts. Ben, the narrator, is trying to figure out whether the memory he has of his late mother shooting a neo-Nazi in the head is real or imagined. Though he “couldn’t imagine his mother actually pulling the trigger of a gun, or even knowing how,” when he remembers her doing it, then he can imagine it. But Ben is not just a middle-aged Canadian Jew reflecting on his childhood. He is also a performance artist whose professional activities have included eating a thousand donuts, building a sacred stone man out of egg rolls, and sitting in a giant tub of ketchup while people pull his hair until he screams. And so Ross’ novel, which is consistently minimalist and nostalgic but also variously touching, hilarious, and sad, frequently challenges (and perhaps distracts) the reader by venturing into the surreal.

— Brendan Driscoll

Over and out.

Ross and Lavery read on Wednesday!

2011-02-21T11:16:00.004-05:00

House of Anansi presents

John Lavery and Stuart Ross
An unusual night of fiction (and song)

23 February · 7:30 pm

LeVack Block
88 Ossington Avenue

This is not your typical evening of fiction. I'm telling you.

Join us for this rare joint reading by John Lavery and Stuart Ross.

John will be reading from his widely acclaimed novel, Sandra Beck, and he'll be performing selections from his forthcoming CD, Dignity. He gives readings such as you have never before witnessed.

I'll be reading from Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, his ReLit Prize-winning story collection, as well as some new works, and possibly a preview from his forthcoming novel, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew.

And it's free, damn it!

JOHN LAVERY is the author of two acclaimed story collections, Very Good Butter and You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off (both from ECW Press), and the novel Sandra Beck (Anansi). Very Good Butter was a finalist for the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and Lavery has twice been a finalist in the annual Prism International fiction contest. His stories have appeared in This Magazine, Canadian Forum, the Ottawa Citizen, and the London Spectator, as well as in the Journey Prize Anthology. He lives in Gatineau, Quebec.

STUART ROSS's most recent books are Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books), Dead Cars in Managua (DC Books), and I Cut My Finger (Anvil Press). Buying Cigarettes for the Dog was a finalist for the Alberta Readers' Choice Award and the Alberta Book Publishers Award, and is the 2010 winner of the ReLit Prize in the short-fiction category. Stuart is Fiction & Poetry Editor at This Magazine, and he has his own imprint through Mansfield Press. After half a century in Toronto, Stuart now lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

Over and out.

First review of SDJ

2011-02-11T11:06:00.002-05:00

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew went to the printer this week, I think, and now it has received its first review, in the trade publication Publishers Weekly.

02/14/2011 Fiction

Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew
Stuart Ross, ECW, $17.95 trade paper (168p) ISBN 978-1-77041-013-8

Ross's slight first novel is composed of brief, somber, funny tales, and begins in Ontario with the narrator's memory of his mother avenging the gas chamber deaths of her Polish relatives by shooting a prominent neo-Nazi in the head. The fantasy of the victim suddenly empowered--his mother killing Rolf Köber as he steps out of a Jewish-owned hardware store, his hardhat spinning "like a dreidl"--becomes a mournful dirge that runs through these nostalgic and grim coming-of-age anecdotes. Both the narrator, Ben, and his mother have been bullied, she as a girl by Christian children, he by an older boy who forces him to destroy the book he's reading. As Ben destroys Black Like Me he thinks, "Now was the time to fight back," a vengeance fantasy that comforts him. Ben's parents die of cancer and his older brother, Jake, loses his memory, then his mind; Ben turns to performance art, reliving childhood traumas in acts called "Stagger" and "Nerve Endings," and often rehearsing fantasies, such as Jimmy Stewart's bell tower pursuit of Kim Novak in Vertigo. These are sharply composed vignettes with a keen sense of timing and humor. (Apr.)

Over and out.

Another stupid book trailer, plus Snowball, Mansfield, Queen's

2011-01-24T18:46:00.004-05:00

OK, so I did some book trailers in the fall. A couple of them ended up on Huffington Post, which was pretty thrilling. In one case, my number of "views" went from about 150 to about 3,700.

Here's my new trailer.

Meanwhile, looking at the final final final pages for Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, due out this spring with ECW Press. Don't know what will happen with this book, but I'm curious to find out.

Also working on the new spring titles for Mansfield, both under my "a stuart ross book" imprint: Campfire Radio Rhapsody, the second poetry collection by Robert Earl Stewart of Windsor, and Mongrel, a first novel by Marko Sijan, also of Windsor, though he now lives in Montreal. The two books create a pretty dark image for Detroit's neighbour. And, although I know I'm biased, they are both brilliant books.

My next task is to convince Mansfield publisher Denis De Klerck to put my imprint logo on the back of the book instead of just the copyright page. Right?

Last week, I sent in the stats on my Queen's residency. I had 85 appointments with about 30 different people; presented seven readings; conducted about eight workshops; produced six publications; gave about six readings. I produced three short stories, about a dozen poems, and one personal essay; did the final edits on my novel, too.

I made a lot of very good friends, too.

Over and out.

THE TENT: My New Year Poem

2011-01-01T23:33:00.001-05:00

THE TENT

I waited for the next year
to be invented. I took a number.
I passed the time creating
brief theatrical productions
in my head. My head hurt.
I dreamed I was a popular blue
soft drink, a gangly dog cartoon,
a sneaky “u” in American labour.
I dreamed I lived in a big city.

You wake up and you are
in a small town. A building
rings bells, and the lake
is just three minutes away;
the bits touching shore
are covered in ice. Are those ducks
frozen in the lake? No,
they are rocks that look like ducks.
Phew. The relieved townspeople
cluster by Town Hall, squeeze hard,
and the “s” pops out. They are
townpeople now. It is only
one town. It is in Canada.
Twenty Eleven kicks the “s”
down the street, whistling a song
my father liked.

My father never met Twenty Eleven.
My father liked Nelson Eddy, who he also
never met. The song was “Dardanella.”
My father and I build a tent
by the water. The water is solid.
We wait. The year is invented.
He teaches me what it can do.

Stuart Ross
1 January 2011

More HuffPost ... and leaving Kingston!

2010-12-13T19:11:00.002-05:00

Oh my gosh, what a day! Been packing to leave Kingston, tying up lose ends....

Then I remembered I had to hand in my response to the copy editor with Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. So I wrestled with the final niggling challenges around sun-up and send that in. Then I remembered that I had to get my Hunkamooga column in to sub-Terrain this morning! So I based that out. Then Michael at ECW sent back the typeset pages of Cigarettes for proofreading. How the hell they do that so fast?

Many other odds and ends. And then I just found out that HuffPost has again put up one of my book trailers! What a day!

Over and out.

I made Huffington Post!

2010-12-08T11:19:00.002-05:00

I probably spend more time reading Huffington Post than I spend writing. I am hooked. So imagine my thrill when this morning I found out that my second book trailer had made it onto HuffPo's best/worst book trailer-poll.

I went from about 230 hits to about 3,000 overnight. This might increase my book sales by one or maybe even two!

Here it is.

Over and out.

I'm reading on Monday in Kingston — plus Ben Walker, Anne McLean and John Lavery!

2010-11-27T13:59:00.003-05:00

One of the greatest pleasures of my residency at Queen's this fall has been organizing a series I've called The Real Resident Reading Series. These readings, without exception, have been dream readings for me. Last Sunday, I also put together a stand-alone event featuring six Mansfield Press poets I've worked with: about 50 people showed up on a Sunday late-afternoon and most stayed to the not-so-bitter end: it was a long night, because several of the writers got stuck in a traffic jam on the 401, just a few kilometres outside of town. In the end, all was well.

This Monday, I'm reading in my own series, even though that's bad form! I'll be joined by musician Ben Walker, translator Anne McLean and novelist John Lavery. It's going to be a great evening.

Over and out.

Today, Mansfield Press invades Kingston. Plus: Fuck Facebook

2010-11-21T11:22:00.004-05:00

Today! 5:15! Ben's Pub! Kingston! The Mansfield Press Kingston Poetry Invasion featuring readings by the serene Jason Heroux, the surprising Leigh Nash, the mysterious Lillian Necakov, the wily Peter Norman, the optimistic Natasha Nuhanovic, the turbulent Jim Smith. All for free! And hosted by the neurotic Stuart Ross. See you there!

I really do have to make this blog part of my (professional) life again.

Fuck Facebook. I'm not leaving quite yet, but still, fuck it.

Over and out.

Kingston Poetry Invasion this Sunday!

2010-11-17T12:51:00.003-05:00

OK, I'm straying off Queen's campus this Sunday to present six poets I've worked with through Mansfield Press. Here's the info. Please send all your Kingston friends to it. And tell them to bring all their friends and their colleagues and their hostages.

I mean, holy cow, this is one heck of a fine array of broad-ranging poets!

Over and out.

Stuart Ross's New Book Trailer

2010-11-10T00:11:00.001-05:00

I'm a freakin' self-promotion machine!

Over and out.

Real Resident 4!

2010-11-07T17:55:00.002-05:00

Oh, man, I'm buried in stuff.

But last week's Slow Reading / Quick Writing workshop was so successful. What a great group of people. And last weekend's Writers' Boot Camp in Windsor was a lot of fun too. Big group - 21 people. But we wrote a lot.

And here's this, for tomorrow. Very, very excited about this reading, the fourth in my Real Resident Reading Series. Please tell all your Kingston friends!

Over and out.

Slow Reading / Quick Writing

2010-11-04T00:02:00.001-04:00

Oh, many, what am I getting myself into?

slow
reading /
quick
writing

Join Queen’s University writer-in-residence
stuart ross for workshops in slow reading
and quick writing throughout November!

4th-floor lounge, Watson Hall
Thursdays, 5:30–7 pm
November 4, 11, 18, 25 (come to 1 session or all 4!)

Each week, we’ll read a single page by 5 writers.
Real relaxed-like. We’ll talk about words, about
sentences, about paragraphs. Then we’ll write like fiends.

Drop by 529 Watson each week to pick up the readings.

More info? Write Stuart at hunkamooga@sympatico.ca

a workshop for writers

Over and out.

BookFest Windsor and Real Residential 3!

2010-10-29T17:47:00.002-04:00

Making my way to Toronto now, and then Windsor tomorrow morning. In Windsor, I'm doing a pre–BookFest Windsor event — a three-hour Writers' Boot Camp at the Art Gallery of Windsor. Admission is a measly five bucks, and there may still be openings available. If anyone's interested, they can visit BookFest Windsor's website and see the details. The festival starts in earnest next week, and the lineup is great. Wish I was gonna be there for the major hubbub. I've really enjoyed my visits to the festival in years past. Great group of people and a great venue.

On Monday, I'm hosting the third instalment of the Real Residential Reading Series in Kingston, where I'm Writer-in-Residence this fall and having an amazing time. Again, meeting some fantastic people, reading some incredible stuff, and getting a bunch of my own writing done.

Monday's reading features novelist Martha Baillie, coming in from Toronto; Natalee Caple, who's a fiction writer and poet, but mostly a poet on Monday, visiting from Peterborough; and local light Trevor Strong, a member of the Arrogant Worms, as well as his Kingston group Trevor Strong and his Line of Credit, and the author of some very demented little stories.

The first two readings in the series attracted standing-room-only crowds. I'm expecting the same on Monday. Here's the poster:

Over and out.

ReLit!

