The Sink Blog

Bad Dentist

2006-07-12T15:32:00.000-07:00

Today I dumped my dentist. I was planning on never calling him back, but when his office phoned me at work and invited me in for a cleaning today (phoned me at work and invited me in for a cleaning today? what dentist’s office does THAT?), I actually had to dump him. My reason for dumping him is this: I had the first cavity of my life three months ago, and he decided to fill it without using anesthesia. When (with shaking voice) I asked him if I could please have something to numb the area, he acted all put out and implied that I was a lightweight. This was after his loony hygienist spent an hour with her hands in my mouth, telling me that there are too few women in New Zealand, which causes the male population to “go gay,” and explaining how much she hates English people because of “what they did to Diana.”

And before you assume I’m being hyperbolic for the sake of comedy, let me assure you I’m actually leaving stuff out for the sake of brevity. Bad dentist.

Man, I vowed this blog would not turn into a record of my banal daily activities, but would instead be a scintillating report of my Artistic Experiences. Apparently I don’t have artistic experiences, I just watch TV and get messed around by bad dentists like everyone else. Only I’m pretty sure my dentist is worse. My ex-dentist, that is.

Claptrap

2006-07-10T15:39:00.000-07:00

Well, Banff was fun. It sucked all the blog spirit out of me, temporarily (I was worried this would become a gushing diary). But Banff is long over, sadly. I got a lot of work done — I’d say I got as much done in that month as I’d normally accomplish in a year. Plus, I went swimming all the time and met people I really liked. I would recommend The Banff Experience to anyone. It’s a good way to spend a month.

Now I’m back working on behalf of the magazines of Alberta, which is fun if a little sleepy during the summer months. I find I’ve been reading Western Standard cover-to-cover and thoroughly enjoying it simply because it makes me think. I’ll read a story, then immediately start forming elaborate counter-arguments in my head, doing research to support them, etc.; so as a reading experience it’s far more engaging and stimulating for me than reading the local like-minded weekly and feeling righteous and apathetic. There’s also something about the way many hardcore right-wingers write that just tickles me - the straight-faced use of words like “claptrap” and “boondoggle,” not to mention the refrain, “for shame!” By comparison, hardcore left-wing writing seems dour and gloomy. This is, of course, a generalization. Some Western Standard content is straightforward, politically-neutral journalism; some leftie writers have vibrant, colourful voices. Okay?

Anyway, in other magazine news, I subscribed to The Believer and received my first issue — pretty!

Also, family news: I have one new nephew (born in June), and his name is Liam and he’s lovely. Plus, Dan and I adopted a tiny girl kitten last week, so now we have a cat called Michael and a cat called Popo. Fans of Kobayashi Makoto will rejoice.

My Significant Opinions on Film

2006-04-24T15:01:00.000-07:00

I got a sunburn yesterday after taking a long walk in the blazing Calgary light. It has stupid comedy missing bits where my hair was and where my bag rested, and it smarts. I have to wear high-necked shirts to avoid social disgrace.

Last Friday I went to the Calgary Underground Film Fest and watched movies at Broken City. I saw two unpleasant (but interesting) shorts and the unpleasant (but interesting) feature-length drama, Buy it Now, about a girl auctioning her virginity on e-bay. The film is presented in two parts (by writer/director Antonio Campos, for those who wish to know); the first is documentary style and the second is far more director-ridden. Because of some intelligent narrative decisions and some remarkable acting, the first half is completely harrowing. I thought the squirmy experience was deflated by having to watch it all over again in a more artistic and explicit style (however, I ran into a friend who had the opposite opinion, so there you go). Surely one well executed docu-drama with such polarizing (and not a little disturbing) subject matter would suffice. Or perhaps postmodernism and Roshomon-style narratives and cleverness in general are lost on me.

After the show I watched Red-Milers get Checkstopped on 8th St.

Useful Activities

2006-04-18T14:23:00.000-07:00

Sorry for not updating my blog, avid readers. I know you’re all whimpering in corners and tweaking out your hairs one by one. Well, here’s a new entry.

