Word Things

Some notes on a literary festival

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Wed, 07 May 2008 02:29:00 +0000

The Blue Metropolis literary festival was held in Montreal between Wednesday April 30- Sunday May 4. I attended at least one event every day, usually with my literary outing date, Lesley, and it was fun, inspiring, overwhelming, etc.

April 30, 2008: Reading with James Meek, Nancy Huston and Donald Antrim. A good, solid reading. My favourite was Nancy Huston, who read excerpts from her recent English translation "Fault Lines". I was unexpectedly taken by Donald Antrim, who I was not familiar with. He read from a hilarious work-in-progress. I found it surprising that he began the novel 6 years ago, but shelved it when the project became unwieldy. There’s something strangely comforting in knowing that a "real writer" can start a novel, get stuck, trash it and pick it up again after 5 years. You just sort of assume that once you have books published you write and complete things and they get made into books in neat 2 year spans or something.

May 1, 2008: An interview with Nancy Huston lead by CBC’s Michael Enright. Nancy Huston is probably my favourite "new" discovery of the festival. ("New" in brackets because she’s written dozens of books, is respected and well known, etc.) Caroline and Lesley had both glowingly recommended "Lignes de faille", but I never got around to reading it. I was charmed at the reading the night before, but what really sealed the deal was this interview. They discussed things like the complexities of being an ex-pat in Paris (Nancy Huston was born in Calgary and lived in various parts of Canada and the Eastern United States before moving to France), the impact of childhood, the problems of language (trivia: Nancy Huston wrote her university thesis about taboo under the tutelage of Roland Barthes!) and more. The interview will be broadcast on the CBC sometime soon and would definitely be worth listening to. I would now like to read every one of her books. Okay, go. (One down – I breezed through "Losing North" this weekend; it’s similar in topic to the interview)

May 2, 2008: A panel discussion called "From manuscript to book: The publishers have their say" with Jon Paul Fiorentino, Robert J. Sawyer and Patricia Aldana. Jon was the more contemporary, indie side of things, Patricia covered children books (she works for Groundwood Press) and Robert was science fiction. It was an interesting panel and covered a lot of things I already knew, but didn’t mind hearing again i.e. submit everywhere, but know who you’re submitting to and why you’re right for them. Patricia was the only one who believed that people shouldn’t simultaneous submit, but come on, guys. We will simultaneously submit anyway, especially if you’re going to wait 6 months to give us rejection letters. Things got a little prickly when the topic of self-publishing came up. Jon valiantly defended DIY culture, much to the chagrin of Robert. Discussing it later on, Lesley made a good point that it really depends on the genre. A science fiction chapbook is probably weird, but a poetry chapbook is lovely. Anyway, it was an interesting panel.

May 3, 2008: A lecture/reading by Daniel Levitin, who wrote the book "Your Brain on Music" about the science behind listening to music. The lecture was fascinating and he talked about things like how the part of your brain responsible for movement is stimulated while listening to music, which is why in general we have to suppress the urge to dance or tap our fingers when we listen to a song we like. Admittedly, the lecture portion was too short, but he was eager to read to us an excerpt from the book that he will be releasing in the summer, which will deal more with the evolutionary side of things. After the lecture I realized that I hardly just listen to music anymore. I am always doing something – taking the bus, driving, doing the dishes – and I wonder how this has affected my relationship with music?

May 4, 2008: I spent the day at a workshop called "Pitching the Pitch" lead by Gerald Wexler. While I’ve done my fair share of research about the publishing world, the movie industry is a complete mystery to me. Over the past few months Soraya and I have written a screenplay, and now that it’s done, we’re not sure what to do with it. I was hoping this would clarify things a little. I have no experience in pitching, which was obvious when it came time for me to pitch my movie, but I got great suggestions from Gerald and the class. The respected (and um, dreamy) journalist/non-ficton writer, Adam Lebor, was in the workshop as well, hoping to get pointers on pitching his novel/movie. He had been on several panels at the festival and I didn’t expect to see someone "established" in a workshop with me. Similar to how I was surprised by Donald Antrim, I was shocked to find out that Adam’s novel is having a difficult time getting published. I assumed that, given his credentials, the book would be snapped up in a second. Oh, publishing. What a fickle beast.

Notes from a writing workshop

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:45:00 +0000

I'm thinking that it's harder to write in the summer. And I say "summer" because this part of the world leaped from ridiculously towering snow drifts to flip flop and tank top weather within a one week span. But it's so hard to write when there is green grass to walk on and bottles of white wine to drink and no one feels like burrowing anymore and even those squirrels at the park were eating potato chips out of your hand this balmy, beautiful Thursday evening in Montreal. What makes it a little more difficult is that for the past 8 weeks I've been taking a writing workshop lead by Mikhail Iossel and there's nothing like a weekly workshop to get you in the habit of writing, or at least actively thinking about writing. It ended yesterday and I'm crossing my fingers that I'll carry the habit into the sunny season. Resolution.

