This was the 10th anniversary of Art from the Heart. It was one of things I was looking forward to, after weeks of focusing intently on houses, both mine and other people's.

(Which is a rather cryptic way of saying that we bought one house and sold another in the last month...)

The last two show + sales featured lots of artists and lots of people looking at the art, and this year's Art from the Heart show was no different.

One hundred and forty-seven artists had three pieces each on display and hundreds more came out to see, which meant that the MERC community center was packed.

My usual modus operandi is to do a quick tour and find out where my art has been hung, so I can sit somewhere and watch people look at the work.



I found my work quickly and noted with some dismay that one of my pieces was hung sideways. But, since we'd dropped off our pieces without hangers attached (we went straight from the framer's to the art drop-off location), I couldn't in good conscience complain about that.

So I didn't complain.

I also try to make two-three circuits of the room, one to make first impressions of the other work on offer, to see what draws me and what doesn't, and then another and another so I can properly shed those first impressions.

At some point during these go-rounds, I read through the programme, which includes pictures and bios of the artists.

There were several returning artists this year, whose work I hailed while dodging the throngs of people. There were also several many new artists whose work said any number of things...



Finally, I usually like watching the people buying art, how quickly they walk, how quickly they decide...except this year, it was different.

Instead of a headlong rush on the art in the first half hour of the sale, there was apparently a steady stream of sales in the last few hours.

I was tickled, while walking from the community center playground with M and Aa towards the end of the sale, to see a girl unlock her bike with one of my pieces under her arm.

One thing the organizers did this year was to offer artists a ten minute consultations with visual art professionals - in this case, arts writer/educator Amy Karlinsky and artist Racheal Tycoles.




I met with Tycoles, whose work "depicts the post-industrial landscape as a reflection of the romanticism of the past, the dystopia of the present and the search for the sublime." She also works in photography, which I thought was almost too too apt.

So I turned my upside-down piece right-side-up so she could see it, and listened.

And then I accepted the money for my piece & trucked my other two pieces home in the late November fall sun.

I didn't wear a frock either Friday or Saturday. And I was a little overwhelmed, first by the crush of people at the opening reception Friday, and second by the rush of buying/selling houses.

(Don't even ASK how the manuscript-editing is going. But give me a few weeks and I should be chugging along...)

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A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of swallowing the last gulp of my first cup of tea - and my nerves - before walking the block and a half to the CBC building.

I was scheduled for an interview with Shelagh Rogers of CBC's The Next Chapter, a weekly show about things bookish.

"Monday, November 9th, 2009

Lorna Crozier grew up poor in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and later became one of Canada's best-known poets. Lorna writes about her upbringing and particularly her tough-and-tender mom in a memoir called Small Beneath the Sky. Jane Christmas recalls her extraordinary trip to Italy with her mother, a journey that was supposed to lead to a renaissance in their difficult relationship. Jane's travel memoir is called Incontinent on the Continent. Andreas Schroeder describes his strict Mennonite father, and Ariel Gordon starts a project to photograph the hands of Canadian authors."

The producers had gotten wind of the Hands On Project, something I conceived of during HOT AIR (i.e. the official blog of THIN AIR, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival).

Basically, because of my intense dislike of taking pictures of people, I hit upon the idea of taking pictures of writers' hands. No coaxing, no summoning of intimacy, just a writer's hands, plonked down on a table.

Plus, writing being frightfully reliant on hands, I thought it apt.

So, even though I wasn't half as eloquent as I'd hoped, it was fun to chat with Shelagh about the hands project. Even if she didn't mention that I'm a writer. And that I have a book out in the spring.

Fair's fair. I didn't mention that we'd met at the Manitoba Book Awards in the spring, where M mistakenly referred to her as "he," which led to a discussion of underwear (hers) and bathing suits that fit like bras (mine).

Or that my boss, Aqua Books owner Kelly Hughes, had been up to his usual on-stage tomfoolery at her expense.

The piece aired this week, and the podcast is available on the website, so...click click.

(If you want to hear my bit specifically, its the last segment & starts at 43:48.)

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A review of Buffalo Runs Press' Rutting Season anthology, from the newly e-updated Montreal Review of Books:

"Rutting Season is essentially three chapbooks filled out with a conversation by the poets. The shop talk must have seemed a fine idea, but it seems too mutually congratulatory.

