course information pending

Read a review of sybil unrest by Cris Costa for Agora here.

This is the same review published by Memewar earlier this year.

Read Sophie Mayer’s review of Sybil Unrest in Chroma here.

With Aubyn Rader, Ashok Mathur, Fred Wah and yours truly.

6:30 – 8:30 at the Railway Club, 579 Dunsmuir Street, Vancouver.

Long time since I blogged, though it’s been an eventful summer. Highlights: Shanghai International Writers’ Festival, Queer Literary Kinship conference in Ghent, and the TransCanada3 conference in Sackville, New Brunswick, plus travels to Seal Cove, Newfoundland with Roy and Smaro.

My new book of poems, Automaton Biographies, comes out in October. Stay tuned for launch dates!

But now, its this start of term. I’m using “Little Red Riding Hood” to teach subtext to first years. More fun than a barrel of monkeys!

Great slippery infectious ones against StoryMill, for wiping out three days worth of writing through a simple slip of the mouse. It’s my fault for not realizing that the scene bubbles in Timeline are actually attached to real scenes in the Scene view. Delete a bubble lose your scene. Delete a bunch of bubbles, lose days of work. And it is not retrievable, even by the whizzes at ArtsIT. StoryMill doesn’t save txt files, it saves whole novels plus research etc. as one big file, easily modified and easily lost. Not recommended, even with adult supervision.

Please join Nomados for a poetry reading and book launch with Kim Duff and Larissa Lai at 7:30 on Friday May 8 at 1067 Granville Street, alley entrance. BYOB

Kim Duff is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia and a researcher of avant-garde poetry and global spatial logic. Her dissertation focuses on contemporary British literature, particularly literature that engages with Thatcherism, privitization and urban spatial theory. She’ll be reading from her recently published book of poetry, Tube Sock Army, LINEbooks.

“Everyone in the Tube Sock Army can hear technology building its architectures in the voice. And Kim Duff tracks the provocations of this ‘neoliberal domesticity project’ as it gets us to whisper our passwords into our cell phones ’softly.’ So much for disembodiment. In the intimacy afforded by 30-second intervals, we relax, texting ourselves the grocery list. ‘Truthiness’ breaks down our globalized front doors (the apartment keeps shrinking, but the rent goes up). Nevertheless, it’s in the interstices of these spatializing mediations that we keep vying (hope-full) for contact. This is ‘creature address.’ Hallo:” — Laura Elrick

Larissa Lai, acclaimed author of Salt Fish Girl, When Fox Is a Thousand and [with Rita Wong] Sybil Unrest, launches her Nomados chapbook Eggs in the Basement. Lai has been the Markin-Flanagan Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary (1997-8), and Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Simon Fraser University (2006). Shortlisted for three awards, Salt Fish Girl was described by Herizons as “hope in the midst of despair.” The Georgia Straight called it “a well-written and highly inventive novel.”

In Sybil Unrest, “Larissa Lai and Rita Wong . . . find in adulterated adspeak a ticker-tape, twitterpoetry that – because it’s more than 140 characters long – makes meaning out of the meaningless. . . . Sybil Unrest argues that consumerism doesn’t necessarily kill us. . . . It fragments us and puts us back together wrong, galvanised with electrical goods like Shelley’s monster.” — Sophie Mayer, Chroma

Praise for Eggs in the Basement:

Procedure-in-a-round, Eggs in the Basement ticks the metronome of everyday diction through looped words and known notions. Text, repeated, collides and colludes meaning, lyric echoic, fierce. Disjunctive narrative swallows its own tail and births eggs into itself. Dim the light and consume immediately. a.rawlings

Spun from a source text generated in a writing exercise, Eggs in the Basement takes this initial set of linguistic, social, geographical, and political constrictions to recombine into poems that perform the possibilities of expression and affect. In this relationship of limit and possibility, this book (which is so aware of its historical moment) works through the everyday terrains of the social and the poetic. It is a book that travels parallel to the forms of freedom (and their negation through consent and force) that liberal democracy slyly serves up in its language of consent. Jeff Derksen

Eggs in the Basement is a brilliant instance of the contrapuntal improvisation that can occur between writing and thinking. In this long poem Larissa Lai develops these linguistic clefts with such acute awareness and intelligence that each poetic shift triggers a new and surprising message, relentless in an absorption of the cascade of signals at the threshold of potential meaning. Fred Wah

“The world beneath the world” is what Dionne Brand called it, when she was here reading for Play Chthonics last fall. The world we’d live in if Columbus hadn’t sailed the ocean blue, if Lenin not Stalin, if Mao without the Cultural Revolution, if Kennedy not Nixon, without the Viet Nam war or the war in Iraq…. She says that world still exists beneath the surface, that it has a language, that we can go there. Roy and Slav say there are signs all the time, if we pay attention.

