the ottawa small press book fair : home edition #24 : Horsebroke Press

Jeff Blackman is a poet and publisher. He has authored 15 chapbooks of poetry and prose including the Coral Castle Trilogy with Jusitn Million, BLIZZARD: Ottawa City Stories with Peter Gibbon, and most recently, You Just Proved Poems Work, available from Horsebroke Press. Check out his May 2020 virtual reading here complete with green screen and lip synching (15 minute mark). Register for Meet the Presses' virtual conference to see him on a magazines and journal panel Sunday, November 29, at noon EST.

Q: Tell me about your press. How long have you been publishing, and what got you started?

Horsebroke Press began around 2010, mainly as a means to self-publish broadsides and chapbooks. In 2020 I’ve focussed on monthly zine production.

Q: How many times have you exhibited at the ottawa small press fair?

I can’t say how many times. The first time I exhibited would have been with In/Words Magazine & Press back in 2007 when the event was at Library & Archives Canada; may have been a special Ottawa Writers Fest edition. I’ve since been there on behalf of The Moose & Pussy, Apt. 9 Press a couple times sitting in for Cameron Anstee, and Horsebroke.

Q: How do you find the experience?

Once you make back the cost of the table, it’s great.

Q: Would you have made something specific for either of this year’s fairs? Are you still doing that? How does the lack of spring or fall fair this year effect how or what you might be producing? 

Those are good questions and I have no answers for them.

Q: How are you, as a small publisher, approaching the myriad shut-downs?

I launched a zine in March 2020, the week Ontario shut down, titled These Days. The first one was intentionally intimate. I reached out to a few of my neighbours plus my immediate family, who all happen to be photographers, artists, and poets. Plus Justin Million in Peterborough, my life-long collaborator.

I sent copies to additional family and close friends, and personally invited them to contribute. I continued this, expanding outward month by month, with issue one reaching about fifteen households, then twenty, then thirty, and on it’s gone to now around 50. It’s exclusively a print thing, sent out by regular mail.

I’ve missed a deadline or two, but as of November 2020 I’d received contributions from about 30 friends and family members, and published a half-dozen issues.

After a friend insisted on paying for issue #2, I started accepted donations via https://www.patreon.com/thesedays. The magazine continues to remain free for everyone I’ve ever asked to contribute, and all the money I raise goes back to the contributors. Starting with issue #4 I retroactively paid all contributors an honorarium of $10. As of now I’m now paying $15 honorariums.

Q: Have you done anything in terms of online or virtual launches since the pandemic began? Have you attended or participated in others? How are you attempting to connect to the larger literary community? 

The online workshops the Tree Reading Series run are very good. The whole team at Tree has just done an incredible job this year. As has the team behind VERSeFest, and the Riverbed Reading Series, which also launched during the pandemic.

As part of an ongoing series, I’ve interviewed some of the folks behind all three of these events. I was driven part by genuine curiosity, and part by a desire to drum up interest. It’s hard getting anything online going in the endless sea of free content.

And that was one of the driving forces behind launching a mail-only print zine in 2020. To maintain my connections with family and friends, and nurture the connections between them. With the exception of promotion and sales, I’m keeping content offline and have no plans to digitize.

Q: Has the pandemic forced you to rethink anything in terms of production? Are there supplies or printers you haven’t access to during these times that have forced a shift in what and how you produce?

For the first couple issues I was really worried about droplets and would intentionally let the zines sit for a day before mailing them. I’m not so paranoid now and trust Canada Post to keep us safe.

This whole endeavour has all brought me back to my roots, photocopying and stapling black and white art together and just getting it out there. It feels great.

Q: What are your most recent publications? How might folk be able to order copies? 

These Days #6 featured photography by my partner, Kate Maxfield, prose by a friend from my salad days, Vanessa Davies, and an interview with Avonlea Fotheringham, VERSeFest administrator, about getting that festival online. Kate’s photography of Lowertown and Centretown is some of her best, and Vanessa’s true story of life in the face of death will move even the most cynical.

I’d also plug issue #5, also still available. I don’t go out looking for themes, but they happen sometimes. I wound up with an entire issue about motherhood, with heartwarming and -breaking poems by Ksenija Spasic, LN Woodward, Gail Blackman (my mom!), and Peter Gibbon. And just an awesome poem by my son as well.

Both of these issues are available via my Etsy store (https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/HorsebrokePress), as are a few other back issues and old chapbooks by Justin and I.