Anyway, during class I would half-hazardly jot down phrases or book titles that Mikhail would mention, and I thought it would be interesting to compile them in one blog post. Sometimes I'm not exactly sure what I meant by the scribble.

Mar 5 / 08
"A Lie That Tells the Truth" - John Dufresne
"What If" Ann Bernays and Pamela Painter
axis of chronology
a writer's interest in their own writing is contagious, i.e. if you're bored writing, the reader will be even more bored reading
do things on purpose and make sure the reader knows this
the reader shouldn't be smarter than the writer
Donald Barthelme - 40 Stories, 60 Stories
constraints on writing "cigarettes" - limiting choices makes writing easier and generates unintended meanings
"Every Hunter Wants to Know" - mushroom hunt story!! [Note: This is a story Mikhail wrote that stems from being a child in Russia and doing some yearly mushroom hunt; this week I was obsessed with the act of mushroom foraging after finishing "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and thought it was serendipitous]
cut, don't add

Mar 12 / 08
Molloy vs. Godot
Boris Pasternak- Russian poet
(I guess I didn't take many notes this class)

March 19
Make a questionnaire for a character
Consider point of view as a camera
"Fat" Raymond Carver
chiaroscuro [Note - I think I just realized I really like the sound of this word]
Annie Hall's original title [Note - It was "Anhedonia", which is the inability to experience pleasure from normally pleasurable life events]
"Reunion", "Angel on the Bridge" - Cheever
calibrate
atmospherics [again, just words I decided I liked]
The Magic Barrel - Malamud

March 26
My story got workshopped so most of my notes are about that, but there's also this:
bats who keep talking to remind themselves they're alive [I don't remember the context]
Flann O Brien [Note - Just a few days earlier my friend Molly had been telling me about him, and since then his name has been popping up everywhere]
Phillipe Algao (Logos and Chronos) [Note - I think I really butchered this guy's name because I can't seem to google the right info about him]

April 3, 2008
Borges, "The Aleph"
"Separation of Starlight" Sorentino
Amy Bender short stories
Evelyn Waugh
George Saunders

April 9, 2008
If you do something on purpose, do it twice
an unreliable narrator: when the reader knows more about the narrator than the narrator herself
movies by Tarkovsky - Mirror, Solaris (not the remake)

April 16, 2008
You need an abundance of realistic details to make magic realism work
nostalgia is sadness
Sorentino (again)
The Art of the Personal Essay
"Signs and Symbols"

April 23, 2008
I didn't take many notes this class because one of my stories was workshopped and it was the last class, so it was mostly a lot of talking.

So, 8 weeks of class condensed into offhand scribbles.

Liveblogging the Junos

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:25:00 +0000

Teri: Who's that?
Andrew: I dunno. Who's that?
Teri: I think they just said he's a figure skater.
Andrew: Who's that?
Teri: ...
Andrew: Best new group?
Teri: Who's that?

The only way to be quiet / is to be quick

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:00:00 +0000

Timely: The New Yorker published an article about Frank O'Hara's "Selected Poems" (which I mentioned in the last entry).

His poems, so full of names and places and events, are exquisite ledgers for the tallying of reality. They all attempt to move the vital but fleeting items in Column A—sandwiches and torsos, lunch hours and late nights—into Column B, where works of art stand, “strong as rocks,” against the ravages of mortality. The attempt to move people from Column A to Column B is called “elegy,” and, while every poet tries it, few have done so with the illusion of real-time improvisation that makes O’Hara’s poems so risky and so satisfying.

Yeah.

Notes on NYC

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:46:00 +0000

New York City, you exhaust me. We rolled back into Montreal on Easter Monday close to midnight, sleep deprived, with sore feet - the markers of a successful trip. It was my third time visiting the city, but I only seem to visit for breathless weekends (the shortest being one and a half days, the longest being four and a half), so it still feels new, unexplored, uncharted. Andrew and I drove up with Nel and Mark and stayed with Shane and Heather in their loft in the Bronx. We walked a lot, we bought books and shoes and clothes, we went to galleries and ate a lot of food. It was good. Here are some of the highlights.