Yesterday I went there, for a few moments– dinner hosted by the gracious Jeff Bear for his sister Shirley Bear, and us– her friends– out at Jeff’s house in Musqueam. Such food! I tried kaaw for the first time, ate oysters, chunks of smoked cod, salmon, halibut. Shirley and Roy remember the possibility of the 60s before the disillusionment of the 70s, hang on to hope, justice in the cells. That world is still possible, if we can figure a way through this one, churning out students like human widgets. My friend Margot calls it a chicken factory, grade ‘em by size and quality, so the corporations can pick their minions.

I had to leave just as the fish was arriving. Me and the little dog Decker, we salivate… But left for a good reason– to attend and read for the launch of Fist of the Spider Woman, edited by the lovely and amazing Amber Dawn. There are women out here on the east side actively making that other world, and I am grateful to be able to go there sometimes.

I’m kicking myself for having missed Shirley Bear’s reading at the On Edge series last Wednesday. She’s been an important figure to me in the last few years as an elder, artist and writer. I’m looking forward to having a visit with her later this month.

I’m also really looking forward to the launch for Fist of the Spider Woman, an anthology of horror stories (and other genres) by queer and transgressive women, edited by writer,  performer and editor extraordinaire, Amber Dawn. It’s a huge honour to have a few pieces from my long poem “Nascent Fashion” included.

GLBTQ community has remained so supportive all these years, through the transformations and transmutions of both my person and the community itself. I’m headed to Ghent later this month for a conference on queer literary kinship, organized by Katrien DeMoor. I’m really looking forward to meeting Emanuel Xavier, Robert Gluck and especially Sarah Schulman, and to seeing Anna Camilleri again. And, so serendipitously, it turns out that the lovely and talented Angela Rawlings is hanging out in Ghent for a while. Check it this cool clip of her and Jaap Blonk. I always get excited when my communities collide. I’ll stay on in Ghent for a bit after the conference to spend time with Angela, rest my head, and, with any luck, meet local poets. I may even get some writing done.

And speaking of “Nascent Fashion,” that poem is coming out in my first solo poetry book, Automaton Biographies, which Arsenal Pulp Press is publishing later this fall. “Rachel,” a long poem based on the Ridley Scott film Bladerunner and the Phillip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, will also be in that collection, for those of you who are interested.

For now, it’s the last week of class. I’m looking forward to the end of term, though I will miss my students. Papers are due on Wednesday, and the Canadian Studies class has an exam on April 17th. Study hard, my friends, but don’t forget to ask yourselves why you do so.

My long poem Eggs in the Basement is out, published as a limited edition chapbook by Nomados Press. Meredith Quartermain just came by last night with 26 lettered copies. Much appreciation to her and Peter both for being interested in it and for producing such a beautiful edition!

Eggs in the Basement is an experimental, process-oriented poem. I generated a body of source text in a ten-minute automatic exercise, separated it as neatly as possible into subjects and predicates and wrote the poem by repeating first all the subjects and and cycling through the predicates in the first half, and then reversing the procedure for the second. Strangely, the result is loosely the story of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, in which two murders are committed by a collective: an initial one, which traumatizes the collective, and a second, which covers over the first and consolidates an violent and violated melancholy from which the group cannot escape. If you’re interested at all, you can obtain the chapbook by writing: Nomados Literary Publishers, PO Box 4031, 349 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6B 3Z4.

Or check out their website: Nomados

I’m really looking forward to teaching at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in San Diego this summer. It’s the last week to apply. Get in there, all you talented moonbeams!

I’ll be crossing the Pacific pond shortly for the Shanghai International Literary Festival. I’ll also have talks at Fu Dan University and Ningbo University. I’ve been wanting to go to Shanghai for many years. Looking forward to chats, books, ideas, high-tech, fab food and spectacle in this mythic city.