Q: What are you working on now? 

Issue #7 will be out in December. I’m hoping for a big holiday issue, but you can’t predict these things.

I’ll be accepting contributions up to Nov 27. You can reach me at thesedayszine2020@gmail.com. That won’t change in 2021.

Talking Poetics #31 : Stephen Collis

thresholds of the poem

Poems have so many points of genesis. Mine often arrive through study—through reading, through being in pursuit of something—some idea, some history, notes accumulating and suddenly something stands out—a found phrase, a concept, a problem, a voice—and the poem starts up. Sometimes they feel even more given—a donated line appearing out of nowhere, when you weren’t even looking for a poem. “Give me music” began like this—a voice suddenly stepping up to the inner mic and calling out, “Give me music because I never could understand it.” Now I have a job: follow where the given line might lead—sometimes a sprint down the page in hot pursuit, sometimes slower, involving long pauses while listening for what might come next—walking, thinking—brooding even.

I love not knowing where the poem came from, exactly, and where it might go. The poem’s strangeness—it’s being a stranger I must entertain, or prove myself a poor host. The value of the half-understood, the just-glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. The capacity to be surprised. What I’ve always valued in poetry.

And the permeability of selves. That voice with its demand—“Give me”—is not me—is a version of me—is a supposed person (as Emily Dickinson called her poetic “I”)—a “person of the poem” (Robert Duncan). Voice in poetry is a practice of the outside—a listening to what crosses the thresholds of the self. “Give me”—what? What do you need? I will try to find it, best I can. I will try to listen—good listening being the art of making poetry. And that listening, if it’s working, I find it cycles up and down in register—from “upper limit music,” as Louis Zukofsky had it, to “lower limit speech”—the poet with their finger on the fader, riding it up and down at the mixing board. So there’s speechy things—voices—what I have to hear as something said—and then there’s the turn away from what feels like a voice, into the densities of language, the unspoken spoken, the sound of language sounding itself, testing its depths—what are the “mechanisms / of consanguinity”? Why the ambiguities of “same as struck only dinosaurs”? Speech and what I’m choosing to call music—the making of meaning and the making and marking of silences and presenting absences—the void rendered on the page—the blank from which language rises—gazing back at the nothing from which it comes and to which it will very shortly return—is the struggle I turn to poetry to engage in.

Somewhere in the writing of this poem I began to realize what I was writing was a brief prelude to my forthcoming book A History of the Theories of Rain. I find how a book begins—where to mark what is outside the book—not the book—and what will be the beginning of some hundred pages of poetry—is always a tricky thing. So I like little preludes that are somehow before the book, outside its main structure and table of contents. Heralds. Beacons we might wander towards. And yet the book’s main themes are here—especially the sense of being already in the midst of the disaster of our times—which is in part the rupture of temporality itself. In terms of the climate emergency—the attempt to name the cusp we are on, the threshold we are sliding across—forecasting what is to come involves hindcasting of what has gone before. And science loves the fantasy of an imagined future science millions of years hence looking back on us now at the mark we leave in the geologic record. See! I told you you fucked it up! So—in the poem—dinosaurs, and those dinosaurs who “survived” the “last collapse”—the ones with wings, the ones which became birds—especially seabirds, which I read somewhere, all birds today have evolved from (true/not true—not necessarily poetry’s business). What music comes out of our crumbling? What speech matters now? I kept Teju Cole’s words in mind—the book’s epigraph—“The disaster is here, it is just not evenly distributed.”

Coming to the last lines of this poem—“the possibility of song remains / without words to smother it”—my editor at Talonbooks, poet Catriona Strang, commented: “and yet words are what’s to come.” Why start a book this way? Good question. It’s a cliché, I know—that poetry is saying the unsayable—but yeah, I kind of go in for that. It’s a marking of the threshold again too: the poem is perfect … until it is written—that music we can hear—that voice just stepping to the mic inside—all the possibilities of sound and texture—perfect while they remain nothing more than potential music—and music, I fucking love music, but I have no real capacity or facility to make music—so these words will have to do, will have to stand in the place of the music I can’t render. Here’s the song I can’t sing—every poem, every book—the song I can’t sing.

Oh yeah, and that other threshold—the one the scientists can graph for us again and again, which we keep humming our way across—all our sweet potentialities awaiting the potential smothering to come. Sorry. It’s kind of dark. But that’s—kind of—where things seem to be at.

