Rose-coloured reviews *Killarnoe* by Sonnet L'Abbé

I knew I wanted to read something by Sonnet L'Abbé because I've seen her do a few readings over the last year or so and they were amazing. I totally believe that the best way to sell a book is to have the person who likes it most (usually the author, one would imagine) read a little bit of it to you. A few distainful readers notwithstanding, this would be the ideal selling technique if only more people went to readings. I am one who does, and thus buy a lot of books, though in truth *Killarnoe* was a gift (a requested one!)

*Anyway*, I loved L'Abbé's readings , and I was pretty sure I would love the poems on paper too. I was right. Killarnoe is a book rich in play, in sex, in sound, in self-deprecation, in jokes and juxtopositions and alliterations and *rhymes* (the rarer it gets, the more I like it). It is joyful, thought-provoking reading.

The poems I heard at the readings were, I think, largely from the second section in the book, "Instrumental." Each is a meditation or exploration of a sound, which gives the poems titles like the thoughtful "Ah", catchy "I" or the sexy "Ungh." These pieces are full of life, though I suspect highly theorized at their base. Breaking language down to sound memes (AMT, am I using that word right?) is not a simple task, but the poet manages a light touch nonetheless: "noteworthy / the pure ooh / of boo /of moo // the poor ooh / of few / of zoo."


I was surprised to find I didn't much like a section of political poems called "Z: Ghazals for Zahra Kazemi." In a reading, I had been quite astounded by the weird sad fear and humour of "My Osama bin Laden T-shirt" (which appears in the book in the section after Z). Upon rereading, that piece held up, but the other topical stuff left me cold.



One reason could be is that ghazals are a highly complex, very structured form with which I'm not really familiar. There's a lot of repetition (a L'Abbé trademark, I'm told) and not much room for narrative. To put it more bluntly, I didn't understand these. Then I found the notes in the back of the book and I *did* understand--at least who Zahra Kazemi is, and some of the other people mentioned in the work--but I still didn't really "get" the poems. I couldn't go inside them--they required me to bring with me a certain amount of info, or at least insight, that I don't have.


That's ok--some poetry is always going to shoot over someone's head, and writing for the rather large subset of the population that reads th newspaper is not a crazy idea. Most of L'abbé's work is so multilayered, so open and accessible that though I nearly always suspected there was more to it than I had understood, there was plenty for me to savour.


Like a poem towards the end of the book, "Third Breast," which was decidedly creepy and bizarre and I really like it. But I have the strong impression there it obliquely references a tri-breasted creature somewhere in mythology that I'm forgetting about...do you know? I'm sure L'Abbé knows, and I don't, but it doesn't matter. I will think about that poem for a long time anyway, which really, is the point.


I once had a wonderful English prof--this might have even been in high school--who drew a diagram about layers of meaning. Literal, metaphor, allusion, symbol, allegory, etc. Then s/he (I actually have no idea who this was, sorry) said that a story poem that was only surface would be pretty simple and dull, but that work that only existed on the deeper levels would also be dreadful, because the reader would have no point of entry or reference, no simple enjoyment or identification before the heavier work began.


I think about this when I read a book like *Killarnoe*, which operates on so many levels and seems open to having the reader on any or all of them, or wherever you would like to go.

RR

The Toronto Poetry Vendors

This is Toronto poet, and one of the Toronto Poetry Vendosr, Carey Toane (the other is Elisabeth de Mariaffi), giving me a sneak peak inside the city's first (that I know of) poetry vending machine, now installed and activated inside This Ain't the Rosedale Library.

Slip in a twoonie (wow, I never write that word--is that how you spell it?) and you'll get a tiny brightly coloured broadside featuring a poem. The Toronto Poetry Vendors offer poems by 10 Toronto poets--here's the gang, if you are curious:

Kevin Connolly
Dani Couture
Elisabeth de Mariaffi
Andrew Faulkner
Jacob McArthur Mooney
Stuart Ross
Jenny Sampirisi
Meaghan Strimas
Carey Toane
Paul Vermeersch

The neat things is that the poems are just stacked in there, and so when you turn the crank, you just get the next one in the queue, no picking and choosing. So after this afternoon's lovely launch (excellent readings, excellent cookies), everyone in the audience bought a poem, and then milled around asking each other, "Who'd you get?" "Who'd you get?" It's like baseball cards for the litsy set.

