This year’s judge will be Zsuzsi Gartner. Postmark deadline April 15, 2012.

For more information, visit our online contest page or write to event@douglascollege.ca. More details below.

Come help us celebrate!

EVENT, Poetry is Dead, and PRISM cordially invite you to a cake-eating, toe-tapping, poetry-reading, make-February-a-little-brighter issue launch.

Nick Thran

SW: Before we get to Earworm, I’d like to start outside your book. You and your wife poet Sue Sinclair recently moved to Fredericton New Brunswick after living in New York for two years. What have you brought back from the time you spent in the U.S.? What follows you?

NT: I’m still processing the time. I find living and writing in another country a liberating thing, and I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to do so. Plus, I wasn’t just new to the city—I was also new to being a teacher, a husband, a graduate student; this made it a broader and more mysterious kind of newness for me than, say, moving from Victoria to Toronto as a younger man. New York is a great place to confirm the suspicion of one’s own smallness in relation to other things, and to acquire the capacity to revel in it. Mountains and jungles are good for this too, of course, but it’s harder to get a good bagel and a cup of coffee during that type of experience. Everything we brought back from our time in New York fit snugly into a rented Nissan Altima—and most of that we brought there with us. To see strangers outside our apartment rifle excitedly through the last batch of poetry and philosophy books we culled before the trip back to Canada, that was special.

SW: What I admire about the poems in Earworm is how you build a kind of lyric immediacy with the reader—there’s a well-crafted tension in what you give away and what you keep to yourself. In David Orr‘s collection of essays Beautiful & Pointless, the poetry critic ruminates on the concept of “the personal” in poetry. And Orr’s friend and colleague Joshua Weiner responds to his line of thinking about the lyric mode as the most common vehicle for this personalism when he says, “It’s not a flavour that draws readers…it’s a sound, an intimate sound memorably figured. It is a mystery but not…a muddle. The sound of a single voice singing to each of us is a primal experience of reception, connection and transmission. The experience is part of our cognitive growth; we’re probably hardwired by it.” In a recent review of Earworm, your poems were credited as being “Genuinely, impossibly cool.” I’m intrigued by this idea. What elements combine to make a poem cool for you as a reader? Do you think Weiner’s notion might have something to do with it?

NT: Every time the word cool pops up I think of this stanza from Berman’s “Self Portrait at 28”,

If you were cool in high school
you didn’t ask too many questions.
You could tell who’d been to last night’s
big metal concert by the new t-shirts in the hallways.
You didn’t have to ask
and that’s what cool was:
the ability to deduce,
to know without asking.
And the pressure to simulate coolness
means not asking when you don’t know,
which is why kids grow ever more stupid.

“Cool” is one of those words that one can throw over a lot of more specific, helpful ones; a burlap sack kind of word. I guess maybe a more positive way for me to see the word cool would be as a kind of neon sticky-note on a page; a Whoa, this is something interesting and appealing in a way that I can’t quite articulate on first pass, but I’m going to come back to it soon with some more questions. Cool should be a precursor to a more rigorous engagement. It’s not, to my mind, a sustainable quality in and of itself.

I haven’t read David Orr’s book, or any of Joshua Weiner’s work, yet—but yeah, that description of intimacy on the level of sound, the memorable phrase seems apt to me. Nobody but William Matthews has, to my knowledge, ever written the lines “We lie down among the sandwiches./ The world is strange./ Look into our eyes and see.” But there they are, up on the tip of the tongue like PIN numbers or the phrase “Good morning.” Primal stuff. And, with a nod to Weiner’s employment of the word “flavour,” I’ve never thought about whether those are roast beef sandwiches or hummus and pita. When a word like “sandwiches” can nestle into the syntax of a line like that, when it feels like the right word, more so in this instance than “lovers” or “corpses” or “ragweed” would, the world does become a more mysterious, varied and exciting place. And that mystery is—to borrow part of a phrase from Lewis Hyde’s Common as Air — a “stay against the tyranny” of the language of tax returns, punditry, consumer reports, etc. It is one of poetry’s powers.

SW: You recently ventured up the Grand River by canoe with a handful of other great poets as part of the Fish Quill Poetry Boat Tour. I heard Linda Besner on the radio talking about her experience reading in rural communities along the way – she said the response was amazing, and that she felt “People’s connection to poetry is underestimated.” How was your experience, and how what was it like for you to read from Earworm in this context?