Give me music because

I never could understand its

direct connection to

that feeling stream

squall and water clock

washing ideas right out of me

taking up the mechanisms

of consanguinity rushing

toward last light over Pacific

and some seabird there

gliding and catching moonlight

same as struck only dinosaurs

to have survived last

collapse of intricate order

winging now into night

as the cellos soar and

the possibility of song remains

without words to smother it

 

 

Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (Talonbooks 2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (Talonbooks 2010), Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks 2016) and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (Talonbooks 2018). In 2019 he was awarded the Latner Writers’ Trust of Canada Poetry Prize in recognition of his body of work. In 2021 Talonbooks will publish A History of the Theories of Rain. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

the ottawa small press book fair : home edition #23 : Doris Fiszer

Doris Fiszer has won awards for her poetry including the 2017 John Newlove Award and the 2016 Tree Reading Series Chapbook Award for The Binders. The Binders was also shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in Canada and the United States. Locked in Different Alphabets, is her first full-length poetry collection. Doris is happily retired, lives in Ottawa with her husband Bruce and enjoys spending time with her grandchildren.

Q: Tell me about your writing. How long have you been publishing, and what got you started?

Writing poetry has been my focus for as long as I can remember. Since retiring, I have devoted more time to this passion.  I have also occasionally dabbled in writing children’s short stories and may attempt to do so again. One of my first poetry acceptances was with Bywords which at that time was still producing print journals. Over the last twenty years, I have also had work published in other online and printed journals and anthologies in Canada and the United States. Past membership in several poetry groups under the expert guidance of Stephanie Bolster and the late Barbara Myers has expanded my knowledge of the publishing world.  The publication of my first chapbook, The Binders (Tree Press’s 2016 Chapbook Award) and the launch of The Binders at the Tree Reading Series motivated me to keep writing and sending my work out for publication. Winning the 2017 John Newlove Award was another huge boost for my publishing history. The award also offered me the opportunity to publish a chapbook, (Sasanka, Wild Flower, Bywords) and a launch at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. Thanks Amanda Earl! The publication of these two chapbooks encouraged me to complete a full-length poetry manuscript and submit it to different publications. I was fortunate to have Locked in Different Alphabets, published by Silver Bow Publishing in Vancouver in June.

Q: How many times have you exhibited at the ottawa small press fair? How do you find the experience?

I have exhibited at the Ottawa small press fair on three occasions and try to regularly attend the spring and fall fairs. These fairs offer writers the perfect venue to display their work, check out new titles and network with fellow poets. An occasional book sale is a bonus too. Thanks, rob for giving writers this opportunity to exhibit their work!  I will miss the excitement of attending the fair this fall.

Q: Would you have made something specific for this year’s fairs? Are you still doing that? How does the lack of spring or fall fair this year effect how or what you might be producing?

I would have exhibited my new poetry book, Locked in Different Alphabets, as well as my two chapbooks. Launching during a pandemic is not an easy endeavour and has motivated me to find alternative ways of making my writing accessible to readers.

Q: How are you, as a literary writer, approaching the myriad shut-downs? Is everything on hold, or are you pushing against the silences, whether in similar or alternate ways than you might have prior to the pandemic? How are you getting your publications out into the world?

Ruby Tuesdays the poetry group I belong to has been meeting weekly on Zoom since the shut-down in March. Initially, meeting virtually was quite an adjustment for everyone. This group of talented and supportive writers, however, has adapted well to this new format. Weekly writing exercises and the group’s constructive feedback on each other’s poems have helped me adhere to a fairly regular writing practice. The shut-down has proved to be a challenging, yet an unexpectedly productive writing and publishing period for me. The shut-down in March gave me ample uninterrupted time to edit and submit my manuscript which was accepted by Silver Bow Publishing in Vancouver at the end of April. The editing process moved extremely quickly and my book was published in June. I have used social media to promote my book and have mailed out copies to those interested in purchasing a copy. As well, I have approached independent book stores in Ottawa who have agreed to carry my book.

Q: Have you done anything in terms of online or virtual launches since the pandemic began? Have you attended or participated in others?  How are you attempting to connect to the larger literary community?