What’s changed since last time? My tall houseguest has moved back to his own house. Dan has gone to England, which means I’m all alone except for the cat, and he just gives me reproachful looks all the time. Even when I feed him turkey hearts. From my own hand. My neighbour’s six year old sometimes thumps on the window until I come out and talk to him about Dragonball and Inspector Gadget 2 (there’s an Inspector Gadget 1?), but does that qualify as enrichment?

Look, I posted some links on this blog. They’re not exactly alphabetical—they’re not in any order at all (Jason Christie is not, for example, “low status,” although to be fair Dan does rank pretty high…but don’t start looking for patterns). I recommend the Calgary Blowout one, if only to read Ryan Fitzpatrick’s quite interesting filling Station editorial.

My spare time lately has been consumed by freelancing (to pay for my Banff Centre adventure, for which I don’t yet know if I’ll receive full funding), and the new best show ever, Veronica Mars. It’s so good it makes me wish I had cable so I could watch it like a regular person, rather than pilfering dvds off friends and trolling the increasingly dodgy pirate bay site. All this freelancing and downloading has prevented me from spending any attention whatsoever on the aforementioned Banff Centre adventure, which is fast approaching. Time to buy new hiking boots! And develop some sort of focus as a writer! I have been sending out manuscripts and stories at an accelerated rate lately in honour of the upcoming adventure, but it’s hard to get excited about that—still, it’s a good idea for me to set up some kind of rejection schedule for myself. Like sowing lettuce seeds every couple of weeks so as to ensure a steady harvest period (look! I made a simile! I should write a book!) I hate going to the post office with big envelopes marked “to: Fiction Editor.” The postal workers give me sly looks when I’m fumbling with my SASEs. If you know what I mean.

Does everybody know about http://bookninja.com? It’s excellent.

Martin Fulton Overkill

2006-03-20T15:45:00.000-08:00

I did everything on Saturday. I snowboarded (oh, sorry, I rode) in the mountains, I went out for dinner and was introduced to a friend's super cool new spousoid, and I went to a gig at The Castle. I haven't been to a gig for ages - no wonder I've been feeling aged and bourgeois. Dean Martin of The Summerlad & the Ex-Boyfriends and Lock Fulton of general widespread fame and notoriety have joined forces to form the Martin Fulton Overkill. I recommend seeking them out. Fun! Metal! Guitar-drum duo!

Why is 1st Street so seedy these days? I mean, it's always been decrepit, but at least it used to be fun. Why, I remember when an 18 year old girl with a belly full of Dr. Pepper drop shots (shut up) could stagger up and down that block without fear of snagging her shoes on a corpse. On the other hand, reminiscing about the mid-'90s is doing nothing to assuage my feelings of agedness and bourgeoisness. Neither does the fact that I'm currently "pricing out" life insurance policies.

Lock of Martin Fulton Overkill is staying with me and Dan at the moment. He's alarmingly tall. Dan's tall, yet Lock towers over him. He's about twice as tall as I am. Living with two giants is making me self conscious about the top of my head.

Paying for Holes

2006-03-19T07:50:00.000-08:00

Bad news at work—our funding is being cut, cut, cut. I’d feel better about it (well, not better) if the cutting was related to a failure on our part, but as usual it’s simply a case of random government budget violence, too many hands in too many pots, robbing Peter to pay Paul, and various other metaphor jumbles that add up to this: oh poo. The funding reps targeted AMPA’s reading series as the first thing we could get rid of. This just about broke my heart considering the effort I’ve spent on that reading series lately. I can understand why they want to kill it—it doesn’t offer enough benefit to enough AMPA members—but the problem is that now it never will. I liked having my own reading series to play with, even if thoughts of stinky cheese and ffwd listings did occasionally wake me up at unholy hours of the night.