Nel and Mark doing explorery stuff

Favourite out-of-context sculpture: We arrived on Friday afternoon and while the light was still good, Shane took the four of us for a huge walk around his neighbourhood in the South Bronx. The thing about travelling with a bunch of urban explorer types is that I pick up all this random information about things I wouldn’t otherwise think about. Like, within my first hour in New York City I got a brief tutorial on the sewer system, how water is brought into the city (from the Catskills! The pipe is leaking! It’s been leaking for over 30 years!), the point of those wooden water tanks on buildings around the city, etc. It’s oddly fascinating, and it was great getting a personal tour of the Bronx. As for the out-of-context sculpture, there’s a shipping yard near the water where if you peer through the fence you can see a massive rusting metal sculpture created by Richard Serra (who just had a retrospective at the MOMA). It was slightly surreal to see it just sitting there, bleeding rust, out in the middle of a dead-end lot in the Bronx

Richard Serra: art, not scrap metal

We also poked around the Hell Gate Bridge and because it was low tide, crossed briefly over to Randall’s Island without having to use a bridge. Tucked into a corner underneath the bridge is a tag by a graffiti artist who gave up on spraypaint and turned to metalwork instead. His metalwork tags are scattered throughout the city and this is one of the more obscure locations.

I would like tags more if they were always cast in metal.

Favourite meal: Oh god, Sylvia’s. After a day of walking all over the city we wanted food that stuck to our bones and warmed us up. Soul food. So, we went to Sylvia’s and the meal was nothing less than completely satisfying and delicious. Miss Sylvia herself was at the door greeting the diners and my only regret is that I was so stuffed I couldn’t order a slice of Red Velvet Cake for desert. Such is life. Between us we ate: many slices of cornbread, fried chicken, ribs, collard greens, mac and cheese, okra gumbo and garlic mashed potatoes.

So much goodness in one photo.

Art exhibit best viewed while fully awake: The Whitney Biennial is perhaps not best experienced at four in the afternoon when you’ve been walking non-stop since 9 in the morning on 6 hours of sleep. It’s hard to feel engaged with the art when your mind is kind of blanking on what it means, and I found myself most tickled by the exhibits that I could interact with directly rather than just stand back and look at. So, I don’t know how I felt about it, to tell you the truth.

At the MOMA, not the Whitney. People dozing off.

Favourite Nabokov-inspired art piece: You would think the International Centre of Photography would have more… photography, but the first floor was devoted to excerpts from photographer/designer/ installation artist, Barbara Bloom’s collection, including a few Nabokov inspired pieces, like the cover of Lolita in rug-form or, my favourite, a butterfly box with tiny drawings of Vladimir, each one named by a different pseudonym used in his career.

Favourite unexpected public space: The weather was so beautiful in New York City compared to Montreal – over ten degrees, sunny, even actual flowers peeking out. We were pretty psyched about hanging out in Central Park and soaking up some sunshine, but before getting there it was a pleasant surprise to stumble upon Bryant Park, next to the New York Public Library, and eat hot dogs at a little table, the sun shining down, yellow taxis whizzing by in the distance.

Odds of someone quoting the scene from “Annie Hall” where Woody and Diane are in line at the movies while waiting in line to watch a Godard film at Film Forum: 100% maybe? Is it just inevitable? On Saturday night, after dinner and aimless wandering, we felt like sitting down and zoning out to a movie. We were in Chelsea at the time, and Godard’s “Contempt” was about to start playing, so we bought tickets. Within 10 minutes of standing in line, we listened as a guy explained that Annie Hall scene to his date. What is perhaps stranger is that she had never seen the movie. Note: Like the Whitney Biennial, don't watch Godard when you're feeling sleepy. Oops.

Best hot chocolate ever: The City Bakery. With a homemade marshmallow.

Song you totally expect to hear at a peace rally, but also totally not expect to hear because it’s such a cliché peace rally song: Kumbaya. But we totally did. Note: I'm for peace and all, but we didn’t seek out the peace rally, we just happened to be sitting around Union Square while it was happening. But I was pretty cuted out by this old man with a dot-matrix printed banner for peace:

Favourite book purchased from a cute bookseller: Steinbeck’s memoir of driving around the U.S. with his dog, “Travels With Charley”. I had just returned a library copy of the book before leaving, and was charmed by Steinbeck’s ambling descriptions. I wanted a copy of my own, so when I saw it sitting on the bookseller’s table, I gladly forked over six dollars for it.

Most a propos poetry collection purchased from The Strand: Frank O’Hara’s “Selected Poems”. O’Hara’s New York is so vibrant and romantic, exclamation marks and orange-coloured things everywhere. His love poems melt me quicker than ee cummings. Whenever we had some downtime, his poems were the only things I could digest.

Excerpt:

I'm going to New York!

(what a lark! what a song!)

where the tough Rocky's eaves

hit the sea. Where th'Acro-

polis is functional, the trains

that run and shout! the books

that have trousers and sleeves!