Seriously, funnest thing ever. Also, how often do my photographs turn out this cute? Like, seriously, almost never. It was the poetic buzz, I tell you!

RR

Linkages

I am mainly recovered from last week's slump, and have various good things to suggest, report, and share:

--If you missed Sunday afternoon's lovely Draft Reading Series 5.2 Salon des Refuses(you poor thing), you can recapture some of the magic by reading Mark's essay on rejection (from the Draft magazine) or looking at AJ's pictures.

--If you are still in hot pursuit of poetic pleasures to celebrate Poetry Month, why not go see the Toronto Poetry Vendors launch their big bright green poetry machine (I have no idea if it's actually green, but it's called Spearmint...), this Sunday at This Ain't the Rosedale Library.

--Another poetic option would be to read my one and only published poem, originally from echolocation, now reposted on Pickle Me This. I am pretty proud that Kerry considered this piece--called "Dead Boyfriend Disco"--worthy of inclusion in her Poetic April. I write perhaps three poems a year, mainly lame ones, so I'm pretty proud that DBD exists, period. Warning: it's really long, probably because I wanted it to be a story.

And yes, I am still reading tomorrow evening, 7pm, at the Free Times Cafe with fine folks like Adrienne Gruber and Andrew Daley. I am looking forward to it because it's going to be fun; you might be looking forward to it being over so I'll stop mentioning it every day!

RR

April is Poetry Month

But you knew that, I'm sure, and are probably well into a much-more-organized-than-mine celebration. But nevertheless, I am enjoying the poetic focus right now, reading the John Smith tribute issue of CNQ and Paul Vermeersch's Between the Walls (ok, so I read that at the end of March, but I'm still going to count it). Right now I'm in the middle of Skim by Mariko Tamaki, which is not poetry but a graphic novel, and also absolutely captivating (and funny!) so far (I knew it would be--not sure what took me so long to get to actually reading it!) But after that, it's back to poetry with The Laundromat Essay by Kyle Buckley, another book everyone but me has already read and loved.

Also this week, I'm thinking I'll do a poetry class with the teens. The teacher recommended it, and if I weren't such a chicken it should have already been on the slate. But I'm actually really worried about this, because I am not a poet. I've studied loads poetry, mind, but I very much doubt what the kids want is help with scansion. They would like to know how to write the stuff--or really, since they are teens, they are probably already writing it and just want to get better. But I don't know that I know about that.

I think the easiest way into poetry is the Imagists. It was for me anyway--I think The Red Wheelbarrow was the first poem I really really *felt*--it didn't feel like an inept teen half-guessing at an erudite writer's goals, but like the poem was there to paint a picture in my head and it did that. Anyway, it's a happy memory for me, so I'm gonna try out some of that stuff on them, and use it as an opportunity to talk about finding the single *right* word, not 17 close-enough, out-of-the-thesaurus words (a problem my students are having. Let me know if you have any recommendations, even if they're not from that particular movement--my students aren't too fussy that way, and neither am I.

And one more bit of poetic news is that I received an absolutely lovely illustrated copy of Hillaire Belloc's *Cautionary Tales* as a gift this week, from someone who likely has no idea that it's Poetry Month, but it does nicely suit. I haven't read the whole of it yet, but as soon as I saw the title in the table of contents, of course I read this one (the poet's been dead more than 50 years, so I'm not violating copyright by sharing this, am I?) It's best read *aloud*!

Rebecca
Who slammed Doors for Fun
and Perished Miserably

A trick that everyone abhors
In Little Girls is slamming Doors.
A Wealthy Banker's Little Daughter
Who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater
(By name Rebecca Offendort),
Was given to this Furious Sport.

She would deliberately go
And Slam the door like Billy-Ho!
To make her Uncle Jacob start.
She was not really bad at heart,
But only rather rude and wild:
She was an aggravating child...

It happened that a Marble Bust
Of Abraham was standing just
Above the Door this little Lamb
Had carefully prepared to Slam,
And Down it cam! It knocked her flat!
It laid her out! She looked like that.
*
Her funeral Sermon (which was long
And followed by a Sacred Song)
Mentioned her Virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her Vices too,
And showed the Dreadful End of One
Who goes and slams the door for Fun.
*
The children who were brought to hear
The awful Tale from far and near
Were much impressed, and inly swore
They never more would slam the Door.
--As often they had done before.