2010-10-22T08:45:00.003-04:00

Went to Ottawa on Wednesday for the 10th annual ReLit shindig. After three consecutive years of being shortlisted for the award, this year I won, for short fiction. Yay for Buying Cigarettes for the Dog! Michael Kenyon won in the novel category for The Beautiful Children and Gillian Jerome in poetry for Red Nest.

The celebration took place at a small pub called the Barley Mow. I got my decoder ring. And, best of everything, John Lavery played six of his original songs, including one called "Quickeye," which he dedicated to me; this version had a couple of Claude François references!

It's been a busy week! On Monday, I brought Paul Dutton, Jason Camlot and Lily Hoang to my Real Resident Reading Series in Kingston, and the room was packed and the readings were stellar. The next night I was in Toronto for Mansfield Press's 10th-anniversary launch party. Considering how much stuff was going on in Toronto that night, it was amazing how busy the room was. Denis De Klerck, Mansfield's publisher, said it was the biggest Mansfield event ever. Again, great readings and lots of book sales.

Over and out.

Celebrating McFadden, Real Resident Reading, Mansfield Launch Party ... and more!

2010-10-17T12:39:00.007-04:00

So much has been happening. A week ago last Thursday, David McFadden was surprised in the Mansfield Press office by a 70th-birthday party and the presentation of a festschrift with contributors from across the country.

Dave was lured to his celebratory fate with the promise of a lecture on Chile by Jim Smith. But when he opened the door, his eyes immediately fell on his 96-year-old dad sitting there. And then a big cake that read, "Dave — You're 70! Be calm, honey!"

In a highly secret operation, Jim Smith and I began planning both the festschrift and the party about six months ago. It was pretty tricky getting the various names and addresses and figuring out who was important in Dave's life. I'm sure we missed a lot of people. But we did our best.

The party was a blast. Dave's father (Bill) was there, and Dave's brother (Jack), and Dave's daughter (Jenny) and granddaughter (Chloe). Four generations of McFaddens, and every one of them a wonderful person! Lots of writer friends, and others close to Dave. Stan Bevington, Merlin Homer, John Boyle, Leslie McAllister, Paul Vermeersch, Victor Coleman, Richard Huttel, Margaret Hollingsworth, Paul Dutton…

Denis De Klerck, the publisher of Mansfield Press, was generous enough to offer his beautiful office for the occasion, and to provide some great wine. Stan Bevington and the crew at the Coach House press did a beautiful job on the book, and were also very generous in their billing on this non-commercial venture.

It was a really excellent party. It was a thrill, too, to be able to honour a great writer like Dave, someone who has been a great influence, and a great friend.

Here's the book, A Trip Around McFadden. Contributions from many of the above, plus Diana Hartog, bill bissett, George Bowering, Michael Dennis, and so many more…

Meanwhile, over here in Kingston, where I'm spending the fall as writer-in-residence, October 4 kick-off of the Real Resident Reading Series was a standing-room-only success, with fine readings by Elyse Friedman, Jeff Latosik and Jennifer Londry.

The second instalment of the Real Resident Reading Series takes place tomorrow night (October 18) at 7:30 pm at the Grad Club on Queen's Campus:

And finally, for now, looking forward to this Tuesday night in Toronto, when Mansfield Press celebrates its 10th anniversary with the launch of five new books and guest readings by the poets Denis De Klerck published in his inaugural year. This will also be the launch of my imprint, "a stuart ross book." There's a lot going on in Toronto this Tuesday night, but this'll be a wonderful party. Here are the details:

Over and out.

My new book trailer!

2010-10-14T14:17:00.001-04:00

Over and out.

Real Resident Reading Series @ Queen's

2010-10-03T09:43:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow marks the first instalment of the reading series I'm curating this fall in Kingston as part of my writer-in-residency at Queen's University. Here's the poster. Imagine it in colour.

Over and out.

Kingston, Pernice, Mansfield

2010-09-17T14:10:00.012-04:00

I've been in Kingston nearly two weeks. My writer in residency for the Department of English kicked off officially this past Monday. I have a great apartment in a very quirky, nifty neighbourhood about 20 minutes' walk from the campus, and a great office I share with Carolyn Smart in Watson Hall. Already, I've done a couple of quick class visits and met with a couple of student writers. One of the main purposes of the residency is to give me time to write, and I've been at that, too: a few poems, responding to Michael Holmes' gentle edit of my forthcoming novel, and doing some fine-tuning for grant applications.

Oh, if you know anyone at Queen's who might like to have me check out their writing, tell them to drop me a note at hunkamooga [at] sympatico [dot] ca.

This weekend I'm back to Toronto. Taking a workshop with and attending a reading by Anselm Berrigan, who's being brought in by the Toronto New School. Very excited about that. When I taught a course a few years back on the New York School and its descendants, I played a couple tracks of Anselm reading, and one of the participants was very upset; she found it really aggressive and she got up and left. No idea what hit her so hard about it.

On Monday (September 20), I'm leading an onstage interview with novelist/poet/indie-rock-hero Joe Pernice. It's part of This Is Not A Reading Series, and it's marking the paperback release of his second novel, It Feels So Good When I Stop, which is a real blast. Joe and I will be talking about that book, a bit about his poetry (I really love his Two Blind Pigeons), perhaps touch on the Meat Is Murder novel, and he's going to sing a bit. Am I terrified? Why yes, I am terrified. Takes place at 8 pm on Monday at Clinton's, a room I'm at least very comfortable in. And have you tried the soy drumsticks there? Mmm.

Next Wednesday (September 22), I'm taking part in a tribute to the late and fantastic Paul Quarrington at the Kingston WritersFest at an event called PQ's People Mix It Up! I wasn't a close friend of Paul's, like some of the other people appearing that night, but I knew him for 30 years, and I figure I'm going to represent the people who only knew Paul a bit, but who were made to feel like old and dear friends by that awesome guy. I'll be reading from Paul's first novel, The Service, which I still love. Takes place at the Grand Theatre in Kingston, 7:30, $20.

The last few weeks I've been hustling to get a few freelance jobs off my plate, and to finish off the edits on some books for Mansfield, two of which kick off my "a stuart ross book" imprint. The Mansfield Press 10th Anniversary Launch Party takes place October 19 at 7:30 pm at the Boat, in Kensington Market. Five books launch that night: Imagining Toronto, by Amy Lavender Harris; Goodbye, Ukulele, by Leigh Nash; At the Gates of the Theme Park, by Peter Norman; Stray Dog Embassy, by Natasha Nuhanovic; and Winter Sport: Poems, by Priscila Uppal. We'll also have in the house some special guests from the first decade of Mansfield Press. Event hosted by me and publisher Denis De Klerck.

Over and out.

ReLit hat trick, etc

2010-09-01T08:34:00.003-04:00

Much happening, little time to blog:

The Gabriel Gudding workshop a few weeks back was a nifty event with a full house, that house being the new offices of Mansfield Press. It was the first event other than a small-press sale put on by members of the Meet the Presses collective. Gabriel's a smart-as-hell guy, and though I worried we were heading into academic territory in the one-hour lead-up to actually writing, when we got down to it, the prep all came together. We wound up each writing a single poem: a sort of prayer for protection of someone we cared about.

In the evening, Gary Barwin, Gabriel Gudding and I read at the Piston on Bloor, in a one-off reading. The place was full with a real diversity of audience: no one community or clique dominated. It was just a bunch of nifty people hoping for a nifty reading. And it went really well. It was a particular thrill to finally hear Gabe read after admiring his poetry for so long, and after reading it aloud myself repeatedly in Poetry Boot Camps.

Since then, I've been mostly in editing mode: editing other people's stuff, with a focus on three books being released by Mansfield this fall. Trying desperately to clear the decks before my residency at Queen's University kicks off early this month.

Meanwhile, I've made it onto the ReLit Award shortlist for the third year running. In 2008, it was for I Cut My Finger; in 2009, for Dead Cars in Managua; this year, it's for my short story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. Luckily, my bridesmaid outfit from the previous years still fits.

Over and out.

EXCLUSIVE! POETRY WORKSHOP WITH GABRIEL GUDDING (and a reading too!)

2010-08-05T15:09:00.008-04:00

The always surprising Chicago poet Gabriel Gudding leads a poetry workshop in Toronto on August 12, 5:30 to 7:30 at the offices of Mansfield Press, 1 Wiltshire, Unit 204A (near Dupont & Symington).

Here's the skinny:

Encomium and Petition

This workshop will explore the writing of these two kinds of poems. We'll examine contemporary and experimental, as well as ancient and consecrated, examples of these subgenres in order to understand the practices, methods, uses and relevancy of this ancient cultural work done by poetry.

To register for this rare opportunity, write hunkamooga [at] sympatico [dot] ca. Cost is $25. Preregistration is a must.

The workshop is co-presented by Meet the Presses and Mansfield Press.

THE READING

Gabe will also be reading later that evening with Gary Barwin and Stuart Ross at The Piston (Bloor & Ossington). Further details coming your way soon.

Gabriel Gudding is a poet and essayist. His books include A Defense of Poetry and Rhode Island Notebook. He teaches experimental poetry writing at Illinois State University, and his work has been translated into French, Vietnamese, Spanish and Danish.

This reading marks the launch of his chapbooks Congratulations on Being Here (Paper Kite Press) and Small Celestial Theater (Proper Tales Press).

"In a crowded field, Gudding's work demands attention." — The Boston Review

"This is the first 21st-century classic." — Alan Sondheim

"This book is one of the best books of poetry I've seen for many years." — Stride Magazine

"Rhode Island Notebook is an act of kindness — to his daughter, to himself, even to poetry." — Cultural Society

Over and out.

my imprint logo, residency at Queen's University, & other stuff

2010-08-03T14:09:00.004-04:00

So, publisher Denis De Klerck at Mansfield Press has given me my own imprint, under which I'll publish some fiction, some non-fiction, and mainly poetry. Have I mentioned this here before? I'm not sure. Anyway, the first two titles that will be released under the "a stuart ross book" imprint are set to launch in October, at the press's 10th-anniversary hoedown. The books are both first collections of poetry: Goodbye, Ukulele, by Leigh Nash, and Stray Dog Embassy, by Natasha Nuhanovic.

I think the plan is that the previous books I've acquired for the press and edited will become retroactively "a stuart ross book" books. Those'd be titles by Alice Burdick, David W. McFadden, Lillian Necakov, Peter Norman, Jim Smith, Robert Earl Stewart, Steve Venright and Tom Walmsley. It'd be great if you could go buy tons of them so they go out of print and the logo can appear on the second printing.

Oh, my logo: there it is up there. I wanted it to be stark and a bit goofy, to maybe undercut any ego. Hey, it wasn't my idea to have my name in the imprint title!

Very sad that This Ain't the Rosedale Library has been closed. Pages and This Ain't both, in such a short period of time. What happens to small presses as indie booksellers close? Well, I think they'll have to push for direct sales to the public from their websites. You can visit Mansfield (and order books [free postage in Canada!]) right over here. Meanwhile, somebody oughta give Charlie Huisken a big shiny medal for all he's done in the past 30 years for the Toronto literary community. I look forward to seeing what he's up to next.

In other news, I'm going to be writer in residence at Queen's University in Kingston this fall. I just sent in my office hours, which was pretty exciting. I'm hoping to meet with a dozen students a week about their manuscripts, as well as doing various events in the off-campus community: workshops, stuff on radio, and readings (giving and hosting).