Stuff to keep me warm.

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:11:00 +0000

I’ve been really good about winter this year. I haven’t really minded the snowstorms – they usually happened on Sundays and I felt cozy sitting at home - writing, cooking, baking - relieved that I wasn’t out on the streets. I even went skiing once. But now, February 29th, the temperature a frigid -15 degrees celcius and I am officially cranky. I mean, come on, enough with it already! The upside is that I’ve been writing a lot this winter, and I’m wondering if it will keep up when spring comes. It’s easy to settle in with my laptop and a warm beverage on a cold night, but it will be a different story when it’s 25 degrees and there’s a bottle of white wine in the fridge.

Anyway, word-wise, I went to two readings this past week. On Tuesday many people crammed into the delightful Drawn and Quarterly store on Bernard to watch a bearded Adrian Tomine give a slideshow presentation about his work, mostly his last graphic novel “Shortcomings”. It was interesting to see the progression of sketches to final graphic novel, and Adrian gave a thorough discussion of the process. He also addressed the “unpolitical” issue that has kind of plagued him his whole career. People expect a visible minority to tackle their otherness in their work, and given that Adrian never has really talked about being Japanese the way say, Sandra Cisneros discusses being Mexican, there have been people who criticize him for what they see as avoidance or internalized racism. It was interesting, and something I’ve definitely thought about myself with my own work. He stands firm in his position that he writes about what he wants to write about, that he’s interested in human behaviour and the small moments between people, and that to do otherwise would be forced. Anyway, his work totally resonates with people, so obviously he’s not doing anything wrong. And like he said, it’s great that people are actually paying attention to comics as valid social commentary, something that wouldn’t have been considered 20 years ago. The funny thing is that you can still sense how self-conscious he is about his work, especially his earlier stuff. It’s endearing.

Last night was the Atwater Poetry Project featuring Elizabeth Bachinsky and Carmine Starnino. Elizabeth was my favourite; she is such a great reader – charming and seductive and funny.

And some zine news!
“Cement, Flour, Saints” will soon be distro’d by the amazing Ms. Hipp’s My My distro. Also exciting, for those of you that have read the zine, an amended, edited version of the first section (“cement”) is going to be published in an upcoming anthology by the Montreal based small press, Invisible Publishing. I’ll post more details about the anthology when I know, but yay.

And I don’t think I mentioned it earlier, but there’s other book activity going on in our house – Andrew and his friend Michael will have a book published by Furnace Press about Buffalo’s grain elevators in September. Details are here: http://www.furnacepress.com/news.htm Michael is a wonderful, erudite writer and you know how I feel about Andrew’s photos, so I’m obviously excited to see the end product.

Irrational behaviour

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:50:00 +0000

I was in the business program in university and although my concentration was on accounting, I essentially minored in economics, a field I desperately wanted to be really awesome at. I probably studied harder for my economics classes than I did accounting, and despite all the studying, I was only ever average at it. Eventually I realized it was because I was treating economics as a proxy for the English lit classes my practical (and scaredy cat) self had opted out of. I zoned out at the charts and equations and instead daydreamed about the metaphors of economics. Micro vs. macro. The concept of quantifying utility. Efficient markets. We touched on the economics or love and marriage in one class and I think I flipped out a little. I loved this stuff, the language of it, the concept of mapping all of our messy, human traits onto a grid. Anyway, I graduated and most of my real economics education evaporated away, leaving me with the superficial poetry of its nomenclature rather than the weight of real knowledge. But I was reminded of my interest in economics this morning reading this article by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker that talks about "behavioural economics". The concluding paragraph summarized the flaw with projecting human behaviour onto economic theory:

If there is any consolation to take from behavioral economics—and this impulse itself probably counts as irrational—it is that irrationality is not always altogether a bad thing. What we most value in other people, after all, has little to do with the values of economics. (Who wants a friend or a lover who is too precise a calculator?) Some of the same experiments that demonstrate people’s weak-mindedness also reveal, to use a quaint term, their humanity. One study that Ariely relates explored people’s willingness to perform a task for different levels of compensation. Subjects were willing to help out—moving a couch, performing a tedious exercise on a computer—when they were offered a reasonable wage. When they were offered less, they were less likely to make an effort, but when they were asked to contribute their labor for nothing they started trying again. People, it turns out, want to be generous and they want to retain their dignity—even when it doesn’t really make sense.

Eatin' bacon, huh?

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:59:00 +0000

This is more word-y than music-y, so it gets filed in this blog. For my lovelies, in honour of Valentine's Day, here's a bit from one of my favourite Wiretap episodes.