This is not one of those anthologies that justifies itself with a new approach to writing, a common programme. The poets are talented, especially Ariel Gordon, whose work is an image-driven sequence about the profound intimacy between a mother and a nursing child.

Michael Lithgow's work is more leisurely and meditative. He has the lyric poet's eye for revealing details and a good sense of when to modulate away from grand statements, but at the same time is interested in narrative and character. His poems are reflective and don't offer easy gratification. No fast food there."

(More of the review after the turn...)

"Linda Besner writes about recognizable human experiences; a trip to the eye doctor or the butcher, but she defamiliarizes the language by writing words backward, or occasionally rhyming consecutive words ('om comb').

She doesn't go as far as Erin Mouré or Steven McCaffery in undermining discourse, but she creates momentary nodes of unexpected meaning when the mind pauses over phrases like 'sag oven' or 'such a long emit.'

When we are told that a character wrote 'YAG' on his forehead with eyeliner, we perceive the strangeness and arbitrary quality of the term 'gay.' The next step might be a more radical (as in 'root') dismantling of language. On the other hand, there are advantages in stopping where she does: language retains some of its normal functions even as it is being mildly subverted.

Gordon, Besner, and Lithgow are poets to watch."

In the category of should-go-without-saying, but...fun!

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Art From the Heart
10th Birthday Party
Art Show and Sale

Opening Night: Friday November 20th, 7 - 9 pm
430 Langside St.

Party attire please. Entrance is free, donations welcome

Saturday November 21st, 10 am - 4 pm

* * *

Join the festivities on Friday night with a giant birthday cake pumping out some sweet tunes at centre stage with DJ Mama Cutsworth, and some sweet treats and great Birthday 'give-aways', this art Sale will top the charts!

Celebrate 10 years of beauty, creativity and lots of cash going into the hands of inner-city and low-income artists. Over $30,000.00 has gone directly into the hands of our local artists over the past ten years, lets make this year another record breaker!

If you're shy of crowds come Saturday and enjoy the artwork in a more humble atmosphere.

For more information see our website at www.artfromtheheart.ca

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This'll be my third year of placing art in Art from the Heart and M's first. Though it seems like a year-and-a-half since we dropped off our artworks, there's still a week or two before the sale...

Today I have two thoughts/feelings regarding said event:

1) gladness at another opportunity to show my images &
2) dismay at the phrase 'party attire.'

There's nothing like two weeks of moving gak to de-frock a girl...

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We moved all this junk on the weekend, mostly because we suddenly bought a new house a week and a half ago and so suddenly had to have our old house clean and tidy.

Look Ma! A moving van full of what the home decorating industry calls "clutter." But which consists, I think, of all the things that make up a life: heaps of books, dog-eared and spine-split.

My high school English essays.

Picture frames that looked promising, once...

Except maybe for the George Foreman grill thing-y in the foreground, from my mum's buy-gifts-from-the-TV phase. Foolishly designed & hard to clean, it made it through three brunches and three post-brunch-clean-ups before it was tucked away.

[Why are you moving it at all, you ask? Because it is destined for a humdinger of a garage sale in the the spring, that's why...]

Flatteringly, the rental truck was wheezing louder than we were as we made our way the six blocks from the Spence Neighbourhood to Wolseley.

I've carefully NOT packed the notes on my sadly neglected manuscript, thankfully due at the end of December.

They (they being my unfailingly-supportive-writer-friends) say that this neglect will mean good things when I finally can stop living lightly in the old house (i.e. when it sells) and move into the new & newly-cluttered house. And can use my writing days, to, well, write.

I have also kept track of which box the books of poetry for December's poetry column in the WFP have gone into.

I also know where the lawyer/banker/insurance agent/real estate agent papers are. That's all.

More later! (And thanks to M. for letting me steal another image...it hasn't been the greatest six months for image-making, I hafta admit.)

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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by: Ariel Gordon

Though Regina writer Andrew Stubbs has published three books in his other life as a professor of rhetoric and composition, White Light Primitive (Hagios Press, 96 pages, $18) is his first collection of poetry.

Taken as a whole, Stubbs' work achieves what most writers hope for in mid-career: an ambiguous wisdom that escapes most Young Turks.

The poems on offer here eschew title case and in most cases punctuation, and his line breaks intend uncertainty. But Stubbs is still somehow able to parse shifts in feeling and thought precisely.