Also, after a lot of back-and-forth-and-back between me, ECW editor Michael Holmes and Underlines Studio designer Fidel Peña, we have a prototype cover for my 2011 novel, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. I hope to post it here soon.

I also hope to post soon exciting news of a Toronto visit by Chicago poet Gabriel Gudding, one of my favourite American writers. Stay tuned.

What else? Last week's Poetry Boot Camp was a sell-out and a lot of fun. Some good writing happened amid a really interesting group of people. That'll probably be my last Toronto Boot Camp until the new year.

Over and out.

Cigarettes review from Broken Pencil

2010-07-06T00:55:00.004-04:00

Last year, my story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog was reviewed by Broken Pencil founder/publisher Hal Niedzviecki. Hal and I had a little spat resulting from the fallout from the review, but I gotta say, mostly he's been a very strong supporter of my work. I never did put the review up here, and I just found it on the Internet. I think it's pretty insightful. I learned from it. This is from Issue 43 of BP. (Hal's theories aside, a small correction is probably in order: in paragraph 3, the word "threatened" would be more accurate than "sought.")

Buying Cigarettes for the Dog

Looking for the thematic connective tissue that holds together Stuart Ross's long awaited second book of short stories is like, well, buying cigarettes for the dog. It's an ill-advised activity, surreal and vaguely menacing, fruitless and nevertheless compulsively appealing. So what's it going to be? Here's one: Ross, venerable member of the Canadian small press scene, an excellently prickly personality, author of more than a dozen mostly slim volumes of mostly deadpan poems, gets angry.

There's an anger that burbles just below the surface of many of these stories. And when that anger percolates to the surface, as it does in the ranting narrative "So Sue Me, You Talentless Fucker" and several other of these pieces, there's a tendency to latch on to it as the ah-ha moment: Here's where Ross slams his cards on the table, shoves the smoldering tip of his cigar into the drink of the fat cat sitting next to him, and takes his stand against whiners, bullies, power brokers, and no-good cows plotting insurrection in the mountains.

But be careful now. A reread of "Sue Me", a story one cannot help but assume was inspired by a real life episode during which small press festival organizers sought to sue Ross for criticizing their efforts, shows more than just jarring - and maybe even oddly refreshing - rage. In that story, and in this book in general, Ross is, yes, pricklier than ever. But he's also funnier and more refined in the way he approaches his trademark narrative of a man, middle-aged, neither success nor failure, suddenly confronted by a weirdness like cows attacking or a walk that takes so long that by the time our everyman gets home his wife has up and died and new people have moved in. So, to get back to "Sue Me," here a parallel Ross neatly intersperses his newfound anger with his longtime themes of displacement, alienation, loss and guilt. "You grew a little beard and stood upon the stage," he writes of the playwright who will eventually sue the narrator, "and you were the rabbi, and even worse, you had a folding card table playing the role of a dining room table in a nice middle-class house, a folding card table like the one upon which my mother used to play maj jong in the living room, when I would creep down the stairs and take some ju-jubes from the little bowl." Anger, yes, but something more.

A something more that resides in stories like "The Suntan", stories where we keep expecting the anger, keep expecting the lash out, but it doesn't come. In "The Suntan", Albert Greenbaum, "a big balding man with a tub for a torso", disturbs the equilibrium of some Florida sanatorium by approaching the inscrutable Lana, tall, glistening, silent, and telling her the story of his father's life. Again, we have Ross-ian themes: guilt, silence, an ill-advised attempt to connect that disturbs the fragile, illusory peace we have become pathetically accustomed to. And again, in the figure of Greenbaum confronting the iconic Lana, who hides behind mystery the same way she hides behind her sun glasses, we get anger: who are you to hide from me? But, in the surprise turn the story takes, we also get the tenderness, the sense of a humanity that refuses to succumb to rage, that insists on the possibilities of redemption through a rupture of complacent silence. And so while it's easier to describe this book as angry Ross, ugly Ross, a Ross steeped in apocalyptic scenarios and Fin de siècle lunacies, that would be a mistake. This book, as good as anything Stuart Ross has done, is about redemption. It's the redemption Beckett sought for his tramps, Singer sought for his displaced Jews, and Ross's gaggle of hopeless everymen seek for themselves. (Hal Niedzviecki)

Over and out.

July 25, Toronto: Poetry Boot Camp

2010-06-29T01:22:00.002-04:00

I've scheduled a Poetry Boot Camp for mid-summer. Because I so often have return Boot Campers, I make it a point to devise several new writing strategies for each session.

Accept no substitutes.

STUART ROSS'S POETRY BOOT CAMP
Sunday, July 25, 10am-5 pm (w/ 45-minute lunch break)
Christie/Dupont area
$75 includes materials and light snacks

Prepayment guarantees your spot. To register, write Stuart at hunkamooga@sympatico.ca.

BOOT CAMP DESCRIPTION
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!

COMMENTS ON MY PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS:

"I really enjoyed myself and felt like I got a lot done. I thank you very much for the stimulation & the relaxed atmosphere."

"Yay! Excited to go back to trying to write poems. I have so many new things to try now. Thanks!"

"I liked being exposed to the familiar in a new, fresh, creative way."

"Just what I needed!"

"I most enjoyed the relaxed pace and the self-directed nature of the work."

"The Boot Camp pushed me beyond my comfort zone in precisely the way that I hoped it would."

"My favourite part was the variety of non-threatening strategies for writing."

"Really informative, really helpful workshop. Great energy!"

"Excellent pacing! The day passes quickly — it really is a boot camp!"

"You always get such interesting characters attending your workshops!"

"Excellent overall. I got a lot of out of it. Money very well spent! I'd recommend it to others."

"Very well-run, well-thought-out workshop! Thanks!"

Over and out.

Cigarettes reviewed in Event

2010-06-28T15:04:00.003-04:00

Nice to see a stray review of Buying Cigarettes for the Dog pop up in the literary journal Event. Here it is:

EVENT

Stuart Ross, Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, Freehand Books, 2009
Amy Jones, What Boys Like and Other Stories, Biblioasis, 2009

Sometimes at an EVENT fiction board meeting, one of our team will put forward an inventive ultra-short manuscript as a ‘sorbet piece,’ a palate cleanser between other works lined up for publication in upcoming issues. The collected short-fiction works by Stuart Ross in Buying Cigarettes for the Dog are more like quick shots of tequila. Ross is a co-founder of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair; editor of the anthology Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence; and a writer of six collections of poetry, two collaborative novels, a previous collection of short fiction and a collection of essays, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer.

There are 23 very short works in Buying Cigarettes for the Dog and each is a strange, self-contained world. Unifying the collection is a beguiling expansive feeling created through narrators who appear to relish the art of storytelling. Ross engineers a general loosening of temporal markers so that his characters seem suspended outside the world of the ticking clock. He also finds Beckett-inspired absurdity in the process of naming, cataloguing and defining terms.

The words of the narrator at the end of ‘Mr. Joe’ seem to speak for Ross’s approach: ‘I practise the politics of inclusion.’ There is a galloping anthropomorphism in the writing so that the entire landscape seems to participate and breathe in response to events. Birds, dogs, cows and chicken feet are actors on the stage, making appearances as totemic visitors from another dimension. Conventional power hierarchies are comically inverted in stories like ‘The President’s Cold Legs’ and ‘Me and the Pope,’ where everyday blokes have intimate access to institutional figureheads.

There are a few persistent motifs recurring over multiple stories. For instance, we hear repeatedly about Hank Williams’s music, Payaso cigarettes, death by drowning and spumoni ice cream, giving an eerie cohesiveness to the parade of dreams. Other references pull popular culture and classic literature into the framework of the stories in interesting ways: We learn how one character played the song Suicide is Painless in a school band, how another used a hardback copy of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice as a weapon. Throughout the volume, Ross embeds the reader in the story as captive listener: ‘ right now you’re the only person who will actually talk to me.’

The quirky four-page story that launches the collection is titled ‘Three Arms Less’; it links two casualties involving severed limbs. The tone here is everything: a cultivated linguistic naiveté enveloping a burnished seed of contained outrage. Ross writes, ‘When there was a war, a little brown boy had his arms exploded right off the sides of his body, where they were attached at the shoulders. He was ten years old. It hurt him a lot.’ In addition to the little boy Ali, we meet Aron, a mountain climber who lops off his own arm to save himself from death by exposure and starvation. We discover that the loss to the planet in terms of limb count is precisely measurable:

So then what you had was this world with three arms less. It really threw things off all over the place. Buses were late and a guy fell on his head and Miss November’s left breast was a little bigger than her right breast.…

Making sarcastic pronouncements with deadpan certainty, Ross constructs a biting fable about human interconnectedness and the process by which we forge celebrities. In Ali’s story, particularly, the idea of culpability and the human cost of war intrudes uncomfortably into the landscape of fable. The narrative focus flares briefly within the experience of each delimbed character before bowing out with a hyperbolic flourish: ‘After that, the number of arms in the world never changed.’ Ross conceals a political razor’s edge under his cape.

If ‘Three Arms Less’ is a faux-naïve documentary about collateral damage, ‘Bouncing’ takes us right into the very noggin of body trauma. The self-proclaimed Bouncing Man reveals how he tripped in a ‘precise sequence of limb-related fiascos’ and began bouncing on his head ‘like an upturned pogo stick.’ The narrator’s journey has an epic quality:

Each village became an overturned blur, each downpour a welcome laundering. I could focus only on the blows to my skull and the subsequent rattling, the quiver of every molecule of bone that held my increasingly irrelevant brain in its protective embrace.

While continuously bouncing, the narrator lists the reactions of those who gather to observe him: ‘those who mocked and those who tried to help; those who genuflected and those who tried to profit.’ The ongoing action of bouncing becomes a way of highlighting the range of human response to unexpected events.

‘Guided Missiles’ is the only extended story, though it proceeds through titled subsections that maintain the short-burst fictional approach. Archie, an aspiring DJ, encounters a prophet, engages in a violent act, experiences an apocalypse and ascends to ‘green man’ status, where there is finally peace:

Archie had been in the tree for fifty years, or seventy-five, or three hundred. His flesh was a deep brown, weathered bark. Small green sprouts emerged through fissures, decorating the lengths of his arms and legs.

The mythic image conveys the metamorphosis in vivid physiological terms and reinforces the concept of elastic time.

This is short fiction to savour. Maybe there’s a kind of sorbet infused with tequila we could name after Stuart Ross? Eat with a little salt and a wedge of lime.

[snip: review of Amy Jones]

— Christine Dewar

Over and out.

A Toronto literary institution under threat

2010-06-23T07:56:00.002-04:00

I started going to This Ain't the Rosedale Library when I was 19 or 20. It shared a Queen Street entrance with The Record Pedlar. That's where I first met Charlie Huisken. That store has been a huge part of my literary life and small-press identity for 30 years. I can't imagine a Toronto without it. Well, I can imagine a greatly impoverished Toronto.

Since Queen Street, This Ain't has lived on Church Street, and then, most recently, on Nassau Street in Kensington Market, where they have made themselves an essential community hub.

Last weekend, though, Charlie turned up at work to find the landlord had changed the locks. The store owes $40,000 in back rent. Here's a note from Charlie and his son (and now business partner) Jesse.

If only we'd all bought all those books we've been dreaming of at This Ain't the Rosedale Library. Keep watching that spot for updates.

Over and out.