Seduction

xo

Three verities

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 03:55:00 +0000

The fun thing about living with a photographer is that I get access to books that I wouldn't think about buying/borrowing myself - big, beautiful coffeetable books, certain art theory and criticism, etc. I was reading some essays in Robert Adams' Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values and was particularly intrigued by an essay called "Truth and Landscape", which tackles the question of what makes a landscape photography different from say, regular documentary reportage. It was timely because we had just come home from an afternoon spent poking around the little galleries at 372 Ste Catherine, and I had especially enjoyed the landscape photos of Lawrence Beck. I've also been recently thinking about Andrew's photos, the types of landscapes he prefers, trying to contextualize them, I guess, explore different ways of understanding or appreciating them.

Lawrence Beck

Andrew Emond

The truth is that I've generally been the kind of person who likes photos "with people in them", who can't always sit still long enough to drink up the hugeness and the detail offered by a landscape photo. But this is starting to change now that I've actually started paying closer attention. I was also recently flipping through my Virginia Woolf books (yes, I flip a lot through my books, especially when I'm sitting at my desk trying to write. I figure it's better than e-stalking via Facebook). I came across that section of To The Lighthouse that is simply a description of the passage of time. And then there are those big chunks of The Waves which are pure written landscapes.

Anyway, this is all to say that when I was reading that Adams essay, I came across this really elegant description he gives of landscape photography, and realized that it applied just as easily to writing and stuff I'd been thinking about, that it helped me string together my meandering thoughts on landscape photography with naturey writing descriptions. And it was kind of satisfying.

Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities - geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact - an affection for life.

Yeah.

Saturday morning snowstorm writing tip

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 15:38:00 +0000

How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will on to a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book - to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

(Cannery Row, John Steinbeck)

Recent word-related things

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 02:20:00 +0000

I've felt especially word inspired recently. Maybe it's the winter? The erractic seesaw between bitter cold, freezing rain and numbing snowstorm means that I want to spend a lot of time curled up in bed with something to read. On my bus rides to work I make a beeline for the first available seat and read steadily until it's my stop. No dreamy window peering; I can barely see out the window.

True Grit - Charles Portis: These days I just want to read books that take place in the steamy, dusty South. I want to read about horses and heat. I guess it's another response to the weather. This book met that criteria, was laugh out loud funny, had a scrappy 14-year old heroine and was written beautifully. I was truly sad when it was over.
Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste - by Carl Wilson: I've been a little disapointed with the 33 1/3 books I've read to date, but this one was a pure delight. Wilson examines sentimentality, the politics of taste, Quebecois culture, uses a Gilmore Girls episode to make a point about what works with Celine's music, travels to Las Vegas and has a horrible time, quotes "The Book of Love" by the Magnetic Fields and more.
Went to a zine reading featuring Jeff Miller (Ghost Pine zine) and Julian Evans (One Way Ticket), and I don't know why zine readings never occured to me before. Zines are so chatty by nature - they work so well in this format. Speaking of readings, this month's Pilot was also fun and there is just something vaguely satisfying about drinking a gin and tonic at the bar while listening to writers read on a late Sunday night when I'm normally home cuddled in pjs and thinking about the work week ahead of me.

Tags and books.

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:56:00 +0000

I was tagged by An Endless Banquet, so voila, a post.

1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Instead of 7 random things about myself, here are 7 of my favourite bookstores I've encountered during my travels, a list I've been meaning to compile for awhile. In the past few years I've realized that my favourite kind of souvenir is of the printed paper variety. Kitschy t-shirts shrink in the wash, postcards get shoved into boxes, the novelty of a gift-shop trinket fades. Books have staying power, and it's nice to look at my bookshelf and remember when I bought a certain book or where I read it. Most of these shops are East Coast/New England heavy, but that's just because I take a lot of roadtrips and since I live in Montreal, that's about as far as I can venture in a car on a weekend.

1. The Country Bookshop, Plainfield, VT. - Plainfield, Vermont is the kind of small town I sometimes think about escaping too. It has all the necessities: a pizza parlour, a Southern BBQ restaurant (River Run, which is one of my top 5 restaurants of all time), beautiful countryside and a used bookstore. The Country Bookshop is a house crammed full of books, shelves running up to the ceiling, stacks along the floor. We usually visit after eating too much food at River Run, and flipping through books is the perfect digestif. Memorable purchases: A slim, blue-cloth hardcover of sparse and strangely beautiful poetry by Jose Garcia Villa.