Particularly good is the long poem war, where Stubbs re-inscribes his father's experience as a soldier in the Second World War:

"war is in our bodies. we see / with war, all dead things becoming gentle, / restful. the living are the / smell. rubble. hunger. / without death there / wouldn't be anything to talk / about, memories to make us powerful, empty."

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The first half of Toronto writer Soraya Peerbaye's first book, Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (Goose Lane, 108 pages, $19), is comprised of a poem-by-poem contemplation of the relationship between objects and people, what we choose to share with each other, "what our hands have held."

Peerbaye, whose ancestral home is Mauritius, lapses delightfully into (fully glossed) French and Creole as she writes warmly of pistachios and mangos but also stethoscopes and harmonicas.

Once the title sequence is reached, however, the book changes pace.

Drawn from a trip Peerbaye made to the Antarctic, the poems travel blindingly fast, moving from the informed zeal of eco-poetry on whaling and long-line fishing, to the wistful intimacy of family poems, to the elegiac reach of writing on a chapter of Tierra del Fuego's colonial history.

But despite the range of work here and the number of registers Peerbaye is working in, she is always in control of her material. Highly recommended.

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(Two more review-lets after the turn...)




The Exile Book of Poetry in Translation: 20 Canadian Poets Take on the World (Exile Editions, 299 pages, $25) is Toronto poet and novelist Priscila Uppal's response to a call to action from W.H. Auden.

Auden famously asserted that a writer's only political duty is "to translate the fiction and poetry of other countries so as to make them available to readers in his own."

Uppal Canadian responses are varied, from Christian Bok's homophonic translations of Arthur Rimbaud's Voyelles and George Elliot Clarke's translations of other literary translations of Alexander Pushkin to Paul Vermeersch's translations of literal translations.

The introductions that each poet provides to their works-in-translation are easily as fascinating as the poems themselves. Dionne Brand, for instance, admits to taking Spanish lessons over a period of years so she could translate Pablo Neruda more faithfully.

* * *

Vancouver Island writer Maleea Acker's first book, The Reflecting Pool (Pedlar Press, 94 pages, $20), reflects a lineage that includes an MFA from the University of Victoria as well as five summers in remote Alberta firetowers.

In poems tha t are canny mash-ups of city/travel/nature poetry, Acker touches down in urban Mexico, semi-urban Spain and rural Saskatchewan.

The poems, many of which are built of two-line stanzas, reach for grace, for release, for ways to encapsulate and order the world:

"Ours was the happening in between, / a diffusion of streets into history, an environment // defined by you, unrolling, alleys, not drawn but born."

In the book's third section, however, Acker goes home, writing about her father, a familiar landscape. The well-crafted, well-considered elegance of the earlier poems slips a bit as the poet is forced to contemplate losing her home base:

"Someday my father will die: the place // will be the one I return to the rest of my life, / to recall the sorrow, to swim past dark in its dry husk."

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Her first book of poetry will be published in the spring by Palimpsest Press of Kingsville, Ont.

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Given that THIN AIR is over - and I didn't have the handy excuse of the bloggy blog with its monstrous need for content - John Barton wanted to know what I was going to do with his hands before he would plunk his tastefully adorned fingers down on the signing table at McNally's.

I'm not sure if it helped or hurt that I'd just finished reading in support of his trip to Winnipeg. (Heh.)

All of that notwithstanding, I think Barton OWNS that pinkie ring.

* * *

John Barton has published nine books of poetry and five chapbooks, including Designs from the Interior, Sweet Ellipsis, Hypothesis, and Hymn, which was released by Brick Books in August. A third and bilingual edition of West of Darkness: Emily Carr, a self-portrait, his third book, was published by Buschek Books in 2006. Co-editor of Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay-Male Poets, he has won three Archibald Lampman Awards, an Ottawa Book Award, a 2003 CBC Literary Award, and a 2006 National Magazine Award. He lives in Victoria where he is the editor of The Malahat Review.

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I think I'm going to keep on doing what I'm calling the Hands On Project.

Partly because I'd much rather have a picture of a writer's hands than their autograph in a book but mostly I'm curious about what different writers' hands look like and the intersection of function and aesthetic.

Also, taking a picture of hands at rest is similar to taking pictures of mushrooms. Everyone knows what a mushroom is, but it's only when you examine them up close that you get to see the exquisite details...

Finally, I'm curious about the different intimacy of shooting someone's hands, of observing what the writers say about their hands as I'm shooting them.

Except John Barton. And Margaret Sweatman. Both kept their silence.

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