RR

On-going goings-on

I think this might be a low-post week due to busyness, but then again it might be a high-post week due to having pictures and reports on the busyness. We'll see how that goes.

Plans:

Tomorrow night is The Writers' Trust Awards ceremony. Despite being in a totally different venue than it was two years ago, and thus causing me a little brain-on-fire here-is-not-there moment, I still think it will a lovely event. There will be literary repartee of canapes and fancy drinks, there will be entertaining speeches (at least, last time I attended, almost everyone spoke remarkably well, and briefly), there will be a *lot* of prize money handed out. And there will be me, in a *dress that I ironed* (what I wouldn't do for literature) helping McLelland & Stewart's fiction editor Anita Chong announce The Journey Prize 21. Yay for all long-listers, short-listers, and of course, the soon-to-be-known winner (guess who is very excited not to have to keep a secret anymore??)

Then on Wednesday morning, I get to get up very early to go out to University of Toronto at Scarborough to give a lecture of my stories. I'm going to direct my comments mainly towards the last story in *Once*, "Massacre Day," which is one of the ones the students are studying. It's also a story I've never done a reading from and since the audience has all (allegedly) read the piece, I'm free to read from any point in the piece. I think I might take this unprecedented opportunity to read the ending. But what I am looking forward to most is a discussion with students. It never fails to amaze me when people offer me insightful, thoughtful, utterly accurate interpretations of my work that I never thought of. Can't wait.

Wednesday evening will find me at Ben McNally's for the Biblioasis Poetry Bash, appreciating three poets imported to Toronto for the occasion. Should be outstanding--see you there?

So, if this is it for postage for a few days, I would like to leave you with these lines from the song "The New World" by The Burning Hell:

My world would be a place where everyone would play the saxophone
But never soprano saxophone
Only tenor and baritone
Then a drum and a trumpet and a rusty old French horn
Would play a solo and make us shake our little bones

RR

Treats and Wonders

Via Scott: Of course I love this gallery of book sculpture because of coolness and ingenuity. Of course I hate it because no one is reading those books. It's very confusing.

Canadian poet (and cool guy) Troy Jollimore had a lovely poem, "At Lake Scogog" in this week's New Yorker.

Once, I told AMT a tale of woe about working very hard on a story for months, only to have the nth draft dissolve in my hands like grains of sand--it was an unworkable idea, but the only way to find that out was the months of work on an unpublishable story for which no one would congratulate me. And AMT, a linguist who regularly runs experiments that are sometimes brilliant and sometimes not, explained to me about a little publications called *The Journal of Null Results*. I said, "Please blog that so we can all feel a little better about things. And she did--I hope you do!

For the glue to dry on our new creation
RR

Rose-coloured Reviews the Al Purdy Tribute

Are there lovelier people anywhere than Toronto lit-folk? (and those in search of a grim and serious review surf away) Last night at the Dora Keogh, Paul Vermeersch hosted an incredible night of readings in honour of the ninth anniversary of the death of Al Purdy and as a benefit for the project of saving the house he built and wrote in, to be turned into a writing centre.

I attended despite not being a mad Purdy devotee--I loved Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets but hadn't really gone farther. I thought, perhaps I should. It couldn't really miss being a fun night, with such great readers on the bill, like Elyse Friedman,

Nick Thran


Katherine Parrish


and many more. And of course the Purdy poems, the lovely space of the Dora, and the stellar line-up drew even more lit-folk into the audience, like

Mark Sampson


Russell Brown


Adam Sol


Ok, I'm trying to make this a review and not just a name-drop--starting right now! What was awesome about the evening? First, the vast range of talented and diverse readers. Dani Couture and David McFadden are very different poets who gave very different, lovely and heartfelt readings. Every poet did and there were *twelve* by my count!! They even brought in an out-of-town ringer to replace a couple absentees, and we got a lovely off-the-cuff reading from

Adam Getty


Overall, it was quite a raft of readings, but another thing that was great about the evening was that every reading was short and sweet. When a reader reads just enough, the words hang in the air instead of getting buried or blurred, and with everybody doing just one or two poems, we got that effect time and time again last night.

Also, the evening moved along smoothly due to Mr. Vermeersch's "belief that there should be enough breaks to allow people to purchase drinks and go to the bathroom." Indeed, especially considering the facilities at the Dora are *behind the stage.* Awkward!