2. Atlantis Books, Oia, Santorini, Greece. When you're in Santorini, you Must watch the sunset in the village of Oia. Everyone talks about it. It's one those jaw-droppingly beautiful events, the huge sun turning pink and purple and getting all streaky and ablaze before disappearing into the sea. The thing is, it's kind of surreal and eye-roll inducing to see the hoopla around it - people filming the sunset (seriously, who is going to watch a filmed sunset, ever?), clapping when it's over, rating it against other sunsets, etc. It was pretty, but the thing we got most excited over in Oia was Atlantis Books. It's a tiny bookstore that looks like it was carved out of a cave, with shelves and shelves of amazing books, the kind of trove a travelling bookworm dreams about. There was a lazy dog sleeping in the corner, and the girl running the shop for the evening was wearing an "Ithaca Is Gorges" t-shirt and playing Belle and Sebastian. Memorable purchases: The Greek Islands by Lawrence Durrell and Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon.

3. A&E Books, 1000 Islands Parkway, Ontario: Driving back from Toronto this past September we took the more scenic 1000 Islands Parkway route after Kingston so that we could see some water and trees instead of transport trucks. Along the way I noticed a "Bookshop Open" sign (the one pictured in the upper right corner of this very blog!). We drove a few minutes and then decided we didn't want to pass it up and turned back around. A&E Books is on the top floor of a house and is small, but has a nice selection of books on topics like birdwatching or cartography. Memorable purchases: A gorgeous illustrated edition of Robinson Crusoe and an early edition of Scouting for Boys.

4. Black Sheep Books, Montpellier, Vermont: There is an amazing concentration of spectacular independent bookstores in Montpellier, at least 5 of them within one city block. Whenever Andrew and I take a little trip to Vermont (which is much easier now that we live in Montreal), we always seem to come home with a trunk load of books. Black Sheep Books is a little anarchist bookstore with a decent, but limited collection of books. The best thing about Black Sheep Books is that if it weren't for their recommendation for River Run, we would've never discovered Plainfield. The people who work there are just friendly like that. Memorable purchase: a graphic novel about Emma Goldman's life, of course.

5. Corporate chain, New Jersey, NY. There was nothing charming or unique about this bookstore – it was just a regular big box kind of place - but listen, it was a few years ago, late summer and I was stuck in the depths of New Jersey on a business trip. One night after a long day of work, instead of sinking into the hotel bed I took the rental car keys and drove around, trying hard not to get lost on the endless maze of highways. I was having one of those nights where I felt a little bereft, a little too far from home, and was comforted to find myself at a bookstore. I bought Joan Didion's newly published Year of Magical Thinking and, for nostalgia reasons, "For the Roses" by Joni Mitchell, just so I could listen to "You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio" in the car. I read the book sitting in a McDonalds and felt a lot more restored. Memorable purchases: Self-explanatory.

6. Big Chicken Barn, off of Route 1, Maine. When I went to Maine one of my main(e?) goals was to find books by Robert P. T. Coffin. I had read a few of essays in a collection Gourmet writing and after falling for his exuberant, passionate enthusiasm for Maine cookery wanted to read more. I wasn't able to find any of them in Toronto, and even in Maine had some trouble. I found a novel of his in Portland, but the book I really wanted was Mainstays of Maine, all rhapsodic food writing. I finally found a well-read hardcover of it in the depths of the Big Chicken Barn, a barn stuffed with good and bad books, antiques, junk and who knows what else. Memorable purchase: Mainstays of Maine, obv.

7. Pages, Toronto, Ontario. I visit Toronto once every two or three months now that I live in Montreal, and I rarely let a trip pass without stopping to visit Pages. It's just one of those stores that I know I can rely on for something good and interesting, and sometimes I'll schedule plans with people in the area so that I can get there early and spend a good 30-40 minutes browsing until I have to meet them. Memorable purchases: Too many to count, but on my last trip back, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson
and the Maisonneuve food issue.

For reference, here in Montreal my book needs are met by the endlessly charming Word (469 Milton), the solidly stocked and perpetually open Paragraphe (2220 Mcgill) and the huge and awesome Bibliothèque Nationale. I am always keen on bookstore recommendations, in Montreal or elsewhere.

And I tag whoever wants to do this. (Sorry for the rule breakage).

Old zine stuff

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 20:29:00 +0000

I'm taking some time to organize my files before things get busy again and I found some old zine shots:

Cover of melt the snow #12 (two toned linoleum print)

Some scans of pages from melt the snow #7

Link to bigger version

Link to bigger version

Distro news

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 01:07:00 +0000

A more lengthy post will come soon once holiday madness dies down a little, but my zine is now officially available at Learning To Leave a Paper Trail distro. Ciara's description includes a line that basically sums up my entire aesthetic approach to writing:

"i like it when people recount things in a kind of obsessive way. "

Happy holidays. Keep warm and remember that the more butter in your meals, the better.

