Thursday 23 October 2008

Good day

By the time you read this, I'll have written the next line, although the way things are going I can't be sure. A while ago I woke up already over-stressed about the day ahead the one or two behind. Took a bowl of Bran Flakes and a look out the window to settle me down.

This morning I start working with some writers down at Globe Theatre (where my daughter Lucy has made her professional debut playing Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream).

And I'm working on my act for the Saskatchewan Book Awards Literary Saloon coming up in a couple of weeks.

Saturday 11 October 2008

Tour gin

For Ariel Gordon, the "Newborns and Nightowls" tour in support of The Navel Gaze, her new chapbook from Palimpsest, was a way to get to know her own book better. "I read it out loud every day in the car," she says, over a lousy gin and tonic in south Regina. Here she casts a sly glance in the direction of her tour-mate, Kerry Ryan, who's been launching The Sleep Life, poems from Muses' Company.

Gordon's poems track a pregnancy, pre-conception to afterbirth. Longish down and across the page, they've continued to push, so to speak, into Gordon's present work. "I'm still going on the pregnancy/childbirth poems," she says.

After the back-and-forth with Ryan during their reading at Luther the other night, Gordon noted "We could go endlessly back and forth with sleeping and birds". That seems about right--sleeping and birds--as the two Winnipeg poets drive north through autumn to Prince Albert for the last stop on their tour, Gordon's Gaze once more sounding from within.

Thursday 9 October 2008

Brand New Books

I look forward to my shower, down the hall to the teller, over for supper with Tracy and Ariel and Kerry and maybe others, I don't know. And a couple of brand new books.

First I'll finish listening to this song.

The two of them apparently pulled in last night around 7. Almost twenty-four hours later now; I'm sure the landlady has treated them well. Ariel said something about maybe fooling around with their presentation. Fine with me.

I've slapped on an old Alison Krauss, Now That I've Found You, just to be continued.