PRAYER OF DEFAMATION

2010-06-10T16:46:00.004-04:00

PRAYER OF DEFAMATION

I have been retained by and who have instructed me to letter to you respect to the Toronto apparently making these statements maliciously to attack the reputation and character of, frankly, and with the intent to injure them in their office, professional, calling, or malicious and exceed the limits of comment and free speech, I have read legal proceedings against you many, for example, your recent e-mail on or around January 3, copied to numerous parties nature and tone your web write this by included the following statement, at this point, frankly, I don’t see how libel critics, deny reactions to your criticisms are untrue and defamatory, you are the community a voice, and refuse to recognize the collective can have the moral authority to run a fair dedicated to literature and independent voices, the “people” in these statements are defamatory, other statements my cease clients, and your advice with regard statements are patently false and in my opinion, many of your recent statements concerning my clients and in your e-mails, blog and Facebook postings with made the last months in blog postings, e-mails, 2008, etc., of the same you over postings and, as such, they are further actionable and may expose you to punitive bullying, therefore, fair Small Press Book Fair and wrongful conduct, they will also seek your malicious matter and defamatory statements constitute under which their funds people who censor, attack and were acquired and an intent to defame and interfere with squelch debate, my clients and their work, yours is more than damages criticism — it is against and this letter constitutes a demand for a tortuous interference with the business immediate retraction in writing of the false and libelous have made, I also request that further tortuous interference and making references in your website, blog, Facebook page, to my clients, etc., be removed immediately before this immediately escalates any squelch further, it is my defamatory suggestion that you seek your own squelch vendetta without further notice legal to these very serious issues, if you do not immediately publish the requested retraction as well as squelch and desist from conduct also constitute and contractual relations of and false, malicious and defamatory statements concerning and, they may institute statements that you daily harassment and if they are forced to file suit to stop your defamation and awards and damages, legal fees, special damages and litigation expenses, amen.

Indie Literary Market stash

2010-06-08T10:20:00.003-04:00

It was like coming home last Saturday, attending (and helping to organize) the Indie Literary Market at Clinton's Tavern in Toronto. Not only because I got to do some postering earlier in the week with Nicholas Power, with whom I founded the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, but because this was a room filled with great literary presses and magazines, and the people who came seemed largely to be after actual literature.

The Indie Literary Market was curated by Meet the Presses, a collective that's a dozen strong, and while we didn't manage to get all the presses we wanted there, we still gathered what amounted to a dream bookstore for small-press Canadian literature. We even got Anvil in all the way from Vancouver.

I did very well at my Proper Tales table, and just about all the money I took in I spent at other tables, though I could easily have spent three times that amount.

Here's my stash of chapbooks, books, broadsides, zines, leaflets and postcards:

Heaven For Bid, by Kemeny Babineau (LaurelReedBooks; "This is # of 62 billion copies.")
Poetri, by Kemeny Babineau (LaurelReedBooks)
The Punctuation of Thieves, by Gary Barwin (serif of nottingham)
this is visual poetry, by Gary Barwin (chapbookpublisher.com; got it at the serif of nottingham table)
The Others Raised in Me, by Gregory Betts (Pedlar Press)
Some Answers, by George Bowering (LaurelReedBooks; brilliant sequence!)
[untitled], by p.cob (Curvd H&z)
Write Ottawa, by p.cob (from Curvd H&z table)
Write Ottawa, by p.cob (from Curvd H&z table; different from the one previous)
Sweet, by Dani Couture (Pedlar Press; I'm so excited about this book!)
deed, by jwcurry (Curvd H&z)
Riryphur's rurrusur, by jwcurry & Rob Read (Curvd H&z)
Kiki, by Amanda Earl (LaurelReedBooks)
The Plight House, by Jason Hrivnak (Pedlar Press)
The Adventures of the Dragonfly!, by Nicholas Jirgens (N.J. Productions; from the Rampike table)
Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, by Jeff Latosik (Insomniac Press)
Other Poems, by Jay Millar (Nightwood Editions; got it at the BookThug table)
Ballads of the Restless Are, by bpNichol (Curvd H&z)
from a photo by D. M. Owen (Room 3o2 Books)
uncovering ground, by Nicholas Power (Gesture Press; I love these leaflets Nick has been doing!)
writing on water, by Nicholas Power (Gesture Press)
Chuck Palahniuk, Choke, by Michèle Provost (Curvd H&z)
Grave Mistake, by Stuart Ross (Toronto Poetry Vendors; got my own poem out of a vending machine!)
BOOK, by Ken Sparling (Pedlar Press)
heart badly buried by five shovels, by Hugh Thomas (Paper Kite Press; at the serif of Nottingham table)
Ladies' Favourite of Tennessee, by Carey Toane (Toronto Poetry Vendors)
The Coming Envelope 1 (BookThug)
Grey Borders, Spring 2009 (handed to me by Jordan Fry)
Handthology (Meet the Presses; this was the build-your-own-anthology project we conjured up for the Market)
Winter 2010 (Battered Press; with chapbooks by Marv Sandeye, Jonkil Calembour, Jeff Latosik, Nick Power)

This was the second Indie Literary Market. Will we do more? Maybe. Will we do other kinds of things? I sure hope so.

Over and out

AISP

2010-06-03T11:19:00.003-04:00

Last week I attend the 30-something-year reunion for my secondary, AISP (Alternative & Independent Study Program; it's now called Avondale Alternative School). It was a pretty incredible experience. Lots of joy, and some dollops of sadness, and much reflection on mortality.

I got selected, first, to write a kind of ode to the school, and then to actually MC the entire evening, which turned out to be a lot of fun. And a great honour. AISP has some pretty notable alumni, for such a tiny school.

I had about three months to write my poem, during which time I panicked and flailed. I began the actually writing at 3 a.m. the night before the reunion. I did a little bit of cannibalization (mostly of devices) from earlier poems. The piece got a great response. Lots of inside references, but here it is nonetheless:

AISP

Did I ever tell you about this school
a school made up entirely of initials:

Apples In Silver Purses
Astronauts Integrating Small Pandas
Ask In Sequence Please
Agatha Ivanov Speaks Portguese

It was a free school
and we were free
to create our own learning
to call our teachers by their first names
to hang a parachute from the ceiling of the Common Room
(until a fire marshal told us otherwise)

We were free to rebel
to make super 8 films
to scream sound poems in the hallways
to make Xerox art in Dorothy’s office
to make comic books instead of essays
comics books about global domination by Venus fly traps

We were free to invent our own courses
skip classes walk out of classes sit in on classes
that we weren’t even taking
free to take the side of Mao Tse-Tung

Did I ever tell you about the initials?

Actively Irrigate Subtle Plantations
Anything Irritates Shirley’s Piano
Abe’s Integers Smoke Pot
Angels Illuminate Soryl’s Pecadillos

We were free to get beat up less than
at Jeffreys, MacKenzie, Fleming
to read any goddamn book we wanted to
I mean truly weird shit
to take three courses a year, or fifteen
to stage mock hostage-takings
and write revolutionary communiqués
to hang a parachute from the Common Room ceiling
I’m serious
because it meant we were alternative
and we were independent
sometimes we studied
and we were never programmed

we ate French fries at Dairy Freeze
fried liver and onions in the cafeteria
Carl ate cookies in his office
and then he brushed his teeth
thus providing a lesson

Have I mentioned the initials?
Always Investigate Snoopy Parents
Armadillos Invest Snappy Premiums
Africa Israel Switzerland Poland
Asia Istanbul Spain Peru

On torn sofas
in the Common Room
we argued sports and politics
under an actual parachute
that hung from the ceiling
a ceiling
a parachute
a fire marshal

We were free from beating each other up
free from conveyor belts
sausage education
particle board learning
We were free from Catcher in the Rye
if we wanted to be
free to take a class with a teacher
who’d fold our poems into paper airplanes
and fly them across the room

plus we had a parachute
a Common Room
a ceiling
initials
have I told you about the parachute?

27 May 2010
Copyright © Stuart Ross

Over and out.

Indie Literary Market this Saturday in Toronto

2010-06-03T11:10:00.003-04:00

Our Meet the Presses gang has organized a second Indie Literary Market, happening this Saturday at Clinton's back room in Toronto. One nifty feature this time around will be a sort of "build-your-own-anthology," where you can collect anthology pages from the tables you visit and then have your personalized collection bound on your way out the door. I'll be there with my Proper Tales table, and two new publications:

• HARDSCRABBLE 2: the new issue of my poetry magazine contains great poems by Kostas Anagnapoulos, George Bowering, Laura Farina, Jason Heroux, Leigh Nash and Ron Padgett. I know I'm biased, but this is my favourite litmag.

• NEW PRODUCTS, by Loren Goodman. You may have read Loren's book Famous Americans, and/or you might have read his poems in the first issue of HARDSCRABBLE. Loren's an amazing American poet, and I'm honoured and giddy to be doing a substantial chapbook of his new poems. His stuff is stark-raving crazy and brilliant.

If you can't make it to the Indie Literary Market, you can order either of these for $5 + shipping ($1 Canada; $2 U.S.; $3 elsewhere). Write me at hardscrabble [at] bell [dot] net.

Here's the skinny on this Saturday's Market:

Over and out.

Toronto Poetry Vendors

2010-05-25T21:20:00.002-04:00

OK, so Elisabeth de Mariaffi and Carey Toane have got some poetry vending machines going. They seem to be pretty sweet. There's one already installed at This Ain't the Rosedale Library.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, May 26) I'm taking part in the installation of another machine at a coffee joint on Dupont. Presumably I'll be reading my poem right outta the gizmo.

Worth noting that there has been one other poetry vending machine in Canada (that I know about): the bubble-gum-style contraption that Tamara Fairchild and Maria Erskine run some years back, in Toronto and Ottawa. Theirs was a travelling machine.

Here's the skinny on tomorrow's TPV launch:

Wednesday, May 26, 2010
7:00pm - 9:00pm
Ezra's Pound
238 Dupont St.
Toronto, ON

Toronto Poetry Vendors invites you and your toonies to celebrate our growing empire of mechanized poetry, as we launch a third machine at Ezra's Pound on Dupont St. Come listen to the clink of change as TPV contributors Kevin Connolly, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, Andrew Faulkner, Jacob McArthur Mooney, Stuart Ross, Jenny Sampirisi, Meaghan Strimas, Carey Toane and Paul Vermeersch drop a coin and read their poems...

Over and out.

Ticker Text … and more

2010-05-23T11:22:00.002-04:00

My fine friend Jason Camlot, a great poet and a prof at Concordia, has put together an intriguing project that boggles my non-techie mind: The Ticker Text Project. He's looking for poets around the globe to participate. Check it out.

On a side note, get Jason's most recent book, from Paul Vermeersch's 4 a.m. Books imprint with Insomniac: The Debaucher. It's Montreal! It's Jewish! It's poetry! And it's a great book.

Some loose ends to be tied up:

I did not win the Alberta Readers' Choice Award. That $10,000 award went to Michael Davie, an Albertan writer and software guy, for Fishing for Bacon. After five finalists were determined by jury, the voting for the winner was done by Internet voting: anyone could vote multiple times, but at two-hour intervals at minimum. Although the prize was determined by this public vote, the results haven't been posted. I was curious about the results, because I know I was at a really close second-place about a week before polling ended. I wrote to my contact at the ARC Awards, asking if, in the name of transparency, the voting number would be publicized. I didn't get an answer.

