Please join CUE in launching its inaugural season, with readings by George Bowering, Ted Byrne, Larissa Lai, Christine Leclerc, Donato Mancini, Sharon Thesen, and Lissa Wolsak.
Music by Cellosound.
Oct 17th. at 7:00 pm
Mountain View Cemetery, Celebration Hall
5455 Fraser Street (East 39th Ave. at Fraser)
Vancouver, BC
Special launch prices on all books. For more information go to: capilanocreativewriting.blogspot.com
I need to work on ruthless, but in the meantime artless will have to do.
If you’re in the UBC vicinity tomorrow evening, I’m reading and speaking as part of a series put on by Patricia Robertson, the writer-in-residence at Green College. The series is called “Is Fiction an Endangered Species?” I feel very honoured to be sitting on a panel called Words Tamed and Untamed: When We Were Stories” with Robert Bringhurst and Linda Harvey. We’ll be talking about traditional storytelling and the role of fiction in contemporary culture. It runs from 8 – 9:30 pm at the Green College Coach House on the UBC campus.
If out and proud is more your style, come to Little Sister’s this Thursday. I’m reading with Nairne Holtz, one of the editors of No Margins, and the illustrious Marion Douglas, who was the very first person I ever went on tour with.
Little Pear Garden has just put out a trailer for the Salt Fish Girl theatre piece. I’m really excited about it! Check out their website:
If I can get away from work, I’ll check these events out:
No One Is Illegal and neworldtheatre present…
Storytelling Our Lives:
Stories of Migration and Displacement
Featuring: Sindy Angel, Adriana Contreras, Gurpreet Kambo, Amal Rana,
Ghassan Shanti and Carly Teng
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Doors at 2 PM
2:30pm – 3:30pm sharp
Chapel Arts
304 Dunlevy Avenue (corner East Cordova, 2 blocks East of Main)
Monday, September 29, 2008
Doors at 7:30
8 – 9 pm sharp
Room 1800, SFU Harbour Centre
515 W Hastings
[ These are all free events. Donations will be thankfully accepted ]
‘Storytelling Our Lives’ is an exciting new theatre production that
involves young people of colour sharing their personal stories of
immigration and displacement in a series of deeply moving and courageous
testimonies.
These performances are a culmination of a series of workshops as part of a
collaboration by No One is Illegal and neworldtheatre. The project and
performances hope to jointly contribute to bridging the gap between art
and activism by bringing into focus the individual faces and unique
stories of those who have gone through the migration process. This project
also draws upon the deeply rooted and central role of culture, creative
expression, and storytelling as key components of resistance movements by
providing a connection between personal narratives and global
understandings.
Eleanor Ty and Chrystl Verdun’s Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography is out! There are pieces by Smaro Kamboureli, Paul Lai, Kristina Kyser, Pilar Cuder-Dominguez, Joanne Saul, Christine Kim, Ming Tiampo, Tara Lee, Eva Karpinski, Mariam Pirbhai, Christine Lorre writing on the work of Shani Mootoo, Fred Wah, Hiromi Goto, Suniti Namjoshi, Ying Chen, Ken Lum, Paul Wong, and Laiwan. If you are at all interested, I also have a piece in it, thinking about the problem of how the racialized subject can write her or himself, and what kinds of public selves get produced in this apparently self-liberating act.
Back in town. Went to see The Tempest at Bard on the Beach last night, in preparation for teaching it later this term. Enjoyable and fraught. Or enjoyable because fraught? Race issues neatly skirted through calculated casting. I’ve been watching the remakes and retakes too– a hilarious version from the 80s featuring John Cassavetes and Molly Ringwald and of course, Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. Derek Jarman made one too, which perhaps I’ll watch later tonight.
Working with the Play Chthonics committee to get the new season lined up.
Don’t forget to attend the 20th anniversary JC Redress conference if you’re in town.
