A roundup of poetic doings & otherwise

Carol A. Stephen of the Canadian Authors Association's National Capital Region Branch, and member of the Bywords selection committee prepares an exhaustive list of local readings, signings, contests, calls for submissionsand workshops every week. There are more calls etc than I can ever manage to put on the Bywords.ca news, so you should visit.

"It's the image though, of a figure leaping off a bridge, someone endowed with more than a little artistic ability, that is difficult to shake. It calls to mind John Berryman and Hart Crane, not to mention all the other brilliant suicides that followed other methods. There is a gap there, there always is. Unanswered questions and secret lives." Jamie Bradley's latest blog entry, Minding the Gap, talks about the suicide of film director Tony Scott.

Long & short lists

rob mclennan has been long listed for the CBC Poetry Prize.

Sandra Ridley, Christian McPherson, Mike Blouin, Matthew Firth have been long listed for the ReLit Awards

Bardia Sinae  is shortlisted for the innaugural annual Walrus Poetry Prize & needs your vote to win. Do it. It's an excellent poem by a poet on the rise.

Best wishes & good fortune to all candidates on all the lists. There's some great poetry in there.

Scoops

Info has begun to trickle in about the upcoming Ottawa International Writers Festival thanks to the authors themselves. Marcus McCann, Matthew Tierny, Spencer Gordon are some of my favourite writers who will be attending this fall's festival. Bywords will have our John Newlove Poetry Award at the festival once more. & I am not giving any scoops on who won, but all parties have been informed.

My (Incomplete) Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2012 List

[thank you to the Quill & Quire Blog & 49th Shelf for their helpful lists]

Lorna Crozier - The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everday Things (non-fiction/memoir)

Sandra Djwa - No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page (Biography)

Rae Spoon - First Spring Grass Fire (Short Fiction)

Jeanette Lynes - Archive of the Undressed (Poetry)

Jonathon Ball - the Politics of Knives (Poetry)

j. fisher - iii. (Poetry)

Jian Ghomeshi - 1982 (memoir)

Frank Davey - aka bpNichol (Biography)

Spencer Gordon - Cosmo (Short Fiction)

Donato Mancini: You Must Work Harder To Write Good Poetry (essays)

Katherine Monk- Joni: the Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell

Alan Light - The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah” (non-fiction)

Sylvie Simmons - I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

Emma Donoghue - Astray (short fiction)

forthcoming chapbooks published by above/ground press, Apt. 9 Press; the fall part of my annual Book Thug subscription

Disappointments

a manuscript of mine that looked like it was ever so close to being accepted based on publisher enthusiasm finally got rejected after two years. c'est la vie, c'est la guerre, mes amis. ever spineless. onward.

Thrills

nothing new to report, just glad to have had stuff published recently, an online article, poetry chapbooks, vispo chapbooks, e-books, pornography.

Progress

I continue to work away on ghazals, grant proposals, smut, creative explorations of various kinds.

I am currently putting together the 5th anniversary issue of Experiment-O for AngelHousePress.

I'm actively solliciting essays, rants, interviews, manifestos, artistic & poetic statements for the AngelHousePress online essay series. Take a look. Send me something.

I'm organizing the John Newlove Poetry Award for Bywords to take place on Friday October 26, 2012 at 6:30pm via the Ottawa International Writers Festival.

We are finalizing the chapbook of last year's Newlove Award recipient, rob mclennan. it will be launched on Oct 26 also.

Work on The Fall Issue of the Bywords Quarterly Journal has begun. The launch will be on November 4 at Collected Works at 2pm.

Charles & I have recently purchased Kindles & I'm in love. My Kindle is easy to read in both sun & shade; I can enlarge the font for these old eyes; we can share titles. I plan to use the Kindle for fiction & non fiction primarily, saving poetry for the physical book.

For some reason, I now have a Flickr account. mostly I wanted to be able to comment on other's work, but not wanting to leave the account inactive, I added some photos I took during a rainy walkabout in 2009 before my sickness hit. I may add some visual poetry. We'll see.

AIDS Walk for Life will take place on Saturday, September 15 at 7pm. I've met my fundraising goal of $200, but would sure love more donations. Thanks to the wonderful folk, both in Ottawa & elsewhere who've supported my campaign. See my page here. The Bywords team currently consists of two people, Charles & myself, which is more than enough for a party because we have fun, but please consider joining the team officially here or unofficially by just meeting us there last minute. It's a respectful & caring thing to do & it's great fun. If we meet our $500 fundraising goal, I'll wear my tutu.This  year we're raising money for the fabulous Bruce House which offers support & assistance to people living with AIDS/HIV.
What are you up to?

"Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers."--Cecil Beaton