Anyway, the night I lost, I wanted to redeem things for myself: I stayed up till about 4 a.m. and nailed the ending of my novel and sent it in to ECW, who will be publishing it in spring 2011. That felt good. I think I could have tinkered with that book forever, but you gotta put an end to it sometime.

Last Tuesday's reading at the St. Clair/Silverthorn library: what a great time. Funny thing: David McFadden showed up, as audience, and, by coincidence, Nicholas Power, Lillian Necakov and I all had prepared to read poems about/for David. Only Jim Smith didn't, but Dave's influence in Jim's work was perhaps his salute. McFadden, by the way, just a week earlier, had launched Why Are You So Long and Sweet? Collected Long Poems of David W. McFadden. He read two poems from that at the launch: "Nevada Standstill," which he'd never read aloud before, and "Cow Swims Lake Ontario." His book is absolutely astonishing: the breadth of what he does — and the humour, humanity, and audaciousness — is incredible. You better go buy a copy.

Over and out.

Necakov, Power, Ross, Smith reunion!

2010-05-17T14:29:00.002-04:00

Very excited about tomorrow's reading in Toronto. Lillian Necakov, Nicholas Power, Jim Smith and I have been part of the same writing community since the early 1980s, and we're all appearing on the same bill at St. Clair/Silverthorn Library. I'm not sure that we've all ever read together before. Here's the skinny:

STILL KEEPIN' TORONTO READING
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
6:30pm - 8:00pm
St. Clair/Silverthorn Library
1748 St. Clair Avenue West (near Old Weston Road)

A lively early evening of new fiction and poetry by Lillian Necakov, Stuart Ross and Jim Smith.

Hosted by Nicholas Power (who will also read a couple of pieces)

Lillian Necakov is the author of four poetry books, including Polaroids (Coach House Books), Hat Trick (Exile Editions), and The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press).

Nicholas Power is a Toronto poet and fiction writer. His book include A Line in the Mind and The Over-the-Shoulder Poems (both from Gesture Press).

Stuart Ross's most recent books are Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books) and Dead Cars in Managua (DC Books). He is the co-editor of Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament (Mansfield Press).

Jim Smith is back after a decade away from the literary scene. His newest book is Back Off, Assassin: New and Selected Poems (Mansfield Press). He is also the author of Leonel/Roque (Coteau Books), One Hundred Most Frightening Things (blewointmentpress), and more.

Admission is free.

Over and out.

Meanwhile, back in Ontario…

2010-05-10T14:15:00.002-04:00

Hmm, is it being negative to suggest to someone that they proofread their online book reviews before posting them? I think it's being constructive. It's for their own good. It's for the good of writing.

Meanwhile, I'm back in Ontario, after a great three-weeks-and-a-bit out west, first in Edmonton, and then in the Kootenays. Spent most of my Kootenay time in New Denver, but also did workshops and readings in Burton, Nakusp, Grand Forks, Nelson, Kaslo, and Rossmore. An amazing time, and I really am feeling like part of the New Denver community now. They've been so welcoming to me.

Tomorrow, in Toronto, at Magpie on Dundas West, the launch of David W. McFadden's Why Are You So Long and Sweet? Collected Long Poems, as part of the Insomniac Press spring launch. Here's an interview with me on Open Book Toronto about editing the collection.

Over and out.

Thanks!

2010-05-01T11:50:00.002-04:00

Big thanks to all of you who voted for me online for the Alberta Readers Choice Award. The winner will be announced on May 14. I'll wait to see whether they're offering to fly me out.

Meanwhile, here I am in New Denver. Great week teaching at the school here. Thursday night was a blast with the elementary-school coffeehouse over at Silverton Hall. Last night was the secondary-school coffeehouse, with great readings by Michelle, Sadye, Angelo and Danika — a very small contingent of students, but all four read really well and had very strong work. Also readings by me, Murray Kimber, Mitchell Scott, and Celia Gunn.

Today: off to Burton for an afternoon reading, along with some local writers, at the high school. Always great to visit a new community, read my work there, and here the work of locals.

Over and out.

A few days left to vote for Cigarettes! Plus two new nominations!

2010-04-27T20:10:00.004-04:00

OK, here I am in the little cabin in New Denver, B.C. Just about dusk. Raining pattering on the metal roof. Slocan Lake, which I see out my window here, is choppy and beautiful.

Came out west a couple weekends ago, first to Edmonton, where I took part in a panel organized by the Alberta Readers Choice Award people. Strange experience, but a lot of fun. Even if the champion for one of the other books dismissed Buying Cigarettes for the Dog as "fluff." Simone Lee, of Calgary's Pages Bookstore on Kensington, who has championed my book, was a blast to hang out with. And she acquitted herself well on the panel, which ended up splintering into a non-fiction-vs.-fiction wrestling match after award shortlistee Myrna Kostash fired the first volley over fiction's bow.

Three of the five shortlisted books are non-fiction.

You can still vote for me every two hours until midnight on April 30 right here! When we were last allowed a peek at the voting results, I was neck and neck for the lead with one other title. I need all the help I can get. The award was juried all the way from the 200-plus eligible titles down to the final 10 and then the final 5, but now it's this internet voting thing.

Meanwhile, got the news last night that Buying Cigarettes for the Dog has been shortlisted for two more awards, this time from the Book Publishers Association of Alberta's Alberta Book Awards! It's one of three titles shortlisted for Best Cover (thanks to Fidel Peña of Underline Studios) and one of only two titles shortlisted for Best Trade Fiction book.

The results of both the ABA and the ARCA will be announced on May 14. Have I mentioned you can vote for Cigarettes right here?

Great short visit to Edmonton, and the spent my first week in New Denver polishing off my novel so I can hand it in to the publisher. Also helped out a bit, as driver, two documentary filmmakers — Moira Simpson and Catrina Longmuir — who were here working with the New Denver students on an amazing doc project. This second week, I've begin working in schools: yesterday spent all day at Nakusp Secondary School, and today working with elementary school students at Lucerne.

It's always such a great experience.

Over and out.

So Sue Me: A video reading

2010-04-16T15:17:00.002-04:00

Just arrived in Edmonton this afternoon for tomorrow's Alberta Readers' Choice Award Publishers' Fair at the Stanley A. Milner branch of the Edmonton Public Library.

Also gonna hang out with Wayne Arthurson and with Mark McCawley and hopefully other people too.

Then: off to the Kootenays!

In the meantime, you can still vote, every day until April 30, for Buying Cigarettes for the Dog right here. I'd be mighty grateful if you did.

Also, in the meantime, here's another video reading from the book:

Over and out.

"Three Arms Less" — a video reading

2010-04-06T04:42:00.001-04:00

Over and out.

"The Engagement" — a video reading

2010-04-02T09:11:00.001-04:00

Over and out.

Cigarettes' Champion

2010-04-01T07:55:00.003-04:00

It was Calgary bookseller Simone Lee who ushered by short-story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog from the Top 10 shortlist for the Alberta Readers Choice Award to the Top 5, and thus to the public vote.

Simone owns the great and friendly indie bookstore Pages on Kensington. Here she is talking about Cigarettes.

And here's where you can vote. Every day till April 30.

With the help of my publisher, Freehand Books, as well as the Edmonton Public Library, I'm going to be able to attend the ARC Awards Publishers Fair on April 17. I'll be sitting on a panel with three of the other four shortlisted writers (one of them is long-gone), as well as the "champions" of each of the five books.

Over and out.

David W. McFadden's Collected Long Poems

2010-03-31T16:08:00.003-04:00

In 2007, I had the thrill and honour of editing Why Are You So Sad? Selected Poems of David W. McFadden for Insomniac Press. There I was, working on a Selected with the guy whose poetry changed it all for me when I stumbled on one of his books in a library at around age 15. Why Are You So Sad? was shortlisted for the Canadian Griffin Prize for Poetry.

Then in 2008, it was just as exciting working with Dave on a new collection of sonnets for Mansfield Press, where I'm the poetry editor. The book was brilliantly titled Be Calm, Honey. It got shortlisted for a Governor General's Award, McFadden's third such nod.

This past year I worked with Dave on the companion volume to the Insomniac Seletected. This one is called Why Are You So Long and Sweet? Collected Long Poems of David W. McFadden. It's a brilliant, insane, eclectic book. And, as with the previous two books, I learned a huge amount working with Dave, watching his revisions to poems he wrote years ago.

Here's the cover, featuring a very young Dave (photo by his father, William).

The book launches in Toronto on May 11, at the Magpie.

I feel very blessed to have had the opportunity to work with my Canadian poetry hero three times. So far.

Over and out.

Alberta, Jim, Memoir

2010-03-26T12:30:00.003-04:00

Alberta

The voting for the Alberta Readers Choice Award continues until April 30. If you like my book Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, you can vote for it right here. Every day. I'd be very grateful. Going to post another story from the book in the next few days.

Jim

Jim Smith is one of my literary heroes. I don't think there's anyone in North America doing what he does in poetry. His work is complex, accessible, visceral, funny, political, personal. You can read a nice little interview with him right here. And then go out and buy his new book, Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems. I'm thrilled that Jim is back in the literary world after a decade-long absence. In Toronto, you can find it at This Ain't the Rosedale Library. Perhaps at some other indie bookstores. If you can't find it via that route, you can order a copy direct from Mansfield Press.

Memoir

Still a couple of spots available in my memoir-writing workshop tomorrow in Port Hope, at Furby House Books. Noon till five, $60, lots of fun. Let me know if you wanna get in on it. Details in the previous posting.

Over and out.

Memoir workshop in Port Hope

2010-03-20T19:15:00.001-04:00

Next Saturday, I'm leading a memoir-writing workshop in Port Hope, just an hour outside of Toronto. Here are the details:

WAYS OF BEING: A MEMOIR-WRITING WORKSHOP
Saturday, March 27, Noon - 5 pm
$60
Furby House Books (upstairs), 65 Walton St., Port Hope

In this relaxed and enjoyable workshop for both beginning and published writers, we’ll explore the forms and possibilities of memoir and the personal essay. We’ll look at memoir through fiction, poetry, letters, the postcard essay, and other forms. We’ll tap into secrets, lies, and dreams. We’ll also discuss some exciting questions: Who am I writing for? What’s worth writing about? Do I have to tell the truth? Is this paragraph any good? Could I publish this?

To register, email hardscrabble@bell.net

Over and out.

A City, Some Rain (and please vote for my book!)

2010-03-15T19:55:00.003-04:00

My short-story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books, 2009) is one of five finalists for the Alberta Readers' Choice Award. Now the public votes. Daily, even. Here's the link to vote.

Below is the second in a series of excerpts from the collection. "A City, Some Rain" was originally commissioned by ArtSpeak, a Vancouver art gallery that was looking for something text-driven to accompany their Toni Latour catalogue. Toni does a lot of performance stuff in which she imitates critters, so I thought I'd explore critterdom.

A CITY, SOME RAIN

1.