Snowed in

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 23:30:00 +0000

Had planned on seeing the Coen brothers adaptation of "No Country for Old Men" , but turns out I'm not the only one who felt compelled to stay wrapped up in pajamas for the entire day and is now too reluctant/cozy/lazy to brave the cold Montreal winter to make it to the theatre.

In zine news, "Cement, Flour, Saints" will soon be distributed by Learning to Leave a Paper Trail distro, which is one of the smartest and sharpest distros around. I have never been disapointed by any zine I've ordered from Ciara, so I'm really glad she's interested in distroing me. The subscriptions she's offering would also be an awesome Christmas present for those of you with ziney people in their lives.

Reasons

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:43:00 +0000

So, I don’t really know why I make zines or why I’m so obsessed with writing. For all intents and purposes, I am a logical, rational, pragmatic person. I work in accounting. Why would any logical, rational, pragmatic person be so attracted to such a cruel, cruel activity as creative writing? I mean, writing makes you so vulnerable. You are taking your thoughts and ideas – things that spring from the rawest parts of your brain and heart – and you are giving them to other people to read, dissect and judge. It’s so excruciating. Why can’t I just take up mountain climbing or tennis and be done with it? What I do know is that when I’m not in the midst of writing something, I feel awful. One of the most depressing periods for me was last winter when I was working way too many hours at an accounting firm, barely finding time to read a few paragraphs in a book, let alone trying to write one. To put it mildly, I cried a lot. So even though writing isn’t the most logical of interests, it’s a passion, an obsession, something I have to do, etc. Faulty brain wiring, talent or not, I’m stuck.

But making zines again reminded me of one good reason for being obsessed with this stuff. Admittedly, it’s pretty selfish: zines give me an excuse to connect with people I think are cool, people I admire, people I like. As I sat and handwrote little notes to old friends and new friends in faraway cities to include with the zine I was mailing to them, I realized that if it weren’t for the zine, I probably wouldn’t be writing them at all. I wanted to, but there never seemed to be a good excuse. But now I have something, a reason to say, “Hi! This is my way of saying I really like you and I’m happy to know you” or some less cheesy variant thereof. And by doing that, I get all these sweet responses in return. I love that.

Another example: Dave Eggers. He was in Montreal last night, giving a talk about the 826 Valencia project and his latest book, What Is The What. The talk was wonderful – funny and informative – and he had a sweet quietness about him that I didn't anticipate. At the end of the night he was signing books, and because I had forgotten to bring any of the 4 books of his that I own, I got him to sign the November 28 section of my Moleskine planner. I’m not super keen on book signing stuff (although I’ve gotten some good ones recently), but it’s a nice souvenir. Mostly I wanted to say hi and thank you, and I wanted to give him a copy of my zine. It was a good feeling to see him thumb through it and ask me about it. It’s nice, you know?

So yes, writing (or at least the unshakeable desire to write) is painful, but every so often it’s worth it. I guess.

Stealing Genius

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:26:00 +0000

Expozine was as overwhelming as I'd expected it to be, but still so satisfying. I came home with a book, some Endless Banquet apricot pansy jam, some wonderful zines (like, QSL USA, a fascinating collection of CB radio calling cards by an old zine friend) and a pair of amazing typewriter key earrings by Misssoka.

Did you get a copy of Stealing Genius with your copy of Matrix? Lesley and I met on Friday evening at the Gare Centrale, plunked down at a table, pulled out some scissors, tape and old copies of Choose Your Own Adventure books and put it all together. We chose the Gare Centrale because of its proximity to a copy shop, and we managed to get the zine done and copy it within 10 minutes of the place closing. Success!

Stealing Genius is a collection of various writing from most of the members of the QWF Workshop lead by Jon Paul Fiorentino between September-November 2007 (Albert Cohen, Anurag Dhir, Bettina Grassmann, Josh Levy, Julie Mahfood, Kristina Mainville, C.J. Miller, Lesley Trites and Teri Vlassopoulos). There are excerpts from novels and short stories, poems, even a bit of a screenplay, and an introduction from Jon. Our group is pretty diverse (in ages, professions and writing styles), but I'm really proud of this little collection. If you're interested in getting a copy, drop me a line.

QWF Awards

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 15:28:00 +0000

Went to the QWF Awards last night and was happy to see two of my favourite books from 2007 win awards – Heather O’Neill’s “Lullabies for Little Criminals” and Neil Smith’s “Bang Crunch”. The book nominees read excerpts from their novels while Sherwin Tija quickly sketched accompanying drawings on Illustrator (projected on a screen onstage). It worked well and one of the nicer moments was when Heather O’Neill read a very short excerpt from her book. The passage was about first kisses – the adult kind of first kiss – where she compares the feeling to a game of Russian Roulette, and from a series of scribbles the image that came together was the barrel of a gun loaded with heart shaped bullets.