In more cheerful news, I saw derek beaulieu’s launch of fractal economies on the 15th, and it was really something. derek gave performance responsibilities to four other writers, all of whom really stepped up. Jason Christie and Jordan Scott both did readings of poems they’d written for derek, Jill H. literally framed derek’s “framing the narrative” poem, and Natalie Walschots gave everyone the wiggins by displaying her “ai” body art, an inkless tattoo (read: weeping mass of pinholes) on her back. What interested me the most was the trouble she had getting tattoo artists to participate. I guess having holes punched in your skin and injected with chemical colourants is perfectly acceptable, whereas just having holes punched in your skin is totally pervy. Natalie insisted it didn’t hurt, and I kind of believe her. She’s probably the proud owner of a crusty back scab by now. I hope she takes photos and posts them on her blog—scabs are interesting. So are burn blisters, which I used to get all the time when I worked in the food-cooking industry and was forever setting my wrists alight. Provided you don’t rip them off accidently, burn blisters provide this magic, pain-free bandaid for ruined skin, and then they just disappear when the skin underneath is repaired (by “disappear” I mean “end up in your soup”). Wow, human bodies. Anyway, returning to poetic body art—I think I like it.

I’m thinking of clipping pages from derek’s book and framing them. Apologies to Talonbooks and their print provider, who probably went to considerable effort to get the pages to stay IN derek’s book.

It was a terrific event. I even went out afterwards, which is something I haven’t been doing much lately. Blame the short days and freezing rain—I’m rarely in the mood to bike home in the middle of the night, especially not when I’m tipsy (as much as I enjoy scabs, I’m not nuts about scars). I should go out more often.

What a community this is—I can never get over how much everyone actually likes everyone else.

In my last post, the reference to Michael Green naked, holding a bucket of water had to do with his hilarious absurd One Yellow Rabbit Cabaret character, The Whaler. I wasn’t just being—I dunno—questionably imaginative.

Wacky Face

2006-03-14T20:33:00.000-08:00

I went to the CBC Poetry Face Off last week, which is something I've never done before. It was good fun, although on the whole I prefer page poetry to spoken word - a side effect of being an antisocial nerdling, I guess. I saw some people who I haven't seen for ages, like Namedrop Namedrop. The performances were varied, which was nice. Michael Green won, congratulations to him - only disappointed that he didn't perform his piece naked, holding a bucket of water. I have to admit, I was firmly in the David Bateman camp (get it, camp?) because he's so entertaining and witty, and his writing is good, good stuff.

I had a conversation with the loud, crass (but with a heart of gold) mortgage broker who works down the hall from me. He told me poetry can't really be understood until it's heard aloud. I think he was bluffing, plus, I disagree, but he had a point. And he gave me a chocolate easter egg.

I'm trying to get out to events I don't normally attend. I have a theory that it will make me a better-rounded person, but it probably won't.

Readings, readings, readings

2006-03-08T20:27:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted for ages. It seems like most blogs are full of irritable excuses for not blogging. Here's mine: work has been busy. When I come home I don't feel like looking at a computer screen. When I look at a computer screen, I feel anxious about the fact that I'm not getting any writing done. When I get some writing done, I feel anxious about other things. Antisocial behaviour, for example, or: is my full time job interfering with my chosen career, even though it's career-related? Or: should I really be eating this?

I just sneezed about twelve times in a row. That's because I just vacuumed, which kicked up a bunch of cat dander, and apparently all of it went straight up my nose. Sneezing is very distracting.

We held a great big conference at work (the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association, or AMPA, as it is affectionately known, or GRAMPA, as it is more affectionately known). We also had a launch party/reading, and I was concerned about it because I wanted it to be fun. I also talked the "conference committee" into featuring readings at the conference's kick-off banquet, despite a certain amount of resistance from people who don't like readings. Or more specifically, people who don't like the idea of readings. Anyway, there were plently of readings to handle last week and I wanted all of them to go well, mostly because I care about my job (and want to make AMPA the coolest organization ever for the lit. community), and partly because I wanted to show the resistant people that readings don't necessarly suck.