At the bus stop, in the misty rain, early in the morning, a chill wind skidding along the sidewalk, a tussle broke out in the queue. Bob was fighting his way to the front, to the gaping door of the bus. Inside the bus, nearly spilling down the few steps towards the door, were more and more of the lumpy bipeds, some with large suitcases clutched in their right hands, hands that barely poked out of glistening plastic rain sleeves. “Let me to the front,” urged Bob. “I am the numbat, the banded anteater.” He pushed forward, but was shoved back, and curses rose from the small cluster of bipeds gathered round the open door of the bus. “For god’s sake,” cried Bob, “I have fifty-two teeth — no other land mammal has fifty-two teeth! I have a tooth for every card in the deck!” One of those queuing broke free from the mass and got a foot onto the first step in the bus. The cold rain began to pelt harder. Bob was certain he could hear each individual drop hit its target. “My ears are prominent!” he shouted. “I eat termites!” In the back of the bus, the silent back of the bus, oblivious to the commotion outside, another biped stood, making herself as thin as possible in the crush of her fellows, one hand gripping an overhead rail, the other holding a paperback book just inches from her gently quivering snout. In the book, the tip of a sword cut swiftly through the laces of a corset. Passion would ensue, as it always did. All was calm in the back of the bus, the rain streaming along the windows in soothing rivulets.

2.

Sarah lay on her back in bed, listening to the rain pummel the skylight above her, watching the ectoplasmic shadows the rivulets threw onto the walls of her bedroom. Beside her lay another biped, unshaven and childless, mucus fluttering in his nostrils with every sleep-breath. Sarah rose towards the ceiling, into the darkness, and began to glide through the treetops, sniffing out the nests of birds. I am an egg-eating snake, she thought. I produce no venom. Each time she slithered to a nest held high in the branches, she swallowed the eggs whole. They passed through her mouth and were ruptured by a row of teeth that descended from the roof of her throat, and she swallowed the contents. As for the shells, she compacted these within, and launched the ivory balls out through her mouth. Good god, I’m efficient, she thought. I can only marvel at myself. She shifted, pulling the covers more tightly around her shoulders and off the hirsute figure that lay at her side. It felt like years since she had crawled into bed beside him, years since the glass had smashed against the wall in her living-room.

3.

The water rushed along the gutter towards the drain, washing over Henry’s face. He was motionless, remorseful, lying in the street on his side. A tie was knotted loosely around his neck and his shirt was unbuttoned partway down his chest. He was only dimly aware that it was cold in the gutter, that his dark hair waved like seaweed in the flowing stream. His skull throbbed. Two passing bipeds stopped and knelt to lift Henry out of the water. “A remora,” one of them said. “His dorsal fin has become an enormous oval sucker. He’s travelled the warmest seas on the planet, fastened to the undersides of larger host fishes. He is kind, considerate, grateful. He doesn’t give his host any trouble, but occasionally disengages to eat other fish. This one’s big — they’re rarely longer than a metre.” Henry began to cough, and water dribbled from the corner of his mouth. Back at his house, Tammy sat shivering in the dark at the kitchen table, her eyes on the clock, a mug of cold coffee in her hand. She knew she shouldn’t have left the party early. The doorbell rang, and Henry’s gerbil ran faster on its little wheel.

4.

It was so goddamn early in the morning, and Luc couldn’t remember if he’d just arrived at work or still hadn’t left from the night before. He sat at his desk, his sleeves rolled up, listening to the rain play on the window behind him. A phone rang on his desk. He looked at it, lifted the receiver, paused, then placed it back in its cradle. He peered across his office to the opposite wall, where years ago he’d hung a large acrylic painting of a startled bear in a dark forest. Luc longed to take shelter behind the painting, in the little crevice between the picture frame and the canvas. Or perhaps up there, by the ceiling, behind the curl of peeling wallpaper. He picked up a pen and slid a pad of sticky memo sheets towards him. I am a tiny black thrip, he printed carefully. I flutter my narrow fringed wings and suddenly I am in your hair, in your eyes. Winter approaches, and I shall hibernate in your house, in any available crevice. Luc leaned towards the potted plant on the far corner of his desk and sucked of its juice. A wrecking ball crashed through the window behind him, and Luc flew from his brown leather chair.

5.

A colourful blur of bipeds pressed by in both directions, some holding soaked newspapers over their heads, others wielding umbrellas or tugging hoods low on their creased brows. Sheltered from the clamour, in the doorway of a boarded-up shop, Lisa stood with her eyes nearly closed, her hands hanging loosely at her sides. Her mottled, brownish-black coat glistened. “I’m not used to this,” she murmured. “I long again to scuttle through the hot desert, where chuckwallas belong.” She closed her eyes and became aware of her breath. “A plump lizard, I inflate my body with air and thus am wedged between these rocks. I cannot be dislodged. I cannot be dislodged.” A taxi skidded to a halt at the curb opposite her, and a face appeared at the back window, squinting through the pedestrian traffic. “Lisa? Is that you? The guy on TV said —” “I cannot be dislodged.” The rain fell harder now, splashing up from the sidewalk like fireworks, and Lisa felt safe, felt cleansed.

Copyright © 2009 by Stuart Ross

Alberta Readers' Choice Award: voting starts March 15!

2010-03-14T21:33:00.002-04:00

I don't know how the voting is going to work. But Buying Cigarettes for the Dog is in the shortlist of 5, culled from a total of 225 books published in Alberta last year.

If you feel like voting for my book, I'd be mighty grateful. Unless there's another book on the list you'd prefer to vote for.

Here's the website. I assume instructions for how Albertans can vote will be posted in the morning.

Other stuff has been happening. Tons of it. The Rogue Stimulus launch tour. A trip to NYC. More on those later.

Over and out.

Tree Reading, then the Rogue Stimulus tour!

2010-02-22T08:37:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow night, February 23, I read for the first time at Ottawa's legendary Tree Reading Series, along with Stephen Brockwell. I'm going to be reading from a new poetry chapbook, I've Come to Talk about Manners, which'll be ready for the reading from Cameron Anstee's nifty Apt. 9 Press, as well as new short stories. I'll have Dogs to flog. So to speak.

The details:

Tuesday, February 23, 2010
8 - 10 pm
Ottawa Arts Court
2 Daly Avenue
Ottawa, ON

Tree hosts two writers at the Ottawa Arts Court. Local poet/writer and Archibald Lampman Award-winner Stephen Brockwell will perform some of his work, followed by Stuart Ross reading from his first collection of stories in over a decade, Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. The evening will begin at 8pm, and preceding the reading from 6:45-7:45 Terry Ann Carter will host her first of a series of four workshops for emerging writers.

Note on Stephen Brockwell: Stephen Brockwell currently lives in Ottawa but has spent a large part of his life in Montreal and other equally exhilarating places. His Fruitfly Geographic won the 2005 Archibald Lampman Award for best book of poetry by an Ottawa resident. He runs his own IT consulting business from home, and he is the author of several books including The Wire in Fences, The Cometology (ECW Press, 2001), and The Real Made Up (ECW Press, 2007).

Shortly after this reading, Stephen Brockwell and I embark on our mini-tour in support of our nearly instant anthology, Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament, beginning Thursday in Montreal, heading to Parliament Hill and elsewhere in Ottawa on Saturday, then to Kingston, where we'll be joined by Arrogant Worm Trevor Strong, and winding up, the night before Parliament reconvenes, in Toronto. Along the way, contributors to the anthology will be reading their Proroguing poetry. The book, which contains 72 poems, is published by Mansfield Press, and the awesome cover is by Gary Clement.

This tour also serves as a multi-city launch for Jim Smith's Back Off, Assassin! New & Selected Poems and Robert Earl Stewart's Something Burned Along the Southern Border, which were my Mansfield poetry acquisitions for 2009. We'll also have some other Mansfield titles on hand, including Tom Walmsley's incisive and smart novel Dog Eat Rat.

Over and out.

BOUNCING

2010-02-11T11:29:00.003-05:00

Here's the first in a series of excerpts from my short-story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books, 2009). I think "Bouncing" is, like, an allegory for something. Maybe you can figure it out.

BOUNCING

Due to a powerful convolution of entanglement, one ankle blocking the path of another, a knee tilting inward while a foot swung around backward, I fell and I hit my head. I didn’t witness it from nearby but from within my very self, and so I am only speculating upon the precise sequence of limb-related fiascos, but the blows to my head I am certain of. My head hit the ground, and then hit it again, and then again, and so forth, until I was bouncing down the small hill like an upturned pogo stick, which is something I’d believed possible only in cartoon animation. I’m tempted to digress for a moment so we can compare our favourite Saturday-morning children’s programming, but my doctor — as well as my brothers and my mother — have expressed impatience with my digressions, and I don’t want to exasperate you, too, because right now you’re the only person who will actually talk to me.

Here’s the thing: with each blow, each contact of the top of my head to the hard-dirt ground — along a sloping path that served as a shortcut to my home, allowing me to avoid the paved sidewalks riddled with children and their lemonade stands — I uttered a sharp “Ah!” or “Unh!” depending on the exact angle of impact. Thus did the people who lived up along the brink of the ravine, their houses in danger of tumbling into the trees, hear me and come running through secondary and tertiary paths to witness my comical descent. Well, they found it comical until they found it alarming. They jogged along behind me, their numbers growing, discussing amongst themselves what they might do to slow me down and bring me to a stop, lest I bash my brains to smithereens in the ravine, making it impossible for them to, in the future, gaze wistfully down into the trees and mist without evoking the terrible image of my boinging demise.

As for me, I wondered if, after all, it wouldn’t have been preferable to sidestep the occasional lemonade stand and hurt the feelings of small children by declining to patronize them as they made their first desperate stabs at capitalism, a system I championed, but whose drawbacks I was all too aware of. Yes, perhaps I might even have stopped to enjoy a plastic tumbler of the pink and sugary lukewarm drink, parting with a nickel or dime or whatever these midget entrepreneurs extorted from passersby these days. It is unlikely, that way, that I would have experienced this terrible pounding atop my sorry noggin.

I could hear only snatches of the discussion taking place around me, but there was talk of lassooing me, rolling a log into my path, shooting me with a sedative-loaded dart, and tackling me outright; one woman, gasping for breath as she loped along, suggested passing me a pillow that I might hold above my head, or more rightly below it, given my inverted posture, to cushion the impact each time I bounced. They argued, they joked, they shouted to each other and to me, they formed committees and subcommittees, agreed on meeting dates, venues, and catered lunches. That they were taking my predicament seriously was reassuring.

By now I had reached the cradle of the ravine and had begun to bounce up the opposite incline. This surprised me, as I had expected to tumble into a heap at the bottom, not continue my staccato trajectory uphill. I had to accept that this would not end, that I would continue pogoing along, my audience dwindling and swelling again depending on the time of day, the weather, their work schedules, and what was on television. I would never show up at the plant again — they would hire someone else to press the button when necessary — and I might never again see my family.

A stocky man in a rumpled sweater followed along beside me now, close as he could safely come: he was hunched over, and his legs were kicking comically as if he were a Cossack dancer. I recognized him from the tiny square picture that appeared beside his name in the daily newspaper, and took comfort that it was no mere city reporter assigned to me, but a popular columnist.

“I am the Bouncing Man,” I told him. “I was a happy child and a content father and husband, but now I spring through the ravine and shortly up into the street and down the highway and through an endless string of villages, each blow to my lid a reminder that we are placed upon this earth by God and we are set upright and given a tiny shove that we might begin moving and determining our own direction and in this way defining who we are and what our values might be. Tell your readers I have a joined a club of exceptional men — men who stumble without cessation about their living rooms, who stomp day and night through the corridors of their offices, who teeter like metronomes in public squares. I am not alone.”