But oof, while $3 wine may seem like a good idea at the time, it’s definitely not. A sobering walk home in the beginnings of the first snowstorm of the year wasn’t much help either.

Expozine

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 02:32:00 +0000

The collating problem from the other day has been solved, and mail will be going out tomorrow. God bless those train rides from Toronto to Montreal.

For those of you in Montreal, this weekend is Expozine, the small press/comic/zine fair. I've never been, but zine fairs are always fun and overwhelming and there are always lots of cute people walking around or selling stuff. So you should go spend your pocket money on zines instead of fancy coffees or jeans or drugs or whatever.

I won't be tabling, but I will walk around with copies of my zine to trade and give away, so if you see me wandering aimlessly, tap me on the shoulder and say hi. But this is more exciting: back in September, Lesley and I decided to sign up for a Quebec Writers Federation workshop lead by Jon Paul Fiorentino. The workshop turned out to be wonderful and most of us in the workshop decided to quickly slap together a group zine for Expozine called "Stealing Genius". I'll post more details about it later on this week, but just so you know, Jon will be giving away copies of it with Matrix Magazine and while you may not want to pay copies for our workshop zine, you definitely want to spend cash on Matrix.

Rule #1: Don't drink and collate

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 22:38:00 +0000

Because you will find yourself with 50 copies of your zine in the wrong order, after you've just sealed 20 envelopes to mail out to friends and old zine friends.

Um, if you have a zine with pages in the wrong order, I will give you a new one.

Collating

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 03:30:00 +0000

This is where I con Andrew into helping me put copies of my zine together while Archer the cat watches on:

And this is where Andrew says, "WTF, Teri, stop taking stupid pictures of your feet and help me put this thing together!!!"

Cement, Flour, Saints

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 23:45:00 +0000

Back in the mid-nineties I was one of those angsty teenage girls who wore blue corduroy pants and cardigans and listened to a lot of Eric's Trip. I was in the suburbs, looking for people to relate to, easily awed by the idea of a City. I first heard about zines in Sassy (god bless Sassy), and then, after following the zine review column in Canada's monthly music rag, Exclaim, finally sent out a few quarters and stamps to strangers in Canada for their fanzines about Sloan. I read these photocopied booklets, and figured I could make something too. I sat on my bedroom floor with a felt-tip pen and an electric typewriter and wrote this vague, emotional, blurry zine. Melt the Snow #1. It was so embarassing. I mean, the thoughts of any 17 year old are inherently embarrassing - go read your high school diaries if you don't believe me. That's why non-teenagers are the best writers of coming-of-age novels.

So, I made 13 issues of Melt the Snow, and then I started another zine called "The Second Part". I made 4 issues of it before quitting zines in October 2004. I guess "quitting zines" sounds a bit extreme.

I "quit zines" because at the time I wanted to concentrate only on writing fiction, and fiction in zines always seemed a little awkward to me - sloppy editing, releasing work before it was really finished. And there's that whole stigma of self-publishing your own fiction. Making a zine suddenly seemed too rookie for me. I wanted, you know, the major leagues. And I was working too many hours at an accounting firm anyway to keep up with zine stuff. I hated collating, and I never had enough time to write people back. So I stopped making zines altogether.

And then, a few years passed. I did work on my fiction. I still work on it. And, as time passed, the snobbism I had built up towards zines melted away. Suddenly I remembered how much I loved zines. Their sloppiness and heart, the smudgy uneven tones of a photocopier, all of it. I wanted to make another. So I did.

Cement, Flour, Saints is not the most creative of titles given that the zine is made up of 3 parts (cement, flour, saints). It's mostly words and a few poorly photocopied photos. You can read about a holy stream in Nova Scotia, about watching fireworks from the roof of an abandoned brewery, and you can bake a plum crumble from a recipe I've included. It's small and square and fits in the palm of your hand. You should read it.

This is how you can order the zine:

The easy way: Paypal me $2 CDN, along with your mailing address so I can send it to you.

The hard way: Send me something as a trade. A mix CD, your own zine, a postcard, a map, your first born, etc etc. If you want to clear the trade with me first, go ahead and email me, but I like surprises too. Email me and I'll send you my address.

Zine in process

noreply@blogger.com (terki) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 23:16:00 +0000

Making a zine kind of looks like this:

The most important tool on that table is the glass of red wine, followed closely by the Boy Scouts manual.

And near the end, it looks like this:

This is when you start to see the appeal of doing things on the computer.