The readings totally didn't suck. Sandra Vida and Christian Bok read at the launch party, and they were a great contrast for each other, and they were both extremely lovable. Sandra shared a magazine story about her experiences in the Glasgow art scene. Christian launched into "chapter I" from Eunoia and ended with Ubu Hubbub (later, Sandra told me it reminded her of watching bp nichol at the New Gallery...eee, she is cool). I was standing behind the publisher of Canadian Cowboy Country, an Edmontonian AMPA board member who was in town for the conference--and he loved it. Colleen (my lovely boss) was horrified by how fast the wine disappeared. Pages was stuffed all the way down the stairs. I love it when Pages fills up like that. AMPA was giving away discount coupons for cultural mag. subscriptions. Hopefully those will catch on. These magazines, for those interested parties, are selling one year subscriptions for 25% off: Alberta Views, Beyond, dANDelion, Expression, filling Station, FreeFall, Galleries West, Legacy and Prairie Journal. These are GOOD magazines. Go here: www.albertamagazine.com to find my email address. If I post the address here it will become spammier than it already is.

As to the banquet...Chris Ewart and Jill Hartman read. They killed. Chris read from Sunny Day; Jill read some St. Ampede poems (with f-bombs excised) I was so proud I could have eaten my hands. They got fawned over and everything. This was my first experiment with taking readings out of book/coffee shops and sticking them into a new environment. I'm going to do it as often as I can. People love readings, they just don't realize it. Who doesn't like being read stories? Yay, Calgary writers. Yay, open minded business people. Yay yay yay.

I had some poems rejected by The Malahat Review today. Humph. I saw Natalee Caple speak to the Writers Guild of Alberta a couple of weeks ago, and she said when she had work rejected, she'd sulk for a bit, have a smoke and send it right back out again. I wish I smoked. Well, not really. But it would make certain situations seem more purposeful. It's tough being angsty yet relatively vice free.

Brain Book

2006-02-01T15:57:00.000-08:00

I’m reading a book about brains. I don’t often venture into non-fiction, despite having a house full of really interesting non-fiction books (Dan’s), because I prefer make-believe. Every once in a while I get involved in non-fiction, usually insanely readable stuff like Sleep Thieves, which made me afraid of insomnia, or in this case, The Midnight Disease.

The Midnight Disease has to do with neurobiology and brain functions. It’s written by Alice Flaherty, a neurobiologist/writer who has also experienced bouts of mental illness. The importance and accuracy of the book’s content has been questioned by hardcore neurobiologists, but it’s written with style and it isn’t boring, and for my purposes, that’s enough. I’ve never read anything that specifically addressed literary creativity as a neurological function. Apparently, creativity is associated with the temporal lobe and limbic system. These are the parts of a body that are associated with manic depression, and Flaherty points out the correlation between creativity and mild mental illness. I’m suspicious of the book, but I’m enjoying it. I thought it would cause me to worry that I’m mentally ill, but actually it’s making me worry that I’m too sane to be properly creative.

In other news, I found out about Banff Centre funding – I got some! Very happy. Now I can get myself together for a May writing vacation instead of hedging and fretting and trying not to get my hopes up or make solid plans for the next five months. Thanks, Banff Centre! According to my info package, while I’m in Banff I get to tote around an “Artist ID Card.” I’m so tickled. I shall take it into the township and behave in an arrogant manner.

Poll

2006-01-24T20:23:00.000-08:00

I stopped throwing up in time to vote (see previous entry) - squeaked my ballot in just before the polls closed. I don't want to talk about my political convictions because ballots are silent for a reason, but I will say this first-past-the-post system tends to paint Alberta all one colour, when really only half of Alberta is that colour. I'm just saying. Did anyone else get the impression Peter Mansbridge was having the Biggest Blast EVER last night? He looked like he was about to hug himself the whole time. Awww.