NT: The Fish Quill Poetry Boat Tour was something I signed on to do at the very last minute, as a fill-in for a poet who couldn’t make it. I was living in a dark basement sublet in Toronto that I was starting to have trouble leaving during the day. The poets—Linda Besner, Helen Guri, Leigh Kotsilidis, Asa Boxer, Gabe Foreman and Daniel Renton—and the musician—Abigail Lapell—were all terrific, and there was something special about hearing nearly an entire collection read to you in increments by the author each evening, after a long day on the water. There were a lot of unique experiences with audience members; I think Linda mentioned the security guard in the radio interview. He stopped his car in front of the ice cream parlour where we were reading, ran towards the few of us milling around out front and recited the poem he’d written for his wife who passed away 17 years earlier. Then he very sincerely apologized for having to work that night and miss the reading, wished us well, and ran back to his car. He had tears in his eyes. It was amazing.

Admittedly, there were a few self-conscious moments when I was less sure that there would be very much connective tissue between the poems from Earworm and the ears of some of the audiences; more than I might have had had the readings taken place in urban environments. But, mostly, I just felt a lot of peace. Every night someone had something good to say about our event, and every night someone walked out of the venue with a book of poetry. And even if we had only read to the organizers and a couple of empty lawn chairs every night—the sheer fact that eight people in their thirties would jump into canoes for ten days to go read poems in ice cream parlours and beneath covered bridges would have made me feel just fine about people’s connection to contemporary poetry. They’re all fine writers and musicians, but I’m rooting for that gang as people too.

SW: Earworm, the thing that’s stuck in your head that you can’t name, is (for this reader) an engaging theme, and the poems here keep their promise – there’s a willingness on the poet’s part to guess, and guess again. In the first poem, the speaker inhabits a painting by Edward Hopper. In other poems, Aerosmith & Springsteen make appearances. Caravaggio, Mark Strand. Cartier-Bresson. What is it about other artist’s work that draws your attention? Does this kind of reverberation tie back in with your theme?

NT: Earworm is a loan translation from the German ohrwurm. I overheard someone talking about it while I was working at the Bloor West Village location of Book City in Toronto and knew right away that it was going to be the title of a poem, and then the title of my book. It never really presented itself as a theme for the other poems. Even as I was finishing the last few poems at NYU last winter, it often felt like, thematically, I was wrenching some of them into the manuscript with a crowbar. But “earworm” did present itself as a kind of invitation. I was going to try on different voices, personas, different forms. I was going to throw the whole kitchen sink in there as far as whose work I was reading or looking at. I thought that as long as I wasn’t trying to be showy or irreverent, there might be something between them that stuck.

I’m a magpie. I’m online. I’m attention deficit. I have selective memory. I don’t think in a linear way. I work hard anyway. Attention is multivalent. It isn’t just memory-recall, or knowing how the thing got moved from point A to point B. Other people write about this more eloquently: Jan Zwicky, John Berger…I have to trust that other people, readers, can relate. I used to be hard on myself for not remembering the plots of novels, the names of characters. Now I read accepting the fact that those things will leave me, sometimes the very next day. So when I’m digging up subjects for poems, when I’m entering a relationship with another artist’s work, whatever the genre, I’m never really digging up the whole whale: just an eyeball, or a piece of the jaw. Sometimes I don’t even get down to the carcass. I mistakenly hook into a boot, or a photo by Cartier-Bresson I remember seeing. Bingo. Reverb. Off we go.

SW: One final question for you, Nick. What’s it like in Fredericton today?

NT: It’s Labour Day. Overcast. I can hear wind in trees. I want to mow the lawn, but the downstairs neighbour has the dog he shares with his ex out back, and it’ll probably nip at my heels the whole time. I’ll wait a while. Sue made homemade bread. Three loaves. It’s her mom’s recipe, one she came up with by herself. The whole house smells delicious. I want to eat bread all day.

Sheryda Warrener is the author of Hard Feelings (Snare Books, 2010). Her poetry appeared in EVENT magazine most recently in issue 40:1. She Lives in Vancouver, B.C.

