New Site, New Projects

If you’re here, then you’ve discovered my new website, courtesy of Bontano.net. It’s been an intensely busy few weeks, between David Khang’s How to Feed a Piano at Centre A, and Tracing the Lines: A Symposium on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki.

A few cool ideas/instances to emerge out of these discussions: Edouard Glissant’s idea of a poetics of relation (eloquently taken up by Rinaldo Walcott on the panel for How to Feed a Piano), the notion that to become animal is to be elevated from the location of the human (Candice Hopkin’s idea), that to practice many languages produces a different kind of freedom in bodily, social and intellectual life (from Marwan Hassan’s talk at Tracing the Lines).

Had a particularly good time working with Rita Wong and Dorothy Christian on our evolving water project. With an eye towards deepening our collaborative and coalition building practice we involved seven other people in our performance/paper: Roy Miki, Denise Nadeau, Phinder Dulai, Candice Hopkins, Monika Kin Gagnon, David Chariandy, Cecily Nichols. The piece was a scripted performance of original text and quotation, all of which resonated around the ideas of water, community, indigenous/settler coalition, sound and time.

Now—thinking about other kinds of collaboration that might be possible through my upcoming stint as Peter Wall Early Career Scholar. And trying to sort out content for my section of English 110, which I’m thinking of framing around the notion of alternate realities. And preparing to move house again…