Eventually, and I have no idea how much time had passed, I became oblivious to the activity around me — those who mocked and those who tried to help; those who genuflected and those who tried to profit. The cameras, the cars, the trotting dogs. The handsome woman who said she was my wife; the children who called to me their impressive grades. Each village became an overturned blur, each downpour a welcome laundering. I could focus only on the blows to my skull and the subsequent rattling, the quiver of every molecule of bone that held my increasingly irrelevant brain in its protective embrace. I lost track of time, and of my name, and of the significance of this ball of dirt across which I bounced, bounced, bounced. I became merely impact and motion, impact and motion.

I remember a story my father once told me. A boy is playing in the sandbox in the schoolyard, and darkness falls. He hears the voice of his mother calling him in for supper. On his way home, he loses his way in the shadows and walks until his feet are sore. He curls up against the side of a stranger’s house and falls asleep. In the morning, the sun pries open his eyelids. He is back in the schoolyard. He realizes he is not the boy at all, but the sandbox, and so he is already home.

Copyright © 2009 by Stuart Ross

The sad passing of Barbara Caruso

2010-02-07T09:31:00.002-05:00

I was saddened last month to hear of the death of artist Barbara Caruso on December 30.

Barbara was amazing: a fascinating visual artist and the author of three important and very illuminating books from The Mercury Press — two volumes of journals and a collection of essays. I don't know if there is any more honest and telling published account of an artist's life than the two installments of A Painter's Journey.

Barbara, married to the poet Nelson Ball for 44 years, was a brilliant, lovely person.

The few times I visited with them in Paris, Ontario (I wish it had been a lot more than a few times), Barbara always had challenging and absorbing questions, about my writing, or my life, or politics. She talked with great deliberation and precision about her own work: the paintings and drawings that I got to see at a few gallery shows I made it to in Cambridge and at Toronto's Artwords Gallery, and that appeared on the covers of Nelson's legendary mimeographed weed/flower books in the 1960s and 1970s. I learned so much in those few talks: I'd never heard anyone speak so passionately and clearly about colour, about shape, about the field of the canvas.

We ate cookies, drank tea, talked. I'm going to cherish those visits, the quiet and warm hospitality Nelson and Barbara offered.

It always struck me that Barbara, in her visual art, and Nelson, in his writing, did such similar things: minimalist explorations of subtleties, and of the field of the canvas/page. All created with such care, and such commitment to their respective arts.

My most profound condolences go out to Nelson Ball on his loss.

Over and out.

Sneak peek at Gary Clement's cover for Rogue Stimulus

2010-02-06T15:04:00.003-05:00

Coming soon from Mansfield Press. Featuring 72 poems in protest of Stephen Harper, by writers from across Canada.

Over and out.

some publishing news

2010-02-06T04:26:00.007-05:00

So much has been happening, it's sort of paralyzed me.

My novel got accepted for publication in spring 2011. More on that another time.

Been buried in work with Mansfield Press, which has been one of the most exciting aspects of my literary career. So proud of the books I acquired and edited for the last season: poetry by Jim Smith and Robert Earl Stewart, and a new novel by Tom Walmsley. I think those books are as good as anything any Canadian press has put out in recent times. And I'm real excited about Peter Norman's debut poetry collection, coming out as part of this spring's Mansfield list.

And Stephen Brockwell and I just finished an insane two-week blitz that led the Mansfield anthology Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament from conception to the printer. About 350 poems poured in; we selected 72. Some of the poets included in the book, which will be released when Parliament reconvenes in early March, are George Bowering, Alice Burdick, George Elliott Clarke, Michael Dennis, Amanda Earl, Jason Heroux, Lillian Necakov, Joe Rosenblatt, Steve Venright. An amazing collection.

OK. There's this young guy in Ottawa named Cameron Anstee, and last year he started up a chapbook press called (I love this) Apt. 9. He's published some gorgeous books, by some great writers, most recently my pal Michael Dennis. And later this month he's releasing a chapbook of my new poems. The announcement on his blog is here. Poke around and see what other stuff he's done. But it's struck me that I can't even remember the last time someone else published a chapbook of mine. Was it Home Shopping by jwcurry's Room 3o2 Books? That was a decade ago or something. I don't think anyone's asked me for stuff for a chapbook since then. Well, I'm excited about this one. The other day I sent Cameron about 40 pages of poems and he selected 20 pages. I've never done that before: just send a bunch of stuff and let the editor choose from among it all. His selections surprised me. I'll be reading at the Tree Reading Series on February 23, and I'll see the book for the first time then.

Over and out.

Good night, Paul Quarrington

2010-01-21T11:07:00.004-05:00

Paul Quarrington died today. He was a brilliant, brave, beautiful guy, so supportive of younger writers.

I'll cherish the memory of his September concert at Hugh's Room. The pure magic of the music. Paul's warmth.

Over and out.

I don't want to read another fucking limerick!

2010-01-19T23:11:00.003-05:00

The poems for Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament are pouring in, with just an hour to go before the deadline. My co-editor on this project, Stephen Brockwell, was on CBC's As It Happens tonight, and somehow that triggered a friggin' avalanche of limericks. Well, actually, tons of limericks and other doggerel were already dropping into the harper@mansfieldpress.net inbox.

We've received about 200 poems so far, from all across Canada. And really, I don't want to read another limerick. Though I do think it's telling that Stephen Harper would inspire these sordid little rhymes.

It does amaze me, though, that doggerel is still what comes to mind when a huge portion of Canadian think of poetry.

There have been some amazing poems in the inbox, too, and by some very fine poets. Some I've heard of and some I haven't. It's going to be a great anthology, and I will never have to read another limerick. You can't make me!

Over and out.

PROROGUE THIS BOOK!

2010-01-16T11:38:00.004-05:00

Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell approached me to collaborate on a very interesting project. We talked it through, did some negotiating. I was game. I approached Mansfield Press publisher Denis De Klerck to see if wanted to be part of it. He was game. Details follow.

PROROGUE THIS BOOK!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: JANUARY 14, 2009
CANADIAN WRITERS TO PROTEST PROROGUED PARLIAMENT

Ottawa small business owner Stephen Brockwell, Toronto poet and editor Stuart Ross and, Denis De Klerck, the publisher of Toronto literary house Mansfield Press, will mark Stephen Harper’s Prorogation of parliament with Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Vacation Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament.

Contrary to what the Harper government would have Canadians believe about the “chattering classes,” people are expressing their outrage over Harper’s unilateralism at family dinners, in the workplace, in social media and in print. Professional and aspiring writers across the country have been invited to submit poems for the anthology which will be published by Mansfield Press just in time for the reconvening of Parliament on March 3.

A book launch and protest will be held at or near Parliament Hill on March 5, 2009.

People interested in contributing to Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Vacation Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament should send a poem of no more than 75 lines by e-mail (preferably as a Microsoft Word attachment) to: harper@mansfieldpress.net. Submissions will not be accepted after midnight Tuesday January 19 to ensure timely editing, production and distribution. For more information contact Stephen Brockwell via email or 613 728 5287.

The poems are pouring in.

Over and out.

2010

2010-01-01T19:28:00.001-05:00

2010

It is two thousand and ten.
I look around for something
to prorogue. I decide to
prorogue the search for
something to prorogue.
— How small is it?
Wait: this minyan is so small.
That’s what I was talking about.
You can fit it in a phone booth.
It phones god. God phones
for Chinese food. Walks around
for days with fortune cookie
in pocket. Let me try
to explain another way:
“Black obelisk for sale. Barely
used in nine years.”
The primates have learned
nothing. Art has not yet
been invented. The closest thing
is a guy who stuck his head
out the window and yelled:
“This, this, this, and this!”
I am filled with tiny slips
of white paper. I open my mouth.
One flutters out. A talent scout
sees me pursuing it and thinks
I am doing a new dance.
The best thing since.
I sign contract. TV loves me.
But I prorogue my success.
Right now, I require the broadcast
of the heartbeat of everybody.

Stuart Ross
1 January 2010

A very curious gift idea: I Cut My Finger

2009-12-27T10:56:00.002-05:00

Just found this review of my poetry book I Cut My Finger, as a last-minute 2009 holiday gift suggestion, on a site called The Internet Review of Books. I'm grateful for the reviewer's thought and enthusiasm, and glad she liked the book. It is, however, a truly odd review: I'm not sure I've ever been called "optimistic" before!

I CUT MY FINGER
By Stuart Ross

Suggested by Joanna M. Weston

This is poetry for an evening by the fireside with a bottle of wine. Give it to a friend and tell them to savour, relish, enjoy the poetry.

Ross writes of hamburgers and history, of oceans and orphans, of sonnets and self-portraits with humour. But underlying the piled on images is a realistic, often optimistic, view of the world: the prince will always kiss Sleeping Beauty into wakefulness, will always bring the glass slipper to Cinderella.

Ross links images in a dance of kaleidoscopic colour and shape. At the same time he maintains rhythm and the cohesion of felt emotion. He brings a sense of adventure and wonder to each page; the reader can never be sure what might happen next. Violence erupts occasionally into the poetry, much as it does in real life, but that keeps the reality in Ross’s surreal world. The reader may be bemused by the combinations of images, but must be prepared to suspend belief in order to be both beguiled and surprised.

With time and patience, the pleasure of reading this book will be deep and lasting. Drink the wine of Ross’ poetry, let the prince meet Cinderella and enjoy the last waltz with laughter and delight.

There's no telling how a reader is going to interpret one's work.

Over and out.

I, um, made the Top 10 literary feuds of the decade

2009-12-26T13:21:00.002-05:00

Shaun Smith of OpenBookToronto has rustled up a Top 10 list for the past decade's literary feuds. I think this will be the only time I'll appear on a list with Henry Kissinger and Oprah Winfrey.

Unbowed.

Over and out.

Dog makes Ottawa Xpress's Worst of Year!

2009-12-25T07:19:00.006-05:00

MJ Stone of the Ottawa XPress has declared Buying Cigarettes for the Dog the Worst Book of 2009:

Worst book: Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. I probably won't hear the end of it for selecting Stuart Ross's latest effort as the dog of '09. When my review was published, the Internet was aflutter with Ross fans convinced that my critical skills were lacking. But it's all a question of taste: While some may regard the book a work of genius, it left me yawning and bored

.

Was the Internet really "aflutter" with my defenders? I think that's just this reviewer's delusion of grandeur. There wasn't a single readers' comment after the review, and a search of "MJ Stone" and "cigarettes" comes up with nothing but the review itself.

MJ was the reviewer who compared me unfavourably to Ernest Hemingway.

Regardless, it's a new achievement for me!

Over and out.

Dog makes NOW's Top 10 of 2009

2009-12-25T07:13:00.002-05:00

Very pleased that Buying Cigarettes for the Dog has made Susan Cole's Top 10 of 2009 list in NOW Magazine.

Her brief blurb on my book:

Poet Ross doesn’t waste a word in this entertaining, sometimes sad, sometimes laugh-out-loud-funny collection of short stories. More, please.

Over and out.

Robin Wood — off to the Big Screen in the Sky

2009-12-24T15:15:00.004-05:00

I'm a guy who is prone to hero worship and so forth. But one of the great heroes of my adult life, one of my great mentors, was Robin Wood. I've often said that he was probably the greatest influence on me beyond my parents.

I first met Robin when I was about 20 and Elliott Lefko dragged me into one of Robin's film lectures at York University, where Robin was a professor at Atkinson College. I was enthralled by Robin's class and screening, and proceeded to take several courses with him, including a course on Hitchcock and De Palma, one on Japanese cinema, and another on European cinema. I later became, for about 10 issues, the typesetter and designer for CineAction!, the magazine of radical film theory that Robin co-founded with an eclectic bunch of very exciting thinkers, including Richard Lippe, Florence Jacobowitz, Bruce LaBruce, Scott Forsthe, Susan Morrison, Janine Marchessault and others.