EVENT 40 Year Anniversary Party

Please join us at 7:00 pm on Wednesday, October 26 for a reading and celebration in honour of EVENT Magazine’s 40th Anniversary.

Featuring readings and reflections by former editors David Zieroth, Calvin Wharton, Cathy Stonehouse, Billeh Nickerson and Rick Maddocks. Hosted by current editor Elizabeth Bachinsky.

David Zieroth‘s latest publication is a chapbook, Hay Day Canticle (Leaf Press, 2010). The Fly in Autumn (Harbour, 2009) won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in that year and was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry in 2010. He won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for How I Joined Humanity at Last (Harbour, 1998); his work has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award, and his poems have appeared in over thirty-five anthologies. David was editor of EVENT from 1983-1997.

Calvin Wharton is Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Douglas College. His work has been published in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies, and broadcast on CBC radio. He has published a poetry chapbook, Visualized Chemistry (Tsunami Editions), and co-edited the anthology East of Main (Arsenal Pulp) with Tom Wayman. He also wrote the non-fiction Rowing (Stoddart) with Silken Laumann, and a collection of short fiction, Three Songs by Hank Williams (Turnstone). His most recent book is a collection of poetry, The Song Collides, published by Anvil Press in spring 2011. Calvin was editor of EVENT from 1996-2001.

Cathy Stonehouse is the author of a poetry collection (The Words I Know, Press Gang Publishers 1994) and co-editor of the creative nonfiction anthology Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008). Her creative nonfiction, poetry and short fiction has appeared in a wide variety of Canadian literary journals and anthologies. A creative writing instructor and freelance writer/editor, she lives with her family in East Vancouver.  Cathy was editor of EVENT from 2001-2003.

Event 1/1, Spring 1971

Billeh Nickerson is a writer, editor, performer, producer and arts advocate. He is the author of The Asthmatic Glassblower, Let Me Kiss it Better: Elixirs for the Not So Straight and Narrow, and his most recent collection, McPoems. He is also the co-editor of Seminal: the Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets, and a former editor of PRISM international and EVENT, two of Canada’s most respected literary journals. He has performed at hundreds of readings and festivals across Canada and the U.S, and, in 2008, served as Queen’s University’s Writer in Residence. He teaches Creative Writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Billeh was editor of EVENT from 2003-2005.

Rick Maddocks‘ fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies throughout Canada. His collection of linked stories, Sputnik Diner, was published by Knopf and Vintage Canada. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from UBC, where he was fiction editor for Prism International. His work has appeared in such anthologies as Write Turns: New Directions in Canadian Fiction (Raincoast) and AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds (Vintage). Rick is also a songwriter. He has written and performed music with The Beige, an atmospheric roots quintet whose second album, El Ángel Exterminador, was released in 2010. His experimental “gospel funk opera”, The Meal, premiered at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in 2011 and will be restaged in Spring 2012. Rick was editor of EVENT from 2006-2010.

Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of three collections of poetry, Curio (BookThug, 2005), Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood Editions, 2006), and God of Missed Connections (Nightwood Editions, 2009). Her work has been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award (2010), the Kobzar Literary Award (2010), The George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature (2010) the Governor General’s Award for Poetry (2006), and the Bronwen Wallace Award (2004) and has appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and on film in Canada, the United States, France, Ireland, England, China, and Lebanon. Elizabeth has been editor of EVENT since 2010.

Doors at 7:00, readings begin at 7:30 p.m.
Admission is free and refreshments will be served.
Pick up a copy of the current issue of EVENT—or a subscription—and celebrate with us!

Douglas Room (Lower Level) at Douglas College, New Westminster
700 Royal Avenue

EVENT magazine is one of the top literary magazines on the West Coast of Canada. We publish fiction, poetry, non-fiction and book reviews by and about the best new and established writers in Canada today. We are known for featuring an eclectic mix of traditional and contemporary approaches to writing. Our authors frequently win major literary and magazine awards after having published in our pages. This year alone, EVENT magazine swept the National Magazine Awards taking Gold and Silver for Fiction.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council and Douglas College.

For more information, please call 604.527.5293 or email event(at)douglascollege(dot)ca.

Check out the Facebook event page.