Ok, and another good thing was there were two fundraising activities added onto the evening, both a silent auction with a poetry broadside, litfestival tickets, and a homemade quilt; and a raffle for another broadside. And these are objectively good things, not just good because I won the raffle (as part of a complicated raffle-ticket-buying collective, exact disposition of prize yet to be determined). I was very worried about tripping over one of the petit barstools, a shopping bag or a friend's limb on the way to the stage to claim my (our) prize as the MC said, "Congrats, Rebecca Rosenblum." I had just about made it when the always on the ball Julie Wilson called, "And congratulations on being nominated for a National Magazine Award, too!" Then I stumbled, but survived to turn in the ticket and go ask Julie, really?

Yes, apparently, really.

But that's neither here nor there.

Of course the best thing about the evening is that Al Purdy's poems are *meant* to be read aloud, practically demand it. Much poetry is, of course, but not everything is

May 23, 1980

I'd been driving all day
arrived home around 6 p.m.
got something to eat and slept an hour
then I went outside
and you know
--the whole world smells of lilacs
the whole damn world

I have grown old making lists of things I wanted
to do and other lists
of words I wanted to say
and laughed because of the lists
and forgot most of them
--but there was a time
and there was this girl
this girl with violet eyes
and a lot of other people too
because it was some kind of party
--but I couldn't think of a way
some immediate plan or method
to bathe in that violet glow
with a feeling of being there too
at the first morning of the world
So I jostled her elbow a little
spilled her drink all over
did it again a couple of times
and you know it worked
it got so she winced every time she saw me coming
but I did get to talk to her
and she smiled reluctantly
a little cautious because
on the basis of observed behaviour I might be mad
and then she smiled
--altho I've forgotten her name
it's on one of those lists

I have grown old
but these words remain
tell her for me
because it's very important
tell her for me
there will come one May night
of every year that she's alive
when the whole world smells of lilacs

That wasn't even one of the pieces read last night but somebody mentioned it and reminded me that it was once a favourite of mine (and no, not for the reason you are thinking).

Great great evening.

Because you sleep with a gun
RR

Let Us Compare Mythologies

Like all book-lovers, and I think a fair amount of those who aren't even *that* bookish, I am certain my lens on the world is distinctly tinted by what I read when I was young. What I read now, too, but in those impressionable years I do think I internalized stories more thoroughly than perhaps I do now in my older jaded years. I feel those books formed my internal mythology.

Naively, perhaps, I assumed that school-inflicted part of this lens was semi-universal; that many if not most of the books I read in school were on syllabi all over the country. But then I asked around my friends of like age and station...and *no one* had read what I read in school. Did I go to a mutant school? I find it so odd to think that I read the world in the light of *Antigone* and most don't.

So here is a list of all that I can remember reading in high school. I think some of the years are off, as there is more in some than others, but it's a good approximation. The starred items are book-report books, chosen off a list of 3-4 (I don't think we ever had free choice). I would love to see other people's lists, if you feel like posting'em somewhere or in the comments or sending them to me. I'm once again really curious about something minor and irrelevant.

English Course Requirements, Wentworth County, Middle Nineties

Grade 9 English, Enriched

--Selection of Greek and Roman mythology (plus excerpts of The Iliad
--Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
--Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
--Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut*

Grade 10 English, Enriched
--A short story collection about multiculturalism--the only story I remember being A Class of New Canadians by Clark Blaise
--Obasan by Joy Kogowa
--Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
--A selection of ballads--the only ballad I remember being The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Lord Tennyson
--The Diviners by Margeret Laurence*

Grade 11 English, Enriched
--Everyman, a medieval morality play and my pick for most-hated high-school text
--The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
--a selection of sonnets, the only sonnets I remember being Shakespeare's love sonnets
--Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw (I remember nothing about this play)
--Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Grade 12 English, Advanced
--The Oedipus Plays by Sophocles--we read all three, but only studied Antigone in-depth
--The Tempest by William Shakespeare
--Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
--something else that I am forgetting

OAC English
--Hamlet by William Shakespeare
--Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (my pick for most-loved high-school text)
--The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood*
--The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence

Never, sadly, anything by Leonard Cohen, whose work I didn't read until university (and never the title work of this post, actually). But I sure did like the songs when I was a teenager!

