August 13, 2012
Quill & Quire front cover interview is live
This week the cover story interview I did for June’s Quill and Quire became available online. Thank you to Q&Q for showing such faith in me and to Cheri Hanson for such a thoughtful article. Click on the photo below to read it.
August 13, 2012
Golden Thursday
Thursday was a fantastic day. Katie Taylor took the Olympic gold medal in Women’s Boxing for Ireland and Seán Bán Breathnach expressed it like no other. Invoking the poets and presidents. Go hiontach ar fad!
The same day I learned I was on P22 of the Irish Echo talking about Malarky — a great day. Very special. I grew up on diaspora newspapers and the Readers Digest. (The Readers Digest in the US also wrote a lovely review of Malarky) Some years ago I traveled to the NYPL to look up the Irish Echo from 1963 specifically to read some community listings in the back of it. Why did I go that far? Because the paper was not available on microfiche or obtainable so if I wanted to see it, I had to go to NY. So it’s lovely to think that things have come the full circle. There’s something very Gertrude Stein about circles. More of them please!
I leave it to SBB.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgMicT1GFaY&w=560&h=315]
August 13, 2012
Last Night of the Proms weather updates
I am shockingly behind with weather events, of which there have been several.
The Last Night of The Proms style Thunderstorm immediately comes to mind. Very dramatic thunder and lightning, which myself and the small male (who’s taller than me now) delighted in. We love storms because we speculate the power will go out (it rarely does) and if we’re truly speculative we make flasks of water and boil the kettle. Once we even purchased storm friendly sushi! The Last Night of The Proms thunder event was followed by the Last Night of Proms monsoon rain event. Fantastic — have not seen monsoon rain like that since nearly 20 years ago in a monsoon rain event in Jakarta. It was so thrilling I may have to bring forward my plan to have the Japanese weather symbols tattooed upon me. I need my own personal forecast and thunder and rain seem apt.
Overall we are in a wonderful batch of long hot days that make for working outside and eating truckloads of blueberries and cherries.
I am hoping to build a balcony garden, gardening at the community garden (nothing hectic to report, except peas — this year I am merely gardening to make the bees happy),
Summer is wonderful. Amen.
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August 1, 2012
New collaboration goes live: “Rooms” in Boulderpavement
I am very pleased to share this. In June I was commissioned to write an original flash fiction piece for Boulderpavement I was given the theme dream. In addtion I opted to collaborate with visual artist Jeremy Isao Speier on the piece.
I wanted the text to be completed or extended or responded to through images. It was a fascinating process.
Yesterday the piece went live and I am thrilled with the result. I was surprised at how lifted I was when I first saw the piece but I think in part it came from the sensation of creating work again and seeing it realize itself and the wider scope that’s possible with collaboration.
To read “Rooms” please visit http://boulderpavement.ca/issue007/rooms/
I thank Boulderpavement and the Banff Centre Press for this opportunity.
July 21, 2012
Malarky invited to Wordstock Portland Book Festival
I was delighted to hear the news I have been invited to Wordstock the Portland Book Festival in the Fall. I am excited to visit Portland as I’ve never been.
Thank you indeed to Wordstock for the invitation.
July 21, 2012
In the Bog 2012
A great day’s work today in the bog helping my mother bring in the turf or at least some steps in the process to bring up the turf.
We stacked turf and made reckles the four of us and joked and had a bit of craic.
The rain stayed off til we’d done what we could manage. It’s backbreaking but peaceful work. I love the small purple flowers in the heather with their tiny bells hanging off them and the details in the sods.
Nephin mountain borders that bog, like I said it’s ever so peaceful out there. No nicer place to work, no matter how hard it can be physically it’s somehow twice as rewarding. We may return again in the morning and carry on if the weather holds, but I suspect it won’t.
July 18, 2012
Baile Atha Claith
I am having a splendid time navigating the weather in Dublin — patchy drizzles, intermittent downpours, essentially constant rain until this morning, when hark ye Sun! I hardly knew how to behave until by 8pm wandering past the GAA ground in Cabra big, fat raindrops recommenced and pounded my cardigan.
You cannot but admire the consistency.
Minutes ago there was a bout of howling wind. Actual howling wind. I am humbled by its appearance in July.
The weather is the top topic here and you can be assured of a discussion about it with anyone whose breathing. Hark it howls again. I am weathery made up. Yesterday though I was weathery dismal. The company exceeds all of the above. Warm beyond warm and so familiar.
July 10, 2012
Hot Spot!
The wave of heat has been with us for two days and we are delighted with it. Welcome heat. Welcome wave. It’s a particularly good combination because at night the temperate falls and it’s not unbearable.
Or it may be the case that we are simply defrosting from the past six months of chilly puddling and therefore cannot gain any actual sense of the temperature because we’ve been so frozen. Who would actually know at this point what’s unbearably hot as we’ve become fluent in unbearably overcast.
Yesterday (Sunday) it was scorching at 4pm. I gave thanks and scorched along with it.
My only concern now is that of thunderstorms and what they lead to — the dreadful forest fires.
Sources tell me there was an hour long discussion on BC Almanac on the weather today. I am ashamed to say I missed it. Such is the nature of my present life my weather forecasting or weather watching has been derailed.
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July 8, 2012
Malarky selected for Amazon Best Books of 2012 So Far list in 2 categories
This week or Friday gone, Amazon.ca announced it’s Best Books of the Year So Far list and Malarky was selected in 2 categories! Given there are only 10 spots in each category that was a coup.
It was happy days to be listed alongside Tamara Faith Berger’s novel Maidenhead (also in 2 categories) as our books speak to something in between them. Perhaps the assumptions made about women’s sexuality. I read with Tamara in March at VPL (along with Ben Wood whose novel is also listed) and enjoyed her company and our discussions greatly.
July 8, 2012
This week I have read some of the most unambitious meanderings in a long time on literature, I’ll save you from them. Except to say language is certainly the way to go! And I commit to going even further with language! We need to move beyond middle brow expectations of story and prescription in the novel. What century is this again?! Form needs to reflect the undulations of the ordinary, daily life, the mind, the moment, this moment not stand back from it safely framing and merely dabbing calculated light on the traffic and trees around it and getting the reader up the hill to the next set of traffic lights. Enough of the linear, enough of the expected. Ideas and interrogation please. A literary work needs to be considered within its context not co-opted sideways to that which is not its concern and that which is already to be found plentifully in the myriad of mystery novels and middle brow fiction.
I could have engaged more with the various debates, but was very caught up thinking about Robert Walser’s use of tone in The Assistant and have been so struck by the image of his own death in the field finish. I reread Coetzee’s essay on Walser and was particularly galvanized by this paragraph:
Also, Little Star Journal have blogged some considerings on Christopher Middleton’s Thirty Poems of Robert Walser. Read it here
Finally the other thing that’s consumed me this week are thoughts of creating small living spaces within small living spaces. I came across a wonderful structure in a coffee shop Moii on Cambie near Broadway. Go and visit it. It’s a tiny tiny room within the coffee shop that an artist/media artist with an interest in industrial design built for her final project at Emily Carr. I want to learn to build walls and try to up my output from the Japanese hand saw with the green handle. I am convinced that being short will help realize this small space creation because the walls do not need to be so high to house me.