Departure

I said good-bye to both my son and my youngest daughter this morning. By day's end they'll be in Vancouver (Honours history student and improv whiz) and Saskatoon (to start rehearsals for A Christmas Carol at Persephone), respectively. In a minute or two I'm into the classroom, proposing to my students that they write about saying good-bye. I'll write a drop or two myself.

Later: Don't know if the topic took or not in class. They'll have the chance to work informal journal entries into longer pieces for their next essay assignment. For my part, I started to noodle away about the unsaid behind goodbyes.

Now, back in my office, I'm listening to the new Tafelmusik recording of the Beethoven 7th, the same piece I heard on CBC the afternoon of 9/11. I can't wait to go home and go to bed. The goodbyes feel like a bomb.

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.

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.

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.

Reading matters

Leona Theis dropped into Luther the other day. The next two days I spent in Winnipeg at Thin Air, where I had a couple of readings.

Leona talked and read with my students, a great addition to our class. They made each other think, I think. I know I wrote a bunch of stuff down.

In Winnipeg I enjoyed the hospitality of Thin Air. With 7 of the 14 longlisted Giller writers on hand, I was surrounded by fiction writers. All the better. I laid a little Human Comedy on them.

At this point, I could try to explain either why I tape photos of Virginia Woolf and Gabriel Dumont to my office door, or why in Winnipeg I walked to the downtown Mountain Equipment Co-op store and Louis Riel's grave.

Either way, I had to press Friday morning to prepare for talk of Bruce Rice's "Story of a Tree" in one class, and a kind of journal-essay assignment in another. The talk of the Rice poem proceeded like this: I ask for questions or observations. Silence. Silence over here too. More silence. Ok, talk about it in groups then, I say. That works. Turns out, these readers were experiencing the very process the poem itself was more or less describing (increasing abstraction in Mondrian paintings of a tree). We moved on to something else eventually, but now I'm thinking we should come back to this idea for an update: how do you read? do you need specialized knowledge when you read poetry? can you live with surrender?

Today's Class

I just finished reading new work by my creative writing students, which was fun for sure. I notice that people who think about writing write better stuff right away. But that just opens the door to so much more these writers can do.

Part of the fun for me in the professor position is whacking the horse on the rear end, so to speak, not that I know a thing about horses. My point is that now that the writers have arrived onto the field, they have to let the animal go, and I'll stick with animal.

I think some students become friends, or at least neighhbours, of their characters. Which means, maybe, watch them veer off.

And now I want to come up with a way of putting these matters to my students.

Loco log, first pass

8767
6063 standing still westbound Swift Current

8883 west near Swift Current

5989
9840 eastbound near Morse

8814
8798
9418(some of these back to front)
9108 Parkbeg eastbound 3:58 pm Sept.1