Writers and readers, lend me your facebook status updates

And join the Coalition to Keep Canadian Heritage Support for Literary and Arts Magazines on teh Facebookz.

The Malahat Tractor Review

I've been talking a lot about the DCH situation, and this came up quite a bit (from the DCH press release):

To implement this principle, the Government will:

[...]# continue to recognize the special challenges of certain types of periodicals (including farm publications, Aboriginal publications, and publications serving official-language minority communities).

They have made it clear, however, that lit mags will have their exceptional status revoked. Heritage senior media relations adviser Dominique Collin reiterated that bulleted point to Quill and Quire this week.

Please, people, if you care about Canadian literary culture, write to your MP, the Minister, your local and national writer's associations, your magazine association. Don't let Canada turn its back on literature.

Stephen Harper loves kittens at all times of the day for the purposes of loving them for their kittehness.

Canadian Heritage has decided to "streamline" its funding for magazines by merging the Canada Magazine Fund and the Publications Assistance Program (see rob mclennan's blog for a full article). Less bureaucracy would not be unwelcome as CH is notoriously difficult to deal with, but what they are also changing is the minimum circulation requirement for funding. Five thousand. Five, thousand. Five thousand may seem like small potatoes to general-interest, commercially viable, populist magazines, but I have never heard of any literary magazine worth reading reaching anywhere those numbers in this country. This means that every small magazine and journal -- the ones who present what little literary production we have in this country -- would be excluded from a very substantial source of funding. I can't imagine this not having repercussions. Many of the few jobs in producing Canadian literary culture could become extinct. What else? Poets might find it difficult to find publications to place their poetry (because there wouldn't be any, or they would have to seriously slow down production as they would have to rely entirely on volunteers, not to mention lower page counts, production value, etc., and magazines with circulations over 5000 tend to not be very interested in poetry), and thus they wouldn't be able to get the 40 pages required for Canada Council Emerging Writer grants, or any publisher to notice them.

This is an incredibly bad situation for Canadian literary culture. It's difficult enough for lit mags to stay afloat as it is, but to have the government body that is supposed to protect and invest in the efforts of cultural producers basically tell those producers that what they are doing has no value seems to be not only a fiscal decision but a demoralization strategy. It seems perverse, that the Ministry would seek to destroy the very culture it is set up to protect.

I'm sure there will be some sort of organized action in the near future (as this plan isn't set to come into play until next year). The first response I've seen is Ryan Fitzpatrick and Natalie Zina Walschots' STEPHEN HARPER:

STEPHEN HARPER was started as the first magazine under new funding guidelines made by the Canadian Periodical Fund. We believe that the best response to these new guidelines is to try to produce a literary journal streamlined enough to meet the new realities of today’s publishing industry. STEPHEN HARPER has an official subscription base of 413 – each MP and senator in the Canadian government is a subscriber, including our namesake! As well, STEPHEN HARPER will be starting a list of unsubscribers (the SH! list) of people not quite lucky enough to be members of Canada’s own government, but who still wish to receive the light of STEPHEN HARPER into their heart.

Maybe this will be enough for everyone in Canadian lit to lay down arms against each other and stop squabbling for once.

Speaking of Sina

The Invisibility Exhibit read by Erin Wunker over at Lemon Hound.

Sina Queyras' Expressway, JPF's Stripmalling

I love Sina Queyras, her writing, and Coach House's ephemera.



Also I am very sad to miss Jon Paul Fiorentino's launch of his new novel Stripmalling (with really awesome graphics by Coach House's own Evan Munday). Maybe the JPF will make it out west...

UPDATE: Here's the trailer for The Way of the Smock: The Making of Stripmalling. If you have to be a loser, you might as well be an adorable one.



Go Jonny and Sina!

shameless snug promotion

A few things regarding The Invisibilty Exhibit:

Featured poem at Geist in early Feb.

Noted as one of Five Best Reads in Vancouver Magazine's Best of the City 2008.

Vive le Fance.

snuggerview

Here's an interview that rob mclennan did with me over the past few months. Fanceh.

Blog to stop the recurring unsnug.

Is it cozy? Is it snug?

Everyone is sick. When I say everyone, I mean ME. And my sister and my nephew, but they're miles away, and the only one sick around here is me, so that's pretty much everyone. Around here. Besides my dog and my cat, and they just don't understand just how very sick I am. Well, have been. I'm a bit better now. But I was really very quite sick, you see, and it was very, very hard to be me. I won't go into details, because it seems to be a flu (or 'flu, as Nick would write it, as he writes 'phone), which is never nice to describe. But there was shivering and fevered dreams, and much moaning and demanding that the cat go make me cups of tea, which never seemed to work out.

See, this is why I have not been blogging. When your life is little, your blog is boring.

I've been writing a little, although it keeps hitting all these speed bumps. Like, Superbug/Norwalk/Ebola epidemics. Or, constant Reanimated Dad dreams.

I've been having this recurring dream for as long as I can remember. (I've written about this elsewhere, as clumsily.) I'm in a house, usually my grandparents' or my family's, and there is an area I've never been in because it is boarded up and secret. In the deepest, dankest area of this quarter is my dead grandmother, in some sort of suspended animation, so she doesn't actually start decaying until I find her.

Well, that situation -- walking through the house, noticing how everything is covered in grime and decay, the fish in the tank are not just dead but half decomposed and the tank is filled with algae, the house is covered in cat shit and vomit, cat hair, dust, spilled coffee on the tiles coated in black dust, and then turning the corner to find the impossible the body his body on the floor -- that's what happened in December.

Now my almost nightly dream is thus:

I walk into that room and find him and he gasps, wakes up, and is alive. Here he is, and all that was just a dream. But he's not quite alive, he's half asleep and mumbling and needs to be led around. I run around finding all the food he likes and movies he likes to watch and try to put him back where he might be happy, on the couch, cat nearby, a bad comedy on. And sometimes I can hear him from the next room with his crazy laugh, and breathing in the air and laughing it out again and I know that things will maybe be okay for a little while longer.


I know I should just be over it by now, but there isn't really an hour that goes by without this. Hence the silence. There's not a lot of poetry in me right now.