There's music on Clinton Street all the through the evening
RR

Sometimes

Sometimes, I become so upset at my teetering stacks of books and papers (commented one recent guest, "You're busy!" me: "Or should be!"), email queue and general failure of productivity, that I resolve to scale back on all frolic, forthwith. Which is of course the signal for an eruption of amazing frolicking opportunities amongst my friends and acquaintances. Thus, last night spent on the announcement of the Descant Winston/Collins poetry prize (congrats to all the long- and short-listers, and to Descant for the amazing bash) and later on guitar harmonies and silliness (I sure know the words to a lot of bad songs). And then today, between the yoga and the photo shoot and writing this very important blog post, I had amazing things planned, workwise...which didn't quite happen. And in a few hours, I have to go out for Mexican food!! How do these things happen?

Something, obviously, has to scale back. Don't worry, it probably won't be this blog; does a junkie ever get too busy to shoot up? I fear it's sleep.

Wake up
The house is on fire
And the cat's caught in the drier
RR

An Homage / Rebecca is 2009

Last summer, I heard poet/graphic novelist/playwright/performer Mariko Tamaki read a couple times. Everything she put to the microphone was amazing, especially segments from her collaborative (with Jillian Tamaki) graphic novel Skim (not everyone can read aloud from a graphic novel and make it vivid). At the Scream in High Park another wonderful piece she read was a poem of her collected Facebook status lines (I have looked *all over* for a link; I think it's not online; please correct me if I'm wrong). Like most "found" poetry, I'm sure the artist put a lot of energy into making this piece work rhythmically and tonally, not to mention how poetic you have to be just have high-quality Facebook status lines most of the time when it's so easy to just write "...is glad it's the weekend."

So I make no claim to artistry nor high-quality status, but I find Ms. Tamaki's idea too irresistible not to try my own version. Perhaps it's the lure of seeing my name over and over like that, or reliving happy memories of the past few weeks, or how it provides a tidy summary of my state of mind immediately before and since the change of year. But anyway, I give you

Derivative Facebook Poem: Rebecca is 2009

Rebecca wants to put up the new calendars now!
Rebecca listens to the Fleet Foxes.
Rebecca has changed her mind, is no longer ready for 2009.
Rebecca faces facts: 2009 is coming. Rebecca wishes you all kinds of joy with it!
Rebecca is experiencing the future.
Rebecca is experiencing contact-lens issues that make her seem a tragic tearful figure. Don't believe the rumours!
Rebecca is nostalgic for the good old days, when this apartment had heat.
Rebecca has heat--hooray!
Rebecca mopes for no reason
Rebecca appreciates being indoors.
Rebecca is despondent after failing to locate Germany on a map.
Rebecca is fairly efficient, for a Saturday.
Rebecca is warm now, but anticipating cold
Rebecca is headache grey.
Rebecca is liscious.
Rebecca gets a lot of phone calls before 9am these days.
Rebecca thought this morning's sunrise was especially nice.
Rebecca is CEO of herself.
Rebecca will soon have eaten all available candy.
Rebecca is flexible.
Rebecca thinks back on high school and wonders, was *anybody* cool then?

RR

Rose-coloured Reviews *Unisex Love Poems* by Angela Szczepaniak

The plucky heroine of Angela Szczepaniak's dizzying novel in poems is referred to as a "gingerpear confection" as she dangles suspended on a tightrope and "encounters the world inverted." The expression is an apt description of the whole collection: sharp and sweet and worth savouring, though hard to read slowly.

I was scared to read this book. A wonderful front cover illlustration by Jeff Szuc did not sufficiently distract me from the jacket copy, which promises "[a]n autopsy of language," terrifying to those of us who didn't know language was dead and didn't even send a bundt cake.

The wonderful lightness and elegance of Szczepaniak's work might be better likened to surgery than autopsy--at times gory, at times clinical, but all with the goal (in my opinion) of ressucitation. Yes, these poems work with language as an object, dead if you like, a thing with physical properties like a serif or a ligature in print, a stammer or an accent when voiced. And at *the same time* these poems play with words to tell a decidedly alive and lively set of stories, about a lonely guy named slug who breaks out in a horrible rash and sets about investigating his apartment building to find the cause. In his search, he meets Butterfingers, a lonely girl with a history of sad relationships and a stammer.