In those classes, and through my friendship in those years with Robin, I learned a huge amount about how to watch films, how to write, how to think. I had never met someone so truly radical and brilliant. And such a beautiful humanist.

I heard yesterday that Robin died last week, at his Toronto home that he shared with his partner, the film critic Richard Lippe. Robin was 78. No one ever gets enough years, I think, but Robin did accomplish so much: he was a huge inspiration, I'd bet, to not only hundreds but thousands like me: students and colleagues who gained knew appreciations for how films could be read and appreciated.

I hadn't seen much of Robin in the past decade or so — but when I did see him he was always thoughtful and good-humoured and affectionate and, well, intimidating. I have followed his writing/thinking in CineAction!, and he has always surprised me: he's never become some wrote Marxist film critic: he always reevaluated, and gave every work its own consideration.

This week I'm going to watch Rio Bravo, a favourite film of his, by Howard Hawks, and maybe I'll even screen Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which he once dubbed "the most distinguished American film of the 1970s," a claim that would be laughable … until you see in it what Robin saw in it. Robin also introduced me to my own favourite film: Vertigo. I remember his voice catching after he screened it in our class, even though he had likely seen the film dozens of times by then.

This obit appeared in Tuesday's New York Times:

Robin Wood, Film Critic Who Wrote on Hitchcock, Dies at 78

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: December 22, 2009

Robin Wood, a film critic who published the first serious work in English on Alfred Hitchcock and who applied formal rigor and moral seriousness in his book-length appraisals of Howard Hawks, Arthur Penn, Ingmar Bergman and other directors, died on Friday at his home in Toronto. He was 78.

The cause was complications of leukemia, said Richard Lippe, his longtime partner.

Mr. Wood, who was British by birth and education but spent much of his career teaching in Canada, made a remarkable debut as a critic. While teaching English at a secondary school, he placed an article on Hitchcock’s “Psycho” in Cahiers du Cinéma, the celebrated journal associated with the French New Wave and auteur theory. With this validation, he began writing for a variety of British publications and followed up with a series of influential studies of important directors.

Influenced by the Cambridge critics F. R. Leavis and A. P. Rossiter, whose morally committed approach to literary criticism galvanized a generation of British university students, Mr. Wood never lost sight of the ethical and political aspects of film. This tendency became more acute after he came out as a gay man in the 1970s and took a sharp turn to the political left.

He had come to believe, he told the reference work Contemporary Authors in 2005, that there was only one defensible motive for writing about film: “To contribute, in however modest a way, to the possibility of social revolution, along lines suggested by radical feminism, Marxism and gay liberation.”

Robert Paul Wood was born in Richmond, Surrey, on Feb. 23, 1931. A fractious child, he was often taken by a maid to the movies to get him out of his parents’ hair and soon developed an infatuation with the Hollywood comedies of Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert Cary Grant.

After earning a degree in English from Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1953 and a diploma in education a year later, he taught English at secondary schools in Britain and France. At one, he started a film society and encouraged students to write critical appraisals of the films they watched.

Following his own advice, he wrote an essay on “Psycho” and submitted it to the British journal Sight & Sound, whose editor returned it with the comment that Mr. Wood had failed to see that the film was intended as a joke.

Infuriated, Mr. Wood sent it to Cahiers du Cinéma, which, despite its contempt for British film criticism, accepted the article, a careful teasing out of the themes of sex, death, money and compulsion in the film. The Cahiers cachet afforded him instant entree to the British journal Movie, to which he began to contribute in 1962.

“I began to realize that all of these films that I had loved in the past could be taken seriously, that some real artistic claims could be made for them,” he told Your Flesh magazine in 2006. “That was a revelation, and really all I needed to understand. So it was purely from that article in Cahiers that I became a film critic. I think if they had turned it down, I probably wouldn’t have written about film anymore, and I would probably still be an English teacher today.”

Mr. Wood, a penetrating critic with a graceful prose style, soon emerged as one of Britain’s most influential film writers, a reputation enhanced by the groundbreaking “Hitchcock’s Films” (1965). “A lot of people thought it was ridiculous, this idea of taking Hitchcock seriously,” he told Your Flesh. “He was seen as simply an entertainer; one was merely amused by his films, had a few shocks, a few laughs, and that was it.”

A series of important monographs followed: “Howard Hawks” (1968), “Arthur Penn” (1968), “Ingmar Bergman” (1969) and “The Apu Trilogy” (1971), which dealt with Satyajit Ray’s work. With the critic Ian Cameron he wrote “Antonioni” (1968), and with Michael Walker he wrote “Claude Chabrol” (1970). Many of his essays were collected in “Personal Views: Explorations in Film” (1976).

In 1973 Mr. Wood was invited to create a film studies program at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, where he lectured until accepting a post as professor of film studies at York University in Toronto in 1977. He retired in 1990.

In addition to Mr. Lippe, he is survived by his children Simon, of Toronto; Carin, of Bath, England; and Fiona, of Bordeaux; and five grandchildren.

In his later film criticism, Mr. Wood concentrated on politics, specifically sexual politics. A 1977 speech to the British Film Institute, “Responsibility of a Gay Film Critic,” gave notice of his new critical program, which he pursued in “Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan” (1986) and “Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond” (1998). With colleagues at York, he started a radical film studies journal, CineAction, in 1985.

His enthusiasm for Hitchcock never flagged. In 1989 he returned to the subject in “Hitchcock Revisited,” appraising the director from new angles but maintaining his admiration. “I think the best of Hitchcock films continue to fascinate me because he’s obviously right inside them, he understands so well the male drive to dominate, harass, control and at the same time he identifies strongly with the woman’s position,” he told the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org) in 2000. Hitchcock’s films, he continued, “are a kind of battleground between these two positions.”

So, good night, Robin Wood. You were a genuinely great man.

Love, and over and out.

This season, shop at This Ain't the Rosedale Library (if you're in Toronto)!

2009-12-15T02:09:00.003-05:00

The new location of This Ain't the Rosedale Library, in Toronto's Kensington Market, is sorta diminutive. But it's filled with so many great books. So if you're shopping for gifts for others or yourself this season, head over there! 86 Nassau!

There are some great indie bookstores in Toronto, but this one is still my favourite, just as it was 30 years ago.

Over and out.

Mansfield Launch this Wednesday in Toronto!

2009-12-06T22:36:00.004-05:00

Since 2007, I've been editor at Mansfield Press; I'm real proud of the books I've put through there: great and unusual collections by Alice Burdick, Jason Heroux, David W. McFadden, Lillian Necakov, Steve Venright.

This season, I'm responsible for acquiring and editing three of the books being launched on Wednesday: the novel Dog Eat Rat, by Tom Walmsley; the debut collection Something Burned Along the Southern Border, by Robert Earl Stewart; and Jim Smith's return to poetry, Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems. Incredible books by incredible authors, with gorgeous cover designs by Mansfield publisher Denis De Klerck.

If you're in or near Toronto, I hope you can join us for our fall celebration. And bring your posse.

Over and out.

To Ottawa, to Small Press Book Fair

2009-11-27T01:59:00.002-05:00

Off to Ottawa today, to catch Michael Dennis and others read the night before the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair. And then the fair itself, on Saturday: always a good time, if sparsely attended. I'll be doing a Proper Tales Press table, with honkin' new HARDSCRABBLEs featured. And Leigh Nash (who'll be there with her Emergency Response Unit) and I will also tend a Mansfield Press table, with the new titles by Tom Walmsley, Bob Stewart and Jim Smith, plus a nice spread of the backlist.

Gonna be fun. The fair takes place at the Jack Purcell Community Centre, off Elgin Street. No address listed (rob, fer gawd's sake!) on the Facebook page. Goes from noon till five. Looking forward to seeing my dear Ottawa friends. Maybe making some new ones.

In other Mansfield news, I'm just beginning to catch my breath after an onslaught of large and small editing jobs. Most exciting for me are the Mansfield titles I'm working on: a first book of poetry by Peter Norman, of Halifax, formally of Calgary, Ottawa, and Vancouver. The book is called At the Gates of the Theme Park, and it's this incredible mixture of strange formalism and crazy anarchy. I'm thrilled to have nabbed this manuscript, and the book is due out in March. Also for March, a fantastic family memoir by Marianne Apostilides, The Lucky Child. I remember seeing some much earlier version of this when I was sitting on an OAC jury years ago, and I was deeply impressed then, at the time not knowing who the book was by.

Meanwhile, the Toronto launch for the three 2009 Mansfield books I acquired and edited — Tom Walmsley's Dog Eat Rat, Jim Smith's Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems, and Robert Earl Stewart's Something Burned Along the Southern Border — takes place on December 9, 7:30 pm, at the Monarch Tavern, on Clinton just south of College. Also launching is Pier Giorgio Di Cicco's Early Works, and there'll be guest readings by Corrado Paina and my hero, Mr. David W. McFadden, whose Be Calm, Honey (Mansfield, 2008), was a finalist for this year's GG.

Over and out.

Broken Pencil, broken principles

2009-11-26T11:48:00.006-05:00

Broken Pencil will not publish a letter to the editor from me in which I correct errors in their recent "incorrections."

The motive for my letter to the editor was to put the truth somewhere on record.

Luckily, it is on record — in Hal Niedzviecki's original review of my book. If you want an accurate version, read what Hal says. Ignore the subsequent incorrections.

As for Broken Pencil, I'm disgusted. I'm disappointed.

Over and out.

Windsor reading ... workshops ... stuff

2009-11-06T01:13:00.002-05:00

Off to Windsor this morning to participate in a panel and to give a reading at WordFest, a real nice writers' festival taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor. The panel is about publishing; the reading is called Multimedia Poetry, but I will be reading prose and there'll be no multimedia for my stuff. More info right here.

Another highlight for me will be Robert Earl Stewart's reading on Saturday: it'll be his first reading from Something Burned Along the Southern Border, which I acquired and edited for Mansfield Press. A fantastic poetry collection.

Speaking of which, I just saw Bob's book yesterday. It arrived from the printer along with Jim Smith's Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems, which I also put through Mansfield. Another really great book. And both of them have beautiful covers designed by Mansfield publisher Denis De Klerck.

Finally, I have a couple of workshops coming up, and there's still some space:

THE WORD BLITZ: a workshop by Stuart Ross
Sunday, November 15, 10am-5 pm (w/ 45-minute lunch break)
Christie/Dupont area
$75 includes materials, light snacks & a book by Stuart Ross

To register, write Stuart at hunkamooga@sympatico.ca

For beginning writers, or those who simply want a one-day writing holiday or to break through one of those mythical writers' blocks. The Word Blitz is a hands-on exploration of short fiction, poetry, the personal essay and memoir. We'll write, and we'll talk about how to make writing a part of your life, as well as about various forms of publication.

STUART ROSS'S POETRY BOOT CAMP
Sunday, November 22, 10am-5 pm (w/ 45-minute lunch break)
Christie/Dupont area
$75 includes materials, light snacks & a book by Stuart Ross

To register, write Stuart at hunkamooga@sympatico.ca

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. Arrive with an open mind, and leave with a heap of new poems!

Over and out.