In Toronto now, and have had the good fortune to attend The Movement Project’s production “How We Forgot Here” which sends audience members on an interactive theatre journey on Ojibway Air. Who counts as a legitimate migrant to Toronto and why? Where is home? The piece was really moving for the ways in which it deals with the relationship between (im)migrants and indigenous peoples, and the violence and grief of two kinds of displacement.
One of the contributors to that project, Gein Wong, is also a member of Little Pear Garden. She has just showed me the script for the theatre incarnation of Salt Fish Girl. Pretty excited..
Note from Jane Bouey of People’s Co-op Books today, saying that the Globe and Mail is suspending its “Books” section. This, after the Harper budget cuts to the arts. How can a country get its priorities so wrong?
Just back from the ISEA conference in Singapore and a side trip to Thailand. What bliss to step from the hamster wheel to the wheel of Enlightenment. Or at least the freewheel of capital. Our panel, “Mediated Hauntings,” was fun. I realize how much I miss working with old colleagues whose thinking has so much influenced my own. Alice Jim was the only person I haven’t worked with before—she gave a great paper on Second Life and True False Creeks, which is a project on False Creek, Vancouver and False Creek, Dubai that Henry Tsang and Glen Lowry are working on. What happens when the virtual “prints out” in real geography?
Drank Singapore slings at Raffles Hotel, ate fish head curry in Chinatown, rambled through the Indian and Muslim quarters on the last day. Caught a lot of papers on electronic art—one on cyberfeminism that I particularly liked. Went to a handful of exhibitions and openings including a sound performance by Spektr! and Experimenta Play, an exhibition of new electronic art. Loved the shy photograph, in which the subjects run away if you approach too closely.
We went to Koh Samui for an island holiday afterwards. After all those conversations with David and Diyan about the cultural possibilities of SE Asia, I chose the beach. Needed the beach. And did not much for days but lie on the beach, swim, eat rambutan and mangosteen, and stare at the sky! And try not to get too dragged down by the infrastructural horrors of contemporary western tourism. On the last day we went kayaking and snorkelling in An Thong National Park. We were delayed somewhat by a rather spectacular fire caused when a truck careened into the local 7-11.
Later this week, I’m off to Toronto, where Little Pear Garden is working on a dance/opera production of Salt Fish Girl.
Enjoyed listening to Michael Franti tonight, while sitting on the beach outside the Vancouver Folk Festival. I was too late/disorganized/cheap to buy a ticket, but it was nice to watch the water and listen to songs about peace, love and revolution. Sometimes I do wish the 60s back.
There’s a mother spider nursing two huge eggs outside my office window. I wonder if they will eat her when they hatch, like the baby spiders Rachel remembers in Bladerunner.
Gearing up for The International Symposium on Electronic Arts in Singapore. I fly across the Pacific Pond later this week. In August, off to Toronto to play consultant during the workshop of a Salt Fish Girl opera!
After all these years of trying to teach myself to complicate and nuance, I’m in a position of really learning to clarify and simplify for the purposes of first year teaching. One of the things I want my students to learn is that language is not transparent. But how do you teach that without exercising the assumption of transparent language?
I’m mulling form these days, after having witnessed Mark Nowak’s extraordinary poetry work with American and South African Autoworkers, and Walter Lew’s movie-telling exercises with his students. Both are about a kind of subversion and both have a kind of beauty, or strength, though not in the sense that I expect any of my own students to get. (Why don’t I? May they would get it.) Or my own performance/paper at Tracing the Lines, with Rita, in which had seven others help us perform a piece that engaged various kinds of texts functioning at various levels of consciousness about their textuality, and at the same time attempting to do work that is social and political. I’m not sure that it “worked” or that it was “strong” but it drew people together in a way that seemed to me to be step in the right direction—away from authority, towards community and recognitions of kinship in difference (between natives and settlers, between humans and the elements).
If I had my way, everyone who came out of my classes, or for that matter, any one with the good fortune of a Western education would write, read and share poetry. Its quality wouldn’t matter nearly as much as the engagement with text and with other readers and writers. What could an education be that wasn’t about producing elites? What would its poetry sound like?
Thanks, Myron, for the quality banner!