Kaitlin’s Creative Non-Fiction story ‘Sleeping with the Dead’ was the winner of our 18th Creative Non-Fiction Contest, and was first published in EVENT 34/3.

Kaitlin’s story also appears in our Fall 40 Year Anniversary Issue. It was chosen by former EVENT editor Billeh Nickerson to appear in our special Retrospective section. You can subscribe online right now! Fresh!

-Nikki Reimer

Photo by Lani Russwurm

As I head toward Little Italy, also known as Commercial Drive, to interview Vancouver writer and EVENT contributor Wayde Compton, I think about other cultural hot spots that exist in Vancouver.  Compton starts off with telling me a bit about a hot spot I never knew about, Hogan’s Alley. It was the first and possibly the last local neighbourhood with a concentrated black population and a major inspiration for his book  After Canaan: Essays of Race, Writing, and Region (2010).

Compton explains how Hogan’s Alley was not only a space inhabited by the local black community, but pretty much everyone who wasn’t Anglo was there, including many Italian, Chinese and Japanese Canadians. It was located around Union and Prior Street from approximately Main Street to Jackson Avenue, and was home to many businesses and the African Methodist Episcopal Fountain Chapel, Vancouver’s only black church at the time.  Compton explains how the construction of the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts in 1972 was questionable and argued to be a form of structural racism that drove out much of the black community. “It happened during an era of civil rights movement,” he tells me. “Similar urban renewal plans happened in the United States about ten years earlier.”

Photo from arsenalpulp.com

We often hear about black history in the United States, but do those stories really relate to Canada and Vancouver in particular? After Canaan offers a local and personal narrative of our black history. “The narratives that existed in my twenties were civil rights and black power narratives, however it doesn’t necessarily fit in a place like Vancouver,” Compton explains. “I didn’t fit in those narratives. Let’s stop trying to borrow these answers from somewhere else and think about the conditions here. ”

Compton goes on to explain how the viaducts caused the community in Hogan’s Alley to disperse but not as a collective. “That I suspect has something to do with Vancouver’s unique black community,” Compton says. “There was racism against blacks in Vancouver, but that wasn’t the primary racism. The primary was against Asians and Natives. Blacks were like the afterthought, there wasn’t a big fear of the black community. It made it easier for blacks to integrate into society.”

Not only does Compton’s work offer a local and personal narrative of black history but a different way of thinking about race and hybridity. Compton introduces me to the word “pheneticization” which replaces the term “racial passing,” mainly referring to someone of mixed-race passing for white.  There are many instances where someone doesn’t look like where they’re supposed to be from. Compton explains further that “pheneticizing” means to shift the focus from the viewed to the viewer to get rid of the constant dichotomization of race.

Both us of being mixed-race, Compton and I swap stories, mainly funny anecdotes of our experiences dealing with public confusion of our mixed-race identities. “My wife is white so no one’s ever going to look at my daughter and guess that she has any black heritage,” Compton tells me. “All we have to describe that is ‘passing,’ and to say that a baby is ‘passing’ for something seems incredibly wrong. I need to give her some kind of tool to start thinking about these ideas when she grows up. It’s not what she’s doing it’s what other people are doing.”

Compton goes on to express the importance of diversity and a mixture of voices in the local literary community. “From the research that I did of black writing, you definitely see a payoff of multiculturalism. From the 80s and back, there’s so little black writing being published, and all of a sudden, there’s so many black writers getting published. We’re seeing people pushing for diversity and demanding it. It’s absolutely vital in the arts. Diversity should be on the agenda all the time or people will forget about it. There is a lot of interesting work being done right now from voices that we’ve never heard.”

We end our conversation with a little bit of advice for EVENT readers and aspiring writers. “Writers need to keep in mind that their lives are interesting,” says Compton. “A lot of young writers don’t get how interesting their experience is and want to write about some other one. That’s what has worked for me, learning to read my own life and my place in the world and knowing that it can be worthy of literature instead of looking elsewhere.”

Coming up for Compton is his reading at the Vancouver Public Library on Tuesday, September 20, 2011 where he’ll be reading some of his many award-winning works and talking about his writing process. Click here to learn more about the event. Admission is free, but seating is limited! Compton has also been named a Finalist for the 2011 Vancouver Book Award! For more information on Compton’s work, visit his website at www.waydecompton.com 

- By Nicole Freeston 

We joined forces this year with PRISM international to present readings from four amazing local authors. Gillian Jerome, Donato Mancini, Jeff Stautz and Jen Currin entertained listeners with thought provoking, entertaining and at times, humourous poetry and prose. Thanks again to the Georgia Straight for being one of the sponsors for this year’s tour!

