sybil unrest, my collaborative long poem with Rita Wong, has just come back from the printers! I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m pretty excited. Much gratitude to Michael Barnholden of the newly formed Line Books, for his hard work and constant faith in this project. We had a lot of support from the good folks at The Kootenay School of Writing, and from Aaron Vidaver and David Fujino, whose collaborative long poem performance at KSW several years ago was a catalytic inspiration.

Catch Clint Burnham, Aaron Peck and Rishma Dunlop at Play Chthonics this Wednesday, Nov. 12, 7:30 at Graham House, Green College on the UBC campus. Details here.

Had a great time in TO (briefly, briefly) with Gein Wong, Emily Cheung and Aries Cheung. It was pretty cool to see Salt Fish Girl staged.

Upcoming: Friday, Nov. 21, 4pm: an English Department talk called “Agency After the Bounded Subject: Biopower, Body Parts and Human Rights in Stephen Frear’s Dirty, Pretty Things

Nov. 25: a reading with the Short Line Series at the Railway Club with me, Tony Power and others. I’ll update you on the start time when I have it.

Play Chthonics brings Christian Bok and Christine Stewart to the Green College Coach House this Wednesday. Should be a good one. Details here.

On Thursday, I fly to Toronto for the Salt Fish Girl theatre piece staged by Gein Wong, Emily Cheung, Aries Cheung, Brigitte Tang and the company Little Pear Garden. I visited them when they were workshopping it last summer. Now I’m really looking forward to seeing what they’ve done! Check it out.

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: http://capilanocreativewriting.blogspot.com/2008/10/cue-open-text-anthology-launch.html

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:

http://www.saltfishgirlshow.com/Salt_Fish_Girl_Home.html

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?