That slug's rash is made up of h's, in several fonts, and that Butterfingers's stammer stands in for punctuation and gradually begins to confuse meanings, is just part of the magic and tragedy of these characters. The linguistic high-wire act goes on right above the emotional lives of the characters.

As you might have gathered, a book that gets it's initial plot push from a rash is not a buoyant one. While terribly funny, and I think ultimately quite romantic, *Unisex Love Poems* takes a grim view of the rites of love. There are two competing advice tomes running through the book, one for "Nice girls" who seek to avoid getting groped and secure matrimony, and one for their paramours, who seek to turn "your pretty poppy into a spirited spark plug." Both use the same peppy euphemistic language and even similar flower metaphors, and both use metaphors of trapping the opposite sex into doing your desires.

Also on the advice front are some remarkable recipes for preparing the various internal organs (and two for tongue!) Nothing will make you rethink the common metaphor like a recipe for for "Stuffed Coeur" that advises one to "trim visible fat and functions" and that "the industrious and devoted honeydrop will use strands of her own hair to sew cavities."

The recipes and accompanying diagrams gave me a tough time, as much as I was enjoying the jokes. And I was so sad for poor slug, whose wife is after his accent in his divorce case and who seeks companionship in a spider behind his fridge. But I was cheered up by slug's lawyers, spitz and spatz, fairies because they are three and a half inches tall...or because of their "companionable" as well as legal relationship.

Also, typographic cartoons! Also, slug's fieldnotes on all the living things he finds in his apartment. This book is less than 200 pages long, but it's full to bursting. It's best to be honest and admit that I'm *sure* I missed things too subtle and complex to be gotten in a quick and devouring read. But I'm quite happy to reread sometime soon.

About halfway through reading *Unisex Love Poems, I dropped the book in a dish of ice-cream while sitting in a cafe. As I began to clean it off with the only implement available, my tongue, it did occur to me that it's been a long time since I've seen a better book to lick.

I was lost but I was kind
RR

Blog stars

I wonder why everybody being extra-interesting on Wednesday? And yet they so were:

"It all comes down to the slippery definition of “friendship,” a definition that is rendered ambiguous by the Internet’s systemic blurring of the divide between the personal and the private. A person can be, in Niedzviecki’s definition, “disengaged” by virtue of a computer monitor, yet still feel a personal connection with an online figure, whether that person be someone met in a chat room, through the comments section of a blog, or via an online gaming community."
--from With Friends Like These by Steven @ That Shakespeherian Rag

"I can be a morbid person. Especially around this grocery store, where people with canes but young bodies, and hunchbacks, and disappointed and wild eyes, inevitably attract my attention for reasons I've never been fully able to understand. So when I saw this bride, I was already on edge in a way. My first thought was, Oh my God, she is going to jump off the roof."
--from "Bride on a Pawnshop Roof" by Lauren

"Poets, I'd supposed, knowing better than the rest of us the careful constructs upon which ideas are built, of "just words" after all, and how those words and those ideas can't be bent and twisted into anything, and that anything is everything, and that nothing can be sure. The difference of a line break, a comma; how fragile is simply everything, including life itself."
--from "Of Poetry and War Crimes" by Kerry @ Pickle Me This

Maybe Wednesdays are better than I thought!

What will become of us / oblivion
RR

Stories and Poems

"Look, there are more people playing 'Grand Theft Auto' this very second than will ever buy whatever book you’re talking about. No one cares, dude."

"That’s no reason to …."

"Hey! Loser! In about ten years nobody will be reading books! It’s over! Deal with it!"

--Michael Carbert, writing in "The Urquhart Disaster", Maisonneuve Magazine

I admire the folks at Maisonneuve for, among many other things, continuing to care about stories and books in the face of mounting distractions and dissausion. So I take it as high praise indeed that they'll be publishing my story, "Massacre Day," in their next issue. I'm very excited, and will certainly let you know when it's on the newsstands.

Other people working hard for the cause of words, this time poetry, are all the poets and volunteers at The Scream in High Park, culminating tonight in what, we hope, will be beautiful weather, out in the park. But really, I'm going rain or shine: Claudia Dey! Dani Couture! And a whack more talented folks!

Finally, this is neither story nor poem, but it made me laugh a lot--"My Airline" by David Owen: "You may no longer hum or do any form of beadwork."

You're all ladidah/but I know who you really are
RR