The best part of the experience for me was that my parents were working as poll clerks...and they were at my polling station. They signed up to be returning officers, but for that they would have had to attend a special training session that conflicted with my niece's fifth birthday party, so they were clerks instead. They had to deal with the long line of people who didn't have voter cards for one reason or another, and they had to do it for 12 hours. After that, they decided to stick around and witness the count, which ticked up to 14 hours - by the time they rolled the 2 blocks to my house for a cuppa, it was 10:00 pm and my Dad could literally barely finish a sentence. Thinking about it, that's like 14 hours in the service industry where the lunch rush never ends. You're constantly explaining the same set of instructions and confirming the same details again and again. My parents have both been retired for a couple of years, and it's fair to say that's not the kind of activity they're used to - still, they handled it like soldiers.

It was so cool seeing them there. I realized I rarely see my parents in a non-domestic context - we're usually either at my place, their place or my sister's place. I think there's nothing more fun than running into people you know well in a totally usual context, like when I bump into Dan on the street. It makes them more visible somehow, in that you can suddenly see where they fit into the world, as opposed to only seeing where they fit into your particular world. I'm always surprised by how small my parents are relative to other people (we're a stubby family).

The demographic was interesting last night, clerk-wise - they were all either retired like my parents or they looked like university students. Nothing in between. The kids and the oldies are running the democratic process, it seems. As always, there was an officious gent with a waxed mustache and a store of bad jokes - there seems to be one of these every time I vote. Maybe it's the same fellow.

I love voting. Not so much because I enjoy politics, but because I love democracy in action. I really do. I love going to an elementary school gymnasium and standing in line, and I love being asked my full name a whole bunch of times, and I love being irritated by officious men and their facial hair, and I especially love placing my ballot in the cardboard box (after the officious man has removed the piece of paper he's using as a barrier, that is). Everything is cardboard, and we vote with pencils. I love that.

Time to Ill

2006-01-23T09:07:00.000-08:00

Happy election day. Fittingly, I woke around 4 am with some ungodly affliction - I think it's food poisoning, but it may also be IMPENDING DEATH. It should be sorted out by evening, I hope. I can't vote if I'm vomiting. Under normal circumstances I'd consider it, but I have to be on my best behaviour as it turns out both my parents are working as returning officers at my polling station. Awww.

I haven't had food poisoning since Dan & I went to Vietnam and I ate a bunch of fruit. It served me right. The thing I have now is not as bad as that thing was. That was the only time I've ever resembled a description in a gothic novel - waxy skin with bright fever spots on my cheeks. I amused myself between bouts of sickness by admiring my deathmask face in the mirror. I still can't decide whether I count puking into a roadside squat toilet one of the highest or lowest points of my life.

I feel very unwell. Poor piteous Julia.

The En Space

2006-01-18T10:07:00.000-08:00

I took an Adobe InDesign course not long ago, and made a new and exciting discovery: the en space. Apparently, that's what goes between the province and postal code in a typed address. Like so:

Calgary, ABEn SpaceT2T 6C5

I knew about en dashes because they're my favorite thing next to em dashes, but the en space is new to me. I don't know how to make one of these in Word, though. It's keeping me up at night.

No word from the Banff Centre. When?

Suspense

2006-01-17T13:04:00.000-08:00

I was accepted to the Banff Centre's Writing Studio a couple of weeks ago. I'm waiting for a package in the mail that will tell me whether I've received any funding or not. If not, there's pretty much no way I can go. The suspense, as you may imagine, is absolutely killing me. It's been a long time since I've checked the real mail box as often as I check the e-mailbox. When? When?

I really want to go.

Floppy Tongue

2006-01-16T17:44:00.000-08:00

I set up a blog last month with the intention of joining Calgary's big blog club - imagine my irritation when my password was shut out. I don't know what happened there, because I'm absolutely postively convinced I was using the proper password. So I emailed the blogger people, reset my password, and the whole thing happened all over again. So I've set up another blog, reasoning that this one will work just fine because I've, like, paid my dues. I hope it keeps working. I have blog envy.