Stay tuned for our 40th Anniversary Issue!

EVENT and PRISM international will join forces this year to present a smattering of amazing local writers: Gillian Jerome, Donato Mancini, Jeff Stautz and Jen Currin. Find us at Blim (115 E Pender St) at 7:30pm as part of Tour A to witness a selection of readings by these local authors.

Click HERE to find the event schedule and purchase your tickets now! They are by donation ($5 to $10 suggested).

Thank you to the Georgia Straight for being one of the sponsors for this year’s tour!

This amazing package is a combination of:

• Two one year subscriptions to EVENT Magazine
•  A voucher for two tickets to the upcoming Vancouver International Writers Festival evening event with Michael Ondaatje
• A copy of George Bowering’s My Darling Nellie Grey.

Don’t miss out on this amazing deal! Bidding closes on August 15, 2011. Click HERE to make your bid!

It is one of the only sunny days Vancouver has seen this year as I sit across from poet Jen Currin at the Bump n Grind Café on Commercial Drive. She is a familiar face in the neighbourhood. So, with Americanos and snacks in hand, our conversation begins— interrupted only by numerous motorcycles blazing down Commercial. Still, the interview can’t help but be rewarding.

We start with chitchat about her newest poetry collection, The Inquisition Yours, winner of the Audre Lord Award and finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. The Inquisition Yours was launched on March 27, 2010 in Vancouver and speaks about the devastations of our current world – terrorism, war, and political instability– and maintains the spiritual aspect of human experience, something prevalent in many of Currin’s books. “I think The Inquisition Yours is maybe a bit more overtly political, “ Currin tells me. “But at the same time it looks at [war] from a spiritual point of view. I was trying to specifically think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a spiritual problem and consider it that way.”

Currin explains how she strays away from narrative poetry and enjoys more creative control in meticulously weaving different things together. “I call myself a collagist,” she says.” I always write from a notebook,” she adds, as she reaches into her bag and finds she has, for the first time, left it at home. She laughs. “I always take notes from reading, from life, from thought, and when I sit down to write, I weave them together. I have a love/hate relationship with narrative.”

Currin describes her extensive research and intake of information for The Inquisition Yours as ambient and intuitive. “I take in independent media like Rabble, the Tyee and the Guardian,” she says. “I take in what’s happening in Afghanistan or Iraq and use that, or other things like the history of bombing.” Currin’s specific case studies are even more compelling. “I did research about where soldiers were sleeping and what kind of structures they were sleeping in. It was interesting for me to read about the variety of structures from concrete bunkers to holes dug in the ground, shacks built really quickly and in bombed out buildings.”

Currin is excited to discuss where her inspiration comes from and those poets she is in constant conversation with. She describes her love for authors like Anne Carson, Elizabeth Bishop, Dionne Brand and Karl Marx. “I think of myself as a spiritual Marxist, and I actually agree with probably ninety per cent of what he’s written,” she says. “But for me, there’s another consideration for social change and that is the heart and the individual spirit connected to the larger collective spirit.”

As an instructor of creative writing courses at Kwantlen University, Jen shares her thoughts on the status of future writers who may be caught up with technology and social media and writing less. “People are using social media more, and there’s even stuff like Twitter poetry,“ she says. “However I don’t think people are writing less because of social media. They are just writing differently. I think there will always be readers, we just don’t know what they’ll be reading or writing. Since I teach young writers, I see their desire to read and to write stories. Creative writing classes are filled.”

Not only is Currin encouraged by young aspiring writers, but by the local literary community itself. “A few words that come to mind are diversity, support, knowledge sharing, and learning. Having a place to share your work with people who understand what you’re doing is important,” she says. “It’s great to be able to have conversations with other writers. It feeds the practice.”

Coming up for Currin is an English-to-English translation of Elizabeth Bishop. Check out her website at www.jencurrin.com to find out more about this amazing EVENT contributor.

                                                                                                            – By Nicole Freeston