Virtual launches offer the possibility of participating in a wide variety of literary events and supporting poet friends and colleagues who have released new books, or have been nominated for awards.  I enjoyed Claudia Radmore’s, Frances Boyle’s and Pearl Pirie’s book launches. The Ottawa Book Awards and the Ottawa International Writers Festival were also highlights. The Tree Reading Series and other online readings and events keep me connected to the poetry community. I am also looking forward to VerseFest in November.  Silver Bow’s publisher, Candice James is in the process of organizing a virtual launch for Susan Atkinson, The Marta Poems and me on December 6th. Our manuscripts were accepted for publication within weeks of each other. We are delighted to be able to share our debut full-length collections with the literary community.

Q: What is your most recent book or chapbook? How might folk be able to order copies?

Locked in Different Alphabets is my first full-length poetry collection. It is available from Silver Bow Publishing:  www.silverbowpublishing.com and Amazon. Copies can also be purchased directly from me at dorisfiszer@rogers.com.

Q: What are you working on now?

Publishing my book has given me the freedom to explore a more diverse range of subjects and experiment with different forms of poetry. I am curious to see where these new poems will take me!

the ottawa small press book fair : home edition #22 : Kees Kapteyn

Kees Kapteyn: I was raised in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and now live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada where I work as an educational assistant.  I have a published chapbook entitled Temperance Ave. through Grey Borders Books as well as having been published in such magazines as Blank Spaces, Wordbusker, Writing Raw, In My Bed, blue skies, ditch, Novella, Corvid Revue and Revolution 21 as well as various editions of Canadian Author’s Association Niagara’s poetry and short story anthologies. Self-publishing adventures include the fiction chapbooks Holocene and A Hierarchy of Needs.  Most recently, my short story “Geosmin” was included in the Alanna Rusnak Publishing fiction anthology Just Words 4.

Q: Tell me about your writing. How long have you been publishing, and what got you started?
 
A: I write fiction of varying lengths. Until recently it’s been short stories and flash fiction but in the last year I’ve been committed to a full length novel.  I’ve been publishing since the early nineties, running along with the zine phenomenon that had tied itself to the indie scene back then. I would hijack the photocopier at work late at night and churn out a hundred or two copies of whatever cut and paste thing I’d contrived at that point. These were fiction chapbooks, poetry chapbooks and an arts and culture mag that I put out somewhat regularly.  It was pretty fun joining this community of other creative people across Canada.  I got to connect with people that I never would have even known about otherwise, being pre-internet and all.  I was invited to conferences, zine shows, benefit concerts and other cool things.  It was a great start.  In 2016, I set up Smidskade 9 Press as a vehicle to participate in shows like the ottawa small press fair, and to act as an umbrella under which to keep my published works.

Q: How many times have you exhibited at the ottawa small press fair? How do you find the experience?
 
A: I’ve been part of the ottawa small press fair twice now and it was a great experience both times.  They were opportunities to network with different presses and individuals in the community and it was also a way to educate myself in what other people were doing with their presses.  It was also a way to get a feel for what the industry (can we call it that?) was up to.  People were so open to talk shop and have been just as curious as I was about the whole thing.  You, rob, you embody that attitude and I’m so glad you present these opportunities because they’re crucial for this community.
 
Q: Would you have made something specific for this year’s fairs? Are you still doing that? How does the lack of spring or fall fair this year effect how or what you might be producing?
 
A: I have a couple stories that I was going to slap together as chapbooks for the next show.  I want to do it in a more professional manner rather than just street-level cut, paste, xerox and staple.  That will take money, but I think it’s what I have to do to present a sellable product.  Gone are the days of the 5th-generation-image punk zines.  The lack of public displays like the press fair this year only makes me switch to other modes of creating.  It hasn’t really slowed me down.
 
Q: How are you, as literary writer, approaching the myriad shut-downs? Is everything on hold, or are you pushing against the silences, whether in similar or alternate ways than you might have prior to the pandemic? How are you getting your publications out into the world?
 
A: Working in education, the shutdown gave me the precious opportunity to dive into forming my novel.  Every day I did a little bit of something and at this point I can say that I have about ¾ of the rough draft done.  As far as hard copy output, I’m just promoting my fiction chapbook.  Since it looks like we are about to slip into another mass shutdown, I’m not keen on putting anything more in stores, since they all look like they will sink into temporary obscurity, being deemed as non-essential services. Quarantine without books? Seriously?!  They sound pretty essential to me!!
 
Q: Have you done anything in terms of online or virtual launches since the pandemic began? Have you attended or participated in others? How are you attempting to connect to the larger literary community?
 