A few nights ago (Jan 12) I got to participate in the Flywheel Experiment. I tried to get on board last year (the Jocelyn Grosse/James Dangerous musical interpretation of Christian Bok year - so good) but was too late, the poets in this town being a vigorous and eager bunch. I haven't been so nervous about a reading for a long time. Well, I've been nervous about audience reaction at readings very recently, but I haven't just been plain scared of reading the words out loud before. Ryan Fitzpatrick, lord of the flywheel experiment, cunningly gave me Colin Martin's work to read. Colin does a lot of restrictive writing, for example a bunch of his poems are written either with the left or right hand side of the keyboard. This is something I found out after the reading, and of course I felt like a tit for not having noticed. Using this technique, you get a lot of "lumpy pumpkin pump" and "loop" and "loll" and a bit of "moon moujik mukluk"... you get the idea. It's serious fun to read. A few things happened at various times:

- I sounded like a gibberish-spouting cat lady.
- I sounded like an anchorwoman.
- My face twisted all over the place and a little spit came out.

It's fair to say it was a challenge for me. I think that's what Ryan had in mind (he's always trying to spank down my lyricism). I'm not sure what Colin thought about it. He pointed out after the reading that one of his poems, which I suggested sounded like babytalk when read aloud, was in fact about a murder scene. I think he may have thought I was a bit of a tit too. But I thought the experience was excellent. It made me think about the physical act of pronunciation and how easily it can prompt emotional states. While I guess this wasn't a revelation, it gained a far more tangible understanding of this phenomenon than I had previously had. Now I keep thinking about Jordon Scott's blert poems. And I have that nasty feeling of being overly aware that my tongue is just an organ that sort of flops around in my mouth. Eee.

Also, I tried to convince Colin Martin that NOD should join the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association (the fine organization for which I work). Everyone with a good arts & lit magazine should join AMPA. We're having a big joint launch party for all our arts & lit publications on March 2 - just today Christian Bok agreed to perform. Despite Calgary's new status as poetry central, I've noticed that the literary community is still divided into factions. Some are deliberate, I guess, because of bad blood or other such nonsense, but others exist simply because certain people haven't been introduced yet. For example, there's an extraordinary publisher called Karen Neudorf who puts together a terrific magazine called Beyond. I wonder to myself, why has she not been introduced to everyone I know? Anyway, that's what I'm hoping will happen with this launch party, that the filling Station/dANDelion tag team will interbreed with the Beyond folks, who will adopt FreeFall (did you know they're looking for a new editorial collective?), who will bond with old school mags like Prairie Journal and have drinks with the Alberta Views lefties and the sweet-natured Legacy folks, and all will unite to suck NOD into the AMPA community...aw heck, I shouldn't bring my work home with me.

I'm going to post something else tomorrow, just to see if it works.

The Last Post

2006-01-16T17:42:00.000-08:00

I’ve come to terms with the blog. The secret seems to be writing everything up in MS Word and then copy/pasting it to the blog, thus reducing the degree to which I’m aware that I’m posting my opinions to the Internet, like some sort of creep.

Anyway, Calgary literature—this is the whole point of the blog. A couple of nights ago (December 7, to be exact) I was at the Shift & Switch launch at McNally Robinson, along with Ryan Fitzpatrick, Jay Gamble, Jill Hartman and Larissa Lai, and the host/poet tag team of Jason Christie and derek beaulieu (derek prefers no caps, and I respect that because I’m a really good person.) Excellent event, the only disappointment being the necessary but tragic absence of Angela Rawlings (who, along with her partner Conor, once allowed me to taste the best wine I’ve ever been allowed to taste, thus convincing me that the wine wine-people love is not the same wine I’ve been buying all these years, the kind that causes all the plants in the house to die once uncorked…the point being that Angela and Conor are also really good people, better than I, because there’s no way I would have shared that wine had it been mine. Plus, they made me dinner.) But Jason and derek were present, and I felt proud of them for having made such a spanking anthology, and grateful to them for including me in it.

The readings were excellent (for a really good rundown from a person who pays attention and updates her blog more often than never, see Jill Hartman’s account at http://semi-p.blogspot.com/2005/12/bait-shift-sift-tsk-swish-schist-list.html. Jill even noticed what I was wearing and was charitable enough not to make fun of it because she is a REALLY good person.) Ryan Fitzpatrick is a delightful guy, an outstanding poet and one of the most fiery advocates of local writing I know. It’s great to watch him read, especially when you can tell he’s completely tickled by his own work (which, lest you should get the wrong impression, has nothing to do with ego—it’s just this wonderful look he gets on his face, like he cannot BELIEVE he wrote this line, never mind reading it in public. He’s perpetually astonished by his own cheekiness, I think.) I dropped in on him last week when he was on duty at Music World and I was on my way to the movies with Dan (husband) and Glenn (brother-in-law).

“That guy is very intense,” commented Glenn.

“You should have seen him pre-Korea,” I sagely responded.

Jay Gamble read, dedicating a poem to the lovely (and sadly absent) Carmen. Awww. He read the story-in-one-sentence poem, always a hit—it reminds me of a poem I heard once in high school, wherein the title of the poem is about 400 words long and the poem itself is a tiny little sentence.

Jill Hartman, the self-proclaimed ‘hump’ poet, gave us some booty. I can’t be objective about Jill because she’s a dear friend and the person who originally pushed me across the divide between wanting to be a writer and becoming a writer. I imprinted on Jill as an infant writer and now I follow her around like a duckling. Jill’s reading style has changed vastly over the years. She used to read quickly and softly—almost apologetically—but these days our Jill is a model of confidence, poise, and sometimes audacity. Frankly, she’s brazen. Her writing is tricky—beautiful and tricky. She treats language the way painters treat colour—she knows which words go together, which contrast, which moods are evoked by which combinations…she also knows when to let a metaphor die, as I’m about to do here. Her poems are little buildings. The words all hook together. Her poems are knitted scarves.

The break, whereupon I fled from my parents and sister, whose eyes I could not meet after Ryan’s “My Penis Hurts When I Glue It to My Hand” poem. Having family at readings makes me all tense, even though the chance of them being offended by anything (scratch that—letting me know they’ve been offended by anything) is really pretty low. It’s a context problem I have when I see certain faces next to other faces—all the parts of my life get jumbled and my hands shake. It didn’t help that my Shift & Switch poems are the only family-related poems I’ve ever written, with names and everything, and a reference to a statement my mother once made after I’d started writing poetry but before I’d mentioned it to her. She said she thought it was nice for people to do that kind of thing, but that they should expect anybody else to enjoy it and they shouldn’t inflict it on other people. I understand her sentiments completely and she (and the rest of my family) have been nothing but supportive of me since I “came out” as a writer, but I can’t help thinking about what she said whenever she comes to a reading. Especially when she's flipping through a book which includes a poem I wrote about that specific statement. Meta, yes?

Post-break, Larissa Lai, who manages to be graceful even with a bandaged foot, read Bladerunner poems, which probably delighted my dad. I rarely hear Larissa read poetry, although once we shared a Flywheel evening, and she read a bunch of kooky poems about “the eggs in the basement,” and it was terrific. I think Larissa’s writing is extremely subversive. Her stories are often frightening, and I often think she must have spooky dreams. Yet she’s invariably cheerful.

I read from something new I’ve been working on, a poetry/prose hybrid called The Hypergraph Diary. I heard an interesting story about an epileptic, agoraphobic, paranoid, hypergraphic woman who lived in the US. She didn’t leave her house for 30 years. When she suffocated during an epileptic fit, her husband was accused of murdering her (he too was very strange, apparently), and later exonerated when investigators discovered the woman’s 10 000+ page diary, which detailed a contented life and a happy marriage. I’ve relocated the story to Calgary and made the hypergraph and her husband wealthy. He’s a petroleum engineer, and the hypergraph spends her days in their Prospect Avenue mansion. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this tale, but I’m excited so far.

A happy night, overall. Perhaps I'll like blogging.