A: I like to keep up with new releases and support my friends and colleagues.  I’m glad we have the online platforms to do readings because I was really missing them.  It’s so great to see people like Pearl Pirie, Phil Hall and Heather Haley putting works out and going public despite the restrictions.
 
Q: What is your most recent book or chapbook? How might folk be able to order copies?
 
A:  My most recent professionally published work is a book of flash fiction called Temperance Ave., and it’s available from Grey Borders Books. http://greybordersbooks.jigsy.com/kees-kapteyn
 
Q: What are you working on now?
 
A: Right now I am working on a novel I’m calling LefTturn.  It’s about a fella whose wife has been unfaithful and the ensuing separation puts him into a kind of existential tailspin.  The universe is trying to give him clues as to what he should do to get his life back on track, yet he either ignores them or simply does not see them.  As the book progresses, the signs become more and more apparent and outrageous, to the point where strange, supernatural things start to happen.  I’m having a lot of fun with it, and as I’ve said I’m about ¾ through the rough draft, so hopefully it will be ready for the streets in a year or so.  Maybe by then we’ll be done with this pandemic?  I sure hope so!

Talking Poetics #30 : Valerie Coulton

four words and a quote

When I started writing with intention, I would go to a café in Berkeley on a Saturday morning for two hours. I would take my notebook and some books that were in play for me, by writers like Kathleen Fraser. I was still living with my then husband but falling deeply in love with my poetry teacher. I would drink a little coffee, swim around in the books, and then, filled up with language, do what I called “dipping the bucket”, which was writing whatever showed up for me for about twenty minutes. Even though I called it “dipping the bucket”, my mental image was more like casting and hauling in a big net of silvery fish. Then I would sort through the fish and make some poems. These I would “type up”, often at work on Monday, and take into the poetry workshop.

Now I have lived in Barcelona for many years with my poetry teacher, who is also my favorite poet, Edward Smallfield. He invented a writing prompt that has served me unfailingly for the last 24 years. It consists of a personalized postcard with four words and a quote. He used to pass these out in workshops, and then everyone would write for 15 minutes, with the option to read our pieces aloud if we were so inclined. The writing that came out of this exercise was often astonishing, and sometimes led to book-length projects.

We continue with our postcards every week, in our private two-person Sunday workshop and in the four-person workshop we have with our friends and parentheses co-editors. We also use it, among other prompts, in the generative monthly workshop we teach, and it tends to be everyone’s favorite.

So, a poem often starts for me with a postcard. It might seem to be the image that sparks something, or the words/quote, but my sense is that it’s really the tension between the elements that makes something happen. Sometimes even the postcard fine print is important. Sometimes I use all the words, sometimes none of them. Whatever happens, though, feels like it couldn’t have happened if I’d simply sat down to write.

Here’s an example from our Sunday workshop on August 2^nd.  The postcard was of a woodcut by José Guadalupe Posada titled “Gran Fandango y Francachela de todas las Calaveras” The words were: sweet, battle, smoke and clatter. The quote was “we’re all dead men conversing with dead men”. Here’s the first poem that came from this:

el día de los muertos

the sea is not our home

someone sang

a floor of monsters

in the mind

something speckled, adrift

spine without body

swimming to nowhere

in our world

there is one bat

maybe two

small leather hunters

in the air between

us & everyone else

you have written of sweet wine

& the dead

those sugar skulls for sale

terra nova

As I’d been inspired mainly by the image up to this point, I decided to make another pass, trying to use all the words this time:

sweet

in the battle

to remain ourselves

smoke

sink clatter

skateboards

dogs

our neighbourhood bat

& the voices

of our bones

So, what happens to these “postcard poems”? Sometimes they’re stand-alone pieces, sometimes the beginning of a conscious series, and sometimes the beginning of an unconscious series whose pattern and coherence emerge over time. Lately I’m aware of new strands coming into my poems, different voices, memories, dreams and fears. I notice once again that whatever the prompt, the work is always my work, a product of whatever is under the surface waiting to be brought to shore.

Valerie Coulton’s books include small bed & field guide (above/ground press), open book (Apogee Press), and The Cellar Dreamer (Apogee Press). With husband Edward Smallfield, she’s the co-author of lirio and anonymous, both from Dancing Girl Press. She lives in Barcelona and co-edits parentheses, an annual journal of international writing.